6. Cedar Avenue

Sia’s POV

I handed Skyler the coffee at ten to five, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.

Operation Make Him Love Me had officially begun when I woke up at four with a stiff neck and a dead fire. The cold from the night had gone, and I still didn’t know what it had been. What I did know was that I had thirty days, a number sitting at -110%, and one real advantage: four years of someone else’s obsessive notes on exactly what this man liked.

So I borrowed the camp stove, found a tin mug, and made it the way the diary said. Black, with three sugars, because he looked exhausted.

He was in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the dashboard while Marcus drove us out of the depot. I leaned over the back of the seat and held the mug out like an olive branch.

“What’s this?”

“Coffee. Black, three sugars. You look like you could use it.”

The cab went very quiet.

Skyler didn’t take the mug. He turned his head and looked at me, and I watched the exact second his face closed.

“Who told you how I take my coffee?”

“Nobody. I just—”

“Nobody,” he repeated, very softly.

I looked down at the mug, and it hit me a full second too late. The villainess had known all of this. She had pushed it at him for four years: soup at his door, little notes, coffee. To the man on the receiving end, this wasn’t romance. It was the same girl, with the same key, trying the same door.

“Don’t.” His jaw tightened. “Don’t do that again.” He turned back to the windshield.

[Affection: -115%.]

Minus five points. For a cup of coffee.

I set the mug in the cup holder with great dignity.

Fine. The diary was a map of everything I shouldn’t do.

New plan: stop doing what she did, and be so useful that he couldn’t afford to hate me. He didn’t need a girl with a mug. He needed someone who was right.

Harlow appeared at dawn, as if the town had been waiting for us to try to sneak past.

The sign said POP. 18,000, with a bullet hole through the zero. A main road ran straight through the middle of the place, Cedar Avenue, four lanes of empty asphalt pointing north like an arrow. Beyond it, a narrow canal road split off along the water.

“Cedar.” Skyler traced the road with one finger on the dusty windshield. “Straight through. Twenty minutes, then we’re back on the highway.”

Marcus put his foot down.

And the cold slammed into me so hard that the coffee jumped out of the mug.

It wasn’t the thin thread I’d been carrying for a day. It was a wall, and it lay across the whole length of Cedar Avenue like a body.

“Stop the truck!”

Marcus hit the brakes. Eli smacked into the seat in front of him. Everyone turned to stare, and I understood that this was my moment, my one clear chance to be useful, and that I had about four seconds to make it count.

“Not Cedar.” I gripped the seat in front of me. “Take the canal road.”

Lena twisted around. “Excuse me?”

“The canal road. Please.”

“It adds an hour,” Marcus growled, in the voice of a man who had already decided he hated the idea.

“I know.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Lena drawled. “The princess has opinions about the route now. Does she want a carpet laid out, too?”

Skyler looked at me with those dark, sleepless eyes, the way a man looks at a lock he can’t pick. I couldn’t tell what he was weighing. Whether I was lying. Whether I was leading them into a trap.

“I’m not asking you to like it.” I didn’t look away. “I’m asking you to take the other road.”

“The canal road.” His tone left no room for argument.

“Skyler—”

“She was right yesterday. I’d like to see her be right twice before I shoot her.”

Marcus swore and wrenched the wheel. We bounced onto the canal road, and I braced both hands against the seat in front of me and prayed I hadn’t just dragged six people an hour out of their way for nothing.

We’d gone a quarter of a mile when the town behind us cleared its throat.

The ground let out a long, low groan. Then Cedar Avenue sat down.

The asphalt buckled, split down the middle, and dropped away in a roar. Buildings folded in on themselves like wet cardboard. A bus tipped over the edge and vanished, and a thick wall of dust rolled up from the hole. At the lip of the crater, a man stood with his arms spread wide, and the earth rose and fell under his palms like breathing.

“Earth-type,” Eli whispered. “Day two.”

Nobody spoke. We were all looking at the place where we would have been.

Lena stared at the crater, and then at me. Her mouth opened, then closed. She didn’t apologize, and she didn’t say “princess” either, and I’d take it.

I checked the system, because I couldn’t help it.

[Affection: -115%.]

Nothing. I had just saved six people’s lives, and it earned me exactly zero points. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. A medal?

“Canal road,” Marcus muttered at last, like it had been dragged out of him.

Five minutes later, the road ahead of us cracked like a dropped plate, and he had to stop. “Bridge. I need to see if it holds. Everybody out. Stay close.”

We piled out onto the cracked asphalt. The canal ran dark and still on one side. On the other, a low concrete barrier ran along the road.

Nora was the last out of the truck.

She stood at the back with her hand on the door, staring at the cloud of dust over Harlow. Her face was wrung out and gray. And then the cold touched my neck, and I knew it. I had felt it pressed against my back all night.

It was her.

And it wasn’t pointed at her. It was coming at her, from the left, from the dying crater, hot and fast.

“Nora, down!”

She turned and stared at me with her swollen red eyes, and I didn’t wait for her to decide. I threw myself at her. We hit the pavement together and slid behind the concrete barrier, and a heartbeat later a slab of Cedar Avenue came tumbling out of the sky, struck the road where she’d been standing, and tore the truck’s rear door off its hinges like a lid off a can.

Gravel rained down on the barrier. Then everything went quiet.

Nora lay beneath me with her mouth open, her cropped hair full of grit.

“Get off.” Her voice came out flat.

I got off.

She scrambled backward on her hands until there was a full arm’s length of cracked pavement between us. Her hands curled into fists in her lap, the knuckles white. She stared at the ruined truck door, and then at me, and then very deliberately at her own boots.

“Are you hurt?” I reached out, just a little.

“Don’t touch me.” She said it through her teeth.

It wasn’t the voice of someone afraid of me. It was the voice of someone afraid of what she’d do if I got any closer.

I nodded and put my hands where she could see them.

[Affection: -115%.]

Still nothing. I added it to the list of things the system didn’t care about.

Everyone piled back into the truck, minus one door. Nora took the seat farthest from mine and turned toward the window without a word. Marcus gunned the engine, and for the first ten minutes, nobody spoke.

Then Eli, who had been staring at his tablet the whole time, made a small, strange sound.

“Skyler.” His voice was thin. “That wasn’t only the wind-type.”

He turned the tablet around. The map was dotted with red. One was the wind-type, still behind us. But there were others now, five or six of them, scattered across the countryside.

And every one of them was moving in a straight line.

“They’re all coming this way.” Eli swallowed. “Like something’s pulling them.”

Skyler didn’t answer. His face had gone very still. The cold had started up my spine again, slow and steady, and I had the horrible feeling that this was only the beginning.