Yoon grinned wickedly. “That’s because it’s a panther.”
“You keep panthers?” Vinci’s voice was calm and even, though Marcus had come to know his moods well enough to view this as surprise.
“Not typically, no,” said Marcus. “Yoon is . . . special.”
“We found wild ones in Brooklyn,” said Yoon. “I think they escaped from a zoo. On patrol last year I found this one as a baby, and I’ve been raising him. He’s pretty tame.”
“Until Yoon tells him to rip somebody’s head off,” said McArthur. “Then everybody has nightmares for a few days.”
A man in a dark-green cloak stepped up to the doorway, a rifle in his hands and a pair of night-vision goggles pushed up across his forehead. “You sounded the all clear. What’s going on in here?”
“Commander Asher Woolf,” said Woolf, holding out his hand to shake. “We’re looking for Delarosa.”
The soldier looked over the group quickly, sizing them up. “You and you I recognize from the Grid,” he said, pointing at Woolf and Galen; then he looked at Marcus. “You look like Marcus Valencio.”
“I am,” said Marcus. He’d become a minor celebrity after helping Kira bring back the cure.
The soldier frowned at Vinci, though, and Marcus felt a pang of nervousness. Did they know what Vinci was? Did they suspect?
“You I don’t know,” said the soldier.
“I vouch for him,” said Woolf. “Now we need to get out of here.”
The man thought a moment longer, and finally nodded. “Let’s go.” Marcus and his companions grabbed their packs—little more than bedrolls at this point, with their food and ammo almost completely gone—and followed the White Rhinos into the trees. Though they called it a forest, it was really just an overgrown subdivision; derelict houses and weathered fences crumbling from thirteen years of disuse, with the neighborhood’s old trees and an explosion of new young ones growing up in the abandoned yards. Woolf had chosen their house because it sat on a small rise, giving a slightly better view of the path they’d expected Delarosa to take; that the White Rhinos had come right past them instead of sticking to the more obvious route was, Marcus thought in hindsight, a big part of why the group had been so hard to find. They knew the Partial army was looking for them, and they knew how not to be seen.
The rest of the group was farther out in the trees, arranged in attack formation around Marcus’s hiding place, safely concealed in cover. Delarosa herself was near the center of the group, near a low wagon. Marcus frowned at this, wondering what could possibly be so important—and so heavy—that they would risk the ruts and tire tracks of a wagon in order to haul it around. He didn’t get a chance to ask, for Delarosa recognized Woolf and nodded brusquely, cutting off all conversation with a single question.
“The Senate sent you?”
“We haven’t heard from them,” said Woolf. “We assume they’ve been taken.”
“We’ll talk later,” said Delarosa, tossing each of them a dark cloak mottled with green and brown. “Wear these, and stay as quiet as you can. If you attract any Partials, we’ll leave you to them.”
“Understood,” said Woolf.
Marcus threw the cloak over his shoulders, covering his pack and weapon and everything, and pulled the hood up over his head. The White Rhinos moved almost silently through the trees, Yoon’s black panther ranging ahead like a malevolent shadow. Marcus did his best to stay as quiet as they did, but found himself constantly stepping on twigs or clattering chunks of broken concrete into one another. Delarosa glanced at him angrily on more than one occasion, but she seemed to glare at Woolf and Galen just as often. Vinci was far more stealthy, though still outclassed by Yoon and some of the more experienced guerrillas. It made Marcus wonder again about the different abilities of the various Partial models—Vinci was infantry, likely not built for infiltration. Heron, who had once terrified Marcus by appearing ghostlike from the shadows, definitely was.
While they walked, Marcus studied the White Rhinos. Most of them were in Partial uniforms—old, weathered uniforms, but still recognizably Partial.
Claimed from fallen enemies?
he wondered. He also noticed that all of them carried a gas mask, hung from a belt or dangling from their backpacks. That seemed odd, as the Partials didn’t seem to be using any chemical weapons, but when he looked again at the Partial uniforms he smiled, realizing with a burst of excitement exactly what was going on. At the first rest stop he approached Yoon about it.
“You’re disguising yourselves as Partials,” he said, keeping his voice at a barely audible whisper. “The gas masks block the link, so you put them on and wear those uniforms and the Partials can’t tell from a distance that you’re human.”
