It’s close to three thousand dollars. And he had it in his shoe.

My gaze drifts up from the bills to his face. “Seriously?”

“What—you want to complain now?”

No, I don’t. But who walks around on that much money? Like he’s literally walking around on it. “What if the bounty hunter had found it?”

“Then that would have sucked for me slightly more than this.” He shoves the cash into his pocket and turns in the direction I indicated, since we’re both eager to leave the motel far, far behind us.

I follow, and it takes an agonizingly long time to shuffle-walk with Malcolm to the little strip mall down the street. I keep throwing sidelong glances at him.

“What?” he asks through gritted teeth, and I can’t tell if it’s more the pain from his side or what I’m forcing him to do that earned me that irritable response.

“What do you have against banks?”

He doesn’t answer.

The pawnshop has long since closed, not that we need it anymore, but we do find a surprisingly kind man at the gas station nearby, who’s much more taken with our boxer story than the motel manager was, and lets me use his phone to hop on Craigslist, find the cheapest running car possible, and give the seller the address to meet us.

The car is…a car, so I don’t care that it looks like something that barely survived a monster truck rally, or that the floor is rusted clear through in places so that I can see the road passing beneath us.

Malcolm, on the other hand, cares slightly more, given that the owner had sensed our desperation even before he saw us in person and claimed multiple other offers to jack up the price. In the end, it takes nearly all of Malcolm’s cash to buy it. We have enough left for gas and the few other necessities that we need for the journey, but not a lot else. I don’t worry too much until a few hours later, when Malcolm takes a deserted side road and eases the car onto the shoulder.

I jerk forward and clutch the dash. “What are you doing? I didn’t tell you to stop.”

Malcolm shifts into park. “My ribs are on fire. I need to take a break.” He eyes the sharpened piece of window ledge I’m still holding. “You are still well within stabbing range, okay?” His eyes flutter closed as he unbuckles his seat belt and winces. “I’m not saying you didn’t do a good job of being threatening back at the motel, but enough. You need my help, and you’ve made sure I need yours.” He hisses in a breath and reclines his seat, then lifts his hoodie. I blanch.

Even against his dark skin, I can see the deep bruising wrapping around his ribs and muscled torso. No wonder he had trouble moving; I’m amazed he’s been able to sit up and drive as long as he has. I stare at him a second longer, then reach into the backseat for the bottle of painkillers. I toss it at him, along with an extra water bottle. He knocks back way too many pills, and it’s strange that after being chased and abandoned and fleeing for my life through the woods, I can still feel sympathetic for someone who literally caused this mess.

He hands the bottle back.

“How much farther?” I say.

“Four or five hours.”

“Can you make that?”

Malcolm doesn’t even open his eyes as he answers. “Yes, but I need to sleep. And so do you.”

The weight of my eyelids is becoming unbearable, unconsciousness beckoning me like the sweetest lullaby. I do need to sleep. My brain feels like it’s full of cotton, and even the simplest decision is beyond me. I hurt all over too: my head, from smashing into both the window with Mom and the pavement at the motel; my hips, hands, and knees, from falling out the window; my ribs, from Malcolm kicking me. We need to lie down somewhere that won’t have us panicking at the slightest sound.

But I force my eyes open wide. I’d let them close once while Malcolm was driving and almost immediately had a vision of Mom with bruises like his. I can’t sleep if it means seeing that again. “Then I’ll drive. I don’t think I can sleep.”

He stops my hand when I reach for the keys and shakes his head.

“We can’t go in until afternoon anyway, so we either kill time now while it’s dark and no one’s around or we hole up somewhere during the day, when someone is much more likely to notice us.”

“Why afternoon?”

Malcolm’s eyes have drifted shut again. “Can’t you just trust that I know what I’m doing here? I’ve got a hundred thousand reasons to want this to work.”

If I had the energy, I’d laugh. “It doesn’t seem like you need the money, based on what you were keeping in your shoe.”

“That was every dime I had to my name. This”—he gestures at the rusted-out car—“is not what I was going to spend it on.”

A fresh wave of weariness washes over me. “Enough okay? I’m not going to feel sorry for you. You got into this with both eyes open, and I’m the last person you want to be complaining to. So stop.”

I’m actually surprised when he does.

After a few minutes of silence, I glance over to find his eyes still open and his frowning gaze trained out the window. When I hear his stomach growl, I pass him some of the protein bars before grabbing two for myself. I watch as he inhales three of them before I’ve finished my first.

Right. He’s been in a trunk. I offer him another bar, and he takes it.

“We have to wait because there’s a shift change at five. Employees in, employees out. Plus visiting hours end at six, so there will be a lot of unknown people to keep track of.”

