“Calix!”
He waited, wondering if she’d wandered away, praying that she hadn’t locked the door. It felt like a lifetime, but it was barely a second before the door opened. Calix stood in the doorway, balancing on her good leg.
“You need anything?”
He kept her in his peripheral vision, his eyes on Gorman.
Listen closely,
he thought, hoping that the soldiers were paying close attention. “Have the hunters reported back yet?”
She blinked, a tic Samm had come to recognize in her as confusion. It wasn’t the question she’d expected, but she answered it. “Phan bagged a deer; he and Frank are bringing it back. Should be here soon.”
“And the harvest?”
She blinked again. Her voice was more hesitant this time, probing him for answers. “Everything’s picked, they’re still . . . canning the fruits and beans and stuff, is . . . everything okay?”
“Everything’s great,” said Samm, watching Gorman closely. “How about the beehives? We getting enough honey?”
If she was still confused by his questioning, she kept it to herself this time. “Yields aren’t as high as last year, but we’re doing okay,” she said. She paused a moment, then added, “Certainly enough to feed ten extra mouths.”
“Great.” Samm phrased his next sentence carefully—not a request, but not a command. “I know I told you to keep these guys’ diets light and bland for the first little bit, but they’ve been through a lot, and I think they deserve a little something extra. That honey candy Laura makes is amazing. Let’s get them some.”
Calix grinned; she’d helped Laura make the most recent batches and loved showing them off. “Lemon or mint?”
Samm looked at the Partials. “Lemon or mint?”
Dwain shook his head in disbelief. “You’re bribing us with candy?”
“We’ll take mint,” said Gorman. Calix nodded and closed the door, and Gorman scowled at Dwain. “That wasn’t a bribe, it was a demonstration.” He shot a hard glance at Samm. “He’s showing us they’re equals.”
“We’re working together,” said Samm. “Partners, friends, whatever you want to call it.”
“What do
you
want to call it?” asked Heron. Samm gave her a quick glance but didn’t answer.
“But why?” asked Gorman. “After everything that’s happened, after everything you’ve told us about the humans and the world and all the million things wrong with it . . . Why?”
Samm was still looking at Heron when he answered. “If you want to survive in this world, you need to stop asking why people work together, and just start working together.”
K
ira crouched in the shade, surveying the destruction before her. She guessed the ashes were at least a month old, maybe more. Animals—maybe foxes, probably cats, and by the looks of it at least one wild pig—had already ravaged the site, dragging clothes and backpacks through the dirt, scattering the remnants of old, weathered equipment. Picking clean the bones.
Kira picked up a scrap of an old armored vest and turned it over in her hands before dropping it with a thump back into the dust. Dr. Morgan’s records of the smaller factions were accurate, but apparently out of date; she had sent a patrol out in this direction, but there was no report of this battle. The corpses might be Morgan’s soldiers, rival soldiers, or a mix of both. Kira wondered if there were newer, more complete records hidden in a drive somewhere, encrypted and secret, or if Morgan had simply stopped bothering to complete them. They were both equally possible, but Kira’s gut told her the latter was more likely. Morgan was obsessed, pursuing the cure for expiration with fanatical zeal. Everything else was being left by the wayside, including the people Morgan was trying to save. This forgotten battleground might very well be the last attack she’d ordered. Kira prayed that it was.
A small breeze lifted the ashes from an old grenade blast. Kira sat on a fallen log, staying under the trees and keeping her back to the water, where attack was less likely, and pulled out her map. She was in a thick beech forest on the shores of the North Stamford reservoir—about ten or twelve miles from Morgan’s headquarters in Greenwich—where Morgan’s scouts had marked the location of a possible recon camp for a faction of Partials called the Ivies. Obviously the recon camp was gone, but what about the rest of the Ivies? Kira hadn’t been able to find clear data on each faction’s beliefs or alignments, but the file on speculation listed the Ivies as “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That marked them as potential allies for Kira, and their suspected territory was relatively close.
