Five Survive By Holly Jackson (1)

Also by Holly Jackson A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Good Girl, Bad Blood As Good as Dead

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Text copyright © 2022 by Holly Jackson Cover art copyright © 2022 by Christine Blackburne Map copyright © 2022 by Mike Hall Cover design by Casey Moses All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN 9780593374160 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780593374184 ISBN 9780593704899 (international edition) Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read. Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to publish books for every reader. ep_prh_6.0_141928376_c0_r0

Contents Cover Also by Holly Jackson Title Page Copyright Dedication Floor Plan Map 10:00 P.M. Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four 11:00 P.M. Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine 12:00 A.M. Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen 1:00 A.M. Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-one Chapter Twenty-two 2:00 A.M. Chapter Twenty-three Chapter Twenty-four Chapter Twenty-five Chapter Twenty-six 3:00 A.M. Chapter Twenty-seven Chapter Twenty-eight Chapter Twenty-nine Chapter Thirty 4:00 A.M. Chapter Thirty-one Chapter Thirty-two Chapter Thirty-three Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five 5:00 A.M. Chapter Thirty-six Chapter Thirty-seven Chapter Thirty-eight Chapter Thirty-nine Chapter Forty 6:00 A.M. Acknowledgments About the Author

To Harry Collis, who, at a hundred years old, is probably the oldest Young Adult reader in the world…

10:00 p.m.

Here and not. Red and black. One moment there, another gone. Her face in the glass. Disappearing in the light of oncoming headlights, reappearing in the dark of outside. Gone again. The window kept her face for its own. Good, it could keep it. Back, the window didn’t want it either. Red’s reflection stared through her, but the glass and the darkness didn’t get her quite right, blurring the details. The main features were there: the too- pale glow of her skin and the wide-set dark blue eyes that weren’t hers alone. You look so much alike, she used to hear, more than she cared to. Now she didn’t care to hear it at all, even think it. So, she looked away from her face, their face, ignoring them both. But it was harder to ignore something when you were trying. Red shifted her gaze, looking instead at the cars in the lane beside and below. Something wasn’t right; the cars seemed too small from up here at her window, but Red didn’t feel any bigger. She watched a blue sedan edging forward to pass, and she helped it along with her eyes, pushing them ahead. There you go, bud. Ahead of this thirty-one-foot-long metal can, speeding down the highway. Which was strange when you thought about it; that you traveled down a highway when high was right there in the name.

“Red?” The voice opposite interrupted her thoughts of lowways and highways. Maddy was looking at her through the dimmed inside lights, skin screwed up around her sandy-brown eyes. She gave a small kick under the table, jabbing Red in the shin. “Did you just forget we were in the middle of playing a game?” “No,” Red said, but yes, yes she had. What had they been playing again? “Twenty Questions,” Maddy said, reading Red’s mind. Well, they had known each other all their lives; Red had only gotten a seven-month head start and she hadn’t done a lot with it. Maybe Maddy had learned to read her mind in all that time, more than seventeen years. Red really hoped not. There were things in there no one else could ever see. No one. Not even Maddy. Especially not Maddy. “Yeah, I know,” Red said, her eyes wandering to the other side of the RV, to the outside door and the sofa bed—currently sofa—where she and Maddy would sleep tonight. Red couldn’t remember; which side of the bed did Maddy like again? Because she couldn’t sleep if she wasn’t on the left side, and just as she was trying to read Maddy’s mind back about that, her eyes caught on a green sign outside in the night, flying over the windshield. “That sign says Rockingham, aren’t we getting off this road soon?” Red said, not loud enough for anyone at the very front of the RV to hear, where it would have been more use. She was probably wrong, anyway, best to say nothing. They’d been driving on this same road for the past hour, I-73 becoming I-74 and then US 220 without much fanfare. “Red Kenny, focus.” Maddy snapped her fingers, a hint of a smile on her face. It never creased, though, Maddy’s face, not even with the widest of smiles. Skin like cream, soft and clearer than it had any business being. It made the freckles on Red’s face stand out even more, side by side in photos. Literally side by side; they were almost the exact same height, down to the highest-standing hair, though Red’s was dark blond where Maddy’s was more light brown, a shade or two separating them. Red always had hers tied back, loose bangs at the front that she’d cut herself with the kitchen scissors. Maddy’s was untied and neat, the ends soft in a way Red’s never were. “I’m

the one asking questions, you’re the one with the person, place or thing,” Maddy prompted. Red nodded slowly. Well, even if Maddy also liked to sleep on the left, at least they weren’t on the bunks. “I’ve asked seven questions already,” Maddy said. “Great.” Red couldn’t remember her person, place or thing. But really, they’d been driving all day, setting off from home around twelve hours ago, hadn’t they played enough road trip games? Red couldn’t wait for this to be over so she could finally sleep, whether left side or right. Just get through it. They were supposed to arrive at Gulf Shores around this time tomorrow, meet up with the rest of their friends, that was the plan. Maddy cleared her throat. “And what answers did I give, remind me?” Red said. Maddy breathed out, an almost sigh or an almost laugh, hard to tell. “It was a person, a woman, not a fictional character,” she said, counting them off on her fingers. “Someone I would know, but not Kim Kardashian or you.” Red looked up, searching the empty corners of her mind for the memory. “No, sorry,” she said, “it’s gone.” “Okay, we’ll start again,” Maddy said, but just then, Simon stumbled out of the small bathroom, saving Red from more Organized FunTM. The door bounced back into him as the RV sped up. “Simon Yoo, have you been in there this whole time?” Maddy asked, disgusted. “We’ve played two whole rounds.” Simon pushed his black, loosely waved hair away from his face and held an unsteady finger to his lips, saying, “Shh, a lady never tells.” “Shut the door, then, jeez.” He did, but with his foot, to make some point or other, almost overbalancing as they hurtled along the highway, changing lanes to pass. Wasn’t their exit soon? Maybe Red should say something, but now she was watching as Simon waded forward, leaning on the tiny kitchen counter behind her. In one awkward motion, he slid onto the booth beside her, knocking his knees on the table.

Red studied him: his pupils were sitting too large in his dark, round eyes, and there was an incriminating wet patch on the front of his teal-colored Eagles shirt. “You’re drunk already,” she said, almost impressed. “I thought you’d only had like three beers.” Simon moved close to whisper in her ear, and Red could smell the sharp metallic tang on his breath. She couldn’t miss it; that was how she knew when her dad was lying to her, No I didn’t drink today, Red, I promise. “Shh,” Simon said, “Oliver brought tequila.” “And you just helped yourself?” Maddy asked, overhearing. In answer, Simon balled both his fists and held them in the air, yelling: “Spring break, baby!” Red laughed. And anyway, if she just asked, maybe Maddy wouldn’t mind sleeping on the right tonight, or for the rest of the week. She could just ask. “Oliver doesn’t like people touching his things,” Maddy said quietly, glancing over her shoulder at her brother, sitting just a few feet behind her in the front passenger seat, fiddling with the radio as he chatted to Reyna in the driver’s seat. Arthur was standing just behind Oliver and Reyna, now shooting a closed-mouth smile as he caught Red’s eye. Or maybe it was actually Simon he was smiling at. “Hey, it’s my RV, I have a claim to anything in it,” Simon hiccupped. “Your uncle’s RV.” Maddy felt the need to correct him. “Weren’t you supposed to have a driving shift today too?” Red asked him. The plan was to share the drive equally among the six of them. She had taken the first two-hour shift, to get it out of the way, driving them out of Philly and down I-95 until they stopped for lunch. Arthur had sat with her the whole time, calmly directing her, as though he could tell when she was zoning in and out, or when she was panicking about the size of the RV and how small everything looked from up here. Mind readers everywhere, clearly. But she’d only known Arthur six or seven months; that wasn’t fair. “Reyna and I swapped,” Simon said, “on account of the beers I’d already drunk.” A wicked smile. Simon had always been able to get away with

anything, he was too funny, too quick with it. You couldn’t stay mad at him. Well, Maddy could, if she was really trying. “Hey, Reyna’s really cool, by the way,” Simon whispered to Maddy, as though she had some claim over the coolness of her brother’s girlfriend. But she smiled and took it anyway, a glance over at the couple, picture-perfect, even with their backs turned. A break in the conversation; now was the time to ask before Red forgot. “Hey, Maddy, about the sofa bed—” “—Shit!” Oliver hissed up front, an ugly sound. “This is our exit right here. Move over, Reyna. Now! NOW.” “I can’t,” Reyna said, suddenly flustered, checking her mirrors and flipping the turn signal. “They’ll move for you, we’re bigger, just go,” Oliver said, reaching forward like he might grab the wheel himself. A screeching sound, not from the RV but from Reyna, as she pulled the hulking vehicle across one lane. An angry Chevrolet screamed on its horn, and the guy at the wheel threw up a middle finger, holding it out the window. Red pretended to catch it, slipping it into the chest pocket of her blue-and- yellow-check shirt, treasuring it forever. “Move, move, move,” Oliver barked, and Reyna swerved right again, making the exit just in time. Another horn, this time from a furious Tesla they left behind on the highway. “We could have just come off at the next one and worked it out. That’s what Google Maps is for,” Reyna said, slowing down, her voice strange and squished like it was working its way through gritted teeth. Red had never seen Reyna flustered before, or angry, only ever smiling, wider each time she checked in with Oliver’s eyes. What was that like, to be in love? She couldn’t imagine it; that was why she watched them sometimes, learning by example. But Red should have said something about the exit earlier, shouldn’t she? They’d made it almost all day without any raised voices. That was her fault. “I’m sorry,” Oliver said now, tucking Reyna’s thick black hair behind her ear so he could squeeze her shoulder, imprinting his fingers. “I just want to get to the campsite ASAP. We’re all tired.”

Red looked away, leaving them alone in their moment, well, as alone as they could get in an RV with six people, thirty-one feet long. Apparently that extra foot was so important they couldn’t round it down. The world on her side of the RV was dark again. Trees lined the road, but Red could hardly see them, not past her own reflection and the other face hiding beneath it. She had to look away from that too, before she thought about it too much. Not here, not now. The truck in front slowed as it passed a 35 sign, its brake lights staining the road red ahead of them. The color that followed her wherever she went, and it never meant anything good. But the road moved on, and so did they. Oh wait, what was it she needed to ask Maddy about again?

A strange yawning in Red’s gut, the sound hidden by the wheels on the road. She couldn’t be hungry, could she? They’d only stopped for dinner at a rest stop a few hours ago. But the feeling doubled down, twisting again, so she reached out for the bag of chips in front of Maddy. She removed a handful, placing them carefully in her mouth one by one, cheese dust coating her fingertips. “Oh yeah,” Simon said, standing up and sidling out of the booth, heading toward his bunk beyond the mini-kitchen. “And youse all owe me seven bucks for the snacks I got at the gas station.” Red stared down at the chips left in her hand. “Hey.” Maddy leaned over the table. “I’ll cover you for the snacks, don’t worry about it.” Red swallowed. Looked down even farther to hide her eyes from Maddy. Not worrying wasn’t a choice, not one Red had anyway. In her darkest moments, those winter nights when she had to wear her coat to bed, over two pairs of pajamas and five pairs of socks, and still shivered anyway, Red sometimes wished she were Maddy Lavoy. To live in that warm house as though it belonged to her, to have everything they had and everything she didn’t anymore.

Stop that. She felt a flush in her cheeks. Shame was a red feeling, a hot one, just like guilt and anger. Why couldn’t the Kennys heat their home on guilt and shame alone? But things would get better soon, right? Real soon, that was the plan, what it was all for. And then everything would be different. How freeing it would be to just do or think, and not have to double-think or triple-think, or say No thank you, maybe next time. To not beg for extra shifts at work and lose sleep either way. To take another handful of chips just because she wanted to. Red realized she hadn’t said anything yet. “Thanks,” she mumbled, keeping her eyes to herself, but she didn’t take any more chips, it didn’t feel right. She’d just have to live with that feeling in her gut. And maybe it wasn’t hunger after all that. “No worries,” Maddy said. There, see, she didn’t have any. Maddy had no need for worries. She was one of those people who was good at everything, first try. Well, apart from that time she insisted on taking up the harp. Unless Red was one of Maddy’s worries. It did seem that way sometimes. “Are we in South Carolina yet?” Red said, changing the subject, one thing she was good at. “Not yet,” Oliver called behind, though he wasn’t the Lavoy she’d asked. “Soon. I think we should be at the campsite in around forty minutes.” “Woohoo, spring break!” Simon yelled again in a high-pitched voice, and somehow he had another bottle of beer in his hand, the refrigerator door swinging open behind him. “I got it,” Arthur said, passing an unsteady Simon in the narrow space between the sofa bed and the dining table, clapping him on the back. Arthur darted forward to catch the refrigerator door and pushed it shut, the dim overhead lights flashing against his gold-framed glasses as he turned. Red liked his glasses, standing out against his tan skin and curly dark brown hair. She wondered whether she needed glasses; faraway things seem to have gotten farther and fuzzier lately. Another thing to add to the to-worry list, because she couldn’t do anything about it. Yet. Arthur caught her looking, smiling as he ran a finger over the light stubble on his chin. “Given up on Twenty Questions, have you?” he asked them both.

“Red forgot her person, place or thing,” Maddy said, and that made Red think: Wasn’t there something else she’d forgotten, something she wanted to ask Maddy? “Chip?” Maddy offered the bag to Arthur. “Ah, I’m good, thanks.” He backed away from the bag, almost tripping over the corner of the sofa bed. A look clouded his eyes, and now that she was looking, was there a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead? Red didn’t normally catch these things, but this one she did. Did that mean she looked at him too often? “What’s up?” she said. “Deathly allergic to cheese puffs?” “No, thankfully,” Arthur said, feeling his way as he sat down on the sofa bed. Oh yes, Red needed to ask Maddy about which side she slept on. Shit, Arthur had just said something and she hadn’t listened. Best to go with a well-placed “Huh?” “I said at least I don’t feel as dizzy as Simon probably does.” “Carsick?” Red said. “Well, RV-sick?” “No, it’s not that.” Arthur shook his head. “Probably far too late to be telling you all this, but I’m not that great with tight spaces.” He looked around at the crammed-in furniture and the compact kitchen. “I thought it would be wider—” “That’s what she said!” Simon interrupted. “For god’s sake, Simon, enough with The Office references,” Maddy said. “He’s been doing that since middle school, before he even knew what it meant.” “I’m standing right here, Mads, don’t third-person me.” “Can you all shut up for a second?” Oliver spoke over Maddy’s retort. “We’re trying to navigate over here.” Red turned back to Arthur. “Well, good thing you’re not spending a whole week in this cramped RV. Oh…wait.” Red smiled at him. “I know, right.” Arthur was Simon’s friend, really, but he was all of theirs by now. He didn’t go to their high school, he went to one in South Philly, but he and

Simon were on the same basketball team, both joined last year sometime. Red guessed Arthur didn’t much like his friends at his own school, because he’d been coming to all their parties and hangouts since senior year began. And that was okay, because she liked having him around. He always asked how she was and how was her day, even though Red usually answered with lies or exaggerated stories with only faint traces of the truth. He showed interest when Red wasn’t interesting at all. And there was that time he dropped her home after that New Year’s Eve party and let her sit in his car, warming up in the dry air of the heater before she had to go inside the cold house and find whatever mess her dad had left for her. Arthur didn’t know that was happening, he thought they were just talking, talking the night away at two in the morning outside her house. A small kindness he never knew he’d given her. She should give him one back. “We’ll be at the campsite soon, I think,” she said. “You can get out and stretch your legs in the great big outdoors. I’ll come with you.” “Yeah.” Arthur smiled. “I’ll be fine.” His gaze dropped from her face to the table, where she was resting one hand. “I was meaning to ask earlier, but I didn’t want to distract you from driving. What does your hand say?” “Oh.” Red blushed, raising the hand and rubbing at it self-consciously, realizing as she did that there was something written on the back of that one too. To-do lists everywhere, even on her own body. To-do lists and never-get- done lists. “I’ve got a two-for-one special for you,” she said. “On our left hand, we have: Call AT&T.” “Ah, I see. Fascinating. What about?” he asked. “You know,” Red said. “Just to check in with them, see how they’re doing, whether they had a good day.” Arthur nodded, a wry smile to match hers. “And did you do it?” Red pursed her lips, looking at the empty box she’d drawn near her knuckle. “No,” she said. “I ran out of time.” “And hand number two?” “On hand number two,” Red said, drawing out the suspense, “we have the very elaborate and detailed instruction: Pack.” “You must have done that one,” Arthur said.

“Just about,” she replied like it was a joke, but she was telling the truth this time. Packed literally right before she left the house this morning, no time to even double-check her bag against her list. She’d been too busy making sure there was enough food in the house for her dad while she was away. “Well, if you did it, why haven’t you checked it off?” Arthur said, pointing to the small empty box on the see-through flesh of her hand. “Here.” He stood up, grabbing one of Maddy’s pens from the table that she’d used in an earlier game of Hangman. He uncapped it and leaned toward Red, pressing the felt-tip end against her skin. Gently, he drew two lines: a check mark in the little box. “There you go,” he said, standing back to admire his handiwork. Red looked at her hand. And it felt stupid to admit it to herself, but the sight of that little check mark did change something in her. Small, minuscule, a tiny firework bursting in her head, but it felt good. It always felt good, checking off those boxes. She held out her hand proudly for Maddy to examine and got the nod of approval she was looking for. Arthur was still watching her, a look in his eyes, a different one that Red couldn’t decipher. “Brazil nuts,” Red said. Arthur’s face screwed up. “What?” “I used to be allergic to them as a kid, but I’m not anymore. Isn’t that weird, that a person can just change like that?” she said, fidgeting with the front pocket of her light blue jeans. She’d been sitting here in this spot a long time now. Too long. “My mo—p-parents had to write it on my hand, so I wouldn’t forget. Also, does the pattern in the curtains remind anyone of something?” She touched the white-and-blue curtain hanging down next to her, running her hand between the pleats. “It’s been bugging me all day, can’t work out what it is. A cartoon or something.” “It’s just a random pattern,” Maddy answered. “No, it’s something. It’s something.” Red traced her finger over it. Like the silhouette of a character she couldn’t quite place. From a book she was

read at night, or a TV show? Either way, best not to think back to that time, to when she was little, because of who else might be there. “Tomatoes,” Arthur said, saving her from the memory. “Give me a rash around my mouth. Only when raw, though.” He straightened up, as did the wrinkles in his white baseball jersey, navy on the arms. “Anyway, I think I better help with the directions. I’m sensing that Simon is being a hindrance.” “I’m doing a stellar job, thank you very much,” Simon said, looking over Oliver’s shoulder at an iPhone with a marble orange case; must be Reyna’s. There was a map on the screen, a blue dot moving along a highlighted road. The blue dot was them, the six of them and all thirty-one feet of RV. Thank god it wasn’t a red dot. Blue was safer. Arthur sidled to the front, blocking Red’s view of the screen, her eyes falling instead to Maddy, who gave her a not-so-subtle wink. “Huh?” Maddy shushed her silently, nodding her head ever so slightly in Arthur’s direction. “Checks all the boxes,” she whispered. “Stop it,” Red warned her. “You stop it.” They both stopped, because just then Maddy’s phone rang, an angry-wasp buzz against the table. The screen lit up with the view from the front camera: the off-white ceiling and a sliver of the underside of Maddy’s chin. Across the top was the word Mom and FaceTime video, with a slide to answer button waiting patiently at the bottom. Maddy’s reaction was instant. Too quick. She tensed, bones sharpening beneath her skin. Her hand darted out to grab the phone, holding it up and away to hide it from Red. Red knew that was what she was doing, she always knew, though Maddy didn’t know she knew. “I’ll call her when we get to the campsite,” Maddy said, almost too quiet to hear over the wheels, pressing the side button to reject the call. Looking anywhere but at Red. Mom. Like Maddy thought Red would split open and bleed just to see the word.

It had been the same for years. In freshman year, Maddy used to take kids to the side and tell them off for saying yo Momma jokes in front of Red. She didn’t think Red would ever find out. It was a forbidden word, a dirty word. She even got weird talking about the Mummers Parade in front of Red. How ridiculous. Except, the thing was, Maddy wasn’t wrong. Red did bleed just to see the word, to hear it, to think it, to remember, the guilt leaving a crater in her chest. Blood, red as her name and red as her shame. So, she didn’t think it, or remember, and she wouldn’t look to the left to see her mom’s face in her reflection in the window. No, she wouldn’t. These eyes were just hers.

Red concentrated on staring ahead. She wanted to think about the pattern in the curtains again, but she couldn’t risk looking that way. Instead, she looked down at the check mark drawn on her hand, eyes tracing the lines, trying to summon back that tiny firework. Maddy placed her phone facedown. “Shall we play another game?” she said. If Red had to sit here any longer, she might go mad. Even just walking a few laps of the RV might help. Thirty-one feet, you know, not just thirty. The 2017 GetAway Vista 31B. 2017 was also the year that—no, stop. She was about to stand up when the sound of a duck quacking stopped her, mechanical and insistent. It was coming from behind her head. “Oh, that’s me,” Oliver said, jumping up from the passenger seat and squeezing his wide shoulders past Arthur and Simon. “Mom’s calling,” he said. Red breathed in. “How do you know it’s your mom without looking?” Simon asked, a look of genuine confusion on his face. “Personalized ringtone,” Oliver said, walking past the dining table to the tiny kitchen, running his hands through his golden-brown hair, the exact same

shade as his eyes. His backpack was sitting on the counter. He unzipped it. “My mom started it; has personalized ringtones for the whole family,” he explained, digging his hand inside. “She has duck à l’orange for her birthday meal every year. Hence the duck.” He found the ringing phone, pulled it out. “Arthur, can you take over directions?” “No problem.” Arthur took the empty seat. “Hey, Mom,” Oliver said, holding the phone out to get a good view of his face. He stepped forward and slid onto the booth beside Red. Catherine Lavoy’s face filled the screen, her hair the same color as Oliver’s, neat and curled. Faint lines around her eyes as she smiled out of the phone. She looked tired, her face full of shadows. “Hello, sweetie,” she said, an uncharacteristic croakiness catching her voice. She cleared her throat. “I just tried Madeline but she wasn’t picking up.” “I’m here, Mom,” Maddy said, with an awkward glance at Red, but Red pretended not to notice. It was stupid anyway because Red liked Catherine. More than liked her. Catherine had been there Red’s entire life. She was kind and caring, and she always knew just how to help her. And, most importantly, she always cut sandwiches into triangles. Oliver pressed the button to activate the rear camera so Maddy could wave at her mom. “Sorry, I didn’t hear it ringing.” “That’s okay,” Catherine said. “Just calling to check how you guys are doing. Are you at your stopover point yet?” Oliver pressed the front camera on again, and Red could see from the direction of his gaze that he was looking into his own face, shifting his angles so the light found his cheekbones. “No, not yet, we’re close to the campsite I think, though. Hey, where are we?” he called to those at the front. Arthur checked over his shoulder. “Driving through a Morven Township. Should be around twenty-five minutes.” “Who was that?” Catherine asked, searching the corners of her screen as though they could give her the answer. “Maddy’s friend, Arthur,” Oliver said. “Who’s driving?” Catherine asked.

“Reyna is currently.” “Hi, Mrs. Lavoy,” Reyna called from the front, not taking her eyes off the dark road. “Hello, Reyna,” Catherine shouted back, too loudly, her voice crackling against the speakers. “Okay, so you’re almost there?” “Correct.” “Great. Oh, is that Red there?” Catherine asked, peering into her screen, raising it closer to her eye. Oliver tilted the phone, trapping Red inside the camera. She smiled. “Oh, it is! Hello, sweetie, how’s it going?” “Yeah, good. No official complaints to file.” Catherine laughed. “And are my children behaving? You know I trust you the—” Catherine froze on the screen, dead pixels distorting her face. “The—” Her hand jolted across the screen, blending into the mess of her face. No longer a person, just blocks of muted color. “Mom?” Oliver said. “Th…th…” Her words scattered into layers, robotic and strange. Red’s image was frozen too, eyes wide, afraid she’d be stuck in Oliver’s phone forever. “Mom, can you hear me?” Oliver said. “Mom?” “Ca…n you g…uys hear me? Hello?” Catherine’s voice broke through, but her face couldn’t keep up, mouthing words that already existed, talking before she could speak. “Got you,” Oliver said. “Well, sort of. Guess the service must be spotty around here.” “Okay, well.” Catherine’s face fast-forwarded, twitching as it dragged itself to the present. “I’ll let you get on with…is that a beer bottle?” Catherine’s eye moved to the camera again, staring at a shape on the counter behind Oliver’s shoulder.

“Yeah, it’s mine,” Oliver said smoothly, without a beat. He might just be a better liar than Red. “You aren’t drinking on this trip, are you, Maddy?” Catherine raised her voice to find her daughter off-screen. “No, Mom,” Maddy began. “I know—” “—You are seventeen, I don’t want to hear from anyone that you’ve been drinking. You can have fun without it.” Which reminded Red; Maddy turned eighteen in just a couple of weeks. She was already worrying about how to get her a birthday present. “Yes, I know. I am. I won’t,” Maddy said, leaning forward so her mom could hear her more clearly. “Oliver?” “Yes, Mom. I’ll watch her. Take chaperone duties very seriously, won’t we, Reyna?” “Yes ma’am,” Reyna called. “All right.” Catherine eased back from the camera. “I’ll let you go, then. I’ve got some prep to get on with. Text me in the morning before you head off again.” “Will do, Mom,” Oliver said. “Okay, bye everyone, bye Red.” They called “Bye” in clashing tones, Simon going high and shrill for some reason. “Love you, Oliver, Maddy.” “Love you, Mom,” they said in perfect Lavoy synchronization, and Oliver thumbed the red button, disappearing Catherine back to that warm house in Philadelphia. “Whew.” Maddy breathed out. “What more does she want? My big brother and his girlfriend are already accompanying me on spring break at her insistence. It’s so annoying.” She was talking to Red, she must have been, because just then her eyes flashed and she snatched them away, realizing she’d been complaining to the one with the dead mom. But that was okay because Red was thinking about

the cartoon Phineas and Ferb; they weren’t a match for the pattern in the curtains, but now the full theme song was running through her head. “It’s fine,” Oliver said to his sister. “Reyna and I are renting our own condo. You won’t even see us; we’ll leave you and all your friends to it. Wouldn’t catch me staying in an RV for a whole week with a bunch of teenagers.” “Yeah,” Maddy said, directing her voice at her brother now, “but Mom doesn’t know about that part.” “And what Mom doesn’t know can’t hurt her. She’s just stressed with work stuff at the moment,” Oliver said, coming to his mom’s defense. He did that a lot. Red really wanted to stand up now, to escape this conversation, to go stand with Arthur at the front, but Oliver and his wide shoulders were trapping her here. Simon came and sat down too, just to make the situation worse, dropping in beside Maddy and digging his hand through the bag of chips. He shoveled an entire fistful into his mouth. “Yeah, I know,” Maddy said, cheeks still flushed. “But she doesn’t have to take it out on me.” “She’s just protective of you,” Oliver countered. “What are youse all talking about?” Simon said, spewing orange crumbs from his mouth as he did. “My mom,” Oliver explained. “She’s stressed because she’s in the middle of this huge case at the moment.” “Oh yeah, she’s a lawyer, right?” Simon asked, going in for more chips. Oliver did not look amused. “She’s assistant district attorney,” he said, and it was hard to miss the pride in his voice, the way he overpronounced those three words. Which Red translated to mean: No, Simon, you idiot, she’s not just a lawyer. “What’s the case?” Simon said, oblivious to the disdain on Oliver’s face. “You’ve probably heard about it on the news,” he said, pointedly. “It’s a pretty big deal.” A huge deal, Red thought.

“It’s a homicide case; a murder involving two members of the biggest organized crime gang in the city,” Oliver said, a shadow of disappointment in his eyes as he didn’t get the reaction he was looking for from Simon. He elaborated: “The literal Philadelphia Mafia.” “Oh, cool,” Simon said, between bites. “Didn’t know the Mafia was still a thing, I love The Godfather. ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold,’ ” he said in a dreadful Italian American accent. “Very much still a thing,” Oliver said, settling in to his story now that he had Simon’s attention. Could Red climb under the table to get out? Urgh, no: too many legs. “There was some leadership dispute going on in the crime family, I won’t bore you with the details. And at the end of August last year, one of the leaders, Joseph Mannino, was killed by another, Francesco Gotti. Allegedly, I should say. Shot him twice in the back of the head.” Red tried not to picture it, studying the curtains again. She had heard it all so many times; she probably knew the details even better than Oliver. Not that she was going to say so. “We are officially in South Carolina!” Arthur called, pointing to a green sign out the front, illuminated by the RV’s headlights. Oliver kept talking: “Mom is the lead prosecutor taking Frank Gotti to trial for the murder. The pretrial conference is in a couple of weeks—” April 25 to be exact, Red thought, surprised she had remembered that particular detail. That wasn’t like her. “—and then it’s jury selection and the actual trial.” “Cool,” Simon said again. “Mrs. Lavoy, taking on the mob.” Oliver seemed to swell a little, sitting up taller, blocking Red in even more. “But it’s not just all that. She had to fight to even get this case. Normally a crime like this would be considered a federal case and would be tried by the US attorney’s office. They’ve tried to prosecute Frank Gotti multiple times, on various charges like drug trafficking and racketeering, and have never once got a conviction. But Mom managed to argue that this murder was under the DA’s jurisdiction because it wasn’t specifically related

to drug trafficking and because Frank Gotti killed Mannino himself; he didn’t pay a hit man like they normally do.” Simon yawned; Oliver was losing his crowd. But he didn’t take the hint. “And we know that,” Oliver continued, “because there was an eyewitness. Someone actually saw Frank Gotti walking away after shooting Mannino dead. And that’s why Mom’s so stressed—because the entire case rests on this witness’s testimony. And, as you can imagine, in cases against the Mafia, lead witnesses are often intimidated out of testifying or straight-up killed. So Mom has had to make sure the witness has been kept entirely anonymous in all the court documents. Witness A is what the press are calling him.” “I see,” Simon said. Did he regret asking? Red certainly regretted having to hear it all again. “But if she wins this case,” Oliver said, eyes flashing as though this were the most important part of the story, so Simon better stay with him, “it will be career-defining. The current DA is retiring after this term, and if Mom gets this conviction, she’s basically guaranteed to win the Democratic primary this year and be elected DA.” “Let’s not jinx it,” Maddy chimed in, and it was nice to hear someone else’s voice for a change, other than Oliver’s and the one in Red’s head. “No”—Oliver nodded down at his sister—“but I’m saying, if Frank Gotti is found guilty, Mom has a great chance of becoming DA.” He turned back to Simon. Poor Simon. “Her biggest competition at the moment is Mo Frazer, another assistant DA. He’s very popular, especially with the African American communities, but if Mom gets this conviction, I think it will give her the edge over him.” Oliver finally drew back, bowing his head like he was waiting for someone to personally congratulate him. “Congratulations,” Red said, resisting the urge to add one small clap. Simon took the opportunity to escape. “Shut up, Red,” Oliver replied, trying to make it a joke. There were times when Red thought of Oliver as a borrowed big brother; she’d known him her entire life, longer than Maddy if you thought about it like that. But then there

were other times she wasn’t even sure he remembered her name. Not like it was a difficult one: think primary colors. “She’s done incredibly well for herself. DA before the age of fifty. Of course, by that time I’m going to be US attorney general,” he said, again like it was a joke, but it really really wasn’t. Oliver managed to turn everything into a dick-measuring contest. Red snorted at that, giving the voice in her head a pat on the back. “What?” Oliver turned to her, his wide shoulders even wider now, a blockade either side of his neck. “Okay, so what are you doing with your life? I actually can’t remember which college you’re going to this year, remind me?” A lump in Red’s throat. “Harvard,” she said without blinking. “Full-ride scholarship.” Oliver’s eyes snapped wider, bottom lip hanging open. She had just one- upped his prelaw at Dartmouth with a premed girlfriend, how dare she? Red enjoyed the look while she could. “Wh…R-really?” he said. “Yeah,” she said. “Early admission.” “Red,” Maddy said in a mock-warning voice, her eyes silently scolding. She used to enjoy annoying Oliver too. “What?” Oliver looked between them. “I’m not going to college this year,” Red said, relenting. It was fun while it lasted, living that other life. Oliver laughed, a sigh of relief buried in there somewhere. “I was going to say. Full scholarship at Harvard, ha! Didn’t think so.” Oh he didn’t, did he? “You’re not going anywhere?” he asked now, fully recovered from the shock. “Red missed the application deadline,” Maddy explained for her. Which wasn’t the truth, but it was a good lie, a convenient one, because how very Red it was. “You know me,” Red said, just to hammer it home.

“How could you miss the deadline?” Oliver turned to her, a look of cold concern on his face, and Red didn’t like where this was going, but she was trapped right here in this fucking booth forever. She shrugged, hoping that would shut him down. It did not, Oliver opening his mouth to speak again. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “You were such a smart kid.” Don’t say it, please don’t say it. “Seems a shame,” Oliver went on. “You had so much potential.” And there it was. The line that ripped her open. She’d lost count of the number of times it had been said to her, but there was only one that truly mattered. Red was thirteen and Mom was alive, screaming at each other across the kitchen, back when it used to be warm. “Red?” Maddy was saying. It was too hot in here. Red stood up, knocking her knees against the table, swaying as the RV turned. “I gotta go—” But she was saved by Arthur, calling: “Shit, I think we went the wrong way.”

