The first thing she saw was the SUV. It was on its side, the engine pitched as the back wheels spun, one of them burning against the highway. Not on fire, but totaled. She limped away to give it a wide berth. Hopefully everyone inside was dead or unconscious.

  She squinted through blurred vision to try and find the truck, and only then realized that she probably had a concussion. That would explain the numbness, and the pounding behind her forehead. Dispassionately, she assessed herself and the scene in front of her, until finally she spotted the general colors and shape of Chester’s truck. It was upright, at least. “Mom?” she called. “Dad? Derek?”

  No one answered. She quickened her pace, but her hip complained and something nervy and sharp shot down the back of her right leg. She called out again and got no answer. But there was someone in the opened passenger door of the cab.

  When Lana got close enough, she saw her mother clearly, one arm draped over the opened or shattered window of the truck to steady herself, the other braced on the edge of the seat. Her eyes were closed, and there was blood on her lip. “Hey,” Lana said as she came closer, “Mom? Hey, look at me.”

  Elizabeth glanced around, clearly dazed, and her unfocused eyes settled on Lana. “Honey?”

  Lana rushed to her, ignoring the hurt in her leg, and caught her mother when she seemed too unsteady to move. “I’m here,” she told her, and maneuvered her back to the seat. “Sit down, okay? Dad?”

  Past her mother, Caleb was unconscious in the driver’s seat but didn’t look bloody. The steering wheel was canted at the wrong angle, though, and the airbag looked like it had tried and failed to deploy, leaving scorch marks around a half-emerged puff of deflated material. Some of the mental numbness finally started to wane, and fresh worry filled Lana’s aching head and body. She propped her mother up. “You okay? Here—pinch your nose, it’s bleeding. Might be broken, be careful. Let me check on Dad.”

  To get to him, she hurried around the back end of the truck and saw Derek in the bed, still unconscious. The side of his head was bloody, but he was visibly breathing, at least. There were so many dents and holes in the truck’s chassis that she and he both were lucky not to have holes in them. She couldn’t be sure that Derek didn’t, really, but as much as she wanted to be sure he was okay she had to check her father first.

  She found Caleb groaning softly by the time she made it to him, the side of his head cut and bleeding down his cheek and jaw, and gave him a gentle shake. “Dad? Come on, wake up.”

  Caleb roused slightly, his voice slurred when he spoke. “Lana?” he murmured. “Hit m’head... Liz. Liz?”

  “She’s good, Dad,” Lana assured him, reaching over him for her pack that had gotten lodged into the floorboard by the gear shift. She pulled it to her and dug through the outer pockets for what few first aid supplies were in it. They’d lost the main medical bag with their old ride, though, and all they had were bandages and antibiotic ointment. She tore off a length of bandage and pressed it to her father’s hand, then lifted it to the gash along the side of his head. “Hold this here, okay? I need to check on Derek.”

  Caleb gave her a weak nod, and once Lana was certain he had the strength to put pressure on the wound, she hurried back to the bed of the truck to see about Derek. The tailgate was jammed shut, one of the lower corners crushed where they’d clipped the SUV before.

  She braced herself against the pain and hauled her body over the ruined tailgate. She half fell onto the truck bed, blinking rapidly as another twinge of something awful rocketed down her leg. Derek lay sprawled across the bed and Lana crawled over to him, flipping him fully onto his back. She checked his previous injury to make sure it hadn’t split open, then felt around his skull and neck for any signs of broken bones.

  This was the second time she’d checked to make sure Derek was alive, now. Some distant terror nagged at her, but she drowned it in clinical coolness as she made certain he wasn’t seriously injured. From what she could tell, he had a cut on his head, likely had a concussion, but was at least responsive.

  If it was more serious than that, her crash course in field medicine that he’d given her didn’t cover it. She sagged and pressed her lips to his bloody forehead. “Please be okay. Just be okay, that’s all I ask.”

  No one was dead. That was a start, at least. Lana busied herself wrapping Derek’s head in bandages to staunch the bleeding, then pulled herself up and climbed over the tailgate again. She lowered herself carefully to the asphalt, trying to get her brain running at normal speed. What had to happen next?

