Chapter 2

We pulled onto the highway, heading west out of New York. The city skyline faded in the rearview mirror. For the other kids in the van, it was the start of an adventure. For me, it was a countdown.

I leaned forward, making my voice loud enough for the driver and his partner to hear clearly.

"You know, my foster mom is a real piece of work," I said to Jennifer, who looked startled by my sudden conversation. "She had this crazy dream that our bus was going to crash. A premonition, she called it. Can you believe that? Totally superstitious."

Up front, I saw the driver's eyes flick to the rearview mirror. He exchanged a tense, almost imperceptible look with his partner.

Bingo.

They had a script. An "accident" was part of their plan. My mentioning it threw a wrench in their timeline. They didn't know that I knew. They just thought it was a weird, unsettling coincidence.

An hour later, we were deep in the Appalachian Mountains. The sky had turned a dark, angry gray, and rain began to lash against the windows. It was the same storm. The same stretch of road.

"This weather is getting bad," Jennifer said, her voice tight with worry. "Look at those rocks up there."

She was pointing to a steep, unstable cliff face beside the road. I knew what was coming.

"Driver," I said, my voice calm. "You should slow down. That section of the road looks unstable. We should pull over for a minute."

The driver's partner turned around, his face a mask of irritation. "You the expert now, kid? Just sit back. We know what we're doing."

He was arrogant. He was dismissive. He was exactly the same.

Just as he finished speaking, a rumble echoed from above. A shower of small pebbles cascaded down the cliffside, followed by a larger boulder that crashed onto the road just yards behind our van.

The van swerved. The other kids screamed.

I just watched the driver's knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. He was shaken. My "lucky guess" had unnerved him. He looked at me in the mirror again, this time with a flicker of something new. Suspicion.

The tension in the van was thick enough to choke on. The other kids were whispering, glancing nervously between me and the two men up front. The storm, the rockslide, my "premonition"-it was all too much.

The driver's partner, clearly trying to regain control, unbuckled his seatbelt and reached for a crate of bottled water on the floor.

"Everyone calm down," he said, his voice forced and overly friendly. "Let's all have some water. Settle the nerves."

I knew that water was drugged. In my last life, I drank it without a second thought. I woke up in a cage.

Not this time.

As he offered a bottle to the boy I'd argued with earlier, I "accidentally" knocked my backpack off the seat. It hit the crate perfectly, sending the bottles skittering and rolling across the floor of the moving van. Most of them burst open, spilling the drugged water everywhere.

"What the hell is your problem?" the boy yelled at me, jumping up.

"It was an accident!" I shot back, getting in his face. "Maybe if you weren't taking up so much space!"

"You did that on purpose!" he shouted, shoving me hard.

I shoved him back. It escalated quickly into a clumsy, flailing fight in the cramped aisle. The driver was yelling at us to stop. His partner was trying to pull us apart.

It was the perfect diversion. No one was drinking the water. And in the chaos, I ended up on the floor, right behind the driver's seat. Exactly where I needed to be.