“What do you mean?” Oliver got up from the booth—thank God, Red was free—and walked the four strides to the front, nudging Simon out of his way. “Let me see,” he said to Arthur, holding his hand out for the phone with the directions. Red was free and she wasn’t about to sit at this table any longer. She sidled along and out, moving toward the congregation at the front, perching on the corner of the sofa bed. Oh yes, now she remembered. “Maddy, which side—” “—No, it’s fine.” Oliver spoke across her, swiping his finger on the screen. “It’s redirected us. Just keep going down this road, it takes us past a small town called Ruby. Then it should be a left turn and we go south for a bit, toward the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge,” he read from the screen. “Campsite is right around there. We should be just over ten minutes, everyone.” “Perfect,” Reyna said, taking one hand off the wheel to rub at her eyes. “You getting tired?” Oliver asked her. “I can take over?” His voice was different when he spoke to Reyna. Softer at the edges.

“No, I’m good,” she said, shooting him a quick smile over her shoulder, stretching wide across her light brown skin. It seemed almost a waste, that a smile that nice was meant for Oliver. That was a mean thought. He meant well. Everyone always meant well. “You okay?” Arthur asked Red, vacating the passenger seat so Oliver could take it and coming to stand beside her. She nodded. “RV feels smaller when you’ve been in it for ten-plus hours.” “I hear that,” he agreed. “We’ll be there soon. Or we could both get shit- faced like Simon and we won’t care anymore.” “I’m not shit-faced,” Simon said from behind Arthur. “I’m a very comfortable-amount drunk.” “I’m not so sure Tomorrow Morning Simon will agree,” Red said. “I’m not sure Now Maddy agrees either,” Maddy said, turning around and perching on her booth so she could see them all. “You don’t want to peak too soon. We have a whole week ahead of us.” Simon finished off his beer in one large gulp, eyeballing Maddy as he did so. “Is it this left turn here?” Reyna asked, slowing down. “Oliver?” “Sorry, um…” He stared down at the phone in his hands. “The GPS has gone weird. I think I’ve lost service. I’m not sure where we are.” “I need an answer,” Reyna said, idling to a stop just ahead of the intersection, hand hesitating over the turn signal. A car horn sounded behind them. And again. “Oliver?” Reyna said, her voice rising, the knuckles bursting out of her skin like bony hilltops as she held the wheel too hard. “Um, yes, I think so. Left here,” he said, uncertainly. But it was all Reyna needed; she pushed off and took the turn, the car behind screaming its displeasure as it zipped off across the intersection. “Asshole,” she said under her breath. “Sorry,” Oliver said. “Your phone isn’t working.” “Not you, the car,” Reyna clarified. “I can’t get the map to work,” Oliver said, swiping furiously at the screen, closing the map app and reopening it. It was blank; a yellow background and

empty grid lines and nothing else. “It doesn’t know where we are. Zero bars. Hey, does anyone have any service?” Red had left her phone over there on the table. But if she had zero bars, it could mean she had no signal, or it could mean that AT&T finally cut off her service after the last unpaid bill. “I’ve got a bar,” Arthur said, his phone cupped in his hand. “Who’s your provider?” Oliver looked up at him. “Verizon,” he said. “Hold on, I’ll get the route up.” He tapped at his screen. “Already had it loaded from when I was directing Red. Okay, so yeah we took the correct turn. You keep on this road for two miles, then it’s a right down Bo Melton Loop.” “My phone is struggling too,” Maddy said, holding it up and shaking it, like that might spark some life back into it. “We’re deep in the country now, folks,” Simon said, leaning on his words in an atrocious Southern accent, spliced with a touch of crazy old man. Sober Simon was normally quite good at accents. He prided himself on them, in fact, always guaranteed a part in the school play. You should hear his upper- class English gentleman. Red watched out the wide windshield, a panoramic view of darkness, the two headlights carving up the night, bringing it into existence. There was no world anymore, only this RV and the six of them, and whatever the dark brought them. Arthur made a small noise: a groan in the back of his throat as he stared down at his screen. Red stood up, looking over his shoulder to see what it was. He glanced back at her and cleared his throat. Maybe she was standing too close. “Looks like I just lost service too,” he said, right as Red’s eyes registered the zero bars at the top of the screen. “Shit,” Oliver hissed, tapping Reyna’s phone again, like he could make it work through sheer force of will. If anyone could, a Lavoy could. “It’s okay,” Arthur said to him, “I still have the route up, just can’t see where we are on it. We’ll have to look for road signs.” “Old-school navigation,” Reyna commented.

“Let me help,” Simon said, shuffling over to Arthur and Red, crowding them. “I’m good at maps.” “You say you’re good at everything,” Red said. “I am good at everything,” Simon answered. “Except being humble.” There was no one else on the road. No passing headlights, no red glow of brake lights up ahead. Red stared out the windshield, concentrated. “When’s the turn?” Reyna asked. “Not yet,” Red answered, her eyes now following the highlighted road on Arthur’s screen, no blue dot to guide them, trying to match it with the darkness outside. “Wouldn’t trust Red with directions,” Maddy said. “Hey.” “Well, I mean, it’s not like you’re ever on time, is it?” Red leaned back to look at Maddy perching on the booth, head resting on the bed of her knuckles. “I’ll have you know,” she said, “that everyone else was later than me this morning. I was first by like ten whole minutes.” Maddy looked sheepish, biting one lip. “What?” “Nothing.” Red knew it wasn’t nothing. “Maddy, what?” “I, um, I told you we were meeting at our house at nine. But I told everyone else we were meeting at ten.” “You told me a whole hour earlier?” Red said, and why did it sting that she had? It was a lie, yes, but it was a considerate lie. Maddy knew Red would be late: she didn’t know all the reasons why, but she knew the end result and that was the same, wasn’t it? “So technically, you were fifty minutes late and everyone else was on time.” “I missed the bus,” Red said, which wasn’t true: she spent the last of her change on her dad’s favorite cereal and then walked the whole way, bag wheeling behind her.

“Ha, look, that road’s called Wagon Wheel Road,” Simon snorted, pointing at the screen. “Is that the right I make?” Reyna asked, hand darting to the turn signal, though there was no one to signal for. No, it wasn’t here. “No, no, no,” Arthur said quickly. “It’s the next one. I think.” Reyna sped up again, following the road as it curved around. “Wagon Wheel.” Simon was still chuckling to himself. “Here, this right,” Oliver said, taking charge. “Turn, Reyna.” “I’m turning,” she said, the faintest trace of irritation in her voice. Too many cooks. Which made Reyna, what? A spoon? The Lavoys had fancy spoons at their house: pearly handles and no stains. There was a new sound, joining with the wind as it rushed against the sides of the RV: a rasping noise beneath them. The road was growing rougher, gravelly, the RV lurching as it rolled down. There were no more yellow markings, no more my lane and your lane, and from the light of the high beams Red could see rows and rows of trees standing either side, silent sentinels on the dead-of-night road. She felt watched, which was stupid; trees didn’t have eyes. But neither did doors, yet her mom used to stick googly ones on Red’s so she felt safe in her bed in the dar— No, stop, she needed to concentrate on where they were going. “Looks like we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Maddy commented from her perch, cupping her hands around her eyes so she could look out the side window. “As is the campsite, so we’re good,” Oliver replied. The RV staggered as it hit a pothole. Arthur was chewing his lip, eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “I think it’s left here,” he said, not sure, not loud enough to reach Reyna. “Left, left here!” Simon didn’t have the same problem. But Reyna didn’t listen, didn’t trust the drunk one. “It’s left,” Red said.

“You sure?” Oliver asked her, but Reyna had already pulled the RV into it, and the road wasn’t even paved anymore, just dirt and rocks, dust kicking up into the headlights. “This can’t be right, let me look at the map.” He snapped his fingers for Arthur to pass his phone over. “Reyna, turn around.” “I can’t turn around!” she said, more than a hint of irritation in her voice now: a full underlayer. “This road is way too narrow and this RV is way too big.” “Where are we?” Red asked Arthur, leaning across to see, like it made any difference. “I think we’re here somewhere.” He pointed at the screen. “McNair Cemetery Road. Maybe.” “That’s definitely wrong,” Oliver said. “We have to turn ba—” “—I can’t!” Reyna shot him a look. “Is there a turn?” Red nudged Arthur. “Wait, I think there’s a left soon,” he said, zooming in to the mouth of the small road on his phone. “Might circle us back to that other road.” He glanced at Red and she nodded. “For fuck’s sake,” Oliver said, one of his knees rattling against the dashboard. “We wouldn’t have gone the wrong way if I was directing.” “This is stressful,” Maddy said, her hands buried in her loose hair. “We should have just flown and rented a condo like everyone else from school is.” A flush in Maddy’s cheeks as she realized what she’d said, their eyes meeting for half a second. Red was the reason they didn’t fly and rent a condo like everyone else. That was why Maddy came up with the RV idea. Way cheaper—just gas and spending money. Come on, it will be fun. It was all Red’s fault. “Just keep going,” Red said to Reyna, blocking everyone else out. “I don’t see a left turn.” Reyna leaned closer to the wheel, straining to see. As they followed the corner around, the headlights got lost in the woods, recoiling as they bounded off some body of water: a creek hiding somewhere behind the trees. “Where’s the left turn?” Reyna pushed forward. “There!” Simon pointed out the windshield. “It’s here. Go left.”

“Sure?” Red glanced down at the map in Arthur’s hands. This was it. “Yes,” she said. “Down there.” “Doesn’t even look like a real road,” Oliver said as they peeled down it, dirt and gravel loud against the wheels. It was narrower, tighter, the trees pressing in on them, barring the way with low-hanging branches that scraped the top of the RV. “Keep going,” Red said. Her fault that the others were here and not on a nice plane tomorrow instead, with all their other friends. “I’ve lost the map,” Arthur said, blank grid lines taking over his screen. “Keep going,” she said. “Not like we have a choice,” Oliver retorted. The trees broke away from the road, cutting their losses, giving way to low-lying scrubland and long grass on either side. “Is it a dead end?” Oliver asked, staring out the front. “Keep going,” Red said. “Pretty sure it’s a dead end,” Oliver decided, though none of them could see. “Reyna, it’s wide enough here, you can turn around and head back.” “Okay.” Reyna gave in, pushing her foot against the brake. The RV slowed, rattling against the barely-there road. A sharper sound, like a crack, splitting the night in half. “What was that?” Simon asked. The RV hitched, drooping down at the front left side, Red stumbling into Arthur as it did. “Fuck,” Oliver said, staring at Reyna over there on the sunken side, slamming his fist into the dashboard. “I think we just punctured a tire.”

11:00 p.m.

Reyna turned the engine off and the night grew too quiet, only the sounds their own bodies made, Red’s breath catching in her throat. “I’ll go first.” Oliver stood up, pushing past the others as he walked over to the door of the RV, just beyond the sofa bed. His steps were heavy, shaking the ground. He opened the door and let the outside in. A wash of cool night air hit Red in the face as she watched Oliver take the four steps down to the outside world. Maddy went next, sliding out of the booth to follow her brother. “You okay?” Arthur asked Reyna, who was standing up from behind the wheel, stretching out her neck. “Yeah,” she said, the slightest tremor in her voice. “I don’t understand what we could have hit. There’s nothing on the road.” “Let’s go see.” Arthur gave her a kind smile and then turned, heading out the door, Simon trailing closely behind him, slightly less steady on the steep steps. “After you,” Red said, gesturing Reyna ahead of her. “I’m sure it’ll be okay.” “It will be all my fault somehow,” Reyna said to her, a secret flash from her deep brown eyes. “Just you watch.”

Was she talking about Oliver? Red knew that feeling, but she didn’t know Reyna had felt it too. The two of them, Lavoy-adjacent but not Lavoys and didn’t they know it. Except lots of things were actually Red’s fault. This, even. “No, it’ll be fine,” Red said as she scooped up her phone from the table. Oliver couldn’t blame Reyna; they were happy, they were perfect, small touches and soft voices. Reyna’s shoes tapped down the stairs and then it was Red’s turn, her legs aching from sitting down too long as she took each step. One, two, three, four, and by the end, as her sneakers scraped against the dirt road, she was wondering whether Reyna had seen a dead body yet, as part of her studies. Maybe she could ask if they still looked like the people they once were. Or whether it was true that blood was sometimes blue, not always red. Red followed Reyna, who followed Simon, walking around the front side of the RV, into the too-bright light of the high beams, dust from the road floating upward through them. “Oh fuck!” came Oliver’s voice. He was already there, crouched down beside the wheel, lighting it up with the flashlight on Reyna’s phone. “Definitely punctured.” “You sure?” Arthur asked as he stepped out of the blinding high beam. “Yes I’m sure. I was actually downplaying it: there’s a huge fucking hole and a giant tear in the tire.” “What from?” Maddy said, crouching down beside Oliver as Red came around the corner of the RV and saw the tire for herself. There was a large split in the rubber, about the size of her hand, the two sides peeling away from each other. No air at all, the bottom pooling out under the weight of the RV. Thirty-one feet long, but how heavy? “I don’t know,” Oliver said, searching around with the flashlight, running his hand carefully over the road. “Maybe there’s glass here, or a sharp rock. Maybe a nail. Reyna?” He pivoted to look up at her, shining the light in her eyes. “You didn’t see anything?” “No, I didn’t see anything,” she replied, exchanging a quick look with Red.

“Well, you must have driven over something. Why weren’t you looking?” Oliver returned to his search, a harder edge to his voice. Reyna had been right. Well, she did know Oliver better than Red did. “None of us saw anything. It’s pitch-black outside.” That was Red’s best attempt at helping, but the small sideways smile on Reyna’s face showed that it was appreciated all the same. “I can’t find anything. Maybe it got thrown by the wheel. Or maybe it was just a piece-of-shit tire that broke over nothing.” Oliver stood up, shining the light on Simon now. “Does your uncle ever get this RV serviced?” “How the fuck should I know?” Simon hiccupped. But, really, how the fuck should he know, especially in his current state. “Well, how long has your uncle owned the RV?” Oliver pressed. “I don’t know.” “How do you not know that?” Oliver’s voice sharpened. “Because he’s drunk,” Maddy said, an apologetic glance at Simon, swaying on his feet. “Listen,” Arthur said, “we’ve driven over five hundred miles on the tire today, and it’s been fine.” Defending the tire or defending Simon, Red wasn’t sure. “It doesn’t really matter how it got punctured,” Reyna said, stepping forward. “What matters is what we can do about it.” “Someone call Triple-A,” said Maddy. “There’s no signal, remember?” Oliver looked down at her, Reyna’s phone raised in his hand. “The police?” Maddy tried again. “Still need service to call them, unfortunately,” Arthur answered this time, much softer than Oliver had. “Does anybody have any service at all?” Oliver turned to the group. “Check your phones.” Red pulled hers out of her jeans pocket, the screen lighting up the underside of her face. No bars. No 3G or 4G or GPRS. Nothing. Except 67% battery, which, hey, was pretty good for her. “Nothing,” she said for good measure.

“Who are you with?” Oliver asked, in a way that sounded as though Red could only give him wrong answers. “AT&T.” She glanced down at the unchecked box scrawled on her hand. “Shit,” Oliver said. Yep, see, wrong answers only. “That’s what me, Reyna and Maddy are on. Arthur, you still got nothing with Verizon?” “Nothing,” Arthur confirmed, showing Oliver his home screen. “Everyone has zero bars? Simon?” “Yeah, I’m the same. T-Mobile. Nothing.” “We must be in a dead zone,” Red said. “Okay, so calling for help is out.” Reyna looked at them all. “We—” “—Maybe not,” Oliver cut across her. “We could walk back to that small town we passed. Ruby. Find a landline there to call for help if there’s still no service. It was only a few miles back.” “More like five miles,” Reyna said. “That’s too far.” “Well, maybe we’ll find a house or a farm or something with a landline on the way,” Oliver said. “It’s really dark,” Maddy said in a small voice. “And we’re in the middle of nowhere.” “Not all of us have to go,” Oliver replied. Neither of the Lavoys were volunteering for walking-in-the-dark duty, then. Red had another idea. “Why can’t we just sleep here tonight?” she suggested. “I bet no one else will be driving this way until morning, and then we can get help once it’s light.” “No,” Maddy said, and Red was surprised. She’d assumed Oliver would be the one to shoot it down. “If we wait till tomorrow to fix the tire, then we won’t set off in time, and we’ll be late getting to Gulf Shores. Everyone else from school will be there and we’ll miss the first night out with everyone.” “Not to just swoop in and save the day here, but I’m gonna,” Simon said, leaning his elbow on Red’s shoulder. “Can’t believe I’m the observant one here, but: there’s a spare tire on the back of the RV.” Maddy’s face rearranged, her relief obvious even through the darkness that separated them. She gave Simon an amused smile, and Arthur gave him a pat on the back, the vibration passing through Red too.

“Yes,” Oliver said. “I was just going to ask you whether there was a spare.” Of course he was. “I assume there’s a jack somewhere?” he asked. “I’m a Simon, not a Jack,” Simon replied, with a wry smile that Oliver clearly hadn’t noticed. “I mean the device to lift the—” “Oh right, that jack,” Simon said in an exaggerated tone, miming smacking himself on the head. He really did belong on a stage somewhere. “Yeah, I think there’s probably one in those lower storage units.” “Right, okay.” Oliver clapped and it was too loud, echoing through the quiet scrubland, patches of grass bristling at the intrusion. “Let’s get this done as quick as we can, then get back on the road to that fucking campsite.” The darkness held its breath, listening as they made their plans. Then the wind let go, dancing through Red’s hair, and the grass chattered and the trees whispered, and Red wondered what it was they were saying to each other.

Was now a bad time for Red to say she had to pee? “Reyna.” Oliver turned to her. “You and Maddy go with Simon to find the jack, and we’ll need a wrench too. Something to remove the nuts.” “That’s what she said,” Simon whispered so only Red could hear. “Arthur.” Oliver pointed to him. “You and me will get the spare tire.” “Okay.” “What about me?” Red said as the others picked up their feet and started to move. “Think we are all heading in the same direction,” Arthur said, beckoning for her to follow. They were, moving as a group to the rear side of the RV, Maddy swiping the flashlight up on her phone to help light the way. She pointed it at the side of the RV, the light glaring against the glossy off-white sides and the red-and- blue-stripe motif along the center. The RV seemed bigger from out here, a faint yellow glow leaking out of the windows. Maddy moved the beam lower, the flashlight revealing three large storage units around the rear wheel, under the overhanging side. Maddy opened the one at the very end, and Reyna knelt to have a look. “No, that’s the generator in there,” she said. “Next one.”

Red moved past them, following Arthur and Oliver as they walked around the back of the vehicle. A black ladder was attached here, running to the roof of the RV. And mounted beside it, in a canvas cover, was the spare tire. Oliver gave it a slap. “Let me just see something,” Arthur said, planting one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. He pushed up, climbing fast, his phone a lump in the back pocket of his jeans. Not that Red was looking. “What are you doing?” Oliver called up to him as Arthur stepped out onto the roof of the RV. He might have lost himself to the dark sky if it weren’t for his white sweatshirt, glowing like the moon. Red looked up even farther and, hey, she could see the actual moon. “Just wondering if I can see any lights nearby,” Arthur replied, disappearing from sight as he walked farther along. The sounds of his shoes pattering. Red and Oliver waited for the answer. “Anything?” Oliver said. “Arthur?” “Er, let me look over here and…” Arthur grunted. “No, I can’t see any.” He came back, looming large over them as he turned and carefully guided his foot back to the ladder. “No sign of civilization anywhere.” “Doesn’t matter,” Oliver said as Arthur climbed down. “We’ll get this tire changed in no time and be on our way.” Arthur jumped to the ground, brushing off his knees as Oliver unzipped the canvas cover from the spare tire. He pulled at it and it rattled against its mount. “Hey, have you found a wrench or something?” Oliver called to the others. “We need it to get the spare down.” “Yeah, gimme a sec,” Reyna replied. She needed two seconds, actually, and then a four-pronged wrench appeared around the corner, before she even did. She held it out for Oliver. “Here. And we found a jack in the same compartment, with some wooden blocks, I think to get it high enough under the RV.” “Great,” Oliver said, handing Reyna back her phone. He braced the wrench in his hand, securing it over the first lug nut. “Can you carry it all over to the front wheel?”

“Already on it,” she said, disappearing again behind the RV. “Need a hand?” Arthur asked as Oliver leaned his weight onto the wrench. The nut started to give and Oliver turned with it. “All good, I got it,” he said, loosening it the whole way and removing the nut. Three more to go. “Actually, could you shine a light?” “Sure,” Arthur said, removing his phone from his front pocket and flicking on the flashlight. Red wasn’t any help, was she? Standing here looking at the moon. “It’s big tonight,” Arthur said, following her eyes to the sky. “That’s what she said!” came Simon’s faint call from the side of the RV. Red snorted, looking away when she noticed a flush in Arthur’s cheeks. “Hey, at least we’re out of the RV for a bit.” She gestured to the wide- open nothing all around them, wrapped in darkness. Dirt, low bushes, patches of high grass, and space. Lots of space. Up and down, this way and that. “Must say, exploding the tire with your mind was a slightly drastic measure.” Arthur clicked his tongue. “Desperate times,” he said. “What do you think it could have been, really?” He shrugged. “Probably a sharp rock or glass, like Oliver said.” And was Red imagining it, or did his voice sometimes soften for her? No, he was just nice to everybody. “We should never have come this way,” Oliver said, summoned by his name. He removed the third nut. “I knew it couldn’t be right.” “It’s no one’s fault.” Arthur sniffed. “Not easy navigating without a working map.” Oliver’s silence said all it needed to; it was everyone’s fault except his. “At least it’s only raw tomatoes,” Red said, “so you can still eat pizza.” “What is she talking about?” Oliver said, almost there with the final nut. “Oh, my allergy.” Arthur smiled, somehow staying with her. That was rare. Red lost most people at least a few times a day, sometimes a few times per conversation. “I know, not sure life would be worth it without pizza. I’d just have to have a perma-rash.” “Hey, grow a beard and no one would know,” she said. It would probably look good on him too.

“Don’t know what the fuck you two are talking about, but I’m done,” Oliver said, straightening up. “Here, Red, run this up to the front.” He placed the wrench in her hand, the metal warm where he’d been holding it. “They can start loosening the nuts on the flat before we jack it up.” “Yes sir, right away sir.” But she did it, she even ran, just like he said, rounding the RV and along the side, stones scattering under her feet. She slowed, holding the wrench out to Reyna, who was crouched in front of the wheel, the metallic cover already removed and a bright red metal jack beside her, its lever up and ready. A pile of wide wooden blocks there too. “Oliver said to—” Red began. “—Yeah, I heard him,” Reyna said, taking the wrench and positioning it over the first nut. “He’s got one of those voices that carries.” Reyna leaned into her arms, pushing down on the nut until it gave, loosening it a few turns before moving on to the next. “How often does your uncle use the RV?” Maddy was asking Simon, picking at the side of her lip. He shrugged, and it almost tipped him. “Don’t know. He’s a bit weird.” And then in explanation: “My white uncle.” “Ah,” Maddy said, spinning on her heels at the sound of footsteps. Oliver and Arthur were walking over, the spare tire cradled in Arthur’s arms. Guess Oliver decided to let him help after all. He dropped the tire down, the rubber jumping up to meet his hand again before he laid it on its side. “How you getting on?” Oliver asked Reyna, leaning over her. “Last one,” she said with a grunt as it gave way, and she spun the wrench a couple of times. “All loosened.” “Great.” Oliver rested his hand on her shoulder. A small touch. “Let’s get the jack in place.” A 12-ton hydraulic bottle jack, it said on the side in large black letters against the red. Oliver bent down, unscrewing the black top of the jack, the device growing taller with each turn. “That’s as high as it gets. Someone pass me those blocks.” Simon pushed them over with one foot.

Oliver piled the blocks up, four high, beneath the outer metal frame of the RV, just behind the wheel. Then he placed the steel-plated bottom of the jack on top of the highest block, jiggling it to check it was secure enough. It would do, apparently, because Oliver turned his attention to the lever. He pulled it up and down, and again, and slowly the top of the device began to emerge from the base, reaching up for the bottom of the RV. Oliver’s arm pumped and pumped again. He settled down on his knees; this would take a minute. Which was good, because Red just remembered— “Hey, Maddy, which side of the bed do you normally sleep on again?” she said. “Because I—” “—The left normally,” Maddy said, watching as the jack disgorged itself, metallic and rigid. “But I’m easy.” “Oh, that’s fine, I’m normally the right,” Red lied. And why did she need to? Maddy had just said she didn’t mind. The top of the jack made contact with the frame of the RV, metal on metal, shining ghostly white as Maddy captured the moment in the flashlight. A creaking sound as Oliver pulled the lever up and down and up. Slowly, the RV began to lift, the flat tire unpuddling from the ground. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have liftoff!” Simon whooped, and the scrubland stole his voice, echoing it back, stripping it of anything human. An otherworldly cry in the night. Red watched the RV, inching higher and higher, relieving the pressure on the torn-open tire. “I have to pee.” She suddenly remembered, voicing it as she did. “Ever the lady,” Simon commented. “Well, you can’t go in the RV now we’ve jacked it up,” Oliver said, slightly breathless, slightly irritated, still pumping away at the lever. “You’ll have to find a bush.” “I might upgrade to a tree, thanks,” Red said, turning toward the back end of the RV and the thick trees they’d come through that way. She couldn’t go somewhere in front of the RV; she didn’t know how far the headlights would

reach. Imagine: Arthur seeing her white ass, floating in the night. Red avoided his eyes. “You can’t go on your own,” Maddy said, grabbing her arm. “It’s pitch- black.” “I have my phone.” “No, but, I mean it might not be safe.” She breathed out. “What if there’s an axe-murderer or something?” “No axe-murderers in South Carolina,” Simon said. “Only in North Carolina. It’s chainsaws you’ve gotta watch out for. And vampires.” “Chainsaws. Vampires. Got it,” Red said. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.” “Vampires love peeling eyes.” “Red?” Maddy said. “I could—” Arthur began. “—I’ll be fine, I’m just going over there. Be right back.” Red kept going toward the back, doubling her pace when Oliver called: “Quickly, we won’t be long here!” She’d pee in her own time, thanks. Except now she was moving at a slow jog, and now more of a run, shoes scuffing against the rough road. The voices of the others faded behind her as she moved, just her and the moon now, and the whispering in the grass. She slowed to pull out her phone—11:21 p.m. and 65% battery, still very good for her—and swiped up to flick on the flashlight. Shadows stretched and shrank as she pooled the light around her, searching for a spot. There were plenty of shrubs and bushes around, but they were short, not much to hide behind. And she still wasn’t that far from the group. Red went farther, farther, holding up the light to carve a path through the darkness. Her eyes alighted on a tree right ahead, alone, broken away from the others. Just like her. Branches spring-full of leaves, quivering as she approached. Had the tree been pushed out by the others or left of its own accord? Anyway, Red circled around the back of it, checking to be sure the trunk covered her. All good. She put her phone down on the grass over there, a white glowing halo around it as the rest of the world fell to darkness. She fumbled for the button

on her jeans, unzipped, and pulled them down with her underwear, strapped around her ankles. She squatted. Sometimes it was difficult to pee when she thought about it too hard. So she thought about something else, thought about how good it would feel when this night was finally over. Thought about whether her dad had managed to find one of the ready-meals she’d left him tonight, or if he’d passed out before he could. It wasn’t enough. Nothing she could do for him was enough. There was a ghost in Red’s house, and it wasn’t her mom. Dad needed help, proper help, and you needed money for that. But Red would take care of that for him soon; that was the plan. She just had to see everything through. Not that she could see anything right now, apart from the outline of her phone. A snap in the trees. Red’s eyes flicked up. It was dark, too dark, just black shapes among more black shapes. But there, right over there, something moved in the trees.

“Hello?” Red called, her voice hollow, her eyes alive, sorting through shadows. Perfect. This was the absolute worst way to die. Mid–squat-pissing behind a tree while Maddy’s axe-murderer charged at her from the front. Dignified till the end. No, the worst way to die must be suffocating, no, no, actually, the worst was on your knees, two shots to the back of the—all right, all right, let’s finish up here. There wasn’t anyone in the trees. Red knew that. She did. The only people were the ones she knew of, behind her on the scrubland. It was just a rat, or a bat, or a raccoon, or maybe a vampire. But it didn’t matter because she was finished. Her legs shook as she straightened, pulling her underwear and jeans back up, fastening the button and zipper in a hurry. She lurched for her phone and held it up, the flashlight her weapon against the night. “Aha!” See, no one in the trees. Told you. But even so, Red decided to run back to the others. Oliver would probably say she’d been too long already. Her ponytail flicked against the back of her

neck and she could hear her heart in her ears; was that from the running or because of the axe-murderer? The light swung forward and back in her hand, flashing along the road. Red stumbled over a rock she hadn’t seen, swearing as her ankle buckled beneath her, trying to bring her down. “Red?” Red held the phone up. Arthur was just ten feet in front of her on the road, walking toward her, his glasses reflecting the light. “You okay?” he called. “We thought we heard you yelling.” “Oh, yeah I was,” she said, panicking and quickly double-checking that she’d done up her fly before Arthur could see. “Just shouting at the axe- murderer.” “Well, I hope he’s having a good evening,” Arthur said as they finally met on the road, turning on his heels to walk back together. “He’s having a great time, skulking through the trees, watching girls pee.” Arthur snorted. He pushed his glasses up his nose, a sudden awkwardness in the movement of his arms. “I was going to cover my eyes and call out before I got close, by the way,” he said, like it was important she knew that. “So I didn’t—” “—see me peeing?” she asked. “Exactly. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.” And what did he mean by that? Where were they? As far as Red knew, they were just awkwardly flirting, neither of them very good at it, and in a few months he’d move on with his life, like everyone else. Probably get a nice college girlfriend he could take home for Thanksgiving. “Red?” Crap, she hadn’t been listening. Had he said anything else? “Yeah?” “You know, in all this time, I’ve never asked you,” he said. “Why did your parents call you Red?” “Oh, well, that’s easy,” she said. “Because of my natural bright red hair color.” She reached back to tug at a strand of her dull blond hair. Arthur smiled, shook his head. “And the real reason?” he asked.

“It’s not Red, it’s Redford,” she said, eyes on the RV as their steps brought it closer. Did Red imagine it, or was the RV steadily lowering on one side? They must have changed the tire. “I was named after my grandpa. Redford Foster.” “That’s quite a name,” he laughed. “Isn’t it?” “Very serious.” “Well, he was,” Red said. “He was a police captain.” A pause. “Like your mom?” The word punched through Red’s chest, a hole left behind, air bleeding around it. She slowed to catch her breath. Yes, like her mom. Grace Kenny, captain of the Philadelphia Police Department, Third District. She didn’t know Arthur knew about all that. Arthur drew to a stop, catching her arm, the RV twenty feet ahead of them. “You know, early on, Maddy pulled me aside and told me to never ask you about your mom,” he said. “Or to even mention moms in general in front of you. And if that’s what you want, then that’s fine, but if you can’t talk to your best friend about her, I was wondering, maybe, whether you wanted someone else to talk to about her. And I could do that sometime. If you want.” No. She didn’t want. She could not speak of her, would not think of her. Arthur hadn’t known Red in the before time, he was new, he wasn’t supposed to know about her mom. Maybe that was what Red liked most about him, that he was untainted by knowing. Except he did know, Maddy had told him. Did that change everything? Was that why he was always nice to her, why he softened his voice? She looked down. That was enough. Red refused to think about Arthur knowing, pitying her, or about Mom. Push it away, out of her head, skip to the next thought. Gone. “What are you doing when we finish senior year?” she asked, a question she never asked because she hated when people asked her, and Arthur bristled at the brush-off, dropping his eyes. “You going to college?”

“Um, no, actually,” he said, recovering. “No, for me it’s straight to joining the family business.” He grimaced. What was the family business—kicking puppies? “Which is?” she asked. “Flipping houses, essentially. But I’ll be in the office.” “That’s not so bad.” “No,” he agreed. “Except it means I’ll spend all day every day inside.” “Ah, the ol’ claustrophobia,” she said. He raised a finger. “Exactly.” Red sniffed. “What, did you get locked inside a closet as a kid, or something?” It was a joke, but Arthur didn’t smile. His eyes hardened on the road, shoulders hitched up to his ears. “Yeah,” he said, flatly. “Just a prank but…my brother sometimes takes things too far.” Well, shit. Now it was clearly Red’s turn to put her foot in it. Arthur’s eyes were still clouded, an awkward twist in his mouth. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about his brother, just as much as Red didn’t want to talk about her mom. She made a silent deal with him; he agreed, even if he didn’t know about it. There were more important things to think about tonight, anyway. Now she just had to change the subject, quick, distract them both. “Need to get yourself an outside job, then,” she said. “Dog-walker?” Arthur shook the expression out of his face, recovering as he turned to her. “Farmer?” he countered. “Nature conservationist?” she said. “Ooh, nice.” Red had another one: “Axe-murderer?” she said. “I hear that’s taken.” Red had almost forgotten what it was they were listing, and why, but before she could say her next one, a sound erupted across the wide clearing. Clapping. Cheering. Another loud whoop from Simon.

