As the motor home sped away from the facility, Elena dug through the pantries for a first aid kid as Patrick helped Sam up onto the couch.

"Find it?" Patrick asked.

She nodded, letting her breath out as she carried the supplies over to where Sam was sitting, his tears continuing to spill with each movement of his arm and leg. She carried the first aid kid back to him, knelt beside Patrick in front of Sam, and rolled up Sam's pant leg as gently as she could. As far as she could tell, the scrapes were only skin deep.

"You're going to be okay." She dabbed a cleansing pad onto his scraped, and he whined.

"Hey," Patrick said, "I'm not so sure. We might have to chop it off." He gently karate chopped at the uninjured areas of Sam's knees, and Sam giggled.

A sudden swerve knocked them all to the side. Elena ran to the front and threw open the window to Michelle's compartment.

"We're being tailed. Need to throw them off."

Elena ripped open the curtains on one side of the camper, and Patrick ran to the other side. She could make out police lights beside them, and if she angled herself to see the rear view mirrors, she could see several cars tailing them—some with sirens, some with lights, but all keeping pace right behind them.

"What are we going to do?" Elena cried.

"Hang on to something!" Michelle wrenched the steering wheel to one side, and Elena tumbled to the floor.

"We can't outrun them!"

"I'm going to try to lose them." Out in front of the camper, cars and pedestrians raced to the sides of the street. Michelle ran over a curb and kept driving.

Elena grabbed onto one of the handles at the side of the car just in time for the next swerve; Patrick only just held his balance. "We have to do something!" Elena cried.

"Like what?" Patrick grabbed onto the kitchen counter.

Sam's little voice piped up. "Egg the bad guys!"

Elena and Patrick exchanged a glance. "I've got nothing better," Patrick finally said.

Sam pulled himself off the couch and darted to the pantry. "You get eggs, I'll get flour."

Elena gritted her teeth and slid open a window. Patrick took poor aim at one of the cop cars with the eggs, only managing to catch the rear window of one. A giggling Sam poured flour out of the window, covering the cop car.

The car slowed, falling behind. "It's working!" Sam laughed and ran for the other window. "I'm going to get another one!"

Swallowing hard, Elena watched the car as it fell behind. A window rolled down, and a hand with a gun emerged.

"Down!" She grabbed Patrick and threw him to the ground. "Get down, Sam!"

Gunshots sounded, but no breaking glass.

Elena couldn't keep herself from shaking. "What do we do?"

"We slowed them a little," Patrick said. "Let's keep throwing things."

"Great idea, if we want to die!"

Patrick nudged her with his foot as he stood. "They wouldn't shoot at us, they don't want to hit Sam."

"Well, what was that?" Elena remained huddled on the ground.

"A warning shot. They're not aiming to hit us."

Elena couldn't bring herself to get up. "Sam, get away from the window!"

"Probably a good idea, just in case. Elena, you and I have to keep going."

She breathed in to protest, but another swerve sent her into the far wall as the entire living area tilted to one side. The squawking of the animals had ramped up to be louder than the engines, and Winter ran in panicked laps from Michelle's room to the living room and back.

"Hang on, one more time!" Michelle shouted from the front, and Elena hung onto Sam with one hand and a leg of the couch with the other.

One more swerve nearly toppled the motor home, and the road became bumpy. Elena pulled herself up to kneel and peek through the window. She couldn't see any cars following them anymore, but that didn't mean they weren't close behind. Trees surrounded them, and smaller bushes and plants crackled beneath them.

The camper would be able to handle the rough terrain more easily than the cars would. If there was any place they could go to lose their followers, it would be here.

"Is everyone okay?" Michelle called back.

Sam's lip trembled, his eyes wide, as if he was making up his mind about it. Patrick clapped him on his good shoulder. "We're good. Right, buddy?"

His lips curled into a shaky smile. "We're good, Miss Michelle."

The camper jounced along through the grass and trees. Elena pulled herself up to stand. "Did we lose them?"

"I think so. I took a few last-minute turns to throw them off, but they kept catching up. They might have had surveillance from above."

"Helicopters?" Elena hadn't seen any, but there hadn't exactly been a chance to look up.

