Okay, so, obviously this whole thing hadn't gone at all the way we had expected it to. Not that that was surprising, really. We had known there was no way to plan for everything that could possibly happen. But still, this was pushing it a little bit. First we ran into Robert Parson of all people, then we found a TONI who was now part of the team? Yeah, it was safe to say that this was very different than anything either Paige or I had ever considered as a possibility. Honestly, I thought we’d be fighting a lot more of Pittman’s goons.

But the important part was that we had the machine. And we were alive and in one piece, that was pretty big too. I wasn't exactly sure how that would've gone without Robert's help. I probably would've had to use my power more openly, for one. And that would have brought the force of Breakwater and anything else they could muster down on our heads back in Detroit. I didn't even want to think about how bad that could have gotten.

So, instead, I focused on what had actually happened. We had the machine and Breakwater had no idea who we were. At least, not so far. Now all we had to do was get safely back to Detroit with it.

To that end, we were following Robert down the freeway. He was about half a mile ahead in his own car, using a short range radio to stay in contact. He had assured us that the radios were from some communication focused Tech-Touched, and that it was impossible for anyone else to hear what was sent through them. Their signals couldn't be intercepted. Of course, we didn't just take his word for it. Paige had tried using her own system to break into the encrypted signals between the radios but to no avail. If there was a way to eavesdrop on them, she couldn't do it. And that was going to have to be good enough for me.

Thankfully, I had another bit of distraction helping me avoid dwelling on all the ways what we had done could've gone wrong. Namely, Qwerty. He was perched on my shoulder as I sat in the passenger seat beside Paige, who was driving. Well, sometimes he was on my shoulder. Other times he jumped to my head, or over to Paige herself, or up on the dashboard, the windowsill, anywhere he wanted to go as he kept pointing at various things, asking what they were, where they come from, if he could lick them (that came up a surprising amount, he really liked licking things), and so on. He was incredibly curious about everything he saw, and asked questions like a hyperactive little kid. And he kept taking notes. Or rather, planting notes. Every time he asked about something, I saw him flicking his hands around to open those invisible notes of his so he could record things on the object itself. Which made me wonder how long those notes stuck around. When I asked him, he said he’d put notes on things and gone back over a week later to find it still there. So were they just permanent?

Paige and I answered everything we could, including telling him not to lick things like that. I wasn't sure how much he listened to that last bit, but we were doing our best.

There were a lot of cops on the freeway too. I wasn't sure if that was just my paranoia, if there was something else going on, or if they were actually working with the Breakwater people. Either way, I knew we were still in a dangerous situation. The van looked different than it had, but that didn't mean they wouldn't figure out where we were. If I was seeing this many cops on the road, I could only imagine how many Breakwater cars were out there scouring every inch of the freeway for us in every direction.

Maybe they would decide we had escaped another way? After all, they didn't know we were limited to ground transport. Maybe we had a plane, or some sort of teleportation? Or maybe we had gone to ground. They were probably tearing apart the town back there brick by brick, if I had to guess.

Whatever they were doing, every mile we put between us and Tooele put us another step closer to getting out of this whole thing in one piece. Robert was watching for any roadblocks or other traps, letting us know whenever he noticed a cop paying too much attention to other vehicles. We maneuvered around those situations, taking off ramps and driving around other towns until he signaled that the cops (or possibly ‘cops’) had moved on. Then we made our way back to the freeway once more and kept going.

Finally, after several hours of that, we had made it a couple hundred miles south of Tooele. It was the opposite direction than the way we had come in, which had seemed to be the safest way to go. We would keep going south, then make our way east through Colorado and back north.

After arranging to meet Robert at a roadside motel up ahead, I slumped back in my seat and looked at the dash, where Qwerty was enthusiastically licking a Life Saver Paige had given him. “Are you as hungry as I am? Because I feel like I could devour half a cow at this point. I'd even be willing to risk having to thwart another robbery if it meant we could eat lunch first.” It had been a really long morning, and now that the danger was basically over, my stomach had spent the past while reminding me that it existed.

Qwerty, for his part, bobbed that tiny head of his rapidly, his beak clacking together a couple times. “Food!” he cheered enthusiastically. “If we turn around and go back, I can show you the best dumpsters to dig into! Some of the stuff they throw away is still warm!”

Blanching heavily, I put one hand over my stomach and shook my head. “You know, tasty as that sounds, we can't go back there, remember?”

“Ohhh yeah.” he sounded and looked a bit embarrassed about forgetting before perking up. “Hey, I bet if you let me stick my head out the window I could find some other good dumpsters. I’m really good at finding the best ones!”

Before I could find a response for that, Paige replied, “I think we can do better than dumpsters. We’ll get you a whole fresh meal all to yourself. And if you play your cards right, there might even be a toy in it.”

