“Thanks,” I say to Clay. With the night wind lashing around the Jeep, I wonder if he’s heard me.

“Welcome,” he mumbles.

“Which way?”

“West,” he says, pointing. He tucks himself into the passenger seat and closes his eyes.

I drive into the night. The rutted blacktop is a mess with potholes, car husks, animal carcasses. My eyes are drawn up to a stretch of wind turbines in the distance. I trace the smooth white structures upward. Mom told me they used to provide electricity to this region. Now their tall, ivory forms remind me of bleached bones in the moonlight. When the wind stirs, the spinning blades moan wearily. I shiver and pull my eyes back to the highway.

Clay shifts beside me. His cowboy hat’s tipped over his eyes. His fingers twitch over the black stock of one of his revolvers in his sleep. What’s he dreaming about? How furious his pa will be if he ever finds out he helped us escape? He’s agreed to leave every luxury in the world. Until I can figure out why, Clay’s presence will always make me uneasy. He thinks I’m a bender and if he finds out my secret, turning me in would pay him enough to start a whole new life free of Daddy’s expectations. Even a remotely honest man might jump at the chance for those riches. No, Clay can’t know I’m a girl.

A tire bites into a deep rut and the Jeep jostles Clay awake. He bolts upright, his hand tightening on a revolver. His face slowly registers where he is. He looks over at me with tired eyes.

“Want me to drive?” he asks. He rubs his eyes with the palm of his hand in a way that I would find irresistible if I didn’t have to keep from growing attached.

I shake my head. “Not yet, but I need you to tell me where I’m going. Where’s my mama?”

Clay stares, red-eyed over the moonlit road. He shakes his head. “There’s no use. You’ll never get in.”

I veer around a stretch of blacktop that’s completely fallen away and then meet his eyes. “I’ll get in.”

Clay snorts. “Sure. Let’s just break into the Breeder’s facility, shall we? Brilliant. Even my pa wouldn’t mess with those sons-a-bitches.”

I grip the steering wheel with white knuckles. “It’s your pa’s fault in the first place. If he hadn’t sold my mama to the Breeders, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

He doesn’t meet my eyes when he answers. “I ain’t sayin’ it’s right, but she was of fertile age. They pay good money.” He looks off into the star-filled horizon. “’Sides, if you don’t, they come burn the town down.”

I shiver in the darkness, thinking about the Breeders again. I picture men’s bodies with grotesque animal features—slitted snake eyes, forked tongues, arms that extend to scorpion pinchers. I shake the image out of my head. Those are just old wives tales. They gotta be.

“Have you ever seen a Breeder?”