She wakes with a start, her fists at the ready.

“It’s okay,” he says.

She’s breathing hard, gulping in air. “Like you’d know,” she says. She swings around in her seat, scanning the aisle. In her gray eyes, he sees an army approaching. He turns to look, but there’s no one.

“Hey,” he says, patting her arm.

He watches her recover, calm down. Watches the danger empty from her eyes.

“I was afraid maybe you’d snuck off to tell the conductor,” she says.

“About what?”

“About me being a murderer,” she says. “The conductor telephones ahead. And there’s all these cops waiting for me once we arrive.”

He grins. “No way,” he says.

And now she’s staring at him. “You’re on the run, too,” she says.

He shrugs, tries to look away.

She pokes his shoulder. “You are so!” she says. “Tell me.” Her demand is too loud — loud enough to disturb a businesswoman, who turns and glares at them over her reading glasses.

“Sorry,” says Kitty, waving to her. “My brother here is such a dick.” Then they both sink low in their seats, convulsing with laughter.

Kitty turns toward him, her face only inches from his. She sniffs. “Is it you or me stinking up the place?”

He’s about to laugh, but she’s already tugging on his sleeve. “Tell me,” she whispers.

“Tell you what?”

“What you did.”

“You first,” he says.

She’s about to argue, but she stops, considers his face. “I did kill someone,” she says.

“Liar.”

“A drug dealer,” she says.

“How?”

“I cut his coke with rat poison and then stole all his money.”

“Liar,” he says again.

“The second part is true,” she says.

“But you didn’t kill anyone.”

“I did,” she says. “But it wasn’t him.” And before he can ask any more questions, she squeezes his upper arm tight and says, “Your turn.”

He stares at her. He looks in pain, and she wonders what it is that hurts him so much. Then she realizes it’s her. She lessens the grip on his arm, rubs the spot with her palm. “Poor baby,” she says.

A flicker of gratitude loosens some of the tension in his face but only reveals to her how much else he is holding in. He is not, she thinks, a boy given to secrecy. She doesn’t prod him. Doesn’t need to. She merely hooks his eyes and reels him in.

“I kind of stumbled into this thing. Saw something. A big-time con job, as far as I can tell. And don’t say I’m making it up.”

“Who said anything?”

He grabs the newspapers from the pocket on the back of the seat and shows her the stories. She reads a bit. Glances at him, then reads some more. He waits patiently.

“You saw this guy get kidnapped?”

“Yeah, except it wasn’t for real. The CEO, this Niven guy, was in on it. It’s the truth.”

He talks. The words tumble out of him in a stream so thick and fast, she has to listen with her whole being. There is no way he is making this up — no way this boy could imagine such a thing. He may be gullible, but he seems to have a pretty good grasp of this complicated story. On and on the story unfolds, and her weariness, while it doesn’t go away, backs off a bit, like crows do from roadkill when a car comes barreling toward them. He is at the wheel of this car bombing down the highway, she thinks, his eyes on high beam. She likes his brown eyes when they will stay still long enough for her to see them. She watches between blinks to catch sight of him again.

Then he stops, and though she doesn’t say anything right away, he waits for her to speak . . . waits for . . . what? Approval?

“This Alyson,” she says. She waggles her hand.

“What about her?”

She rolls her eyes. “She’s obviously in on it.”

He gets the victorious look in his eye. “That’s why I’m not going by bus, see? I’m not going to play into her hands. The cops would be all over me. I figured that out, easy enough.”

She punches him in the arm. Not really hard, but enough to make him wince. “You weren’t listening,” she says.

“Was, too.”

She rolls her eyes. “Blink,” she says, “I didn’t mean Alyson was in with the cops. I meant she’s in on the kidnapping thing. She’s lured you up here to get you out of the way. Don’t you see that?”

“I thought about that,” he says, not very convincingly. “But it’s not going to go down like that. As long as I play it my way and not hers, it’ll be cool.”

She wants to hit him again — hit him hard. How can he be so naive? But she stops herself. “What’s she offering?”

