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we going to keep driving this way?” Anika asked, bringing my thoughts back to the car. I hadn’t even turned off the engine—we were wasting gas.
    I lifted my foot and the car eased forward. “I think whatever’s going on, it’s far enough away that we don’t have to worry,” I said, hoping that was true. “We might as well get past it before it gets much worse.”
    My hands were clenching the wheel again, and this time I knew there was no point in trying to relax. The lights edged closer to the snow-blanketed road. Whatever the fire had caught on, it was obviously spreading. Within ten minutes, it had crept across a space twice as large as before. A dim glow hazed the clouds above it.
    We were almost directly across from it when another light glinted off the snow, about fifty feet ahead of us. The circular gleam of a flashlight.
    “Hey!” Justin said. A moment later, I made out a cluster of figures huddled around the person holding the flashlight, a couple of them child-sized. They waved to us, obviously having seen the SUV before we saw them. I slowed.
    “Where did they come from?” Justin said, craning his neck. There were no buildings in sight.
    “They could be getting away from wherever the fire is,” Leo said. “Or they could have started it. Be careful, Kae.”
    They were calling to us now. I could hear them faintly over the sound of the engine: “Please stop! Help us!”
    “What do they expect us to do?” Anika murmured. “The car’s full.”
    “I guess we could give them some food?” Justin said doubtfully.
    We had hardly enough for ourselves. But wherever these people had come from, they looked as if they had even less. As if they had nothing but one another now, stranded in the snow.
    A pang shot through me. But as I wavered and we rolled toward them, I thought of Gav. Gav, who would have been saying right now, “We should at least talk to them,” who felt it was somehow his responsibility to help every person he saw who needed it. Who had felt. My resolve hardened.
    Nine times out of ten, when we’d tried to help anyone, they’d stabbed us in the back the first chance they got. I wasn’t letting that happen again. I could only look out for our group now.
    “They could be armed. It could be a trick. We don’t know them; we can’t trust them,” I said. A woman holding a bundle that looked like a baby stepped to the side of the road, and in that moment guilt tugged at my gut. But only for a second. I jerked the wheel to the side to swerve around her and pressed down on the gas. The engine roared, drowning out the shouts they hollered after us. The SUV jolted forward. I fixed my eyes on the road ahead, nothing left inside me but relief.
    The next time I let myself look in the rearview mirror, the drifters and their flashlight had faded out of view.

“Anyone who comes within miles of that place is going to notice the fire,” Leo commented a little while later.
    I glanced over my shoulder. The flickering light was finally hidden by the small town we’d passed through, but it had been visible for a long time and it could still be getting larger.
    “So what?” Justin said. “If some Warden sees it, why would they think it’s got anything to do with us?”
    “If someone patrols by here, they’ll probably take a closer look,” Leo said. “And that group’s probably still out there, walking the roads and flagging people down. The group that saw us.”
    “Who could tell the Wardens a black SUV went by less than an hour ago,” I finished for him, my heart sinking.
    “Yeah.”
    “Oh, hell,” Anika said under her breath.
    I bit back an echoed curse. Maybe the fire would die out long before any of Michael’s people happened by here. Maybe that group had already found shelter somewhere. But with a little bad luck and a couple radio calls, Michael could know exactly where we were. For all we knew, he already had every Warden he could spare speeding straight toward us.
    “Let’s