Uncaged (46 page)

“I should follow her,” said Cade.

Odin pushed himself up and spoke: “No. My sister won’t ever let anybody see her cry.”

Sitting with X in West’s Jeep, her face lit by the glow from West’s iPad, Shay went out to GandyDancer and dropped a final message.

West, you were right: I am an exceptionally good liar. I made you think I didn’t trust you. But I did, right from the start
.

You are a war hero
.

Shay

Then she cried.

Twist took a hundredth turn around the motel room, then snapped at Odin, “We’ve got to get the chains off this girl. I can’t even stand looking at her anymore. Where in the hell is your sister?”

“She’ll be back.…”

“She’s been gone almost an hour. If she needed to cry, that’s fine—but we’ve got things to do, and crying’s a luxury right now,” Twist said. “We don’t know what Singular’s doing, we don’t have any communications, we—”

A key rattled in the lock and they all turned toward the door as Shay stepped inside. Her face was pink, but her eyes were dry.

She had a Home Depot bag and shook out a pair of bolt cutters.

“Let’s cut her loose,” she said, and unconsciously repeated what Twist had said: “We’ve got things to do.”

“Like what?” Cade asked.

Shay snapped open the bolt cutters, like the jaws of a crocodile, and stepped toward the girl on the bed.

“Like revenge,” she said.

The leader stepped closer. “We need to know three things
now
. How high in the government does all this go? CIA, military, politicians—where does it go? Who’s paying Singular? We need the names,
now
. We need to know how many people are like our friend. How many human copies have you made?”

The woman in bed said, “I won’t tell you a thing.” She shouted, “Otto! Karl!
Herkommen!
”

The boy slammed the bedroom door, locking the dogs out.

The leader said, “We need—”

“Not a thing!” the woman shrieked. “Nothing! Never!”

The leader turned to the boy and said, “Give me the gun.”

He slipped it out of his waistband and handed it to her. “What are you going to do?”

The sixteen-year-old girl thumbed the safety off with an audible metallic
click
.

“I’m gonna kill the bitch,” she said. She raised the gun. “Say good-bye to Senator Dash.”

Excerpt from
Outrage
copyright © 2014 by John Sandford and Michele Cook. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York
.