Damien's location was a petrol station.
Not a safe house, not a pack building, not anywhere strategic or defensible or sensible — a petrol station two territories south of where we were, on a back road that didn't appear on most maps, with a broken light over the forecourt that made the whole place look like the opening scene of something nobody survived.
He'd been waiting there for six hours.
I didn't know what to do with that information so I filed it alongside everything else I wasn't ready to process and focused on the road.
Adaeze drove this time. Nkechi sat in the back with the journal in her lap and her eyes moving between the windows at intervals so regular you could set a clock by them. I sat in the passenger seat and watched the moorland give way to forest give way to the par
