Malorie wants to feel good about this. Two cars full of supplies. As if they dragged the basement of the lodge at Camp Yadin with them.

“And this,” Dean says, “is the door to the next car.”

She hears it slide open.

“You’re already blindfolded so I won’t tell you to close your eyes. We’ve tried dozens of ways to block off the view between cars, but either the wind takes them, the motion breaks them, or those who’ve wanted to look do so anyway. Come on.”

Malorie feels a hand in hers. It’s not Tom. Not Olympia. She pulls back.

“Sorry,” Dean says. “I just thought—”

“We can manage.”

“All right. Follow me.”

She reaches behind her and takes Olympia’s hand. The air is cold between cars. Powerful.

Inside the second car, Dean closes the door behind them.

“More storage. Clothes for the needy, though we’re all needy now, aren’t we?”

Malorie imagines an alternate reality with this man, one in which she would say yes, we’re all needy, and winters in Michigan are brutal, and how kind to deliver clothes, what an incredible thing you’ve started here.

But she doesn’t want to talk any more than she has to. She wants that private room, that space. No more.

They walk.

“Another door,” Dean says. “Ahead is the first of the passenger cars.”

Someone opens the door before Dean does. The person comes fast, and Dean is shoved back into Malorie.

Malorie grips Olympia’s wrist. This is it. The moment they’re going to have to leap from the train. It’s not hard to imagine the gravel cutting into her elbows and knees just like it did when she fell off her bike, riding it for the first time. She can still see Mom crouched beside her, placing a Band-Aid on a cut.

“Sorry,” a man says. “Bathroom.”

He gets by Malorie and the teens clumsily, apologizing as he goes, his words breathless the way words are when someone hurries.

“You see?” Dean says. “A bit like the old world after all.”

He laughs, and Malorie wants to laugh, too. But she was prepared to leap from a moving train, mistaking a man in a hurry for a man gone mad.

“Door,” Dean reminds her.

They step through. Between cars, the motion is stronger, the wind stronger, the feeling that she’s doing something she shouldn’t be doing stronger, too.

“Here,” Dean says once they’re through. “This room is open.”

She hears a door slide. The sound of the wheels gets louder. A distant grating comes into focus. The outside world that much closer. As if Dean has let some of it in.

But this is what she’s asked for. This is what she wants. The safety of privacy. Where Tom and Olympia will not be tempted to discuss anything with anybody lurking deeper on this train.

She steps into the room.