Hide Her (The Erodium Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  “Yes.”

  “If you take my granddaughter from me, and tell the truth about what happened, I won’t be able to protect her. Not after what I’ve done. They’ll remove me from office. No one will stop that program. And she will disappear.”

  “The truth has to mean something, Madam President.”

  “At what cost?”

  Robin looked off and shook her head. “I wish I had the answer to a question like that.”

  “The answer is to walk away.”

  “I’m sorry.” Robin walked across the cabin to the bedroom door and grabbed the knob but stopped when she heard the cock of a gun.

  Her back was turned toward the President.

  “What are you doing?” Robin asked.

  “Saving her life,” the President said.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  Seconds became centuries.

  Robin pressed her ring finger to her palm and twisted her body, her gun shooting out her sleeve and a bullet skewering her shoulder as she raised her arm and, through squinted eyes and searing pain, aimed her weapon and pulled the trigger, the President now looking like the mere image of a woman with a gun.

  Centuries became seconds.

  Robin and the President fell to the floor.

  20

  Blood. Hers. She looked around. She was slumped against the door leading to the bedroom, a dribbling hole in the shoulder of her coat, only darkening the already black leather. The bullet almost hit the book that belonged to her mom. Across the cabin, Molly was on her back, blood staining her white blouse, a revolver beside her body.

  The front door flew open and Mac ran in. He looked at Robin and the President, back and forth, until he spotted the revolver.

  “What did you do?!”

  Mac rushed to Molly and grabbed her hand, blood smearing across their fingers and palms while Robin stumbled to her feet. Wavered in place. Locked her footing. Stabilized. The bullet in her shoulder pulsed, leaked blood in rhythm with the beat of her heart. She hadn’t been shot in years. Forgot what the pain was like, burning outward.

  With a limp arm, Robin trudged over to Molly, kneeling to grab her other hand but stopping when she remembered her gloves. She looked at them. All they’d ever done was hide who she was from the outside world. She pulled them off and held her hand, assaulted by every fragment Molly Walker had to offer, observing them and nothing more, like flotsam gliding down a river.

  Molly, baking Lyla cinnamon apples.

  Molly, coloring with Lyla on a big sheet of paper rolled out across the floor.

  Molly, kissing Lyla on the cheek, the curvature plump and warm, feeling like she’d already done that a second earlier.

  “I did my best,” Molly said, gasping, her eyes fixed on Mac but wide and unblinking.

  “I know,” Mac said. “I know.”

  Molly looked at Robin. “Don’t let them take her. Protect her. Please.”

  Then she took her last breath, and her body went still.

  Robin watched Mac put his hand to his ear and then survey the scene. The President of the United States, dead, Robin, alive, the revolver on the ground, their blood splattering the cabin like paint thrown by a child.

  “Just some target practice,” Mac said into his earpiece. “Nothing to report.”

  “Did you just save my life?” Robin asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Mac stared at Molly. “I loved this woman. I believed in her. But we shouldn’t be here, drowning under a lie. All these secrets. She made her choices, you made yours.” He paused. “I made mine.”

  “I’m sorry. For everything.”

  Mac did nothing but stare at the bedroom door. Still shut. “Take her.”

  “What?”

  “The girl. Take her.”

  “Fuck no.”

  “The only other woman in the world that might have had a chance at protecting her is dead. If Lyla goes back to the world of the living, and Molly isn’t around, these fuckers will take her faster than we can see it happen. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.”

  “I’m done,” Robin said, believing it less and less as time wore on, despite the weariness that pressed through her skin, muscles, bones, swelling by the day.

  “Children are disappearing, the FLF is radicalizing, and we’re at war with China,” Mac said. “The world is soaked in kerosene and all you want to do is to walk away?”

  She thought about the cancer in her brain, how she’d almost used it as an excuse to finally pull the trigger and depart from life for good, to walk away and drink herself into the sand until her brain ate the rest of her and she was claimed by the sweet bliss of true oblivion.

  “Fuck,” Robin said.