“They must be done. Come on,” Arthur said, leading Red up to the RV and along the side. And she might have been wrong, but there was a moment where it looked like he had reached for her hand. They approached the others at the front, the torn-open wheel lying discarded on the road, the RV lowered back down on its new tire. Simon was cradling the jack like it was an old friend. Smiles on everyone’s faces as the flashlight landed on them. “There you are,” Maddy said to Red. “I was getting worried.” “Thanks for all your help there, Red,” Oliver added, his arm tucked through Reyna’s. Red was pretty sure Reyna had done most of the work anyway. “You’re very welcome,” she replied. “Oh and, by the way, I checked,” Oliver continued, speaking to both Red and Arthur now. “This is a dead-end road. Well, it goes through some trees over there, but it’s so tight we’d never get the RV through.” “Okay, sorry,” Arthur said, and what was he apologizing for? They had all gotten lost. And Red was the one who told them to keep going, who brought them down here. “That’s fine,” Red said. “We can turn around.” “Right, let’s get this show on the road.” Oliver clapped again. “Red, can you take the old tire, shove it in the storage compartments? Maddy, grab the blocks and the wrench.” Red picked it up, the tire limp and awkward in her arms. She looked down at the tear, eyes tracing along its frayed edges. Completely destroyed. “This way,” Simon said to her, gesturing with the jack. Arthur, Reyna and Oliver headed off into the high beams, glowing as they made their way back around to the door. “So,” Maddy said, the blocks and wrench gathered precariously in her arms. “Arthur came looking for you. Worried you were lost in the dark.” “And he found me,” Red said. “End of story.” “Oh, what’s this?” Simon asked, opening the closest storage compartment and pushing the jack inside. “Girl gossip?”

“Nothing,” Red said, brushing past him to chuck the tire in too. It made a loud thwack as it landed. “Oh, come on, include me.” He stuck out his bottom lip, tugging on Red’s sleeve. “There’s nothing to be included in.” “Arthur went looking for Red,” Maddy said, the blocks and wrench falling from her arms into the compartment with a loud clatter. She pushed the door shut and locked it in place with the handle. “Ooh, saucy,” Simon said with a click of his tongue and an exaggerated wink. “We were gone for like three minutes,” Red said, walking toward the back side of the RV, the others on her heels. “That’s enough,” Simon said, and Maddy laughed. “Will you two—” “—fuck off?” was Simon’s suggestion. “—shut up?” was Maddy’s. “—make out?” “Ew, Simon.” Maddy’s face crumpled in disgust. “Oh as if you wouldn’t,” Simon said, overtaking Red and turning around. “I’m very good-looking. Check out these cheekbones. Camera loves these cheekbones.” “That’s not what Camera says behind your back,” Red said, pushing him on. “Huh, betrayal!” They rounded the other side of the RV. “Well, anyway,” Simon whispered to Red. “I approve of the pairing.” “You approve of all pairings,” Maddy added. “Not true.” Simon paused again by the door, his foot on the lowest step. “I think it’s weird that Jess T’s new boyfriend is twenty-two, and that they’ve only been together two months and she’s bringing him on spring break. And that he’s called Marco. Red flags everywhere.” With another push, Red finally got him into the RV, stepping up behind him and shuffling in. Everyone was at the front, Reyna settling back into the

driver’s seat. “Really, I can take over,” Oliver was saying. “I only had one beer earlier.” “It’s fine, I got it,” Reyna said. “Can you make the turn?” “Yes I can make the turn.” “Right, okay,” Maddy said, pulling the door closed behind her. “All in. Let’s get out of here.” “Finally.” Oliver looked back at them all, a wide smile cracking his face. “Well done, everyone. Overcoming adversity.” Probably the most adversity Oliver Lavoy had ever encountered. “It makes for a good story, at least,” Maddy said. “Much more exciting than everyone else’s journey tomorrow.” “Yeah.” Simon nodded. “Unless Marco murders them all on the plane.” Reyna turned the keys in the ignition, and the RV roared into life, ready to go. Simon whooped again, Arthur clapped and Maddy cheered. “Oh wait,” she said, fumbling for her phone. “Let’s get a victory selfie. Come on, everyone in.” Maddy outstretched her arm, trying to fit them all in the screen. “Red, in closer. Reyna, turn around.” Red shuffled in closer to Arthur and Simon. She’d already been smiling too long, her cheeks aching. Maddy held up two fingers on her spare hand. “Okay, everyone say: Team RV!” “Team RV!” they called, voices out of time and out of tune. Maddy pressed the button on the V, and Red could see everyone’s teeth in the photo. “Perfect,” Maddy said, lowering her arm to study the picture. “Team RV,” Simon called again, turning it into a chant. “Team RV! Team RV!” He stopped when no one else joined in. There was such a thing as too much celebration. Reyna released the parking brake and the RV rolled steadily forward. She pulled to the left, slowly coming off the road and into the surrounding dirt and grass, headlights scaring away the shadows. But there were always more

behind. Expectant, waiting. Reyna turned the steering wheel as far as it would go, bringing the RV almost parallel to the road. “Okay, back up now. Back up,” Oliver said. “I know.” Reyna put the RV in reverse, and the screen in the center console lit up. A grainy black-and-white image from the rearview parking camera mounted at the back. Red watched the screen as the RV reversed over the road, Reyna pulling the wheel all the way to the right. The rough gravel and dirt gave way to a high patch of grass, beckoning to them in the wind. Or waving them goodbye. But there was something else in the image now, hidden behind the grass. Something crouching, dark and still. “There’s a rock,” Oliver said, leaning closer to the screen. “Careful, there’s a huge rock right behind us.” “I can see it,” Reyna said coolly, backing up a couple more feet before stopping and shifting into drive. She inched forward, straightening up the wheel as the RV staggered back onto the road, facing the way they’d come in. “Let’s go.” She pressed down on the gas. Red thought they’d never leave. She cradled her hands, fingernails biting into the skin of her wrist. “Team RV!” Simon shrieked again, more frantic this time, and Maddy gave a light round of applause for Reyna and her three-point-turning skills. Maybe that was why they didn’t hear the first one, but Red did. A crack that split the night again, and the RV sank behind her, scraping on the gravel. Another crack and hiss, and the front right of the RV buckled, tipping them off balance. “What the f—” Simon began, falling into Red. Another. The back left burst, the RV collapsing with it. Another. The last one. The RV grated against the road, screeching as it rolled to a stop. All four tires. Gone.

Nobody said anything for a second. Then for a moment. Then two, as Red stared at them all, breath picking up in her chest. Oliver was the first to break the silence. “What the fuck, Reyna?” He turned to her. “What have you driven over?” “I didn’t do anything!” she broke, shouting back at him. “It wasn’t me. Must be something wrong with the tires.” “I can’t believe this.” Oliver ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up at the front. “We should have checked for glass or sharp rocks before we moved. I can’t believe this,” he said again, storming toward the door, his shoulder knocking hard into Red’s as he passed. He wrenched open the door, feet crashing against the steps. Reyna switched off the engine and pulled out the keys, scrambling out of her chair to follow Oliver outside. “What’s going on?” Maddy asked, the first note of fear in her voice. “Let’s go see,” Simon said, already halfway out the door, jumping down. Maddy went after him, cradling her phone in her hands, the Team RV selfie still up on her screen. “You okay?” Arthur asked Red, catching her eye.

She rubbed her shoulder. “Fine.” She turned to the steps and skipped down them. She looked left. The wheel at the front had a gaping hole across it, like a downturned mouth in a silent scream. She looked right. She couldn’t see the hole in the back tire, but she could see it was flat, rubber splaying out on the road, even chunks that had come loose. Arthur came down the steps, standing behind her, one thumb hooked in the pocket of his jeans. “Are we ever going to get out of here?” Red asked him. “I don’t know,” he said, walking away around the front of the RV, following Oliver’s voice. “And this one!” Oliver shouted, from the other side. “And, let me see, yes the one at the back too. All punctured. All four tires. How the fuck does that happen!?” Red could hear him clearly, even with the width of the RV standing between them, his voice filling the empty scrubland. “How do you puncture all four tires?” “Oliver, it was not my fault. We were hardly even moving!” Guess Reyna had been right. But whose fault would it have been if Oliver had been driving, Red wondered. Maddy was standing in the headlights, chewing her thumb, glowing around the edges like she was lit from within. She did that when she was nervous. The thumb-chewing, not the glowing. Red didn’t know where Simon was, he must be on the other side somewhere too, quiet for once. Red followed her eyes over to the back tire on this side, searching for the hole, the tear, the point of origin. If a thing was destroyed, she needed to know how. She knew her own point of origin. That day. That last phone call. But maybe the tire didn’t have one, or maybe it was underneath, hiding it like she hid hers. “It’s no one’s fault, youse guys.” Simon’s voice sailed over. “What the fuck are we going to do now?!” Oliver’s next. “Stop shouting and we’ll work it out!” Reyna.

And then something new, a flicker in the corner of Red’s eye, pulling at her attention. She turned to look at it. There was a red dot, right over there on the off-white side of the RV, near the open door. That wasn’t there before. It was too low down to be part of the red-stripe blue-stripe pattern along the side. And it wasn’t just a dot, was it? Too bright for that. It was a little red light, clinging to the side of the RV. No bigger than a fingernail. “Guys,” she called. Someone else had to see this. But wait. The red dot was moving now, shuddering as it lowered down the side of the RV. Red watched it go, blinking as it came to a stop, a few inches above the edge of the frame. “Guys!” Someone else needed to see this. The red dot moved again, toward the wheel. Toward Red. She backed away and the dot disappeared, reemerging on the other side of her, moving, moving, beyond the back wheel. “Guys!” A crack in the darkness, louder now that she was outside with it. Red flinched, hands up to her ears, and the red dot wasn’t there anymore. But there was something else. A splintered hole in the RV. Not the size of a fingernail. The size of a bullet. That was when she knew. “It’s a gun!” Red screamed to the others. “What was that?” Oliver’s voice, fast and unnerved. “It’s a gun,” Red said, turning to face the darkness. There was someone out there, in that wide-open nothing full of shifting shadows. Someone in all that nothing, someone with a gun. A rifle. “Someone’s shooting at us!” Oliver yelled, finally understanding. “Go, Reyna, go around the front. Back in the RV.” “Oliver!” Maddy screamed. “Maddy, go get inside! RUN!”

Red couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she move? The voices of the others blurred into a high-pitched hum in her head. Arthur sprinted past her in the ringing silence, scrabbling for her arm, but she couldn’t move. “Red!” he screamed from the steps. She smelled something, bitter and strong and— “Move, Arthur, get inside!” Oliver barked, pushing Reyna in front of him and up. “Come on, Simon, hurry! Take my hand! Okay, is everyone inside? Red? Where’s Red?” Red faced down the darkness, breath trapped in her throat. Why wasn’t she moving? Just move. And then the voice wasn’t hers anymore, it was her mom’s. There’d been a shooting in the city, downtown. And Mom wanted her to know something. You have to run, Red. If there’s ever an active shooter. Run, don’t hide. It’s harder to hit you when you’re moving, so run! Run now, sweetie. Run! Run, Red. She should run. She needed to run, out into the wide-open nothing. “RED! Get inside the RV now!” But Oliver’s voice was louder than her mom’s, and Red listened to him. She chose. Her shoes pushed off against the dirt and she flew. To the steps and up, taking Oliver’s outstretched hand as he dragged her inside. The door slammed shut behind her.

“Everyone get down!” Red dropped to her knees, her chest tightening around her hummingbird heart. She couldn’t breathe, she felt like she couldn’t breathe. “Maddy, get away from that window,” Oliver said, the panic cutting up his voice. “Come here.” Simon was huddled in front of the refrigerator, Reyna by the kitchen counter. Maddy crawling up beside Oliver under the dining table. And Arthur was crouched here, next to her. “I tried to get you,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.” “What did you see, Red?” Reyna asked her, her dark brown eyes too wide, shoulders hitching as she spoke. “You saw them?” Red shook her head, gulping to force the air through. “No. No, I didn’t see anybody. I saw a dot,” she said. “A red dot, on the side of the RV. Before we heard the shot. Someone shot at the RV.” “A red dot?” Simon stared at her. “Like a laser sight?” “I think so.” Simon screwed up his face. “This can’t be real,” he said, tilting his head. “No, this really can’t be real. Are you sure it was really a gun? Couldn’t someone just have a laser pointer, and made the sound to scare us?”

“What are you talking about?” Arthur asked him. “I’m saying, let’s not panic.” Simon’s words slurred as he forced them out. “Maybe it’s not what it seems. This could just be a prank. The guys from school knew we were stopping over near here. Maybe they followed us. Trying to scare us.” “Why would they do that?” Maddy’s voice shook. “I don’t know. Rob and Taylor are always pulling shit like this. Fucking sadists. And they don’t like me. You know they—” “It’s real, Simon,” Red said, cutting him off. “I saw the bullet hole in the side of the RV. I was right next to it.” His face rearranged, cold fear taking over his eyes. It made it all worse somehow, watching the sudden change in Simon. “Oh my god,” Maddy said, trying not to cry. Red knew that face well. “He shot at you, Red?” Not really, but it had been close enough. A couple of feet. The red dot must have touched her on its way. She didn’t like that. “Calm down.” Oliver squeezed Maddy’s hand. “Someone shot at us, but I’m sure this is all some kind of misunderstanding, okay?” Simon scoffed. “Sure, just a misunderstanding. There’s a sniper out there with a high-powered rifle and a laser sight who’s decided to use us as target practice. But yeah, just a misunderstanding.” He’d changed his tune. “Maybe it was a warning shot,” Oliver said. “Six,” Arthur corrected him. “Six shots. He shot out all the tires.” “Right. But maybe we’re trespassing on his land or something.” “Oliver,” Reyna said. “What? This is the South.” He shuffled forward, out from under the table, leaving Maddy behind. She looked so small under there. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, crouching low as he moved forward, toward the sofa bed, eyes on the window above it. “Oliver, what are you doing?” Reyna hissed. “I’m just going to explain what we’re doing here. I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding.”

Not sure enough to stand up, though. Clearly Oliver had never been in a situation he couldn’t talk his way out of. Red didn’t think this would be one of those. Keeping his head low, behind the sofa, Oliver slowly reached up and unlatched the window, sliding it a few inches open, letting the darkness in. “Hello!” he called, up and out the gap in the window. “I’m sorry if we’re on your land, we got lost!” Red should tell him it was pointless. The shooter was using a laser sight to help him aim, which meant he was probably more than shouting distance away, out there in the wide-open nothing. Oliver wouldn’t listen, though, even if she did. “We were just trying to leave!” Oliver shouted, louder now. “We won’t say anything if you let us leave! I’m sure you have a license!” Red looked back at Arthur. He was fidgeting, nervously tapping the top of his leg. And so was she, it turned out, picking at the seams of her front pocket. She checked in with Maddy on the other side, half under the table, strange downward shadows on her face. Then Simon gasped. He pointed, and Red whipped her head around, following the line of his finger. To the front of the RV, and the back of the driver’s seat. Right there, against the very top of the headrest, was the red dot. “It’s inside,” Simon whispered, terror reshaping his face again. “What?” Reyna couldn’t see. Red looked away from the dot, tracing it back to its point of origin. “It’s coming through that window. Oliver, watch ou—” She didn’t finish and the window exploded above him. Shattering into a million million pieces that rained down as he covered his head with his arms. Shards that shimmered as they fell, scattering around Red and Arthur too. Maddy screamed. “Oliver!” Reyna shouted. “Are you okay?” He raised his head carefully, surveying his arms, touching his face as though afraid it might not still be there. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice emptied out with the shock. “Fine.” He shook his shoulders, glass glittering as it clung to his shirt. He swiped at his

arms, and the last few shards dusting his hair. Lucky he didn’t seem to be cut anywhere. Lucky like a Lavoy. “Yeah, just a warning shot,” Simon said, a tremble in his hand as he flicked a piece of glass away. Had Red ever seen him scared before? Ever? Simon Yoo was supposed to be fearless. “Well, you’re the one who thought it was a fucking prank,” Oliver growled suddenly, coming through the shock. “Fuck this. There’s obviously some maniac out there. We need to get out of here, right now. First we need to cover the windows. Turn down the lights so he can’t see us inside. Simon, can you?” Simon was closest to the light switches. He glared at Oliver. “Just reach up and dim them. You aren’t by a window. You’ll be okay.” Simon’s legs shook as he raised himself up from the floor, using the handle on the refrigerator for balance. He reached out to the panel of switches beside the fridge, quickly turning the knobs as far as they would go without clicking off. The lights in the living area of the RV lowered to their darkest setting, a weak, murky yellow. “Good. Okay.” Oliver nodded to the rest of them, digging a small shard of glass out of his collar. “Right, now we need to close all the blinds and curtains.” Red nodded. They had to keep out that deadly red dot. Oliver saw her. “Okay, Red, you do the blind on the broken window.” Why? He was right next to it. “Arthur, you take the curtain on the front right window.” “I see,” Arthur said to Red. “We get the side with the sniper.” Oliver ignored him. “Maddy and I will do the windows by the dining table.” Yep, on the safe side, Arthur had called it. “Reyna, you take the curtain front left, by the driver’s seat, once Arthur has closed his. We’ll leave the windshield so we can drive out of here. And Simon, you get the one by the bunks.” So Simon had made it to the non-sniper side too, then.

“Oh and close the bedroom door while you’re there; there’s a big window at the back there too.” “What about the window on the door?” Simon said, gesturing to it with his head. “Oh yeah. Red, can you grab that one too?” Sounds fair. “Okay, everyone.” Oliver clapped his hands and they all flinched at the sound, too close to the crack of the rifle. “Let’s do it. Go, go, go!” Red pushed up into a low crouch, her shoes crunching against the sparkling glass as she lunged forward, passing Oliver. She took a breath and stood up, slowly, her leg catching on the small fire extinguisher mounted to the wall here. She turned and tucked herself sideways in the thin gap between the blown-apart window and the one in the door. Trying not to think about the red dot, but of course now she had. With her left hand, she reached out for the chain hanging by the window, quivering in the outside breeze that wasn’t outside anymore. She pulled, and the cream-colored shades started to descend. Too slowly. “Come on,” she willed it, glancing aside to see Arthur ripping the black curtain closed ahead of her in the cockpit, Reyna now venturing out to hers. Red pulled, too hard, the shade jamming. “Fuck you,” she said, reversing the chain a few turns to set it right and then drawing it down the rest of the way. The wind laughed at her, playing with the bottom of the shade, pushing it out a few inches and sucking it back in. Red turned her head the other way, catching Simon as he closed the door to the bedroom at the back. She reached up with her right hand, over and out to the catch at the top of the window in the door. She held her breath and dragged it down in one quick movement, the dark shade locking in place at the bottom. Only now did Oliver rise up, beckoning Maddy to do the same. They leaned over the booths at the dining table, unhooking the tiebacks and pulling both sides of the curtains across. Red still couldn’t work out what the patterns in those curtains reminded her of. It was on the tip of her brain, really. So annoying. It wasn’t that guy from SpongeBob, was it? The grumpy one with

the clarinet. Oh, damn it, what was his name again? And what was that smell that was following her, bittersweet and cloying? Was it coming from her? Red looked down and raised her shoe. The bottom of her sole was dirty and wet with something. She sniffed. Was that gas? “Okay, good work everyone,” Oliver said, out of breath, like he’d had the difficult job there. A thanks would be nice. “Right, let’s get out of here. Reyna, where are the keys?” He held out his palm toward her. “How?” Maddy asked him. “All the tires are blown out.” “The RV will still move,” Oliver said. “Slowly, and it will likely cause irreparable damage to the wheels, but I think we have bigger problems right now.” Why would there be gas on Red’s shoes? “Reyna, keys!” He snapped his fingers impatiently. She patted the pockets on her hoodie, at the back of her jeans, a look of horror dawning in her eyes. “I don’t have them. I don’t know where they are.” Red had seen her take them, after the four tires were shot out. “What do you mean?” Oliver rounded on her. “You had them. You were driving!” “I know, I know.” She ran her hands nervously through her black hair. “Maybe I dropped them when I was running, I don’t know.” “Outside?!” Oliver was shouting again. “Maybe, I don’t know, I’m sorry!” “Well, who’s going to go outside and get them, Reyna?!” “Nobody’s going outside,” Simon interjected. “I’ve got them,” Arthur said. Nobody listened except Red. “I’ve got them!” he shouted over the others, pointing to the kitchen, behind the counter where Reyna had hidden. Arthur stepped forward and picked the keys up, rattling them to make the point. “Here,” he said, chucking them over to Oliver, who barely caught them, fumbling them against his chest. “Okay, fine,” he said, shooting a quick “Sorry” over in Reyna’s direction. And Red couldn’t help but wonder: Who would Oliver have made go outside to get them?

“I’ll drive,” he said, passing his sister and his girlfriend on the way up to the driver’s seat. And Red hadn’t noticed before, but there was now a bullet- sized hole in the headrest, white stuffing escaping through the ripped plastic. Imagine if that hole was inside one of them. No, don’t, because then she’ll think of two bullets to the back of the head…right, see? And anyway, she needed to concentrate on thinking about why her shoes smelled like gas, and everything else. Oliver settled down into the seat, cricking the bones in his neck. He cleared his throat. “I’ll get us out of here,” he said, like a promise or a threat. He pushed the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine coughed, empty sputters one after the other. That sound you never wanted to hear. “What?” Oliver said, staring down at the key in disbelief. He tried again. The engine gasped and spluttered, taking its dying breath. “What?!” Oliver roared. He flicked his head to check the fuel gauge. “We’re out of gas. That doesn’t make sense. We filled up again at nine o’clock. It should be three-quarters full, at least. How is it empty?” He punched the steering wheel. Again. And again. An inhuman sound in his throat. “That’s what he was aiming for,” Red said, glancing down at her shoes, understanding now. “Not me. He was aiming for the gas tank.” “What?” Oliver turned back, his face patchy and red. “He shot out the gas tank,” she said. “Why?” Maddy asked. Red had an answer. The others probably did too, but Simon was the one who gave voice to it. “So we can’t leave.” The RV was going nowhere. And here they were, the six of them, trapped inside it, the wide-open nothing and the red dot waiting for them out there.

12:00 a.m.

Trapped. Shut in. Only thirty-one feet to share between them, that extra foot important enough not to round down. “Why would he want to trap us here?” Maddy asked, her pupils too wide, dark pools eating away the color of her eyes. “What does he want with us?” “I don’t know,” Oliver answered, pushing up from the driver’s seat, one more punch to the wheel for luck. “He probably lives around here, and we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I told you we should never have come down this road.” “Like you predicted this was going to happen?” Simon said, a surprising note of anger in his voice, an unsteadiness to his tread. Red should get him some water. He needed to sober up, fast. His instincts were dulled, his reactions, and he would need those tonight. “I said it was the wrong way and none of you listened!” In the kitchen, Red opened the cupboard mounted high beside the microwave. She removed a glass and guided it to the shiny-clean sink, flicking on the faucet and filling it near full.

“We had no service. We were lost,” Arthur said, a forced calm in his voice that no one else had right now. “Here.” Red handed the glass of water to Simon, telling him with her eyes to drink it. At least she didn’t have to hold the glass for him, like with her dad sometimes. “It was Red,” Oliver said, not looking at her. “She insisted we come down this road. And you two.” He pointed at Arthur and Simon. “You three were navigating. This is your fault.” Simon stepped forward, splashing some of the water on his shirt. The other patch had finally just dried. “By the same logic, I could say it was Reyna’s fault we got stuck here. Because she was driving and refused to turn around.” “I couldn’t turn around!” Reyna said. “Everyone, please!” Maddy slapped her hand on the dining table three times. “This is not helping. It’s no one’s fault we’re here. But we are, okay? And we have to work together to figure out what to do.” “There’s nothing we can do,” Simon said, near hysterical now. “Unless someone also happened to pack a rifle for spring break and we can snipe him back.” Red mimed for him to drink up. “Is there still no service?” Maddy said, answering her own question as she looked down at the lock screen on her phone. “Shit. Nothing.” “Can’t you call emergency services without a signal?” Simon said, still not drinking. “I swear I’ve seen it in a movie before.” It didn’t work like that, Red knew. She’d asked that question before herself, years ago on a family vacation in Yellowstone. “Yeah, ’cause sometimes it comes up saying No service—emergency calls only,” Reyna added. “That’s only if your phone can piggyback onto another network,” Red said, her mom’s answer now becoming hers. “There’s clearly no service from any network here.” “Try it,” Oliver said, ignoring her. “Try, Maddy.”

Maddy unlocked her phone, her tongue tucked between her teeth as she concentrated. She brought up the keypad and carefully typed in 9-1-1. She waited for a nod from Oliver, then she pressed the green button and raised the phone to her ear. They waited. The seconds stretching into eternity as Maddy closed her eyes to concentrate harder. It was one of those things she did that made her Maddy. Like when they were ten and she thought you had to ring the doorbell every time you left or came home, even if no one else was in and you had the key. That shrill, insistent bell in one held note, standing outside the Lavoys’ house. Funny how Red could remember some things like that, yet she couldn’t remember to call AT&T. She wondered what were the things that Maddy thought made Red Red? Maddy exhaled, her chest sinking. “Nothing,” she said quietly, letting the phone fall to her side. Oliver swiped at her arm, grabbing the phone. “No network connection,” he read from the alert on the screen. “Fuck.” He dropped the phone back into Maddy’s hands, worthless to him. Well, Red did say. “Someone might have called the cops, though,” Maddy said, not ready to give up yet. “I know it’s late.” She glanced at her phone. “It’s four minutes past midnight, and most people are probably in bed. But someone must have heard the gunshots and called the police, right? There were farms and houses not too far back.” “The shots weren’t loud,” Red said. “Even we couldn’t tell what it was at first. Just the sound of the tires bursting.” “It’s a rifle?” Maddy doubled down. But Red had heard these guns before, a memory she tried to push away. The three-volley rifle salute at the funeral. A line of officers in uniform, aiming over the flag-draped casket. The road beyond the cemetery blocked with what felt like every squad car in the city, top lights spinning, painting the world red and blue. Ready to aim. Fire. Three times. A crack like thunder, riding through the sky, shaking the bones inside you. And those had even been blanks. So loud. Unmistakable. Piercing through the bagpipes as they

played “Amazing Grace,” which was funny in a way because her name had been Grace. The Lavoys should know; they were all there too. Catherine standing with one hand on Red’s shoulder, squeezing when the rifles went off. Red’s dad didn’t even cry, standing on her other side. No, he saved all his falling apart for after. “Red?” Arthur said. Oh no, they’d been talking without her. “I think Red’s right,” Simon said, the glass in his hands only half full now. “It wasn’t even loud enough for us to know it was a gunshot. I think he must be using a suppressor.” “A what?” asked Reyna. “A silencer,” Simon explained. “And yes, all of my worldly knowledge does come from movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.” “So you think nobody heard?” Maddy deflated even more, if that was possible. “Nobody called the cops?” Simon shrugged. “I think we can’t count on it.” “No, we can’t count on it,” Oliver repeated, picking up the sentiment, chewing on some silent thought. “We make our own luck,” he said to Maddy alone, a Lavoy expression that often got wheeled out. Which must mean that Red was terrible at making hers. Maddy looked back at her brother, a new glint in her eye. “Make our own luck,” she said. “Well, if no one heard the gunshots, then maybe they’ll hear this.” Before anyone could say anything, Maddy charged to the front of the RV, leaned across the driver’s seat and pressed her thumb into the wheel. The horn screamed, rupturing the quiet of just-past-midnight. One long note, then four short bursts. “Maddy?” Red said. She didn’t like her standing so close to that bullet hole in the driver’s seat. On the other side, the shade over the smashed window swayed in the wind, like a silent threat from the outside world. No, not Maddy. Maddy leaned the heel of her hand into the horn, as though she could make it louder that way.

“Maddy,” Arthur said, a tension in his jaw as he eyed the broken window. “Maybe we shouldn’t—” Three loud beeps cut him off. “Someone will hear!” Maddy shouted, determined. “Someone will—” Red felt it more than she heard it. A rush of air to her right. The shade shuddering, dancing against its fixings, a new hole ripped through it. Maddy screamed. “No, Maddy!” Red screamed harder.

The small window on the driver’s side must have blown out, a clinking of broken glass as it cascaded out onto the road, out of sight. There was a hole in the black curtain hanging across it, at the top, only a foot above Maddy’s head. But she still had a head, eyes blinking at them all. It had missed her. “Are you hit?” Oliver bounded forward, dragging his sister back from the cockpit. “No, I…no,” Maddy said, shaking her still-there head. Red took her hand, held on to it. If Maddy had been standing up straight, or a few inches back…well, it didn’t bear thinking about. And Red was good at not thinking about things like that. “He really didn’t like you doing that,” Simon said, another wet patch on his shirt, the glass empty as he placed it back on the counter. “No, he did not,” Red agreed. “Right, okay, everyone,” Oliver said, pushing Maddy down to sit on the booth. “New rule. No one does anything without checking with me first. Not one thing unless it has been discussed with the whole group, okay?” He looked around at each of them for confirmation. Red nodded.

“I won’t even take a piss without preapproval,” Simon said, holding up his hands. Red should refill that glass for him. She wasn’t sure there was a worse time to be drunk than right now. “Right.” Oliver pushed himself up, half sitting on the table as the others gathered around him. A determined set to his jaw, like he knew he was the only possible leader here. Twenty-one years old, prelaw, a sister and a girlfriend to protect, a mom who would soon be DA. “We’ve already lost two windows, which is not good news. So, the first thing I want us to do is to board up those broken windows, for extra protection.” “With what?” Reyna asked, shrugging her empty arms. “We must have something. Everyone, check around the RV and in your bags and suitcases. Look for any resources we can use and bring them back to this table.” “Resources?” Arthur asked. “Things to help us survive. Something to cover the windows. Anything that could be used as first aid. Or as a weapon.” “A weapon?” Simon snorted. “Yeah, that sniper won’t know what’s hit him when I slowly charge at him with my Gillette razor.” Oliver ignored him. “Now. Five minutes, guys.” No one protested, shuffling away from the table in various directions, knees bent, keeping their heads low. Simon and Arthur headed toward their bunk beds—Simon on the bottom, Arthur on top—and the bags they’d dumped there this morning. Oliver and Reyna pushed past them, drawing to a stop outside the closed bedroom door. The queen-sized bed beyond it, where they were supposed to be sleeping tonight. Red wasn’t sure anyone would be sleeping tonight. “The window at the back is still exposed,” Oliver said to Reyna. “You crawl into the room, take cover against the back wall and lower the shade. I’ll hit the lights and close the door so the sniper can’t see anything.” He wasn’t speaking to her in that soft voice anymore. But that was the first rule of leadership, wasn’t it: delegation. Still, Red couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked her or Arthur or Simon to cover the window for them instead, or gone

ahead and been the hero himself. Reyna stared back at Oliver, like she couldn’t believe it either. “Fine.” She swallowed. “Okay, three, two, one.” Oliver pulled open the door, and Reyna slipped inside on her hands and knees. She disappeared as Oliver reached in to switch off the light, closing the door after her. He caught Red’s eye, watching, and gave her a grim nod. A few seconds later, Reyna’s voice called through, “Okay, done!” and Oliver followed it back into the bedroom, flicking on the light, heading toward the closet and out of Red’s view. “Red, come on,” Maddy said, pulling at her shirt and jolting her back. Maddy stopped short of the sofa bed, her eyes up on the large overhead cupboards, where Red and Maddy had stored their bags. Getting them would mean standing right in front of the broken window. The shade was still breathing in and out, wind whistling through the ripped bullet hole, a faint trace of gasoline finding its way inside. Maddy’s hand shook as she studied the hole, looking back to where she had been standing to re-create the path of the bullet. Or that was what Red imagined she was doing; she knew Maddy and Maddy knew her. “I’ll get the bags,” Red said, pushing Maddy aside, back into the safety by the table. She walked forward, crunching through the fallen glass, then raised one foot and stood up on the sofa bed. The fake leather squeaked against her shoes as she pushed up, her other leg hovering behind her. She opened the first cupboard, grabbing the dark purple side handle of Maddy’s new bag and swinging it out, muscles in her arms straining. “How much did you pack?” she said, dropping the heavy bag onto the sofa, scattering more glass. Maddy darted forward to retrieve her suitcase, holding it in both arms, almost like a shield. Red opened the other cupboard and reached for her bag, only noticing now that the seams were breaking at the side, loose black threads tickling her skin as she grabbed it. Dad wouldn’t like that; this was her mom’s old suitcase, Grace Kenny—Philadelphia still scribbled in the luggage tag at the

top. One of the last pieces of her handwriting they had left. Not the time to think of that, though. Not ever the time. Red stepped down with the bag in her hands, turning back to Maddy, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the door and the kitchen counter, unzipping her stiff, new bag. The zipper snarled as she pulled it around the corner. Red brushed some glass aside with her foot and settled down beside Maddy, her back arching as she leaned against the door, buttressing the side of her suitcase against Maddy’s. She unzipped it, pushing the top flap open so it slapped the floor of the RV. “No sudden noises,” Simon called over his shoulder, annoyed. “Sorry,” Red called back over hers. She stopped; Maddy was staring at her. “This is crazy,” Maddy said quietly, shaking her head, pausing to bite down on her lower lip. “I can’t believe this is happening.” Red still couldn’t believe it either. For different reasons, probably, because she always half expected the worst to happen. Maddy was half full and Red was half empty, which reminded her: she needed to get Simon some more water. “Are we gonna be okay?” Maddy asked, and suddenly her eyes were filled with tears, one escaping, making a break down her cheek. Red swiped it away as it reached Maddy’s chin. “Yeah, we’ll be okay, I promise,” Red said, a promise she hoped she could keep. She tried to tell Maddy that with her eyes and nothing else, a slow blink. “What if one of us gets shot?” Maddy said, her bottom lip threatening to go, ready to take her whole face down with it. “No one’s getting shot.” Red held her eyes. “We are getting out of this alive,” she said, “you and me.” Always you and me with them, since before they could walk and talk and think. And even before that, when their moms were best friends, their own you and me from the first day they met at college. Lavoys and Kennys, except their moms had had different names back then. Maddy wasn’t just her best friend, Maddy was family. “Come on, let’s look

for resources,” she said in her Oliver voice that usually made Maddy laugh. It didn’t work tonight, so Red tried something else: “Maybe those six bulletproof vests I packed will come in handy.” Maddy snorted, wiping her nose. “Maybe so will the functioning cell tower I brought in mine.” There we go, a near smile at least. Maddy pushed open the top of her case and it was so packed that maybe she really did have a whole cell tower in there. Tall piles of clothes, neatly folded and separated into sections: underwear there, shorts that side, multiple pairs of jeans, three separate wash bags, shoes in pairs down the middle like grid lines. They were only supposed to be gone seven days, yet Maddy must have packed enough clothes for weeks. Red glanced at her own case. No piles, no folding, no order. It was all chucked in together. Balled-up underwear buried in each corner, a watered- down mascara and a foundation that didn’t match her skin tone somewhere loose in there, never to be seen again. A puddle of marbly-pink goop—which must mean her shampoo bottle had leaked—spreading over a lone sock. Her toothbrush stood up dead center, her nice shirt caught in its bristles. She’d been hoping she could borrow Maddy’s toothpaste, not that it mattered now. “Red,” Maddy said, disapprovingly, looking down at the mess of Red’s suitcase. She burrowed her hand through, overturning clothes to see underneath. “Did you forget to even pack a bikini?” she asked, searching through the rest of it. Red had one bikini, blue and white, and Maddy was right: it wasn’t here. “Guess I must have missed it,” Red said, trying to remember forgetting it. Maddy turned to her. “And what the hell were you going to do on a beach vacation without a swimsuit?” Red shrugged. “Borrow one of mine, I’m guessing?” She was annoyed, but at least if she was annoyed then she wasn’t scared right now. That was better. “Don’t think it really matters anymore,” Red said. “We’re not making it to the beach.”

