Libby pulled it from her bag and unfolded it across her lap, spreading it carefully. Her eyes moved across it with the focused attention of someone who’d decided the map needed all of her right now because thinking about anything else meant thinking about the alley.
“Maine,” I said before she could ask. “We stay on this until we hit the split, then we push north.”
She nodded, tracing the route with one finger, and didn’t look up immediately.
Maine. Home.
Not just a direction on a map. An actual place. My land, my compound, the animals—all of it still there, I assumed, still waiting, while I’d been too busy chasing the next problem to think about any of it.
My land. My cabin. The animals.
I looked at my hands.
“They’re probably dead,” I said, low enough that it might not carry to the backseat.
Libby’s eyes came up from the map. “What?”
“My animals,” I said.
Lily’s head came up immediately from whatever she’d been staring at in her lap. “What kind of animals? Do you have goats?”
“Yeah.”
Something changed in her expression—a small, involuntary spark that had no business surviving everything that had just happened to her but had apparently decided to, anyway. “I love goats.”
“Yeah, well. I’m hoping they loved me enough to figure out the latch and not just sit there starving in the pen.”
Fiona raised an eyebrow. “Your contingency plan is that the goats break themselves out?”
“Goats are the most stubborn, ornery, impossible animals on the planet,” I said. “If anything’s making it through this, it’s them. They don’t die out of spite. They outlive things just to be difficult.”
Another laugh from the backseat—slightly less fragile this time.
Libby’s mouth curved, faint and tired but genuine. “So our long-term survival strategy rests primarily on the shoulders of some angry farm animals.”
“Damn right,” I said. “You ever actually spent time with a goat? They’re basically indestructible and deeply unpleasant about it.”
“I want to meet them,” Lily said, with a conviction that suggested she’d already started naming them in her head.
“You might end up eating one of them,” I said.
Lily’s face went through several things at once.
“… oh,” she said finally.
Fiona snorted. “Welcome to the food chain, kid.”
Lily pulled a face that suggested she intended to revisit that information at a later date and not before. “I’m going to pretend it’s from the grocery store.”
“Probably for the best,” I said. “You have anything against rabbits?”
“Rabbits?” Lily said.
“When I was starting out, I got into meat rabbits. Let a few loose to do what… well, rabbits do.” I paused. “I’ve got quite the population going.”
* * *
The road stretched ahead of us, long and open and blessedly clear. The sound of the tires on the asphalt was the most ordinary sound I’d heard in days. I let it fill the vehicle for a while without putting anything else over the top of it.