Sure enough, we stopped for food and pulled around the back of the store, in a spot furthest from any other vehicle so we could have some privacy. Qwerty got a kids meal with apple slices and broken up pieces of chicken nuggets. At first I wasn't sure how that would go over, considering the whole part-parrot thing, but both he and Paige assured me it wasn't anything close to cannibalism. And, of course, he got the toy in the meal, which turned out to be a little race car. He proceeded to run around the back of the van with it, giving off loud vrooming sounds as he made the toy race along the walls and floor. For the moment at least, he was thoroughly distracted by that.

Meanwhile, the rest of us ate our own food, half-listening to Qwerty playing with that toy car. Robert was standing just outside the driver’s side door, his own car parked nearby as he watched the nearby freeway for anything untoward. His voice was low. “I think we've lost the bulk of our pursuit right now. They probably think we're holed up back in town in one of his other houses. But keep your eyes open just in case. And don't do anything to draw attention.” He looked at me directly. “That means no interfering in any more robberies until we’re back in Detroit. You don't want to give those people any way to track your movements. Because believe me, they will be watching for anything out of the ordinary. And if they put enough together to figure out that you're going to Detroit, this is going to become even more complicated than it already is.”

Well, he was right about the complicated thing, that was for sure. Even discounting all this Pittman machine stuff, I had a thousand things I wanted to ask. But even getting into one of those things would involve saying more than I probably should have. It was far too dangerous. He was so close to my parents. There was no way he wouldn't tell them who I really was if he figured it out, right? Even if so much of my… everything was telling me to trust him, it was just… I couldn’t risk it, right? My subconscious wanted me to trust him because he apparently saved my life. But I couldn’t actually remember how that happened. I didn’t remember anything about my actual relationship with him beyond some feelings that might not even have been real and that I didn’t know the context of. Him saving my life didn't mean he wouldn't tell my parents the truth. Hell, he might do it just because he thought it was the right thing. He might think he was protecting me or something. The fact was, even if he still cared about me and I hadn’t been just another protection job, he could still say too much to my family.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

So, needless to say, I was incredibly conflicted. It was a good thing I was still wearing my mask (I’d put it back on as soon as we got near him, after taking it off while we were driving) so he couldn't see the expression on my face, even if that made it a bit awkward to sit here like this. He was probably wondering why I was keeping my face secret from him, but I didn't have much choice on that. It was either let him wonder why I was hiding my face, or allow him see it. And if he saw it, I would have a hell of a lot more questions to answer. Questions that I was pretty sure he wouldn't be satisfied with half-truths to.

Shaking that off, I gave the man a short nod. Part of me wanted to argue with him about needing to help people even if doing so was dangerous, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t fit with me being Style. I was already treading on pretty thin ice keeping up this ruse. “Yeah, don't worry, I think we can stay quiet for now. But hey, stepping in to stop that robbery before is what gave us the crystal we used to stop the flying guy back there, so it wasn't exactly a waste--hey how did you know we were the ones who did that in the first place? That was in a completely different state.”

Robert offered me a very slight smile, clearing his throat. “Ah, let’s just say I spent some of that driving time just now doing some checking through the news reports over the past couple days along the routes you were most likely to have taken. Read through with some of those witness reports and put two and two together. But like I said, the Breakwater people can do that too. I don't know if they'll figure out it was you back during that whole thing, but they'll definitely be watching for anything out of the ordinary now. So stay low and don't stand out. Getting that machine back home is the most important thing if you want to save those people.”

Paige, sitting between us in the actual driver’s seat, made a soft coughing sound under her breath before speaking up. “We do. You know who I am, so you know who Irelyn is to me.”

“I do,” Robert confirmed, watching her reaction intently. “Does that mean you care about her and that she's more than just the absent daughter of the people who bought you?” The actual words might have seemed harsh on their own, but it was clear that he was genuinely curious about how she felt about that whole thing.

Paige, for her part, paused, one hand gripping the wheel tightly even though we weren't going anywhere. Then she gave a short nod. “I'm not sure how I feel exactly. But she went through all this to try to help me. At least in part. She… did more than I ever thought she would, and she’s only in this position because I lied to her. This whole thing, her ending up on Breakwater, that--all of it is because of me.”

Us, I wanted to correct her. I definitely helped with the lying to Irelyn thing. It was both of our faults. Well, and Pittman’s too, of course. He wasn't exactly blameless in this. But Paige was right about Irelyn only being there because we had misled her. Which just made me wonder how different this whole situation would be if we’d told her the truth. Or at least didn’t send her down to Florida.

That hit me hard, like a punch in the gut. What if my parents died because of this? What if they never recovered and it was all because Paige and I had decided to lie to Irelyn and create a chain of events that had led to this? How would I ever recover from something like that? I slumped in my seat a little, glad that the mask disguised my probably-horrified expression. Not that it hid my body language, of course. Which Robert seemed to notice, turning to look at me more directly. “Are you alright?”