Maddy didn’t say anything. “I don’t have anything useful,” Red said, zipping the suitcase shut and kicking it away. “Let me see,” Maddy murmured, turning back to her own bag. She picked up one of the wash bags, shiny plastic zebra print, and opened it. “Yes, I thought so,” she said, dipping her hand inside and coming back with a pair of hair scissors. “You never cut your own hair—?” Red said. “No, but I always take these when I go away. Never know when you might need a pair of scissors. I had to turn leggings into shorts once when I misjudged the weather.” “Are those for first aid or a weapon?” Red eyed the scissors. “Both, I guess,” Maddy said, pulling out a small roll of Scotch tape from the same wash bag. She placed both items beside her, giving them a quick pat. “Oh yeah.” She reached out for the front of the suitcase and the zippered compartment there. “I brought a real flashlight, just in case we were out late on the beach and our phones ran out of battery or something.” She pulled out a flashlight about the size of her hand, black with a fluorescent yellow stripe. “I put a beach ball in there too. Guess that was pointless. What the hell is going on, Red?” “I know!” Arthur said suddenly, loud enough for the others to hear. “We can use the mattress from my bunk to block up the big window behind the sofa.” “That’s a good idea,” Red said, at the exact same time that Oliver said it, as he reemerged from the bedroom with Reyna on his heels. He had something in both hands, cradling the items as he struggled past Simon in the narrow corridor. He arrived beside the table and stopped to look around at them all, eyes alive and searching. “Okay, time’s up,” he said. “What did everybody find to help us survive the night?”

Oliver went first, of course, placing down a small first aid kit—Red guessed Reyna had packed that—and a headlamp, with a couple of spare batteries. Maddy stepped up and added her scissors and Scotch tape to the collection. Simon returned to the kitchen empty-handed, like Red. But he stopped there, pulling open one of the drawers. “I knew there’d be one here somewhere,” he said, cutlery rattling and a scraping sound of metal on metal as he pulled his hand out, clutched around the black handle of a kitchen knife. It was sharp, with a serrated edge that caught the dim overhead lights. “Chekhov’s knife,” Simon said with a dark smile as he added it to the items on the dining table. “Huh?” said Oliver. “Never mind, it’s a theater thing.” A clatter and a grunt behind, as Arthur wrestled with the mattress from his bunk, pulling it down and tucking it under one arm, his glasses knocked askew on his face. Red gave him a thumbs-up, and he returned it with his spare hand. “Did someone open my tequila?” Oliver said, digging through his backpack on the counter.

“Another mystery to solve,” Simon said, by the refrigerator. “Right after we work out why there’s a sniper out there shooting at us. That reminds me.” He opened the fridge and pulled out a glass bottle of vodka, unopened, adding it to the pile on the dining table. Red questioned him with her eyes. “For disinfecting wounds,” he explained. “Or liquid courage.” “Aha,” Oliver said, his hand reemerging from the bottom of his backpack clutched around a shiny silver Zippo lighter. Engraved too, bet that was expensive. Onto the pile it went. “There’s a small toolbox in here,” Reyna said, voice muffled, her head buried in the closet right by the front door. “I guess we don’t need a tape measure, though.” “Not unless we want to measure the length of the RV for fun while we’re trapped in here,” Simon said. “It’s thirty-one feet,” said Red, “not just thirty.” Simon should know, he was the one who told her that, and now she couldn’t get the damn number out of her head. Reyna backed up out of the closet, and in her hands were a small hammer, a screwdriver, and a roll of gray duct tape. “There’s a mop and a dustpan and brush in there too,” she said, adding those new items to the collection. “Great.” Oliver’s eyes spooled around, skipping over Arthur, whose hands were full, and flicking between Simon and Red. “Simon,” he said. Unlucky. Probably because he was closest. And because everybody knew he drank the tequila. “Can you grab the dustpan and brush and sweep up the glass?” “Really?” Simon hardened his gaze. “We don’t want anyone cutting themselves,” Oliver said, leading him in the direction of the open closet, the movement disguised as a pat on the back. “It will take you two minutes, go on.” Simon muttered something under his breath, but Red only caught the hardest of syllables. She didn’t imagine it was anything worth repeating. He picked up the dustpan and brush, struggling for a moment to separate the two, then bent low, sweeping piles of window glass into the pan, glittering as it moved.

“Excuse your feet,” he said, maneuvering around Maddy’s shoes and her still-open suitcase. “Okay, this is good,” Oliver said, surveying the resources they had managed to gather. Red looked too: a pair of scissors, a lighter, a headlamp, a flashlight, spare batteries, a hammer, a screwdriver, duct tape, Scotch tape, vodka and a kitchen knife. Each item disappearing from her head as soon as she moved onto the next, like one of those memory games she always lost. “Should I get this in place?” Arthur asked, hoisting the mattress up higher in his grip. “Yeah, go ahead,” Oliver said. “Out of the way, everyone.” Arthur walked through slowly, guiding the mattress past corners and people. The handle on the bathroom door tried to grab his shirt and pull him back. Reyna unhooked it for him and he nodded his thanks. He turned awkwardly to avoid Simon on the floor, but the back of the mattress bumped him on the head, and Simon muttered something else unheard. “It should just slot in here, behind the back cushions,” Oliver said, taking the back end of the mattress and helping Arthur to guide it up and forward, in front of the broken window. They pushed it through, sliding it into the gap between the back of the sofa and the wall, wedged in under the overhead cupboards. “Hold on, it’s blocking the door,” Oliver said, shoving the mattress in farther, tucking the far end in beside the front passenger seat. “There we go,” he said, grabbing it and giving it a shake to check. “That’s wedged in there good.” It might be wedged in there good, but would a mattress stop a bullet from a precision rifle? Red wasn’t sure it would, but at least they could now pretend they were safe in here, without the outside breathing in through that window. Pretending was half the game, and she should know. Her life depended on it. “Right, that’s one window done.” Oliver stood back. “We still need to cover the one by the driver’s seat. Red?” He turned to her. “Did you find anything we can use?” No, she was the only one who had failed on that front, staring down at her useless suitcase, its edges fraying as the threads unpicked themselves, like

they wanted to break. And, hey, that gave her an idea, if they wanted it so bad. “Yes,” she said, surprising herself most of all. “My suitcase. We can flatten it out and use it to board up that window. It’s breaking anyway.” “Good idea,” Reyna said, ahead of Oliver. “And we can use the duct tape to keep it there.” Oliver hadn’t said it was a good idea, Red was waiting, but he grabbed the knife from the table and held it out to her, handle first. “You do the honors,” he said as she took it. “But also, let’s put your stuff somewhere. We don’t want all your crap in the way.” “We can put it in my case,” Maddy sighed. “I’m sure it will fit, she doesn’t have much.” Maddy grabbed Red’s suitcase and flipped it over, the upturned contents falling on top of her neatly packed possessions. She sighed again to see it, removing the leaking shampoo bottle and then pressing it all down so the lid would zip shut. Red hoped Arthur hadn’t looked at her balled-up underwear. She knew one pair she’d packed had unicorns on it; Santa had gotten them for her that final Christmas. Red hadn’t believed in him since she was eight, of course, but it was tradition that Santa got the Kennys ugly socks and underwear for Christmas. Only, Santa must have died when her mom did. “Oli, can you help me get my bag back up there and out of the way?” Maddy asked. Only his little sister was allowed to call him Oli. Believe her, Red had learned the hard way. “Yep, sure.” He grunted as he lifted the double-packed case, Arthur opening the overhead cupboard for him as he drew close, helping him squeeze the stuffed bag inside. Simon was just finishing up, brushing the last few shards and crumbs of broken glass from the sofa, backing away as he finished. The floor was all clear now. He carried the full pan into the kitchen—Red sucked in a breath as he stumbled, tripping over nothing—but his hand was somehow steady. He

opened the cupboard with the trash can and dumped the glass out, tapping the pan against the edge to get the last of the glittering dust. “Go on, Red.” Oliver had returned, standing over her as she crouched by the empty shell of her suitcase. “Let’s get this done.” Red tightened her grip on the knife, holding it out to the corner nearest her. She tried not to look at the luggage tag hanging from the top, but her eyes betrayed her. Come on, it didn’t matter. Mom wasn’t in that luggage tag, Mom was dead. And they needed something to block the window; Red had to be useful, like everyone else was. She pressed the knife against the corner, sawing down with the serrated edge, cutting through the zipper, and the fabric, and the cardboard underneath. The knife chewed up the material with its teeth, splitting the corner apart. Red shifted to get the next one, the handle of the knife growing warm in her hands. Why did she find the word resources funny anyway? What she really should be thinking about instead was that red dot out there, and the person in charge of it. Watching. Waiting? “Good job on the glass, Simon,” Oliver said, a delayed well done, but a well done all the same. A good leader motivates his team. Delegation. Motivation. Would Oliver say good job to her when she finished butchering her mom’s old suitcase? “There,” she said, sitting back, the final corner cut through, the sides of the suitcase lying prone against the floor. “All right, get it in place, then.” That was all the well done she got. Oliver Lavoy wasn’t as liberal with his approval as Maddy or Catherine. They gave Red well dones all the time, if she’d earned them. “I’ll help,” Arthur said, stepping forward to grab the duct tape and scissors from the table. Three resources used already, oh come on, would she stop it with the resources. Just think of another word, then. Stuff. Thingamabobs. Jawn. Red stood, picking up the remains of her suitcase, carrying it to the front of the RV, a few steps behind Arthur. He drew the edge of the curtain out a couple of inches and leaned closer to take a quick look.

“Just one of the panes shattered,” he said. “This side.” He gestured to the one at the front. “Do you want to hold it up and I’ll tape it?” “That’s what she said!” “Simon, come on, really,” Maddy snapped. “Now is not the time or place. If that’s the last thing I hear before I die, then I swear to God…” She left the threat empty and dangling. There was a flush in Arthur’s face again, a warm pink. He swiped at his cheeks like he could wipe the blush away, hide it from her. Well, that was fine if he was embarrassed; he’d probably seen her old unicorn underwear anyway. Arthur busied himself pulling a length of duct tape free and cutting it loose with Maddy’s scissors, and Red positioned the unfolded suitcase in front of the curtain, over the gaping hole into the wide-open nothing out there. In the dark, where the red dot lived. Arthur rested one knee on the driver’s seat and pressed the tape along the top edge of the suitcase, cutting off more to secure it. “Are you okay?” he asked her, moving on to the next side, his hand accidentally brushing past hers. A tiny firework in her head. What a stupid little fucking firework. Maddy should tell it that now was not the time or place. “Everything will be okay,” Red said, staring forward, losing her eyes to the minute details of the suitcase fabric, crossing over and under, so she didn’t think about how close Arthur’s face was to hers right now, both leaning across the driver’s seat. “That’s not what I asked.” “I don’t know,” she answered, honestly for once. “Are you supposed to be okay when someone’s trying to kill you?” “I don’t think you are.” And, somehow, Arthur’s voice did away with the hard syllables, smoothing them over, gliding one to the next. Someone else might call it mumbling, but Red wasn’t someone else. Arthur pressed a long piece of tape down across the width of the suitcase and onto the part of the window that had survived, withdrawing his hand quickly from the curtain and back into the safety of the RV.

A sound interrupted them. The flushing of a toilet. Red checked over her shoulder to see Oliver closing the bathroom door behind him. “Right, everyone, over here,” he called, another loud clap. Red flinched. Someone should tell him to stop doing that. “Go on,” Arthur said to her. Had he noticed the flinch? As long as he hadn’t noticed the firework. “I can finish up here.” He splayed his hand against the suitcase, taking its remaining weight from her, ready with the last few pieces of tape. “Thanks.” She stepped back, grabbing the scissors and the roll of duct tape, taking them with her back to the dining table. Someone else had already replaced the knife. Maddy was leaning against the refrigerator, and Red went to lean against her. “Looks like Arthur is just finishing up with that window,” Oliver said, right as Arthur was done, wiping his hands off down the front of his jeans and walking over. The six of them, gathered in and around that tiny kitchen. “Okay, now that we’ve secured the RV,” Oliver continued, though who could say how secure it really was, against that rifle. They couldn’t see outside anymore, the RV was their own little world, but a bullet could come in anywhere, through the wall and anyone in the way, out the other side before they even had a chance to scream. That didn’t feel very safe, not as Red understood the word. “Next, we need to work out what our plan is.” “Plan?” Maddy asked. “Yeah, so that we all get out of here. Alive,” he added, and with that one word, the air grew thick, a strange buzzing in Red’s ears as she did that thing where she tried to imagine what it would be like to be un-alive. Reyna cleared her throat, and Red was grateful for the distraction. “Well, listen.” She glanced down at the time on her phone. “It’s been like twenty-five minutes now since he last shot at the RV. Maybe he’s…I don’t know, maybe he’s gone?” Her voice went up at the end, turning it into a question. “What, you think he got bored and went home to jack off?” Simon said. “Maybe.”

“Unless he’s waiting,” Maddy said. “Waiting for what?” Reyna asked her. “For us to think he’s gone, and to walk out the door right into his crosshairs,” she said, darkly. “It is a fair point,” Oliver said, and Red wasn’t sure who he was siding with, until he drew closer to Reyna. “How do we know if he’s even still out there?” He wasn’t going to make one of them go outside and check, was he? And what were the chances it would be either Red, Arthur or Simon he gave those instructions to? The expendables. “I’m not volunteering to go see,” Simon said. He must have had a similar thought, still annoyed about the glass-sweeping. There was that fizzing in Red’s ears again. Could anyone else hear it? “Well, put it this way,” Oliver said. “The RV is not going anywhere. We can’t call for help. So, the only way we’re getting out of here is by leaving the RV. And Reyna has a point; it’s been a while since his last shot. Maybe he’s gone.” “Why would he shoot out all the tires and the gas tank to trap us here if he was just gonna leave right after?” Maddy said. It seemed no one knew how to answer that. No one said anything for a moment, eyes shifting around the group, Red fiddling in her pocket, Simon staring up at the ceiling. Until a voice dared to break the silence. “Hello.” Red looked up, at Simon, then at Arthur. Had one of them spoken? The voice had sounded strange: metallic and muted. But, no, it couldn’t have been them because they too were looking around, searching for the speaker. Arthur caught her eye and Red shook her head. It wasn’t her. “Did someone just—” Reyna began. Oliver shushed her, holding up his finger. “But I—” Simon now. “Shut up!” Oliver shouted him down, holding up both hands to control the silence. But it wasn’t silent; there was that empty, fizzing sound again.

It clicked off and— “—Hello,” the voice spoke again, deep and disembodied. Maddy gasped, and Oliver tapped her on the arm to keep her quiet, brandishing his finger at the rest of them. “Hello?” A voice, but no one to claim it. Red scanned over her shoulder. The voice was coming from the front of the RV, and so was that fizzing sound she hadn’t imagined. “Hello,” it said. “Come here.”

“Nobody move!” Oliver’s eyes were frantic, spinning in his head as he studied the front of the RV, and the darkness of the uncovered windshield. He backed up, feeling for the knife on the table. “He said, ‘Come here,’ ” Maddy whispered, fear spiking in her voice, hands moving instinctively to protect her head. “Is he right outside? Oh my god he’s going to kill us all.” “Hello.” The voice clicked off, replaced by that fizzing hiss, but this time Red knew exactly what it was, the sound passing through her, gathering snapshots of memory. Ones she normally pushed away, the good and the bad. Running around her house, back when it had been warm, a walkie-talkie in her hand as she played Cops and Cops with her mom. They’d invented it, you see, because neither wanted to be a robber. Tiny Red yelling made-up police codes into the radio, sometimes too excited to remember to press the push-to- talk button, but always remembering to finish with “Over!” Running into separate rooms, demanding status reports on the Bad Guys. The Bad Guys were invisible, but somehow she and her mom always managed to save the day and save the city. Together. They were heroes, if only in the game.

It was static, that sound, the fuzz between her voice and her mom’s as they ran to each other, laughing, taking cover. But that was all ruined now, because it was the exact same sound as the one at the funeral, the static between the final call on the police radio. Central to Officer 819. Static. Officer 819, no response. Static. Officer 819, Captain Grace Kenny, is End of Watch. Gone but never forgotten. Static. Gone, that was right. And Red tried to forget most of the time. “Hello?” The voice came from Oliver that time, crouching low on the floor, eyes trained on the front of the RV, knife up. “He’s not there,” Red said. “It’s a two-way radio.” Oliver narrowed his eyes at her. “A walkie-talkie.” Oliver straightened up, his grip loosening on the knife. “Where is it?” “Somewhere over there.” Simon pointed toward the driver’s seat, the one- eyed bullet hole glaring back at them. “Inside or outside?” Reyna asked, taking one tentative step forward. “How would he have gotten it inside?” Oliver snapped. “We are right here and the RV is secure.” Maybe if he said it enough times, it would become true. “Come here,” the voice said, crackling at the edges. “He wants us to go and get it, I think,” Maddy said. “I don’t care what he wants,” Oliver barked. “Let me think for a second.” “He wants to talk to us?” Simon asked, exchanging a glance with Maddy. “Hello.” “He’s waiting,” Reyna said. “We don’t want to piss him off, Oliver.” “What are we waiting for?” Simon said. He stepped forward, not checking back for permission from Oliver. “Come on.” He beckoned, not quite brave enough to go alone. Red stepped up, Arthur too, walking carefully toward the front of the RV behind Simon, keeping their heads low. Red was ready to drop to her knees at the slightest sound or whistle of air, her breath tight in her chest. The static grew louder, thicker, trying to draw up old and older memories, but Red thought them away. She needed her head here and now. And,

anyway, Simon was right, the static was coming from somewhere near the driver’s seat. Beyond. “Excuse me,” Oliver said, maneuvering Red out of his way with his elbow. Clearly he’d had his second to think, then. “Where is it?” “I can’t see,” Simon said, crouching low to search the footwells in front of the driver and passenger seats. “Not here.” “It’s outside,” Red said, following her ears. “Outside that window.” She gestured to the one she and Arthur had just boarded up with the flattened suitcase. It sounded like the radio was just beyond, hovering in the darkness of outside where the rules were different, waiting for them to let it in. “Did you hear anything when you were covering the window?” Oliver asked. “No, nothing.” Arthur swallowed. “He must have put it there after we were done,” Red followed up. She would have recognized that sound right away, if it had been only inches from her head. “We have to get it,” Simon said. “He wants to talk to us.” He peeled back a few strips of the duct tape that held the lid of the suitcase in place. “Anyone want to take a look? Oliver, you’re in charge, aren’t you?” “I’m not putting my face out that hole.” “Hello.” The voice was right there, tinny but clear. A shiver passed up Red’s spine, climbing it to the back of her exposed neck. “Well, I’m not putting my face out there either,” Simon hissed. “Can’t be on Broadway without a fucking face.” “Hey, hey, one of you use your phone,” Reyna said, standing with Maddy just behind the gathering. “Take a video on your phone, out the window.” “Good idea,” Arthur told her, already retrieving his from his front pocket. He swiped across to find his camera app, sliding to the video option and tapping the lightning bolt to activate the flash. Aggressively bright against the dull yellow of the overhead lights. “Be careful,” Red told him as Arthur pressed the red record button, and the beep it made cut right through her, joining the shiver up her back.

Arthur nodded at Simon, who tucked himself up onto the chair to make room for him, pulling back the corner flap of the suitcase. The gap was small, but enough for Arthur to snake his hand and phone through. He reached forward, losing half his arm to the outside world and the unknown beyond. “Hello.” Simon sucked in a nervous breath and Arthur flinched, gritting his teeth. The sleeve of his arm shifted and wrinkled around the hinge of his elbow as he moved the wrist beyond, recording a full arc of outside. Red watched his face as he did, the tension in his upper lip, the focus in his eyes, and she reasoned that if she didn’t think about the red dot then it couldn’t possibly take his arm, or any other part of him. But didn’t that count as thinking of it? “Okay,” Arthur said, his face unfurrowing as he drew his arm back inside the RV, quickly, clumsily. He tapped his thumb to the screen to stop the recording. Simon pressed the duct tape back in place and Red leaned across the back of the chair to see the video on Arthur’s screen. Oliver did the same, watching over Arthur’s shoulder. The video began with a shaky view of the dashboard, clipping the end of Red’s voice as she told him to be careful. It moved over, catching Simon as he pulled his legs up out of the way, glancing back, eyes on a point above the camera. A close-up of Simon’s fingers as they bent into ridges, pulling the suitcase aside. The screen zoomed in on the black hole, breaking that barrier between out there and in here as it moved through into the total darkness of outside, the air lit by the ghostly glow of the phone. There was nothing out there, nothing they could see, until the view shifted down and the flash reached the road, picking out stones and pieces of glass. “Hello,” the voice repeated from ninety seconds ago, through the recording. The shot juddered and then continued, swinging around to the right, the white light reflecting in the driver’s-side mirror. “There!” Simon pointed at the screen. Arthur paused the video. Hanging from the bottom of the driver’s-side mirror was a shape, a small black shape with an antenna out the top. The

walkie-talkie glared at them through the darkness with one bright green eye: a small backlit rectangular display. “Where is it?” Maddy asked from back there. “Attached to the driver’s-side mirror,” Oliver answered, straightening up. “Okay, Arthur, reach out and grab it.” “Why does Arthur have to do it?” Simon said. “Because he’s already done it once.” “It’s fine,” Arthur said, rolling up the sleeve on his right arm, opening and closing his fist like he was practicing, tendons sticking out under his tan skin. There was a small, puckered scar near the base of his index finger that Red had never noticed before. Now definitely wasn’t the time to ask about it. “He wants us to pick up the walkie-talkie, he won’t shoot, not yet,” Arthur said in a whisper, more to himself than to anyone else. He cricked the bones in his neck and then he was ready, nodding to Simon. Simon pulled the suitcase back, a bigger gap this time, and Arthur leaned toward it. He balled his fist and pushed through, his arm disappearing outside again. His breaths came too quickly, fogging his glasses, his nose pressed up against the suitcase as he reached, blindly. “I can feel it,” he said, the muscles in his neck straining. “Grab it,” Oliver said, leaning forward. “I can’t, it’s attached.” Arthur blew out a mouthful of air and closed his eyes behind his glasses. Like Maddy did sometimes, to focus. Had Red ever tried that trick? “Okay, I think I can unclip it…hold on…” “Don’t drop it,” Oliver said, like Arthur wasn’t already telling himself the same thing. Probably; Red couldn’t read his mind. “Got it,” Arthur exhaled, opening his eyes and blinking slowly as he carefully guided his arm back through the gap, elbow, then wrist, the antenna of the walkie-talkie snagging on the suitcase as he finally pulled it inside. The static hissed, crossing the threshold, and Arthur hissed too, looking across at Red, his green-brown eyes swimming as they readjusted to the light. “Here,” he said, reaching over Simon to pass the walkie-talkie to Red, dropping it into her hand. It was cool against her fingers.

“Hello,” it crackled from within her grip. She was holding his voice, he, him, the sniper, the red dot, but she didn’t want to and her heart was too loud, reaching up into her ears and the back of her throat. Red stared down at the walkie-talkie, at the numbers on the display, at the buttons below the screen, at the crop-circle holes of the speaker and microphone at the bottom of the device, so like the one she used to play with. All black, apart from the green display and one red button on the side. “What should we…,” she began, but Oliver stepped over and picked the walkie-talkie up out of her open hand. He studied it, narrowing his eyes. “What are we going to say?” Reyna asked. “Maybe we should plan beforehand, how to best play it, so he leaves us alone.” “How do I…” Oliver shook the walkie-talkie, glancing up at Red. Had he really never played with one of these before, even as a kid? Red only ever remembered him doing homework or telling her and Maddy to keep it down. Oliver Lavoy, born prelaw just like his soon-to-be-district-attorney mom, no time for playing. “You hold down that red button at the side there to talk.” Red showed him, like her mom once showed her. Not now, get out of her head, you don’t belong here. “Right,” he said, like it was obvious now. He took a deep breath. “Oliver,” Reyna said, “should we—” Oliver pressed the button and the static cut out immediately. He raised the walkie-talkie to his face. “Who is this?” he asked, pushing his voice out so hard that it growled around the edges. The static returned as Oliver released the button, looking back at the rest of them, eyes wide. They waited. The static clicked out. “Ah, you found me.” The walkie-talkie spoke, cold and metallic. “Who is this?” Oliver said again. “The button,” Red reminded him.

“Who is this?” Oliver repeated, holding down the button this time. Static. “You know who this is.” Static. “No?” Oliver said. “I’m the one outside with the rifle.” Red swallowed, forcing it down her too-tight throat. “What do you want from us?” Oliver said, pacing away from the cockpit and down the length of the RV. The rest of them followed. “If it’s money, I don’t think we have much cash on us right now. But you can have it all. And my credit card. I’ll give you the PIN. Take as much as you want. It’s yours. Just let us go.” Click. Static. “I don’t want your money,” the voice said. A shadow crossed his face, confusion in the draw of his eyebrows. If only it had been that easy, Oliver. Throw money at the problem. “What do you want, then?” Oliver paced. “I’m sorry if we’re on your land. We didn’t mean any offense. We got lost. We were never supposed to be here. Just the wrong place at the wrong time.” Static. The walkie-talkie crackled, a strange, hitching sound. Was he laughing at them? “What if I said you were the right people, in the right place at exactly the right time.” Oliver lowered the walkie-talkie, glancing up at the rest of them, eyes drawn. His mouth flickered silently, words dying before he could breathe life into them. Maddy’s arm tensed, pushing against Red. Simon on her other side, holding on to her sleeve. She didn’t move, staring at the walkie-talkie in Oliver’s hand, molding the static into empty whispered words in her head. Right people, right place, right time.

“What does he mean?” Arthur said, voice rasping and low, catching on the sides of his throat. His eyes darted to Red’s, but she couldn’t give him any answers there. Oliver sucked in a shaky breath and raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. He pressed the button, and the only sound in the RV, in the world, was Red’s breath, too heavy in her chest. “What do you mean?” Oliver asked of the man out there in the wide-open nothing. Static. “I’ll tell you what I mean.” Static. “Oliver Charles Lavoy. “Madeline Joy Lavoy. “Reyna Flores-Serrano. “Arthur Grant Moore. “Simon Jinsun Yoo. “Redford Kenny.”

Chaos. When had Maddy started screaming? Red couldn’t remember now. Like the sound had always been there in her head, along with the static. Simon’s shoulders bucked, thrashing as he choked on air. The walkie-talkie dropped to Oliver’s side, chaos in the golden swirl of his eyes, moving too fast to be in real time. Arthur stuttered. Reyna swore. Red listened, the chaos creeping into her own brain as she realized that something new was beginning now, a shift in the air and a hitch in her chest. “How does he know our names?” Simon choked. “How the fuck does he know our names?!” “No, no, no,” Maddy shaped her scream. “He’s here to kill us. He’s going to kill us all!” “I—I don’t u-understand…” Arthur shook his head. “H-how—” “Fuck!” Reyna held the sides of her face, strands of black hair clinging to her skin. “This was planned. This was all planned. He was waiting for us here.”

Not random, no. Not wrong place, wrong time. Planned. It was all planned. And why was Maddy’s scream still in her head? Oliver’s eyes kept spinning, like they were broken, spooling loose right out of his skull. “Oliver, do something!” Reyna shouted. “Say something. He knows who we are!” He snapped back into life. “What can I say, Reyna? What can I do? I’m trying to think what this means!” “What this means is that he trapped us here on purpose. He knew we were coming.” “How could he know?” Simon said, eyes watering as he coughed on the words. “We got lost.” “Why? Why?” Maddy wailed. “Everyone, let me think!” Oliver roared into the chaos, patches of red climbing up his neck, threatening to take his face. Maddy cried. Simon coughed. Arthur stared and Reyna shook her head. Red listened, filling herself with the static to push out the scream. But the static cut out, and in its place that deep, tinny voice. “I can tell you your dates of birth and home addresses too, if you like.” Oliver recoiled from the walkie-talkie in his hands, placing it down on the table. He stood back and studied it, arms hugged around his chest. “Is it possible he searched the RV license plate after he shot out the tires?” he asked the others. “That it might have led him to Simon’s uncle, then Simon, then to finding the rest of us?” Red could tell from Oliver’s face that he didn’t believe it even as he gave voice to it, that an answer wasn’t needed because it had already been given in the asking. “He knew who we were before we got here,” Reyna said, joining Oliver to stare down at the walkie-talkie. “He brought us here, trapped us here.” “Why?” Maddy wiped her face.

“He’s going to kill us,” Simon said, and his voice didn’t match the words, hollow and flat. “I don’t want to die,” Maddy cried, a new tear cascading to the cliff edge of her nose. It jumped free, splattering on the floor. Red took Maddy’s hand again, gave it a squeeze. Not quite an it’ll be okay anymore, but an I’m here too. Oliver nodded to himself, once, twice, then he lurched forward to pick up the walkie-talkie again. “We’ve already called the cops,” he said. “A while ago. They say they’ll be here any minute.” Static. A crackling sound, cold and inhuman. He was laughing again. Oliver waited for the static to return, then he held down the button. “Yeah. Hilarious, isn’t it? They’ll be here in less than five minutes, so you should probably pack up and start running if you want to get a head start.” “The cops aren’t coming. No one’s coming to help you.” A muscle twitched in Oliver’s cheek. “Yes they are. We called them,” he said, a new hint of desperation in his voice. Static. “You didn’t call anyone. There’s no service. I made sure of that.” Oliver lowered the walkie-talkie, his thumb straying away from the button. “FUCK!” he screamed, holding on to the word as it ripped at his throat. Flecks of spit in the air. “He knocked out the cell service?” Reyna said, her hand moving to the back of Oliver’s neck as he bent forward, elbows to his knees, head to his hands. Defeated already. “How could he do that?” Simon said, turning to aim the question at each of them. Nothing. “The more important question is why,” Reyna replied. “What does he want? We give it to him and maybe he lets us go.”

“He wants to kill us,” Maddy said, squeezing Red’s hand back, so hard that she felt their bones crunching together. Oliver sniffed, straightening up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pushed the button. “Please don’t kill us,” he said. Oliver Lavoy was not ready to die. Were any of them? A crackle from the walkie-talkie. “That depends on you,” the voice said. “I want something from you. And I will get it before the night is over.” “I said you can take my credit card. All of our cards. Take whatever we have.” Red had nothing. Static. “I told you, it’s not money I want.” “Ask him what he wants,” Simon said, flapping one hand to get Oliver’s attention. “Ask him.” Oliver held down the button. “What do you want?” Static. “One of you knows something. A secret. You know who you are and you know what it is.” Red’s eyes crossed in front of her, and she imagined she could see the sound of the static, staining the air a speckled gray, closing in around her. Maddy’s shoulders dropped, her hand growing sticky and uncomfortable in Red’s. Arthur was blinking, too fast, turning to watch Simon as he coughed and spluttered. Reyna’s eyes dropped, and Oliver chewed the inside of his cheek. No one was looking at Red, but she looked at them all. Oliver raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth again. He waited one moment, then two. “What secret?” he asked, releasing the button. Static. “That’s for the six of you to figure out. And remember one thing: you can’t see me but I can see you. If you try to run, I will shoot.”