She examined her map, scavenged from a high school library on her way out of Greenwich. She had transferred Morgan’s records to a data screen, purely in the interest of speed, but the battery wouldn’t last more than a few days, and as soon as she was out of Morgan’s reach, she’d sat down and painstakingly copied as much of the info as she could into a musty paper notebook. The map, too, she had heavily marked with pencil, denoting all the possible faction camps and her most likely routes to travel between them. Some were weeks away, either north along the Hudson or east through Connecticut and Rhode Island. One group had allegedly traveled all the way to Boston, fleeing the faction war almost completely. The Ivies, if Morgan’s scouts were correct, had retreated to the wilderness in between, making their home by a place called Candlewood Lake. Maybe twenty miles away, as the crow flies. Kira checked her supplies—a bedroll, a poncho, a handgun, a compass, and a knife. A bag of apples. Only what she could glean from the hospital without arousing suspicion. She’d look for more on the road.
She filled her canteen in the reservoir.
Time to go.
The first leg of her journey ignored the highway and cut across the countryside, through a wooded stretch of land that the map said was more empty forest, but that turned out to be broken asphalt roads that wound through a loose collection of massive homes, each with its own fetid swimming pool, and most with their own tennis court. Kira kept to the trees when possible, just in case someone was following her, but when she reached the town of New Canaan, she turned north on Route 123 and made much better time. It was late enough in the year that most of the leaves had changed color, and foliage seemed to burn with bright yellows and oranges. Most of the leaves would fall soon, a callback to the old days when the winters were fierce and heavy, but the beeches kept theirs well into the spring. Kira wondered if they’d always been that way or if it was a new development, nature’s way of adapting to the new, winterless world the humans had created.
She passed a golf course, the long, open greens overgrown by saplings. It always felt like such a waste when she saw that—old golf courses were some of the easiest fields to clear for farming. A good sign, she decided, that the Ivies were nowhere near.
Kira camped for the night in a fire station; the giant bay doors were open and the trucks gone, making Kira wonder if the firefighters had succumbed to RM while out on a call. The disease didn’t normally kill that fast, but if they were already infected and working while sick . . . She hadn’t seen an infected adult in thirteen years, but she knew the disease was painful, and she couldn’t imagine the strength it would take to keep going in those final stages. She had to admire anyone who’d try to fight fires while dying of the plague. She rolled out her blanket in the barn-like cavern of the open station, protected from rain but smelling the cool night air, and fell asleep to dreams of fire and death. In the morning she felt like she hadn’t slept at all. She repacked her bedroll and started walking again.
She followed Route 123 north until it ended, then traveled east on something called the Old Post Road. Her route seemed to weave back and forth between New York and Connecticut, and she couldn’t help but wonder how those ancient divisions had been decided, and what they meant for the people who’d lived there. There were no gates or walls, no clear delineations of where one state ended and another began. She didn’t even know what that division meant. It had been so obvious to the adults, and so meaningless to the post-Break children, that they’d never bothered to teach it in school.
However the state relationship had worked, it was over now, the houses empty, the cars rusted and falling apart, the roads buckling and breaking as new plants and trees encroached relentlessly back into their ancient territory. Birds roosted in the upper windows of sagging houses, while deer and other animals stepped lightly through the overgrown lawns, nibbling the new young leaves that grew up between the ruins. In another hundred years, Kira thought, these houses would crumble and fall completely, and the forest would swallow them up, and the deer and the boars and the wolves would forget that there had ever been anyone here at all.
The thought of wolves made her worry about Watchdogs—the bizarre talking hounds that ParaGen had made as scouts and companions for the Partial soldiers. There were none on Long Island, but she had been attacked by a feral pack of them on her trip to Chicago with Samm. He had assured her that they weren’t fully intelligent, at least not to a human level, but Kira couldn’t decide if that knowledge made her more or less nervous; more or less disturbed. She had no idea how widespread they were, but prayed she wouldn’t encounter any on her trip to Candlewood Lake.
Eventually the Old Post Road ended as well, and she turned north on Route 35 toward the town of Ridgefield. The town wasn’t large by any means, but it was far more developed than the forest and scattered houses she’d been walking through since Greenwich, and the heightened visibility gave her pause. In all likelihood there was nobody here, nobody for miles—and if there were, it would probably be a scout or spotter for the Ivies, not a far-ranging agent of Dr. Morgan. Even so, the urban center scared her. Instead of trees and dirt on the edges of the road, there was simply more concrete, which meant the forest hadn’t regrown as heavily. The sight lines were longer and more open. An enemy would be able to see her from blocks away, instead of the few dozen feet allowed by the woods; she would be easier to ambush, or simply snipe from long range. She hesitated on the outskirts of the thinning forest, trying to convince herself she was being paranoid, but in the end she backtracked and cut through the trees and yards, pushing her way through dilapidated fences and dashing across each open street. The detour was barely an extra mile, maybe two, but she breathed easier when she finally passed the last shopping center and rejoined the narrow forest highway.
