“Whoa!” Shane runs over to a table outside a dimly lit stall, finds a real oddity—some taxidermist threw together a true chimera: a frog’s head on a bunny’s body with what looks to be a tabby cat’s tail. It sits beneath a cracked jewel lamp that is also for sale. “Look!”

Atlanta makes a face. “I’d put that down. You’ll get fleas or something.” She snorts. “Maybe that’s why they call these things flea markets.”

“It does smell.”

“I bet.”

Suddenly his eyes shift, catch light, see something else that fills his fool head with excitement. “Comic shop!” And he’s off like an Iditarod husky. She rolls her eyes and follows after, finds him rifling double-time through a long box of dusty old comics. She sees titles she doesn’t recognize—Outsiders, Starman, New Mutants—alongside a few she does—Batman, Flash, The Avengers.

Shane looks like a miner who just found a rich vein of gold, and Atlanta has to hook him under the arm and drag him back out. “That’s not why we’re here, geek-boy. I need stuff.” Yesterday she nabbed an advance of cash from Jenny. Soon as Jenny started writing a check, Atlanta said she needed the real deal instead—cold, hard greenbacks, thanks. She paid a bit to Guy for his troubles, and now she’s here, prepping for next week’s trip to the Farm.

They muscle past a pair of superfat middle-aged housewives in too-tight sweat pants (on the one is emblazoned the word “Juicy” in pink glitter, which Atlanta assumes is supposed to make you think of sex but instead makes her think of ham) and there she finds what she’s looking for: Keystone Mobile, a grungy, overstuffed stall full of mobile accessories and headsets from the early 2000s, plus a ton of old phones crammed together in a glass case.

Dude behind the counter is a lanky sort with crow-slick hair and a patchy beard poking up out of his face like a bed of bad weeds. She tells him she needs a burner—no plan, just a pay-as-you-go.

“Something that’s all phone, though. I don’t want to play fruity little games on it.”

Shane chimes in: “Angry Birds is pretty cool.”

“They don’t sound cool. They sound angry.”

“What provider is this?” Shane asks. “AT&T? Sprint? Boost?”

Atlanta doesn’t know, so she just shrugs. Shane asks the scraggly-beard, who says, “We’re an . . . independent provider.” He starts boxing up a basic, gray, candy-bar phone: a little brick of forgotten technology. He goes into a spiel, sounding rehearsed and mechanical: “Keystone Mobile. You’ll hear about us in a few years when our patented 5G signal goes—”

“That’s not a real service,” Shane whispers in her ear, but she shushes him and pays for the phone.

Then she drags him on toward their next stop.

This stall: weapons.