  “Fuck,” Mac echoed.

  “I can’t just take her.”

  “You can,” Mac said. “Take the cab you came in, put her in the trunk, and drive the two of you out of here like nothing happened.”

  “What about you?”

  He looked her up and down. “You know how to knock someone out?”

  “I mean, I’ve never tried a three hundred pound man before, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  “The only way we get away with this is if we make it look like you held me at gunpoint, forced an all clear through my earpiece, and knocked me out.”

  “They’ll think you’re a coward,” Robin said.

  “Doesn’t matter if it keeps Lyla safe.”

  “I’d say sorry but this is your idea.”

  “The truth will come out,” Mac said. “You killed the President of the United States. You’ll be the most wanted woman on the planet. But the girl will be safe. And then we can get to work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The program, the one Molly was looking into. It needs to stop. We can finish what she started.”

  Robin thought about all those kids, the ones like Lyla, stolen from A-Cad, from their families, caged in some facility somewhere, hidden, suffering in ways she didn’t want to imagine.

  “What do I even do after I—” she remembered the girl, “—we get away?”

  “Find the FLF.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “They’re deceitful fuckers, but they’re honest folk,” Mac said. “Some of them at least.”

  “You want me to walk into a den of terrorists and ask for help?”

  “I want you to hide the girl by finding the people who saved her in the first place. Ask for Joel. Don’t trust him, just use him.”

  Joel. The enigmatic leader of the FLF, a man who had done something bad for a good reason, bury the truth to the save the girl.

  “What about you?” Robin asked.

  “I’ll be fine. Fired, but fine.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  “A hard ask, Madam Fugitive.”

  Robin stared at the scene, processing the enormity of what had happened and what was about to happen. She was about to make more irreversible choices. Somehow though, standing there with a hole in her shoulder and her head in withdrawal and the President of the United States dead by her hand, she felt she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

  Robin walked up behind Mac.

  “Sorry.”

  She choked him out. He was tougher than the usual suspect, beefier, denser, wider, but she got the job done. The fight he instinctively put up was a pathetic shade of what she knew he could throw her way if he really wanted to. After she slapped his cheek and got nothing back, she laid him down beside Molly.

  Then Robin walked to the bedroom and opened the door, knowing the girl inside was scared, confused, alone, and about to wonder if the only woman in the world who could protect her was the same woman who had killed her grandmother.

  The first thing the girl saw when the door opened was a woman that looked like her mother, the one that died of drugs, stalk into the room with a speckle of blood on her hands. Bey
ond the woman, the girl saw her nana. Laying on the ground. Blood everywhere. The girl said nothing. She locked up, returned to the familiar inside place she went to when things went existentially wrong, when she didn’t know what was happening or why and couldn’t do anything about it because the world was big, bigger than she was, bigger than everything.

  The woman with blood on her hands scooped the girl up and buried her face in her chest. As the woman held the girl and ran out of the cabin, the girl held the woman, her hands on her neck, and the girl saw everything the woman had ever done, seen, heard, thought, felt, the worst parts of herself, the wounds that wouldn’t heal.

  Robin, small, her parents driving her down a dirt road, out in the wilderness, trying to convince her everything was going to be okay and nothing was going to change and they loved her, later on staring down at her for some time, looking for a sign that would tell them they were doing the right thing.

  Before the woman lowered the girl to the ground, cupping her cheeks, telling her she was safe, the girl saw one last thing.

  Robin, firing a bullet at President Molly Walker.

  The woman heaved the girl into the trunk of the cab and their connection broke, leaving the girl with nothing but fear as the woolly felt on the trunk bottom smelled like dust and itched at her arms and the inner lights glowed through the dark like eyes without pupils and the woman grabbed the open trunk, pressed her finger to her lips, and slammed it shut.

  Thank you for reading Find Her. The story continues in Hide Her, book two in the Erodium Trilogy. Find out what happens when Robin and Lyla go on the run. Can Robin keep Lyla alive long enough to find the FLF?

  Click here to read Hide Her

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