Swallowing hard, I gave a little nod. “Yeah,” I managed in a thick voice that probably wasn't all that convincing. “I-- it’s just a lot. Pittman, he… he's a piece of shit. I owe him a broken face and maybe a few other broken things.” That much, at least, was true for both the real Style and me. Though she might've just flat out said she wanted to kill him. “I want to give that bastard what he deserves, and maybe we actually can with that thing.” I waved a hand toward the machine in the back, which Qwerty was still ‘driving’ the toy car around. “So yeah, maybe I'm a little anxious to get back there and get on with this.”

Paige balled up her hamburger wrapper and tossed it in the bag before speaking firmly. “We all want to get on with this. But we can't rush it. If we get pulled over anywhere on the ride home… yeah, maybe the Breakwater people aren’t actively searching for us this far out, but they’ll damn sure be monitoring for any vans getting stopped by the authorities. And with a van like this, the cops’ll want to check the back. I’m not sure what they’d think that thing is, but they’ll report it.”

She was right, if we did anything that attracted the attention of the authorities, Breakwater would know about it. No matter how badly I wanted to rush home and get on with this, we had to take it slow and steady. Even if the thought of sitting in the van for the next two days gradually driving back to Detroit sounded completely agonizing.

“I suppose that means you won’t be driving that much,” Robert noted with a look my way. “As fun as that little escape back in Tooele might've been, your style doesn't exactly scream subtle.” He paused, then gave a soft chuckle. “Style.”

Well, at least he seemed to be buying that that was who I was. Which was a good thing, right? So why did a sharp pang of regret pass through me at the thought? It was like I felt bad about lying to this man, even though I didn't even know him. But that wasn't quite right, was it? Part of me, a buried, blocked-off part, knew him incredibly well. It made me feel sick inside. When I looked at his face, I wanted nothing more than to trust the man and tell him everything, all of it from the very start during that night at the old motel. It was so hard to sit there and lie to him. Somehow, it was even worse than lying to my parents. Or maybe it just felt worse in this moment, because of everything that was going on. Either way, it made a knot twist itself into my stomach. I didn’t trust my voice right then. I knew if I said anything, he would be able to hear the truth in my voice.

Thankfully, Paige spoke instead. “Well, we may need to take our time and avoid attention, but that doesn't mean we have to drag our feet. Let's get back on the road.” There was a brief pause before she added, “After we grab some snacks. Probably best if we don't have to stop for a while.” So, she headed for the gas station next to the fast food place we had just grabbed lunch from, to grab a few bags-worth of road trip supplies. Robert went too, leaving me to chat with our new TONI friend for a minute. Or I would have, but Qwerty had finally tired himself out and slumped down in a corner with his wings folded around himself like a blanket. He was still possessively hugging the car close to his tiny body like it was his favorite thing in the world.

I didn't want to disturb so I turned it back to my phone and was checking for any news from Tooele, when a voice spoke up from near the window. “It’d probably be easier if you stopped trying to hide, you know.”

The words made me jump. It was Robert. Fuck, how sneaky was this guy? I hadn’t even heard him approach. “What?” I managed, turning to stare at him through my open window.

“I know the truth,” he informed me simply. “The height, the body type, the voice, it all fits.”

Oh God, oh no, oh shit. Mind racing, I opened and shut my mouth, struggling to find words. What was I supposed to say? How could I--what was he--why…

“Pittman made you look like her, didn’t he?” Robert continued, staring intently at me. “He made you look like Cassidy so you could take her place, before you rebelled. That’s what’s under that mask, the reason you keep it on even though Paige isn’t wearing hers. You’re trying to hide that you look like Cassidy Evans. Which means that you know what I am…. was to her.”

Oh, he figured out some of the truth but had gone in the wrong direction with it. That was perfect. He gave me an excuse to let him see my face without revealing who I really was. I couldn’t have asked for a more convenient mistake. It solved so many problems, at least in the immediate sense.

So, I gave a short nod of agreement. But the words that came out of my mouth in that moment were, “No. I’m not a--”

Whatever I was about to say next, which even I wasn’t sure of, was interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. It echoed through the air, even as Robert pitched forward against the van. I saw blood appear on his shirt, before he dropped to the ground out of sight, giving me a clear view of the sniper on the far side of the lot who had taken that shot.

I had no more words then. All I had was the scream that tore its way out of my throat.

A scream that seemed to come both in that very moment, and from a long-forgotten past. The scream of a sixteen-year-old girl, and an eleven-year-old child each witnessing the same event five years apart. I saw Bobby fall now, and I saw him fall then. I saw the blood. I saw… I saw…

I saw it all.