“Huh.”

“Maybe it was broken? He looked surprised it didn’t affect me more.”

“Maybe.” She resumed digging in the backpack, pulling out the map. She opened it and studied it for a moment.

“Am I going the right way?”

“Yes. We’re headed toward Val’s Territory, though we still have a few more miles.”

“How far can we drive until we need to go on foot?”

“I mean…we could go almost the whole way there, but…” She winced.

“What?”

“What do you think the odds are that they don’t have GPS tracking on this thing?”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“We probably shouldn’t risk it, right?” He slowed.

“Let’s…” She twisted around to look behind them. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Nothing but empty road. “Why don’t you really step on it? Let’s put a few miles between us and that city before we go on foot.”

He smiled at her. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

—

The car suddenly died five minutes later. The engine turned off, and it slowly rolled to a stop. It refused to start again when Lennon tried. Maisie grabbed the backpack and climbed out.

“They may have remote access to it,” she said, glancing up at the sky. He followed her gaze, searching for drones. It was too dark to see anything.

“Or it could have just been out of power?” he said hopefully.

“Could have been.” She pointed into the darkness. “Let’s not stick too close to the road. If they were tracking it, we don’t want to make it easy for them to find us.”

They traipsed into the grass. The lights of another neighborhood were visible up ahead. They also had an intense streetlight situation going on, from the looks of it.

“At least we covered a lot of ground.” She bumped her shoulder against his with a smile. He bumped hers back.

Their eyes met briefly. He was doing a horrible job ignoring that little voice telling him to keep his distance.

And he was going to keep ignoring it, if she kept looking at him like that.

“I should probably check in with Hadley,” she said. “Been a while.” She pulled the backpack around to her front, grabbing the radio inside. She turned up the volume. “Hadley?”

“Oh my god! Finally! I’ve been pinging you for, like, twenty minutes. I was imagining the worst, FYI.”

“Sorry. We were in a car chase.”

“A car chase? What?!”

“Turns out Lennon’s a very good driver.”

“I know, I’ve been watching the news here.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, Elise tried to stop me, but I know how to access it myself now, soooo…”

“Is something up?”

“Yeah. I have bad news.”

Maisie sighed. “Tell me.”

“Declan figured out that you took Lennon and went up north. And he did not love that, let me tell you.”

“What did he do?”

“Well, first he yelled a lot, like a big baby.”

Lennon almost laughed. He cleared his throat.

“Then some shit went down here, and now basically the Declan faction and Lopez faction are at war. But, like, a tense war. No-one-is-talking-to-each-other kind of war. And I can’t really tell who is on which side now. I think some people are siding with Declan just to avoid getting killed.”