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steel bar.
      "Open it," her fellow prisoner said.
      Amy's fingers fumbled on the lock. Grimacing, she forced the bar up and over. It squealed a little as it slid down. She pushed open the doors–
      –and almost fell into oncoming traffic. Her arms windmilled for a minute before a hand bunched up in her jumpsuit and yanked her back. Columns of headlights had gathered just a foot below them. Drivers honked and gestured at dashboard comms. Far away, she saw the blink and spin of police cars. The kennel room wasn't a room at all: it was a vehicle.
      "Hey, a mobile prison," said her new captor. "The chimps are getting creative." Then he pushed her.
      Amy landed on her knees – atop a car. She winced and tried to apologize to the woman shouting in the driver's seat. Beside her, the other prisoner jumped down and grabbed her arm. He pulled her off the car and along the highway, out of the red glare of the mobile prison and into the rows of increasingly noisy cars. Amy looked back. The sisters stood high above in the mobile prison, watching. They could still help you , a voice inside said. Do you want to be a hostage ?
      "Out," said her kidnapper. He was tapping on the driver's side window of an old and dented blue sedan with the business end of the gun. The teenaged boy inside yelled something, and Amy's captor flipped the gun around and busted the window with it. "Out," he repeated. " Please ."
      The boy scrambled out of the car on the other side. He held his hands up. "You can take whatever you want," he said. "I mean, seriously, just take it, just let me go–"
      "Start running," Amy's kidnapper said. The boy ran.
      Her kidnapper reached inside the door via the broken window, and opened it. He pushed her inside. She crawled over to the passenger side and squeezed back against the seat as her hostage-taker reached across her and pulled the door shut. It slammed and she flinched. He gave her an odd look before shutting his own door and edging the car past the prison and into the flow of traffic. He could barely fit his bulk inside the driver's seat. He didn't bother with a seat belt.
      "You see that?" he asked, pointing at the mobile prison as it blurred past. Outside, it looked like an ordinary eighteenwheeler with the words ISAAC'S ELECTRONICS inscribed across its panels. "That's somebody's idea of a joke . It's fucking sick ."
      Amy said nothing. The gun sat between them. She wondered if she could grab it and use it. But where would she go? They were screeching through traffic. She couldn't drive. At least, not in real life.
      "You could thank me, you know." He began ripping out peripherals and throwing them out the window.
      "For taking me hostage?"
      "For saving your ass!" He tossed a fistful of wires onto someone else's windshield. "You didn't want to go with them, did you?"
      Amy blinked. She hadn't quite thought of it that way. "Well, no…"
      "Who were they, anyway?"
      Amy hugged her knees. "My aunts, I guess," she said. How much had he heard back there? "I, um… I sort of killed my grandmother." He said nothing, but she sensed the suspicion anyway. "She and my mom were having a fight, and I got in the middle, and–"
      "Whatever. Family drama. Got it."
      Amy's kidnapper had sort of a doughy face, olive-skinned and fringed with huge black curls on top and a scrubby beard across the non-existent jaw. He had very nice eyelashes, though, long and perfectly curled like in a commercial. He seemed to notice her staring, because he turned to her suddenly and said: "I'm Javier."
      "I'm Amy. Amy Frances P–" She paused. Maybe giving out her name wasn't such a good idea. "Amy Frances."
      "Was that your first time in jail, Amy Frances?"
      "Uh huh."
      He sped up. "Lucky you."
     
    Amy watched the highway scrolling by. It looked like an old cartoon where the backgrounds were the same and just recycled on a loop: strip malls, streetlights, abandoned car dealerships