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Cas looks at us disapprovingly. “You two better not fall off.”

“Oh, okay, Miss Pot-calling-the-kettle-black. You should’ve seen her a couple of weeks ago, Syd. On the ground, three feet from her horse, flapping at me with her hands, sniveling like a kid. Classic.”

I shake my head. It’s always been this way with the two of them. They’re as different as fire and water in some ways, but are twin halves of a perpetual whirlwind.

We push Cress behind a large clot of juniper, to keep her sheltered from the punishing hail that comes through in the late summer evenings. Then it’s time for me to get back on the horse. Literally. Cas is waiting for me to answer something. “Sorry, what?”

“You remember how to do this, right?” she asks. “Do you need a leg up?”

At first I decline. I’m embarrassed to admit that without my morning stretches and after two days white-knuckling a car, I do, in fact, need help. I get my leg in the stirrup, but I’m too tired to pull myself up. I get about halfway there before falling back into her arms.

“How about now?” I can tell she’s trying to keep the
I told you so
from her voice, and somehow that makes it even worse. “Knee or hands?”

“Your choice,” I say. She laces her hands together and I put my left foot on them, bouncing our long-ago agreed-upon three times before she launches me into the air. I heave the rest of my right side across the saddle, the high pommel horn digging into my sternum before I can right myself. Cas checks my stirrups and hands me my reins. “All set?”

“Guess so.” I take one last look at Cress, trying not to cry. Abandoning her out here alone feels ungracious, at best.

A few tears escape but Cas and Len have the good grace to ignore them, continuing their low-level bickering until we reach a clearing.

“The camp is just through there,” Cas says, pointing to a copse a little ways off to the east, the sun beginning to sink into the hills behind her. “Don’t be too long, okay? We’re on watch, so we’ll say we met you here. It’s up to you to say why, if anyone asks.”

“If anyone even sees,” Len says, taking another swig of whiskey.

Cas seems disappointed. But I’m disappointed, too. My childhood best friends aren’t exactly my enemies, but they aren’t on my side, either. Sure, they’re sorry my dad is gone, but what about everything else? My whole life is gone and they’re here living in some time-warp Garden of Eden. Though it’s near dark, the land is so much greener than I remember it. There is water and birdsong where I remember dust and vultures. Cas and Len are freckled and healthy and well fed. And I’m pale and exhausted and hungry and bitter.

I try to feel something besides resentment, but I’m coming up empty. And then I think I should start paying attention because the clearing is starting to close in around me. I begin to whistle, so as not to surprise whoever is behind the line of cottonwoods.

I hear the telltale chock of a shotgun. The horse underneath me does, too, coming to a halt before I even touch the reins.

I sit back and lift both hands. I use my best stage voice to carry across the distance. “Hello? My name’s Syd. I’m looking for a camp of Survivor diplomats. I have some supplies for you from the City.”

“Are you a Survivor, Syd?” A low, warm voice comes from the trees. A woman steps out. She’s black, her hair braided back into swirls. She isn’t exactly frowning at me, but she’s not smiling either.

“For all intents and purposes. I’m from the City. To the west,” I say. Hers is a complicated question. I’m not sad I didn’t get sick, but Survivors wear their survival as a badge of honor. And passing for one without having survived anything, well, it’s a stupid kind of guilt, Danny used to say, but it’s guilt all the same.

“Me too. Though we haven’t been back in years.”

I nod. “I know you’ve all been at this for a while.”

“If you’re from the City, why do you travel with New Charitans?”

“It’s kind of a long story, and I have to get back to Cas and Len.”

“Wait, you don’t mean Casandra and Len
Willis
?”

“Yes.” A slice of dread zips through my stomach. “How—”

“The Governor’s children?”

“Um, look, I don’t . . .”

She holds a finger up at me, as if she’s thinking on the fly. I have a horse and some distance, and the gun she’s holding isn’t cocked at me anymore. I could make a break for it.

She shifts her weight. “Do you happen to know if Perry Willis made it back inside? I’d like to talk with him.”

Perry is Cas and Len’s eldest brother. Though I didn’t see him as often as the other Willis kids because he attended boarding school back east, he hated me. The feeling was mutual. His disdain for the romance between Troy and me had been raw and unveiled. When the word got out that we were leaving for the City, Perry cornered me. “You leave nothing but trouble in your wake,” he’d said. “If you left yesterday it wouldn’t be soon enough.” He’d certainly be delighted to see me again.

“I haven’t been back for a while. But, I can try to get word to him if it’s possible.” If Perry Willis is the key to diplomatic success in New Charity, you could knock me over with a pinecone, but all the same, this woman must have a reason for asking.

“Drop the supplies and back up, please,” she says.

“Wait, aren’t you going to tell me your plan?”

“Plan?” She laughs. “I don’t even know you, or if you’re telling the truth about who you are. Why would I tell you my ‘plan,’ were I to even admit I have one?”

Dread is shoved out of the way by annoyance. “I guess it was pretty stupid of me to think you diplomats had something else up your sleeves besides attending goodwill dinners.”

The shotgun rises to her shoulder again. “Supplies, please.”

Wait until I tell Doc how these people treat their own. I hope he hasn’t wasted any of my SpaghettiOs on them. It takes me a minute to undo Cas’s confounded knots, but when I do, I drop the bag in front of the horse, who shies to the side. The motion scares all three of us. “Sorry,” I say. “Out of practice.”

She nods, and I back the horse up about ten paces.

