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“I did some more suspension work,” he says, launching into an intensive and informative session on car mechanics. He opens the hood and shows me around the basics. “You shouldn’t need gas with all three tanks full. It’s not actually that far, but if you run out on the way back . . .”

“If things look dicey, I’ll take a horse back,” I say. “And we can go get the car later.”

“The worst thing on this car has always been the starter,” he says. “The starter harness is here.” He points to the underside of the steering column. “You’re still keeping your pocketknife sharp, right?”

“Always,” I say. Another of Danny’s good influences.
Bringing a dull pocketknife scavenging is like trying to eat yogurt with a broom,
he’d said, rolling his eyes at the dull blade I’d presented to him to cut herbs.
Might as well chew these off with my teeth.
And then he did, smiling at me with a mouth full of cilantro.

“Shall we go find the girls?” Doc asks.

“I’ll be right there,” I say. “I just need a minute.”

I don’t want to leave them. Mina and Buster. Agnes. Doc. Memories of my mom and Danny. But I have to.

I think of all the things Doc will be able to do with lights and heat in the clinic. How much safer we’ll be again with streetlights. All the hot SpaghettiOs we can eat. Mina can grow up with the possibility for life to be the way we knew it. If I have even the slightest chance to give that to her, how is it fair if I don’t go?

When I open the door to the second-floor library, Mina is talking to Doc, slow and deliberate, as he peeks under her cast, frowning. “Buster has made friends with all the cats, but especially Rusty Bucket”—she points to the pair curled up in my armchair. “I renamed him.”

“Well, that’s a fine moniker.” Doc steps back to scratch the sun-colored tom’s ears.

“Syd says when I’m sixteen, I can have an apartment of my own.”

“Wow! You’d better start booking a decorator soon,” Doc says. “Say, Mina, why don’t you go tell Agnes that Syd’s about ready to leave?” This time Mina leaves us without question, Buster bounding after her, careful not to bump her crutch.

“I’ve got half a mind to get a dog of my own to take with me,” I say.

“Not the worst idea you’ve had.” Doc claps his big hands together once, as if to clear the air. “Listen, Syd. I know you have a lot on your mind. But there’s something I need to ask. It might crimp your timetable, but it’s important.”

“Hit me.”

“Mina’s not responding as well as I’d like to the antibiotics I gave her. I’m going to start her on something else, but my stock is low. Our scouting teams aren’t finding much for drugs anymore. I’ll give you a list of what will work if you can check the clinic in New Charity.”

My stomach sinks. I’ve told Doc about my dad’s death, but I’ve been careful not to mention my real purpose for going. Even he’d have trouble swallowing my plan to figure out how to destroy the reservoir’s floodgate and restore our power. It’s one thing to get there and back. It’s another to accomplish it all with a deadline. “How long can she go without them?”

“I have enough to get us through a week, week and a half. If you can manage that fast.”

No problem. What could go wrong? Remember me, New Charity? Pardon me while I rob your pharmacy and destroy your reservoir. “I’ll hurry.”

I turn back to the entrance of the library, the same wide, white doors as the rest of the apartments in this building, the place I’ve called home since my mother and I moved to the City. Agnes is standing there with one of her lacy handkerchiefs, a lithe calico winding itself around her legs. Mina and Buster stand at her side, taciturn.

“Take care of yourself, won’t you,” Agnes says as I get closer. Her eyes are clear and bright.

“Doc will check in with you every few days,” I say. “Just tie the flag out your window if you need him, okay?”

“Come here, Syd.” She wraps me in a hug that smells of cat food and time.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” I say, hoping I’m not lying.

“You can do what you set out to, Cressyda Turner.” She takes me by the shoulders. “I know this is about more than your father. Go and build that bridge between the City and New Charity. Build it for you, for us.”

I blink at her. “I believe in you,” she says. “Always have.” She lifts a hand and turns back toward her desk across the hall, the cat trotting ahead.

I kneel down in front of Mina. “I’m going to miss you both a lot. Promise you’ll take good care of Agnes and Doc for me. Remember to take all your medicine and try not to stay up all night reading, okay? And no more than two cans of tuna a day for Buster, even if he asks.”

She nods. Buster gives me a lick on the cheek. “Syd?” she asks. “Can you bring me something?”

“Anything, Mina. What would you like?” I remember asking my mom the same thing whenever she flew to Dallas or Vegas or Atlanta for work, and she’d bring back things like snow globes and T-shirts. Maybe New Charity still has those things. Maybe not.

“I just want something from somewhere else.”

I blink back tears. “You got it.”

“And Syd?”

“Yes, Mina?”

Her voice is barely above a whisper. “Could you not forget to come back?”

I’ve now officially lost it. I bury a kiss in her hair, and lower my—Mom’s—sunglasses so she won’t see me crying.

I want to enshrine her smile and Buster’s bad breath and last night’s dinner by candlelight, at which Agnes, Mina, and I followed our tuna and corn with two stale Zingers apiece—usually reserved for birthdays. I taught Mina Danny’s old trick of pulling the frosting off in one piece and eating it last.