  They needed a new ride, and everyone had to get moved to it. She looked around the highway. There were abandoned cars in sight. The truck wasn’t on fire, and she didn’t smell gas, so there was probably still fuel in the tank. So, she had a clear next step.

  “Don’t... don’t move,” a woman wheezed behind her.

  Lana froze, then slowly raised her hands. She looked over her shoulder carefully and found a blood-faced Victoria Steen standing some distance behind her, a handgun raised in Lana’s direction.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  LANA

  Outside Odessa, MO

  Friday, July 20th, 10:12 am CST

  The woman had one eye swollen shut and was clearly favoring a leg. Her uniform was shredded across one arm, and a medical cuff looked like it had been applied there. “Look at you,” Lana muttered. The brief spike of fresh adrenaline didn’t last long. Her body was too exhausted to keep it up.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” Victoria warned her, and stalked forward. “Where is the laptop?”

  Despite the seriousness of the moment, Lana could only laugh. She shook her head slowly. “Jesus,” she breathed, “you really did all this for that thing? What are you gonna do, Victoria? Walk it to Kansas City? What’s on it that’s so important?”

  The bloody field marshal moved toward her and knelt to check the pack at Lana’s feet without answering. Not that Lana expected her to. She had half a mind to let the woman take the thing at this point.

  “This all would have been so much simpler if you’d simply followed directions.” Victoria rummaged over the pack to get the top opened. “Now I’ve got agents dead and injured and look at the lot of you. You’re exactly the kind of problem I’m out here trying to solve.”

  “Oh, so we’re not invited to your club anymore?” Lana wondered, eyeing the gun as Victoria peered down into the bag and saw the wire and foil wrapped laptop inside. “I’m heartbroken, really.”

  Satisfied the laptop was there, Victoria hauled the pack to her shoulder and then rose unsteadily. The hand holding her weapon was shaking slightly. “You should be.” She took a step back, her gun trained on Lana’s chest. “I offered you a home. Safety. Security. Something productive to do with your life. You were in college before all this and doing well.”

  She wobbled on her feet. “I’ve seen your profile. You had a boyfriend, and a promising future. And now, what have you got? You were a woman who wanted to be something, Lana. Something meaningful. Something important in the world. What are you now? A bandit? You could have been so much more.”

  “I’m everything I need to be.” Lana turned slowly to face the woman. She tilted her head toward the truck. “I’m Caleb and Elizabeth Machert’s daughter. I’m a survivor. I’m a soldier. Whatever your expensive software thinks I was going to be, the fact of the matter is that I’ve changed. I’ve grown past whatever that was. You don’t know a thing about me, lady. Maybe you did, once. Or maybe your boss did, anyway. But now? You don’t know what I want, or what’s best for me. You don’t know what’s best for anyone. Surely you can see that?”

  “Apex is—” Victoria started.

  Lana snorted. If she had to sit through another warped tour guide speech, she’d beg the woman to shoot her. “Apex is a bad idea. It’s a caste system dressed up in sci-fi clothing, run by someone who has no clue what it means to live a normal life. You think Alan Trusk knows the first thing about you or me, or what kind of life we live? What’s important to us? A spoiled billionaire who had everything handed to him?”

  “Mr. Trusk is a good man,” Victoria said coldly. “He designed a system that can save us, and he did it over a decade ago. Just for this sort of eventuality. He’s a visionary. He understands what people need, what they crave. Order, direction, and purpose. Can’t you see how much better it will be? And how inevitable it is?”

  Lana shook her head and took a chance at lowering her hands. Her arms hurt too much to keep them up. Victoria didn’t shoot her, at least. “You saw what happened. St. Louis. Gone. What do you think comes next?”

  Victoria shook her head. “That wasn’t Mr. Trusk,” she insisted. “That was the government. The new president.”

  “Okay,” Lana said bitterly, “and what do you think it means? It means your boss, and Apex, are always going to be under the threat of that happening to you. What is Trusk’s endgame, do you think? Is he just gonna hand your fancy system over to the US Government? Do you think everyone in this country is going to be convinced? And when they’re not, what do you think will happen?”

