Twisting in my seat, I catch Riva’s gaze. She nods, understanding the question I’m asking without needing words.
I turn to Jacob. “I say we go straight to BC. It’s our best shot by far.”
Jake hesitates for a second and then waves his hand toward me. “Let’s do it. Give me our route and see where we can look for a new ride along the way.”
With a few beats of my thumb, I bring up the map for our location. I meant to focus on the roads streaking across the state around us, but as I study the landscape, another detail catches my eye.
I zoom in and trace the markings crisscrossing the map. “What if we didn’t get a new car right away?”
Jake’s gaze flicks toward me as he propels our current vehicle down the bumpy country road that brought us here. “The guardians could already be on the lookout for this one. We don’t want—”
I hold up my hand. “That’s not what I meant. They’ll be looking for us in cars in general. We’ve got a long way to go—it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we could get some rest while traveling too. There are a bunch of freight train lines through Kansas. We could hitch a ride like we did with the truck before.”
Dom speaks up from the back. “Would we be able to catch one that goes all the way up to Canada?”
I tilt my head, studying the screen. “I don’t know what the typical routes are, but there’s a network with tracks that go northwest all the way up to the border. It looks like… we could pass through Nebraska, then Wyoming, and then Montana, and cross into BC there. We’d have to check the GPS periodically, and I suspect we’d need to switch trains at least a couple of places, but they could get us most of the way there.”
Jacob’s expression turns pensive. “That method could be faster or slower depending on how consistently the trains are running. But we can always hop off once we’ve gotten some distance from this place and grab a car somewhere there’s less heat on us.”
I nod. “Yeah, exactly. The more we mix things up, the harder it’ll be for the guardians to predict what we’re doing or where we’re going.”
“All right. Figure out the best place for us to catch a ride nearby—and where we could ditch the car easily too.”
I shoot Jake a tight smile in return. “Already on it.”
* * *
The light in the train car gradually fades with the sinking of the sun. We eat the rest of our stash of food, making plans to pick up more wherever we get off this first train, and sway with the jostling of the car on the tracks.
Every half hour, I check the phone to confirm our progress on the line this freight train is traveling along. When I curl up on a musty canvas sheet next to the stacks of wooden crates to try to get a little rest, Jacob takes over.
I’m not sure he’s been sleeping at all. He always pushes himself to his limit, even when he doesn’t have to, but how the hell any of us could convince him to take a break, I don’t know.
I wake up to a soft creaking and the sight of Jake and Zian peering at the phone with the electronic glow splashed across their faces. Dominic is lying against a different stack of crates, the hood of his parka pulled up to cushion his head, but when I move to join the others, he stirs and sits up.
All I can make out of Riva is her sneakered feet poking out from the thicker shadows where she’s tucked herself in an alcove between more of the boxes.
“Don’t leave it on too much,” I say in a hushed voice, sinking down next to Jacob. “We don’t know when we’ll be able to recharge the battery.”
“We got that extra battery pack,” he mutters.
“Yeah, and eventually that needs to be recharged too.”
He sighs, but he turns off the phone. “We’re coming up on an interchange. Based on how fast this thing has been moving, I’d say we’ll get there in twenty minutes or so. Then we’ll have to see whether it keeps going the way we want, stops to unload, or veers off in the wrong direction.”
We might have to get off, he means. I nod and glance toward Riva. “Should we wake her up?”
“No point until we know for sure, right?” Zian says before Jacob can answer.
Jacob grimaces. “If she is even sleeping and not pretending so she can listen in.”
Listen in to what? What secret plans are we making that he thinks she’d want to spy on?
I fight down the urge to shake the guy. I know I don’t understand how it’s been for him in the past four years, but at some point, he needs to open his eyes and see that he’s imagining a monster that isn’t here.
Dominic moves closer to Riva with quiet steps and rests his hand gently on her calf. “She’s definitely asleep,” he murmurs a moment later. “Pretty deeply too. I don’t know how much rest she’s gotten in the last few days.”
If she can’t hear us, then Jake can’t object to me bringing up the specific issue that’s been niggling at me more and more during those few days. I turn to him, making my voice as firm as I can manage.