An actual answer. And it makes sense. I nod and look back at the things we bought and still need to use: hair dye, scissors, a razor, clothes. And makeup—most of which is for him so we can try and hide the damage done to his face. “We’ll just slip in?”

“Something like that.”

“So tell me. I need to know exactly—”

“No, you don’t. You want to know. There’s a difference.”

Irritation tightens my lips. “Just because I’m not holding a knife on you anymore doesn’t mean I’m not in charge.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what it means.” Malcolm crumples up the wrappers and tosses the empty water bottles into the backseat before pushing his door open.

Panic courses through me, and I’m ready to lunge for him when he announces that he’s just going to pee.

I went at the gas station, but Malcolm was done with walking by then and opted out. Still, I find myself counting the seconds until he returns.

Malcolm studies me warily when he settles against his seat and reclines it as far as it’ll go. After a minute of watching me jump at the slightest noise, he hits the recline lever of my seat, and the back drops out behind me. I’m reaching for the blade in an instant.

“You’re making my ribs hurt just from watching you. Worry tomorrow. Relax tonight.”

“I can’t relax.” The muscles in my neck tense as I speak. I don’t want to list all the reasons why, but that doesn’t stop them from zipping through my mind again and again and again.

“You’re different than I thought you’d be,” Malcolm says, eyeing the blade that I have to force myself to set down again. “The girl in the picture looked less homicidal.”

“The girl in the picture wasn’t being hunted. But you took care of that.”

He doesn’t seem offended by the accusation. “If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.”

“So why was it you?”

Malcolm smiles, one corner of his mouth pulling to the side. “You ever hear of the Porch Pirate Punisher?”

“Should I have?”

He shrugs. “I guess it’s mostly a Pennsylvania story.” I’m beginning to think that Malcolm has a flair for the dramatic, because he makes me prompt him before he’ll continue. “My dad was a hacker too. He’s the one who taught me…a lot of things. Like not to trust banks, once he showed me how vulnerable they were. When I was younger, I thought he was kind of like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, you know? Except the rich were mostly regular people and the poor was always him—even once he had plenty of money.” Malcolm shifts in his seat. “He went to prison for the first time for creating a software program that stole thousands of credit card numbers. He served two years, then was arrested again a few years later. See, he improved his program, made a few friends, and went from stealing and selling thousands of numbers to millions. He died from pancreatic cancer before being released, and I’ve been with my gran ever since.”

“I’m sorry.” It’s an instinctual response to hearing about someone’s loss, but I’m surprised to find I actually mean it.

“After he died, I decided I wanted to go the other way, use what I knew to help other people, not just myself. I rounded up a bunch of security footage from people who’d been robbed by porch pirates throughout the state of Pennsylvania, then I created a modified algorithm specifically to find their faces and ran it through every social media platform I could to identify them.”

I can’t help but smile. “That’s cool.”

“The FBI didn’t think so. Though that was probably because I also coded a program based off the one my dad originally wrote to steal credit card numbers and then I posted the pirates’ numbers online.”

I gape at him. “You’re lying. You’d be in jail.”

A big self-satisfied grin stretches across his face. “Can’t send a fifteen-year-old to jail. You can, however, scare the crap out of him by sending a bunch of feds to his school and yanking him out of homeroom.”

“Wait, wait. That’s not even possible. You said you identified porch pirates just from images you lifted off security cameras? At fifteen years old? I don’t think so.”

“Scary, isn’t it? Granted my algorithm was in a league of its own, but there are programs, like Social Mapper and FindFace, that can search through a billion photos from a normal computer in less than a second. Those two programs are much more basic and limited than what I created, but they do exist.”

Something cold and painful lodges in my throat, like I’d just swallowed an ice cube. “That’s why you were hired to find my mom, because of that program.”

He nods. “I did gain a certain level of notoriety after that, but part of the deal I made with the FBI involved turning over my algorithm and everything else I had, with the understanding that I wouldn’t get a second chance if I put on a black hat ever again.”

“But you did.”

He lifts one shoulder. “I had interest from a bunch of tech security companies when I graduated from high school, but my gran wanted me to go to college. And I wanted to prove to her that she could raise a good man. I ended up at Penn State in order to be close to her when she got sick. And when she got sicker, I took an offer that would pay me enough to take care of her.”

We’re both quiet after that.

After a few minutes, I open my door and throw my makeshift knife as far as I can into the tree line.

“Is that your way of telling me you want to be friends now?”

“No.” I pull my door shut. “It just means I don’t believe you’re the bad guy anymore.”