The Worlds We Make Read Online Free PDF Page B

watching them. He turned his head when I noticed him, snapping open the cap of the pill bottle. I remembered how he’d turned pink in Anika’s presence when she’d first joined us, his gaze following her wherever she went. It’s nothing , I wanted to tell him. She’s four years older than Justin. The two of them —it’s never going to happen. But she hadn’t shown the slightest interest in Tobias either. So I kept my mouth shut as I tramped with the others back to the SUV.
    I took the wheel first. Beneath the swathes of fabric we’d fixed over them, the running lights provided just enough illumination for me to follow the road as it wound along a stretch of farmland. I didn’t think their pale glow would stand out across much of a distance.
    After an hour, the road ended at a T intersection. Beside me, Justin squinted at the road atlas. “Looks like we should take a left, and then turn onto the first road to the east,” he said.
    “How close is this taking us to the highways?” I asked when we reached the second turn.
    “Not too close,” Justin said. He measured with his fingers. “I think there’s still at least a mile between us and the nearest one.”
    “We don’t know for sure the Wardens are sticking to the highways,” Anika said. She paused, fidgeting with her gloves, and then added, “If Michael was smart enough to do everything else he’s done, he’s probably smart enough to figure out we’d try to slip by on the side roads.”
    “Well, if we meet any Wardens, we’ll just blast through them like last time,” Justin said, as if he’d been the one doing the shooting when we’d fled Toronto, not Tobias.
    “I’ll be happier if we don’t run into them at all,” Leo said. “Any ‘blasting’ is going to make other people want to see what’s going on. The Wardens aren’t the only dangerous ones around.”
    True. There’d been plenty of dangerous people back on the island, where no one had heard of Michael.
    “I’m surprised he trusts anyone that much,” I said. “I mean, the people who catch us, what’s to stop them from just using the samples themselves?”
    “Michael would probably have them killed,” Anika replied, matter-of-factly. “Anyway, I think he’s given some people the idea that, if he got the vaccine, he’d somehow let everyone who’s loyal to him get a piece of it.”
    Did he think he could split up the samples and just a fraction would be enough to protect people? Or—Drew had said Michael had recruited doctors. Maybe he figured one of them would have the know-how to duplicate the vaccine in small batches with whatever equipment they’d scrounged up, so he could dole it out to whoever paid the highest price.
    I realized I was gripping the steering wheel much more tightly than I needed to. Screw Michael. Justin was right. We’d beaten the Wardens before, and we’d do it again if we had to.
    As I flexed my fingers in an effort to relax, a muted boom echoed across the field to our right. My head snapped around, my foot hitting the brake. We slowed to a halt.
    In the distance, to the west and ahead of us, a streak of light flickered. It flared brighter as another booming sound rang out, and a second light leapt up beside it. They wavered, dipping and swaying, like lines of flame.
    “Wow,” Justin said. “Something big just blew.”
    Leo leaned between our seats. “I wonder what?”
    I strained my eyes, but all I could make out through the darkness was the quaking of the distant fire. “It could be anything. Maybe just an accident. There must be factories around here, with all kinds of chemicals stored in them that no one’s looking after anymore.”
    More than just factories. How many nuclear power plants were operational in North America? Would the workers have taken the time to make sure they were safely shut down, in the midst of the epidemic panic? A shiver ran through me. Just one more in a long list of possible horrors the future might hold.
    “Are