Yoon smirked. “Pretty clever, don’t you think?”
Marcus whistled softly. “It’s amazing. Everyone’s wondering how you’ve managed to hide for so long, but with a disguise like that you could walk right up to them.”
“Only the ones who look like Partials,” said Yoon. “McArthur’s too young, Delarosa’s too old, but I can pass pretty easily—they think I’m a tank driver, for some reason.”
“Samm said the drivers and pilots are all petite girls,” said Marcus, marveling at the deception. “Apparently they saved the government a lot of money, building smaller tanks and jets. So you’ve actually talked to them? And they didn’t suspect anything?”
“It was hard at first,” said Yoon, “because they usually only wore the gas masks to fight each other—against humans there’s no need for them. We planted the story that the humans were using some kind of biological weapon, and it seems to have caught on.” She laughed. “We’ve even heard rumors of Partials dying from it in East Meadow, so it seems the legend has taken on a life of its own.”
“That’s hilarious,” said Marcus. “Do you use the disguises just for emergencies, like if a group of Partials finds you in the woods, or do you actually seek them out for information and stuff?” Yoon tried to answer, but Delarosa whistled a birdcall, and the group was back on the move.
They walked for hours, almost until dark, and stopped for the night in a thick outdoor grove. This surprised Marcus, because he’d always learned to camp in the abandoned buildings that covered the island—they gave you shelter, they kept you hidden, and they were more defensible if you ever got attacked. Even the Partials used them. Once again, though, the White Rhinos seemed determined to defy expectations, and Marcus decided that they were probably avoiding the houses precisely because that was where everybody expected them to be. Delarosa chose a spot near a babbling stream, to mask any errant sounds with the white noise of the water, and kept everyone low to the ground to reduce the camp’s profile. Guards stayed along the outer perimeter, while the mysterious wagon was brought in near the center of camp.
“Help me dig a fire hole,” said Yoon.
Marcus’s eyes went wide. “You’re lighting a fire?”
“One of the benefits of staying outside,” said Yoon. She held up a pair of rabbits. “How else are we going to cook these?”
“But that’s the whole problem,” said Marcus. “We’re
outside
. Anyone in the area can see it.”
Yoon rolled her eyes. “Watch and learn, city boy. Hold these.” She thrust the rabbits into his hands, pulled a small shovel from her pack, and surveyed the ground around the camp. “That’s the best spot for it,” she said, pointing at the slight depression where Delarosa had left the wagon, “but we can find another.”
“We could move the wagon,” Marcus suggested.
“The Wagon Has Priority,” said Yoon, in a tone of voice that gave each word the weight of law, if not an outright religious commandment. “And trust me—you don’t want to build a fire even remotely close to it. Let’s try over here.” She walked ten paces east of the wagon, maybe twenty-five feet, and knelt down to start digging.
Marcus knelt next to her, keeping his voice even lower than usual. “So what’s in the wagon?”
“Secrets.”
“Well, yeah,” said Marcus, “but are you going to tell me what they are?”
Yoon kept digging. “Nope.”
“You do realize that we’re on the same side,” said Marcus, readjusting his grip on the rabbits. They were soft and furry, and cuddly enough to creep him out when he remembered they were dead.
“The Wagon Has Priority,” Yoon repeated. “When Delarosa tells you, she’ll tell you, and she’ll probably tell you tonight, so stop worrying. Until that happens, however, I am a soldier and I will keep my commanding officer’s secrets.”
“Your commanding officer is a convicted criminal,” said Marcus.
“So am I, remember? We all have our baggage.” Yoon paused in her digging and looked up at him. “Delarosa does what nobody else is willing to do,” she said. “It’s kind of her thing. Last year that made her a criminal; now she might be the only hope for the human race.”
Marcus thought about this, leaning closer. “Have you really been that effective? Everything we’ve heard suggests you’re a thorn in their side, causing just enough trouble to keep the army off balance but not strong enough to gain any serious ground. Do you really think you can fight them off?”
“Not yet,” said Yoon. “But eventually, yes. After.”
“After what?”
Yoon smirked. “The Wagon Has Priority.”
“Good,” said Marcus, nodding. “I was hoping you’d say that again. Cryptic answers are the
best
.”
