Escape Read Free Page A

against the wall, burying her head in her hands for a half second before visibly forcing herself to regain her composure.
    Sam had no choice but to glue his fingers to the arms of his chair. The desire to crouch down next to her and hold her was like some kind of preprogrammed hypnotic command. His fingernails were turning white from clenching the cushy arms of the chair, but he knew a physical gesture would only turn into an awkward disaster.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she uttered.
    â€œNo,” Sam said gently, feeling like he was calling to her from a hundred miles away, even though the roomwas the size of the average rich man’s closet. “Just tell me what it is. Tell me what I can do.”
    â€œI don’t know,” she replied. Her frustration was clearly near the boiling point. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I know Dad is in trouble. They took him, Sam. They took him from the hospital. And I have no idea where. I don’t know where he is and I have no idea who ‘they’ are.”
    Sam felt a flash of pure empathy for Gaia’s father. He pictured her father being carried away with nothing to think about but how far he was being taken from his family—how far he was being taken from Gaia. Sam knew every one of those sensations far too well.
    â€œWell. . . we have to find him,” Sam declared. “That’s all. We need to start looking for him right now. We don’t want to waste any time.”
    Gaia froze for a moment and looked up at Sam. This rather obvious reply seemed to strike her in some surprisingly deep way, as if Sam had somehow said the thing she’d been longing to hear, even though he couldn’t really imagine what else there could possibly be to say. If someone was missing, what else did you do but start looking immediately? Didn’t they always say that the first forty-eight hours were some kind of critical period for finding missing persons? But still, Gaia’s face had seemed to light up when he said it. Like he’d just solved some riddle she’d been mulling over all morning.
    â€œYes,” she said, showing the first faint signs of a smile since she’d walked through the door. “Yes, that’s right. Right now. I need to start looking right—”
    â€œWe,” Sam corrected her. “We need to start looking.”
    Gaia’s smile faded from her face. “Sam. . . you don’t need to be involved in any more of—”
    â€œGaia.” Sam searched her eyes for some common sense, trying to ignore their mesmerizing shade of ocean blue so as to complete his sentences. “Whoever the hell I’m hiding from right now is out there somewhere. And I’d be willing to bet my second life on the fact that those same people have something to do with whatever is going on with your dad. So we need to start looking for him, Gaia. We .”
    Gaia stared into Sam’s eyes. And she kept staring. She stared long enough to confuse him terribly and make his heart beat twice as fast. The longer she looked, the quicker his heart beat.
    â€œWhat?” he asked finally, praying for her to blurt out a ten-minute monologue about how much she loved him—how much she’d always loved him and had dreamed about him every night he was gone the exact same way he had dreamed about her. . . .
    â€œI don’t know,” she said, lifting her bag off the floor. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind. “I’m just. . . I need to talk to Tatiana. I need to—”
    â€œLook, Gaia . . .” Sam stood up from his chair and took a step closer to her, trying not to make her feelcornered. “I want to help you. And I need you to help me. If this is still your uncle doing this, then we both need to know that. If he’s just a vegetable in a coma, then we need to figure out who is doing it. Either way. . .