I wrap my arms around her, trying to hold in these last memories. To keep the good parts, and forget the bad. But I can’t regret this decision to leave before I’ve followed through. Someone has to try.

“I’ll see you soon,” I say to Mina.

“See you soon,” she echoes. Buster barks.

“Ready?” I ask Cress, idling on the curb. I slide into the driver’s seat, hoping like hell that we are.

The old interstate is good for the first thirty miles or so. The police have had crews filling potholes with gravel in exchange for food for a couple of years. Things don’t start to get dicey until the pass. The weather and the constant, subtle shifting of the earth have buckled the pavement, and boulders block the way in places. We have some close calls, but nothing I can’t mince my way through.

I’m exhausted by the time night falls onto the road in front of me, neck stiff and eyes dry. I almost have to pry my fingers off the steering wheel, and my knees are shaky when I get out to find a tree—a silly precaution when I’m probably the only human within five miles.

Back in the car, I inhale a can of tuna, and lean the seat back. Dawn comes in what seems like a few minutes, even though I’ve had several hours.

Cress is running well and I pat her on the steering wheel every hour or so with encouraging pep talks in between singing to my mom’s old cassette tapes. In this way, day two for the most part mimics day one, but Doc has managed to slip me a can of SpaghettiOs, which I eat in between grateful sobs, wondering in all this vast silence and tree line whether I’ve gone completely insane.

When the third day dawns, things feel easier. For better or for worse, I’ll spend the night in my childhood bedroom with the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.

It’s remarkably quiet as we pass over the flat farmland on the other side of the pass. I see deer, fox, and other animals that are too fast to identify. Occasionally I see smoke from a campfire, but it’s always too far away to bother with. It’s Cress and me, dodging the dandelions springing up from the road, the sections of washboard, finding newer sections that we can almost take at speed, creeping over ruts deeper than the car’s wheels.

I watch the odometer tick upwards. Five hours, four. I turn off the interstate where half a sign still reads “Charity 10 Miles”—the “New” having blown away some time ago.

At the bottom of the off-ramp, after crossing a teeth-chattering cattle guard, Cress coughs, then sputters, and the gas pedal stops working. The engine dies and I pull off the road like the cars I saw back on the pass, just in case a scouting team comes by and needs space. I get out and open the hood, staggering back from the miasma spewing from the engine.

But I hardly have time to examine my poor Cress when I hear hoofbeats. I think for a moment about hiding, about my mom’s pocketknife in my jeans, but I’m exposed as can be out here. A wall of wind buffets the car.

The three horses approaching are either my personal saviors, or one shy of my own personal apocalypse.

“Syd Turner!” Len Willis—a lankier version of him with longer, blonder hair and the same twinkling gray eyes—beams down from his horse. “I do believe you’ve overheated.”

His sister dismounts and hits me with a bear hug from the other side. “You’re really here! I can’t believe it!”

“How did you know I . . .” But of course they knew. They probably knew before I knew.

“We brought you a horse to ride,” Cas says, as breathless as she was seven years ago. She points to a compact black mare, saddled and tied behind her horse. “We should get loaded up and going before we have too much dark ahead of us.”

“Wait, what?” I don’t know whether to be grateful or bemused.

“Strange business, having prescient friends, isn’t it?” Len says, leaning lazily onto his pommel. “I can never get used to it either.”

“Well, at least the two of you haven’t changed.” It comes out unkinder than I mean it. I pocket my keys, then I think better of it and tuck them in the space behind the gas tank cover—the place where my mom would leave the keys if we ever needed to exchange them without meeting. No matter what I was carrying, I wanted Cress to be there when I came back. “How far is it?”

“About eight miles as the crow flies,” Len says. “Though we haven’t figured out how to fly. Yet.”

“We’re so sorry. Cal was a good man,” Cas says. “It was a nice service.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?” I don’t know what’s wrong with me. They have gone out of their way to help me, and still I can’t find it within myself to be kind in return. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

Cas starts chattering in double-time to cover up the awkwardness, tying my bags to each of our horses. I make sure Doc’s bag is tied to my own saddle in between condolences and yet more condolences. I wave them off. “Thanks. But I’m okay. Really.”

“We’re still sorry,” Cas says, her eyes brimming with irritating pity.

I change the subject. “Say, is there a camp of Survivor diplomats along the way, by any chance?”

Cas looks at me strangely. She glances at Len, who shrugs.

“I can’t pretend that’s not where I came from.”

“I know,” she says. “But maybe we should talk about you being careful.”

“But,” Len says, “that talk can wait until tomorrow. We’ll show you where the camp is, and if you, say, need to relieve yourself, you can tell us and we’ll look the other direction for a bit.”

I nod. There are lines, and we have already started the process of drawing them. Cas frowns, but agrees.

“You look like you could use a drink.” Len passes me a flask of nasty-smelling whiskey. After a few swigs, the tension in my shoulders drains.