She also knew that Jury Curado was dead. There was no maybe about it. He survived the end of the world, but he didn’t survive Evan Rander.
At noon, the Silvers rose from their fifth shady rest stop. Hannah watched jadedly as Amanda once again enlisted Zack to help her to her feet, a surprisingly dainty move for a woman who was normally self-reliant to a fault. The actress had caught enough lingering stares from Zack to know, even if he didn’t, that he harbored some attraction for Amanda. It wasn’t until her sister’s second outreached hand that Hannah realized the door swung both ways.
Great, the actress seethed. She gets a funny love interest. I get a deranged stalker.
Theo walked alongside her on the unpaved road. She glowered at his tender concern. “My sister send you to check on me?”
“I’m checking on my own,” he insisted. “I feel bad. I should have waited until we were settled before—”
“Settled? When are we ever getting settled? We can’t go a day without someone jumping us.”
“Things will get better.”
“Is that a premonition or just a platitude?”
Theo wasn’t sure. Ever since he stepped out of the woods, he’d carried an odd surplus of optimism, more than he knew how to handle. His body beamed with giddy anticipation, as if there was a recliner and an ice-cold lemonade waiting for him on the other side of the plains.
“Hannah, I’m really sorry I threw that Evan stuff on you. I should have waited.”
“I’m mad at you for the opposite reason.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re holding out on me. I know he talked about me, but you’re not telling me what he said.”
In relaying his tale of last night’s discussion, Theo had censored Evan’s uncharitable mentions of Hannah. He was stunned she’d sensed the omissions. The woman could be jarringly perceptive.
“I didn’t think it was worth sharing,” he said.
“Well, it’s about me, so why don’t you let me decide?”
“It’s about both of us, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
As Theo formulated his reply, Amanda and David both shouted in alarm. Now the others followed their gaze to the middle of the road, at the still and crumpled form of Mia Farisi.
—
She’d blacked out once before. Last year, at the end of a school assembly, Mia felt the auditorium spin into a vortex of bright lights. Before she knew what was happening, her eyelids fluttered and she toppled back into her classmates.
It was her own damn fault. Her latest weight tantrum had thrown her into a six-day regimen of cabbage soup and rice cakes. She never expected her crash diet to become literal.
Her oldest brother picked her up from school. Though Bobby Farisi was six-foot-four and built like a fortress, his baby sister had a way of turning him to porcelain. After a half mile of stony silence, he fell into blubbering tears.
“You pull any stupid shit like that again, I swear to God I’ll kill you. Don’t ever scare me like that!”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“Don’t apologize,” said Amanda. “Just drink.”
She woke up in the shade, with her head in Amanda’s lap and a bottle pressed against her lips. Her head pounded. Her skin throbbed as if she were one continuous bruise. Mia took a sip of warm water and then scanned her surroundings. She could only see Amanda and Zack.
“What happened?”
“You fainted,” said Amanda. “You’re overheated. A body can only take so much.”
“Where are the others?”
“They went to get water. They’ll be back soon.”
“Water from where?”
David had spotted the green bolt logo of a vehicle charging station behind a line of distant trees. None of the others could see it, even after following his pointed finger. The boy had thrown Zack a lordly grin. “And you mock my love for carrots.”
Zack wasn’t feeling very humorous at the moment. He paced the grass with furious distraction.
“You should have told us you weren’t feeling well. We would have rested more.”
“I didn’t want to slow us down,” Mia said.
“You think there’s a speed trophy waiting for us in Brooklyn? Our only reward is getting there alive. So you tell us next time. You pull this martyr crap again, I’ll tape you in a box and mail you to Peter.”
Amanda squinted at him. “Ease up. She doesn’t need a lecture now.”
On the contrary, Zack’s wrath was like water for Mia’s soul. Though the cartoonist could probably fit inside one of her brother’s arms, he carried the same masculine vulnerability, the same caring passion. It was scary how much she loved him right now.
Zack let out a self-defusing sigh, then sat down with the others. “I don’t like splitting up like this. Not without cell phones.”
“They’ll be fine,” Amanda assured him. “They know the way back.”