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another soft click—the door closing. Tessalistened hard, desperate to know if the stranger had been sealed inside or outside. But no more voices spoke.
    The floor vibrated softly beneath Tessa, as some sort of engine purred to life. The vehicle moved—forward at first, and then, as it went faster and faster, not just forward but also …
    Up.

CHAPTER
11
    For a moment Tessa couldn’t make sense of this.
Up? How could we be going up?
Surely her senses were scrambled; surely she was just confused.
    But she felt herself rising and rising and rising, along with the forward motion, and finally her brain supplied an explanation:
Oh. This isn’t a car or a van. It’s a plane.
    Of course, she had never been in a plane in her life. She’d never even seen one up close, only in pictures and news footage: the proud military jets soaring through the sky, defending the border. The helicopters ferrying military officials into or out of danger. The bombers speeding off toward the enemy lands …
    Gideon flew a bomber in the war,
Tessa remembered.
    Could this be a bomber they were flying in now? Was he headed off on some secret military mission?
    Tessa remembered the flat way Gideon had said,
I killed one thousand six hundred and thirty-two people. Do you still think I’m a hero?
She remembered the devastated look in his eyes. She couldn’t imagine him dropping any more bombs.
    Then where were they going? What was he doing?
    Tessa couldn’t think of any possible answers to either of those questions. It was too hard to think with all the weird forces of flight tugging at her: the floor rising beneath her, lifting her higher and higher, even as gravity seemed to be trying harder and harder to pull her back down. Then everything tilted, and she slid backward. She grabbed for something to hold on to, but there was nothing within her grasp except the blanket, which was sliding too.
    “Oh, yeah!” Gideon cried from the front of the plane. “I know how to fly!”
    Nobody answered him. Did that mean that the other man was still down below, back on the ground?
    The blanket had slipped off Tessa’s head, so she dared to look up. As far as Tessa could tell, Gideon was sitting in front of a dimly lit instrument panel. She couldn’t see anyone in the copilot’s seat beside him, but from this angle only a very tall, very large man would be visible.
    She had to know if Gideon was alone or not.
    Using the column and the wall as a support, Tessa clawed her way up to a standing position. She swayed unsteadily with the jerking and tilting of the plane.
    “Turbulence?” Gideon muttered. “Or—are there still some external controls I need to override? What’s hidden in the coding?”
    He began frantically pressing buttons and pulling on controls. A computer screen glowed to life above the instrument panel, providing more light. But Gideon was flashing through various commands so quickly that the light was there and gone one instant to the next.
    Tessa glimpsed a shape in the copilot’s seat, but it was too small to be a person. Was it a backpack, maybe? A duffel bag? She rose on her tiptoes, wanting to be sure—
    And the plane lurched to the side, slamming Tessa against a window.
    “Oh, no! You are not in control anymore!” Gideon screamed from the pilot’s seat. “This is my plane now!”
    Tessa decided this probably wasn’t the best time to spring forward and announce,
Guess what? I’m coming with you!
She found a strap to hang on to beneath the window, and clung to it for dear life. She realized she’d had her eyes squeezed shut ever since the plane had tilted sideways. But the jerking movement seemed to have stopped for the moment, so Tessa dared to open her eyes again.
    The entire city lay beneath her.
    And for now, for once, it was
beautiful.
The darkness hid all the dirt and despair and desperation. Under the night sky the city’s lights stood out like gleaming jewels. The streetlights were lined up like beads on a necklace;