Elias felt the road before he saw it change.

Not the asphalt...that stayed the same. It was a long scar south cutting through the fields of weeds and cornrows with pot holes big enough to bury a body in.

But the change was in the way the air thickened with heat and metal.

Zubair eased their speed a breath and, without glancing back, nudged the truck half a lane to the right. It was the kind of correction that said he didn’t like what he smelled up ahead.

"Talk to me," Lachlan said, his voice too bright and cheery to be anything but happy.

Elias didn’t answer him.

He angled the side mirror with two fingers until the glass held more horizon than cab, then tipped his chin toward Sera.

Blood had dried on her knuckles in a brown shine; her expression had the looseness of someone who’d finally eaten after a long fast.

Luci’s body pressed down into her thighs and contentment radiated around the two of them. Alexei had a boot propped on the door, humming something shapeless.

Behind them, the riders had realized that the old way of doing things didn’t work, so they tried to figure out a new plan.

Now, they weren’t close enough to physically touch the truck, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close enough to do some damage.

They rode in a broken crescent, dirt bikes snapping at the edges like gnats, trucks in the middle with sheet-metal brows welded over shattered windshields, flatbeds bringing up the rear with rifles braced on roll bars.

They had stopped whooping.

They had stopped laughing.

The sound now was engines and a kind of angry breathing.

"It’s not a charge," Elias said. "It’s a sweep."

"Let’s try that in English," Lachlan shot back, adjusting the machete in his grip.

"They’re not trying to knock us off the road. They’re trying to make the road smaller."

The proof arrived with the next bend: two gutted semitrucks, nose to nose, muscled onto the highway like old bulls.

Their cabs were skeletal and empty, but their trailers had been split and swung to make a gate across both lanes.

Between them, a pickup idled with its tailgate down and three men crouched in the bed. One held a coil of something that glinted like water.

"Clever," Alexei said, his tone almost admiring.

Zubair grunted once in neither agreement nor disdain.

His eyes ticked left, right, cataloguing: shoulder soft, median dropped six inches to a gravel gully, a ditch pocked with rebar and the ribs of a collapsed guardrail.

He tapped the brake with a love only he used for machinery.

"They’ll want the tires," Elias said, already picturing the arc of the coil.

As if the word had been a cue, the men in the pickup rose as one.

The coil unspooled, a long, glittering braid strung between hooks welded into the semis’ frames. Chains, barbs, shards—homemade, mean, perfect for chewing rubber down to smoke.

Lachlan blew out a breath. "Right. Through the ditch it is."

"Soft shoulder," Zubair said.

"You can make it," Alexei tossed in, infuriatingly cheerful. "You always do."

"We’re heavy," Zubair returned. "Better to make them blink."

He didn’t elaborate or explain what any of that meant. He never did.

Instead, he proved it with actions.

The truck drifted toward the centerline like a bull coming to full attention. The men on the pickup’s tailgate saw it and tugged their cable tighter, the middle sag rising to a lethal grin.

"This is a new version of ’Chicken’ that I have never seen," Sera said mildly with a shrug. "It seems fun."

Zubair did what he always did with good advice: he turned it into throttle. The engine bellowed—honest sound, all muscle—and the truck lunged.

The men on the pickup scrambled to keep their cable taut.

Behind the semis, dirt bikes surged to the flanks to grab whatever spilled out of the trap when it snapped shut.

In the mirror, Elias caught the briefest flash of the riders’ leader, still masked, still counting.

At twenty yards, Zubair downshifted hard enough to make Alexei’s boot thump the door.

At fifteen, he pressed the horn—a single long blast that made birds lift in a ragged sheet from the field.

At ten, he swerved left as if he’d changed his mind, as if the ditch had magically become a friend.

The men on the cable hauled with everything they had.

At five, Zubair put the wheel back where he’d wanted it all along.

The truck shouldered through the cable where the welds were weakest, not in the center where the barbs were proudest.

Snapped metal sang.

The cable whipped back like a furious snake and picked a man clean out of the pickup by his belt. He landed in a clatter of his own hardware and didn’t get up.

The hood took a stripe of scoring. The windshield bloomed a spiderweb at the very top edge. The tires—blessedly—stayed whole.

"Ha," Lachlan breathed, reverent as church.

A bike knifed in from the right to throw caltrops in their path—little welded bouquet of nails.

Alexei leaned out the window and, with the casual viciousness that made him Alexei, slapped the back of the rider’s helmet as if admonishing a child.

The blow wasn’t much. It didn’t have to be.

The rider’s balance already belonged to speed and swagger; losing two degrees was enough. He hit the cable they’d just broken with his throat.

Elias shut his eyes for a single breath and opened them again.

It never did to let the mind make stories about mercy out here.

Now that the world hand ended, what he once knew to be acceptable when it came to the rules of warfare had changed.

And if he didn’t change with it, he wouldn’t even know how he died.

"Round two," Sera said, almost pleased. "Fight!"

It came from the flanks, as Elias had predicted before.

Dirt bikes fanned wide into the stubbled fields, engines screaming.

Three trucks with welded cow-catchers nosed into the median, planning to punch across and pen them. The flatbeds lurched forward in the center to spit rifle fire in ugly, undisciplined bursts.

"Stay straight," Elias advised, because the instinct in a man is to dodge bullets like bees. It was wasted motion. Bullets have no eyes for swerving.

Zubair stayed straight.

Glass pinged around them.

A round took a chip out of the dash and buried itself in the glove box with a dull sound.

Luci pressed closer to Sera but didn’t whine. He braced himself like he would be the one thing between his Mistress and death.

But Sera...Sera smiled like a kid standing in front of a Christmas tree wondering which present she was going to open first.