Patrick gripped her hand harder, and they raced across the street. She screamed as two cars screeched to a stop and the drivers leaned out of the windows to shout and swear at them.

"Sorry!" she shouted back, and they kept running. She glanced over her shoulder—two men in hazmat suits had taken their helmets off and were running after them on the other side of the street.

"We've got to lose them," Elena said.

Patrick let go of her hand. "This way."

She followed him to the fence leading into a backyard. He climbed over and jumped down onto the opposite side and kept running. She took a deep breath and pulled herself up and over the cold, spiky wire fence, but the ground on the other side slammed her feet harder than she expected, and the air rushed out of her lungs.

Patrick turned back to her. "Okay?"

She nodded and kept running. Sirens began to wail.

"The sirens won't stop following us!" Elena shouted.

"It's okay, those guys can't jump the fences in those suits. We'll lose them." He jumped up onto the wooden fence that divided the two neighbors' yards. "But only if we keep moving."

His voice sounded out of breath, and Elena's lungs burned. She jumped onto the fence but couldn't pull herself up. He reached down and grabbed her by the arm. "Never pegged you as one who needed rescuing," he said, laughing.

She scoffed and pushed him down from the fence. He scrambled to his feet, she climbed down, and they ran again.

A low, deep barking sounded, and an enormous German Shepherd chased them to the next fence. Patrick had made it to the top of this fence already, but Elena trailed behind.

"Come on!"

"I'm coming!" She only just made it to the fence in time for the dog to reach her. A sharp pain seared in her ankle as the dog bit down—her pant leg tore as she pulled away.

Patrick landed on her feet into the space behind the yard, but Elena fell onto her side. "You okay?"

"I'm—I'm—" She pulled himself to his feet and limped. Her ankle burned, and cold sweat broke out all over her body. "I'm okay. Let's go."

She took his hand again, and they ran, slower than before, through the grass in the park where they had landed. "Trees over this way. We've lost them, but they'll have a harder time finding us here."

They slowed their pace to a walk, and Elena went to lean against a tree. She pulled out her cell phone, scrolled through her contacts, and called Michelle.

Michelle answered on the first ring. "What's the news?"

"There's people swarming the school. People in hazmat suits, they saw us and we had to run. And I got hurt."

"What happened?"

"Got bitten. Dog in a yard we had to run through."

"Can you get back here?"

Elena's next breath came shuddering. "We're not coming back to where you are. We'll have to catch up with you later."

"What?" Patrick cried.

Elena lowered her phone and hit the speaker button.

Michelle's words came in fierce. "Elena, you get back here, do you hear me?"

"No. They're going to know you're close. They're going to start searching the area, so you and Sam need to get far away. Get on the road, and we'll catch a train. We'll meet you in—" In her mind, she scanned through the city names she'd seen on the map, but she couldn't remember where any of them were. "Well, you just start heading south. We'll get on a train going south and catch up to you, I'll call you when we know where we're going."

Michelle was silent for a moment. "I trust you, Elena," she said finally.

"See you soon." Elena hung up and turned to Patrick.

"How is it?" he asked

She sunk to the ground, and he knelt in front of her. She peeled back the torn fabric and winced at the torn skin. She took off her sweater and tied it around her ankle. The pressure hurt, but there was nothing she could do about it.

"It might get infected," Patrick said

"This'll at least stop the bleeding. Michelle will know what to do when we do get back to the motor home."

"Do you need to go to the hospital?"

Elena breathed hard. They couldn't do that. It was like Patrick said—they had to keep moving. "Maybe. But Michelle might be able to fix me up. She has some medical training, she was in med school for awhile."

His brow furrowed. "What kind of training doesn't she have?"

Elena grinned against the pain. "She's no engineer. That's why she needs me."

"But seriously. What's she doing working for Camp Universe?"

Elena shrugged. "Apparently, she volunteered on site as a counselor one summer and fell in love."

Patrick let his breath out.

It was quiet for a few minutes. When Elena's breathing had slowed down, she reached down and started to untie the sweater from her leg. Ideally, she'd leave it on until they got back to Michelle, but it looked strange, and it would attract too much attention if she was walking around with a sweater tied to her leg. The fabric had stuck to the skin in places, and ripping it off restarted the bleeding and freshened the pain. However, it didn't bleed as much as before, and she was able to stand, albeit putting most of her weight on her left foot.

"Let's go." Elena limped down the dirt path. "We passed a train station a few blocks back."

Patrick held out his hand, but she pretended not to notice.

The train ride was, thankfully, uneventful. Elena picked a random station on the map and called Michelle to meet them there. They kept quiet and kept their heads down, and Elena limited her limping as much as she could, though it was almost more than she could take when the train was standing room only.

The sun was already starting to set as they arrived back at the motor home, and Michelle had been waiting for them for awhile in the parking lot of the train station. The smells of dinner wafted throughout the cabin area, and Elena suppressed a smile. Leave it to Michelle to keep things running as if they were normal, even in the midst of chaos.

Elena had expected the pain to dull with time, but it seared worse now than before. She sat silently at the table as Patrick told the story of everything that had happened as Michelle cleaned and properly bandaged Elena's ankle. Sam sat on the couch playing a game on Michelle's phone.

"So going back to the camp is out," Patrick said. "What do we do now?"

"We've got to get out of here. Get as far as we can." Michelle stood to stir the pot for a moment, then turned back around to face them. "Obviously, we don't have much of a choice there. But we've got to keep an end game in mind. We can't just run for the rest of our lives."

Elena settled back in her chair and closed her eyes, but it did nothing to help her focus this time. If anything, it helped her focus on the pain in her ankle. So she returned to the conclusion she had drawn the last time she had had time to think in silence. "We need to find out what's going on with Sam's anomalies. We don't know anything about what's going on until we know what Tech United is looking for."

Sam looked up from his game and locked eyes with her.

"I don't know if those people in hazmat suits found anything at the school. If they didn't, we're not at any disadvantage yet. They don't know much more than we do."

"Other than whatever they were able to find out through the experimentation at the facility," Michelle said.

"Okay, yes. But if they did learn something from the camp, maybe we can learn the same things from retracing Sam's steps."

Now all eyes turned toward Sam, and he lowered his game onto the couch.

"Sam," Elena said, "where were you living before you came to camp?"

His eyes grew very round. "You're not going to take me back there."

"No, of course not." Patrick glared at Elena. "We'd never do that to you."

Elena shot him a look back. "Okay, yeah, we're never going to make you live there again. But they might know some things, so it might be worth—"

"They're worth nothing."

Elena took a deep breath. Her ankle throbbed in time with her heart beat. "Okay, I know. But they might have seen the anomalies. And—" she cleared her throat— "mistaken them for demons."

Sam pulled his knees into his chest.