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peeked back down, and seemed to think.  
    “What is it?” Jeanine asked.  
    “Tell me you are accomplished runners,” Peers said. “You needn’t be marathoners, per se, but perhaps you enjoy a sprint over shorter distances. You know. For fun.”  
    Instead of answering, Cameron moved past Peers and peeked up the staircase. There was a large anteroom in the rock. Past that was the cave’s front entrance, and abundant sunlight beyond. They had maybe twenty yards to cover, and that wasn’t a problem. The thirty or more Reptars milling the area’s recesses were.  
    “Just a straight jaunt through the center, don’t you think?” Peers said, rustling his robes as if to loosen his joints.  
    “You can’t be suggesting … ” Cameron began.  
    But then Peers shot up the steps. The dog nipped Cameron’s heel; then they were running. Every black alien head turned, rising from a semi-crouch and turning to follow.  
    They could never make it. Not in a thousand years. The way was clear up top, but they’d be in the wide open. Reptars were faster than people in a straight sprint. They’d be pinned seconds after arriving topside. Then the Astrals would steal the archive key or kill them. Probably both.
    But when Cameron arrived in the sun with Peers, Jeanine, and the dog ahead of him, he saw Piper standing off to one side. A reinforced vehicle that had once been a Honda Accord screamed toward him from the other side.  
    Cameron dodged just in time. The car missed him by two feet at most then gunned hard at the cave entrance. There was a crunch, a bang, and a visible poof of white airbags as the car’s front end smashed into a hole in the hillside. No glass shattered; the car had no windshield or windows.
    A thin man was unbuckling, pushing at the deflating airbag and extricating himself from the smashed vehicle with amusing delicacy. When he finally jumped from the trunk end to the ground, Cameron saw that he had a small mustache and was wearing a crash helmet.
    Peers took Cameron and Coffey by the arm and led them toward Piper and the others — who, it turned out, were standing in front of what looked like an armor-reinforced urban tank that might once have been a city bus. He nodded toward the man with the helmet.  
    “That’s Aubrey,” Peers said. “But I wouldn’t talk to him right now. He’ll be peeved about losing his car whether he volunteered it or not.”
    “But—”
    Toward the bus’s door. Shoved inside while the man called Aubrey shooed Meyer, Kindred, and Clara in from an added entrance on its other side.
    “You’d better have your ticket out and ready to be stamped,” Peers told them.  
    Up the steps. Into what was, yes, indeed a converted bus armed with gun turrets. Studded with spikes and wrapped in razor wire.
    “I’m just kidding,” Peers said. “We don’t stamp tickets anymore.”  
    The engine revved as the man with the mustache plopped into the driver’s seat. Peers stood beside him, holding a vertical handrail. The bus lurched. Swung in a half circle. Then peeled out through ancient stone streets and hills while the Astrals poked futilely around their new prison’s plugged hole, their spherical silver shuttle hovering without a pilot nearby.  
    After the rattling streets gave way to open roads, Cameron finally peeled his eyes, steeped in terror, from the windows.  
    Then he turned and saw that someone was already sitting beside him.
    It was the dog.

CHAPTER 6

    The travelers wouldn’t sleep.  
    That didn’t surprise Peers. When he and Aubrey had first made their way out of London, in the occupation’s earliest days, a charismatic man named Saul had taken them into what turned out to be more cult than caravan. Peers hadn’t slept for the first night they’d been in Saul’s too-good-to-be-true protection, nor had he slept on the second. Not since university had he stayed up for so many hours, and the longer he’d stayed awake, the greater his paranoia. Sleep was