It had been Adrian’s idea to go separately, and Hailey and Nick hadn’t argued with him. Hailey hadn’t been convinced that Adrian, in the state they’d found him in his office, would make the four-mile trip from the Tufts campus to the base of Beacon Hill by bike intact—but he didn’t seem the sort of person who lost arguments very often, and Hailey didn’t have the time to waste. By now, half the police officers in Boston were probably out searching for them—and law enforcement was the least of her worries. The woman who’d nearly killed her twice was obviously working for someone; whoever it was, they were after the same thing Hailey was—and had already killed multiple people in the pursuit.

Hailey shook off the thought of the woman with the sable hair—that ice-cold look in her eyes, as she’d aimed that gun, the way her body had shattered when the cannon had gone off—with a violent shudder, and leaned up against the fence next to Adrian, feeling the cold iron against her shirt.

Adrian had already given her and Nick a two-minute history lesson on the park behind them on the way out of his office. The professor liked to lecture, that was for sure, and something as simple as giving directions had been an opportunity for him to tell them more than they’d ever need to know.

“The Common is the oldest public park in the country,” he’d intoned, as he’d led them out of 14 Talbot. “Dates back to 1634, when it was bought from the commonwealth’s first settler by the Puritans. Fifty acres in the heart of the city; over the years it’s been used as everything from a cow pasture to a dumping ground to a gallows to a center for protest. It was also one of the main encampments of the British army at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The regiment that raced Paul Revere to Lexington and Concord in 1775 started their night there.”

Now, after the dash from Tufts to that iron fence, partially on foot but mostly in the back of a taxicab, her face and Nick’s shielded as best as possible—it seemed fitting that things had come full circle, in a way. The impetus for Revere’s midnight ride had begun here, and perhaps, close to this same spot, the man’s true legacy would soon be revealed.