Chapter Eighteen
Anna
Cassie hurried Meg and Anna back out through the maze of corridors. They were more heavily burdened than before. Cassie and Anna each carried a backpack over her shoulder, and this time Cassie and Mom held the giant, bulging duffel bag between them.
“How far to the coffee shop?” Anna said.
“A few blocks,” Cassie said. “We have to go the long way around, though, because we want to avoid surveillance cameras.” She glanced over at Anna. “Don’t worry, Callum and I planned ahead.”
“Clearly,” Mom said.
Cassie led them through a stairwell, and they came out on a different street than the one they’d come in on. “I don’t know if I can explain what it’s been like, being left behind.” She walked rapidly across the cobbled road and entered another doorway on the other side.
“You don’t have to, Cassie,” Mom said, “I know all about it.”
“I guess you would.” Cassie took a left and then a right through another maze of buildings.
“When David was born, Mom did everything she could to get back to Papa,” Anna said. “She couldn’t.”
“Your mom’s life was never in mortal danger,” Cassie said.
“True,” Mom said, “but I’m not so sure how this would have worked if it had been. David was still a baby. He wasn’t ready.”
“We saved Papa’s life at Cilmeri,” Anna said, “but if you had brought us back sooner, Papa wouldn’t have gone at all.”
Mom’s expression turned brittle. “Now that I couldn’t promise you. The man is stubborn.”
Cassie’s lips twitched in a quick smile before she took the lead again. “I think I need to explain anyway.”
Anna certainly wasn’t going to stop her.
“Callum and I had to make plans because we didn’t know how soon you would return, and we wanted to be ready when you did.”
“That explains the safe house and all the rest,” Mom said.
“Exactly,” Cassie said.
“Is that why you two haven’t—?” Anna stopped. She’d been about to ask one of the most personal questions possible.
Cassie made a ‘hm’ sound. “Were you going to ask if that’s why we haven’t had kids yet?”
They’d crossed another street and passed through several basements before taking a set of stairs back up to street level. A wooden door blocked the way.
Before she opened it, Cassie leaned against it. “This isn’t the Middle Ages, Anna. Waiting two years is nothing here. But yes.”
Anna was still catching her breath, but she ducked her head in acknowledgement of that sacrifice. “Thank you for telling me.”
“I wouldn’t want you to mention it to Callum.” Cassie looked from Anna to Mom. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Mom said.
Cassie opened the door, and the three women stepped out onto another cobbled street. Callum and Darren stood two feet away to the right, half-hidden underneath a large green awning.
“Hey,” Cassie said.
“Hey yourself.” Callum took the duffel from Cassie and slung it over his shoulder. It clashed with the proper look of his suit, tie, and trench coat. He was bigger than any of the women were, though, and he hadn’t exactly let his hard won medieval physique run to fat. “Any trouble?”
“Not that we know of,” Cassie said. “I gather we’re catching a bus?”
“The 25.” Callum checked his watch. “We have five minutes to get there.”
“Then we should go.” Cassie looked back at Mom and Anna. “This is where it gets tricky. The bus stop is at the end of this street in the exact spot where we got out of Darren’s car. We should walk determinedly without running. Anna, could you walk with Darren as if you know him well?”
Darren and Anna looked at each other. He shrugged. Anna nodded.
“Meg, you and I will stay together, and then Callum can bring up the rear,” Cassie said.
“We may have to bunch up to cross the street, but otherwise, don’t stop for anything,” Callum said. “We’ll be in the open and vulnerable.”
Darren lifted one arm, eyebrows raised, and Anna moved close enough so he could put his arm across her shoulders. She kept the backpack slung over her left shoulder, and she put her right arm around his waist. It was awkward and weird to be walking this way with a man she barely knew. Math would just have to forgive her. If she ever told him. Maybe it would never need to come up.
“There it is!” Darren said.