The air was too thick in here, syrupy with the smell of gasoline, with the quickening of their breaths. It plugged Red’s nose and her ears until she could close her eyes and pretend she wasn’t here at all, forcing herself to think of that pattern in the curtains. You can’t see me but I can see you, and Red could see nothing here at all with her eyes shut. “He’ll shoot us if we leave the RV,” Oliver said, like they hadn’t all been listening, like they hadn’t all just heard that together. Red opened her eyes, twisting her hand out of Maddy’s grip. She watched as Oliver dropped the walkie-talkie down on the table, a heavier thud than it should have made. It stood end up, the green LCD display watching them. “We are never getting out of this RV.” Simon sniffed, running his hand down his face, pulling the skin out of shape, revealing the red underneath his eyes. “If we’re going to die here, fuck it, I’m having more tequila.” “No, Simon,” Red croaked, her voice raw and unused. “Fuck it!” he barked, strolling over to the kitchen counter. “Come on, everyone, let’s do shots in the dark.” Reyna sidestepped, blocking his way to the counter and Oliver’s open backpack. “No,” she said sternly. “We need to stay rational.”

“What are you, the tequila guardian?” He pointed at her. “Right, because I’m Mexican?” “No, because you’re standing in the way.” He hiccupped. “If I want to die drunk, then I’ll die drunk, thank you and good night.” “We’re not going to die,” Arthur said, stepping forward to pull Simon back, hand on his shoulder. “We just need to give him what he wants. What’s the secret he’s talking about?” “And who?” Maddy added quickly, picking at her fingernails. Red looked straight ahead, blinked slowly, clearing her eyes like someone who had no secrets. Someone who wasn’t thinking of them right now. Everyone had secrets, though, didn’t they? Somebody else here had to. Were hers any worse, any bigger? Most likely, at least the one she was keeping now. The plan. But no one could ever know about that, that was the point. Oh, and there was the fact that her mom was dead and it was probably her fault, all her f—could it be Bart Simpson, the pattern in the curtain? “It’s not me,” Simon said, giving up on the tequila. He pushed past Red and Maddy to drop back on the sofa, head resting against the mattress wedged there. “My only secret is that I haven’t told my parents I want to be an actor, not work in finance. Don’t think someone’s threatening to kill me over being a secret theater kid. Apart from my dad, that is,” he said, adding in an exaggerated stage whisper: “He’s Korean.” “I can’t think of anything,” Arthur said, pausing to scratch his eye. “Nothing big enough for this.” “Me either,” Maddy said, almost too fast. Red noticed. And the way she wouldn’t look up or hold anyone’s gaze. Oliver stepped forward, cleared his throat. “I know who it is. I know what this is about.” Red looked at him. Maddy looked at him. Arthur and Simon looked at him. Reyna didn’t. “It’s me and Maddy,” he said. Maddy stiffened. “I don’t—” she began. “—It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Oliver cut across her. “This is about our mom.” Now Reyna was looking at him. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“This must be about her case. The Frank Gotti case.” “What’s that?” Arthur said. “Our mom is assistant DA, and she’s the lead prosecutor on an upcoming homicide case.” “In the Mafia,” Simon said, gesturing with his beer bottle. Wait, where did he get a beer from? “Yeah, exactly.” Oliver snapped his fingers at him. “This whole thing seems exactly like something they’d pull.” “Why? What’s the case?” Arthur made the mistake of asking him. Could Red really stand to listen to this one more time? Oliver glanced at her and she kept her face straight. “So, about a year ago,” he began, leaning back on the table, “the boss of the organized crime group—” “The Mafia,” Simon offered. “Yes, the Mafia.” Oliver’s jaw tightened, clearly irritated at the interruption. “The boss of the family, a man called John D’Amico, died of throat cancer in the hospital last year. He left behind a bit of a power vacuum, with three members of the family vying for the top job to replace him.” Yep, Red thought, first up was— “Tommy D’Amico,” Oliver said, holding up one finger. “John’s oldest son.” Number two: “Joseph Mannino, who had been John’s underboss, which is a second-in- command-type thing.” And finally: “Francesco Gotti, who had been John’s consigliere, which is like the top adviser role.” Oliver tucked away his three upheld fingers, and Frank Gotti was the one who flashed into Red’s mind, that photo of his face she’d seen and seen again, one dark curl of hair falling down to cover his left eye. “The three of them split the family into factions, as it were,” Oliver continued, glancing around to make sure they were all listening. “There was fighting but no one got seriously hurt. Not until last August, when Frank Gotti

killed Joseph Mannino himself. Shot twice in the back of the head. And my mom—our mom—is the one who’s prosecuting Frank. The trial is in a few weeks and she’s going to get a guilty conviction. We know it. They clearly know it.” Arthur looked down, eyes flickering back and forth like he was sifting through everything Oliver just said. “So you think this”—he gestured around at the RV, at the wide-open nothing outside the blocked-up windows—“us being here, that sniper out there, is about that murder case?” “Yes, that’s clearly what’s going on,” Oliver replied, his eyes unfaltering. “This is all about my mom. They’re trying to get to her. And they are using me and Maddy to do it.” “You mean, like, holding us for ransom?” Maddy said, uncertain. “In a way.” Oliver nodded. “They’ve probably already contacted her, told her they are holding us hostage somewhere.” “But why?” Reyna chimed in now. “What would they want from her?” “If they go to trial, Mom is going to put Frank in prison for the rest of his life. They can’t let that happen; he’s their leader. Well, to some of them. They are probably demanding she find a way to drop the charges to stop the case going to trial. Or…” He trailed off. “Or they’ll k-kill us,” Maddy finished it, stumbling over the word. Oliver didn’t say anything, but his silence was answer enough, the static from the walkie-talkie filling in for him. “And, now that I’m thinking it through, maybe this secret he’s talking about, the secret he wants…maybe it’s the identity of the eyewitness. The one the whole case rests on. And they want Mom to give it to them.” “So they can kill the witness and stop the trial?” Reyna asked, eyes narrowing, a knot of lines forming across her forehead. Red looked to Oliver, waiting for the answer. “Yeah,” he replied. “Wouldn’t be the first time a witness for the prosecution was killed right before trial with these kinds of people. That’s why Mom tried so hard this time to protect the witness’s anonymity. This whole thing has organized crime written all over it.”

“And will she give it up?” Red asked then, trying to catch up with the others, to see the whole picture and their place within it. “Will she give them the witness?” Oliver looked across at her. He blinked. “If it’s a choice between me and Maddy and the witness, Mom will give them the name,” he said. “Life or death. She’ll have to.” Red nodded. Something tightened in her chest, uncomfortable and warm, as Oliver’s words became real. Fuck. Either way it went, someone was going to die here. If Oliver was right, that was. And, it seemed, he usually was. “That’s why we can’t let that happen,” Oliver continued, hardening his gaze, sharing it with the others. “We have to stop them. We have to escape. We can’t let my mom give up that name. This trial is too important. It would be the end of her career.” “And someone would die,” Maddy reminded him. “She would be killing the witness, giving them up.” “Right. I already said that,” Oliver snapped, missing the point. Red caught it, though, glad that Maddy was here to offset her brother. Between saving a life and his mom’s career, it was clear which was most important to Oliver. And probably, by extension, his own career. Red bit her lip so she didn’t say anything, not that it would probably change his mind at all. “Are you sure that’s what this is about?” Reyna asked Oliver, looking up at him, something in her eyes, a glint that Red couldn’t read. A silent conversation in half a second. Oliver brushed her off. “Yes, it has to be about that. I mean, if you just think logically, Maddy and I are the most high-value targets here. It has to be about us.” Red couldn’t disagree. “Any reason anyone else here would be held hostage by a sniper?” he asked the room. The others shook their heads, Red too. “Nobody loves me,” she said with a sniff, not like Catherine loved Maddy and Oliver. That hurt, thinking about it, a twist in her gut and a hole in her heart.

“Right, okay. We’re all agreed?” he said, not looking for an answer. “So now we have to work out how to escape.”

Escape was a strange word, wasn’t it? One of those ones that tripped Red up. Funny like resource but not in the same way. A word that, if you thought it too much, grew spiky and nonsensical in your head. Please someone say something else. Escape. Eeescape. ESCAPÉ. “Just to float an alternative,” Simon said from the sofa, his head bouncing back against the mattress. Thank you, Simon. “Why don’t we just wait this whole thing out, here in the RV? Look, sunrise must be at about six a.m., right? And when it’s light, the sniper loses his advantage, because we’ll be able to see where he is. Then we can escape”—there it was again—“and because it’s morning we’re more likely to be able to flag down help.” He sat back, hands raised as though his plan were there, sitting on top of them, held out like an offering. “My mom will give up the name before sunrise.” Oliver shook his head, dismissing the plan. “And the witness will be killed,” Maddy said, a grim set to her jaw. “Mom would be responsible for someone dying.” Someone dying. Red’s chest tightened again. “Right.” Simon nodded, raising his hands and the plan even higher. “And that’s very sad for the witness, of course. Poor guy. But it’s not really our

fault. And I’d prefer the six of us to survive. We’re safest in the RV. I mean, come on.” Simon glanced around. “Arthur? Red?” he said, looking for agreement in their eyes. But Red didn’t agree, she couldn’t. She looked down. “I think we should do what Oliver says,” she answered, keeping her voice flat. What other choice was there? Oliver was in charge: the natural leader, the highest value. This was about surviving, and this RV wasn’t safe, no matter how hard they pretended. Simon dropped his hands, a flicker of betrayal in his eyes as he shot them at Red. He shrugged it off and returned to his beer. “Majority rules.” Oliver clapped his hands, returning to business. “Let’s start thinking about how we can escape, then.” ÉSCÄPÈ. “Or get help,” Maddy added. Arthur sighed, removing his glasses to wipe them against his sweatshirt. “Both seem pretty impossible right now. No cell service. No one around. A rifle. And we don’t know where he is, out there in the darkness.” A pause. “He has all the cards.” Oliver exhaled, conceding the point, and Red bet he didn’t like being someone without any cards. Cards. Pokémon cards? Was that the pattern in the curtains? If she thought about that, then she couldn’t think about anything worse, like what was happening here. The static filled the room again, in the absence of voices, and Oliver glanced down at the walkie-talkie. “Maybe he doesn’t have all the cards,” he said, scooping the walkie-talkie up, cradling it between his hands like it was spun from glass. “We have this. He’s overlooked something here. He’s given us a communication device!” His voice picked up speed, mouth trying to keep up, as was Red. “Can’t we use this to contact someone? Walkie-talkies don’t need cell service, I mean, clearly. And don’t emergency services use walkie-talkies, anyway? Can’t we somehow connect this to the police radio and ask for help?” “Can’t believe we didn’t think of that sooner.” Simon sat forward. “That’s a plan I can get on board with.”

It didn’t work like that. None of it worked like that. “How would we…” Oliver trailed off, studying the LCD display. “What’s wrong, Red?” Arthur had been watching her, he must have read it in her eyes. She thought she was better at keeping a straight face; she’d had enough practice. “I’m sorry,” she began, looking at Maddy instead of Oliver, the softer of the Lavoys. “Two-way radios don’t work like that. Radio frequencies are regulated. Emergency services, like the police, have their own frequencies specifically so they don’t get interference from other signals, like you’re suggesting.” “Right, I know,” Oliver said. Had he, though? “But, in an emergency, can’t we make it do that?” There was a simple answer to that, the one Oliver didn’t want to hear. But he was asking, so: “No,” she said, looking away from him as she did, so his eyes didn’t bully a different response out of her. “No, it’s not physically possible to make this radio transmit on the emergency frequencies that police use.” “Fuck” was Oliver’s simple answer in return. “How do you know?” Reyna turned to Red, but Oliver answered for her: “Her mom was a cop.” And that was still hurt. It always did. But that wasn’t why she knew so much about walkie-talkies. Well, not directly. Her mom was a cop, but so was Red when they played that game together. And that was how she knew. Four days after the funeral, Red found a box in the attic, a box of her mom’s old stuff. And there, nestled between old jackets and shoes, were the walkie- talkies. A piece of masking tape across the back of each, one with MOM, one with RED. She hadn’t been looking for them, not really, just looking to look, to preserve her mom for another day, and then another. Red left her own walkie-talkie there, took the one labeled MOM down to her room. She stole a screwdriver from her dad—he was already mostly lost by then, but he could still pretend to function, still went to work—and, in the quiet of her room past midnight, she took apart the walkie-talkie. Piece by piece, wire by wire, but she never did find her mom’s voice hiding inside.

“It’s probably an FRS radio,” she said, approaching Oliver, holding her hand out, waiting for him to let it go. He placed it in her hand, and she felt the familiar weight of the device. She knew it, inside and out. “FRS?” Oliver said, not stepping back, like he couldn’t be too far from the walkie-talkie, couldn’t trust her to even hold it. “Family Radio Service,” she said. “It’s the radio frequencies most amateur devices like this use. If I remember right”—and she did remember right, how could she ever forget this—“it has twenty-two channels.” She knew more than that, that those twenty-two channels were found somewhere between 462 and 467 megahertz, and that the speaker also functioned as the microphone, built from the same bones: a magnet, a coil of wire, a cone made of plastic. She’d learned all that, putting Mom’s walkie-talkie back together again, until it turned on and hissed at her. For days that was all she did, took it apart, rebuilt it, did it again on her mom’s birthday the year after, and the one after that. You couldn’t do that with dead moms, though, rebuild them. They stayed gone. “So, we can’t use it to contact anyone else?” Oliver asked, still standing too close. Red stepped back if he wasn’t going to. “Yes, we could,” she said, and the light returned to Oliver’s eyes. “In theory, if someone else is using another two-way radio on the same frequency channel within range, we would be able to talk to them. The sniper is using channel three.” Red and her mom always used number six, for some reason. It was lucky, at least until it wasn’t anymore. “What’s the range?” Reyna asked, studying Red as though she couldn’t wait for the answer. Red sighed, unable to give them what they wanted. “It’s not great with something like this,” she said. “It depends on the terrain, the weather, how many trees and buildings are in the way, but…” She thought about it. “A couple of miles, maybe. A few at most.” Red and her mom once picked up interference from a wedding planner barking orders down her end. Must have been someplace close. The groom

had been late, apparently, but Red pretended it was a surveillance mission and they took notes. Laughing. The kind of laugh that hurt during and after. “Oh,” Reyna said in response. No, it wasn’t good news, not for them. They were in the middle of nowhere, a range of three miles still left them pretty much in nowhere. But there were houses and farms within all that nowhere. Reyna pulled out her phone to check the time. “It’s almost one a.m.,” she said, deflating. “I guess it’s unlikely anyone will be out using a walkie-talkie.” Silent agreement from the rest of them, the walkie-talkie laughing at them from Red’s hands. “Unlikely, but they might?” Red said. “Or someone might have a baby monitor on in range. We could keep cycling through the channels, see if we pick up any interference?” Red hadn’t found her mom’s voice on channel six, or any of the others she’d tried. But it was harder when the person you were looking for wasn’t alive. “Yes.” Oliver snapped his fingers at her, a smile cracking his face. “This is what I’m talking about! Some initiative. Okay, Red, you’re in charge of the walkie-talkie. You cycle through the channels, but make sure you always return to three, every couple of minutes or so. In case we miss the sniper trying to talk to us. We don’t want him to know what we’re up to.” Red glowed, despite herself, nodding as she accepted the order from Oliver. Was she useful? What a plot twist that was. A smile from Maddy too, full house. Red bet Arthur was secretly impressed as well; look at her, knowing stuff. Right, focus. There was a man with a rifle outside, and Red was trying to be useful. She wouldn’t want to die, not like that. Although she supposed it wouldn’t take two shots to the back of the head this time. Just the one, just anywhere. Red pressed the menu button and then the + on the right, switching to channel four instead and the empty static there. She could pretend the tone of the static changed each time, a different swirl of sound, like a new song. But it didn’t, it sounded the same. An empty hiss. Up to five now, then six. Red waited longer there, just in case.

“Okay,” Oliver said, looking around at the group. He stepped over to the sofa and, in one quick motion, removed the beer bottle from Simon’s hand, walking it over to the kitchen counter. “So Red is on part one of the plan; trying to get outside help. But we need part two. An escape plan.” ÊŚĊĄPË. Stop that. Up to channel eight now. Should she go back to three and make sure the sniper wasn’t trying to talk to them? “Like our mom always says.” Oliver turned to Maddy. “A plan must have two parts, and you have to make sure either way plays out in your favor.” “That’s win-win,” Maddy said, completing it for him. Yes, Catherine Lavoy always had a plan, Red knew that. Birthday presents and reserves. Two different flavors of ice cream. Red herself preferred the lose-lose system: no plan at all and no backups. She pressed the down button back to three to check for the sniper’s voice. Nothing. Back up to eleven. Click, static, click. “And what is the plan?” Simon said, his words more slurred now, but Red couldn’t tell if he was putting it on to irritate Oliver. “You’re the leader, the most high-value person here. What is your brilliant plan to escape the active shooter out there in the pitch-black who can see us but we can’t see him?” Oliver’s jaw snapped open, hanging ajar as his eyes spooled in his head again, working loose. “That’s it,” he laughed, slapping one hand against his hip. “That’s his only advantage, that we don’t know where he is.” “I’d say his advantage is the giant fucking rifle with the laser sight,” Simon muttered. Oliver didn’t hear him, or didn’t listen. “That’s the plan, that’s all we have to do. Work out exactly where he is out there. Find the sniper.”

1:00 a.m.

“Find him?” Arthur said, at the same time as Reyna, voices clashing, each leaning on a different word. Finding a sniper in the pitch-black wide-open nothing. Something about needles and haystacks, Red thought, or a shot in the dark. Literally. She scrolled up through the channels on the walkie-talkie, the flickering of the static not quiet enough to be just background noise. Nothing. More nothing. “Yes,” Oliver said, his eyes too wide and his voice too loud. “Don’t you see, if we work out exactly where he is, we can use the RV to cover us while we run the other way. He’ll never even know.” Oliver turned his wide shoulders, head following a moment later. He looked up at the mattress covering the broken window as though imagining the bullet, bringing it back to life in his head. “From the positioning of the shots through both windows, and the first tire he shot out, he was definitely on this side.” He gestured beyond the front door. “I guess at an angle, though, if he was able to shoot out the tires on the other side, most likely aiming underneath the RV. So he must have been somewhere over there, low to the ground, hiding in the long grass.” Oliver held out his arm at a diagonal, pointing his finger between the right side and back end of the RV.

“Okay.” Reyna swallowed, letting her hand skim Oliver’s as she came to stand beside him. “That narrows it down.” Oliver moved his hand away, shaking his head. “No, he was there. But then he came up to the RV to plant the walkie-talkie on the driver’s-side mirror. He could have moved position after that, knowing we’d think about this.” He sighed. “Realistically, he could now be anywhere, on either side.” Arthur nodded, eyes darting to the corners of the RV, like it was starting to shrink around him. At least it had that extra foot, thirty-one feet instead of thirty. “So how would we find him now?” he asked. Oliver scrunched his face, thinking. And if that wasn’t enough, he said: “I’m thinking.” How to find a shooter in the dark? Red should make another joke to cheer Maddy up, talk about the night-vision goggles she’d packed in her suitcase. “Is now a good time to mention I packed my thermal imaging goggles?” Simon said, rising from the sofa. Hey, that was her line. A bit better, actually. Simon could have it. “Shh,” Oliver hissed, pressing his fingers to his temples to think even harder. “Red?” he said suddenly, turning his attention to her. The static fizzed as she looked up. “When someone shoots a rifle, is there something other than the noise? Does it give off any light, a flash?” Red shrugged. Why was he asking her that? Oh, right, because her mom was a police captain and she would have known the answer. Oliver seemed like he was waiting for more. “I don’t—” she began. “—Yeah, there’s a muzzle flash,” Simon said, his arm knocking into Red’s as he rejoined the group. Arthur was right; it was too small in here, and it was getting warm now too. Everyone turned to look at Simon. “It’s like that little explosion of light when you fire,” he said, finally looking up, noticing their eyes. “Why are youse all staring at me? What, you don’t watch movies? I mean the muzzle flash is not really there, it’s normally added in postproduction. But yeah: gun goes off, there’s a flash.”

Turned out Simon was useful too. Who would have thought, the two of them, Red and Simon? Certainly not Oliver, it seemed, judging by the stunned look in his eyes, pupils sitting too large among all that golden brown. He stepped forward, clapping Simon hard on the back, twice. That must be the best well done you could get, beyond words. “Right, okay,” Oliver said, talking it through with himself. “Gun goes off, there’s a flash. That’s it, there’s our plan.” “How?” Maddy asked, and to which part, Red wasn’t sure. Didn’t sound like a full plan, not one up to Catherine Lavoy’s standards at least. “We position ourselves at every window in the RV. Someone watching the front, back, both sides. Every angle. We watch, and then we bait a shot from the sniper—” “—Sounds safe,” Simon commented. “—and one of us will see it, see the flash. Then we’ll know exactly where he is. And then”—Oliver’s eyes glinted—“we run, in the opposite direction, using the RV as cover. We’re going to get out of here.” That sounded more like a full plan, except there was one part missing. “How do we bait a shot from him?” Arthur asked, spotting it too. “Without one of us getting killed?” Red cycled through channel one, then two, back to three. Empty static, all of them. “We—” “—Hello?” The voice crackled into life in her hands. The sniper. “Hello. Are we all still alive in there?” he asked. Red sniffed, breath stalling, heart kicking up in her chest. She scanned the faces of the others quickly. What should she do? Oliver was there before she could ask him. He grabbed the walkie-talkie out of her hand and pressed the button. “We’re here,” he said, trying to disguise the tremor in his voice. “We’re working on that secret you want.” Static. “Good,” the voice answered. “Keep working. Time’s running out.” Static.

“Can we just ask him to take a shot?” Reyna suggested. Oliver rounded on her. “Why would we ask him to take a shot, Reyna? Come on, think. We can’t give away that we’re trying to escape.” He dropped the walkie-talkie back into Red’s hands. “Sorry, I’m just trying to help.” Reyna shrank back, sliding into the booth at the dining table. “Why has he taken shots before?” Oliver said, not really speaking to the others. “He shot at the tires and the gas tank to trap us here. Then at the window, maybe to scare us. Then—” “The horn!” Maddy said, eyes lighting up. She pointed to the steering wheel. “He shot at us when I was beeping.” Oliver snapped his fingers. “Bingo.”

They were really doing this, were they? Asking to be shot at. Inviting the red dot in. Red pressed the button, clicking up through the channels on the walkie- talkie, swapping one static for another while she waited, eyes on Oliver. “Okay, let’s think about our angles, then,” he said. Yes, let’s. “Windows. We’ve got a big one at the back of the RV. Then on the left we have the small one by the bunks, two windows at the dining table.” He nodded his head at them, Red’s eyes catching on the curtains. “The two side windows at the front and the windshield.” The windshield was the only window they hadn’t covered, their only view out into the total darkness of outside. “Then on the right we have the big one behind the sofa, and the small one in the front door. And that’s it, isn’t it? There isn’t one in the bathroom.” “There’s the rearview camera, too,” Reyna said quietly from the table, picking at her thumb. “Should come up if we put the RV in reverse. I think.” “Yes, okay, great,” Oliver said, turning to shoot her a smile. Reyna didn’t return it. “That means we might not need someone to cover the back. The person pressing the horn can use the camera to get that angle. Okay.”

He studied them all and they waited to be assigned their windows, Red skipping back to channel three. “I’ll take the rearview camera and I’ll press the horn.” He swallowed, like his was the hardest job, but he didn’t have to put his face up to a window with a sniper watching outside. “Reyna, you’ll be with me, you watch out the front, through the windshield. Maddy, you take the front left side, watching out the dining table window. Simon, back left, through the bunk window. Arthur, you’re front right, through the window behind the sofa. And Red, you’re back right, the window in the door.” Red nodded. At least her window still had glass in it. She glanced at Arthur, a knot forming in her gut. He’d pulled the short straw here; the last two times the sniper shot at them, it had come through that window. He looked okay, though. Nervous, not scared. Not yet, at least. He glanced at her, and she gave him a quick half smile. He caught it from her, stretching onto the other side of his face. Together they made one whole smile, tight and tense. “I’m taking the riskiest job,” Oliver said. Was he? “He’ll shoot toward whoever is at the steering wheel, like with Maddy. So I’m going to need some protection.” “You’re not going to ask one of us to be your human shield, are you?” Simon said, backing away with his hands raised. Red snorted, though none of this was really funny, was it? They might die tonight, all of them, some of them, her. A bullet could come anytime, anywhere. Was that what made these smaller moments funnier, because they might not get any more? Last chances to smile, to laugh, to tell Arthur she liked him and it was okay that he didn’t like her back because she was unlikable at times, she knew that. To tell Simon that, yes, his cheekbones were amazing and it would be a damn shame if he didn’t end up onstage or in front of a camera. To thank Maddy for always being there by her side, to share all those big moments, and small, some so small that Red had probably forgotten them by now. To tell Reyna that maybe she could do better. To tell Oliver, well, Red wasn’t sure what she would tell Oliver. And that didn’t

matter because she wasn’t going to say any of that anyway. Red wasn’t good at last chances, at final moments, was she? I hate you. She’d never said it since. A swarm of guilt in her gut as she came back to the room, cooling to shame as she watched Oliver studying the pile of resources on the table. Nothing big enough to protect him there. “Oh, I know,” he said, darting forward to grab the screwdriver. “Excuse me.” He pushed past Red and Simon, elbow butting hers, walking over to the small closet beside the front door. He pulled it open. “There’s only a mop and a dustpan and brush in there,” Simon told him. “I know,” Oliver replied, bending down to look at the hinges on the inside of the door. “Arthur, will you help me here? Hold the door while I remove the hinges?” “Sure.” Arthur nodded, rolling up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. He walked between Red and Simon, gently resting his hand on her back as he guided himself through. Fingers warm, then gone, leaving something behind. That stupid, pathetic firework again, at the back of her eyes. Didn’t it know there was a man outside with a gun? Arthur curled his hands around the top corners of the closet door while Oliver guided the screwdriver, slotting it into the first screw. Red’s eyes returned to the walkie-talkie. Her job. Her responsibility. Her plan. Partly, anyway. She clicked up again, shaping the static with her ears, making it say whatever she wanted it to. You could do that with memories too, sometimes. Lie to yourself, think fake thoughts to cover the ones you didn’t want. Like that time Catherine Lavoy took Red to the mall, because she’d finally outgrown her last pair of jeans, and it was Red’s first good day since everything happened. She’d even smiled. But sometimes Red changed it, and it was her mom instead, not dead anymore, not angry anymore. A lie. Impossible. But it was nicer than the truth. “So before we get into position, everyone,” Oliver said, one screw removed, turning his attention to the next. “We will have to turn off all the lights in the RV, so we can see out the windows better. Turn off the

headlights too, so Reyna can see out front. So grab one of the flashlights or use your phone’s light to get yourselves into position.” Simon waded forward, snatching the headlamp from the dining table with a whispered “Yes.” He pulled the elastic over his head, wearing the light over his eye like an eye patch. Red shook her head at him. She thought the adrenaline would have sobered him up by now. She thought wrong, clearly. She crossed to the kitchen and turned on the faucet, filling Simon another glass of water, pushing it into his chest. “All right, Mom.” Simon swayed, taking a sip. “Simon,” Maddy hissed at him, angry lines crisscrossing her forehead. He’d said the forbidden word. Oliver grunted as he removed one of the hinges, the muscles in Arthur’s arms stretching as they took the weight of the door. Oliver bent low to remove the hinge at the bottom. Turning the screwdriver, he said, “You are all responsible for your angle. So you have to be ready when I say I’m about to beep. No blinking, no sneezing, no nothing. We cannot miss the muzzle flash. Simon?” “Aye aye, Captain.” No, Red had already worked out it wasn’t anyone from SpongeBob in the curtains. She was going to die before she figured it out, wasn’t she? Her eyes tripped up on Reyna’s face on their way back from the curtains, sitting there, staring straight ahead. Chewing on her tongue and some silent thought, a strange faraway look in her dark eyes. Was she thinking about the plan, about what they were about to do, or something else? Simon noticed too. He sidled over and whispered in Red’s ear, “You see the way she looked at Oliver when this secret was mentioned? Something going on there.” Red didn’t respond, but she blinked, and Simon seemed to think that was the same thing. He nodded, too hard, and now Red couldn’t help but think he was trying to deflect somehow. “Okay.” Oliver placed the second hinge inside the closet and straightened up, his knees clicking. He took the freed closet door from Arthur and swung

it sideways, tucking it under one arm. “Let’s do this. Reyna, look alive.” She got to her feet, wiping her hand across her face, taking the look in her eyes away with it. “Flashlights on, everyone.” Red placed the walkie-talkie down on the dining table, leaving it on channel three, ready for the sniper. She reached into her pocket for her phone. No service of course but, hey, 51% battery, still pretty good for her. She knew that Maddy panicked whenever her own was below 50%, wouldn’t even leave the house. She swiped down and clicked on the flashlight. “Arthur, hit the lights. Reyna, headlights.” Reyna leaned across the steering wheel and out went the headlights. Arthur reached up to the control panel by the refrigerator and twisted the lights all the way off. The darkness from outside found its way into the RV, disappearing them all, broken up only by the white swinging beams of their flashlights. A yellow glow from Simon’s headlamp as he readjusted it onto his forehead. Red lit up Maddy as she came to stand next to her, ready to take her position at her window. Her face was ghostly pale, almost blue, white dots in the pools of her eyes. “Into your positions.” “That’s what she said,” Simon whispered, walking past Red toward the window by the lower bunk. Red turned, bumping into Arthur. “Sorry, after you,” she said. Arthur approached his window, resting one knee up on the sofa. Red took her place at the front door, waiting behind the closed shade. She watched over her shoulder as Oliver awkwardly spun the closet door to stand end up and he crouched beside the steering wheel. He shifted the gear into reverse, and the image from the rearview camera flickered into life in the center console. The road eerie white at the bottom of the screen, the sky molded from shades of black and gray. Oliver shuffled the closet door against himself. A shield. A barricade. But could wood that thin stop a bullet from a high-powered rifle?

Red turned to her own window. She swallowed, fast-forwarding the next few seconds, to her putting her face and eyes up against the bottom of the glass to study the darkness beyond. She imagined the red dot floating right there on her face, joining the freckles on her nose, moving up to her forehead, or against her teeth, and she’d never even know about it. Maybe she’d hear the crack in her last moment, but she wouldn’t know, would she, as it hit its target? Dead too fast for the fear to live. Like how she imagined Mom had died, in those early days when her dad and the other officers spoke in jagged circles around it. Killed in the line of duty was all some would say to her. Your mom was a hero, others. In Red’s head, Mom didn’t have time to be scared, no time to think her goodbyes, she didn’t know it was her end, she didn’t know and with one blink she was gone. But she wasn’t afraid, and that was one good thing as the world fell apart. Except that wasn’t what happened. At all. Red looked it up, the night before the funeral. Multiple articles about the fatal shooting of Police Captain Grace Kenny of the Philadelphia PD, Third District. She shouldn’t have, because then she wouldn’t know. But it was too late. And the picture in her head changed. Mom on her knees. Begging for her life—the articles didn’t say that part, but Red filled in the gaps. On her knees, terrified, knowing what was about to happen. And then it did: two shots to the back of the head. Killed with her own service weapon. She had time to be afraid, all the time in the world, lifetimes in seconds, there on her knees. Executed was another word the articles used, a word almost too big for thirteen-year-old Red to understand. It didn’t fit in her head, not in the same sentence as her mom. She understood now, though, thinking about putting her face up to that window. Thinking about that red dot searching her out in the darkness. Even a fraction of the fear her mom felt, right there at the end of all things. “Red, are you listening?” Oliver raised his voice. “I said flashlights off!” “S-sorry,” she mumbled, pressing the button, and the pitch-black claimed the RV for itself, the others no longer full people, just shadows, nightmare figures on this nightmare night. No moonlight even, now that Reyna had pulled down the shade on the windshield.

“Now,” Oliver said, clearing his throat. “If you pull your curtains or shades just a little bit, from the bottom corner, so you can look out.” “Do we really have to put our fucking faces up against the windows?” Simon’s voice called behind her. “Sounds like a death wish to me.” “Yes,” Oliver replied. “Because that’s the plan.” Have to stick to the plan, Red thought. Always. Like she was doing right now. She just had to see through the rest of tonight, the rest of the plan. “Oh, I know!” Maddy shouted, directly opposite Red at her window. Always side by side. “We can use our phones, like Arthur did before. Record a video of outside, then we definitely won’t miss the flash.” “Okay, if you’d prefer,” Oliver conceded. “Yes, I’d fucking prefer,” Simon said, a sound of clumsy rustling from his corner. “Right, phones out!” Oliver called. Red watched the dark shape of Arthur struggle with his, fiddling with the front of his jeans. Close enough to reach out and touch. To hold hands, even, if they didn’t need both hands for this plan. “Put them up against the windows now, make sure they are facing your assigned angle.” Red unhooked the shade, her fingers gripped hard around the clasp. Do not let it go. She raised it a couple of inches from the bottom and, with her other hand, pressed the camera of her phone against the glass. She shifted her body so she wasn’t directly behind the phone, in the line of sight, and she watched the screen. There was nothing out there. Only black. She checked over her shoulder at Arthur. His hand had disappeared beyond the lower corner of the mattress, out there in the night, the other still fiddling nervously with his jeans. “Okay, start recording now!” Oliver shouted, and the dark RV was filled with a chorus of high-pitched bleeps, singing to each other, as they all pressed record. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds on the recording. “Ready?” Oliver called, a shadowy arm reaching up behind his shield.

