“Great. That means you won’t have any stupid preconceptions about what to avoid.”

“What, bad neighborhoods?”

“I was thinking more like Colorado, but sure, whatever.” I made a sharp turn onto yet another frontage road, causing Becks to whack her shoulder against the window. She swore, but didn’t yell at me. Our escape was too important to interrupt for silly things like fighting amongst ourselves. “Becks, we still clear?”

“Unless the CDC has invisible cars, yes,” she snarled.

“Good enough for me.” I pulled a disposable ear cuff out of my pocket and snapped it on, tapping the side to trigger the connection. “This is Shaun Mason activating security protocol Campbell. The bridge is out, the trees are coming, and I’m pretty sure my hand is evil. Now gimme some sugar, baby.”

Mahir stared at me with undisguised confusion. “What the fuck was all that about?”

“Single-use phone. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t activate it by mistake.” The ear cuff beeped as the connections were made, routed through half a dozen dummy servers and half a dozen more firewalls.

Fire-and-forget phones are about as secure as it gets, providing you don’t mind spending a few hundred bucks to make one call. That call can’t last for more than six minutes, and it has to end with the total destruction of the phone you used to make it. But yeah, it’s secure.

“Well, that’s definitely one thing no one’s going to say on bloody accident!”

“Exactly. Now get back to finding us a rabbit hole to dive down.”

The beeping stopped, and Alaric’s voice came down the line, asking, “Shaun? Is that you? Where are you?”

“That’s a good question, and no matter how secure I think this line is, it’s one I’m not going to answer. We have a maximum of six minutes talk time before we become traceable, so I want you to get Maggie and set your phone to speaker. Got me?”

“She’s right here,” said Alaric. There was a clicking sound. When he spoke again, his voice was tinny and a little distant, like it was coming down a tube. “Go.”

“Right. Wynne sold us out. I don’t know if he was always dirty or if they got to him after the election, but I’m not sure it matters. He’s dead. So’s Kelly.” I winced as I realized that there was one more unexpected tragedy to her death. “Shit. We can’t even put her on the Wall. She officially died months ago, and it wasn’t because of the infected.”