Her eyes dart in the right direction. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Exhaustion crawls across her features. She scratches behind her ear and sighs. “So you want to keep going, but you don’t want to follow the trail? No, I’m not here for that. If we get turned back, we get turned back. I’m not going to wander around like we don’t have anything better to do. Emerson is hurt, Logan must be terrified. I’m not playing.” Her voice takes on an edge. Finality, and worse, disappointment.

I duck my head and focus on the road. The bread crumbs are spaced out. Hardly enough to form a proper trail. They’ll be covered or scattered if we leave the weather to toy with them. But are enough left to lead us to where Josie must be?

“Let’s continue until we’re turned away, then,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Fine.” Sofia throws up her hands and stalks toward the turn in the road. Her voice echoes around me.

With that one word, she sounds like my friends from school. Like Ariana, my best friend when I stayed with the Marshalls, when she was particularly frustrated by my hardheadedness. Like Ruth, when I lived at the Podolskys. She could groan and grunt dramatically at anyone and anything, but especially me.

For the first time in almost two years, underneath the anger, underneath the humiliation, I feel an ache at the pit of my stomach, an Ariana-shaped hole, a Ruth-shaped hole. An emptiness where belonging is meant to be. I would have done anything to protect them too.

I push my hands deep into the pockets of my work pants, I push the loneliness away, and I follow Sofia in silence.

I’m sorry, I don’t tell her. I’m scared too.

The silence grows until it envelops us both, but we keep walking.

Along the road, toward the narrow pass that leads into the nearest town. I wonder if the people of Sam’s Throne know that we’re here—if they think about us at all. Does anyone even know that we’re left here?

With every step, my anxiety doubles.

We turn the corner toward the mountains and—

There is no roadblock.

No barricades. No floodlights. No soldiers.

No signs of blood from where they shot Reid, either.

I must’ve made a sound, because Sofia stops and turns to me. “Are you okay? Is this it?”

I open my mouth to speak, but my throat clogs up. They forced us to stay here, in Hope, at gunpoint. They told us it was stay or die, and when we were good and well forgotten, they left?

What even was the point of that, beyond sheer cruelty?

When I finally find my voice, it cracks. “I don’t understand.”

The only thing that remains from the roadblock is a truck lying off the road on its side. It looks torn and weathered, older than a couple of weeks. The tires are slashed and a few of the windows smashed in, but it still looks semifunctional. Its canvas flaps and billows. It looks like a good hideout.