8. Ten Points

Sia’s POV

The horizon had stopped being a horizon.

Where the sky should have met the road, there was a brown-black wall now, turning slowly, taller than any building I had ever seen, with dust boiling off the base of it and a sound like a freight train coming up through the floor. Eli’s tablet had promised thirty minutes. Eli’s tablet had been wrong by about twenty-two.

I had a new line on the diary’s last page, written in a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking.

Apologize to Marcus. Properly. Later, when nothing is trying to kill us.

“Faster!” Skyler barked.

“I’m doing what I can!” Marcus had the pedal flat against the floor and both hands locked on the wheel, and the truck was howling about it. Without its rear door, the back of the cab was an open mouth. Wind tore through it. Jun flattened himself against the bench with one arm hooked around a strut. Lena’s ponytail whipped across her face like a rope.

A car came sailing out of the dust ahead of us, turning end over end, and smashed down on the road fifty yards in front of the hood. Marcus wrenched the wheel. We swerved around the wreck with the tires screaming, and my skull knocked against the frame hard enough to make the world go white at the edges.

“Ten minutes!” Eli yelled. “No, less! It’s— Why is it getting faster?”

The cold hit me then. It came up my spine in one long, brutal rush, not a thread now or a fingertip but a hand clamped around the back of my neck, and it hurt. My teeth ached. My fingers had gone numb on the seat in front of me.

I forced myself to look at it, the way I had looked at the skinny scavenger, instead of just flinching away.

The cold wasn’t steady. It leaned. It tilted toward the truck in pulses, and every pulse arrived a half second after someone in the cab raised their voice.

“Go, go, go, you useless—” Lena shrieked at the back of Marcus’s head.

The cold surged so hard that I nearly bit my tongue.

I went cold in a different way.

It wasn’t following the truck. It was following the feeling in the truck. Lena’s panic. Marcus’s fury, still red-hot from my stupid joke. Nora’s grief, a flat gray weight in the corner. Skyler, rigid in the passenger seat with his hatred banked so low and so hard that it felt like a coal.

The book had said the gas liked people who felt too much. I had read that sentence a dozen times without thinking about what it meant to be inside it.

We were a feast on wheels.

“Everyone, quiet!” My voice cracked. “You have to calm down. It’s feeding on us!”

Lena twisted around, her face contorted. “Don’t you dare tell me—”

The wall of wind roared closer, and the cold slammed me sideways into Jun.

Nobody was going to listen to me. I wasn’t the girl anyone listened to. And the loudest, hottest thing in the cab was right there at the wheel, white-knuckled and shaking, driving us toward a funnel cloud with a look on his face like he’d already decided to lose.

Line four. Later was now.

I crawled forward between the seats, bracing against the lurching floor, until my mouth was beside Marcus’s ear.

“Sit down!” Skyler snapped.

“Marcus.” I ignored him. “That joke was cruel. I don’t even know why it was cruel, which makes it worse. I’m sorry.”

His jaw worked. “Not now.”

“Now. I need you steady, and I don’t want you driving angry at me.” I swallowed. “You’re the best driver we have. You got us through that crossroads. You got us around that car. I’m sorry I made you feel like you weren’t.”

He didn’t answer.

But his hands moved. It was small, just a loosening, like a man setting down something heavy. His shoulders dropped half an inch. And the cold, the vast hand on the back of my neck, shuddered, wavered, and for one beautiful second lessened.

Okay. It worked. It was working.

The funnel swayed behind us like it had lost its scent.

“There,” I said, hardly daring to breathe. I pointed through the cracked windshield. Half a mile ahead, a rail embankment cut across the road, with a dark stripe of underpass beneath it. “Marcus. Go under that.”

“Into a tunnel?” Lena yelped.

“It’s a wind-type. It needs open air to push against. A tunnel gives it nothing.”

“That’s a guess!”

“Yes.” I met Skyler’s eyes in the mirror, and I didn’t look away. “It’s a guess. It’s the best one we’ve got.”

A long, awful second went by.

“Marcus,” Skyler said. “Do it.”

Marcus hauled the wheel over, and the truck bucked off the road and dove into the dark.

The world went black and loud.

The underpass swallowed us whole, and the wind slammed into both ends at once, screaming through the stone like a furious animal. Dust and gravel hammered the walls. The truck rocked on its springs. Somebody was shouting, and I couldn’t tell who. I wedged myself against the seat with my arms over my head and felt the cold hit me from both directions, so intense that something warm ran from my nose across my lip and dripped onto my knee.

Blood. Great. The Chill had a price, and it had just sent the first bill.

Then, very slowly, it began to fade.

The roar dropped to a growl. The growl dropped to a whine. Light crept back into the tunnel in dirty gray streaks, and when I finally dared to lift my head, I could see the funnel just outside the north mouth, hovering over the road like a dog at a door it wasn’t allowed through.

It hung there for a long moment. Then it drifted away.

Nobody spoke. I could hear the engine ticking, and Eli’s ragged breathing, and Jun muttering something under his breath that sounded like a prayer.

Something dropped into my lap.

I looked down. A folded cloth, gray and slightly frayed. A man’s handkerchief.

Skyler had turned in his seat. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the tunnel wall with great concentration, one arm stretched back over the headrest, and I got the impression he was trying very hard to forget that he had just done it.

I pressed the cloth to my nose.

[Affection: -140%.]

I stared at the white text, and a bubble of laughter climbed up my throat, bloody and slightly hysterical.

Ten points. Ten whole points. For a nosebleed and an apology.

It was the first time the number had ever moved in the right direction.

Marcus hadn’t spoken, either. He was still gripping the wheel, staring straight ahead through the dust-streaked glass. But after a while, without turning his head, he gave a single short nod, aimed at the rearview mirror.

It wasn’t forgiveness. It was a start.

“Skyler.” Eli sounded dazed. He was holding up the tablet. “The others. The other infected, the ones who were heading for us. They’ve stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“All of them. Right when we stopped feeling… I mean, right when the truck went quiet.” He frowned at the screen. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

Skyler took the tablet. He studied it for a long moment, and then, slowly, his eyes lifted and found mine over the top of it.

I should have been afraid. For once, I wasn’t. I just wiped a little blood off my lip and met his stare.

“How long have you known that?” he asked quietly.

“About ten minutes.” I held up the stained handkerchief. “I’ll wash this.”

He didn’t smile. But something in the line of his shoulders eased, just a little, and he handed the tablet back to Eli without another word.

Then the cold shifted.

It wasn’t behind us anymore. It had slid around the side of my skull and settled in a new place, north, where the tunnel opened onto the road ahead. Thin. Patient. Waiting.

I lowered the handkerchief slowly.

Something was out there, and it wasn’t chasing us. It had been there all along.