The sky was still bruised with the last colors of dawn when we got back on the road.

The three of us settled into the car the way people settle in after a hard night, quiet but functional, the specific morning energy of people who had decided to keep going.

Mercury was driving with her smile back, which surprised me. Jenn was in the back, alone, her hand resting on her bag the way some people rest their hands on prayer beads.

"You good?" I asked her, turning slightly in my seat.

"Yes," Jenn answered softly. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t push.

Mercury glanced at her in the rearview mirror. "You must be an introvert."

"Not exactly," Jenn said. "Just quiet."

"Okay." Mercury looked back at the road and then at me. "Their tire tracks are visible. We can follow them."

The plain stretched ahead with no road to speak of. The sand carried the impression of two armored vehicles that had passed through hours ago. Easy to follow if you knew what you were looking at.

Then I saw it.

A wall of dust coming toward us from ahead. The specific tall sweeping motion of plain weather, fast and total, the kind of thing my mother had taught me to find shelter from before it arrived.

"Mercury," I said. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Shit." She was already raising the reinforced windows. "That is not nice at all."

She stopped the car. The wind hit us a few seconds later, sand passing over the small vehicle in a continuous roar, the windows holding, the body of the car taking it the way old cars take things, with patience and complaint in equal measure.

***

When it finally passed, the world outside looked completely different.

"That was crazy," Mercury said, laughing as we got out to clean the glass.

The wind had passed but had left a coating of fine sand on every surface. Jenn’s old dress came out of her bag and became a cleaning cloth. I did the wiping. The dress collected what the wind had deposited.

"Fuck," Mercury said.

"What?"

She gestured ahead.

The sand had swept the plain clean. The armored vehicle tracks were gone. Every clue that had pointed us toward Sinn’s route was now buried under fresh dust in every direction.

"This is going to be a hell of a journey," Mercury said, laughing as she got back in. "We might end up back in the Forsaken City."

I got in. Jenn settled in the back.

"You good?" I asked her.

She nodded.

Mercury started us moving again, in the direction her instincts suggested, which was as good a method as we had now. The dust hadn’t fully settled.

"You’re going too fast," I said, noticing the change in the engine’s sound. The car was protesting and Mercury was ignoring it.

"I know what I’m doing, love."

Love, I thought. That’s new.

I filed it next to the kiss from the night before, which was either developing into something or staying right where it was depending on whether we lived through the next few hours.

She kept one hand on the wheel and glanced over. "You should also be more concerned about the fact that I’m not wearing anything under this skirt."

I glanced at the back seat to see if Jenn was processing this conversation.

"Don’t worry about her," Mercury said, amused. "She grew up with a man who died with my underwear in his pocket. She’s heard worse."

Jenn let out a small, surprised chuckle from the back, the first real sound of life I’d heard from her since we left the Forsaken City.

"Jenn," Mercury continued, clearly enjoying herself, "can I ask you a stupid question?"

"Sure."

"I wouldn’t if I were you," I warned.

"What’s your body count?"

Jenn made a zero with her fingers. Mercury saw it in the rearview mirror at the same time I saw it.

"No way." Mercury’s voice carried the genuine disbelief of someone who had just received unexpected information. "You’re a V?"

"Yes."

"Were you blood related to Major?"

"No."

Mercury looked at me with the specific expression of a woman making a recommendation she found self-evident.

"You’ve got work to do."

"What do you—"

The car hit something hard.

She had increased the speed without me noticing and we had run over something solid, the impact registering through the chassis. She didn’t stop.

"See," she said.

The dust ahead was settling. A city was appearing through it. She stopped the car.

"Wait," Jenn said from the back, voice suddenly tense. "That city is infested."

One infected was visible through the windshield. Staggering across the road in the middle distance. Not a coincidence, the specific telltale that meant there were many more not yet visible.

"Should we turn back?" Mercury asked.

They were both waiting for me to decide.

"Raise the windows," I said. "Drive slow. We go through it."

"Yes," Jenn said quietly from the back.

Mercury drove in carefully. The city assembled itself around us in pieces, broken buildings, infected moving along the sides of the road, not many of them initially, the specific scattered movement of a place the bulk of the population had already moved through and exited.

We rolled forward. Slow. The infected on the sides didn’t react. The engine was quiet enough.

Then we reached the center of the city.

A square. Open space. And in it, easily a hundred infected, moving in different directions, the specific organized chaos of a population that had occupied this place and made it theirs.

Mercury stopped.

"Why are you stopping?" I asked.

She turned the key again. The engine coughed, caught for a second, then died completely. A thin trail of black smoke rose from under the bonnet.

"Fuck." Mercury slammed her hand against the steering wheel.

I could feel the shift in both women, Mercury’s hands tightening on the wheel, Jenn’s breathing changing behind me, while the plain’s indifferent heat continued pressing down on the motionless car.

Outside the car, the first infected had noticed the sound. It turned its head toward us.

Then the next one did.