Page 88 of Devotion

That’s it. Nothing else is added to the note.

“I guess this is good then,” I say, blinking up at Gabriel’s face.

He’s still focused on the unfamiliar handwriting on the torn bottom half of the same sheet of paper we used for our message.

“Yeah.” He stares down for a few more minutes. Then he tears the note into shreds and drops it into some dirty water in a ditch. The shreds dissolve into muddy pulp.

He was memorizing the directions so he could get rid of the note.

“Ready?” he asks me. “We’ll be hours early, but we might as well wait there rather than here where someone is more likely to see us.”

“Yeah. That sounds good to me.”

I’m pleased and excited that we received a ready response from the rebel group, but I’m also increasingly nervous about getting across the border. It’s afternoon now. The palace will know we’re missing. The president will have discovered the detailed plan to implement a complicated new identification and financial system for the Central Cities has been stolen. While the president and other administrators will probably remember parts of it, they won’t have all the research and calculations, the implementation method and timeline that Gabriel spent so many months developing.

They’ll have to start almost from scratch, and no one will be able to create and write up this plan as thoroughly and effectively as Gabriel did.

The palace will be furious. They’ll consider it treason. They’ll pursue him relentlessly to the border and then probably even past it.

Gabriel is going to have to completely disappear to be safe.

We find the hunting cabin without any trouble and park the motor out of sight behind some thick foliage.

The doors to the cabin are locked, but one of the windows is open, so Gabriel boosts me up so I can crawl in and then open the front door for him.

The place appears to have been abandoned for years. It’s so old that it’s likely to have been constructed before the Fall. There’s nothing inside except a couple of cots with no bedding, a small table with no chairs, and a tall, latched trunk that reminds me of a treasure chest from pre-Fall pirate stories.

The first thing I do is walk over and try to open the trunk. I can’t. I give the lock a few jiggles, but it doesn’t budge.

When I glance back at Gabriel, he’s got a soft, fond smile on his face.

“What?” I ask him. “A lot of people would try to get it open to see inside.”

He chuckles. “But would they check it when their life was at risk because they were being hunted by the government and their last hope for survival was the dubious assistance of violent rebels?”

“They might.” I grin back at him, taking several steps over so I can press the front of my body against his and wrap my arms around his waist.

He hugs me back, and we stay like that for a long time.

“Do you think they’re violent?” I ask at last.

“Who?”

“The rebels.”

“Oh. I don’t know. Probably. Most of those groups are.”

“But they aren’t going to hurt us?”

“I hope not.”

Not very encouraging, but there’s simply not a lot of encouragement to have at the moment. We won’t have any sort of safety until we’re across the border, and even then security won’t be a sure thing.

“We should eat something,” I say, trying to shift my mind from these upsetting reflections.

“Yeah.” Gabriel lets go of me and steps back. “Then I guess we’ll have a lot more waiting to do.”

We do wait.For what feels like an eternity.

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