Red’s breath stuttered, the sound of her heart too loud in her ears, too loud and too fast. And then her heart was lost to a scream, the scream of the horn piercing the night and piercing her ears. One long note, then four short bursts. “Come on.” Oliver’s voice strained as he pressed the horn again. Three short beeps. One long note. The RV wailing into the darkness. And again. Nothing. Not the crack Red’s ears were waiting for, not the clap of the gun. Her phone screen dark and empty. “Come on!” Oliver tried again, ten sharp beeps, sharper, shorter. The RV screamed and screamed again. “Why is he not taking the fucking shot?!” Nothing. The screaming stopped, the ghost of the sound ringing in Red’s ears in the after-silence.

The dark shape of Oliver’s head, emerging from behind the closet door. “Why the fuck didn’t he take the shot?” he barked. Red’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, built a home there in it. “I don’t know,” Arthur said, breathless, pulling his hand back inside the RV and stopping the recording on his phone. A deflated double beep. Red did the same, hooking the window shade back down to the bottom. More double-tone bleeps, from the others’ phones as they withdrew from the windows. The ringing in Red’s ears faded, taken over by the ever-present static. “I don’t understand,” Maddy said, frustrated, slumping down on the booth. “He did it last time.” The walkie-talkie crackled on the table and Maddy flinched, jumping away from it. “Was that for me?” The voice came through, a low hiss. “You know you already have my full attention.” A new sound through the speaker, metal grating on metal, the sound of the rifle cocking. It cut out and the static took over again. Filled the room, filled Red’s head. But the cocking gun, it stayed somehow, working its way

down into her bones. She could feel it, in the turn of her elbow and the bend of her knee. “Fuck.” The shape of Oliver stood up, resting his closet door against the driver’s seat. “That should have worked. It doesn’t…that should have worked.” A sigh from Reyna, because Red knew Maddy’s sighs and that wasn’t it. Reyna’s silhouette floated away from the windshield. “He’s only going to shoot now if he sees one of us try to leave the RV, isn’t he?” she said, but Red couldn’t see her eyes and didn’t know who she was talking to. “Again,” Simon said, his voice drawing closer in the darkness behind her. “I am not nominating myself for self-sacrificing duty.” He didn’t sound drunk anymore. “Maybe you’re right,” Oliver replied, close enough now that Red could make out his face. Well, just the glint of his eyes and the glint of his teeth. “Maybe those first shots at the RV were just to scare us, but now that we know what this is about, what he wants, he’ll only shoot to stop one of us from getting away.” The long-winded way of saying exactly what Reyna just had. Red wondered if he did that to her a lot. “So, maybe…,” Maddy said, uncertainly, and Red could picture the look on her face, the exact pull in her eyes and the fold to her mouth. “Maybe we make it look like one of us is leaving the RV. That’s how we bait the shot.” Oliver nodded his head. “Just what I was going to say. We make him think one of us is escaping out the door, enough to take the shot.” “How, without actually getting shot?” Simon replied. “Are we going to build a fake human or something?” “That’s exactly what we’re going to do, Simon.” The trace of a smile in Oliver’s voice now. Red bet he somehow thought it was all his idea, even though it was Reyna, Maddy and Simon who’d reasoned it out. “Red,” he said then, like he’d read her thoughts. “Can you hit the lights.” She stepped toward the refrigerator and reached up to click the lights back on. Even on their lowest setting, the brightness of the dim overhead lights

made her eyes water, rebuilding the RV and the six of them from the darkness. Maddy squinted at Red, a nod to ask if she was okay. Red nodded back. “And what are we going to build a fake human out of?” Reyna asked now, not disguising the doubt in her voice. “Well, we already have that closet door.” Oliver gestured back to his shield. “That could be the body, if we put one of my hoodies over it.” “The mop!” Simon said, louder than he needed to. “We snap it in half and those could be arms, inside the sleeves.” Oliver nodded, considering it. “Oh,” Maddy interjected. “I have a beach ball in my suitcase. Not blown up yet, but that could be the head, right?” “That could work,” Oliver said. No, it couldn’t, what were they all talking about? Even on her worst day, Red didn’t look like a closet door with stick mop-arms and a giant beach ball head. The shooter would never believe it was one of them; he had a telescopic sight mounted to his rifle. But she didn’t say anything. How could she say anything? That was part of the plan. Red looked over at Arthur and Reyna. They were silent, like her. Oliver clapped and, my god, he had to stop doing that. “Right, Maddy, can you go grab one of my hoodies? The green one. Reyna, grab that mop. Simon, bring the duct tape.” “Red, come with me,” Maddy said, pulling on Red’s sleeve. She didn’t want to walk into the back bedroom on her own. And, sure, because even though this RV was thirty-one feet, Red had been in the same ten feet for far too long. She followed Maddy, past the kitchen and the bunks, through the open door into the back bedroom. Maddy flicked on the light. The black-and-white patterned sheets on the bed were crumpled under the weight of a blue suitcase. “That must be Reyna’s,” Maddy said, walking past the foot of the bed to the large closet along the back right, as they faced it.

“This isn’t going to work,” Red said, now that it was just the two of them and Oliver couldn’t hear. “This plan. The shooter will never believe it’s a person.” “He might,” Maddy said, reaching for the handle and pulling the closet open. There was a long mirror on the inside of the door. Red hadn’t known it was there. She flinched as it doubled the people in the room, catching eyes with herself over Maddy’s shoulder. “Would you think closet-beach-ball-mop-man was real if you saw him out and about?” she asked, looking at Maddy’s reflection. “I might, at a quick glance.” “Why don’t you just ask him out while you’re at it? You’d have cute kids.” Red made a face at her in the mirror, eyes wide and nostrils flared, wrinkles disappearing the freckles on her nose. Mom used to pull that same face at her, in the mirror opposite their kitchen table, making Red laugh over sugarcoated cornflakes. Red pushed the memory away. It wasn’t Mom in the mirror, it was her and Maddy, and that didn’t help anybody. It never did. Put her away. Red needed to focus on tonight, on the people still here, not the ones who were gone and never coming back. Maddy bent low, back to her, blocking the view. But in the mirror, Red could see Maddy’s double, rifling through Oliver’s open suitcase on the floor of the closet. Two Maddys, two Reds. Wait a second. “The mirror,” Red said quietly, not sure yet, the idea still forming. “Can’t we use the mirror to make a double of one of us? A reflection.” She tried to imagine it in her head, placing the mirror at the door of the RV, re-creating the angles. She couldn’t quite get there on her own, not all the way. “At the door. Can’t we…” She trailed off, but Maddy’s reflection had straightened up now, staring her dead in the eye. “That’s brilliant,” she said.

Brilliant. Not a word people often used about Red or her ideas. She felt heat rise to her cheeks, but it wasn’t a bad feeling like it normally was. “Good job, Red.” Maddy sounded so much like her mom when she said that. “Guys!” she shouted now, turning away from the mirror so Red could see her real face. “Scratch the fake human plan, the sniper will never believe it. We’ve got a better idea!” “What?” Oliver’s and Reyna’s voices called in unison. “But we’ve already started building Larry,” Simon followed up. “There’s a full-length mirror in here,” Maddy called as Oliver approached down the hall. “We put this by the door, at the right angle, he’ll think he’s shooting at one of us, but it will just be our reflection.” Maddy put it better than Red could have. Oliver caught sight of himself in the mirror, above Red’s head. She turned to see the real him, a light growing behind his eyes. He smiled. “Yes. Yes, that could work. It will work. That’s the new plan.” He stepped forward, past Red, narrowing his eyes as he studied the mirror, flicking to the small black framing on each corner. “What’s it attached with? Just those screws? We’ll get that down, easy. Simon, can you pass the screwdriver!”

A clattering sound from the front of the RV, Simon’s voice calling: “Coming, boss.” Oliver looked down at his sister. “Well done, Maddy. Really good idea.” “Well, actually—” Maddy began. “—Mom will be proud of you,” Oliver continued, patting her on the shoulder. “When we get out of here, she’ll be so proud of you. That’s a Lavoy plan if ever I heard one.” Maddy dropped her eyes, chewing on her bottom lip. Red watched her, a tightening in her chest, shifting with her ribs. “Thanks,” Maddy said, quietly. Nothing more. Red didn’t mind, though, or maybe she did. What was that too-full feeling at the back of her throat, then? Or that hollow one in her gut? It was fine. Maddy could have that plan, if it would make her mom proud. Red had her own. “Special delivery,” Simon said, jogging up the length of the RV, screwdriver held out in front of him. “Excuse me,” Red said, shuffling past Simon as he reached the bedroom, Reyna walking in behind him. A look passed between them, Reyna and Red, as they converged. Red wasn’t sure what it meant but she returned it anyway. “You okay, Red?” Arthur asked, standing in the kitchen. Red joined him, leaning back against the counter, arms hugged around her ribs, to protect them. “Just dandy,” she said. “So,” he said, nodding his head back the way she’d just come. “Using a mirror to reflect one of us to bait a shot,” he summarized, again, better than Red ever could. “That’s smart,” he added. “The Lavoys are very smart,” Red said. “Want to know a secret?” Arthur said, his voice dipping into whispers, eyes flashing from behind his glasses. “I think you’re smarter.” Red smiled in spite of herself. Had he been listening to her and Maddy in the bedroom? Or was he just trying to be nice? Smart. Another word Red didn’t belong in a sentence with. She had potential, though, remember. Had it, but didn’t use it, that was why people said it.

“I think you’re wrong,” she said, voice flat, barricade up. “I think you’re lying,” Arthur retorted, knocking away at it. She looked up at him, that same drunk-warm feeling behind her eyes. Why was he so kind to her? And why did that make her want to be un-kinder back? Because she didn’t deserve it, that was why. She was just Red. Just Red and Just Arthur, and they should probably just stay that way, because she didn’t know how to be somebody’s someone. “That’s okay,” Arthur said, like he could read the thoughts racing behind her eyes. But he couldn’t, he didn’t know what lived back there, in her head. “Your secret is safe with me. It always is.” “I don’t have secrets.” She hid behind a smile again. Oh, stop it, grinning like an idiot. “International spy?” Arthur asked. “I wish.” “Your real name is Agatha?” “Only if yours is Edgar.” “Secret frog-racing champion?” “You got me,” she said. “Nice.” He smiled too, but he didn’t grin like an idiot. He wore it better. “I won’t tell anyone, promise.” “Won’t tell anyone what?” Simon said, walking down the corridor, knocking into the wall on one side and the bunks on the other. How did he seem more drunk again? “Red’s big secret,” Arthur replied. “Right, move, move, move,” Oliver raised his voice as he walked backward, carrying one end of the mirror, Reyna on the other side. They scattered, out of the way, Red moving over to the sofa and dropping down. It was nice to sit, her legs bone-tired. But she knew it wouldn’t last long. The purple plastic mop was lying in front of her, already snapped in half, the mopping end removed. Oliver and Reyna gently lowered the mirror down, close to the front door, Oliver wrapping one arm around it to take its weight.

“Let’s think this through,” he said, motioning with his head for them all to gather around. See, not long at all. Red stood up, Simon on one side, Maddy on the other, the three of them repeated again in the mirror. “Right, so if someone is standing there”—Oliver motioned to the gap in front of the closet, now missing its door—“they aren’t in the line of fire, they’re protected by the wall of the RV. And if the mirror is in front of the door, angled that way, the sniper will see their reflection, right?” “Science, bitch!” Simon erupted then. “Simon,” Maddy warned. “Sorry,” he sniffed. “But we’re in an RV. I was going to have to say it one time. Think I’d rather be cooking meth, though. Less risky.” Oliver shot him a look, hardening his eyes. “Sorry.” “Yes, that works,” Reyna said, walking around to the front side of the mirror. “But only if the sniper is somewhere in this direction.” She held out both arms in a wedge, a quarter circle, one arm facing straight out through the door, the other toward the back of the RV. “If he’s this way”—she gestured out through the front right of the RV—“he won’t see the reflection. And that’s if he’s even on this side at all.” “Well, of course this only works if he’s on this side,” Oliver said. “We’ll have to repeat it in one of the windows on the other side if it doesn’t work.” Reyna didn’t listen to him, continuing with her own thought trail. “If there was a way to pivot the mirror quickly, and someone else could be standing here”—she gestured to the small gap between the sofa and the front door —“then their reflection could be seen this way.” She held out her arms again, another quarter circle. “And we’d cover this whole side.” Oliver nodded. “Right, okay. How do we pivot the mirror? And, saying that, how do we hold the mirror up? No one can be standing behind or beside it; they’d get hit.” Simon darted forward, scooping up the broken mop from the floor, holding up Larry’s arms. “Could we attach these, as handles? Got a whole roll of duct tape.”

Oliver snapped his fingers at him. “Yes. You get started on that. I want one on either side, at the top corners. Wrap the tape all the way around multiple times so it’s really secure. And use some extra tape to lengthen the handles; we want them as long as possible so no one has to stand in the line of fire. Reyna, maybe you should help,” he added, watching Simon struggle to find the end of the duct tape. Reyna slid the broken mop handles out from under Simon’s arm, and Maddy stepped forward to relieve him of the tape. They got to work, the duct tape droning like an angry wasp as Maddy pulled lengths and lengths from the roll. “Wouldn’t we need to slide the mirror over too, Reyna?” Oliver said. “Like a foot or so, to get the correct angle.” Reyna looked down, studying the floor for a moment as she held up one handle for Maddy to tape. “Yeah,” she said. “Because in its first position, the mirror needs to be slightly off-center, to the left to catch the person standing there.” “Thought so.” Oliver nodded to himself. “We need to put the mirror on something then, something that slides easily. Oh.” He gestured for Arthur to step forward and hold the mirror, moving away to the front of the RV and the abandoned closet door still resting against the dashboard. “This,” he hissed, bringing it over. That won’t slide easily, Red thought. “That won’t slide easily,” Arthur said. “Easier than the mirror against the ground,” Oliver countered. “You almost need something round under it.” Arthur hugged the mirror. “So that it rolls, like a skateboard.” “Good idea,” Reyna said, testing how secure the first handle was. Everyone had good ideas—not Red, though. She stood back, useless, unused. She hoped the others didn’t think she was doing it intentionally. She couldn’t even think of anything round, everything that popped into her head was full of sharp edges. Including that fucking pattern in that fucking curtain. “I got it!” Simon shouted, too loud, darting behind the mirror to the refrigerator. He opened it and came back with his hands full. A can of beer

clenched in both fists. He held them out to Oliver. “That works,” Oliver said. “Grab four more.” Simon grinned, disappearing behind the refrigerator door again. “See,” he muttered, “this is why it’s stupid that they tell teenagers not to drink. Drinking saves lives.” That hadn’t worked with Red’s dad, though, had it? Taking whatever life he’d had left after Mom. Simon passed the rest over, and Oliver placed the beer cans down on their sides, a few feet in front of the entrance, spacing them equally. Picking up the closet door again, he placed it on top of the cans, parallel to the front door. Sliding it forward and back for good measure, nodding to himself. “We’re done too,” Reyna said, not holding on to the mirror anymore, just the handle that side, Maddy on the other, testing it. Reams and reams of duct tape were wrapped around the top of the mirror and the purple plastic, binding them together. It was ugly, but it worked. “Yeah, it will stay up,” Reyna said needlessly. “All right, let’s put it on the door, then. In its first position.” Oliver picked the mirror up by its middle. He turned on his heels and shifted his arms, carefully balancing the mirror on the center of the closet door, pointing at a diagonal, at the space between the closet and the front door. “Simon, stand there, will you?” he asked. Simon did, commenting, “Handsome as ever,” as he stared at his reflection. “Reyna, will you hold that side?” Oliver said, taking the purple handle on the right while she took the one on the left. They fiddled for a moment, making sure the mirror stood up straight. “Maddy, stand by the front door for a second.” She did, winding around Red on her way. She pressed against the door, standing as far back as she could. “What do you see?” Oliver asked her. “I see Simon,” she said, trying not to react as Simon winked at her through the mirror. “Okay, now Arthur stand there, by the sofa.”

Arthur shuffled sideways into the gap. “Okay, so let’s see.” Oliver used his foot, pushing the closet door several inches toward Reyna, the mirror moving with it, one beer can rolling free. “Now, Reyna, pull your handle forward while I pull mine back.” The bottom of the mirror protested, scraping against the door, but it shifted into its new angle. “And now what do you see, Maddy?” “Arthur,” she said, which, judging by her brother’s reaction, was the correct answer. “Okay,” he said. “It’s clumsy, but it works. Arthur, can you come hold this?” Arthur stepped forward, taking the handle from Oliver, the mirror tipping forward as it passed hands. “The only problem is,” Oliver continued, both hands free now, one moving to his chin, “I think the two people being the reflections also have to control the mirror. There’s no space for anyone else, and the rest of us need to be at the windows, recording to find the muzzle flash when he shoots. So, which two are going to be our reflections?” The room was silent, only the fizz of static to mark the passing seconds by. “Well, it can’t be Maddy or me,” Oliver said, gaze moving across them all. “We’re the ones he’s holding hostage. He won’t take a shot at either of us.” Arthur cleared his throat. “The sniper never actually said that.” “No, but he wouldn’t, would he?” Arthur didn’t seem to have an answer for that one. Well, that left all the non-Lavoys, then. What else had Red expected? “Simon, Arthur, it should be you two,” Oliver said, brows drawing low, darkening his eyes with shadows. “Why me?” Simon glared back. “Who died and left you in charge?” “You really want to make Reyna and Red do it?” Oliver replied. “Besides, you’re the actor here, aren’t you?” Simon shrugged. “Act like it, then.” Oliver looked over his shoulder at Arthur, checking to see if he had any complaints. Arthur nodded his head, just once, chewing on the inside of his

cheek. He would do it. “Right, okay, Simon, you’re there by the closet, Arthur by the sofa. Take the handle, Simon, there we go, let’s practice this a couple of times. So Arthur, I think you’ll have to open the door, push it hard so it opens the whole way. And then once it’s done, Simon you’ll have to close it.” Simon coughed. “How am I going to close the door without walking down the steps right into his line of sight?” Oliver faltered, a good point there. “Rope,” Red said quietly, a stupid suggestion really because they didn’t have any. “We can make one out of clothes,” Maddy added, and now it made sense. “There’s some sweatshirts in the top of my bag,” Arthur said. “You can use those. On my bunk.” “Okay,” Red said, Maddy giving her the go-ahead eyes. She walked around the mirror contraption, past the kitchen to the bunks. She stepped one foot up on the bottom bunk to reach Arthur’s bag, sitting there on the empty plastic frame of his bed. “Right,” Oliver was saying behind her. “Let’s reset the mirror into its first position here and run it a couple of times so you know what you’re doing.” Red unzipped the bag, spreading the two canvas sides. Arthur had folded his clothes, not quite as neat as Maddy, and not quite as strict. “So the door opens,” Oliver continued. “We leave it a few seconds on Simon. Arthur, I think you can hold the mirror on your own now, so Simon can step into view. Simon, make it look like you’re walking down the steps or something, don’t just stand there.” “Walking, walking,” Simon replied angrily, the sound of his sneakers stomping on the floor. There were a few baseball shirts at the top of one of Arthur’s piles, more blues, more grays, one dark red. Red pulled out three of them, studied the lengths across the sleeves, and then grabbed one more to be sure. She stepped down, the shirts bundled in her arms. They smelled clean, and yet somehow they still smelled like him. The same as the hoodie he’d let her borrow after New Year’s Eve when he dropped her home. She’d slept in it

that night, under her coat, and in the morning it only smelled like her. Arthur had never asked for it back. Maybe he was used to losing things too. Red walked over to the dining table, Maddy joining her there, picking up the first shirt. “Now, Arthur, kick the door across. About eight inches, I think. Whoa, stop, that’s it.” Red picked up two of Arthur’s shirts by their sleeves, knotting them together at the ends and pulling them tight. “Arthur, you pull the handle back, Simon, grab yours, pull it forward. Yes. Now, Arthur, get back in position, Simon can hold the mirror now.” Maddy took Red’s shirts, tying them to the two of hers and stretching the jumble out to its full width. “Rope,” she said, a pinch at the corners of her eyes, the face she made when she said sorry. Not about the rope, Red knew, about the mirror plan. “It’s fine,” Red told her. “I don’t care.” “How did it look, Reyna?” Oliver asked. Red looked up to see Reyna shooting a thumbs-up from the front door. “You done with the rope?” Oliver’s eyes were on them. Maddy jumped up with it, hurrying over to tie it to the metal handle on the inside of the front door. Double knot. Then passing the other end to Simon, who was shaking his head for some reason. “Okay, let’s get this over with. We need to leave the lights on this time, so the sniper can see the reflection. Red, you take the window behind the sofa, this corner, point your phone in a diagonal toward the back of the RV.” Red followed the order, phone ready in her hand, resting one knee on the sofa, just a few inches behind Arthur. “Maddy, take the same window, the other end, but point your phone straight forward.” The sofa sank as Maddy planted both knees on the other end, glancing at Red. “Reyna, the passenger-side window, aiming your phone diagonally to the front. And I’ll take the rearview camera again.”

He walked over to the dashboard behind Reyna, dropping to his knees, head lowered to the screen. Red watched him and something stirred in her head, switching Oliver out with someone else. Didn’t he know people sometimes died like that, on their knees? “Press record,” he said. Red thumbed the red button on her screen. The birdsong high-pitched beeps from her phone, answered by Maddy’s, then Reyna’s. “Get into position.” Red pulled the bottom corner of the mattress up, sliding the hand with the phone through to the unknown outside, her wrist pressing against a shard of broken glass, but there was nothing she could do about it. She pointed her phone in the right direction and looked away, eyes on the back of Arthur’s head. Red held her breath, counting the seconds. “Is everyone ready?”

“NOW!” “Wait!” Arthur shouted back, shifting his position, wiping his spare hand down the front of his jeans. “Arthur, now!” Oliver screamed. “Open the door!” “Fuck!” Arthur reached forward, slamming his hand down on the handle and pushing hard. The door to the RV swung open, the darkness waiting for them there, gaping and black. It must be a rectangle of light, looking from the other side. Simon raised his knees like he was running, hurrying down the steps, his teeth gritted, eyes wild and afraid and— Crack. The mirror shattered. “Fuck!” Arthur screamed as the mirror jumped out of his hands, crashing back against the counter. “Close the door!” Oliver’s frantic voice filled Red’s ears. “Simon, pull the rope!” Simon scrabbled with it, the rope almost sliding through his hands. He fell back against the closet and he pulled.

The door slammed shut with a thump, lock clicking into place, sealing them inside once more. “Holy fuck!” Simon said, sinking to the floor, laughing or crying Red couldn’t quite tell. “We did it.” Arthur was bent double, breathing hard. His hands were pressed against his thighs, head hanging upside down. Was he all right? “Who’s got it?” Oliver was standing now. “He shot! Who got the muzzle flash on their phone?” Red pulled hers inside, slotting the mattress back into position. There was a bead of blood there on the see-through skin of her wrist, where the glass had pierced through. Her very own red dot. She stopped the recording, phone twittering at her, the same sound from Maddy and Reyna. She navigated to the video file and pressed play. “Get into—” “—Get into posi—” “—Get into position,” Oliver’s voice said three times, overlapping. Reyna’s video was playing half a second before hers, Maddy’s just after. The sound of Red’s breath from the speaker at the bottom of her phone. Rustling as the image on-screen went from light to pitch-black, inside to out. “Is every—” “—Is everyone r—” “—Is everyone ready?” Red brought the screen closer, studying the pixelated darkness. “N—” “—NOW—” “—NOW!” Red didn’t blink. “Wai—” “—Wait—” “—Wait!” The three layers of Arthur’s voice in a frenetic rush, splicing together. “Arthur—” “—Arthur, now—”

“—Arthur, now! Open the door!” “Fu—” “—Fuck—” “—Fuck!” The Arthur from here and now turned; Red felt his eyes on her, but she didn’t look away from the screen because it was coming, it was— Cr— —Cra— —Crack. A tiny flash of light in all that black as the three shots split the air. But it had only been one, and she had it, right here. Red had it. She paused the video, spooled it back. “I’ve got it,” she said, looking up at Arthur. His eyes looked drawn, mouth tight. “I’ve got it.” Louder now. “Let me see.” Oliver rushed over, leaning to watch behind her shoulder. “Play it again.” Red pressed the play button. “Fuck!” Arthur’s voice said one more time. “It’s there,” Red said. “Wait one second.” Crack. A pinprick flash of white light in the dark background of her screen. Small, tiny. Like the little firework in her head. She dragged back through the frames again to play it one more time. There, a quick burst of light, just right of the center. The muscles in Oliver’s mouth twitched. “Which way were you pointing the phone, Red? Exactly.” His eyes fixed on hers, so hard that she had to look away, and yet she could still feel them when she blinked, like they’d marked her. “This way.” Red pointed at a diagonal, out to the right toward the back of the RV. Oliver straightened up, his eyes following the direction of her arm. “So, he’s over there still,” he said. “Hard to say, but maybe a few hundred yards that way. Likely where he was when he first shot out the tires and the

windows. He must have gone back to the same position after planting the walkie-talkie.” The walkie-talkie fizzed, hissing in silent agreement. Red was surprised, almost, that the sniper had nothing to say after what just happened. The muscles in Oliver’s mouth shuddered again, but this time they broke into a wide smile that cracked his face in two. “We did it, guys,” he said, looking around. The others didn’t react. “I said we did it!” Oliver laughed, hitting Red on the shoulder, moving to do the same to Arthur. Arthur still didn’t look right, eyes unfocused, picking at the pocket of his jeans. He was a fiddler, like Red, but maybe only when he was nervous, scared. Simon still didn’t look right either, puddled there on the floor, legs outstretched among large shards of broken mirror, staring up at the ceiling, breath heavy in his chest. “Come on, guys! We did it, we’re getting out of here. Alive!” Oliver pulled Reyna into a hug, burying a kiss in her thick black hair. He wrapped an arm around Maddy and then offered a hand to Simon, to pull him up off the floor. Maddy was smiling now, hugging her own arms. “Woohoo, spring break!” Simon said again, stumbling to his feet. Oliver stood in the middle, grinning at them all. Delegate. Motivate. Celebrate. All the qualities of a natural leader, which made Red more than an unnatural one. Oliver clapped his hands, somewhere between an applause and to get their attention. He already had it. “Right, the sniper is back that way.” He pointed. “So, if we climb out the driver’s-side window and run in that direction”—he pointed with the other arm, the exact opposite way—“the sniper won’t see us, because the RV will cover us. He won’t even know we’re gone. He won’t. And even if he does, he’s not going to be able to catch us. We have a head start, and he’s carrying a rifle.” “You can’t shoot a rifle like that while running,” Red agreed. “We did it,” Reyna said now, nodding, like she could only believe it if she heard it out of her own mouth.

“Fuck yeah we did!” Simon answered, a fist raised as pieces of mirror crunched under his shoes. “Although that’s seven years’ bad luck, isn’t it? Broken mirror?” “Well, it’s good luck for us now,” Maddy replied. Behind Simon, there was a splintered hole in the wooden base of the dining booth, where the bullet had struck through after the mirror, probably out the other side of the RV back into the dark night. Through glass and wood and wood and plastic and metal. Skin and bone would be nothing in its path. “Right then.” Oliver rubbed his hands together, the sound grating. “Let’s get the fuck out of this RV! Don’t bring anything with you. Just essentials. Just your phones. Hopefully we will run into some service at some point so we can call the police to catch this fucker before he runs off. And call our mom to let her know we escaped.” Would Catherine have given up the name they were looking for by now, Red wondered, mind already leaving the RV, skipping away to the next part. Her ears fizzed, but was that just the static? “Shall we take this?” she asked, stepping across the broken mirror to grab the walkie-talkie from the table. “No, leave it,” Oliver said, looking over his shoulder. “We don’t need it. We’re not playing his game anymore.” He walked over to the driver’s seat, leaning across it to rip off the duct tape securing Red’s gutted suitcase across the window. With one hard jerk he pulled it all down, dropping it in the footwell. He ripped the curtains aside, baring the pitch black of outside, waiting for them with open arms. One windowpane was already open, smashed to pieces, but Oliver flicked the catch and slid the other panel across, uncovering that side instead. Easier to climb out of when standing on the driver’s seat. “Will be a bit tight,” Oliver observed, rolling his shoulders. “Everyone got their phones? Yes? Okay.” He stood up on the driver’s seat, ducking as his head grazed the ceiling. “I’ll go first. Then Maddy, then Reyna, Red, Arthur, Simon.” He looked at them in order. “Get in line, get ready. No flashlights on yet, we don’t want him to be able to see anything. You drop down and just

run as fast as you can in this direction.” He pointed out beyond the driver’s- side mirror. “Through the trees there. Keep going, don’t wait for anyone. We’ll regroup on that road and then get the fuck out of here. Got it?” Red nodded, taking her place between Reyna and Arthur, Maddy shuffling to the front. Lavoys first. “I tell you what,” Simon said, from the back of the line. “I never want to see another fucking RV again as long as I live.” “Tell me about it,” Reyna sniffed, almost a laugh. Fiddling, nervous energy, in front and behind Red. “I’m going,” Oliver said, bending down and lowering one leg out the window, coming to sit on the frame, exactly halfway inside and halfway outside. He dipped his head under and out. The static cut off, silence taking its place. Before: “Hello.” The voice crackled to life behind them. Oliver paused, looking back inside the RV, listening. “Cute trick with the mirror,” it said, a bark of laughter in his dark, metallic voice. “But there’s one thing I should tell you before you make the mistake of climbing out that driver’s-side window, Oliver. I probably should have told you sooner, that’s my fault.” Static. Red’s chest constricted, ribs folding in one by one like fingers as she turned to look back at the walkie-talkie, glaring at them from where she’d left it on the table. Her eyes crossed each other, the bright green display doubling itself, filling her head. “How could he—” Reyna began. “Oliver, don’t move!” Maddy shouted as he shifted out there on the window frame, staring down at the road just below him. Silence, prickly and heavy. “I should have told you,” the voice cut back in, sputtering at the edges. “There are two of us.”

One gasp. One scream. One hitch in Red’s chest. There were two of them out there, in the wide-open nothing. Two of them. Two guns. Two red dots. No, this couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t supposed to happen. “Get back inside, Oliver!” Reyna was screaming now. “Get in!” A race between her voice and a finger on a trigger. Oliver tucked his head and rolled back inside, falling against Maddy on the driver’s seat, and Reyna just behind. Reyna stumbled, pushing into Red. She tripped over Arthur’s feet but he caught her, arms under hers, solid and strong. “Close the curtains,” Reyna was still screaming, the sound cutting through Red. “Close them!” Oliver righted himself, reaching up and snatching at the curtains, pulling them together. No gap. Shutting the outside away, splitting them into two separate worlds again: the RV and out there. Only a border of thin black material between them. “It’s not fair,” Maddy cried, mouth bared, eyes clouded. “We were almost out. We were almost free.” Fat tears broke away, rolling to her chin.

“FUCK!” Oliver roared, tendons sticking out across the length of his neck, red and raw, like the puppet strings that worked his head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He beat his fists against the steering wheel, against the dashboard, over and over. “Oliver, stop!” Reyna lurched forward to take his hands away from him, holding them to her chest. “That doesn’t help anyone.” “Two of them.” Simon walked backward over a large shard of mirror, doubling the sole of his shoe before it cracked. “Two fucking snipers. You know what this night didn’t need?” he called. “Another fucking sniper!” Oliver was standing again, pushing Reyna out of his way as he stormed through. One of his feet caught on a can of beer, sending it spinning. He roared again, an ugly, scratching sound, as he bent down and wrapped his hands around the closet door. He lifted it up and smashed it back down, the wood splintering, a clean break, clattering back down in two unequal halves. “Oliver, stop!” Maddy cried. “You’re scaring me!” “I’m scaring you?!” He rounded on her, eyes wild, a fleck of spit foaming in the corner of his mouth. “It’s not me you should be scared of right now, Madeline. It’s the men with the fucking guns!” “Oliver, please.” Reyna pushed him toward the booth, the side not blocked by the broken mirror. “Please just sit down and calm down.” “We were out,” he said to himself, sliding his legs under the dining table, staring at the walkie-talkie. “We were out. I was so close.” Red’s eyes shifted to Arthur as he dropped back against the sofa, his eyes on her but not here at all, glazed, far away. His head fell to his hands and he buried his face in them, whitening halos of skin where his fingers pressed in. Red reached, stretching out her fingers, each one too aware of itself and of what she was making them do. She rested her hand on Arthur’s head just for a moment, near the back of his neck. Mom used to do that to her when she was upset, and Red didn’t even realize until right now that she missed it. She shouldn’t think of her, why did she keep thinking of her tonight? Arthur glanced up, her hand sliding off. He caught it in one of his waiting hands, squeezed, his fingers warm against the cool of her knuckles.

