The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

them.”
    Travis, Paige, and Bethany covered distance among the cars as quickly as possible, moving straight west from their earlier position, from one lower corner of the town toward the other.
    The wide driving lanes between the cars ran north and south, but the going was just as easy from east to west. The cars had the same natural channels between them that existed in any parking lot: the spaces their drivers had needed in which to open their doors that final time, long ago.
    They slipped through the channels, every few seconds crossing the wider lanes. They were acting on a risky assumption: that Finn’s people weren’t standing lookout at all, but were just waiting for the cameras to do it for them. The assumption was as necessary as it was dangerous: they needed to move quickly in order for Travis’s plan to work, and they couldn’t do that while staying low among the vehicles.
    They moved upright at half the speed of a sprint. They’d have gone faster, but the plan required stopping at vehicles every few hundred feet—among other things.
    For Travis there were two other reasons to slow up. Two specific items he was looking for, that he hoped to find in glove boxes along the way. He found the first within minutes. The second took longer, but only a little. He pocketed both things and continued along at a quicker pace.
    If they were lucky they might cover two miles before the cameras could see them. Maybe even three. But either way it was going to be close. The plan would succeed or fail by minutes. Seconds, even.
    If it worked at all.
    The first thing that showed on the laptops were the broad lanes between the cars, stretching away to a vanishing point like rows of corn. Finn had expected that. The ground between the cars had lain in shadow for at least an hour now.
    Humans still wouldn’t be discernible in the lanes: the lanes were reading a hundred degrees, while the tops of the cars were reading five degrees higher. But it was progress.
    It crossed Finn’s mind that Paige Campbell and her associates, however many she had with her, might be hiding in one of the structures within the city. That would be problematic, short term. Every building’s interior had been superheated all day long by the greenhouse effect. It was probably a hundred twenty or higher in each of them, and that heat would take time to bleed out through closed windows and plaster walls.
    But long term it was no problem at all. How long could Campbell and the others stay hidden in those conditions? It was unlikely they’d brought much food and water of their own, if any, and they sure as hell weren’t going to find any left sitting around in Yuma.
    If it came to simply waiting them out, that would be fine. They weren’t going anywhere on the present side, and they weren’t going anywhere on this side either. It was going to end here, sometime in the next twenty-four hours.
    But every instinct told Finn that they were out among the cars, making whatever run for it they could, and that this would be over very, very soon.
    He stared at the laptops again. Watched the contrast of the lanes deepen. Some portions of them were taking on a new shade now. Ninety-nine degrees.
    Moving quickly. Not quite running. Stopping at intervals. They were dead south of town now, two miles west of where they’d begun their sideways move.
    Not far enough, Travis thought. Not nearly far enough. The plan had a giant drawback built into it: it was going to give away their position the instant they executed it. Which might be okay, as long as the plan worked. As long as its effect was immediate and overwhelming for Finn’s people.
    But for that to happen, they needed to cover a certain amount of distance first. The path they’d taken so far was a line from east to west, south of Yuma. Like they were underlining the city on a map, right to left. The longer they could make the line before everything happened, the more likely the plan was to succeed.
    Distance and time. They needed more of one. They were running out of the other.
    Nearly straight ahead of them, the sun’s lower rim touched the horizon.
    The mast was finished. Lambert and Miller stood armed with the others now, while the four with the guywires staked them into the ground.
    Grayling was moving back and forth over his laptops, hunched, looking excited.
    Finn could see sparse portions of the open lanes reading ninety-seven degrees now. Even the cars themselves were reading down around one