American comics: I am full of martial virtues and I love to be kind to others.

Bill jerked his head to the left, slamming it against the steering wheel and bouncing back. His eyes rolled back, leaving only the whites of his eyes, and he slumped limply in his seat like a rag doll with its bones removed.

Lynn felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder from the punch—the previous injury had been aggravated by the movement—he gritted his teeth and endured the pain as he removed the gun and walkie-talkie from Bill's waist.

Diana had already opened the passenger-side door. She leaned in and quickly checked Bill's pulse.

"He's still alive, just unconscious."

“Take his handcuffs off and use them on yourself.”

Diana removed the handcuffs from Bill's belt and cuffed his hands to the steering wheel. Then she retrieved a roll of industrial duct tape from the back seat, tore off a strip, and stuck it over Bill's mouth to prevent him from shouting if he woke up.

"Clean and efficient." She got out of the car and dusted off her hands.

Lynn closed the driver's side door and locked the car with Bill's key. He threw the key, gun, and walkie-talkie into a metal barrel in the corner of the alley and covered it with a few planks.

"Walk."

They hurried through the alley and back to the gas station. Kevin was still waiting in the car, and when he saw them return, his face was filled with relief.

"What happened? I heard—"

"Let's talk on the bus."

Diana started the engine, the Ford Taurus's headlights piercing the darkness at the alleyway's entrance. She didn't take the main street out of town—that direction was south, the direction Gary had mentioned Mill Road. Instead, she drove off the main street and turned north at a fork in the road on the edge of town.

The road to the north was an unnumbered country road, its surface barely smooth, flanked by barbed wire fences and endless cornfields. There were no streetlights, no road markings, only a small section of the road illuminated by car headlights stretching forward in the darkness.

The few lights in Brokenbor shrank into dots in the rearview mirror before being obscured by the rolling hills.

Diana let out a long breath. "So the guy at that gas station was bribed."

“He and the town sheriff were both. One phone call, ten thousand dollars, plus threats to their families.” Lynn leaned back in his chair, his left hand pressing against his aching shoulder.

He said someone was waiting for us on Mill Road.

"Yes. But he doesn't know exactly who it is. It could be a regular thug from the Brotherhood, or it could be another mutant."

"Do you believe what he said? Or is he just acting?"

"The fear in his eyes wasn't feigned. A deputy sheriff standing in a gas station, gun to a stranger, his hands trembling, his voice shaking, almost crying when he talked about his daughter—that wasn't acting; that was an ordinary person cornered."

Diana was silent for a moment. Her fingers tapped lightly on the steering wheel, a habitual gesture when she was thinking.

“This means their network is much wider than we imagined,” she said. “It’s not just informants and traitors within the city; they can infiltrate even remote towns. A single phone call can buy a deputy sheriff and a sheriff.”

“Ten thousand dollars is a huge sum for a small-town deputy sheriff earning thirty thousand a year,” Lynn said. “Add to that the threats to their families, and most people couldn’t handle it.”

"But how did they know we'd be passing through Brokenbo? Kevin threw his phone away a long time ago."

This question made Lynn fall into deep thought once again.

Argo's parting words echoed in his mind again—"Do you really think it's that simple?"

Cell phones are one source of information leaks, but not the only one. Even if the phone is thrown away, their movements can still be tracked. This means there's another source of information, a vulnerability they haven't yet discovered.

Was there a tracker in the car? Lynn considered this possibility, but immediately dismissed it—Diana's car was hers, and no one knew she would be involved before Renault; the Brotherhood couldn't have tampered with her car beforehand. Unless the tracker was installed after they set off, but that would require someone to have approached the vehicle when they parked.

A Reno hotel? A gas station? A small restaurant in Utah?

Every stop is a potential window for exposure.

“We need to check the car,” Lynn said.

"You think there's a tracker?"

"Uncertain, but not impossible. Find a place to stop and thoroughly search the car, inside and out."

"Now?"