“Where are you going now, Syd?” She unloads the shotgun, pocketing the shells, and picks up the bag.

“New Charity.”

She looks up, eyes narrowed. “How are
you
allowed in if you’re a Survivor?”

I’ve become accustomed to trusting the people around me, but some warning bell sounds in my head, and for once I listen. “Family emergency.”

“I see. You’re neither us nor them.”

“I guess that’s true.” Though I’d never put it quite as succinctly.

“Well,
should
you see Perry Willis, tell him that Nelle Harris Mangold asked for him, okay?”

“I’ll try,” I say, hoping I can remember all three names without mangling them.

“Be careful in there,” she says. “Things aren’t all as they seem.” I’m sure she doesn’t mean to be condescending. But it sounds that way, and it pisses me off. We’re on the same team, for the same reason, and, for good or for bad, this is
my
hometown.

“Here’s what you can tell the rest of the oh-so-helpful diplomats, Nelle Harris Mangold: My name is Cressyda Turner and I’m going to open the reservoir when I get inside. So get yourselves ready.” I gently pull my right rein over the horse’s neck, and nudge my left heel into her side.

“Cressyda Turner, wait!” Nelle calls. “You don’t—”

I don’t hear or care what else she has to say. How it’s hard or dangerous or unlikely. I’ve already nudged the mare into a lope that’s turning into a gallop on her way back to her friends and home and dinner, and, just as soon as I open the reservoir’s floodgate, I’ll be doing the same. I lift a hand to wave good-bye. The wind is loosening my hair and I feel like the baddest damn ballerina cowgirl in all the land.

By the time the twins escort me through the steel gates of New Charity, the gigantic steel horses of my memory standing tall and corporeal—with a new shining guard tower alongside—the only kind of badass I feel relates to my very unfortunate rear end. My inner thighs are chafed, and my teeth feel as if they’ve been jarred half out of my mouth. I know how to ride, but when I let my mind wander, I forget how to keep my seat. The dim scraps of sunset don’t allow me to do much scoping, and so I focus on the road ahead of me to keep the horse under me from bolting toward the Willis place.

When Len halts his horse in front of the ranch, my onetime home, I don’t feel much besides disorientation. I can barely stand when I drop down from the saddle. Cas is already behind me, once again propping me up when I almost fall into the dirt.

“Been a while,” she says. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

She’s so close to me that I have to focus to keep my face from betraying how much I’d like to shove her into the nearest pile of horseshit. “Is she always this goddamned cheerful?” I ask Len.

“Depends,” he says. “Sometimes it’s worse.”

She gives us a dirty look as she unties my portion of gear from her saddle. She deposits the bags on the front doorstep before I can even sort out the knots on my own saddle.

“Mind if I turn your porch light on?” Len asks. “The Deacon said he’d leave the house open for you.”

I find myself blinking at him. “Yeah. Sure, go ahead,” I mutter, goggling at the fact that I am in possession of a porch, let alone electricity. Marveling that they have no idea what a big deal it is to watch Len enter the unlocked front door of my dad’s—my—house and flip a switch and have light flood forth on command. No one is afraid of what will be illuminated. Mostly it’s just moths. And Cas, shooting daggers at Len, who has paused to share his whiskey with me once again. “Should probably just leave a flask. You’re gonna need it in a few hours.” He pulls a small bag from the side of his saddle and tosses it to me. “For your muscles.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Little help, Len?” Cas mutters.

No one talks for a bit. My things are piled in a pitiful-looking heap in the front entryway. Everyone falls still, and we stare at the mess.

“Do you need anything? It looks like you might—” Cas starts.

“Let’s let Syd get some rest and we’ll talk about inventory in the morning,” Len says, clapping her on the shoulder. “Dinner tomorrow night? Our house?”

“You sure?” I ask. “I’ll be fine; I brought food.”

“Definitely come,” Cas says. She points at a bag that’s fallen open. “I bet something besides tuna sounds pretty good.”

“I don’t . . .” I stop myself. I don’t want her charity. But I know I may need her help. “I’m sorry, Cas. I’m really tired, and I didn’t even know if I’d be able to get here. It’s just—”

“Emotional. We understand,” she says.

I shove my hand in my pocket. My fingers close around a flat piece of metal and I pull it out. It’s Buster’s rabies tag, in the shape of a bone. From when there were still things like rabies tags. Mina must have slipped it in my pocket.

I think about showing it to the twins, to try and explain how big this journey really is, but I can’t expect them to understand something they have no reference point for. In any case, I’m glad for the reminder of the tag. I need to take all the help I can get: get in, get out, get home. “Thanks,” I say. “For everything.”

“It’s nothing,” Cas says. “I’ll come by tomorrow and see if you need anything, okay?”

“Whatever you do, don’t be late for dinner,” Len says. “You’ll miss cocktails. That’s the part that makes the rest bearable.”

It has been seven full years since I last set foot in this house. Even so, it looks and smells and feels the same under my fingertips, though maybe a bit more like my dad—more sweat and dirt. I know the number of steps to the bathroom without needing to count, and the light switches are where they are supposed to be under my fingers. And when I press them, I can’t keep from crying, so I keep them off for the time being, opening the heavy old curtains instead, welcoming in a bright half moon.

I think that I am safe running my hands over files of my dad’s paperwork on the kitchen counter, his coat, his wallet, things I don’t yet know how to face. In the living room, I stand in front of the couch and flip on the TV. There is only one channel and it is a film—an advertisement, more accurately—about the Sanctuary.