But Trent and Jenks were a lot alike in many ways, stuff that went beyond their similar sleep schedules. Jenks had the same frontier-justice mentality that irritated me when I saw it in Trent. I knew Jenks killed fairies to protect his family, and I didn’t think any the less of him. Ivy, too, had killed people to survive until she had managed to escape Piscary. I was sure Pierce had, though he hadn’t told me of any except the four hundred innocents in Eleison, dead because of his previous lack of skill. Everyone made sacrifices of some kind to save what was important to them. Maybe Trent had a lot more things that were important to him than most people.

“Where are we?” I said softly as I pulled on my boots, not liking where my thoughts had taken me. I felt fuzzy, like I’d been asleep a long time.

Jenks shifted to face me, his wings catching the light and sending snatches of it about the car. “About an hour outside Albuquerque.”

Albuquerque? As in New Mexico? “You’re kidding,” I said, scooting forward to drape my arms over the passenger seat into the front. There was a fast-food bag on the floor. No, it was a take-out bag from a chain of high- priced gourmet eateries. “What time is it?” I asked, looking at the clock on the dash. “And where did you get the red coat, Jenks?”

“Nice, isn’t it?” he said, rising up to show it off. “I got it when Trent picked up some breakfast around sunup. All I had to do was tell a story, and the pixy girls gave it to me. I don’t know what time it is anymore. My internal clock is all screwed up.”

Trent glanced at me, his eyes showing the strain of too much driving. “We crossed into another time zone. The clock is right, but I feel like it’s eleven. I’m tired.”

I did the math, and I looked at the speedometer, seeing it was a mere sixty-eight miles per hour. “Holy crap!” I exclaimed, then lowered my voice when Ivy moved. “How fast have you been driving?”

Jenks’s wings hummed as he returned to the rearview mirror. “Ninety mostly.”

Silent, I turned to Trent, seeing a smile lifting his lips. “I have to make up the time somewhere,” he said. “You sleep a lot, and the roads were empty.”

I tried to stretch by pressing my palms into the roof of the car, but that wasn’t doing it. “I don’t sleep any more than you do,” I said as I collapsed back over the seat. “I just don’t have to do it every twelve hours.” Trent raised an eyebrow, and I added, “You want to stop for some breakfast? Maybe rent a room for a shower or something?”

“Lunch,” Jenks said brightly. “We ate at sunup.”

I stifled a smile at Jenks’s satisfaction.

From the backseat came Ivy’s low, gravelly “I’m hungry,” and Trent smoothly took the next exit, the off-ramp clean of debris, indicating that it was well used and likely had civilization at the end of it. Though the space between the cities was mostly abandoned, there were clusters of oddballs for gas and food holding back the emptiness.