“Before dawn. If there really is a tracker in the car, we're providing them with a new location data point every mile we drive.”

Diana slammed on the brakes, slowing the car down. She stopped at the entrance to a cornfield by the roadside. For miles around, there were no buildings, only endless fields and a black sky.

All three of them got out of the car.

Lynn opened the toolbox in the trunk and found a flashlight and a small mirror. He lay down on the ground and used the flashlight to search the undercarriage of the car inch by inch.

The exhaust pipe, suspension system, underbody protection plate, and fuel tank are all visible under the car. The beam of the flashlight slides across the metal surface, illuminating a layer of dust and mud splattered on the road.

“There isn’t one here.” He crawled out from under the car and brushed the dirt off his clothes.

Diana was inspecting the wheel arches and fenders. "There aren't any here either."

Kevin was assigned to inspect the car's interior—under the seats, in the glove box, in the gaps between the door panels, and behind the sun visor. He searched every corner, even lifting up the floor mats to look inside.

There was nothing in the car.

Lynn frowned. There was no tracker. What, then, was the source of that information?
He leaned against the back of the car, looking up at the starry sky above. The Milky Way stretched out directly above, countless stars forming a cold and vast curtain of light. Polaris hung low in the north, like an unblinking eye.

“Is it possible,” Kevin’s voice came from inside the car, “that something went wrong with Frank, the guy you contacted?”

Lynn's body stiffened for a moment.

“Impossible.” His voice was somewhat stiff. “I’m not saying he deliberately betrayed you,” Kevin leaned out of the car, “I’m saying you used the hotel’s Wi-Fi to log into the FBI’s internal communications system. Even if the system itself is encrypted, the hotel’s network environment isn’t necessarily secure. If the Brotherhood has sufficiently sophisticated hackers, they could probably intercept your connection information at the network level—they don’t need to know what you said, just that someone logged into the FBI’s encrypted platform from a Reynolds IP address. Then they could trace that IP, locate the hotel, check nearby surveillance footage, or directly question the front desk, and they’d know where we are.”

There was silence for several seconds beside the car.

Diana glanced at Lynn.

Lynn closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Kevin was right. Their experience in San Francisco had already demonstrated the fraternity's infiltration capabilities in the digital realm. A hotel's public Wi-Fi was practically undefended to them.

“If that’s the case,” he said, “all they know is that we started from Reno, heading roughly east. They don’t know our exact route, so they’re casting a wide net along all possible paths—Argo on Highway 80, the corrupt cops in Brockenberg, and probably other points we haven’t encountered yet.”

“A net,” Diana said.

"Yes. But the mesh isn't dense enough, so they can only ambush us at key intersections and supply points. We can get through the mesh by avoiding the obvious paths."

"Therefore, we avoid main roads and large towns, and try to explore remote corners that they don't cover."

"That's exactly what I mean. It'll be slower, but safer."

Diana opened the map app and glanced at it—it was a downloaded offline map, requiring no internet connection. She swiped her finger across the screen a few times.

"From here, head northeast through the Sandhills region of Nebraska, which is basically a no-man's land of ranches and dunes, with no cell phone coverage, let alone surveillance cameras. Then enter the northwest corner of Iowa, heading east along the southern edge of South Dakota, taking back roads through southern Minnesota into Wisconsin, then to Michigan, and from there through Pennsylvania into New York."

"This road is at least 800 miles longer than taking Highway 80 directly."

"But no one expected we would go down this path."

Lynn looked at the winding dotted line on the map, which resembled a stream trying to avoid all obstacles, drawing a huge arc on the map of the American Midwest.

“Take this road,” he said.

The three got back into the car. Diana started the engine, and the Ford Taurus made a U-turn on the country road, heading northeast.

Night fell from all directions, enveloping the lonely car in boundless darkness. The road ahead stretched endlessly, the headlights illuminating only a few dozen meters ahead, beyond which lay an unknown void.

But at least at this moment, no one is chasing them.

