I am running so fast that I am not even sure my feet are touching the ground anymore. I just keep pushing my feet to keep moving as fast as they can.

I can’t let them catch me.

I don’t even know how many of them are behind me. For all I know, there could be one or ten, or maybe I have finally caught a break, and there is no one behind me.

I don’t take the chance of looking back, I just keep moving my feet as fast as I can away from the building. I need to find where the Ferris wheel is. The room is over there somewhere, but I can’t take a minute to look around since there are potentially dangerous people chasing after me.

I decide to take a few random turns, and I end up not having the slightest clue as to where I am. I decide to take a sharp turn to the left, but I end up running straight into one of the guards. I stumble backwards, almost falling to the ground. The guard grabs my arm, and fear rushes through my body.

All I can think about is Aiden returning to the group and telling Devin that I am gone, probably dead. I do the only thing I can think of and try to punch at the guard with my other arm and kick at him. He is strong, but when I punch down with my free arm at his arm that is holding mine, his grip loosens, and I am able to free myself and start running again.

I am practically stumbling away from the guard, but once I see that the guards have caught up to me, I quickly correct myself. I have to doge multiple arms reaching for me as I run to the right and down a row of games, but none of them touch me. I do my best to lose them, and I think it is working. When I look behind me, they are about fifteen feet away.

I make another turn, and when I do, I catch the sight of a booth that no longer has its lights on. I run and hide behind it. I sit down on the ground and wait to hear the sounds of the guards running by.

I stay in place and try to catch my breath. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in and out. After about thirty seconds, I hear the sound of boots hitting the ground, and I crawl further into my hiding spot. The sound gets louder, and I know they are coming my way. It is not until right now that I realize that I have not heard a single gunshot being fired at me. The guard who grabbed me didn’t even pull out his gun or threaten to shoot me.

It would be wise to shoot at me while I was running from them, so why didn’t they? From what I can hear, there are multiple guards heading my way, so they had a pretty good opportunity to kill me. I got out. I disobeyed them by escaping. Shouldn’t they want to kill me? I guess I should be thankful that they didn’t, but I can’t help but wonder why.

The footsteps get closer and closer until they are right by the booth I am in, then they run past it. I let out a breath of relief. Another minute goes by before I hear more boots coming my way. Really? How many people did they send out for me? I know I am practically a fugitive, but do they really need so many people to find one person?

I don’t move as they run by, but I do notice that one of them has stopped somewhere by me.

A static voice is heard, “Branson, what’s your status on the girl?”

The voice of the guy standing by my booth responds, “We haven’t found her yet, sir, but we will. I have guys searching every booth and tent as we speak. We’ll find her.”

There is more static heard, and the guy walks off. The police in our town frequently use walkie-talkies to talk to one another, and from the sound of things, the guards here are also using them.

In my second-to-last year of schooling, one guy in my grade was dared to steal a walkie-talkie from one of the policemen. The guy was known not to make the smartest decisions, so he tried the dare. He was caught instantly. While it was dumb, it was also funny to watch him run up to a police car, stick his hand through the window, pull out the walkie-talkie, and then turn around to come face to face with one of the police officers.

If what I heard from the guards using the walkie-talkies is true, then they will find me soon. I need to move.

I peek my head out of the side of the booth and look around. I don’t see or hear anyone, so I slowly stand up and move towards the direction in which I came. I don’t think that the guards would immediately start checking the direction in which I came from. They would first check the direction I ran in, right?

I move a few feet away and hide behind another game with its lights off. I continue this process of moving booth to booth and sometimes booth to tree, until I come across the main tent again.

The four guards are back standing at the entrance of the main tent, and once again, there are quite a few guards walking around the area. The door to the small building that the guard caught me in is wide open. The same three guards keep going in and out of the room, talking to one another.

Their body language and facial expressions tell me that they are under a lot of stress. I am glad they are stressed. I am stressed. They are the ones who came in here and told us they were going to kill half our town. They are the ones who opened fire on us for trying to escape the show tent. I do not pity them.

I can’t hear what they are saying, but I can guess it has something to do with me. They are most likely trying to figure out what I was doing in there and if I took anything.

