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few tied-up pontoon boats.
    The source of the music – the center of this ‘town’ – and the only solid structure built here is Trapper’s, a sleezy-looking bar housed in a log cabin, the name proudly displayed along the roof in sizzling green neon. A row of stuffed alligators line the bar’s wooden porch, their jaws open and searching. From inside, above the music, I can hear men shouting and pool balls cracking.
    ‘All right,’ Nine says, clapping his hands. ‘My kind of place.’
    The place does sort of remind me of the off-the-grid spots I used to hit up when I was alone and on the run, places where the tight-knit and gritty locals made it easy to spot out-of-place Mogadorians. Even so, as I notice a scrawny middle-aged guy with a mullet and a tank top staring at us, chain-smoking in the shadows of the porch, I wonder if we should find a safer place for us to poke our heads in.
    But Nine is already halfway up the creaky wooden steps, Marina right behind him, and so I go along. Hopefully this place has a phone so we can at leastget in touch with the others back in Chicago. Check to see how John and Ella are doing – hopefully better, somehow, especially now that we know the cure-all Five claimed to have in his Chest was a bunch of crap. We have to warn the others about him. Who knows what information he might’ve been feeding to the Mogadorians.
    When we push through the swinging saloon doors of Trapper’s, the music doesn’t screech to a stop like in the movies, but everyone in the bar does turn their heads to stare at us, almost in unison. The place is cramped, not much to it besides the bar, a pool table and some beat-up lawn furniture. It stinks of sweat, kerosene and alcohol.
    ‘Hoo boy,’ someone says, then whistles loudly.
    I quickly realize that Marina and I are the only two women here. Hell, we might be the first women to ever set foot inside Trapper’s. The drunks staring at us range from tremendously overweight to alarmingly skinny, all of them dressed in halfway-open plaid shirts or sweat-stained wifebeaters, some of them flashing gap-toothed leers, others smoothing down unkempt beards as they size us up.
    One guy, in a ripped heavy-metal T-shirt and with a lower lip stuffed with chewing tobacco, breaks away from the pool table to sidle up next to Marina.
    ‘This must be my lucky night,’ the guy drawls, ‘because you gi –’
    The rest of the pickup line is lost to the ages because the moment this guy tries to slide his armaround her shoulders, Marina roughly snatches his wrist. I can hear the moisture on his arm crackle as it flash freezes, and a second later the guy is crying out as Marina twists his arm behind his back.
    ‘Do not come near me,’ she says in a measured tone, loud enough so the whole bar knows that the warning doesn’t go just for the dude whose arm she’s almost breaking.
    Now, the room truly does go quiet. I notice one guy let his beer bottle slip down in his hand so he’s holding it by the neck, all the better for swinging. A couple of burly guys at a back table exchange looks and stand up, eyeballing us. For a moment, I think the whole bar might try rushing us. That would end badly for them, and I try to communicate that with my stare. Nine, who with his tangled black hair and dirty face fits right in here, cracks his knuckles and lolls his head back and forth, watching the crowd.
    Finally, one of the other hicks at the pool table hoots. ‘Mike, you dumbass, say excuse me and get over here! It’s your shot!’
    ‘Sorry,’ Mike whimpers to Marina, his arm turning blue where she’s touching him. She shoves him away and he goes to rejoin his friends, rubbing his arm and trying to avoid looking at us.
    Just like that, the tension breaks. Everyone goes back to what they were doing, which pretty much means guzzling beer. I figure scenes similar to that – little fights, stare downs, maybe a stabbing or two – must happen in Trapper’s all the time. No bigdeal.