But I wished I had worn two coats, wrapped myself in a garbage bag. I wished I had cut my hair short, wished the guards at the gate were women. Wished the world was women.

The other man had disappeared. Then we heard him shouting from the back of the truck.

“Mick,” he said. “They have a house back here!”

Mick, the man in sunglasses, grinned, a mouth of yellow teeth and chewing tobacco. “Cool,” he said.

Knocking on the passenger side window.

Grayson exchanged a look with Dance, then rolled it down. The second man was there. He stuck his head in, and talked to Mick across the seats, panting a little with excitement. “It’s a baby house,” he said. “Looks like it’s got a kitchen and everything.”

“Interesting,” Mick said.

“It’s not for sale,” Dance said.

“I didn’t ask you if it was for sale. But I will ask you, what you have for trade.”

“Trade?” Grayson said.

Dance was speaking in a calm, quiet voice. “We just need to turn around. We’ll be on our way and won’t bother you.”

“Turnaround goes through our place.”

“Listen, sir.” Grayson held up his dead phone and shook it. “Do you know what’s going on? The weather? Any news at all? We can’t get any service.”

“Service? We never had service here. Shit. Maybe it’s an uprising.” The man looked into the distance. “Maybe it’s a Tuesday in West Virginia.”

“We’ll pass straight on through,” Dance said. “We won’t even stop.”

“You don’t have to stop,” the man said. “If you drive this way, you pay us.”

It was a racket. They had dragged the cars over to block the highway, and were hitting up everyone who took the turn. Like we had, dumbly, ignoring the warning spray-painted on the sign. Misreading it.

I stared at the back of Grayson’s head, his neck held stiff and alert. If we didn’t produce an item they wanted, the men would start riffling through our truck. They might find the grow lights, the cash, the gun.

I had stuffed the gun under the driver’s seat when it had been my turn behind the wheel, hiding it in a hole in the upholstery. Lobo had cut the hole for just such a purpose, digging out the seat stuffing, gray as entrails, and hollowing a slit for money or drugs or anything my mama or I might need to hide. The men at the gate might wonder why we had such things, why we had made a secret place for them. I looked at the men’s guns, their long barrels, magazines as big and black as the wings of a giant bird. They weren’t just rifles. They were semis—maybe fully automatic.

I sensed the leather pouch of seeds around my neck, warm and soft against my skin.

Grayson said, “What if we give you—”