It was only a map… from that room. The gun was from the first room, and from what I can see, no one is investigating that building.

I know I can’t stay here forever, so I try to find the Ferris wheel again. I am pretty sure it should be located somewhere in front of the main tent, so I move in that direction, once again going from booth to booth.

There are a few times when I have to stop and duck down further in the booth so that I am not spotted. The guards are still looking for me, and it seems like they have started walking in what sounds like groups of two or three.

I don’t get it. Don’t they have better things to do than look for me?

I wait until they pass before moving along. When I get further from the tent, I notice that there is less light because there are fewer games on. I use this to my advantage since it is easier for me to move undetected in the dark.

The area I am in now is almost entirely dark, and for some reason, it feels more safe than it should be. Dark places are supposed to creep people out, but given the situation, I feel just fine. I take a turn in the direction that I think the giant wheel would be in, but I can’t seem to find it.

The Ferris wheel is huge and lit up, or at least it was earlier. How can I keep missing it?

I get comfortable moving in the dark, and I start walking while trying to look up above some of the tents and booths to see if I can spot the Ferris, but I can’t. I guess I get too comfortable walking like this since I almost walk right in front of two guards.

If it weren’t for the guards talking to each other, then I would have been spotted in all my stupid glory for sure. I quickly move to hide behind the wall of some building, and I shrink back further until I hit a tree. The voices are coming closer, and without a second thought, I start climbing the tree.

My body moves without me having to think much about it. Living in Treegrass, I think everyone here seems to have a natural-born talent for climbing trees. My body moves instinctively. I find myself ascending higher into the tree until I am at the same height as the top of the building.

I am not really sure if I should climb onto the roof or stay in the tree. I think the guards would be more likely to cheek the tree than the roof of a building, so I lean one leg over to the roof and then my other leg. Once I am standing on the flat roof, I duck down and make my way over to the edge where the guards are walking by. I want to make sure they are far enough away and no more guards are coming, before I get down and find my way to the kitchen.

The two guards are still talking to one another as they walk by the building. Unfortunately, to my dismay, they are walking slowly. My frustration grows. Don’t they know I’ve got some place to be right now? What if I am taking too long, and Aiden thinks I have been captured or killed? Aren’t they supposed to be in a hurry to find me?

“I can’t believe we are staying up this late. When do you think we’ll be done here and can go home?” One guard asks the other guard.

“I don’t know, probably when we catch the girl.”

This piques my curiosity, and I strain to hear more.

The guards continue talking, “Danny must be such an idiot to let that girl get away. He went to the academy, he got the training, so how did he let her get away? Shouldn’t he have easily been able to tackle her down and restrain her?”

“Yeah well, he’s young and has only just graduated from the academy a few months ago. You know how it is. Anyway, from what I heard, he tried chasing the girl down, but she was too fast. You can’t blame the boy for that.”

“You can blame the boy for that, and I will. I want to get some sleep, but this girl on the loose is preventing that. They should have never let the others go back to camp early. If the others stayed, then they would have never gotten out of the tent in the first place.” There is another sound, but I can’t identify the source, “She is also preventing me from getting out of this stupid bug-infested hell hole.”

“Listen buddy, we all want some sleep, but complaining about it isn’t going to make us catch her any sooner. We need to find out where her friends are hiding.”

Where my friends are hiding? Do they mean Aiden? My brother? The Jumpers?

“We’re not going to mess up again like in Tundris. That made us look bad, and the Governors won’t like to hear about it happening again here. We are not going to let anyone escape. It’s only been a few hours. They are probably hiding somewhere in here, and we just are too stupid to know where. He said the girl was on the younger side, so she is probably hiding in some small place. Once we find her, everything will be okay.”

“Why don’t you think they’re out there in the town or beyond the borders?”

“Because the guys at the front gate said that they have seen no one leave the carnival, and let’s be real, no one wants to go outside the town borders into no man’s land.”

I want to ask what they know about no man’s land, but given my situation, I don’t think they would answer me and then let me go.

“We will find the girl, and she will lead us to the other thirty-six people missing from the count, and maybe, if we’re lucky, we will also find out about the other people who are missing from the first town. We would be idiots to think they didn’t have something to do with this.”

Chapter 18

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