Not like the one that currently protects the pass. With barricades and floodlights that seem to come out of nowhere.

And soldiers, heavily armed. With guns pointed in our direction.

Six

Grace

“Turn back to where you came from!”

I knew this was a bad idea. I can’t put into words how good it feels to be under an open night sky, to see stars and clouds go on forever, unobscured, endless. I don’t know how to wrap my mind around the overwhelming joy of walking without having to stop.

But leaving Hope goes against every fiber of my being. Not because I want to be there, but because I want to make it out. Properly. I want to prove to everyone—but most of all myself—that I can find a way to be good. To be better than this.

Instead I find myself once more with a gun pointed at me, and a familiar, bone-numbing terror spreads through me.

Hunter clears his throat and raises his hands. He takes a careful step forward. “What is going on?”

“Stay back!”

Hunter freezes.

“Farther, all of you!”

Something heavy settles in my stomach. We all take a few steps back.

The roadblock is set up with barred traffic barricades and a truck parked sideways across the road. It’s manned by at least four soldiers, and none of them look particularly excited about ten teens showing up in the middle of the night. Two soldiers are wearing neck gaiters pulled up over their mouth and nose, and they whisper among themselves. One runs to a truck a little ways farther down the road.

“We’re just trying to get to Sam’s Throne,” Hunter says, when he gets no answer to his initial question.

I push my fists into my pockets to keep from reaching for him and pulling him back.

“Stay there, and show us your permit!” The same voice has an edge of fear to it now, and that only ever makes things worse.

“What is happening?” Emerson whispers behind me. I can’t make out the hushed answer, but it’s probably a variation of nothing good.

The soldier who ran back returns with an officer. The officer motions at the guards to keep their post, then steps in front of the barricades. He hooks his thumbs around his belt. The absence of the weapon doesn’t make him look any less menacing, especially when the soldiers behind him still have their guns trained on us.

“Go back to where you came from, and you won’t get into trouble, kids,” he says, presumably trying to sound older than he looks, trying to de-escalate whatever this is.

“Do they know who we are?” A soft voice. Leah, probably.

“We live in Sam’s Throne!” Hunter says boldly. “We’re trying to go back to where we came from.”

I bite my tongue. I want to hit him. They’ve already recognized us. Emerson isn’t the only one in part uniform, for goodness’s sake. Reid wears a navy-blue sweater with HJTC in bright-yellow letters on its back. What is Hunter going to do? Convince them that we’re harmless fugitives, so don’t mind us?