The small window on the driver’s side must have blown out, a clinking of broken glass as it cascaded out onto the road, out of sight.‌

There was a hole in the black curtain hanging across it, at the top, only a foot above Maddy’s head. But she still had a head, eyes blinking at them all. It had missed her.

“Are you hit?” Oliver bounded forward, dragging his sister back from the cockpit.

“No, I…no,” Maddy said, shaking her still-there head.

Red took her hand, held on to it. If Maddy had been standing up straight, or a few inches back…well, it didn’t bear thinking about. And Red was good at not thinking about things like that.

“He really didn’t like you doing that,” Simon said, another wet patch on his shirt, the glass empty as he placed it back on the counter.

“No, he did not,” Red agreed.

“Right, okay, everyone,” Oliver said, pushing Maddy down to sit on the booth. “New rule. No one does anything without checking with me first. Not one thing unless it has been discussed with the whole group, okay?” He looked around at each of them for confirmation.

Red nodded.

“I won’t even take a piss without preapproval,” Simon said, holding up his hands. Red should refill that glass for him. She wasn’t sure there was a worse time to be drunk than right now.

“Right.” Oliver pushed himself up, half sitting on the table as the others gathered around him. A determined set to his jaw, like he knew he was the only possible leader here. Twenty-one years old, prelaw, a sister and a girlfriend to protect, a mom who would soon be DA. “We’ve already lost two windows, which is not good news. So, the first thing I want us to do is to board up those broken windows, for extra protection.”

“With what?” Reyna asked, shrugging her empty arms.

“We must have something. Everyone, check around the RV and in your bags and suitcases. Look for any resources we can use and bring them back to this table.”

“Resources?” Arthur asked.

“Things to help us survive. Something to cover the windows. Anything that could be used as first aid. Or as a weapon.”

“A weapon?” Simon snorted. “Yeah, that sniper won’t know what’s hit him when I slowly charge at him with my Gillette razor.”

Oliver ignored him. “Now. Five minutes, guys.”

No one protested, shuffling away from the table in various directions, knees bent, keeping their heads low. Simon and Arthur headed toward their bunk beds—Simon on the bottom, Arthur on top—and the bags they’d dumped there this morning. Oliver and Reyna pushed past them, drawing to a stop outside the closed bedroom door. The queen-sized bed beyond it, where they were supposed to be sleeping tonight. Red wasn’t sure anyone would be sleeping tonight.

“The window at the back is still exposed,” Oliver said to Reyna. “You crawl into the room, take cover against the back wall and lower the shade. I’ll hit the lights and close the door so the sniper can’t see anything.”

He wasn’t speaking to her in that soft voice anymore. But that was the first rule of leadership, wasn’t it: delegation. Still, Red couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked her or Arthur or Simon to cover the window for them instead, or gone

ahead and been the hero himself. Reyna stared back at Oliver, like she couldn’t believe it either.

“Fine.” She swallowed. “Okay, three, two, one.”

Oliver pulled open the door, and Reyna slipped inside on her hands and knees. She disappeared as Oliver reached in to switch off the light, closing the door after her.

He caught Red’s eye, watching, and gave her a grim nod.

A few seconds later, Reyna’s voice called through, “Okay, done!” and Oliver followed it back into the bedroom, flicking on the light, heading toward the closet and out of Red’s view.

“Red, come on,” Maddy said, pulling at her shirt and jolting her back.

Maddy stopped short of the sofa bed, her eyes up on the large overhead cupboards, where Red and Maddy had stored their bags. Getting them would mean standing right in front of the broken window. The shade was still breathing in and out, wind whistling through the ripped bullet hole, a faint trace of gasoline finding its way inside. Maddy’s hand shook as she studied the hole, looking back to where she had been standing to re-create the path of the bullet. Or that was what Red imagined she was doing; she knew Maddy and Maddy knew her.

“I’ll get the bags,” Red said, pushing Maddy aside, back into the safety by the table. She walked forward, crunching through the fallen glass, then raised one foot and stood up on the sofa bed. The fake leather squeaked against her shoes as she pushed up, her other leg hovering behind her. She opened the first cupboard, grabbing the dark purple side handle of Maddy’s new bag and swinging it out, muscles in her arms straining.

“How much did you pack?” she said, dropping the heavy bag onto the sofa, scattering more glass. Maddy darted forward to retrieve her suitcase, holding it in both arms, almost like a shield.

Red opened the other cupboard and reached for her bag, only noticing now that the seams were breaking at the side, loose black threads tickling her skin as she grabbed it. Dad wouldn’t like that; this was her mom’s old suitcase, Grace Kenny—Philadelphia still scribbled in the luggage tag at the

top. One of the last pieces of her handwriting they had left. Not the time to think of that, though. Not ever the time.

Red stepped down with the bag in her hands, turning back to Maddy, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the door and the kitchen counter, unzipping her stiff, new bag. The zipper snarled as she pulled it around the corner.