Too much. Red’s arm dropped to her side. She looked around at all of them, at their faces, and there was something new in the air of the RV. Not fear or confusion, they’d had plenty of those. It was despair, plain as she’d ever seen it. And she was an expert in despair. Reyna was the first to come through it, bending to her knees to pick up the shattered halves of the closet door. “What are you doing?” Oliver asked her sharply, his finger balanced on the antenna of the walkie-talkie. “I’m cleaning up,” Reyna said, carrying the pieces of wood toward the back bedroom. “Looks like we’re going to be here awhile.” Red watched her as she crossed the threshold into the bedroom, chucking the broken door into the gap on the far side of the bed. She returned, making a start on the mirror. “Maddy?” she asked, gently. “Can you please help me with this? Pick up those larger shards and put them in the trash?” “Sure.” Maddy sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “We’re never getting out of here.” Simon slid down on the sofa, next to Arthur. “This is the worst day of my life.” It wasn’t Red’s, though, was it? No, she didn’t think so, she’d never replace hers. February 6, 2017. It wasn’t enough just to lose her mom that way, was it? No, there had to be that last phone call too, still hurting from their argument in the kitchen the day before, about Red not concentrating in school, about her grades slipping. Mom called the home phone at 7:06 p.m., to say she’d be late for dinner. Red was the one who picked up. Red didn’t want to talk to her. Fine, she’d replied, thinking Good instead. Maybe she could go to bed without even seeing her mom tonight, without restarting the fight. But Red restarted it then, she couldn’t help it, bristling when her mom called her sweetie. “Don’t call me that. I thought I was a disappointment.” Mom never said that, she wouldn’t. Red was putting words in her mouth. They’d talk about it when Mom got home, that was what she said. But her voice wasn’t normal, and Red thought she must still be angry at her.

Disappointed. Did part of her wish Red had never been born? Something interrupted them, a two-tone sound, trilling somewhere in the background behind her mom. A doorbell. Twice. “Hello,” her mom said to someone else, not Red, because she could never just concentrate on Red for one fucking second, could she? Couldn’t turn the police captain off and just be Mom. That wasn’t fair but Red hadn’t felt like being fair. “Sweetie. Before I go, I need to ask you something. Can you tell Dad to —” And then it came, the worst part. “No,” Red cut her off. “Stop telling me what to do all the time.” And worse still. “I hate you.” Red hung up the phone, cutting off her mom’s voice as she repeated her name. And guess what? Mom was dead within ten minutes of that phone call. “Red?” Oliver said, saving her from the memory, but not from the guilt. That always stayed. She looked up, just as Oliver reached her, dropping the walkie-talkie into her hand. “Keep cycling through the channels, looking for interference. It’s the only plan we have left now,” he said, darkly, turning away. Back to hoping for outside help, because the escape plan had gone out the window, which was a funny way to think of it because that was exactly what the plan had been. Red pushed the + button, skipping to the empty static of channel four, then five. Channel six. She stopped, waiting there. Mom’s channel, from their Cops and Cops game. Stop it, stop thinking about her, Red had no right to be thinking about her. It was her fault Mom was dead, and nothing would fix that, not even the plan. What was it, what was it Mom needed Red to tell her dad? They’d never know, but maybe it would have saved her. It would have saved her and Red said no. Red hung up. Mom was killed, executed, and it was Red’s fault. Only her fault, because the police never found out who shot

her. Twice. In the back of the head. On her knees. Thinking about how her daughter hated her and how she hated her back just as hard. Up and up through the channels, the walkie-talkie fizzing in her hands, holding it too tight. Reyna and Maddy had finished clearing up the broken mirror, and now Reyna was in the kitchen, taking down six glasses from the cupboard. She filled them with water, one after the other, the running faucet filling the RV with a new kind of music, blocking the static for a few moments. “Here.” She passed one glass to Maddy, and another to Oliver at the table, sliding it over. “We need to stay hydrated, it’s been a long night already.” The next two to Arthur and Simon, who needed it most. The last one to Red, a defeated smile on Reyna’s face as Red’s fingers cupped the glass. “Thank you,” Red said, taking a sip, and then a long draw, raising the glass, eyes on the overhead lights. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was, and something else too, that yawning feeling back in her gut. Hungry, again. But she couldn’t eat. She drained the rest of the water and came up for air. They couldn’t escape. So, what were they going to do now? Red couldn’t remember exactly—what was it the sniper had said about that secret he wanted? Would they just wait here, trapped, until Catherine Lavoy gave up the name? She looked to Oliver; he should know what to do, he was the leader. “We’re fucked,” Oliver was saying, speaking into his half-empty glass, lending his voice a hollow echo. “We’re completely fucked.” Or maybe not. Arthur took Red’s empty glass from her, carrying it back to the counter with his. Two dull thuds as he placed them down. And there must have been something wrong with Red’s ears, because now she was hearing an echo of those too, which couldn’t be right. Arthur sighed. “Maybe we should think about the se—” he began. “Shh,” Oliver spat, holding his arms up to silence them all. “I can hear something. I hear…” He drew off, tilting his head to raise one ear.

Red heard it too, a low, clicking, rumbling sound. It was growing, growing, overtaking the static. “What is…” Maddy’s voice faded with one sharp look from her brother. Red looked up, ears straining beyond the ceiling. It was coming from up there, from the sky. “It’s a helicopter,” Oliver said, jumping up from his seat. “It’s a helicopter!” Moving closer and closer, like a mechanical roar of thunder. They couldn’t see it, but they could hear it. “It’s getting nearer!” Oliver shouted, his eyes glittering, replacing the despair. “We have to signal it somehow. Let them know we need help!” “The horn!” Maddy said. “They won’t hear that,” Reyna told her. “The lights!” Simon crashed up to his feet. “We can signal SOS, I know how to do it.” He jumped across to the light panel, flicking the main switch off and then on again in three short bursts. “They won’t see, the windows are covered!” Reyna shook her head, looking around frantically. The helicopter must be right above them now, the mechanical drone slicing through the sky. “Headlights,” Red said. “Headlights!” Maddy screamed. “Simon, go, go, go!” Simon sprinted to the front of the RV, crashing into the driver’s seat as he launched himself into it. Red stood behind him, one hand gripping the passenger seat, the other wrapped hard around the walkie-talkie, the edges biting into her skin. Simon reached for the lever behind the steering wheel and flicked the headlights on. A glow filled the covered windshield, around the edges of the pulled-down shade. “Dot-dot-dot,” Simon muttered to himself and he flicked the lever three times quickly. “Dash-dash-dash.” He moved the control, leaving the high beams on for a longer stretch between the darkness. “Dot-dot-dot.”

“Keep going,” Oliver ordered him, leaning past the driver’s seat, pulling the shade up so they could see the high beams through the windshield, carving up the night. The motorized whine of the helicopter was fading, moving away from them into other skies. “It’s leaving,” Reyna said, the urgency all but gone from her voice. “Keep going, Simon!” But not from Oliver’s. The headlights flicked off and on, following the pattern as Simon whispered it to himself. “Dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot.” Save our souls. Save us. Please save us. Headlights on, headlights off. An idea stolen from another memory. Red’s mom used to flash the headlights when she got home from work late, into the windows of the living room. She didn’t, though, on the night it mattered most. Red was waiting, angry and hurt, but she was waiting all the same. “It’s leaving, Oliver,” Reyna said, placing one hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. “Keep going!” Simon flicked the lever, back and forward, the world in front of them flickering in and out of existence as the headlights flashed. And Red too, flickering between here and then. In seconds, the sound faded to a low drone, then a faint hum, until the night swallowed it whole, leaving not a trace behind. “Gone,” Red said. Simon let the headlights click off, sitting back in his seat. He exhaled, long and hard. “Maybe it will come back,” Maddy said, looking at the back of Oliver’s head. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was a rescue helicopter for us.” That was when Red knew for certain that she and Oliver Lavoy did not live in the same world. She could never hear a helicopter and think it was sent for her. No one loved her enough for that.

“Nobody knows to rescue us,” Arthur said, looking up at the ceiling as though he could summon it back with the pull of his eyes. “My mom, maybe.” Oliver’s voice almost failed him. “I think it was just passing over,” Reyna added, her hand moving to Oliver’s shoulder, staying there this time. “Maybe they saw. Maybe they saw the headlights,” he continued. “Maybe,” she said, gently. “How do you know Morse code?” Arthur was looking at Simon now. “I mean I don’t, obviously,” he replied. “Just SOS. I got it from a film. Panic Room, I think it was.” “Red, keep going.” Oliver turned back to her, mouth tensed in a grim line. If she was their only hope, then the rest of them really were fucked. Red wasn’t getting them out of here. She raised the walkie-talkie and started skipping through the empty channels again. Oliver sighed, rallying himself, shaking out his shoulders. Red was watching, saw the exact moment an idea hit him, lighting up his eyes. “Maybe it wasn’t all for nothing,” he said. “Maybe there’s an idea in there, to make some kind of light signal. Here.” He darted forward, snatching his Zippo lighter up from the resource pile on the table. “He shot out the tank and the gas has leaked all over the road, right?” “Right,” Maddy answered. “If I light this”—he flicked up the flame to demonstrate, fire dancing in his too-wide eyes—“and I drop it out the window, it would set fire to that pool of gas. A fire. A signal fire. And maybe someone will see the smoke. Light travels farther than sound, right?” “Not in the middle of the night,” Reyna told him. “No one will see the smoke.” “And you’d set fire to the RV,” Arthur said, burying his fingers in his pocket, like he was hiding them from Oliver as he confronted him. “Burn us inside with it.” Oliver was getting desperate now, careless. Maybe Maddy was right, they should be afraid of him after all. Reyna could control him, though, couldn’t

she? Calm him down, make him see sense. “The RV is our only cover,” she said. “We can’t set fire to it.” Oliver ignored her, staring into the flame for one more second before flicking it away, dropping the lighter on the table. Simon followed him to the table, reaching over the flashlights and duct tape and masking tape and kitchen knife and scissors and lighter, past the pad of paper and pens Maddy had been using earlier, to the bag of still-open chips resting against the side. He scooped out a handful and placed them in his mouth. “How can you eat?” Maddy asked him, not really a question. “Like this,” he showed her, opening his mouth in an exaggerated chew so she could see the mulched-up orange coating his tongue. She didn’t react. “What’s our next plan?” She looked at her brother. “What do we do now?” Silence, other than the sound of static as Red skipped back to channel three and left it there. And a muted crunch from inside Simon’s mouth. “Gu-ys,” Reyna said, strangely, the word coming out in two uneven halves, like she’d had to force it through. Red glanced up. Reyna was staring past her shoulder, out the front of the RV. Something new and unknown in her eyes. “Guys!” she said in one this time. And then: “Someone’s here.” She pointed and Red whipped around, her eyes following the line of Reyna’s shaking finger. Out through the windshield into the world beyond. And there, scattered by the dark bodies of the trees up ahead, were two small lights passing through the night. Winking in and out as branches blocked the way. The lights curved around with the road, breaking free from the trees, two clean white beams, pointing right at them. Coming this way. Headlights. “Someone’s here.”

2:00 a.m.

Oliver clambered forward, the white beams reflected in the dark of his eyes as they drew closer, the sound of wheels peeling against the road. “Who is it?” he hissed. “No, it’s not more of them, is it?” Simon said, one hand up to shield his eyes. “It could be the police!” Maddy said, her hands clutched to her chest. Red looked out the windshield, unblinking, filling herself with the white light, like the night had grown its own eyes, staring back into her. “Turn on our headlights, Reyna.” Oliver pushed her toward the cockpit. “So we can see who it is.” Reyna’s hand scrabbled forward, reaching for the lever without taking her eyes off those lights. She pushed it and the RV’s headlights clicked on, clashing with the others, head to head. And now they could see what it was. Not a police squad car, but a white truck flecked with dirt, the low rumble of its engine as it rolled forward. Two figures obscured behind the windshield. It swerved, slowly, to the spare stretch of road on their right, the headlights ripping free from theirs, four distinct beams.

“Who the fuck is…” Arthur trailed off, moving forward to stand beside Reyna at the front. The truck sighed, pulling to a stop right in front of them, almost corner to corner with the RV. The engine switched off, taking the lights with it. Silence and static, and the after-tick of their engine. Now that their beams were no longer blinding her, Red could see it was a man and a woman, late sixties or early seventies she’d guess from this distance with two windshields between them. “Who are—” she began to say. The static cut away. “Get rid of them,” the voice crackled from Red’s hands. She flinched, staring down at the walkie-talkie. “You get rid of them now, or I will kill them.” Not with the sniper, then. Not part of the plan. “Do not tell them anything,” he continued, voice darker and deeper now. “Say you are fine, just broken down. If you tell them anything or signal to them in any way, I will shoot them both.” Not part of the plan at all. Red glanced up, caught Oliver’s eye, staring at her as the keeper of the voice. “They’re not with him,” Oliver said. “We can use them to get help.” “He just said not to do that,” Arthur spoke up. “He just said—” “I will kill them,” the sniper cut in, as though he had somehow heard. “If you tell them you’re in trouble, tell them anything, you will be killing them. I’ll do it.” Static. “Get rid of them or they die.” Arthur’s eyes widened, his mouth falling open in a silent word. “But—” Maddy started to say, but the rest didn’t matter, because they heard the clack of a door handle slicing through the too-quiet night. Red turned, watched the driver’s-side door of the truck fling open, waiting there as the man climbed out behind it. Fur-lined jacket zipped up to his chin, graying hair and red-dotted cheeks.

“Hello!” he called, cupping his hands around the word to protect it from the night. “You folks all right in there?” He leaned into the truck door and it slammed shut just as the other side opened. The woman stepped out, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, eyes searching, looking through the windshield. They alighted on Red and the woman smiled, raising a pale hand in a still wave. Red smiled back, with teeth, just as the voice in her hands said, “Get rid of them or they die. Open the door and tell them you’re fine.” “We have to send them away,” Arthur said, turning his eyes to the door of the RV. Oliver pulled him back. “But this could be our only chance to—” “You heard what he said.” Arthur pushed against him. “Do you want to kill these people?” “We have to do what he says.” Reyna walked over, resting one hand against Oliver’s chest. “You understand that? He’s pointing a rifle at them right now.” “Hello?” the man outside called again, boots crunching against the road as he walked over, toward the door. “Fine, go,” Oliver said, letting go of Arthur’s shirt. “Simon, you’re the actor. Act like we’re fine.” “I’m not going out and standing in that doorway.” Simon shook his head. “He already shot at me once.” “He told us we can,” Arthur said. “He won’t shoot if we’re sending them away. I’ll do it.” In one quick movement, Arthur slammed down on the handle and pushed the front door. It swung wide open. The man stood just a few feet from the door, a wrinkled smile stretching into his face, skin folding like paper. “Hello there, folks,” he said, eyes flicking up to Arthur as he dropped down the first step, then to Simon and Reyna behind, then Red. She stood back, gripping the walkie-talkie too tight between her hands, like she could make him not shoot by hiding him away. “Hello, sir,” Arthur replied, bowing his head slightly, moving down another step.

“Y’all okay?” the man asked. “We thought we saw some lights flashing from the road back there, drove around to see if anyone was in trouble.” He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Looks like you got a couple of flats there at the front.” “Yeah,” Arthur said, scratching the back of his head. “We think we drove over something, got a couple of punctures.” “Well, I’ll be,” the man said, standing back, glancing at the rear tire. “Looks like you got a third out, too.” “And I think I smell gas.” The woman stepped forward now so that she too was framed in Red’s view of the open door, blocked by Arthur’s moving shoulders as he scratched at one of his own arms. “This is my wife, Joyce,” the man said, nodding to her. “I’m Don.” “Nice to meet you both,” Arthur said. “Where are y’all from?” Joyce said, a sweet smile on her face as she stood side by side with her husband. Red tried not to picture it, the red dot floating across their backs, darting unseen between their heads. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. “Philadelphia,” Arthur answered. “Thought I recognized the accent,” said Don. “Long way from home.” “Yeah, we’re on our way to Gulf Shores, for spring break,” Arthur said. “Bless your hearts,” said Joyce. Oliver moved toward the door then, his jaw set, clearly deciding it was safe if Arthur hadn’t been killed yet. He pushed past him, dropping down to the final step. “Hello,” he said, voice crisp and clear, back arrow-straight, the full Oliver Lavoy display. “Nice to meet you both. I’m Oliver.” “Don. Joyce,” Don repeated. Seemed he recognized that Oliver was the natural leader here. How could you not, with that straight back and those fierce golden eyes? “We live on a farm just yonder, back that way. We were passing by and saw flashing lights.” “What must y’all think of us, coming home past two in the morning,” Joyce giggled, hiding it behind one hand. Red noticed the blue polish peeling off her nails. “We were with our daughter, she lives in Jacksonville. She just

had a baby this afternoon, our first grandbaby.” The words burst out of her, tripping over each other, like she couldn’t have not said it, like maybe that was the reason they’d stopped after all. “Oh, congratulations to you both,” Oliver said, and Red could hear the smile pasted over his voice. “New grandparents.” “We’re so excited,” Joyce said, looking up at her husband. “Aren’t we, Don? We couldn’t not go and meet the baby right away, could we? She’s called him Jacob, after my daddy who passed last year, and he is the cutest little bundle you ever saw. Isn’t he, Don?” “Yes, dear.” “But,” Joyce went on, eyes flicking between Arthur and Oliver and Reyna as she told her story, “you know how it is, with a new baby, you don’t want your parents hanging around, telling you what you’re doing wrong that first night. That’s why we decided not to stay the night and drive home, leave her and Thomas to it, you know?” “I see.” Oliver nodded. “Well, I’m sure she appreciated you driving all that way and back to visit.” “We’re going to go again next weekend, aren’t we, Don?” “Joyce, will you hush up for one moment?” Don said in answer, an affectionate burr in his voice. “These people don’t want to hear our life story, I’m sure.” He looked down, grinding his boot into the road, raising his heel to study it. “She’s right, you know. You got a gas leak all around here. Looks like the whole tank might’ve emptied.” Please don’t let him look too hard and see the bullet hole in the side there, the one that took out the tank. “Yeah, we think a branch might have got caught under us,” Oliver said, not missing a beat. “Must have dragged it for a while and it punctured the tires, knocked something loose underneath.” Don made a face, gritting his teeth. “Have you called Triple-A?” he asked. “Yes,” Arthur said, at the same time that Oliver said, “No.” An awkward moment, Don’s gaze trailing up away from the two of them. He must have noticed the broken window then, his eyes narrowing, skin

crinkling between his brows. The static fizzed and Red held the walkie-talkie behind her. “We couldn’t get a signal,” Oliver explained. “Oh.” Joyce smiled; she hadn’t picked up on the strain in Oliver’s voice. “The service is terrible around here. We’re lucky to get one bar in our house, and that’s with me hanging out the window in the back bedroom.” “Even worse today,” Don added, eyes back on Oliver, though he didn’t look as sure and easy as he had thirty seconds ago. “Our neighbor told us that this morning, some truck drove into the cell tower south of Ruby. Knocked out all the networks. Apparently he fled before the police got there. I’m guessing it was a stolen truck and he drove around the turn too fast, lost control. I called AT&T from the road this afternoon and they said their engineers were dealing with it, and service should be back by morning. If they can be trusted,” he added with a sniff. Red swallowed. They did that. Drove a truck into the cell tower to disable it. All part of the plan to trap them here. But this wasn’t part of the plan. Don and Joyce weren’t supposed to be passing at this time. Don and Joyce weren’t supposed to find them trapped here, in the wide-open nothing, on their way back late from meeting their first grandchild. Don and Joyce weren’t supposed to happen. “That explains it, then,” Oliver said. “Excuse me for one moment.” Oliver held up a finger and then backed up the steps, through the door of the RV. He walked toward the dining table, pushing Red out of the way, beckoning to Maddy, hiding by the sofa. “If you were driving a car,” Don was saying, “we might could have towed y’all.” He looked around, surveying the giant hulking shape of the RV. Red stepped forward, brushing against Simon at the threshold to outside. “This is quite something, isn’t it?” Don said, slapping the metallic side of the RV. “Thirty-one feet,” Red said. “Is that right?” Don said, a crinkle in his eyes as he looked up at her, pursing his lips to blow out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be.” “It’s my uncle’s.” Simon stepped forward, shooting the couple a smile. Red caught the sideways view, muscles straining in his cheek.

“Really?” Don asked. “And how much does something like this set you back?” The static spluttered behind Red’s back, cutting out. “Send them away,” the voice threatened, low and hissing. Red held her breath. “What was that, son?” Don looked up at Simon. “I said I think it’s for people with more money than sense,” Simon chuckled, loudly, covering the static. “Like my uncle, I guess.” “Right.” Don laughed politely. “Well, we got no sense and no money.” Joyce joined in the laughter, her shoulders hitching. That was when Red’s eyes finally caught it, slipping over the side of Joyce’s shoulder, hiding in the folds of her tied-back hair. The red dot. Waiting. Ready to put a hole in her. Red swallowed again, her smile stretchy and tight, pulling uncomfortably at her skin. Keep a straight face, just like she was taught. Give nothing away with her eyes. Face straight, story straight, all she had to remember. Can you remember all that, Red? “How many does it sleep?” Don asked. “There are five of you, right?” “There’s six of us,” Reyna corrected, a quiver in her voice that made Red think she’d seen the dot too. Reyna was premed; she knew all the soft and delicate things waiting there beneath Don’s and Joyce’s flesh, all the horrifying ways they could split apart in the path of a bullet. Insides that would stay inside, because they were going to send them away to save them. Red must have stopped smiling; Joyce was looking at her funny. “You okay, sweetheart?” she asked. Red blinked, pasted the smile back on. “Yeah,” she said, “you?” “I’m finer than a frog hair split four ways,” Joyce answered. “But I’m worried about y’all and how we’re gonna get you on your way.” “What happened to the window here?” Don asked, his feet shifting, eyes too, straying up to the shattered glass. “Tree branch,” Reyna said, almost too quick, like Oliver’s lie had been waiting on the tip of her tongue. But it didn’t quite fit. “We were too big to

come down this narrow road here, but we pushed through because we couldn’t turn back, next thing we know, tree comes through the window.” “Right.” Don nodded, blinking slowly, like he was trying to picture it in the pitch-black behind his closed eyelids. Red heard whispering behind her. Not from the walkie-talkie, from Maddy and Oliver, bent over the table, their backs to her. She sidled away from the open door as Simon asked Don and Joyce about their new grandchild, and how the birth went. Red stepped up behind Maddy, peered over her shoulder. On a piece of paper, ripped from the pad, Maddy was writing something with the felt-tip pen, waiting for Oliver to tell her the next word. Red squinted to read the note. Help, call the police. There’s an— “Active shooter,” Oliver hissed at her, Maddy turning his words into scratchy black letters on the page. “We are trapped.” “You can’t do that,” Red said, making Maddy jump, smudging the last word. She hadn’t known Red was right behind her. “He said he’d kill them.” “How is the sniper going to know if I pass them this tiny note?” Oliver turned to her, a low hint of rage stirring in his voice. How dare she question him. He was the leader, didn’t she know? “He is hundreds of yards that way. He’s never going to know.” “He might,” Red said, breath stalling in her chest. Come on, she had to do better than that. “How, Red, how?” Oliver’s eyes flashed. “Go on, explain to me how the sniper is going to see this tiny piece of paper.” “When you hand it over,” she said, straightening her back too, raising her chin. He was only a few inches taller than her like this. And she couldn’t let him do this. “I have a plan for that, obviously,” Oliver spat. “Maddy, fold it, and again, and now on the top, write: Do not read until you’ve left this road. Now, quickly.” Maddy folded the note, her elbow crashing into Red as she did, tongue tucked in her teeth. “Say it again,” she said, preparing the pen, shaking in her

grip. “Do not read until you’ve left this road,” he spat, keeping his voice low. “He said he would kill them.” Red watched Oliver watching his sister as she scratched out the words, blocky and big on the small square of paper. “He’s going to kill them.” “No, he won’t,” Oliver replied, ripping the finished note away from Maddy. “I will shake Don’s hand and pass it over. If I angle it right, the sniper won’t even see the handshake, he’ll just see me trying to get rid of them. Don will know something’s wrong and not to react when he reads that top part. They won’t read the rest until they’re safely out of here, and then they’ll send help. The sniper will never know, he can’t know. This is going to work.” He flipped the note in his hand, unfolding it to check the words inside. Help, call the police, there’s an active shooter. We are trapped. He refolded it, pressing harder than Maddy had, eyes spooling across the words on top, scratchy and desperate. Do not read until you’ve left this road. “What if it doesn’t work?” Red said, hand darting out to hold on to Oliver’s sleeve, surprising them both. Maddy too, who gasped behind her. “He’ll kill them. That’s someone’s mom and dad out there. New grandparents. Don’t do this. Don’t drag them into this.” “Red, be quiet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shrugged her off. But she did know, she knew better than anyone. If something happened to Don and Joyce, their daughter would blame herself for the rest of her life. Why hadn’t she insisted they stay the night? Why couldn’t she have had the baby tomorrow instead? Or yesterday? All her fault, dead because of her. Red couldn’t put that into words, though, it didn’t belong, wouldn’t fit. So she tried just one word. “Please.” “What’s going on?” Arthur was back inside the RV, his voice low, walking over to stand between Red and Oliver. “What are you doing?” “I’m giving them a note to call the police, passing it over in a handshake,” Oliver said, like he was expecting praise for his bright idea.

Arthur looked at Red and she tried to tell him with her eyes. Please understand. “You can’t do that.” Arthur turned back to Oliver, and Red breathed out, so glad that Arthur had come back, glad that he was standing right here next to her, on her side. “He’ll shoot them,” Arthur said. Oliver rolled his eyes, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “No he won’t, he will never know. The sniper hasn’t actually taken a shot at one of us yet. Not one. Maybe he’s actually bluffing, just trying to scare us into doing what he wants, maybe he isn’t planning on killing anyone. Not us, not them.” He tried to move past but Arthur stepped in his way. “What if he does shoot?” Arthur hissed. “You’d be killing them.” “Well, I guess it’s four against two. The others would agree with me.” Oliver gestured his head toward Reyna and Simon in the open doorway. Then his eyes flicked back to Red and Arthur; they were the two, outvoted, outnumbered. Unless: “Maddy?” Red said. Maddy held her gaze. “They’ll be fine,” she said quietly. “We can’t not ask them to help us.” “You’ll thank me when the police turn up and save you,” Oliver said, like it was a threat. The static crackled into silence. “You have sixty seconds to get rid of them,” said the voice, vibrating in Red’s hand. A metallic double click from the speaker as he cocked the rifle. “Fifty-nine, fifty-eight.” “Move.” Oliver pushed Red out of his way, the note folded small, clutched in one hand. “No,” Arthur whispered, but he didn’t move to stop Oliver. Red tried, grabbing his shirt again. “Oliver, please don’t—” Oliver turned, angry puppet strings up his neck again. His free hand darted out to Red’s throat. He shoved her and she fell back onto the sofa. “You shut up,” he hissed, bending over her. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

But he was going to get them killed, those innocent people outside, and he didn’t care, he didn’t care because they weren’t him. “Forty-seven, forty-six,” the walkie-talkie crackled. Arthur reached out a hand and Red took it, pulling her to her feet, but it was too late, Oliver was in the doorway, pushing past Reyna to walk down the steps. “We have a landline at our place,” Joyce was saying. “We can give some of y’all a ride and you can call for help from our house.” They walked over to the door, Red’s hand in Arthur’s and she couldn’t remember now, how it had got there. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Oliver said, voice loud and cheery. “We’re fine here. We were actually just going to get some rest now; we have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. You said the service should be back in the morning, we’ll call Triple-A when we wake up, no problem.” “Are you sure?” Don asked. “It’s no trouble.” “Very sure,” Oliver’s voice boomed. “Think we all just want a good night’s sleep and then we’ll worry about getting this RV fixed in the morning. Right, gang?” Oliver turned back to look at them, all six of them gathered by the door, Maddy’s breath on the back of Red’s neck. “Right,” Reyna said with a smile, but she didn’t know what was about to happen. “If you’re sure?” Don returned the smile, dipping his head. Could he tell something was wrong? “Come on then, Joyce-bug, let’s get you home.” “Before you go,” Oliver said with a flourish, “I wanted to say thank you so much for stopping, and a huge congratulations on becoming grandparents.” Red watched as Oliver stepped to the left, reangling Don, putting his back to the sniper’s position. Where was the red dot? “Congrats, sir.” Oliver offered his hand to Don in the darkness. Note tucked under his thumb. “Bless your heart, aren’t you sweet?” Joyce said, as Don reached out and took Oliver’s hand, shaking it up and down just once. Oliver’s hand withdrew, empty.

Don’s face darkened, his eyebrows drawing low as he looked down at the piece of paper in his hand. Reyna noticed it too, head shifting sideways on her neck. “Well, it’s been nice chatting with you all anyway. Don says I can talk until the cows come home.” Joyce laughed, her face up to the sky, and it was too much, this was too much. Should Red scream at them to get in the RV, or tell them to run? Like she should have before, if she’d only listened to her gut and not Oliver. Don hadn’t moved. His eyes shifted across the note and up, a muscle twitching, pulling at the lines around his mouth. He looked at the broken window again. “Thank you,” he said, nodding at Oliver, closing his fingers around the note. Another nod. Now he must know that something wasn’t right here. But he wouldn’t know what until he unfolded the note scrunched up in his hand. “That’s very kind of you,” Don laughed nervously. Oliver laughed with him. “Well,” he said, “you must be tired after such a busy day. We’ll let you get to it.” “Sure.” Don gritted his teeth as his boots pivoted on the road, keys jangling in his grip. He turned to his wife, straightening out his face before she saw it. He didn’t want her to know. “Come on then, honey, we better get out of here.” Maybe it would be okay. Maybe they’d get back in their truck and be out of here before the sniper knew anything was wrong. Red wasn’t breathing, staring as Joyce gave her a final smile, a final wave. The only one who didn’t know, eyes kind and crinkled, blue polish peeling off her nails. She turned to go, walking alongside her husband. Red didn’t blink, she couldn’t, she had to protect them with her eyes. She could hear Arthur’s breath stuttering in his chest, beside her. His hand wasn’t holding hers anymore, small movements in his shoulders, disturbing the air around her. Was he shaking? “You have a safe trip home,” Oliver said cheerfully, raising one hand in goodbye as they approached their truck. Crack.

Too quick. Joyce folded sideways onto the road, a space where the middle of her face had been. “Joy—” Don said, not panicking yet, because he didn’t know, maybe she just fell. Crack. A plume of blood in the headlights. A gaping hole in Don’s face, beside his forever-open mouth. He fell slowly, knees buckling first, crumpling backward over his legs, bent all wrong. Empty stare up at the stars, a halo of red pooling on the road.

Red wouldn’t move. Simon sprinted past her, back into the RV, tripping over her feet. “No, no, no!” Reyna was screaming. “Move!” Oliver spun around and hurtled up the steps, pushing Reyna in ahead of him. That unseen red dot chasing them inside. The door to the RV slammed shut. Red didn’t see who’d closed it, because she couldn’t move, but everything moved around her. Flashes and elbows and eyes. “I have to help them!” Reyna shouted, moving back to the door. “They need medical attention.” “They’re dead, Reyna!” Oliver’s voice. It seemed far away, even though he was right there. A ringing in Red’s ears, static in her hand. “He shot them in the head!” Two shots in the back of the head. Red could move now, unsticking her shoes from the ground, peeling herself away. Maddy was on the floor, crying, head in her hands, hands pinned by her knees. Knees. Was Don alive when he dropped to his knees, or already gone?

Red turned, the effort of picking up her feet almost too much. Arthur’s face was hidden as well, wrapped in his arms against the refrigerator door. His back shaking. “Excuse me,” Red whispered, her voice not her own. No one was listening. Reyna and Oliver were shouting behind her. Reyna hadn’t known about the note, neither had Simon, but they knew now, Oliver telling them in breathless snatches. “You should have told us first,” Reyna said. “We should have all decided together whether or not to do that!” “Oh, easy for you to say now, Reyna. I had to act quickly!” Red tuned out, their shouts becoming just noise that she left behind her. She walked, slowly, past Arthur and the kitchen, her heart too fast, shedding a little more of her every time it beat. Red was surprised there was any left as she passed the bunks and through the open door into the back bedroom. Surely there was just a hole in her chest now, an empty echo against the cage of her ribs. She placed the walkie-talkie on the bed, laying it down carefully like it could feel pain too. With her other hand, she grabbed a pillow from the top of the bed, digging her fingers into it, the fabric pulling like spiderwebs around her fist. She brought the pillow to her face, held it there with both hands. Red screamed. She screamed, the heat of the muted sound hitting her in the face, stinging her eyes. She screamed until it started to snag in her throat, and then she stopped. Put the pillow back in its place, fluffed it up so it didn’t look disturbed. She picked up the walkie-talkie, checked it was okay, and then walked back to the others. Oliver watched her as she returned. “How did you know?” His voice was hoarse. “How did you know he would do that?” Red didn’t know if she could talk, not until the words were there waiting, raw from the silent scream. “Because he said. He told us he would kill them and I believed him.”

She didn’t need to say the rest, it was there, haunting the end of the sentence, finishing the thought. I believed him, but you didn’t. “But I don’t understand how he—” The static dropped out, cutting Oliver off. “That was your fault,” the voice said, dark and deep, breaking up at the edges. “I told you to send them away.” Oliver was in front of Red before she realized, taking the walkie-talkie from her hands. Hey, that was hers. Her responsibility. Oliver pushed down the button. “You didn’t need to kill them!” he shouted, the white of his knuckles pushing through his skin like a prehistoric backbone. “We didn’t tell them anything. You were watching, we didn’t tell them anything. They were leaving!” Static. “You passed them a note telling them to call the police,” the voice answered, clipped and clear. Oliver’s mouth fell open. “Did you think I wouldn’t know?” the voice continued. “That was your fault, I didn’t want to do that. They’re dead because of you.” He paused. A fizzing, metallic breath leaked out of the speakers before the static took over. “I’m not the one who fucking shot them,” Oliver said, voice breaking, but he hadn’t pushed the button, and Red couldn’t tell if he’d meant to or not. “Now,” the voice came back, “before anyone else has to die, listen to me. Stop trying to escape. You can’t. Everything has been planned for. Do what I asked you to.” He breathed out, almost a sigh. “One of you has a secret. Give it to me and I’ll let the others live. We have hours before daylight. I’m not going anywhere until I get it, and neither are you.” Oliver’s brows lowered, a shadow over his eyes. He raised the walkie-talkie, remembering to hold the button this time. “One of us has the secret?” he asked, unsure, tripping over the words. “You’re not holding us hostage to get information from someone else?”

