“I don’t know if I can move right now,” he said, and his head bobbed to the side, his blond, curly head lying against my chest. “I may actually fall asleep like this.”
“Um.” I clumsily rolled him to the side, as gently as I could, pitching him off me. “Sorry,” I said when he looked at me reproachfully. “I don’t like to feel trapped.”
“How about splattered?” he said as his head lolled back into the muddy field. “How does squished work for you?”
I pulled myself to my feet and looked around us. Warm mud rolled down my hands in beads and dripped to the puddle beneath me with a plop. The field was a wide expanse of open ground. The only thing disturbing the perfect flatness of the scene before me was a road in the distance, at least a mile away, and, a couple hundred feet away, an impact crater caused by something hitting the ground. “Hercules,” I said. “Guess you weren’t so damned invincible after all.” I twitched my fingers, one after another, as though I could somehow compel the last of his soul to come to me, to finish what we had started.
I looked over the fields, found the road again in the distance. It was getting close to summer and the days were longer, but I could see the sun hanging low in the sky. We could be at the road in a few minutes at normal speed. I looked back down at Scott lying in the mud and knew we’d be going far slower than normal speed. I took a deep breath, sighing once more. Scott was spent, I was sure of that. I lifted him up onto my back with as much gentleness as I could manage and started carrying him, fireman-style, across the field toward the distant road. Every pain and ache from my fights and the landing seemed to shout at me every step of the way, but that was all right. I was alive. And in Iowa. That part of creation where even God got bored enough to nod off for a while.
I surveyed the flat ground around me, judged the distance to the road, and wondered how long I’d have to walk down it before I found any sign of civilization. I sighed. Could be a while.
“Iowa,” I said, breathing the word like a curse. Because it kind of was.
Chapter 21
Scott and I managed to get a ride from a trucker who was passing through on the way to Decorah, a mid-sized town in northwest Iowa. I should say I managed to get a ride from the trucker. Scott remained passed out and still reeked of mud and champagne, like a pig farmer who’d had a good night, I guess. Probably not out of place in Iowa.
I took a shower and bought some new clothes at a truck stop then rented a car in Decorah. We pulled into the Directorate campus a few hours later, long after nightfall. Ariadne was waiting outside HQ with my mother, her face dark and sullen. I pulled up and got out of the car, stretching my legs as I did so, tilting my arms up in the air. “Hey, guys,” I said from where I’d stopped on the loop just in front of our HQ building, a square, modern-looking structure that rose about four stories above us and two below the ground.
My mother wore a small smile. “I was a little worried until we got your call.”
“A little worried?” Ariadne’s arms were folded and she shot an astounded look at my mother. “She fell out of an airplane.”
My mother’s face didn’t change much, but I saw a hint of something more. “Okay. Maybe more than a little.”
“Senator Foreman caught a flight back to D.C.,” Ariadne said without preamble as I crossed behind the car and opened the passenger door. Scott was still passed out and I hefted him onto my shoulder. He didn’t stir. “He didn’t seem too happy about the outcome of the mission.”
“Did you have to make an emergency landing?” I asked my mother as I walked by her, toting Scott on my shoulder as I headed toward the dorm building. I heard Ariadne’s heels clopping behind us to keep up.
“In Des Moines,” she said. “We caught the next flight back. What about you?”
“Splashed down in a cornfield,” I said. “Managed to hitch to a city where we caught the car rental place just before closing.”
“You lost every single one of the telepaths,” Ariadne said, her voice strained.
“We did,” I agreed. “And the two escorts.”
Her face was grim. “How is this in any way not a catastrophe?”
I kept walking, Scott’s body bobbing lightly on my shoulder. It had been a long day, but he still didn’t seem too heavy. I stopped, realizing we were about halfway across the lawn to the dormitory building. “I should probably take him to medical to be checked out, huh?”
I turned and saw Ariadne looking at me with cool disbelief. “Seeing as you don’t care that your captives were killed in a glorious bloodbath that culminated in you being thrown out of a plane in flight, I might recommend you get yourself examined as well.”