Deadfall Read Free Page A

say.
    “You have them, too?”
    “That’s how I recognized you.”
    You sit back in the seat, keeping your eyes on the scenery outside as it passes. There are trees in every direction, houses dotted in the hills behind them. The leaves are a deep burgundy, some gold. The sky is a flat white.
    He keeps his head down when he speaks. “Those first days after I woke up, when I didn’t know anything . . . that’s what kept me sane. Thinking about those dreams.”
    Outside, in the corridor, you can hear people talking. You eat the rest of the sandwich, savoring each bite. “I couldn’t tell if they were real. I didn’t know.”
    “They always felt real to me.”
    “It’s still confusing,” you say.
    He leans forward onto your top bunk, resting his chin on his knuckles. “Those dreams are the only thing that aren’t confusing.”
    His words are low and soft. He reaches out, taking your hand. He holds it there in front of you, turns it over, his thumb grazing the inside of your palm. Your skin is hot beneath his touch. But it’s too much.
    “I’m not there yet, Rafe,” you say, slipping your hand from his. “I don’t know you. I want to, but I don’t. Not yet.”
    “Right, I know.” He sits down in one of the chairs.
    You listen to his breaths. You don’t want to compare, but you do. The way it felt when Ben was with you, his fingers tangled in yours.
    That wasn’t real. This is real. But it’s getting harder to tell the difference. You climb off the bed and sit across from him.
    “I want to know your story.”
    “My story . . .”
    You lean your forehead against the window, looking out. “How AAE found you, where you’re from . . . how your memory came back. You haven’t told me anything.”
    He rests his elbows on his knees. There’s a bump in the bridge of his nose, the top of it askew, like it was broken at some point. He doesn’t look at you, studying the pattern of the seat fabric instead. “My story is . . . I never got pasteleventh grade. My story is . . . I’ve met my dad twice, and my mom started doing meth when I was six. One of my first memories is finding her passed out on the garage floor. My grandmother raised me.”
    You bring your knees to your chest, watching him.
    “Where’d you grow up?”
    “Outside of Fresno.” There’s a hint of irritation in his voice. “You know I’ve already told you all this.”
    “Tell me again.”
    “It’s still not all there.”
    “Try . . .”
    “There are pieces that feel like they’re missing. But I know I used to go to this boxing gym. The manager was a friend of my older brother’s and he let me go for free sometimes, when there weren’t a lot of people there. This guy saw me fight. He started asking me all this stuff about my family, like where I was from. I thought they were just bullshit questions. Then he said he’d pay for me to fly to Texas, that he’d set up a match for me there. Like I was that good.”
    “I wonder what he was doing for them . . . doesn’t sound like he was a Watcher, or a Stager,” you say.
    Rafe’s hand drops away from his face. “What’s that?”
    “AAE assigns a Stager to each target, the ones that tip off the hunters so they can find you, then make sure there’s no evidence of the hunt. They set me up so I wouldn’t go to the police—made it look like I’d broken into this officebuilding. Watchers are people who monitor you, make sure you’re staying within a certain radius, and make sure you’re healthy. They keep tabs for AAE. They’re the ones that planted the tracking devices on us—you got rid of yours, right?” Rafe nods, and then you go on. “I found it all out when I tracked my hunter, Goss, to his house. He had paperwork hidden in one of his closets, and there was enough there to put some of it together.”
    Rafe rests his head back. “The guy who first approached me . . . I don’t know how he worked for them. Curt. Giant Filipino guy who could talk for hours