  The woman faltered. Her arm shook harder, and the barrel of the handgun tilted downward. The muscles of her jaw tensed with the strain of holding it upright. “There’s a plan,” she ground out through gritted teeth. “You’ll see. If not now, then eventually. But you won’t be part of it. Not after all of this.”

  And then, Lana understood. Victoria had said before that Apex had made her happy. Fulfilled. That she’d been given purpose, and that it was a good thing. But that wasn’t it. Not really. Not now that she was pressed. This was desperation. It was a quiet, terrible fear of not having a purpose. Victoria wasn’t so brainwashed that she really believed everything she said. At least, Lana didn’t think so.

  She was just terrified of the alternative. Lana spoke slowly. “Everyone wants to know where they belong. We all want to know what we’re supposed to be. I get it. I really do, Victoria. But that’s something you have to figure out for yourself. It’s scary, and dangerous, and especially these days it’s hard. So hard.”

  She shoved the memories down. “You have no idea what I’ve been through, how I’ve had to adapt and force myself to change when I didn’t want to. I didn’t know what I had before until it was gone. Poof.”

  Victoria shifted on her feet, barely able to keep standing.

  “Everything from before is gone and whatever you think Apex is replacing it with... it’s just wrong. We’re not supposed to be analyzed and assigned a purpose and mission in life by a computer. We’re supposed to struggle. We’re supposed to hurt, and be scared, and grow into something more than we were before. If you take the easy out, if you let someone like Trusk tell you what you’re made for, you’re never really going to be you, in the end.”

  Victoria’s nostril twitched. Her arm dropped another inch. But she didn’t reply.

  Lana pressed harder. “If you let anyone take that journey away from you, that’s the closest thing to taking your soul. You can see that, right? Put the gun down. Give me the laptop. Walk away from this. We can drop you closer to Kansas City, and then be on our way if you really want to give Trusk and Apex your soul. But I think you don’t want that. I think you’re just afraid of having no choice but to figure it out on your own like the rest of us.”

  “Lana?”

  Victoria’s eyes twitched toward the sound of Elizabeth’s voice. Her arm came up. Before Lana could close the distance between them, the field marshal pulled the trigger.

  The gun misfired. Damaged in the crash, maybe. There was a bang, and a muzzle flash, but instead of firing a bullet, the front of the gun shattered. Shrapnel pelted Lana’s chest and cheek as she barreled toward Victoria who let out a harsh sound of shock and pain.

  Lana tackled the woman, and the two of them hit the asphalt. Victoria struggled to recover and threw an elbow at Lana’s face. It cracked across the side of her head. Dizziness flooded Lana’s brain, and the pounding intensified. Don’t go out like this, damn it.

  Lana scrabbled for Victoria, fighting off dimming vision. She grabbed fistfuls of the other woman’s uniform jacket and wrenched them both sideways until she could twist the fabric around both fists and pull tight.

  Victoria gave a raspy croak of protest and brought a knee up to dislodge Lana. She took the hit. Something in her lower ribs cracked. Then a fist to her upper ribs, just under her arm. She ignored everything—the pain, the clawing, the dry, hissing sound of the woman trying to get her breath as the cinching choke hold cut it off. The hammering pain behind her eyes. Lana held on through all of it until, finally, Victoria’s eyes rolled, and she sagged back to the ground, limp.

  Still, Lana held on.

  “Lana,” her mother said behind her, “let her go.”

  “She’ll keep coming for us,” Lana growled. “She would have shot you. Or shot at you, anyway. It’s better this way, Mom.”

  “She can’t hurt us now,” Elizabeth insisted. She was closer now. Her hand on Lana’s shoulder. “Baby, please. Don’t kill her.”

  The awful pain in that request, the weight of guilt in it, made Lana’s heart crack a little. Some of her anger ebbed. With a sigh, she let the woman’s jacket go, and let her head fall back to the asphalt. With her mother’s help, she eased up to her feet, groaning on the way.

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked.

