Grayson saw me. “That’s not everything, Wil.” He pointed to a speed limit sign, near the ditch. More spray paint. A different hand, more careful, had written: Pirates.

“We have to take this right turn,” Dance said.

I woke up fast. “We are not going that way.”

“The highway is blocked.”

“Maybe.” The smashed cars looked beat-up, cheap. They would go for nothing at a junkyard. They had crumbled easily, meshing together.

“What does pirates mean?” Grayson said.

“Looters down the highway?” Dance said. “Maybe the cars blocking the road were the people who came before us. Who got robbed, and are trying to warn us. Look, we have a lot to lose. I’m fine with taking a side road just to be safe. We have maps now.”

I glanced at the side road. It looked rough, disappearing into curves, the road glittering like broken glass through the snow. “Seems pretty icy,” I said.

“If it’s too bad, we can turn around.”

“Maybe we can just push these old cars off the highway,” I suggested.

The men looked at me, then at each other. But we tried it. We positioned ourselves at the back of first one burned car, then we tried the other. We shoved on the count of three. Grayson’s boot slipped in the snow. The second bumper fell off under our hands.

But neither of the cars budged enough.

“What about driving through them?” Grayson said.

Now it was my and Dance’s turn to exchange a glance. We got back into the truck. I told Dance to drive—he had got us into this parking spot, he could get us out of it. We made it out of the ditch, back onto the rural highway, and inched toward the burned cars.

“We should get a running start,” Grayson said from the passenger seat.

“We’ll slide on the ice,” I said.

Lobo’s old truck had been off the roads and into the woods. It had outrun his enemies. It had had a tree fall onto its hood and had crashed into branches, through mud and floods. It had been pulled out of ditches with chains. And now it was going to blast through two crashed cars.

Except it wasn’t.

The front of the truck grated against the cars. It sounded like the night I had hit a guardrail when, exhausted, driving Lisbeth home, I had drifted to the side of the dark country road. We heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal.

“Stop!” I said. “These cars aren’t moving. If something breaks on the truck, we’re in trouble.”

“I could fix it,” Dance said.

“That seems risky,” Grayson said. “I smell something burning.”

Dance parked with a huff and pulled out one of the maps.