Yoon finished the hole—a narrow pit, like a posthole, about eight inches across and at least twice that deep. She moved over a few inches and dug a similar hole, keeping the piles of displaced dirt close at hand, and when the second hole was finished she knocked a tunnel between them, connecting them at the base. McArthur brought her a collection of twigs and sticks and bark, and the panther, alarmingly, brought a dead cat held lightly in its jaws. It left the thing at Marcus’s feet, eyed him mysteriously, and padded back into the twilight.
Yoon could barely suppress her laughter. Marcus stared at the mauled cat in shock. “You taught it to bring food back for you?”
“That’s a dog behavior,” she said, struggling to keep her laugh quiet. “When cats bring dead animals it’s because they think you’re helpless, and they’re trying to teach
you
. I had a cat in East Meadow that left dead mice on my porch all the time.” She grinned and patted his head. “Poor widdle Marcus, too helpless to hunt his own kitties.”
“I don’t know if I can eat my own kitties, either.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” Yoon confided. “But meat is meat, and as little as cats have, two rabbits weren’t enough anyway. I’ll keep an eye on Mackey while she cooks, and let you know which bits are which.”
“I’ve never felt a more conflicted sense of gratitude,” said Marcus.
Yoon packed the first hole with sticks—the biggest at the bottom, the smallest, toothpick-size fragments at the top—and pulled out a match. “The moment of truth.” She shielded it with her hand, struck it, and dropped it on the wood. It caught almost immediately, the fire spreading slowly from the twigs to the bark to the thicker sticks below, and the second hole acting as a chimney to suck in air to the bottom of the blaze. In moments the fire was burning hot and steady, completely smokeless, and well below the rim of earth that kept the flames hidden. “One match,” said Yoon proudly. “Bow before my greatness.”
“Just help me skin these,” said another woman, and took the rabbits from Marcus’s hands. She started on one and Yoon on the other, keeping the blood and fur and organs buried deep in a third hole nearby. The broken cat lay on the ground beside them, waiting for its turn. Marcus was a surgeon, or at least he’d been in training to become one before the whole world had gone crazy, and blood had never bothered him before, but somehow two bunnies and a kitty was too much. He wandered back toward Woolf and the others, already deep in whispered conversation with Delarosa.
“That’s why we need your help,” Woolf was saying. “We can recruit the smaller Partial factions and put up a meaningful resistance, but we can’t do it alone. You and your guerrillas have the expertise we need to get through Morgan’s lines and find the pockets of resistance on the other side.”
“You’ve done fairly well yourselves,” said Delarosa, but shot a quick glance at Marcus. “Most of the time.”
“One little vine,” said Marcus.
“The more people we have, the faster we can work,” said Woolf. “We don’t know for sure how many Partial factions there are, but either way we need your extra manpower. Time is running out.”
“You’ve heard the rumors?” asked Delarosa.
Woolf shook his head, and Marcus leaned in closer. “We’ve been pretty out of touch,” said Marcus. “Is Dr. Morgan escalating the invasion?”
“Not the Partials,” said Delarosa. “Something new. Some of the outlying farms have mentioned it, and we’ve heard it from the Partials as well when we gather intel.” She looked at Woolf. “There’s some kind of . . . thing.”
“That sentence wasn’t as helpful as you probably intended it to be,” said Marcus.
“What kind of thing?” asked Woolf.
“I don’t even know what to call it,” said Delarosa, shooting a glare at Marcus. He could tell he was stepping over the line, but mouthing off was an instinct when he got nervous. He resolved to rein it back in. Delarosa grimaced, like she was struggling to find the right words. “A monster? A . . . creature? None of it makes sense, but the stories are remarkably similar: a man-shaped . . . thing, eight or nine feet tall, and the color of a new bruise. It walks into villages, settlements, anywhere there’s people, and warns them.”
“Warns them of what?” asked Woolf.
“Snow,” said Delarosa.
Marcus nodded slowly, trying to form a response that wouldn’t get him smacked. Woolf was apparently thinking the same thing, though his tone was diplomatic: “And you believe these stories?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” said Delarosa. “I won’t deny that it sounds completely insane—more like a folktale than real news.” She shook her head. “But the reports, like I said, are too similar to discount. Either an island full of war-torn refugees got together to play a giant practical joke on us, or something’s really going on.”
“An island full of Partials,” said Marcus. “Maybe they’re spreading these rumors for some reason of their own.”