“Alyson?”

“No, Her Royal Majesty Queen Latifah. Of course Alyson.”

“She didn’t say. But I want a lot.”

“Yeah, well it had better be.” Then Kitty throws herself back in her seat and folds her arms, shaking her head. “Whoa,” she says.

“I’m not stupid,” he says. He sounds like a ten-year-old, and she immediately feels like a bully.

“Maybe not,” she says. “But you’re lucky I came along.”

He frowns.

“Yeah, I know,” she says, before he can say anything. “And you’ll get the rest of your money back. I already said that. But you see what I’m getting at? You didn’t see me coming, did you? Well, did you?”

He reluctantly shakes his head.

“Well, this Alyson chick is playing for way bigger stakes.”

“If she’s in on it,” he says dubiously.

“You need me, Blink,” says Kitty, “even if you don’t know it.”

And now a shaky smile grows on his face, and to her surprise his face grows on her.

She remembers something; it comes out of nowhere. Spence staying up late waiting for her. It was when he was home at Christmas just after she turned fifteen. His last Christmas, but they didn’t know that. She’d gone to a dance at the school, and he was sitting in the kitchen reading. Said he couldn’t sleep, but she saw through it.

“So, how was it?” Spence had whispered so as not to wake their folks.

And she had told him — well, not everything. She imagines now that her eyes must have looked like Blink’s: eager, expectant, relieved.

“I want a million dollars,” he says. “To start with.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“And a place in Beverly Hills.” She cocks her eyebrow. “Next door to your place,” he says.

She laughs, despite herself. “Well, let’s start off by trying to keep your sorry ass out of trouble.” She shakes her head. Takes one more look at him grinning at her, then stares out the window. For some reason, she feels better than she’s felt in a long time.

There is something totally not right about Blink’s story, but her mind is unfocused, reeling a bit under the weight of all that information. Her mind wanders. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. He’s reading the paper again, squinting and blinking. She wants to push the hair out of his eyes. He needs all the help he can get. But she resists the urge. She leans her head on the seat back.

“You know where I was Wednesday morning?” she says. He looks up at her. “When you were tracking down breakfast at the Plaza Regent?”

“Where?” he says.

“I was lying in bed thinking of the best way to leave this guy who was snoring beside me.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“So, he snores really bad?”

“Yeah, and he cheats and lies and . . . and a lot of things.”

“The drug dealer, right?”

She nods. “Except I didn’t know I was thinking of leaving him. What I thought I was thinking was how I could impress him by getting hold of some money that was owed to us.”

Blink looks confused, and she doesn’t blame him. And she figures maybe if she can explain what happened to this boy here, it will make some kind of sense to her. So she tries.

“He’d gotten in real late. Real late. And I was lying there thinking about how Merlin — that’s his name — would praise me for being so, you know, resourceful. How maybe we’d get some good food and use some of the money to celebrate with — go out to a club or something.”

“But you said —”

“Yeah, I know. I said I was thinking of how to leave him. But I guess what I was doing was making up my mind to do something — anything! — instead of just sitting around waiting for . . . I don’t even know what.”

He’s nodding now. He gets this part, at least.

“So I go see the guy who owes us the money, and he asks me flat out am I thinking of splitting. And I swear, I hadn’t been thinking of it. Not like on a conscious level. But I guess I was.”

“This Merlin sounds like a real badass.”

“Absolutely. Except, the thing is, I never really figured I could get away from him.”

Blink is listening hard. “You were too afraid?”

“It wasn’t just that. It was . . .” She pauses. Sucks in her lips and bites down hard. Looks out the window. What is she doing? Why is she spilling to this boy she only ever intended to rob?

Then his hand is on her arm. “Tell me,” he says, real quiet. “I mean, if you want to.”

And she thinks maybe she wants to. Wants to tell this stranger that she had stayed with Merlin because he was what she deserved. He was her sentence and her punishment. But before she can say it, the conductor’s voice comes over the public address system.

“Kingston, ten minutes,” he says.