Chapter 9 - THE RUN THROUGH THE MAZE
"Get her out of here!" Luke roared over his shoulder, his right arm sweeping out to shove the second biker back against a rusted water heater.
Sofia didn't freeze.
She had spent four years navigating the narrow, treacherous paths of the Pacific Iron & Metal yard. She knew every stack of crushed cars, every hole in the chain-link perimeter fence, every hidden crawl space beneath the old conveyor belts.
She didn't run toward the main gate where the police cruisers and black pickup trucks were parked.
She grabbed the heavy strap of her oversized canvas scrap bag, hoisted it onto her shoulder, turned on her heel, and bolted deep into the darkest, narrowest canyon of scrap metal at the back of the yard.
Behind her, shouts, curses, and the metallic sound of heavy bodies crashing into rusted iron erupted in the aisle.
"Get the girl!" Sergeant Miller’s voice screamed over the din. "Don't let her reach the fence!"
Sofia ran like a jackrabbit.
Her old white sneakers slapped against the hard gravel, her long ponytail flying behind her beige hoodie. She darted left past a five-foot wall of crushed copper radiators, ducked under the rusty arm of an inactive crane, and squeezed through a nine-inch gap between two crushed minivans.
Her heart was pounding against her ribs like a sledgehammer, but her mind was crystal clear.
She wasn't running just to save herself. She was running because she carried the one thing the giant man with the gold watch had bled to protect: silence.
Behind her, the heavy, panicked footsteps of two men entered the maze.
Flashlight beams danced wildly across the sky, cutting through the darkness, hitting the rusted tops of the scrap mountains.
Sofia reached the far western edge of the property—a quiet, forgotten corner where an old chain-link fence met the concrete embankment of a dry drainage canal. Near the bottom of the fence, where stray dogs had dug under the wire over the years, was a gap eighteen inches wide.
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She dropped to her knees in the dirt.
She shoved her heavy canvas scrap bag through the hole first—protecting her grandmother's forty-eight dollars—and began wriggling her small body beneath the sharp wire.