Red brushed some glass aside with her foot and settled down beside Maddy, her back arching as she leaned against the door, buttressing the side of her suitcase against Maddy’s.

She unzipped it, pushing the top flap open so it slapped the floor of the RV.

“No sudden noises,” Simon called over his shoulder, annoyed.

“Sorry,” Red called back over hers. She stopped; Maddy was staring at her.

“This is crazy,” Maddy said quietly, shaking her head, pausing to bite down on her lower lip. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Red still couldn’t believe it either. For different reasons, probably, because she always half expected the worst to happen. Maddy was half full and Red was half empty, which reminded her: she needed to get Simon some more water.

“Are we gonna be okay?” Maddy asked, and suddenly her eyes were filled with tears, one escaping, making a break down her cheek.

Red swiped it away as it reached Maddy’s chin. “Yeah, we’ll be okay, I promise,” Red said, a promise she hoped she could keep. She tried to tell Maddy that with her eyes and nothing else, a slow blink.

“What if one of us gets shot?” Maddy said, her bottom lip threatening to go, ready to take her whole face down with it.

“No one’s getting shot.” Red held her eyes. “We are getting out of this alive,” she said, “you and me.” Always you and me with them, since before they could walk and talk and think. And even before that, when their moms were best friends, their own you and me from the first day they met at college. Lavoys and Kennys, except their moms had had different names back then. Maddy wasn’t just her best friend, Maddy was family. “Come on, let’s look

for resources,” she said in her Oliver voice that usually made Maddy laugh. It didn’t work tonight, so Red tried something else: “Maybe those six bulletproof vests I packed will come in handy.”

Maddy snorted, wiping her nose. “Maybe so will the functioning cell tower I brought in mine.”

There we go, a near smile at least. Maddy pushed open the top of her case and it was so packed that maybe she really did have a whole cell tower in there. Tall piles of clothes, neatly folded and separated into sections: underwear there, shorts that side, multiple pairs of jeans, three separate wash bags, shoes in pairs down the middle like grid lines. They were only supposed to be gone seven days, yet Maddy must have packed enough clothes for weeks.

Red glanced at her own case. No piles, no folding, no order. It was all chucked in together. Balled-up underwear buried in each corner, a watered-down mascara and a foundation that didn’t match her skin tone somewhere loose in there, never to be seen again. A puddle of marbly-pink goop—which must mean her shampoo bottle had leaked—spreading over a lone sock. Her toothbrush stood up dead center, her nice shirt caught in its bristles. She’d been hoping she could borrow Maddy’s toothpaste, not that it mattered now.

“Red,” Maddy said, disapprovingly, looking down at the mess of Red’s suitcase. She burrowed her hand through, overturning clothes to see underneath. “Did you forget to even pack a bikini?” she asked, searching through the rest of it. Red had one bikini, blue and white, and Maddy was right: it wasn’t here.

“Guess I must have missed it,” Red said, trying to remember forgetting it.

Maddy turned to her. “And what the hell were you going to do on a beach vacation without a swimsuit?”

Red shrugged.

“Borrow one of mine, I’m guessing?”

She was annoyed, but at least if she was annoyed then she wasn’t scared right now. That was better.

“Don’t think it really matters anymore,” Red said. “We’re not making it to the beach.”

Maddy didn’t say anything.

“I don’t have anything useful,” Red said, zipping the suitcase shut and kicking it away.

“Let me see,” Maddy murmured, turning back to her own bag. She picked up one of the wash bags, shiny plastic zebra print, and opened it. “Yes, I thought so,” she said, dipping her hand inside and coming back with a pair of hair scissors.

“You never cut your own hair—?” Red said.

“No, but I always take these when I go away. Never know when you might need a pair of scissors. I had to turn leggings into shorts once when I misjudged the weather.”

“Are those for first aid or a weapon?” Red eyed the scissors.

“Both, I guess,” Maddy said, pulling out a small roll of Scotch tape from the same wash bag. She placed both items beside her, giving them a quick pat. “Oh yeah.” She reached out for the front of the suitcase and the zippered compartment there. “I brought a real flashlight, just in case we were out late on the beach and our phones ran out of battery or something.” She pulled out a flashlight about the size of her hand, black with a fluorescent yellow stripe. “I put a beach ball in there too. Guess that was pointless. What the hell is going on, Red?”

“I know!” Arthur said suddenly, loud enough for the others to hear. “We can use the mattress from my bunk to block up the big window behind the sofa.”

“That’s a good idea,” Red said, at the exact same time that Oliver said it, as he reemerged from the bedroom with Reyna on his heels. He had something in both hands, cradling the items as he struggled past Simon in the narrow corridor. He arrived beside the table and stopped to look around at them all, eyes alive and searching.

“Okay, time’s up,” he said. “What did everybody find to help us survive the night?”