Albie was in the front seat playing DJ and navigator at the same time, a phone in each hand. Ines was next to her in the back, tap-tap-tapping on her knee, which was also jiggling.
“My God, Ines,” Matt said. “You’re like one of those toys that buzzes when you wind it up.”
“Well, if you didn’t drive like you’ve got nothing to lose, I’d probably be calmer.”
“Indoor voices, please,” Sloane called out. “Slo’s gonna vom.”
“And what? If we’re loud, we’ll miss it?” Ines said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Sloane said. “I require an audience.”
Ines laughed and offered her an empty potato-chip bag. Sloane tried to catch Matt’s eye in the rearview mirror, but his phone rang. “Eddie?” he said, answering it. Not that he would have met her eyes anyway—he hadn’t so much as glanced at her since the night before.
Sloane glared at Ines, but she took the bag and angled even more toward the window so she couldn’t see Ines’s leg jiggle. She watched the trees smear past. They were an hour north of Chicago, where the city turned into peaceful suburbs with perfect lawns and mailboxes shaped like barns and dogs and boats. She wondered what it was like to carry lunch money to school instead of a faux-cheese sandwich wrapped in paper, to drive a car your parents bought for you to learn on, to go on school field trips to the city and stare up at the towering skyline. All these safe little lives going on uninterrupted.
“I gotta go, Ed, we’re approaching a dead zone,” Matt said. A second later, he hung up and put his phone back in the cupholder.
Bert had taught her how to drive when she was fourteen, out in the fields behind the house where she had learned about the Dark One. She had almost rolled the old Accord taking too sharp a turn in the mud. She hadn’t needed to go to the DMV for the driving test like everyone else—Bert had snapped a picture of her against a blank wall and then one day just handed her a license out of the blue, along with a passport and a Smoothie Fiend BUY 10, GET ONE FREE! card with two stamps on it already.
Sloane smiled at the memory. She still had that card in her wallet.
“Better download that map, Albie,” Ines said.
“Already done,” Albie said. “All these years and you think I still don’t know that GPS doesn’t work around Drain sites?”
“You knew it at one time,” Ines said. “But you had a couple hard years in there—”
“ ‘Hard years’ is a nice euphemism for ‘so, so high’—”
“And as a result, I don’t like to count on your memory.”
“Fair enough.”
A shiver crawled down Sloane’s spine as Matt turned off the main road. She checked her phone—no bars, and they weren’t even within a mile of the Drain site yet. They didn’t even know why they’d been summoned, but when Agents Henderson and Cho summoned them, they went. It was easier to keep an eye on ARIS when they were invited.
It was quiet in the car as the first signs of the Drain appeared in the land around them. People had resettled in areas like this after the destruction, but the homes here weren’t the kind with manicured lawns and novelty mailboxes. This was a sea of temporary dilapidated structures that had never been properly repaired after the Dark One destroyed the place. People were living without water or power and sometimes with massive holes in their floorboards. Matt had dragged Sloane to volunteer here once, and she’d had to pick her way across a collapsed porch just to get to the front door of a house.
Trees had grown wild and tangled, their roots crowded with weeds as tall as Sloane; long grass collapsing under its own weight hung over broken sidewalks. The road itself was full of potholes thanks to rough Midwestern winters, so Matt’s driving became even more erratic, and Sloane started to contemplate the potato-chip bag again.
“Oh, boy,” Albie said. “Fun times ahead.”
Sloane craned her neck to see out the front windshield, almost knocking skulls with Ines as she leaned in too. Up ahead, the road appeared to come to an abrupt end, and there was just a sea of brightly colored tarps, like the bumps of moguls on a ski slope. And past them, on a small hill, stood the temporary government structure that surrounded the center of the Drain, a white geodesic dome roughly the size of a football stadium.