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features. She hesitated by the door, and Tobias’s shoulders tensed.
    “Wait,” I said. “I can navigate from the back. Justin, let me sit in the middle.” Where I’d be a barrier between Tobias and the people he could infect.
    Justin shuffled out to make room, and Anika scrambled into the front. I took one last look at the house before I slid in beside Tobias. I couldn’t see the window of the room where we’d left Gav. But what lay in there was nothing more than a shell. Justin shut the door, and I turned my gaze forward.
    The border was less than fifty miles away. In a couple hours, I’d be leaving the only country I’d ever lived in. The last scraps of my old life.
    The engine revved, and Leo aimed the car toward Atlanta.
    I charted a course with our old Ontario maps, keeping us off the major roads as much as possible. The Wardens might not have realized we’d stopped, so they were probably well ahead of us now, but I suspected they’d be patrolling every major highway between here and Atlanta until they caught us. They’d heard Leo’s broadcast; they knew where we were heading.
    Leo flipped through the radio stations a few times. He used to drive his dad crazy when we were little, switching stations every few songs because he wanted to hear what all of them were playing. Today there was only the dull fizzle of static.
    He stiffened when we approached the border, and I remembered his story of his weeks in the containment camp when he was trying to get home. But the booths and the lanes between them were empty. Several of the barriers were broken. And then we rumbled past the darkened windows and left Canada behind us.
    Through the next day and into the night, we pulled over every few hours—to switch off the driving, to grab food from the back, to quickly siphon gas when we passed a cluster of houses that all had cars parked in their driveways. We never stopped moving for very long, but our progress was slow. The snow tugged at the tires, and twice we had to backtrack around a road where it was heaped too high. I tried to nap in the back during one of my breaks, but every hitch of the suspension startled me awake. Whenever I closed my eyes, I imagined Gav lying there in that room, the cold freezing him down to his bones. By the time the sun peeked over the horizon the next morning, I was chilled through.
    As I peered out the window, a new worry broke through my exhaustion. The forestland we’d been traveling through for most of the night was giving way to open fields. Fields across which the Wardens might be watching from the larger roads we’d been avoiding. We hadn’t seen another soul so far, but that didn’t mean anything. The Wardens would be keeping a particular eye out for this SUV, the one we’d stolen from them.
    “Anika,” I said, and she blinked to attention at the wheel, where she’d been staring through the windshield as if hypnotized. “You know the Wardens better than we do. You said Michael had headed down this way a little while back—how many people do you think he could have looking for us?”
    She seemed to swallow a yawn. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I mean, I was never in with them—I’ve never even seen Michael. But from what I picked up, listening in on the talk on the street, he’s really good at winning people over. And he brought a bunch with him when he headed south. He’s had, like, a month now to get organized—he could have set up groups in a few different cities by now. If he wants the vaccine this much, he’ll have a lot of people keeping an eye out.”
    “Maybe we should get another car, then,” I said. “One they wouldn’t recognize.”
    Beside me, Leo rubbed his bleary eyes. “That might be safer.”
    “They’re going to come after any vehicle they see, aren’t they?” Justin put in, setting the road atlas on his lap. “It’s not like there’s any traffic for us to blend in with. If we stop to find a new car, we’re just giving them a