Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

mutters. He leaves the room, possibly wary of getting dragged into the spotlight.

Zara’s Texas accent disappears when she sings. Her chosen song is ‘Teenage Dream’—the reference to ‘Fergalicious’ must have been a joke, or related to something I wasn’t present for. She sings without once glancing at the screen to check the lyrics. All her focus is on the audience. It’s as though we’re on stage rather than her. I shrivel under her scrutiny.

Donnie hands the microphone to me. ‘Your turn, Lux.’

I hold up my glass. ‘I’m still working up the courage.’

‘It’s your song,’ Donnie insists, his breath smelling strongly of courage. ‘Come on.’

Reluctantly, I stand up. I should have pretended that I was already drunk, to explain away not knowing the tune. Too late now. Maybe I’ll recognise the song when it starts.

Violins fill the air. On the screen behind me, the singer is geting out of bed. Nothing sounds familiar yet, and the lyrics are already appearing on the screen.

I’m opening my mouth to sing in front of this group of killers who think I’m their friend when Kyle bursts back in. His eyes are wide under his fringe.

‘Fred,’ he hisses. ‘There’s someone outside!’

CHAPTER 6

I am a drop, a braid, a kiss. Where am I from?

Suddenly Donnie’s huge hand is on my shoulder, just close enough to my neck to be a threat. I can smell the veins in his wrist. It’s hard not to imagine ripping them out.

‘You bring anyone with you, Lux?’ he asks.

‘No.’ I try to brush his hand off, but he squeezes tighter.

‘I’m serious,’ he says. ‘Because whoever’s out there—’

‘They’re not with me.’

‘No one followed you?’ Fred asks.

I think about it. Miles of dark, winding roads, checking and memorising the licence plate of every car I saw. No one I saw twice, and nothing at all for the last few turns.

‘No one followed me,’ I say.

Fred turns to Kyle. ‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know. I got a notification—there was movement on one of the cameras.’ Kyle holds up his phone. ‘I figured it would be an animal, but I checked the feed just in case—’

‘Which camera?’

‘R3. A hundred yards north of the house.’

‘What about the driveway sensor?’

‘It didn’t go off.’

It takes a moment for this to sink in. The woods surrounding the house are filled with cameras and sensors. My plan to sneak out in the dead of the night would never have worked.

Cedric is checking his phone. Seeing the same notification Kyle received.

‘I freeze-framed it downstairs.’ Kyle looks nervous but also eager, like he’s hoping Fred will scratch him behind the ears and call him a good boy. ‘He’s about five foot ten, wearing hiking gear.’

‘You get many hikers around here?’ I ask.

‘We do not,’ Fred says.

He leads us all back to the corridor where the bedrooms are, and tosses his keys to Donnie, who unlocks the armoury while everyone else goes downstairs.

I hesitate before following. Nothing good ever happens in a basement.

‘Lux?’ Zara calls.

‘Coming.’ I force myself to walk down the stairs.

The basement floor is unsealed concrete and the walls are tightly packed dirt, holding up a low ceiling crisscrossed with wooden beams. The cramped space is bathed with light from dozens of screens subdivided into hundreds of rectangles, all showing different parts of the woods. None showing the house itself, I notice. A huge server hums in a corner, protected from the dust by plastic sheeting.

‘Welcome to the editing room,’ Cedric tells me quietly. ‘This is where we cut the subscriber videos. Remove cross-set voices, erase anything incriminating, you know.’

Everything in the videos is criminal, but he doesn’t seem to be kidding. He must mean anything that might expose the location of the house.

He seems like the kind of guy who talks too much when he’s nervous. Could be useful.

‘Where’s the intruder?’ Fred is looming over one of the desks, the glowing screens reflected in his eyes.

‘Hang on, it’s gone back to the live feed. Let me bring up the screenshot again.’ Kyle grabs a mouse and starts clicking his way through some menus.

‘Is R3 one of the cameras we moved this morning?’ Fred asks.

‘Right. Lucky, otherwise we might have missed him completely.’

I’m scanning the screens, trying to get a sense of the distances between the cameras. But without any recognisable landmarks, it’s impossible to tell how the pieces fit together.

‘It’s probably a hiker,’ Zara says.

Fred looks doubtful. ‘At this time of night?’

I chew my nails. If it’s not a hiker, it could be a cop. The FBI hadn’t made much headway investigating this group—we didn’t even know it was a group—but maybe the county sheriff’s office was having better luck. I don’t want to be mistaken for one of the bad guys and arrested or shot.

I am a bad guy, of course. But I’m a different kind of bad guy. It feels like the distinction should matter.

‘Well, maybe it’s Druznetski.’ Zara is absent-mindedly tying her hair into a French braid.

Who’s Druznetski? I want to ask. But the question might expose me as an impostor.

Fred hesitates. ‘Why would he show up?’

Zara shrugs. ‘Something he wanted to tell you in person, maybe? No one else knows we’re here.’

‘He wouldn’t be sneaking around in the woods.’

Kyle has found the screenshot. One of the rectangles enlarges—a shadow between two trees. The image is monochromatic, and blurry, but it does indeed look like a man in hiking gear.

‘Is that Druznetski?’ Kyle asks.

Fred stares at the image for a long time. ‘No,’ he says finally.

‘How can you tell?’ Zara says. ‘That could be anybody.’

The man is still frozen on the screen.

‘Well,’ Fred says, ‘let’s get out there and ask him.’

Donnie comes down the stairs carrying the guns, a