Zubair flashed his lights once.

She tapped the brake in acknowledgment without losing speed. Luci’s ears pricked to full point now. He rested one paw on her thigh and kept it there like he intended to hold her to the seat if the world tried something stupid.

The crest fell away to a straight ribbon lined with windbreak pines long since gone wild. Shade made strobe across the hood.

Shadows hid potholes big enough to break ankles. She steered around them to the best of her ability and let the truck float across patches where asphalt had melted into tar snakes.

A black-tailed deer watched them from a ditch and didn’t run.

Halfway down, a Toyota pickup sat nosed into weeds with both doors open and its bed half full of bags of salt.

Sera gave it a glance, a flick of her wrist, and moved on. The creature did the same, interested in measuring risk, reward, and the clock. They were stocked because she had put the world into jars before it ended and even after.

They didn’t need salt that belonged to dead men.

But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t take it.

On the far end of the pine run, the county road intersected a wider one paved in a better life.

A green sign hung crooked off one bolt and offered a number with no meaning. She rolled through without stopping. The trucks hummed along like they’d been built for the same day.

She felt Zubair’s attention slide up her spine like a warm hand. He tapped the radio. "Water?"

She flicked her wrist, and a bottle landed in her palm from nowhere.

She cracked the cap, drank three mouthfuls, then held it to Luci’s muzzle.

He lapped twice and went back to patrol. She tossed the bottle out the window and caught it again immediately; it vanished the same way it had come.

Alexei’s chuckle crossed the radio in a thin line. "Still rude to physics," he approved.

"Physics is boring," Lachlan threw in. "I want breakfast again."

"You just ate," Sera reminded him.

"Yeah, but eating twice is better. Doesn’t everyone have a first and second breakfast... followed by a first and second lunch?"

"Two hours," Elias cut across their conversation, calm like always. "We stop in shade. Fuel. Check tires. Eat if we’re lucky."

"Luck is already in the truck ahead," Lachlan announced. "She’s driving, remember?"

That earned him a look over her shoulder from Zubair’s mirror and a small pleased huff from the creature. Sera didn’t bother to smile. The corners of her mouth loosened anyway.

A farmhouse ruin came up on the right: tin roof peeled back like a sardine lid, porch sagging into knee-high thistle.

The front door hung and knocked itself against the frame with each breeze. Someone had painted KEEP OUT on the siding with something dark enough that the letters hadn’t faded. The paint had dripped into long lines like tears. She didn’t slow down, and Luci’s nose didn’t change.

"Tail?" she asked.

"Still there," Alexei confirmed. "Back a ridge. We drop speed, they drop. We speed up, they speed up. They’re not letting anyone else take the prize."

"What prize?" Lachlan asked, knowing the answer and poking it anyway.

"The trucks," Alexei replied. "And you, princess."

"I am a princess," Lachlan agreed with open delight. "Sera’s, specifically."

Sera rolled her eyes and took the next curve wide to avoid a collapsed culvert.

The road beyond funneled through a stand of cottonwoods. Sunlight dappled her hands. The creature pressed contentment through her veins again—simple, stupid, clean. Road. Air. The men.

Elias’s voice went lower. "We need a cutout. A place to drop off and let them pass while we dissuade them from interest."

"Ambush," Zubair translated, pleased in a way only he could make sound like a prayer.

"Something with cover," Elias added, scanning his map. "Drainage, foundation walls, old machines. I don’t want to fight flat."

"Copy," she returned, and let her eyes pick through the hedgerow for those shapes.

The land gave them exactly what they needed three minutes later with an old co-op yard. It had a long, low concrete pads where grain trucks had once waited, a weigh station booth with its windows punched out, and a set of rusted augers leaning like dead giraffes.

A chain-link fence ran the perimeter and sagged where a tree had grown through it. The gate hung open. Someone had cut it years ago.

Sera downshifted and turned in without brake lights.

Gravel popped under tires, hitting the side of the truck, but she didn’t care.

The three trucks rolled into shade that felt like a new room.

The smell of old grain ghosted the air underneath the mold and mouse.

She took in all the smells, past the first obvious slab and into a far corner where two oversize bins offered sightlines and cover.

Zubair tucked the second truck at an angle that put its nose to escape and its bed to work. Elias pointed to where he wanted folks on reflex and found them already moving there.

Lachlan popped off the tailgate before the truck stopped moving.

He hit gravel in a trot, swung up onto the low pad, and scanned with palms open like he could taste angles. "Nice," he approved. "Plenty of junk to hide behind. Plenty of junk to throw."

"Alexei," Elias directed, "screen the road mouth. Frost only. It would be best if we made them lose control long before we see them."

"Spoken like a man who loves a slow kill," Alexei murmured.

He lifted both hands waist-high. Air got thin for a blink, then crisp; a pale haze painted the gravel in a line across the gate throat just fine enough to be invisible if you weren’t looking.

The first pair of tires through would discover it like a joke with a bad punchline. He stepped left and laid a second coating where a smart driver would try to swerve.

Zubair moved to the shadow of the bins and set his palm to the corrugated steel.

Heat woke in a circle under his handprint and then spread like oil until the whole side of the bin radiated a low threat.

The air smelled faintly of sun on tin.

He kept it low, controlled, a blanket, not a bonfire.

She watched him do it and felt the creature hum in pleased harmony like recognizing a familiar tune.