My hand stilled, but it was clear that he had made his choice.

"What's the rush?" I asked, lightly.

There, at the right corner of his mouth, where his scar met his lips-a faint smile. "I think we could let them sleep, at least for a few more hours."

"And then?"

"We'll hit the road."

Two hours rolled right on by around us. We both must have fallen asleep at some point, because by the time I opened my eyes, the condensation was shrinking against the glass, and a few rays of morning light had made it to the forest floor.

As I stirred, so did Liam. For a while, we said and did nothing beyond working out the cricks and kinks from the awkward positions we slept in. When it came time to finally let go of his hand, I felt the first touch of cold air work its way in from outside.

"Wake up, team," he said. His shoulder popped as he reached back to slap Chubs's knee. "Time to carpe the hell out of this diem."

Less than an hour later, we were standing in front of the black minivan, watching as Zu did one last check under the seats. I buttoned my plaid shirt up to my throat and wrapped a red scarf I'd picked up around my neck three times-not because I was all that cold, but because it helped hide the disturbing bloodstain smeared down my front.

"Yikes." Liam's expression was grim as he leaned over and pulled my hair out from where it was trapped beneath the collar. "Would you rather wear mine?"

I smiled and zipped his coat up for him. My forehead was still tender to the touch, and the stitches were as ugly as sin, but I was feeling better. "Was it really that bad?"

"Evil Dead II bad." Liam bent down to add a few of his clothes to my backpack. Something red appeared in his hand. "Just about gave me a heart attack, Green."

"You can't really call her Green anymore," Chubs pointed out. He was making the difficult decision about which books to abandon and which to take with him, and had seemed to settle on Watership Down, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and some book I had never heard of called Howards End. Left behind: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Sound and the Fury, which Chubs had taken to calling The Snore and the Just Kill Me.

"Yeah," I said. "No more Green..."

"All done?" Liam called to Zu. When she gave him a thumbs-up, he threw her pink bag over one shoulder and my backpack over the other. "Any day now, Marian Librarian. I thought you were the one that wanted to check out."

Chubs gave him the finger, leaning forward to put his full weight into closing the briefcase. I leaned over to help him, trying to avoid the look on Liam's face as he stood there staring at Betty's mangled black shell. Zu was crying without making a sound; Liam had his hands on her shoulders, holding her steady. Even Chubs looked at the car with a rare softness, his fingers bunching up the fabric of his pants.

I understood why we were parting ways with Betty now; the other skip tracer that had been with Lady Jane was still out there, and there was some chance that the woman had reported the car to whatever bounty network the skip tracers used. But I also understood why Liam had been so reluctant to do it. Unlike the abandoned and withered small towns we had driven through in western Virginia, the nearby cities and their populations were still holding on, which meant there would be more folks on the road, and Betty, with her bullet holes and cracked windows, was not exactly inconspicuous. Then there was the fact that we had little to no gas left, and no easy way of finding more, aside from going up and down and siphoning it from the abandoned cars along the nearby highway. There was too much traffic-too many potential eyes-running down the road to do it.

Liam had gotten us as close as he could to Lake Prince, but it was anyone's guess how long it would take us to walk there.

"It feels like we should do something," he said. "Like, send her off on a barge out to sea and set her on fire. Let her go out in a blaze of glory."

Chubs raised an eyebrow. "It's a minivan, not a Viking."

Zu pulled away from his grasp and headed for the trees to her left. Liam rubbed the back of his neck, at a loss. "Hey," he started, "it's okay, we'll-"

But when Zu reappeared in our line of sight, she wasn't empty-handed. Clutched between her fingers were four small yellow flowers-wild weeds, by the looks of it. The kind we always used to have to pull up in Thurmond's garden every spring.

She walked over to the van, stood on her toes, and lifted up the closest windshield wiper. With delicate fingers, she positioned each flower in a row, keeping them straight across the cracked glass.

Something cold and wet caught on my eyelashes. Not tears, but a misty rain, the kind that soaked through you slow and sure, driving you crazy with chills in the process. And I realized then how unfair it all was that we couldn't just crawl back inside of the car; that even if we made it to East River, we'd be soaked and sore for days.

This car-this had been a safe place for them. For us. Now we had lost that, too.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned away, heading for the trees. My fingers brushed again something hard and smooth in my pocket, and I didn't need to pull it out to know that it was the panic button. In the beginning, I had kept it because I wasn't sure I'd be able to protect them on my own, and now...I had half a mind to drop it and let the ground claim it. Liam had confirmed everything that I'd suspected, but it seemed foolish to toss it then, when there was a chance for us to use them like they would have used us. If a PSF or skip tracer caught up to us now, I could press the button, and the agents that showed up would be more than enough distraction for us to have a chance to get away.

But it still didn't make me feel any less ashamed of how relieved I felt to find it still there-to know that Cate, with all of her promises to take care of things, was still out there, still only a touch away.

