As I reached across my nightstand to turn off my lamp, my eyes fell upon the copy of the book that Trey had placed over my phone earlier that day. With an electric jolt blasting through my body, I suddenly knew exactly what he’d been trying to communicate to me in a way that my mom wouldn’t have understood if she’d happened to enter my bedroom before me.

Books.

The library.

Trey was hiding out at the library in town. Not the library at the high school, which would have been foolish, even for him. The big library, the one that had built its second floor with a charitable donation from Violet Simmons’s millionaire grandfather. I smiled widely in the dark, delighted not only that I’d figured out where he was, but that I knew him well enough to understand his clue. After the apocalyptically bad day I’d had, my renewed sense of connection to him made my heart swell.

His choice was a wise one: There were comfortable couches at the Willow Public Library, plus vending machines, bathrooms, and heat. The security system there was probably also somewhat lo-fi, since there probably weren’t many people in town interested in breaking in to steal anything other than the ancient laptops at the Internet stations.

My heart was beating so rapidly that I could hear the blood coursing through my ears. Outside my window, the rising sun was turning the sky pink. I was furious with myself that it had taken me so long to figure this out.

I needed to get to him as quickly as possible. Henry hadn’t been kidding; there’d been a story about Trey in the Gazette, and if everyone in town was keeping an eye out for him, Trey would be crazy to stick around for long. It was Saturday. If I waited until the library opened for business at ten o’clock, there was a chance Trey would have already taken off. The grim realization that this might be my last chance to see him—ever—rocketed me out of bed.

I quickly pulled on jeans and a sweater, taking care not to make any noises that would wake Mom or Glenn, and slipped into the garage to see if Mom’s bicycle was still in working condition. Aside from having flat tires, which were easily inflated with the old pump, it seemed to be in decent shape until I realized after hopping onto it outside the garage that the hand brakes didn’t work at all.

Fortunately, at that early hour on a Saturday, there wasn’t much traffic on the roads leading to the library, so the busted brakes weren’t a problem. But my joints were jittery, and every movement of my body felt like I was bracing myself for a fatal blow. Potential death was everywhere I looked. Now I knew what Mischa’s plight had been like in the fall, when she’d been terrified of eating and drinking for fear of choking to death. Death by air could mean anything. It could include any of the tree branches under which I rode, many damaged and weakened by the storm, falling on me. It could manifest in debris blowing in front of a passing car, and that car blindly swerving and hitting me.