But it still didn’t make me feel any less ashamed of how relieved I felt to find it still there—to know that Cate, with all of her promises to take care of things, was still out there, still only a touch away.

Liam thought the easiest and fastest way to navigate our small pack to East River was to travel alongside the roads that we would have taken had we still been in Betty. We were close enough to the highway to hear the occasional car whiz by, or see the flash of some long, silver-bellied semitruck out of the corner of our eyes, but, he assured us, out of their line of sight. This was the way he had traveled after escaping the League, how he had navigated through most of Virginia—how he hoped to get home.

We were debating whether or not Chubs had broken his toe against an exposed tree root when the wail of a truck’s horn shattered the silence. The booms that came next were infinitely worse—the thundering of something heavy falling and the resounding crack of metal snapping.

We all jumped—I dropped Zu’s hand to cover my ears. The way the tires squealed just before the crash came was like the warning signal for White Noise.

Liam reached over and gently pried my hands from my ears. “Come with me for a second.” He turned back to the others. “You guys watch the bags.”

Before the sound had even settled in the air, we heard the screams. Not the desperate kind—the one you’d hear when someone was terrified or hurt or even out of their head with grief. This was a war cry. A rising rebel yell. After that, there was no chance of Zu or Chubs coming with us. They stayed behind to watch the bags as Liam and I made our way to the line of trees that separated us from the rain-soaked asphalt of the highway.

The semitruck was on its side in the middle of the road, as if it had been flung there like a toy. The smell of burned rubber and smoke curled my stomach as we crouched down, and I was concerned the trail of sparks in front of us would turn into a wall of flame.

Liam stood up and was nearly at the shoulder of the road before my hand managed to catch his elbow.

“What are you doing?” I had to shout over the sound of the rain pinging against the silver, rippled body of the trailer the truck had been hauling.

“The driver—”

Needed help, yes, I knew that, and maybe it made me soulless and horrible, but I wasn’t about to let Liam be the one to do it. Trucks didn’t just flip over on their side for no reason. Either there was another car and driver we couldn’t see, or…

Or the yelling and the accident were connected.

Liam and I were still standing out in the open when the figures in black came pouring out of the trees opposite us. Every inch of them was covered in black, from the ski masks pulled down over their faces to their black shoes. There was an entire highway between us, and still the sight of them was enough to make me reach out and grab Liam’s arm, squeezing it until I was sure he’d be left with a permanent imprint of my fingers.