While Milos was “freeing” Allie from Danny Rozelli’s body, Jackin’ Jill waited with Moose on the bridge—an impossible feat for most other Afterlights, who would be blown into the river by the Everlost wind—but Jill and Moose were safely packed into two fleshies. They might have looked suspicious just standing around on the bridge, but their fleshies were road workers, and road workers have been known to just stand around on a regular basis.

“What if Milos and Squirrel don’t come?” Moose asked.

“We can do this without them,” Jill told him, annoyed by Milos’s absence, and further irritated by her own fleshie’s bad teeth and chewing tobacco breath.

A freight train blared its horn, and rattled down the bridge’s central trestle between the east- and westbound lanes of snarled traffic. It startled Jill, and she gagged on her fleshie’s chew. She had half a mind just to hurl him off the bridge, and find another fleshie—but that would definitely draw unwanted attention.

A police car stopped on the bridge beside them, and the officer lowered his window. Moose looked panicked, and Jill told him to go fiddle with some traffic cones.

“Everything okay here?” the officer asked. “Need us to divert traffic?”

Jill adjusted her hard hat. “Naah, just filling in a pothole. We’ll be done soon enough.”

Once he was gone, Jill glanced down at the gym bag at her feet. Moose, idiot that he was, had left the zipper open. It was just luck that the cop hadn’t seen the explosives. All that effort to skinjack a demolition engineer just to get them— how stupid would it be if their fleshies got busted here on the bridge? They couldn’t afford a slipup, and every minute they waited made it more likely they’d get caught.

“Forget about Milos and Squirrel,” Jill finally said. “We’ll do this without them.”

Jill would take care of the bridge, and Mary would know that Milos was a no-show. Maybe then Jill could squirm her way out from underneath Milos’s thumb.

A few miles away, Allie raced from the Rozelli backyard. There was no one in range for her to skinjack, so she had to rely on her own speed, hoping that her will was strong enough to propel her faster than Milos. Twice she felt him grab at her, and twice she shook him off. Then she finally reached a crowded rush hour street, filled with plenty of people and plenty of cars. She could jack to her heart’s content. This would be the Grand Ole Opry all over again, soul-surfing as quickly as she could, playing hide-and-seek in fleshies, hoping she had learned enough from Milos’s lessons to beat him at his own game.