Liam thought the easiest and fastest way to navigate our small pack to East River was to travel alongside the roads that we would have taken had we still been in Betty. We were close enough to the highway to hear the occasional car whiz by, or see the flash of some long, silver-bellied semitruck out of the corner of our eyes, but, he assured us, out of their line of sight. This was the way he had traveled after escaping the League, how he had navigated through most of Virginia-how he hoped to get home.

We were debating whether or not Chubs had broken his toe against an exposed tree root when the wail of a truck's horn shattered the silence. The booms that came next were infinitely worse-the thundering of something heavy falling and the resounding crack of metal snapping.

We all jumped-I dropped Zu's hand to cover my ears. The way the tires squealed just before the crash came was like the warning signal for White Noise.

Liam reached over and gently pried my hands from my ears. "Come with me for a second." He turned back to the others. "You guys watch the bags."

Before the sound had even settled in the air, we heard the screams. Not the desperate kind-the one you'd hear when someone was terrified or hurt or even out of their head with grief. This was a war cry. A rising rebel yell. After that, there was no chance of Zu or Chubs coming with us. They stayed behind to watch the bags as Liam and I made our way to the line of trees that separated us from the rain-soaked asphalt of the highway.

The semitruck was on its side in the middle of the road, as if it had been flung there like a toy. The smell of burned rubber and smoke curled my stomach as we crouched down, and I was concerned the trail of sparks in front of us would turn into a wall of flame.

Liam stood up and was nearly at the shoulder of the road before my hand managed to catch his elbow.

"What are you doing?" I had to shout over the sound of the rain pinging against the silver, rippled body of the trailer the truck had been hauling.

"The driver-"

Needed help, yes, I knew that, and maybe it made me soulless and horrible, but I wasn't about to let Liam be the one to do it. Trucks didn't just flip over on their side for no reason. Either there was another car and driver we couldn't see, or...

Or the yelling and the accident were connected.

Liam and I were still standing out in the open when the figures in black came pouring out of the trees opposite us. Every inch of them was covered in black, from the ski masks pulled down over their faces to their black shoes. There was an entire highway between us, and still the sight of them was enough to make me reach out and grab Liam's arm, squeezing it until I was sure he'd be left with a permanent imprint of my fingers.

There were at least two dozen figures in black; they moved in unison, with practiced ease. And it was so weird, but watching them flood the road and divide into two groups-one that went to the front of the truck, the other to the back where its boxed contents were spilling out-reminded me of a football team running a play. The four of them sent to the front cab climbed up and ripped the door open. The driver, who was screaming something in a language I didn't understand, was hauled down to the ground.

One of the figures in black-a big one, with shoulders the size of Kansas, pulled a knife from his belt and, signaling for the others to hold the driver down, pressed its silver blade against the man's palm.

I heard a scream and didn't realize it had belonged to me until that same black monster's head swiveled toward us. Liam jumped at the ten gun barrels that swung our way. The first bullet was close enough to nick his ear as it whistled by. There wasn't even time to turn and run. The firing stopped long enough for three of the figures to rush forward, screaming, "On your knees!" and "Head to the ground!"

I wanted to run. Liam must have sensed this, because he latched onto my shoulder and forced me down, pressing the side of my face against the cold, rough asphalt. The rain picked up, filling my ear, my nose, my mouth as I tried to bite back another scream.

"We're not armed!" I heard Liam shout. "Easy-easy!"

"Save it, asshole," someone hissed.

I was intimately familiar with what it felt like to have a barrel of a gun dig into my skin. Whoever was doing it this time had no qualms about dropping a knee onto my back, along with their entire weight. The gun's metal mouth was cold against my cheek, and I felt someone weave a hand in my hair and give a sharp twist. That's when I disconnected from the pain and lifted a hand, trying to twist my body enough to grab whoever was holding me. I was not powerless-we were not going to die here.

"Not those!" I heard Liam say. He was begging. "Please!"

"Awww, don't want your precious papers to get wet?" The same voice as before. "How about you try being worried about yourself or your girl here, huh? Huh?" He sounded like a jock amped up on too much juice and game adrenaline.

Someone stomped their foot down on the same hand I was trying to maneuver toward my attacker's skin. I let out a choked cry, wishing I could turn my head to see what was causing Liam to do the same.

"Doctor Charles Meriwether," the voice read out, "2775 Arlington Court, Alexandria, Virginia. George Fields-"

The letters.

"Stop it," Liam said. "We didn't do anything-we didn't see anything, just-"

"Charles Meriwether?" another voice said. Also male, this one with a heavier Southern accent. I almost didn't hear him over the rain. "George Fields-like Jack Fields?"

"Yes!" Liam made the connection a full second before I did. This was a tribe-these were kids. "Yes, we're Psi, please-we're Psi like you!"

"Lee? Liam Stewart?" There was a shuffle of feet running toward us.

"Mike? That you?" That, from Liam.

"Oh my God...stop, stop!" The gun lifted off my face, but I was still pinned to the ground. "I know him-that's Liam Stewart! Stop! Hayes, get off of him!"

"He saw; you know the rules!"

"Jesus, are you deaf?" Mike yelled. "The rules apply to adults-they're kids, you asshole!"