Eventually 35 merged into Route 7, and Kira made her camp in a small house just outside the crossroads. The windows were all broken—most were, outside the maintained areas—but the roof was holding, and despite a few cat prints in the hallways, it didn’t seem to have become a den for any animals. Two human skeletons lay in the bedroom, their bony arms resting loosely around each other, the decayed remnants of a blanket clinging in tatters to their ribs. Two victims of RM. She cleared a space in the living room and fell asleep looking at the old, faded photos of the family on the wall.
T
he next day would take her to Candlewood, but the route passed through a city called Danbury—several times larger than the town that had scared her so much the day before, and right on the shores of Candlewood’s southern tip. If the Ivies were really there, they’d see her coming for sure.
“That might not be a bad thing,” she mused to herself, falling into her old habit of thinking out loud. She’d spent a few months alone in Manhattan, the only living soul for miles in any direction, trying to track down an old ParaGen office; by the end she’d been carrying on entire conversations with herself, as if desperate for any kind of companionship. She felt silly doing it, but just as silly forcing herself to be quiet. When she got to the city she’d be quiet, but here in the wilderness, why not talk?
The question was, how much of the city should she actually pass through? She munched on an apple in the early morning light, sitting not in the living room but out on the porch, away from the skeletons and their ghostly faces staring down from the photos. She had the map out, spread across her knee, but it wasn’t nearly as detailed as she wanted.
“If the Ivies are there, and see me, that’s good,” she said, “because I want them to see me. That’s the whole reason I’m here.” She swallowed her bit of apple. “Unless, of course, they shoot me on sight. Which they probably won’t do, but what do I know? Do I want to take that chance? If they get close enough to link me, which they can’t do because I’m not on the link, they’ll think I’m human.” She took another bite of her apple. “But for all I know, thinking I’m human might make them more likely to shoot me, not less. I don’t know anything about them.” She swallowed her apple. “And what if Morgan really does have spies up here? What happens if they see me first? I think I need to stay hidden as long as possible. I need a more detailed map to plan this route.”
She repacked her scant possessions and headed back to the crossroads, where one corner held a weathered gas station. The wide metal awning had collapsed over the pumps, and this and the scattered hulks of rusting cars gave her cover as she dashed across the parking lot. The entire front wall had been glass, now shattered and crunching under her feet; years of rain had blown in, wrinkling the magazines in the rack by the front and washing out their colors. Kira picked her way through the shelves looking for road maps, finding them at last in a rotating wire rack that had long since toppled to the floor. Many of the maps were damp, and some had been nibbled by rats, but she found a Connecticut road map that seemed to be in pretty good condition. She found a spot of metal shelving, clear of broken glass, and sat down to inspect her route.
The highway she was on continued straight up to Danbury, where it widened and merged with Interstate 84, a massive multi-lane road that seemed to skirt the edge of Danbury and then curve up toward Candlewood Lake. “That will be the easiest route,” she said quietly, “but also the most obvious. If they’re watching anything, they’ll be watching that.” She searched through the city itself, following the major roads and looking for other options, and marked the two major hospitals with her pencil. All the post-Break settlements, human and Partial, tended to cluster around hospitals, and the Ivies might be the same. “
Might
be,” she reminded herself. Morgan’s records had reported them farther north, on or around the lake itself, and with lake and city so close together it was telling, she thought, that the scouts had placed them specifically at the lake. “Maybe they don’t like cities,” she mused. “I’m not a big fan, either, but I’m an outsider—if this is their home territory, they could secure the city and get a lot of defensive advantages the lake can’t offer. Unless they’re searching for advantages I’m not considering.” She looked closer at the lake, wondering what those advantages might be. Fresh water, certainly, and maybe the longer sight lines across the water. Any hunting or farming they wanted to do in the wilderness would be just as easy in the city; she had grown up doing the same in the dense urban areas of Long Island. It didn’t seem to make sense. She looked at her notes again: the Ivies were “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.”
That was all the information she had. She stared at the map, still completely unsure how best to approach it.