Up ahead, the bus swung around a corner. It was an orangey-yellow and turquoise double-decker—not the London red—and faces peered down at Anna from the top level. Darren raised a hand to warn the traffic that they were crossing, and they dashed across the street. The others hustled along behind. Darren ducked around the front of the bus so it couldn’t leave before they got on it unless it ran them over, and they entered through the folded front door.
The bus driver, sitting at the front of the bus to the right, didn’t even look as Darren dropped a handful of coins into the meter. Five adult tickets spat out.
“Another month and this wouldn’t have worked,” Darren said. “The buses are going to stop taking cash.”
“Yeah, and our cards would be a big fat neon sign for MI-5.” Cassie crowded onto the top step, her hand in Callum’s, and looked past Anna down the length of the bus. “There’s Mark.”
Mark looked exactly as a computer nerd should. He was in his early thirties, of average height, semi-balding, with extra padding around the middle, glasses, and rounded shoulders from too many hours spent in front of a computer. He, too, wore a backpack, and as the companions filed down the crowded aisle towards him, he made room for them to stand around him. At the front of the bus, the seats were arranged with their backs to the windows, but where Mark stood, they were in rows, two seats to a side with an aisle down the center.
Mom found a seat on the left in the first row next to the window, and Callum heaved the bag off his shoulder to lean it against the seat beside her. Anna took off her backpack and dropped it onto the seat itself, and then she sat with her back to the window, right in front of Mom. Everyone else remained standing, holding onto a floor-to-ceiling pole or the bar above their heads.
The bus hadn’t moved, and Cassie peered towards the front, standing on tiptoe to look past the other passengers that crowded the aisle. “It’s okay. The bus isn’t going because the light’s red.”
Anna shifted in her seat, anxious with the wait. She was glad to be moving, though Callum hadn’t actually said what the plan was and where they were going next. A few seconds later, the bus started forward, drove a short distance, changed lanes in order to take a right, and then passed in front of a large white building on the left.
“That’s the courthouse,” Cassie said, pointing, “and that’s City Hall beside it—” She broke off. “My God!”
People had begun exclaiming all around the bus. A woman screamed.
Anna had been looking at Cassie but now twisted in her seat, half-kneeling to look out the window—at the exact moment the front façade of City Hall ballooned outward in an explosion of yellow and red. Rubble, flames, and even vehicles that had been parked in front of the building shot up and outward. A second later, the percussion wave hit the bus, rocking it and throwing the passengers around.
If Anna hadn’t been holding onto the back of the seat, she would have fallen into Mom’s lap. As it was, Cassie staggered, and her backpack whacked into Callum’s arm.
He caught her around the waist. “Christ.”
A few people had burst from the front doors of adjacent buildings. Others ran down the sidewalk, trying to protect their heads from falling debris. The bus had been slowing in order to stop at the bus stop in front of City Hall, but the bus driver stepped on the gas instead, ignoring the people gesturing frantically from the bench at the bus shelter, desperate to get away quickly.
All around, people were screaming both to get off the bus and for the driver to go as fast as he could. Then the bus skidded sideways, coming to a halt as a light pole crashed down across the road in front of it. The bus couldn’t go any farther forward, so with some jerky back and forth starting and stopping, throwing the passengers around in their seats as if they were ping pong balls, the driver managed to turn the bus around. He didn’t even bother to drive on the left side of the road as he should have, but accelerated back the way he’d come, heedless of the panicked traffic coming at him.
Callum and Anna crossed to the opposite side, pressing close to the window. Smoke billowed from the ruined City Hall, and Anna tried to make out what was happening through it. The bus driver, having just passed the near corner of the courthouse, yanked the wheel sharply to the right to avoid an oncoming car.
And then the courthouse exploded too.
Anna couldn’t say who screamed first—her or Mom or everyone on the bus together—but there was no other possible reaction. No human had any power over the mountain of stone and the wave of hot air the explosion sent hurtling towards the side of the bus. Anna put up her hands in a futile attempt to protect her face and—
Heart-stopping terror.
The black abyss.
More screams.
And Callum’s quiet voice, saying, “Here we go again.”