Mikel and Paula stopped around three a.m. at a twenty-four-hour gas station just outside their destination of Jonesboro, Arkansas for fuel. They had lost a day in travel when a tire had gone flat and the spare, as it turned out, didn’t have much more air in it than the completely flat one did. It was frustrating to say the least, but it had been dealt with once they’d found a tire repair shop in the middle of f*****g nowhere.
Ordinarily, Mikel wouldn’t go into any businesses they stopped at; it wasn’t wise to continually be caught on camera. But he had to this time. He’d had to power Paula down completely again. She was getting more and more twitchy, more resistant to commands, a little harder to control. He just knew it was because of the prolonged nanotech exposure. But although he real
