Lennon glanced at Maisie. She’d been quieter than usual the last couple hours.

“You feel okay?” he asked.

She started at the sound of his voice, almost like she’d forgotten he was there.

He, on the other hand, was intensely aware of her presence, and every time her hand accidentally brushed against his. He was intentionally staying on her right side, because he couldn’t brush up against her injured left hand.

“Yeah, fine.” She smiled sheepishly. “Better than you, probably. I actually got to sleep.”

“I slept for an hour or so, I think.” He didn’t feel tired.

“I would have understood, you know.”

“What?”

“If you’d gone. If you’d taken that truck to Northgate. I wouldn’t have been mad.”

He laughed. “Come on, you would have been a little mad.”

She considered for a minute. “Okay, I would have been a little annoyed. At first. But then I would have realized that I’d been unconscious for hours, and you did what you had to do.”

He watched as she pushed a strand of pink hair behind her shoulder. “I know.”

She frowned. “You know?”

“Yeah. You’re obviously a very logical person. I know we just met, but I already got that about you. I didn’t think you’d be mad. Still doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do.”

She stared at him for so long that he had to look away before his face betrayed his emotions. The way she kept watching him with a new kind of intensity was making it hard to concentrate on anything else. He hadn’t known he wanted someone to look at him that way—like she was both surprised and deeply intrigued by him—but now he never wanted her to stop.

“You’re not,” she finally said. “A logical person.”

He laughed. “Not really, no. I mean, sometimes. But I’m more of a ‘go with my gut’ person.”

She nodded. “I like that about you.”

He couldn’t hide his surprise. He wasn’t exactly surprised that she liked that about him, but that she would say it so openly.

She stopped suddenly, putting her arm out to stop him, too.

Ahead, two cops were in an off-roading vehicle, blundering through the grass.

Maisie grabbed his hand and pulled him off the pavement and behind a tree. She crouched down, and he followed suit.

They waited until the cops lumbered over the road and onto the grass on the other side. Maisie stood as they disappeared in the distance.

“Honestly, of all the stupid things to carry over from the US,” Lennon grumbled as they stepped back onto the road.

“What?”

“Cops. Why you would create your own society and then decide, ‘Hey, how about we give a bunch of power-hungry assholes the power to kill you?’ is completely beyond me.”

She let out a laugh, eyebrows raised. “Are they like that on the other side of the wall too?”

“Not exactly, but definitely similar.”

“It sounds terrible over there.”

“Does it?”

“Well, yeah. Apparently, you have some of those”—she waved her hand in the general direction of the disappearing cops—“and you’ve had the same family in charge for years, even though you’re supposed to be a democracy, and apparently you get kidnapped if you go to a place called Georgia.”