A Girl Undone by Catherine Linka

little tricks with traps or tying flies. But he didn’t ask me to talk.”
    “And Barnabas never got mad?”
    “Not that summer. But the next summer Maggie showed up? Nobody would have blamed him if he’d decked me.”
    I wasn’t surprised to hear that Maggie’s return had set Luke off. He was a newborn when she gave him to her brother to raise. “What did you do?”
    “I smashed a custom guitar he’d been working on all winter. The wood was imported from Honduras. It cost hundreds of dollars.”
    “You must have chopped a lot of wood that summer.”
    “Nope, not a single cord. Barnabas told me to pack up, because we were going into the woods. Then he took most everything out of my pack. For three weeks, we survived using a knife, fishing line, and a plastic sheet for a tent.”
    I could see them disappearing into the mountains. Barnabas might have told himself he was teaching Luke a lesson, but after hearing the song he wrote for Maggie, I knew she’d broken both his heart and Luke’s.
    I felt Luke sinking into the past, so I tried to lighten things up. “So if you had a knife, a fishing line, and a plastic sheet, you could keep us alive?” I joked.
    “I’ve been thinking about that.”
    The way he said it, he wasn’t joking. “What do you mean?”
    “Once we hand off the evidence in D.C., I could take us up the Appalachian Trail into Maine. No one would be looking for us there. We could cross over the border into New Brunswick or Quebec.”
    Luke was ignoring all the obstacles we faced getting to D.C., but the fact that he had a plan for what we’d do after the handoff made me feel slightly better. “How far is it from D.C. to Maine?”
    “Five or six hundred miles.”
    Hiking in the mountains in the dead of winter? It would take weeks. “Well, we probably wouldn’t run into a lot of people.”
    Luke turned his attention back to the road because we were coming up on our destination. In ten miles, we’d seen only two other cars. Now we strained to read names on mailboxes at the edge of the road using our headlights.
    Finally, we found the name on the mailbox that matched the one Streicker had given us. The kitchen light was on in the ranch house and a security light beamed over the garage. As we drove in the gate, a large brown-and-black dog leaped up. It ran until it reached the end of its chain by the garage, and then stood on its hind legs, barking and straining to get free.
    An older woman came out and snapped, “Lie down,” at the dog. It silenced, and she called out, “Mikhaela! He’s here.”
    The woman motioned to us to stay in the van as she came around to Luke’s window. “Here’s her birth certificate. An official copy just like you asked. And here’s the money.” She shoved the envelope into Luke’s hands. “It’s all there. Seven thousand in cash. Nothing bigger than a fifty.”
    She turned back to the house. “Mikhaela, hurry!”
    Damn!
    “Did Streicker tell you we’re picking up a girl?” I whispered.
    “Nope. But he said if I saw a maroon pickup out front to drive on.” Luke reached up and felt for a length of copper pipe snapped to the ceiling above his head.
    Great, I thought. Streicker sent us out to do his dirty work because he expected trouble.
    A girl came out of the house, a backpack slung over her shoulder. Her head was down, and she swiped her cheek with the back of her hand. She stood on the porch, the yellow light from the kitchen tinting her face and red ponytail. Even from twenty feet away I could tell she’d been crying.
    The older woman marched over and wrapped her arms around her, and my eyes began to fill, remembering the night a couple weeks before in the darkened airplane hangar when I said good-bye to Yates, my heart fighting to believe we would be together again.
    The woman raised her voice and I heard her say, “I cannot let your stepfather get his hands on you.”
    “But, Gran, Canada’s so far away. I might never see you again!”
    “If