  Lana shrugged. “Just banged up.” She winced as pain shot into her side. “And I think she broke a rib. Or two.”

  She looked down at Victoria’s prone, unconscious form. The smart thing to do was kill her. She put a lot of trouble into hunting them down. The kind of trouble that wouldn’t just go away. But, then again, as long as they kept the laptop wrapped, and maybe found the time to dig whatever chip might be in Lana’s arm out, there was no way Victoria would find them. They’d be long gone before she could catch up.

  So, maybe her mother was right. Maybe they didn’t have to kill the woman. And maybe it was a bad thing that Lana was just a little bit disappointed at that. New, more personal guilt settled on her shoulders. The night that her parents had found her in Greensboro flashed through her mind, and then what her father had said about it later. “I don’t like killing people,” he’d told her. “If there’s any way to avoid it, I would.”

  Lana didn’t like the idea of killing Victoria. She just thought it was the most economical way to eliminate the threat she might pose later on. But killing people wasn’t supposed to be the economical option.

  For the briefest of moments, she was uncertain that what she’d told Victoria was true. Maybe the way she was growing and changing, adapting to all of this... maybe it wasn’t the best way.

  But it was the only way. The only real way, at least. What Apex offered was a lie. “Check on Dad. I’ll see about Derek. Then we need to find one of these cars that looks like it might work and get the gas out of Chester’s truck.”

  Elizabeth studied Lana’s eyes for a bit longer, then nodded quickly and went to see about her husband.

  Derek groaned, barely conscious, as she climbed again into the bed. “...happened?” he murmured.

  She stroked his blood-matted hair. “It’s done. Take it easy. Can you sit up? Anything broken?”

  Derek blinked slowly, then winced at the light and put a hand to his head. He felt the bandages there, and his brow furrowed. “I get hit?”

  “Cracked your head.” He put an elbow against the floor of the bed and began pushing himself up. “Can you move? Feeling dizzy? Know what day it is?”

  He gave a weak laugh. “Does it count if I haven’t known what day it is for the last few weeks?”

  Fair enough. Lana realized she wasn’t sure what day it was, herself, and that probably had nothing to do with a potential concussion. “I’d ask if you remember who the president is, but I guess that’s changed too recently. Know my name, at least?”

  “Are you my Dad?” He smirked too soon afterward for it to be a serious question. “I think I’m all there upstairs. Just hurts like hell. And the light’s a little bright.”

  Lana glanced up at the gray sky. That was probably a bad sign. But he seemed fully conscious, at least, and not slurring his speech, or having trouble paying attention. If his brain was bruised, or he had internal bleeding, or anything dangerous like that, there was no way to be sure of it now. They’d just have to make sure he took it easy until they were somewhere those things could be ruled out.

  “Alright. Let’s get you out of the truck. It’s wrecked, but we’ve still got the gas.”

  By the time she’d helped him down from the back, Caleb was standing and leaning against Lana’s mother. He was recovering quickly, but still dizzy. So, after checking in with him, Lana and Elizabeth left them sitting by the truck to rest while they started checking cars. After an hour or so of searching, they found one unlocked and in good enough shape to drive. Caleb had to hotwire it, but they used some spare hosing in Chester’s toolbox to move the gas over a bit at a time.

  Then they were back on the road, Lana at the wheel. Banged up, exhausted, injured, but alive.

  As long as they had that, Lana figured, there was always a chance that tomorrow would be better.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ELIZABETH

  Outside Springfield, CO

  Sunday, July 22nd, 2:17 pm CST

  For two days, Elizabeth shared the driving with Lana. They made their way well south of Kansas City and kept far away from anything that smacked of Apex. Twice, they found fresh gas, and the little Toyota sedan they’d managed to get going had okay mileage, all things considered.

  Food and water were a problem, but they found a few bottles in the trunk of the car that they boiled and then rationed out as well as they could. Lana’s pack had three MREs in it, so they split those every eight hours or so, just to keep a little bit of food in their stomachs. They didn’t stop except to scavenge for gas and the heat in the car was enough to take the bite out of the cold nights.