Chloe reached up and cut the belt with one swipe of a knife. I dropped to the floorboard. She slammed on the brakes, and I rammed against the seat.
With the car in park, she got out, came to the back door, and just as she opened it, I slammed a foot into it. She staggered back from the hit.
I hurried from the vehicle, feeling the hot welling of blood in my wounds.
Chloe had a gun trained on me.
The barn rose out of the cornfields in the distance.
“I’m out on the road,” she said, and it took me a minute to realize she was on her phone. “Nick tried to get away.” She narrowed her eyes at me but smiled. It was a real smile, too, as if she was amused at my daring play for escape. As if she was impressed.
“Get out here now before I shoot him.”
I put my hands up as she ended the call.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
If I couldn’t fight my way out of this, maybe I could talk my way out. Doubtful. I sucked at talking.
“You don’t remember, do you?” She sniffed. “The Branch and their memory wipes.”
“Remember what?”
I took a step toward her. She lowered the gun and shot me in the leg.
I went down. Dirt gritted between my teeth. A sharp pain raced up my leg.
“Son of a bitch. What was that for?”
“For being an idiot.”
Chloe walked over, the gravel crunching beneath her flip-flops. She was in a dress. Flowers all over it. Her blond hair hung forward in a loose braid. Her lips were pink and glossy.
She looked like any other teenage girl dropped into the middle of an Illinois summer.
But she wasn’t.
Obviously.
She was obviously someone else entirely.
“Six years ago,” she said, staring down at me as I blinked up at her, “you didn’t come here to kill Elizabeth. You came here to kill me.”
34
NICK
MY FREEDOM FOR THEIRS.
That’s what she’d said on the phone.
She was using Elizabeth and me to bargain for her own freedom.
Chloe sat beside me in the dirt, propped herself up on an outstretched arm, and used her knee as a rest to keep the gun pointed at my face.
She stared down the road, squinting into the sunlight.
Chloe was involved with the Branch? Chloe was a part of my old mission here?
“You knew exactly who I was when we met up at Arrow, didn’t you?” I said.
Chloe nodded, but didn’t look at me. “Imagine my surprise. I had to know what you were doing here again.”
“So you got me drunk.”
“Is there any other way to get information out of a guy like you?”
I didn’t answer her. She was right.
“You shot me that night you saved Elizabeth,” she said. “When I first came over to you at Arrow, I thought for sure you’d recognize me. Then when you didn’t, I realized you must have had your memory altered. So then I started wondering why.”
“Would you have hooked up if I hadn’t had that flashback?”
She finally turned to me, her eyes running up and down my body. “Maybe.”
We sat in silence for a beat.
“Why was I sent here to kill you?”
“Do you remember what Riley’s instructions were? From that night?”
That night was still vague in my head. I was fuzzy on the details. There were a few that stood out. Elizabeth staring up at me from the forest floor. Me with a gun in my hand. Elizabeth crying.
I had known Riley was there, but I couldn’t remember what he’d said.
What I did know was that Target E was supposed to be decapitated—and then suddenly all the pieces I’d gathered over the past few days added up.
The Angel Serum. Decapitation, incinerating the body. The mystery girl from the barn lab. The one who kicked my ass with a bedsheet.
That girl had had dark brown hair and…
Chloe tilted her head, and I cursed my lame-ass observation skills. Her roots were dark brown.
“Target E,” I said, and she nodded.
I filed through my flashbacks, trying to see where she fit.
Two stood out: the one of a girl in a white room, and the one I’d had that night when Chloe and I had stumbled back to my hotel room after meeting at Arrow. They were the same memory, I realized, just different parts.
It made sense, though, that if the flashback was of Chloe, it had come racing out when I was with her. Memories are always easier to access when you have a physical anchor in the present.
The only flashback of Elizabeth I was absolutely certain of was the one in the forest. It was possible that was actually the first time I met her.
“My real name is Emily. Emily Chloe Noelle,” Chloe said. “I was known as Patient 2124 in the lab.”
For a brief second, I forgot that we were enemies, and instead I was just in awe of her. “You shot yourself in the head.”