I love you, Kaitlyn thought, as Anna pulled out a long slim cotton-knit dress and said, "This looks like you, Kait." I love you and Lewis almost as much as I do Rob. You're all so decent-and that's why he's going to beat you if you're not careful.
She forced her mind away from that and looked around the room. Marisol's room was like Marisol herself-an unpredictable mixture. Neat with messy, old with new. Like the big mahogany desk, with its silky-ruddy finish scratched and stained, as if it had been given by a loving grandmother to a careless teenager who used it for mixing perfume and storing a CD player. Or the leather miniskirt peeping out of a hamper just below the picture of the Virgin Mary.
A pair of expensive sunglasses were lying half under the bed's dust ruffle. Kait picked them up and absently twisted one gold earpiece back into shape.
"How about this?" Anna was saying, and Kait whistled. It was a very sexy, very feminine dress: spandex bodice fitting to just below the hips then flaring to a sheer chiffon skirt. Tiny gold clasps held the cap sleeves. A radical dress, black, that would make the wearer look slim as a statue.
"For you?" Kait said.
"No, you, dummy. It would make the boys swallow their tongues." Anna started to put the dress back. "Come to think of it, you don't need any more boy trouble. You've got two panting after you already."
"This kind of dress might get a girl out of trouble," Kait said hastily, taking the hanger. Spandex and chiffon wouldn't wrinkle, and she would need all the weapons she could gather if her plan went through. An outfit like this might make Gabriel sit up and take notice, and seducing Gabriel was item number one on her date book.
She folded the dress small and put it in her duffel bag. Anna chuckled, shaking her head.
Is this really me doing this? Kait wondered. Kaitlyn
Brady Fairchild, who used to think Levi's jeans were high fashion? But if she was going to be Mata Hari, she might as well do it thoroughly.
What she said was, "Anna? Do you think about boys?"
"Hmm?" Anna was peering into the closet.
"I mean, you seem so wise about them. You always seem to know what they'll do. But you don't seem to go after them,"
Anna laughed. "Well, we've been pretty busy lately with other things."
Kaitlyn looked at her curiously. "Have you ever had one you really liked?"
There was the barest instant of hesitation before Anna answered. She was looking at another dress, fingering some sequins that were coming off. Then smiled and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess I found somebody worth caring for once."
"What happened?"
"Well-not much."
Kaitlyn, still watching curiously, realized with surprise that Anna's thoughts were veiled. It was like seeing lights behind a paper wall-she could sense color but not shape. Is that what my veiling looks like? she wondered, and barely had the wits to ask, "Why not?"
"Oh-it would never have worked out. He was together with somebody already. My best friend."
"Really?" Thoughts of veiling had led to thoughts of what she was veiling, and Kaitlyn was by now utterly distracted. She hardly knew what she was saying, much less what Anna was. "You should have gone for it. I'll bet you could have taken him. With your looks ..."
Anna grinned ruefully and shook her head. "I would never do that. It would be wrong." She put the sequinned dress back in the closet. "Now, bed," she said firmly.
"Um." Kaitlyn was still distracted. Thinking: I'm casual, I'm calm, I'm confident. She hurried to the bathroom and came back with her clothes still on under the billowing flannel nightgown she'd gotten at Anna's house.
She'd acquired it on the trip up to Canada, because they hadn't stopped by Anna's home in Puget Sound on the way back down. They'd accepted money and a 1956 Chevy Bel Air from the Fellowship and taken Route 101 all the way down the coast, driving all day for three days, avoiding Anna's parents. Avoiding any parents-they hadn't contacted Lewis's in San Francisco or Rob's in North Carolina or Kaitlyn's father in Ohio. They'd agreed on this early as a necessity; parents would only get worried and angry and would never, never agree to their kids doing what had to be done.
But from what Gabriel had said, Anna's parents had gone to the police anyway. They'd had proof of what Mr. Z was up to-files Rob had stolen from the Institute, detailing Mr. Z's experiments with his first group of students . . . but obviously even proof wasn't enough. Mr. Z had the police sewn up.
No one from the outside could take him down.
Kaitlyn sighed and pulled the covers more tightly over herself. She was focused on Anna, lying beside her in Marisol's bed; listening to Anna's breathing, monitoring Anna's presence in the web.
When she was certain Anna was asleep, she quietly slipped out from under the covers.
I'm going out to see Rob, she projected, not loud enough to wake the other girl, but loud enough, she hoped, to wiggle into Anna's subconscious. That way, if Anna noticed her missing in the next few hours, she might assume Kaitlyn was in the living room and not worry.
Kait tiptoed to the bathroom, where she'd managed to leave her duffel bag. She stripped off the flannel nightgown and crammed it on top of the black dress and Marisol's designer sunglasses. Then she crept down the hallway and noiselessly let herself out the back door.
There was no moon, but the stars were frosty-pale in the night sky. Oakland was too big a city for them to make much of a show, and for a moment Kaitlyn felt a pang of homesickness. Out by Piqua Road in Thoroughfare, the sky would be pitch-black, huge, and serene.
No time to think about that. Keep moving and find a phone booth, girl.
Back in Thoroughfare, she would have been terrified of walking around a strange city at night-not to mention daunted by the task of trying to get to another strange city, at least thirty or forty miles away. But she was a different Kaitlyn than she'd been back in Thoroughfare. She'd dealt with things then that Kaitlyn had never dreamed of, she'd traveled all the way to Canada without any adult to help, and she'd learned to rely on her own resources. Now she had no choice. She couldn't wait until morning-she'd never get away from the others in the daytime. She didn't have money for a cab. Still, there must be a way to get across the bay to San Carlos; she just had to find it.
With an almost frightening coolheadedness, she set out to find the way.