Ronan and I are in a room on the second floor of an old hotel not far from the station. The floorboards creak, and the walls are ready to fall in on themselves. Ronan uses a finger and thumb to make an opening in the crooked blinds. “What can be taking him so long?” he wonders.
He sits next to me on the bed and sinks into it. We aren’t using a flashlight in case an opportunistic drifter sees the light, but even in the gloom, I can make out the wrinkles in Ronan’s brow.
It’s freezing again and I can’t stop trembling or thinking about Quinn. I curl up to keep warm. “How will they escape from Sequoia, if it’s so terrible there?” I say. “And what makes Quinn think they can just stroll back into the pod to help?”
I wish I’d tried harder to persuade him to stay. I just watched him leave. And he never mentioned Maude. Does that mean she never made it to Sequoia?
Ronan rubs his eyes. “I don’t know, Bea. But what I do know is that Jude asked for Quinn, and what I’m giving him is a sick kid and his son’s outlawed girlfriend. Let’s concentrate on winning him over, and then worry about Quinn, okay?”
He’s right: If I’m going to be any use to Ronan, and if my parents’ deaths are to mean anything, I have to focus on what we’re about to do. “We just tell the truth: Quinn was here and then he left. Jude Caffrey knows what Quinn and I mean to each other, and he’ll know I wouldn’t return to the pod if Quinn wasn’t following.”
“You seem very confident,” Ronan says. He stands up and peers through the blinds again.
“I’m not,” I say. I’m terrified of returning to the place where my parents were killed and attempting to collude with a man responsible for countless deaths at The Grove.
But if I want to stop others from spending their whole lives under the Ministry’s iron thumb, I only have one choice—I have to throw my shoulders back and fight.