Twenty-Seven
After three hours, they did have to pull off long enough for Joanna’s team to add hardtop covers to the jeeps. Then they stopped again, another ninety minutes later, deciding to take a secondary road to avoid a large caravan of free-zoners.
> Grace pinged.
> had been Joanna’s reply.
She relayed this to Heron. “Surely not everyone in the free zone wants to kill you and take your food.”
Heron’s lenscape clicked off. “It isn’t that they want to kill you. They just feel they have to in order to survive.”
“Why don’t they just settle down in a zone? Like 399 or 404?”
“Most free-zoners have been exiled for theft or murder. They’re the ones who don’t do well in communities.”
Grace found this hard to believe, considering that the only time she’d seen raiders, they’d been
