THE BACK DOORS of the truck opened, and her mom and Aidan jumped in, her mom pulling the backpack in behind her.
Someone came out of the house, a big man, with a gray beard. He was wearing slippers and a bathrobe. He took a couple of steps down the driveway, staring at them. He was holding a gun, a revolver.
“Belt up,” said Emily’s dad. He pulled the lever to D, and the tires squealed as he took off down the street, engine revving hard.
Movement in the rear mirror—the man who owned the truck reaching the road. “Get down,” said Emily to her mom and Aidan as she twisted around, looking through the back window. She expected bullets, waited for the back window to explode in a shower of glass shards.
But the man in the bathrobe didn’t even raise the gun—he sort of stagger-ran, confused, for a few steps, and then stood there, watching them go. Emily realized: he had only just gone through the invisible door. His heart and mind were still in the old world—he wasn’t used to how fast things moved here. He simply didn’t know what to do, even armed as he was.
Emily’s dad, though: he knew. He knew the rules here, the culture, the language. He knew how to move fast, how to decide quickly.
They cleared a strip of mom-and-pop stores and were out of the town before anyone spoke, doing fifty miles an hour. Then sixty. Then seventy. The road was a good one—hard blacktop. Emily’s dad drove in silence for ten minutes, and as soon as they came to a turn, he took it, then the next one.
“Emily,” he said. “Check the glovebox. See if there’s a satnav in there.”
She checked. There was. There was also a bottle of water—she passed it back to her mom, before she turned on the satnav.
“OK. Turn it on. But when it comes up with the options, choose the last one. Whatever the least obvious route is.”
“Police?”
“Yeah. They’ll put out an APB, but it’ll take a while to coordinate. They’ll waste time going around to the guy’s house first, asking questions. We should have an hour. Maybe more.”
Emily did what he said. Then she stuck the satnav to the windshield, using the vacuum tab thing. The route pulsed blue on the screen, the truck a silver arrow, gliding along.
“That was fast,” said Aidan.
“Tell me about it,” said Emily. She was watching her father’s profile, the expression of concentration. “How did you know how to do that?”
He shrugged. “You’ve only known me sixteen years.”
“You learn it in the army?”
“I was Special Forces,” he said. “I can’t really talk about my time in the army.” He winked at her.
“Can’t or won’t,” said Emily’s mom from the back. It sounded like a line from an old argument, or an old joke with edges to it; a script that they both knew well—both following their parts.
Yeah, Emily thought. She’d known her parents for only a part of their lives. More doors, she thought, to other worlds. There was the one they’d all gone through, into this place where people shot at you and your dad stole cars. But there were the ones inside her mom and dad too—that opened into their former lives, their other lives, their hidden lives; the lives they had lived before they came here; before they had her; even the parts they were hiding from each other.
Some of those doors, she thought, would never open.
She wasn’t sure she wanted them to.