“That’s the problem I’ve been working on.” He turned back to the map and traced a line northeast from the small Xmarking our current position—back roads, avoiding highways and population centers. “Four hundred miles. Six hours before. Now—” He lifted his hand. “I have the beginning of a plan. You’re not going to love all of it.”
“Shocking,” I said.
The corner of his mouth twitched. He let it go without comment.
“They hunt by sight and sound—I’m certain of that much. They track movement, respond to noise, and cover ground fast enough that outrunning them on foot isn’t a viable strategy for any real distance. But as you noticed yesterday, during the worst of the initial surge, when the rain came in heavily and the thunder started rolling through—they pulled back. Not completely, not all of them. But enough to matter. The rain disrupted their ability to track, and the thunder buried ground-level sounds. They didn’t disappear.” He looked up. “But they hesitated. And hesitation is a gap, and gaps are what you move through.”
I straightened. “You want to move during a storm.”
“I want to move during a storm.”
“It’s a desperate plan, but it might actually work.”
We stared at each other across the counter, the map a neutral ground between us. Neither of us intended to cross it.
“There’s a front moving in,” Finn said, his voice dropping slightly as he nodded toward the ceiling, toward the sky beyond it. “You could see it from the roof this morning. The pressure’s already dropping—the wind shifted northeast about an hour ago. That system is coming, and it’s moving fast.”
“How fast?” Lily asked.
“Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the outside.” He turned back to the map, pressing his thumb against the coastline with the certainty of someone who’d spent years reading weather and terrain as a single language. “We load up, wait for it to hit hardenough that visibility drops and the noise covers our movement, and we drive. No stops, no detours, no hesitation. We push northeast until we reach the town where my boat is moored.”
He dragged his finger along the coastline and stopped at a small indent I couldn’t identify from where I stood.
“We make it back to my boat. Or we find something seaworthy, something manageable with a minimal crew. And we sail to the island. Hell, we could paddle a rowboat; the point is we get in something that floats and we make it work.”
“A sailboat,” I said.
“Once we’re on the water, everything changes. Those things more than likely don’t swim—nothing I’ve observed suggests they do. The open ocean offers none of that. Just water and wind and distance between us and everything trying to kill us.” He straightened. “We sail up the coast, navigate to the island, and disappear off the grid entirely.”
Lily looked up from her notebook. “Do you actually know how to sail?”
“Yeah.”
“Like—actually sail? Or YouTube-video sail?”
A ghost of a smile, brief and genuine, crossed his face. “Navy, Lily. I can sail. Fiona can too; our dad made sure of that.”
She held his gaze for a beat, then nodded once and returned to her notebook, satisfied. The trust she gave him so readily—a thing I had spent seventeen years earning—sent a sharp, ugly spike of jealousy through me. I pushed it down. I didn’t have time for it.
“What about the drive?” I kept my voice level, clinical, as two people discussing logistics across a map and nothing more. “Four hundred miles on back roads in a deteriorating storm. That’s considerable ground to cover and considerable opportunity for things to go wrong.”
“Agreed.”
“So what happens when something does? What if the storm breaks halfway through and we’re exposed on some county road with no cover and no fallback?”
Finn said nothing for a moment, his gaze steady, like a man checking his math before he signed something.
“Then we take shelter. Wherever we are—a house, a barn, a gas station, or under an overpass if that’s all there is. We go dark, stay silent, and wait for the next window of opportunity.”
“And if the next window doesn’t open?”
“It will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he admitted, leaning forward with palms flat on the counter. “I don’t. But staying here isn’t an option. I know this house is yours, Libby—I know what these walls mean to you. But this city is dying, and with every hour we stay, the safe perimeter shrinks a little more.”
I started to speak, but he continued.
