Chapter 9: The Truck Stop

Signe's POV

By the fourteenth day Tor's farm held forty-one people, a hay barn full of cots and a map on the kitchen wall that Bets updated every hour.

Every night the net grew.

Every morning the city got a little quieter, and the dust got a little thicker, and Tor's diesel tank went down another hand's width.

I did the math on the back of a feed receipt.

We had three weeks of fuel at the rate we were burning it, and we needed the generator and the trucks and the heater in the barn.

There was one place that always had more.

The truck stop at the interchange, where Interstate 29 crossed Interstate 90, had eleven pumps and a fuel farm the size of a church.

In the first life it had been abandoned by the twelfth day, its pumps dry and its lot empty.

I had planned on that.

"It'll be a ghost," I told Wyatt in the cab. "We'll fill the tanker, and go home."

"If you're wrong?"

"I'm not wrong," I said.

"That's what you said about the gate."

"I wasn't wrong about the gate."

"You weren't right about my hand, either," he said, and held it up.

The stitches were out, and the scar was a pink seam across his palm.

I tried not to look at it.

We came up the off-ramp at dusk, with the tanker rig rattling behind us, and the first thing I saw was the light.

The lot was full.

Sixty trucks sat parked nose to tail under the sodium lamps, engines off, curtains drawn in the sleepers.

At the pumps stood a line of men in orange vests with rifles, and across the main island somebody had stretched a chain with a hand-lettered sign.

FUEL FOR TRADE. NO CASH. ASK AT THE OFFICE.

"Well," Wyatt said. "That's not a ghost."

My stomach dropped.

Nothing I knew about the truck stop was true.

In the first life Osterman had taken the pipeline crew into the arena on Day 3, and they'd cooked in there with everyone else.

This time he hadn't taken them, because I'd cost him his gate and made him careful, and a crew with nowhere to go had come here.

I had changed the day, and the day had changed back at me.

I had known that would happen eventually.

I hadn't known it would feel like falling.

[Task: Keep Wyatt Brekke beside you.]

"I'm staying in the truck," Wyatt said, reading my face. "You'll get yourself shot."

"You're not staying in the truck."

"I'm not?" he said.

"The line says to keep you beside me."

He turned his head.

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