I don't know if Liam finally managed to throw him off, or if Mike's words did the trick, but I felt Liam rise next to me, and opened my eyes in time to see Liam drive his shoulder into the black figure on top of me. I gulped in a full chest of air.

"Are you all right?" he asked. He put his hands on either side of my face. "Ruby, look at me-you okay?"

My hands came up to grab his. I nodded.

Of the six guys gathered around us, only two pulled their knit ski caps up off their faces: the big kid-big in a Hercules kind of way-with ruddy skin and black paint under both eyes, and another one with olive coloring, shaggy brown hair pulled back into a short ponytail. The latter was Mike. He reached over and pulled the letters out of Hercules's hand and pressed them against his own chest.

"Lee, man, I'm so sorry. I never thought-" Mike choked up. Liam let go of one of my hands to clap him on the back. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Liam took the letters back from him, and reached back to draw me forward again. "We're okay now," he told me. It seemed to be true enough. The other kids in black had lost interest in us the minute Mike stepped up.

"God, Lee," he said, wiping the rain off his face. "Oh my God, I can't believe you actually made it out."

Liam's voice was tight. "I thought you were with Josh when..."

"I was, but I got through the fields." He added, "Thanks to you."

Another kid, this one with skin as dark as Chubs, jerked his thumb in Liam's direction. "This is Lee Stewart?" he demanded. "From Caledonia?"

"From North Carolina," Liam said, with surprising venom.

Mike gripped Liam's hand, his entire body shaking. "The others-did you see if any of the others made it out?"

Liam hesitated. I knew what he was thinking, and I wondered if he would tell Mike the truth about how many kids actually escaped that night.

Instead, their watches went off at once, a shrill beep.

"That's time," Hercules said to the others. "Grab the supplies and head back. The uniforms will be here any second."

A single gunshot punctuated his order like an exclamation point, thundering across the open road. Liam and I both jumped back, away from them.

The kids at the back of the truck were tossing down the entirety of the truck's load: boxes and crates of brightly colored fruit. My lips parted at the sight of green bananas, just a few days shy of being ripe.

When they moved off and started back toward the trees, I had a clear view of the truck driver being rolled, unconscious and bound, into the ditch alongside the road.

"So, you're what?" Liam rubbed the back of his neck. "Raiding anyone stupid enough to drive by?"

"It's a supply hit," Mike said. "We're just trying to bring in a little food to eat, and this is the only way that works for us. We just have to do it fast-in and out before anyone notices us and can follow us back home."

"Back home?"

"Yeah. Where are you guys headed?" Mike had to shout over the people shouting for him. "You should come with us!"

"We already have our own tribe, thanks," Liam said.

Mike's dark brows furrowed. "We're not a tribe. Not like that, at least. We're with the Slip Kid. You heard of him?"

TWENTY-ONE.

EAST RIVER WAS, after all that speculating, nothing more than a camping ground. A big one, of course, but nothing I hadn't seen before a dozen times over with my parents. After the buildup that Mike and the others had given it, you would have thought we were walking toward Heaven's pearly gates, not some old camping spot that had been called Chesapeake Trails in its past life.

Since Mike had been the one to convince the others to take us along, he was the one stuck babysitting us as we hiked up the muddy unpaved road, saddled with boxes of fruit that were as heavy as they were tempting.

"We go on these things-we call them hits-to gather up supplies for the camp. Stuff like food, medicine, you name it. We also raid stores from time to time."

Liam had given me his jacket to wear to ward off the rain. Though it had turned to a faint drizzle as we walked, the damage had already been done to the flimsy cardboard boxes in our arms. Every now and then, the bottom of a carton would give out completely, and whatever kid was carrying it would be forced to stuff the sodden piles of fruit into their pockets or carry them cupped in their shirts. Kids were doubling back to pick up the scattered, bright trail we were leaving behind us. Every once in a while, I would catch myself from being distracted by the bright trail we were leaving behind.

When Mike had his back turned to us, Liam snuck a hand in the top box and held an orange out in front of my face, a shy smile on his lips. When he dropped it in my jacket's pocket, he leaned over, his sweatshirt hood slipping off his head, and pressed a light kiss against my bruised cheek. After that, the cold trickle on my skin seemed to evaporate.

"Ow, ow, ow, ow," Chubs chanted behind us. "Ow, ow, ow, ow."

"You know," Mike said, "it gives me hope that, after everything he's been through, Chubs is still the same Chubs we all know and love."

"Aw, that's not true," Liam said. "This is Chubs two-point-oh. He hasn't cried once this entire walk."

"Give him a few minutes." Greg snorted. "I'm sure he won't let us down."

"Hey," I said in a low, warning tone. "Not funny."

Chubs was still trailing behind, the gap between us growing with each mile marker we passed. I stopped and waited for him, not wanting him to feel like he was being left behind.

"Need some help?" I asked as he limped up to me. "My box isn't too heavy." And his was, I could tell. He was saddled with grapefruit.

I could see in his eyes that he desperately wanted to trade, even if it was only for a few minutes. Instead, he lifted his chin and said, over the cardboard flap, "I'm fine, though I appreciate your asking."