The proof can't be sent. It has to be carried.

Noa's drive holds the whole machine: how the score works, who buys it, and a roster of the people who run it. Put it on a network and it can be found, and called a disgruntled designer's fabrication. So it has to cross the country the oldest way there is — by hand, sealed inside ordinary things, passed from one trusted person to the next.

Mara has a feed sack, a cast-iron skillet, and a rule: never online, never alone for long. She has a trucker named Roz, Sofia's people on the border, a decoy loud enough to chase, and a voice at the far end of a mountain radio net.

East is short, straight, and watched, so they go the long way, around by the people: down the freight lanes to the Laredo checkpoints, out to the Gulf, up into the hollows of West Virginia. A region behind them, the man hunting the drive is the one whose name is at the top of it.

Air Gap is Book Three of The Mesh and the end of the trilogy that began with False Match. Out now in paperback and on Kindle, where it is also free to read with Kindle Unlimited.