“Audra. Audra!” He’s smoothing the hair from my eyes, searching my face with a frantic gaze.

“Get off me.” I plant my foot against his groin. He backs out the door, hands up, and then extends one toward me. After a moment, I take it and slowly sit up. A wave of nausea rolls over me.

“Remind me not to let you drive anymore,” I say.

We’re in the parking lot of some office complex off the highway. The sky to the east is still dark. Cars whiz by in the distance, crickets twitch in nearby fields. And somehow the world seems far too quiet.

“You banged your head pretty hard in that fall,” he says.

“Where are we?”

“Just over an hour from Chicago.” He leans into the front passenger side. With a wary glance at me, he starts to brush glass off the seat with what I recognize as the torn shirt he tied me up with.

I look back the way we came and instantly regret it; my neck is not going to be my friend tomorrow.

“You okay?” he says.

My head is killing me. I’ve been chased, drugged, fallen from a window, almost crashed upside down, passed out, and haven’t slept more than two hours at a time in days.

“Yeah.” Because despite all that, I’m alive.

“Is he dead?” I ask.

“I doubt it,” Luka mutters.

“How’d you get here from Maine?”

“Caught a flight.”

Hence the car I don’t recognize, which I assume to be a rental.

“My records,” I say, feeling the back of my head. “If they aren’t at the Center, where are they?”

“I don’t know. You didn’t tell me.”

“So I didn’t trust you.”

He pauses, not looking at me. He’s wearing the same outfit I last saw him in at the pub on Saturday. But then, so am I, stupid Nirvana T-shirt and all. But neither one of us resembles the people who ate lunch on the lake four days ago.

“We decided it was best neither one of us know.”

“We?” I chuff. “Good try. I saw you talking to Rolan at the Dropfly.”

“I know.”

“So you were trying to get him away,” I say slowly. “How’d you know he was there?”

Luka assesses me through the seats. “Did you forget that I live across the street? I was watching for you and saw him. Same guy I’d seen around town for days. When you showed up and he followed you in, it was pretty obvious.”

“You asked me out . . . so you could see if he followed me there?”

“It worked.”

I’m not sure how I feel about being my own bait.

“Wait a minute. He didn’t tell you I had my memory erased,” I say with realization. “You told him.”

Which means Luka knows—knew then—what Rolan was. Is.