Michelle's eyes met Elena's through the rearview mirror for just a moment. "A lot of police departments have helicopters. If Tech United has the police in their hands, they've got access, too. So I waited until no one was in viewing range, then drove under the trees."

Elena's stomach turned. "Okay, but can't they just pick us up in infrared?"

"What's infrared?" Sam asked.

"Cameras that see heat instead of light." That wasn't exactly right, but it was how her dad had explained it to her, long ago.

"You're probably right, Elena, they probably do have infrared cameras. It's just going to be a lot harder for them while we're here."

Sam sat down on the couch. "I don't want to go back to the Tech United place."

"That's why we came to rescue you," Patrick said.

Elena knelt down in front of him. "Sam, what did they do to you there?"

"They said I was special. They gave me that plastic box thingy again, and the numbers were going all crazy again, I think worse than before even."

"But what made you jump through the window."

"I didn't want to go into the machine thing!"

Elena glanced back at Patrick, who shrugged and shook his head. "What machine?" she asked.

"It was like this big tube thing, and they said I had to lie down in it and it would take pictures of me."

"Like an MRI?" Elena took out her phone and did a quick image search for MRI machines. She showed one to Sam. "Like this?"

"Kind of, I think so."

Elena stood and turned toward Michelle. "They tried to give him an MRI. Why would they do that?"

"Might have been some kind of scanner that looked like an MRI machine," Michelle called back. "Sam, did they say what they were doing?"

"They said they were scanning for namolomies."

Anomalies. So they were open with Sam about what they were doing—just not clear enough for him to understand. It figured. "Did they say why they wanted to scan you?"

"Because namolomies means I have special needs but they could use them to move the world forward or something."

Appeal to scientific advance to an eight-year-old. Not surprising that that hadn't worked. "So they tried to put you in the machine—"

"They put me in the room with it, then locked me in to go get a medicine. They were mean. I ran away." He pulled his knees into his chest. "What are namolomies? Are they like demons? Do you have to burn them out?"

"No, Sam." Patrick sat down on the couch next to him. "We're not going to hurt you. We're not going to let anyone hurt you. That's why we took you away from there."

Sam smiled just slightly before he tightened his grip on his knees. "Where are we going now?"

"Good question." Elena turned to Michelle again.

Michelle was silent, staring at the path ahead of her, wearing the face she always wore when she was deep in thought. Elena let her eyes fall closed, and she almost immediately lost her balance and stumbled forward. She sighed.

"Hm." She glanced around at the animals in the room, the overturned cages, the items that had fallen from the pantry, the empty egg carton and bags of flour. It reminded her of camp.

They still had all of the equipment to run camp, and it had been simple demos that had allowed them to first see that Sam was special. If Tech United wasn't going to try to discover what was behind Sam's anomalies, maybe they should.

They knew nothing about the nature of the anomalies. But they could find out. It seemed everything had started back at the host school . . .

"Back to camp," Elena said.

"Won't they be looking for us there?"

"We won't go all the way in, not with the camper. We'll scope it out first. But that's where all this started. We need to find out what's going on with Sam's anomalies."

Patrick raised his eyebrows. "Elena, this isn't time for you to be doing one of your science experiments."

"It's not about me!" She held her temples in her hands. "Everything is about the anomalies, Patrick. Everything. Tech United, they were looking for anomalies. Maybe it's not why they came to evaluate us, but it's why they stayed longer than they needed to. Jim was just going to check in and out, then he did a bunch of research on me to get me to crack once he saw what happened when Sam was around."

"Okay, but they could just be crazy."

"Patrick, a multi-billion dollar corporation thought these anomalies were worth testing. Sam." She turned back to him. "Yes, you're special, but I don't think you have special needs. I think you have special abilities."

Sam released his grip on his knees a little and smiled, wiping his nose.

"Okay, I get it," Patrick said. "We have to figure out what's going on with the anomalies. But why does that mean we go back to the camp?"

"For all we know, they started there. If so, maybe we can find a clue about where they came from. And if not, we can still see if any of Sam's—" his wide eyes looked at her— "powers affected anything there."

Sam grinned, Patrick winked at Elena, and Michelle called back, "I'll head back to camp just as soon as I can get onto a main road."