Trickster's Girl (The Raven Duet) by Bell Hilari

Author:Bell, Hilari [Bell, Hilari]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THERE WAS A TRAIN IN Jasper. It was a bigger town than Lake Louise, and even more beautiful, but once a late lunch had satisfied his teen-boy appetite, Raven was interested only in leaving.

"It's perfect," he told Kelsa. "We can take the train all the way to"—he peered at the schedule board—"Prince Rupert. It's the last thing they'd expect us to do because all that steel and the magnetic current will take us out of contact with both nature and the ley."

"We can't take the train," Kelsa said. "Even in Canada they'll check our PID cards before they sell us a ticket. A PID that, in case you haven't noticed, you don't have. And officially, I'm not even in this country!"

"I know." He sounded insufferably smug. "That's why I picked this up."

He held out a Canadian ID card belonging to Robert Winslow, who judging by the photo, was a heavyset man in his forties.

"You stole..." Of course he'd stolen it. And it wouldn't do any good to protest, because he wouldn't care. "But you don't look..." And that didn't matter either. He'd look just like Robert Winslow when he bought the ticket. "What will you do when Robert reports his card stolen? The police can stop this train, and there you'll be, stuck."

He could abandon her and fly, but she'd prefer not to be abandoned now that his enemies knew where she was. The bikers might not be able to get here for several days, but who knew what other human tools they could use.

"He won't report it stolen until it disappears," Raven said. "If he tried to use it, the scanner strip wouldn't work. It only looks like it should, which is why I kept the real card. But Robert Winslow lives here, so he won't have to use it. We've got three or four days before it vanishes, and by that time—"

"We'll be in Prince Rupert. But what about me?"

"Robert can buy a ticket for his niece, as well."

Kelsa scowled. In the U.S. that wouldn't work, but Canadians were so casual about security that here it might.

"I can't afford it," Kelsa told him. "No matter what the tickets cost. Not to mention shipping my bike along with us."

"I can." Raven pulled out his wad of bills. "This will last a few more days, and when it goes I'll make more."

"But that's..." Kelsa didn't want to use the counterfeit money herself. Even if it only hurt some bank that could easily take the loss, it was stealing.

But her debit account was almost empty. If she was going to reach Alaska, she had to use Raven's money. Surely healing the planet, preventing the tree plague's destruction of the northern forests, was more important?

Her father had hated that kind of argument. He'd said that worse evils were committed by people who believed that the end justified the means than by people who were flat-out evil.

Kelsa's father was dead. Dead of a growing cancer epidemic that the doctors couldn't explain. If

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