Kira thought the plan was ridiculous, but Green was talking to her again, and she didn’t want to ruin it. She followed dutifully down the wooded residential road, him on one side and her on the other. The houses in this neighborhood were all large, and set back from the road, which made the cars harder to see; it also made Kira despair of finding an older-looking car, but she persevered. The road turned south, as all of them seemed to, but they were miles from the lake, and they were making better time here than in the trees. Finally she spotted one—no more rusty than the other cars, but with a notably different shape; longer lines and squarer corners. She caught Green’s attention and the two trotted over.

“I’ve been scavenging old-world ruins for as long as I can remember,” said Kira, “but I’ve never bothered with cars.”

“Humans practically lived in their cars,” said Green.

Kira nodded. “Sure, but we were always looking for food and medicine. Sometimes you get lucky and find a survivalist who died halfway home with a trunk-load of canned food, but it was rarely ever worth our time.”

“Watch and learn.” Green walked to the passenger side and leaned in the window, pressing a button on the dashboard to pop open a small box. “This is called a glove compartment,” he said, rifling through it. “Aha.” He pulled himself back out and held up a folded Connecticut road map, in better condition than Kira had ever seen. “The compartment has a watertight seal, so the items were protected from the weather. Let’s figure out where we are.”

“Rita Drive,” said Kira, reading a weathered road sign. “A little horseshoe street off a larger road.”

Green spread the map on the hood of the car, and after some searching finally found it. Kira’s heart sank when she tapped the spot.

“We’re surrounded by lakes.”

“They’re all over this area,” said Green. He traced a winding path. “I think our best bet is to cut across this field, then follow this road, this road, and . . . this road. We might have to jump some fences, but we’ll be clear of the lakes without getting close to any of them.”

“One problem,” said Kira, and tapped her finger on a portion of his proposed route. “I came in through this gap here, trying to avoid the major roads, and that’s where I ran into the very first border marker.”

“That puts the border a lot farther from the lake than I expected,” said Green.

Now that they were out of combat, Kira’s link sense was dulling again, and she couldn’t tell how he felt about their situation—frustrated? Scared? His voice was impassive. “I wondered why we hadn’t run across any yet.”

“Be grateful that we haven’t.”