Sneak (Swipe Series)

shot at this. “I really am . . . very sorry,” she said as she stepped off the platform and into the room. “Just . . . so sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused. And I wanted . . . I wanted to tell you that. In person. Myself. Now that Dad and I are leaving.”
    Erin tried to be casual about it as she scanned the room. There were no closets, no cabinets, no places to file paper of any sort. There was only the desk, off to the side of the small glass room. So where was this top secret page of his? Where could Mr. Cheswick’s filing system possibly hide in an office like this?
    “Well, I appreciate that,” Mr. Cheswick said, fidgeting with something beside his chair. And that’s when Erin saw it, the single drawer just under his desk.
    Erin’s goals, then, were simple: She had to get into that drawer. And Cheswick couldn’t know about it.
    Suddenly, Erin frowned, hard. “You just . . . you can’t know how difficult it’s been for Dad and me. Out here. By ourselves.”
    Dead puppies , she thought. Lost kittens. Frown harder!
    “And now he’s just . . . so sad . . .”
    Iggy. Iggy being hit by rollerstick. Splat. On the ground. Iggy dying .
    “And I just . . . I don’t know what we’re gonna do . . . and it’s all my fault . . . and . . . and . . .” Erin sniffled.
    There you go , she thought. Yes. Yes—that’s it!
    She sniffled again.
    “And . . . I just . . . I know I let you down . . . and I know I let Cylis down . . . and my mom . . . and . . . and . . . everybody . . .” A tear! She felt a tear in her eye!
    That’s it, Erin! Keep it up!
    “And now you hate me . . . and my dad hates me . . . and e-e-everyb-b-b-body h-hates m-m-me . . .” And bingo. Erin was crying.
    The tears came fast now, and the hyperventilating, and the hysteria. Mr. Cheswick looked on in horror. Never having had a child of his own, he had no idea how to handle a situation like this.
    “Erin. Erin, please. It’s . . . it’s all right, Erin. Honestly. I’m— I’m not mad at you. I . . . I promise! I don’t hate you!”
    But Erin only cried harder. Blubbering now. Uncontrollably. Inconsolably.
    “Would you . . . would you like me to get your father?” Mr. Cheswick said.
    “O-o-oh . . . kay . . . ,” Erin said between sobs.
    “Just . . . uh . . . just take a seat here, all right? Just . . . just sit right here, and I’ll be right back.” Mr. Cheswick moved swiftly from his seat at the desk to the platform in the middle of the room.
    Erin made sure to look up at him, to look him in the eyes, with her blotchy red face and the snot dripping from her nose. She made sure he got a nice, long look at that face before he descended.
    And then she was alone.
    Erin wiped the tears on her sleeve.
    She had to work fast.
    11
    It was midafternoon, and Logan, Hailey, and Dane were already exhausted.
    “I’m not gonna make it ’til sundown,” Dane said. “I can’t walk much farther.”
    Earlier in the day, the three of them had hopped off the freight train just where they said they would—at the track’s closest point to the Potomac River.
    “Can’t help you find a boat,” the conductor had said. “But from what I’ve heard, you just follow this ridge twenty miles or so. There’ll be a valley after that—green and inviting, right next to a bend in the South Branch of the Potomac. Don’t know where or how you’re likely to find a way to ride that bend, but fishers say it can be done.” And the conductor rode his train on toward the Gulf.

    “You can make it,” Hailey told Dane now. “If I can, you can.” They’d been on their feet for hours, hiking the difficult ridge of the Appalachian terrain.
    “’Least it’s warmer out here,” Logan said. “Beats the lake weather in New Chicago; that’s for sure.”
    Hailey shook her head, pulling a foot up out of her boot defiantly. “I didn’t have blisters like this in New Chicago.”
    “Me neither,” Dane agreed.

    It was nighttime when the three of them finally came upon the valley.
    “I’m never walking again,” Dane said, basking in the rushing sound of the Potomac. But he was laughing. They had made it.
    “I don’t get it, though,” Logan said. “It’s just . . . grass.”
    But Hailey kept walking. She made it a hundred yards out before she stopped and saw it, the sign sticking up from the ground. It was wooden, waist height, propped up by two stakes in the dirt. “Village of the Valley,” it read, and a little anchor adorned its