Alex was wrestling one of the tent pegs into the hard ground; he glanced at me in amazement, his face looking sculpted in the moonlight. “Never? Really?”

“No, Mom never took me, and Aunt Jo...” I shrugged. I had told Alex what Aunt Jo was like; I didn’t have to explain.

He smiled, knowing what I meant. “Well, we’re sort of roughing it,” he said, moving on to the next rope. “You can get, like, fridges and stoves and stuff, but that’s never really seemed like camping to me.”

“Not that any of that would fit on the bike anyway,” I added.

Alex shook his head, making a tsk-ing noise. “What, so you wouldn’t carry a fridge on your lap if we got one? That’s a serious lack of dedication.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.”

Crawling inside, we got the sleeping bags zipped together. The ground felt freezing through the nylon floor of the tent. “I don’t need a fridge, but a heater would be nice,” I said. My teeth were practically chattering.

Alex grabbed our things from the bike and brought them inside; then he fastened the tent closed, securing us in. “Come here, babe, I’ll keep you warm.”

I smiled; whenever he called me that, I wanted to melt. He drew me to him, and we snuggled together in the softness of the sleeping bags. We were both fully dressed, apart from having kicked our shoes off – it was way too cold to contemplate taking anything else off.

“Promise me it’s warmer in Mexico,” I said, nestling against him. Slowly, I was starting to feel less like an ice cube – and even better, safe, at least for the moment.

“I promise,” murmured Alex. He was lying on his back with his arms around me; one hand had slipped under my T-shirt and was lazily stroking my spine. I could sense how tired he was, now that we’d finally stopped moving. So was I. It felt like a million years had passed since I’d crouched in the Church of Angels cathedral in Denver, trying to stop the Second Wave from arriving. And it hadn’t even been two days.

“Alex?” I whispered.

“Hmm?”

“What are we going to do when we get to Mexico? Do you have any idea where we’re going?” I knew he’d been to Mexico dozens of times; from the sounds of it, he and the other AKs had crossed the border often.

His hand stopped trailing up and down my spine. For a minute I thought he’d fallen asleep; then his voice spoke in the darkness. “I thought we’d go to the Sierra Madre,” he said. “There should be someplace safe there where we can hole up and start trying to recruit other AKs.”