“With what, your cultural literacy and your asteroids? We’ve been practicing for this since video games were invented.” Lucas scowled at Jeff. “You don’t scare me.”

“We should,” said Jeff quietly.

“You should all shut the fuck up, is what you should do,” said Toni. She turned the key. The engine made a faint grinding noise. She tried again, with the same result. Slumping in her seat, she groaned and said, “Your makeup is about to get a field test. This thing’s dead.”

“What?” Mandy leaned forward in her seat. “That’s not possible. The scout ship didn’t even hit us.”

“Then maybe it has an EMP built into that fancy artificial comet tail it came flying in on,” said Toni. “Actually, that would explain a lot, since the dash went black while it was overhead, and it probably makes sense for ships that travel through the infinite fucking void of space to mess with mere terrestrial cars, but as you can’t disbelieve the electronics back on, we’re dead in the water.”

“Meaning what?” asked Jeff.

“Meaning we walk,” said Toni. Her expression was grim. “Let’s hope the road is kinder than the cities, huh?”

2.

If the road was inherently kind, it was not interested in showing that side of itself to us tonight. We walked along the shoulder in a rough single file, leaving our stolen SUV deserted where it had died. It weighed too much for us to shift, and any traffic coming along this road, this late at night, was likely to complicate our lives more than it improved them.

I felt a little bad about that—there might be people fleeing the burning city, and people in the process of running for their lives will often to choose to do so at unsafe speeds. Someone could get seriously hurt. People could even be killed. But try as I might, I couldn’t work up more than the very mildest of irritation over the potential plight of people I didn’t even know. I’d never been the biggest fan of the human race. Now, it was like they were all blending into one big, amorphous “them,” something to be afraid of and to fight, not something to be concerned about.

Graham was a shadow on the road ahead of me. I looked at the back of his neck, trying to remember what it was like to kiss him without considering how he would taste, stripped naked and bleeding out for my delight. The thought was delicious and revolting at the same time. I shuddered, trying to chase it away. It clung, stubborn as a burr.

A hand touched my elbow. I looked back, and saw Tahlia looking at me with concern.

“Slow a bit, if you would,” she said. “I would speak with you.”