“Sure. ‘Hi, I’m Vanessa Mallory.’”

“‘Vanessa Mallory from Wilmington, South Carolina.’ Wilmington is in North Carolina.”

Dan slowly turned to look at Vanessa. She was now blocked by a couple with a baby. Impatient to get by, she tried to help them with their stroller. Dan noted the tight, angry look on her face as she snarled a remark at the parents. Suddenly, her pretty face looked hard.

Suspicions started to flip through his brain like someone shuffling a deck of cards. Why had she been so friendly? How come she’d agreed to travel with them so quickly? It had seemed like they’d been the ones to approach her and offer to travel together, but did she set herself up to be approached?

They’d been played. By a tuba!

Amy grabbed her backpack. “Come on. We’ve got to get off this train.”

Location Unknown

“It hurts,” Nellie said.

“I know,” Reagan said. “No pain, no gain.”

“Do you think they made that expression up for bullet wounds?”

If Nellie expected Reagan Holt, Olympic-level triathlete, to lighten up on her, she was dreaming. Nellie and Reagan were two hostages standing in a bare concrete bunker, but they might have been in an expensive health club for all the focus Reagan was bringing to the session. She’d refused to acknowledge that Nellie’s bullet wound was any big deal (“Oh, please, it was more like a graze.”), refused to concede that without proper equipment they couldn’t train (“We’ve got a wall and a floor, don’t we?”), and dismissed the idea that Nellie could be too weak to try (“There is no try. Only do. Yoda said that, and he was awesome.”).

“Pain is pain,” Reagan said. “Gain is gain. If you don’t rotate that shoulder, it will freeze up, and you’ll be no help to anybody.”