Lynn glanced down at the woven bracelet on his left wrist. The red, blue, and white colors almost blended into a blurry, dark hue in the dim light of the dashboard, but he knew it was still there.

Red represents courage. Blue represents intelligence. White represents peace.

Sofia said that if he wore it all the time, no bad guys would catch him.

He wasn't a superstitious man. But everything that had happened in the past forty-eight hours—the checkpoint, the mutants, the corrupt cops—had happened. He was still alive, and the bracelet was still with him.

Maybe it was just luck.

Maybe not.

The Ford Taurus continued its journey through the Nebraska night, the engine's hum like a monotonous yet resolute lullaby, enveloping the three weary travelers in a thin layer of security. The plains outside the windows shimmered with a greyish-blue light under the moonlight, stretching to the horizon. Occasionally, the massive blades of a wind turbine rose from the horizon, slowly rotating against the starry backdrop, like silent night watchmen.

Kevin fell asleep again in the back seat, this time sleeping soundly with even and long breaths.

Diana turned the radio volume down to the lowest setting and found a station playing midnight jazz. The saxophone melody rose slowly in the carriage like a wisp of smoke, enveloping every seat and every corner, before escaping through the half-open window and dissipating into the boundless wilderness outside.

“When you hit that sheriff just now,” Diana said, “their punches were very precise. Quintico’s fighting style?”

"Training Manual No. 7, Chapter 3, Section 12, 'Subjugation Techniques for Seated Targets'."

"Looks like my studies paid off. But your left shoulder must be hurting even more now."

Lynn moved his shoulder, a dull pain shooting up from deep within his joint. "It's bearable."

"Let me take care of it for you at the next place where we can park. If you keep pushing yourself, you'll lose that arm tomorrow."

"Did you study medicine before, or—"

“My mom is a nurse, and my dad is a firefighter. I grew up watching them bandage each other’s wounds. By fourth grade, I could bandage a sprained ankle, more skillfully than most ER interns.”

Lynn's lips twitched slightly, which could be considered a smile.

“Frank is right,” he said. “You are indeed a trustworthy person.”

Diana didn't respond. Her gaze remained fixed on the narrow road illuminated by headlights, her hands firmly gripping the steering wheel. After a moment, she said—

"After this is all over, you'll owe me a very long story. From beginning to end, without omitting anything."

"Once we get to Manhattan, I'll buy you coffee, and then we'll start the story from the beginning."

"A cup of coffee isn't enough. This kind of story is worth at least a steak."

"make a deal."

They drove through the no-man's-land of Sandhills all night.

It was an almost surreal journey. The highway—if that potholed two-lane asphalt road could even be called a highway—winded between undulating sand dunes, flanked by endless meadows and low hills covered with a layer of silvery-gray hay, looking like the surface of some alien planet in the moonlight. There were no streetlights, no buildings, no trace of human civilization, only the occasional wild rabbit or rattlesnake darting across the road reminding them that this land was not entirely dead.

By daybreak, they had crossed northern Nebraska and entered the edge of South Dakota. Dawn painted the eastern horizon a pale peach-pink, then apricot, then gold, until finally the sun burst forth from the horizon like a blazing bronze ball, spreading its light across the boundless prairie. Dew condensed into countless tiny droplets on the roadside grass, shimmering in the morning light like scattered diamonds laid out during the night.

Diana had been driving since she took the wheel at four in the morning. Her eyes were bloodshot, but her arms remained steady, and she maintained a speed of around sixty miles per hour. She possessed a quality Lynn had seen many times before—a quality commonly found in highly trained law enforcement officers—that allowed her to maintain basic operational precision and judgment even in a state of extreme fatigue.

Lynn slept for about two hours in the passenger seat, but the sleep did little to improve his condition. His left shoulder felt better after Diana wrapped it with an elastic bandage in the early morning; at least it no longer caused pain with every breath, but his range of motion remained limited. (End of Chapter)