This was about him and Maddy, wasn’t it, to get that name from Catherine Lavoy? The Frank Gotti case that Red knew backward and forward. Oliver had been so sure before, and Red had followed him right there. Static. “This is all about one of you, inside that RV. Give me what I want and your friends don’t have to die.” Oliver looked at Red. She tried to hide her realization from him, blink it away. Oliver had been wrong about why they were here. Wrong about the note too. Now two people were dead, right outside, and it was all their fault. “It’s not about using you and Maddy to get to your mom,” Reyna said, voice steadier now, speaking to the back of Oliver’s head. “Someone here has a secret, knows what this is about. That’s what he’s saying. Oliver, it could be —” Oliver cut her off, raising the walkie-talkie to his lips. “Who?” he asked. “Which one of us?” A crackle of static followed by a cackle of laughter. “That’s not how this works,” the voice said. “You know who you are. I’ll be waiting.” Static. The walkie-talkie dropped to Oliver’s side, his eyes dropping with it. Red looked beyond him, at Reyna, then Maddy, Arthur over there and Simon at the back. This was about one of them, about something they knew. Red coughed, looked away. You know who you are. She had a secret too, didn’t she? Bigger than most. But this wasn’t about her. It couldn’t be. No one knew, that was the whole point of it. No one could ever know, not even tonight. That was the plan. Red needed the plan and she wasn’t the only one. But she had her answer; it wasn’t about that, about her. And if they were talking secrets, Red wasn’t the only one hiding something. Clearly Reyna had a secret, something bad enough to think this night could be about that, something Oliver must know too and didn’t want out. Red had picked up on that. She had potential, see? And before, Maddy had denied having a secret just a little too hard and a little too fast, and Red knew her just a little too

well. Which meant there was something she didn’t know at all. She didn’t like that feeling. Simon was the first to speak, voice cutting over the static. “Their truck is right there, like twenty feet from the door.” He sniffed, turning to look out the windshield. He didn’t have a secret he was thinking about, then. Or he was just better at hiding it. “All four tires, working engine, no holes in it. Yet. Doors still open. Ready. It will move. It can drive away.” “I don’t think we’d make it,” Maddy replied. “At least not all of us. He shot them both so fast.” Simon went on, like he hadn’t heard her. “The old man had the keys in his hand, I saw before…I don’t know if I’ve ever seen blood like that before. Too much. I didn’t know, I didn’t think it would look like that.” His hands were shaking, pressed against the glass. “It doesn’t look real.” Was he in shock? Maybe Simon needed to go back there and scream into the same pillow, trap it in there with hers. Red walked around the others to the front of the RV, coming to stand beside Simon, her arm brushing against his. He flinched, and Red could now see why. Out through the windshield, glowing in the white headlights, was Joyce. Right in front of the hood of the truck. She’d almost made it to the open passenger door. Almost. Simon was right, she didn’t look real, folded there like an unfinished mannequin, one hand open and reaching. Her head undone, leaking out and soaking into the road. It didn’t look red from here, the blood, it looked almost black. That was what Mom must have looked like, right? Inside that wooden box draped in the Star-Spangled Banner. Had the bullets gone all the way through, like with Joyce? Was part of her face missing too? The sound of static grew behind her as Oliver approached. He rested the walkie-talkie on Red’s shoulder, wordlessly passing it back to her. Hers, her responsibility, keeper of the voice. Her fingers closed around it. Oliver stared out the windshield too. “Maddy’s right,” he said. “We wouldn’t all make it. He’d be able to take at least two or three of us out before we got the truck moving.”

And there were three people Oliver cared about in this RV, so that was a risk too far. “Especially as the sniper somehow seems to know exactly what we’re doing every time,” Oliver was still talking. “I can’t work out how he knew about the note. There was no way he could even see it, let alone see what was written on it. He…” Oliver’s head whipped around, eyes overstretched, too much white showing above and below. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then stopped himself, gritting his teeth. “What?” Red asked him. He shushed her, head pivoting on his wide shoulders as he looked around the RV. He charged forward, toward the dining table, grabbing his phone from the surface. He unlocked it, tapped at the screen. Red walked over, Simon on her heels. “What are you—?” Reyna began, silenced by the deadly look in Oliver’s eyes. They gathered around him, and Red leaned over to see what he was doing. On the screen, on a fresh page in the Notes app, Oliver was typing. There’s only one way he could have known about— “Fuck this,” Oliver said, irritated, swiping out of Notes, the phone’s fault for taking too long, not his. Oliver’s eyes flicked to the bottom of his screen, and his thumb followed, pressing onto the music app. “Oliver, what are you doing?” Maddy asked. “Wait,” he told her, scrolling through the screen, finger landing on a random playlist. Christmas Songs, it said. Oliver pressed play on the first song and dragged the volume bar right to the top. The song began, choral voices singing ah, and a high-pitched strum on the guitar. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” In April. Deafening as Oliver held the phone in the middle of the group, speaker facing up. He beckoned them all closer.

Red stepped in, shoulders pressing into Reyna and Simon. The drumbeat of the song ticking half as slow as her heart. Oliver flashed his eyes at them all. He started to speak, not loudly, only just audible over the sound of the music. Red had to concentrate, but now she was thinking about the lyrics, and dancing around the tree with Mom before there were two holes in her head. “There’s only one way he could have known about the note,” Oliver said, looking at each of them in turn. “The window, yeah fine, his guy on the other side could have seen us climbing out and told him about it. But not the note. There’s no way either of them could have seen. So, there’s only one way he knew.” He paused. Everyone dancing merrily in the new old-fashioned way. The saxophone burst in, too loud, screaming in Red’s ears. “He heard us talking about it,” Oliver said. “Because the RV is bugged.”

The song continued, saxophone screeching up and down. “Bugged?” Reyna repeated. Oliver signaled for her to lower her voice, to hide it under the music. “Like with a microphone?” “How else could he know everything he seems to know?” Oliver replied. “When would he have bugged the RV?” Reyna returned, just as the chorus did, and Red had to strain to hear. “We haven’t left it unattended.” “Maybe when we were changing the first tire?” Simon spoke with the music. “We were all out there, on the other side to the door. Red and Arthur were off somewhere. He could have snuck in then?” Oliver shook his head. “Not when we were jacking up the RV. We would have felt it.” “When, then?” Reyna asked. “When we stopped for lunch, for dinner at the rest stop? But we double-checked it was locked.” “Maybe even before that,” Oliver said. “Maybe before today. You heard him; they planned for everything, they’ve been planning this awhile. Maybe he planted the bug before Simon even borrowed the RV. Maybe it’s something to do with your uncle.” Oliver looked at Simon as he said that, a shadow of suspicion in his eyes. Simon sniffed. “Or maybe it’s in the stuff we

brought onto the RV. In our bags. We need to search everywhere, find it, so we can get our advantage back.” His eyes flashed as the song drew to an end, rallying them all. He dragged the cursor back and restarted the song. “We’ll have to turn the music off so he doesn’t get suspicious, but no one mention what we’re doing. Just speak normally. Okay?” Yes, sir, right away, sir. Red blinked. It seemed Oliver had already forgotten that two people just died less than fifteen minutes ago, bleeding out on the road out there, blooms of red around their once-heads. He was already on to the next thing. Moves and countermoves. Sniper takes a turn, then them. Win-win solutions, as Catherine Lavoy would say, but so far they’d won nothing. It seemed Oliver wanted to avoid the other solution, the most obvious one: finding the secret that the voice on the walkie-talkie wanted. It wasn’t Red’s he was after, couldn’t be. But now Red was starting to doubt herself, dark thoughts slipping in through the gaps, through holes in her head. Was she doing the exact same thing as Oliver, as the rest of them too, maybe, clinging to her secret because she didn’t want to lose it? She needed the plan. Needed it. Oliver Lavoy didn’t need anything, he already had it all. “Red, you keep cycling up through those radio channels while you look. Okay, let’s do this.” Oliver paused the music, holding his finger to his lips, making sure they all saw. He pointed to himself and Reyna, and then to the back bedroom and the bunks. Red he pointed into the kitchen. Simon the bathroom. Arthur right here at the dining table and sofa bed. Maddy up front in the cockpit. They nodded and dispersed. Red went to the refrigerator first, pulling it open, pressing her body close to the cool air that seeped out of it. The RV was growing warm and sticky, no air passing through, too many bodies, too much movement, too much fear, and dread and guilt. When would Red’s heart stop beating so hard? It couldn’t keep this up. It didn’t want her to forget—did it?—that Don and Joyce were dead outside. She could have done more. She should have done more. She knew that would happen and she let it. The second time she’d listened to

Oliver, chose him, and when would she learn? No time soon, apparently, because she was doing what he told her to right now. Red moved aside a six-pack of beer, unopened, checking behind it. Cheese slices, salami, butter, beer, oat milk, wine coolers, chocolate. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not that Red knew what a bug looked like anyway, some small black microphone thing, right? Well, there was nothing like that in here. She closed the refrigerator door and turned to the counter, placing the walkie- talkie on top. Red pulled open the bottom drawer and searched through the saucepans and frying pans, opening each lid and checking inside. Running her fingers into each corner of the drawer to be sure. Next drawer up, pulling out the stacks of plates and bowls, placing them on the counter and separating each one, the porcelain scraping together, the sound grinding in the bones of her jaw. Nothing there either. Only five sets of each, but there were six of them here. Top drawer, cutlery. Red picked through the knives, forks and spoons, checking beneath the cutlery holder too. Nothing. An empty space for the sharp kitchen knife that was now sitting on the dining table. Red looked; Arthur was underneath the table, only the bottoms of his shoes visible, sticking out the end. Nothing around the faucet or the plug in the sink. Red wanted to wash the drying sweat off her face, but maybe that would be a waste of water. How much did they have in that tank below? And how long would the generator keep running? She couldn’t remember those numbers, but thirty-one feet was burned into her brain, cropping up when she didn’t need it, like right this second. The high-up cupboard with the glasses. Red stood on tiptoes, pushing them carefully aside to see in, but she didn’t really need to. She could see through the rows of glass; nothing black or bug-like in here. She sidestepped to the oven, swinging the door open. They probably would never have used it on the trip. What could you make using cheese, salami, beer, chocolate and oat milk anyway? Nothing good. She needed to stop thinking about food. She was hungry in the slow comedown from the

adrenaline. Scratch that, she’d been hungry before, hadn’t she? Or maybe that yawning feeling in her gut meant something else entirely. “Red?” Arthur’s voice interrupted the thought; he was standing behind her. She straightened up and turned. His eyes were drawn and sad behind his glasses, lashes long and downcast. He didn’t say anything, just raised his eyes to meet hers and then raised one hand. There, on the back of his hand, written in that same black felt-tip pen against his tan skin, were the words: YOU OK? Beside them were two options. YES with a square checkbox drawn next to it, riding up one knuckle. And below that, NO, with an empty box. Arthur gave her the pen, pressing it into her hand, fingers warm against hers as they lingered there. Something passed between their eyes. Red held up the pen, uncapped it. She was always fine, when people asked. Of course she was fine, thanks, yes, she and Dad were doing just great, thank you. Fine, okay, fine. An elaborate lie squeezed into those two tiny words, the greatest gifts to a liar like her. No one asked for more detail if you were fine. But Arthur, he was really asking, she could tell. And so Red really answered. She reached out and held his hand steady, gripped the pen and drew a check mark in the box next to NO. She wasn’t okay. And maybe Arthur wasn’t either. He hadn’t forgotten that they just watched two people die twenty minutes ago. Joyce and Don were somebody’s someone. Each other’s. They had a daughter, a grandchild. But it was the daughter who stayed in Red’s mind, between thirty-one feet and the unknown pattern in the curtains. A daughter like her. “You did everything you could,” Arthur said, the marked hand dropping to his side, matching the to-do lists on hers. “You tried to stop it.” No she hadn’t, not really. She could have done more. Red shrugged, staring down at the checkbox on Arthur’s hand. He’d dropped her hand when Don and Joyce were killed. They were holding hands and then they weren’t, and Red couldn’t remember the changeover. Maybe if he hadn’t dropped her hand, they wouldn’t have died, which was a stupid thought but Red had it

anyway. Sometimes those small, inconsequential things mattered, like hanging up a phone. “It wasn’t your fault,” Arthur said. But didn’t he know? Everything was. All of this. “I need to pee,” Red said, only becoming true as she said it. It was Arthur’s turn to shrug now, a wounded look crossing his eyes. She always did that, didn’t she? Whenever he got too close, whenever it got too real. But now she really did need to go. Red scooped up the walkie-talkie and stepped toward the bathroom door, which Simon had left wide open. She paused as, right then, Oliver and Reyna reemerged from the bedroom. Reyna’s eyes shifted, rubbed red, and Red wondered whether they’d been fighting in there, in whispers so the others couldn’t hear. How bad could their secret be? Worse than hers? And what about Simon? He was being a little too quiet, wasn’t he? Or was that only because he thought the sniper was listening? And, now Red was thinking, Maddy hadn’t come over to speak to her in a while, only Arthur. Oliver clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Anything?” he mouthed, lips and teeth moving in oversized strokes. Red shook her head, saw the others doing the same, a thumbs-down from Simon. Maddy returned to her search of the glove compartment. Arthur was finishing up the kitchen for Red, opening the door to the microwave and checking inside. Red pressed the button on the walkie-talkie, skipping up through channels four and five, swapping one empty static for another, so Oliver could see she was doing her job. He wasn’t paying attention, though, glowering up at the ceiling. “Light fittings?” he hissed, mouth overperforming the words again. “Arthur, help me. And can you pass that headlamp?” Oliver’s voice had returned to normal levels; clearly he thought the request was obscure enough if anyone was listening. They didn’t need her. Red walked through the bathroom door, bringing the static with her, and shut the door, flicking the lock across. Should she have asked Oliver first? No, she didn’t need permission to pee, fuck him.

She placed the walkie-talkie down on the side of the sink, hissing from channel nine, and fiddled with the button on her jeans. Her fingers were too warm and rubbery. “Simon, hit the lights,” Oliver called. A moment later, the bathroom was swallowed by darkness. Did they really have to turn her lights off too? Red pulled down her jeans and underwear, feeling blindly for the toilet behind her. She found it and sat down. “Where’s that mop bucket?” Oliver’s voice sailed through the gaps under the door. “I need something to stand on.” Well, now she couldn’t go, with them all right out there. Red scrabbled through the darkness for the faucet, turning it on so the others couldn’t hear her pee. There was grunting outside, a twisting sound of metal grooves. “Nothing. Next,” Oliver said. The sound of the bucket dropping down somewhere else. “Reyna, you have a quick look in Maddy’s bag. Check the pockets.” Red’s stuff was in there too. But she would have seen if there was a microphone hidden in her things, when she emptied everything out and gutted the bag. If there even was a microphone anywhere to be found. It was starting to look doubtful. Why was Oliver so certain? The sniper had known about the note. It could have been a lucky guess, seeing Oliver shake Don’s hand. But had he even seen that from his position, with the back of Don’s jacket blocking his view? And he didn’t just know there was a note, he also knew that it was asking them to call the police, he said it like a definite, and that was a guess too far, wasn’t it? It had all been so fast. Red scrabbled in the darkness for the toilet paper, ripping some free and folding it up. “Next,” Oliver said, the plunk of the bucket again. She stood, pulling her underwear up and fastening her jeans. She flushed and dipped her hands under the cold running water, flicking the faucet off and wiping her wet hands down her legs. Red stepped forward in the pitch-black, stubbing her toe on the corner of the shower as she searched for the door.

She unlocked it and walked out, closing the door behind her. The darkness was easier to navigate out here, spoiled by a beam of light attached to Oliver’s head as he studied the lights under the kitchen cabinets, removing one of their casings and shaking his head. Simon held the flashlight, and Arthur had the one on his phone. “Nothing,” Oliver said, backing away. “Okay, you can turn the lights back on.” Red was closest, free hands. She flicked up the switches and the inside of the RV reappeared. Maddy was still up front, knees on the driver’s seat, eyes level with the glove compartment. Reyna was standing on the sofa putting Maddy’s case back, checking the cupboard around it with the flat of her hand. “Anything?” Oliver repeated, saying it out loud this time. A low rumble of “No,” from Red, Arthur and Reyna. No bug. “I don’t get it,” Oliver said, dropping down on the closest booth. “There must be.” “We’ve literally ransacked the entire RV,” Simon said. Oliver shushed him. “What?” Simon doubled down. “There’s nothing. We’ve checked.” “Maddy?” Oliver called to the front, where Maddy was clutching something in her hands, a small rectangular piece of paper, eyes narrowed and thinking as they flicked across it. “What have you got there?” “Well, not what we were looking for,” she answered, holding it up. It was a photograph. She brought it over, holding it out for the others. There was a family of five pictured there, huddled together on green summer grass, arms looping in and out of each other’s, a golden retriever mid–tail wag. The man had gray hair and a bright smile, and his wife and three daughters looked near identical with matching burnt-auburn hair, the same person in four different stages of life, only changed by time. “This isn’t your uncle, is it?” she asked Simon. “I thought he didn’t have a family, though. You said he was a loner.”

Simon took the photograph, a muscle working in his cheek as he chewed his tongue. “No, that’s not him. He’s not married, no kids.” Maddy’s face scrunched, the look in her eyes replaced with something new, something uneasy. An edge to her voice as she asked: “So why does your uncle have a photo of someone else’s family in the glove compartment?”

Simon passed the photograph of the happy red-haired family back, not taking a second look. “I don’t know,” he said, voice spiking higher, betraying him. He was supposed to be a better liar than that. “Simon?” Maddy asked. “I don’t know,” Simon repeated. “Do you know all the stuff your weird uncle gets up to?” “We don’t have a weird uncle,” she snapped back. “Is he, like, a stalker, or something?” “No,” Simon said, though he hadn’t leaned into the word like he fully believed it. “No, no, no. Look, I’m sure the RV is just secondhand. Maybe he bought it from that family and neither of them ever cleared out the glove compartment.” “That makes sense,” Maddy conceded. “So why are you being weird about it?” “I’m not being weird.” “Yes you are.” “Maddy,” Red warned. “Simon.” So did Arthur.

“It’s nothing, really.” Simon wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, droplets of sweat by his temples. “Just…well, my uncle owns a used-car dealership, right? That’s why he had an RV we could use. But, and you know, this is not as bad as it’s going to sound…” Simon trailed off, clearing his throat. “What I mean is, I’m not sure his business is strictly legal, if you catch my—” “Stolen?” Oliver barked suddenly. “Your uncle sells stolen cars?” “Maybe.” Simon held his hands up in surrender, taking a step back. “Maybe?” Oliver demanded. “Well, n-no, definitely, actually,” Simon stammered. “I know because I, well, I helped him once. Couple of times. Few times. Run some scams. Apparently I have a trustworthy face. Good liar when I need to be. Acting is just lying, after all, isn’t it?” Maddy gasped. “Simon, you’ve stolen cars?” “No.” He shook his head, pointing his index fingers at her. “I’ve helped. There’s a difference.” “Why would you do that?” Maddy stared him down, breathing hard. “Oh come on, why d’you think?” Simon retorted. “I needed the money.” “Why?” Maddy pressed. “Your parents have money.” “Well, they aren’t Lavoy-loaded,” Simon said. “I know you never have to think about stuff like this, because your mom thinks the sun shines out of your ass and would support you whatever you wanted to do. But my situation is different. I need the money, in case I want to take a year off and apply to drama schools next year and my parents freak out and refuse to pay for it. I haven’t told them yet, I haven’t decided yet. It’s not that big a deal, really. Just think of it as practice for my first big acting gig. My uncle’s been in prison a couple of times, but that was ages ago and he’s actually a pretty nice guy. Not everything is stolen, some’s legit.” “Wait, wait, wait, forget all that.” Oliver stood up, swung his legs out. “Are you saying there’s a possibility that this RV was stolen?” Simon swallowed. “There is a small possibility, yes.” “Fuck!” Oliver smashed his fist down on the table.

“But he didn’t say it was when I asked to borrow it, I’m sure he would have told me. He made it all sound legit, said we could use it for free, no charge, before he sold it on,” Simon said. “Showed me all the features.” Thirty-one feet long, Red thought. “You’re telling me there’s a chance I’ve been driving across state lines in a stolen vehicle?” Oliver rounded on Simon. “Do you know how bad that is for someone like me?” He bared his teeth. “For me and Maddy, considering who our mom is?” “We didn’t steal it,” Simon said desperately. “That’s not the point!” Oliver replied. “I thought you said you didn’t have any secrets before. This is a pretty fucking big one, Simon. Jesus Christ.” Maddy stepped in front of her brother, asking, “Why would your parents let us use this RV if they know what he does?” “They didn’t, obviously,” Simon answered. “They don’t know I got it from him. My mom doesn’t even like her brother, doesn’t know I sometimes go see him. They think we’re renting it from a company, that you organized it.” “Simon!” “What, it’s not my fault, Maddy!” He turned his eyes on her. “It was your idea in the first place. You’re the one who told me we had to keep everything as cheap as possible so that Red could come!” It was strange, hearing her name like that, forgetting that it belonged to her, that it wasn’t just a misplaced splash of color. A second later, Simon’s words punched her in the gut, winding her, gnawing at her chest. Keep everything as cheap as possible so that Red could come. Her fault again. Simon and Maddy, talking about her behind her back, making Red their problem to solve. And why did it hurt so much that they all knew? Little Red Kenny, poor as dirt and a dead mom, but she had potential, hadn’t you heard? Everyone was looking at her now, everyone but Arthur. Red’s eyes glazed but she blinked the tears back, forcing her eyes open and closed. Don’t you dare, don’t you fucking dare. She didn’t need their pity, she had her plan. “I’m sorry, Red,” Simon said, his voice softening. “I didn’t mean…” But he did mean, and that was okay. She was fine. She smiled, waved her hand in front of her face. But she didn’t look at Maddy. That betrayal was

worse, somehow. No, that wasn’t fair. Maddy cared, that was all. Maddy looked after her, looked out for her. Maddy cared. “And I’m sorry about the RV,” Simon continued, looking around at the others. “Look, it probably isn’t stolen, I dunno. But whether it is or not, it doesn’t really matter now. I don’t think someone is threatening to shoot us all over a stolen RV. Killing that innocent couple out there.” He stepped forward, pressing one finger into the photo in Maddy’s hand, over the man’s face. “I don’t think that’s jolly ol’ sniper number one and jolly ol’ sniper two.” He moved to the woman’s face, her auburn hair framing his fingernail. “Husband-and-wife murder team, I don’t think so. It’s not about the RV, is it? Why we’re here.” He finished, breath heavy in his chest, shoulders moving in time with it. He was avoiding Red’s eyes, though, wasn’t he? At least he finally seemed to have sobered up. Enough. “No,” Oliver said, dropping back down to the booth, rubbing the hand that had punched the table. “But it could be something to do with your uncle. A business thing. Some people he pissed off. Or you pissed off.” Simon shook his head. “He’s a criminal but I don’t think he’s that kind of criminal. Plus”—he coughed—“killing all of us, including me, wouldn’t really be a punishment for him. Not sure he cares. This isn’t about him.” “Of course you’d say that,” said Oliver. “People have died.” “Yeah, and whose idea was it to pass them a note? That’s on you, Oliver.” “And it would have worked,” Oliver hissed, “if the sniper wasn’t somehow fucking listening to us!” “He’s not listening,” Reyna said, voice croaky and unused. “We’ve checked, there’s no microphone planted anywhere.” “You were at this table here,” Red said, looking at Oliver and Maddy. “Talking low, so Joyce and Don wouldn’t hear. If there was a bug, it would have to be right around here. Around this table.” “Maybe we haven’t checked everywhere,” Oliver said, studying the table, eyes flickering like he was spooling back his memory, replaying the scene. “Red, give me the walkie-talkie.” That was when she realized; the sound of static had gone. Left her.

Red looked down. It wasn’t in her hand, where it was supposed to be. Fuck, where was the walkie-talkie? She must have left it somewhere. She must have— “Red?” Oliver snapped his fingers impatiently. “It’s—it’s gone,” she stuttered. “I don’t have it.” “What do you mean you don’t have it?” Oliver’s voice hardened. “Where is it?” “I—I must have put it down somewhere,” Red said, patting the sides of her shirt as though it could have somehow slipped down there. She’d lost it. Of course she had, this was what Red did. Couldn’t be trusted with anything. Things erasing themselves from her memory as soon as they were out of sight. Lost keys, lost phones, lost wallets. Why couldn’t they hear the static? Red needed that sound back, anything but empty to her. “For fuck’s sake, Red. Where were you searching?” Oliver pushed up to stand. “The kitchen? Reyna, go check in the cupboards.” “Where’ve you been?” Maddy said, more patiently than her brother. “Retrace your steps.” Red hated when people said that. That was the whole point, she’d already forgotten where she’d been, there was no trace left to follow. It skirted around her mind, evading her as she tried even harder to think back. And, great, now the Phineas and Ferb song lyrics were running through her head again, word for word. “Everyone be quiet a second!” Oliver shouted, holding his finger to his lips, motioning to listen with his hand by his ear. Red held her breath and strained to hear. Strained harder. Where had she left it? It was somewhere, it couldn’t have disappeared, Red knew. Even though things did seem to disappear around her: headphones, homework, moms. There was a faint hiss, almost unnoticeable, not much louder than the way the air fizzed when you were scared or alert. But it was there, Red recognized it, coming from beyond the kitchen. Her eyes followed it, to the closed door.

“The bathroom!” Of course. Red darted forward, slamming down the handle and wrenching open the door. The welcome sound of static filled her ears and there, waiting for her on the side of the sink, was the walkie-talkie. Green eye winking as she stepped forward to scoop it up, holding it to her chest. “I’ve got it!” she called back out to the others. Hers. Her responsibility. Oliver wouldn’t take it away from her, would he? “Bring it here.” Red sidled through the bathroom door, pressing the down button to skip from channel nine—where she’d left it—back to three. “…what I say.” The voice cut in, midsentence. Fuck, the sniper had been talking to them. Red’s eyes widened. The other five were over there, too far away. Just her and the walkie-talkie, keeper of the voice. He couldn’t know, she couldn’t let him know they hadn’t been listening, that they were searching for interference on the other channels. Red raised the walkie-talkie to her lips, pressed the push-to-talk button. “Understood,” she said quickly. Static. Of course they hadn’t understood, they hadn’t even heard what he’d been saying. But that was the only word that came to her, vague enough to fit most places. “Good,” the voice replied. “I’m getting impatient.” Static. “What did you do that for?” Oliver hissed. “So he didn’t know we weren’t listening,” she said. “I think it worked.” “Shh. But we have no idea what you just agreed to,” he said, holding out his hand for her to bring him the walkie-talkie. Red hesitated, then placed it in his open hand. Oliver took the walkie-talkie and bundled it up in his shirt, holding it close in the material, between his tightly cupped hands. His voice dipped back into whispers. “It’s the classic Trojan horse,” he said. “Maybe the bug is inside the walkie-talkie, so it’s listening even when we

think it’s not. We always have it around us. And Red, you brought it over when me and Maddy were doing the note. Maybe it’s listening all the time.” “Oh, they’re clever,” Simon said, wagging one finger. “I can check?” Red offered, voice low. She did not want to believe Oliver, follow him again, even though it made a perfect kind of sense. “I know what the inside of a walkie-talkie looks like, all the parts. I can look?” “How do you know so much about walkie-talkies?” Oliver asked, not giving it up. “I just do.” Red held her hand out now, waiting for Oliver to pass it back. Her memories did not belong to him. He might be the natural leader, but he didn’t know what he was doing here. Red did. Oliver narrowed his eyes. He unbundled the walkie-talkie and passed it over. “Shh,” he said as he did. Red slid into the other side of the booth, placing the walkie-talkie down. She would have to be quick at this, so the sniper didn’t know they weren’t listening again, if he tried to talk. Concentrate. Red’s fingers moved to the knob on top, beside the antenna. She flicked it into the off position and the static cut out. Silence. A buzzing kind of silence, broken up by Maddy’s breath as she leaned over Red. It was distracting, in and out and in, a faint whistle underneath. Red pushed down and slid off the back casing, into the battery compartment. It was empty, other than the three batteries slotted into place. Next she grabbed the screwdriver from the table, inserted it into the first screw on one of the back corners and turned it around, fast as she could. She placed the small screw on the table, spinning around itself, and turned to the next. The others were all staring, she could feel their eyes on the back of her neck, on her fingers as she unscrewed the next one and placed it down. It almost rolled off the table but Maddy caught it. “Thanks,” Red said, unspooling the next screw.

Oliver shushed her. And was it spiteful that Red wanted him to be wrong about this? For him to be wrong and her to be right. She undid the final screw, dropping it with the others, and pulled the plastic casing up and to the side, carefully as red and black wires connected through to the batteries. She propped it there and looked down, bringing her eyes closer. The green circuit board she’d been expecting to see, with small metal parts soldered on. The connection to the antenna, the amplifiers and mixers on an integrated circuit. And what were those small parts called again, oh yeah, capacitors. The tuner, transformers. She remembered the diagrams, the YouTube tutorials. Words and shapes she’d learned long ago, the kind that stayed in her head because they weren’t important. Except they were now, and there was nothing here that shouldn’t be. She recognized it all, same as the parts inside her mom’s walkie-talkie. “Is there anythi—” Oliver began. “Shh,” Red said this time. She was concentrating. Slowly, Red’s fingers pried up the circuit board, just a tiny bit, so she could lower her eye to the gap and see the parts beyond, sitting at the front of the walkie-talkie. She didn’t want to pull anything out of place, she didn’t trust herself to be able to put it back together. She didn’t know if she could rebuild it if it all fell apart in her hands now. The last time she’d taken hers apart and put it back together had been more than a year ago. Last February 6, just for old times’ sake. Red could see red and black wires connecting to the circular plastic part that doubled as microphone and speaker at the front, beneath the grille in the plastic. That was it. Nothing here that shouldn’t be. No bug that didn’t belong. Red lowered the circuit board into position, even more carefully than before, and guided the plastic casing back on. “No bug,” she said, starting on the first screw, forgetting to whisper. Oliver shot her an angry look. “How do you know?”

“Because everything that’s there needs to be there,” Red said, tightening the screw and moving onto the next. “There’s no independent listening device in there because there’s no separate power source. And there’s nothing connected to those batteries that shouldn’t be. He’s not listening to us. Not unless we push the button,” she added, slotting in the third screw. “And we just have to take your word on that, do we?” Oliver asked, also forgetting to whisper now. “Oliver.” It was Maddy who said it this time. “She could be wrong,” he replied. “Or she could be lying to us. How do we know we can trust what she’s saying?” Red wasn’t wrong and she wasn’t lying, not about this at least. She slid the plastic that covered the battery compartment back and turned the knob to switch the walkie-talkie on. The fizz of static greeted her, welcoming her home. She’d missed the sound. Wasn’t that stupid? But it meant the walkie- talkie was working, she hadn’t broken it somehow by trying to be useful. Except now she wasn’t useful, she was a liar. Like when she gave her statements to the police over five years ago. Red was trying to be helpful, to be useful, even though the world was ending around them. She described her final phone call with her mom, every hateful part of it. Over and over again, every last detail she could remember. “There was a doorbell in the background. Mom rang the doorbell at someone’s house. They answered and she said ‘Hello.’ ” But that couldn’t be true, you see, they’d explained to her. Her mom wasn’t found anywhere near a residential road, near houses. She was found inside Southwark Generating Station, that old, abandoned power station on the pier. And she was dead within ten minutes of that phone call. They didn’t say Red was lying, not like Oliver just had, they said she must have been mistaken, confused, she was only thirteen, she was in shock. Sometimes Red wasn’t really sure if she’d remembered it at all. And, now that she thought about it, was she sure about the walkie-talkie? “What are you talking about, Oliver?” Reyna’s turn to look at him, crossing the awkward silence that had followed his words.

“The sniper knew about the note, Reyna.” Oliver’s face was reddening again, heat in patches up his neck. “He knew what was written on it. He also knew exactly where we were to trap us here. So if we’re saying there isn’t a listening device somewhere in the RV, then we have an even bigger problem. Because the only alternative is that…” He drew off, eyes circling around the group, finally coming to rest on Red. “One of us is working with them.”

3:00 a.m.

Red couldn’t hold Oliver’s eyes for longer than two seconds. He won. She dropped her gaze. “What?” Simon said, voice escaping before he’d even formed the end of the word. “Don’t be ridiculous, Oliver,” Reyna said. “No one here is working with the shooter.” “Why is it ridiculous?” he snapped, puppet strings back, spinning his head. “The sniper knows things he couldn’t possibly know. What we’re saying in here, what our plans are, that fucking note. And let’s not forget how we ended up here in the first place.” He paused, eyes flashing under the overhead lights as he cracked the bones in his neck. “This road wasn’t on our route. We got lost. So either the sniper somehow predicted exactly which wrong turns we’d take, or he was listening through a bug he’d planted and following us, or”—he swallowed—“someone in this RV led us right to him.” He looked pointedly at Simon, Arthur and Red, one hand balling into a fist at his side. He stretched it out, fingers ropy and long, as he studied the three of them. Something tightened in Red’s gut, twisting uncomfortably as she watched Oliver’s hand bend and flex.