Blind Run by Patricia Lewin Read Free Book Online Page B

all the lies and betrayals and knew he could never go back.
    Besides, he kind of liked it here.
    In school they’d learned about deserts, but this was nothing like those boring lessons. And it was so different from the island, with its damp evergreen forest hemmed in by the Pacific. Here there were no boundaries. The sand seemed to stretch forever, and the colors were almost nonexistent. Except the sky. He didn’t remember ever seeing anything so blue.
    “Do you think he’ll catch her?”
    Danny glanced back at his sister. “In that old truck? No way.” Walking over, he picked up his backpack and sat on the trailer steps. “How are you feeling?” Callie looked better, but he had to watch her. She got sick a lot and had been to see Dr. Turner the day they’d run away, which made Danny worry that she might be coming down with something.
    “I’m okay.” She took another cracker from the package and handed him the rest. “What did you think of him?”
    “Who? Decker?”
    Callie nodded. “He’ll be back when he doesn’t find Anna.”
    “Probably.” Danny rummaged through his backpack for the Game Boy Anna had bought for him. “But it won’t make any difference whether he comes back or not.”
    Though that wasn’t entirely true. Anna had been bad enough. Danny knew he couldn’t trust her, but he also knew she wouldn’t send them back to the island. He wasn’t sure about Decker. It was pretty obvious he didn’t want anything to do with helping a couple of kids. What would he do if he didn’t find Anna? Would he even care what Danny and Callie wanted?
    “We’ll be okay,” he said, as much to reassure himself as Callie. “The Keepers don’t know we’re here. So we’ll just rest up a bit, then walk out to the road. Someone will give us a ride.”
    Callie looked toward the horizon, where the sun hovered just above the western mountains. “It’s gonna be night soon. Shouldn’t we wait until morning?”
    Danny didn’t like the idea of being alone in the desert after dark, either, but he wasn’t sure they had a choice. Not if they wanted to get away. “We can’t stay here that long. If Decker returns and decides to hand us over to the police, they’ll send us back to the Haven. We’ll lose our only chance to find our parents.”
    “He won’t do that. Anna said he’d help us.”
    Danny laughed abruptly. “Anna said a lot of things. That doesn’t make them true.” She’d lied to him from the beginning, pretending to be his friend and promising to hide him and Callie from the Keepers on Haven Island.
    What a jerk he’d been.
    He’d thought he was so smart, smarter than any of the teachers. Even Anna. But she’d fooled him so easily it was almost funny. Though he didn’t feel much like laughing. He’d known the night they ran—even before they were off the island—that she had no intention of keeping her promise. Then before he could figure out what she
did
want with them, she’d dropped them off here, in the middle of nowhere, with a man who obviously wanted nothing to do with them. It didn’t make any sense.
    “The Keepers will come after us,” Callie said.
    Danny considered denying it. It would be easier than admitting the truth. But what was the point? If they were caught, there would be nothing he could do to protect her. Besides, Callie wasn’t stupid.
    “Yeah. They’ll come after us.”
    She accepted that calmly, probably because she’d already known it. He’d discovered in the last couple of days that his little sister wasn’t as fragile as she appeared.
    “What will they do to us?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.” That, too, was the truth, and something else he didn’t want to dwell on. The Keepers had never physically hurt Danny, nor had he seen them harm any of the others, but kids had a way of getting sick and disappearing. And there was the time he’d seen Sean in the infirmary, after he’d supposedly been taken to a mainland hospital. Danny shuddered at the