My mind races as I try to remember if I knew anything about Ivan having a car in Opatija. Well, there’s one good way to find out for sure whether Ivan’s safe. I look for my pack and, as I do, realize Luka is frantically searching around us.

The backpacks are gone.

“Have you seen our bags? Our things?” he says to the driver.

The driver shakes his head, answering in Croatian, and gestures to where he was standing outside.

“I got out last,” I say, stunned. “I got out after he did. I left them in here.”

Luka curses, shoves out of the car to look in the trunk and then along the road. A moment later he’s talking to the people in the car in front of us, gesturing in our direction.

I was out of the cab for what—ten minutes? Fifteen? How long did I stare at the body being wheeled into the van?

“Please,” I say to the driver urgently. He’s backed to the very edge of the shoulder and is cranking the steering wheel. “Can I use your phone?”

My hands are starting to shake. I have to redial the number twice.

This time it is not picked up on the first ring, or even the second or third. By the fifth ring, I feel sick.

It is answered on the sixth.

“Hello?” I say. “Ivan? Are you there? Are you all right?”

Silence.

And then: “Hallo, Audra.”

It isn’t Ivan.

17

“Who is this?” I demand, heart pounding against my ribs. “Who are you?”

The call clicks off.

The cab door opens and Luka gets back in. “They’re gone,” he says grimly. “No one’s seen them.” And then he notices the phone tremoring in my hand. “Did you reach him?”

“Someone else answered,” I say.

The driver has finally managed to get us pointed across the road and is about to pull forward into the other lane when a light shines through the back window, right in my face. I shield my eyes. The light disappears. Someone pounds on the window.

Luka lunges across me to lock the door, tells the driver to go.

“Wait!” I say, unlocking the door. Hands from the outside pull it open.

“What are you doing?” Luka shouts, and I practically feel him prepare to launch through the door at the figure outside. At the sight of Claudia, he pulls up short.

“Hurry!” she says, grabbing my arm.

“What are you doing here?”

The driver shouts; Claudia snaps back and then launches into a diatribe that culminates with her throwing several kuna at him. A moment later he seems to apologize. Too profusely. And I sense she’s worked her Progeny ways on him, though I have no idea what she’s just said.

“He cheated your meter,” she says as we move away. A lie—for Luka’s sake, I assume.