The Darkest Path

9

I woke at dawn to find a mile-long line of vehicles parked beneath the cliff we had camped on.

Turned out that our hill overlooked a northbound highway that was now filled with a mix of Path and conscripted civilian trucks. The convoy was bookended by heavily armed Humvees and led by a minesweeper that had come to a stop and was surrounded by a small company of soldiers.

All along the line, drivers had left their cabs to lean over their engines or pace impatiently along the highway shoulder. Bear stretched out beside me, watching the trucks with his ears at attention.

“Supply convoy,” I said. “If we’re lucky, it’ll run right along the western front to the Utah border. Maybe farther.”

Bear looked at me quizzically.

“You feeling lucky?”

Bear huffed impatiently and thumped the ground with his paws.

“Yeah, me neither. Come on.”

Bear followed as I crept down a narrow trail. Rocks and slick patches of dusty sand slipped underneath my feet. A night of rest had blunted the knifelike throb of my injuries, but just barely. Bear seemed better off, though, navigating each obstacle like he was born on a mountain. I had to keep a hold on his collar the whole way down, afraid that if either of us hurried, we’d be seen and it would be game over.

We crouched behind a low outcropping of rock at the foot of the cliff. A silver-and-red eighteen-wheeler sat directly across from us. Its driver was circling his rig nervously, eager to go, and watchful. No help there. Ahead of him sat five more civvy trucks. Their cargo doors were open, but they were surrounded by groups of drivers talking and waiting for the signal to move.

Bear and I kept low and close to the cliff face as we went down the line of trucks, studying each one in turn. We came to the second to the last, a beleaguered-looking blue-and-white tractor-trailer. The driver stood at the back by his open cargo door, pulling out and restowing pallets of bread and boxes of dry goods.

There was a radio squawk from the cab of the truck, and the driver ran around to get it, leaving the cargo door hanging open. The driver in the truck behind him was nowhere to be seen, and the Humvees at the rear of the convoy were empty. It was our chance. I pulled at Bear’s collar and we both sprinted toward the highway.

When we reached the rear of the truck, I scooped Bear up and tossed him into the cargo hold. I climbed up after him and he circled my legs, panting and pawing at me as I pushed us back to the far end of the trailer. I sat us down behind a set of shelving units that ran floor to ceiling down the truck. The driver’s door slammed again. Bear surged forward but I grabbed him, holding him back into my chest with my cast. I had to clasp my other hand over his muzzle to keep him quiet.

Footsteps came down the asphalt on the other side of the truck’s wall. Bear tried to squirm away and I petted him slowly across his back to calm him.

“Shhh,” I breathed into his ear. “Shhh.”

The footsteps paused at the back of the truck, and I listened with every cell in my body, heart thumping. Boots shifted against sandy asphalt and then he climbed up into the trailer. I held Bear tight, but he managed to wiggle his muzzle out of my hand and loose one sharp bark.

“Rup!”

My heart seized as it resounded off the close metal walls in the truck.

“Hello?”

Bear squirmed as I wedged us back into the corner, my mind spinning uselessly, searching for a plan. The man started moving again. I needed time, and there was only one thing that might get it for me. I let go of Bear and he jumped into the aisle and ran to the driver.

“Rup! Rup rup!”

“Well, hello. How did you get up here?”

Bear’s tag jangled as the man wrestled with him. I felt the butt of Quarles’s revolver sticking into my back, but I knew pulling it was out of the question. With so many soldiers around, the driver would know that shooting was an empty threat. Still, I dropped my hand beside it just in case while I tried to come up with a story.

“Somebody else back here?”

Bear’s paws scrabbled against the wooden deck, with the driver’s boots echoing behind him. Next thing I knew, Bear was piling into my lap, and I was looking up into the face of the truck driver.

His dark eyes were set deep within brown skin. He wore an untucked western shirt and worn boots. A chewed-up pencil was tucked behind one ear. We both froze a moment and then he looked out the back of the truck. I gripped the revolver, sure he was going to call for help, but then he slowly lowered himself to my level.

“Got a name, kid?” he asked.

I hesitated, my mouth dry as the desert floor. Had the Cormorant MPs released my name?

“Henry,” I said, just to be safe.

“Henry,” he repeated with a scant grin that might have said he didn’t believe me and didn’t particularly care. “My name’s Grey. Grey Solomon. When’s the last time you ate, kid?”

“When did I—”

Grey pulled a paper-wrapped package off a shelf and tossed it to me. “You’re as skinny as a leaf. Here.”

Bear dove for the package, shoving his nose inside and pawing at the wrapper. Grey laughed and hauled him off.

“Take it easy,” he said. “Here. One for you too.”

He threw another onto the floor. Bear jumped off my lap and buried his face in it, snorting as he devoured a small loaf of bread.

Grey turned back to me. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go ahead.”

My stomach groaned at the idea of food. I opened the package and ate slowly.

“Don’t know what it is,” Grey said. “But the thought of somebody not eating just doesn’t sit right with me. You’re a runner, I guess.”

“A runner?”

“You a novice running from the Path?”

Everything about Grey said citizen to me, but there wasn’t the blaze of a fanatic in his eyes, just a kind of amused weariness. Still, it was best to be careful.

“No, sir,” I said, keeping my voice small. “I’m a citizen. Farmhand on a ranch down south.”

I moved forward, just enough so that my bruised face fell into the light. I set my cast on one bent knee, wincing as I did it.

“Who did this to you?”

“No one. I’m—”

“Son…”

“Our beacon,” I admitted, quickly formulating a story. “He was… doing some things he shouldn’t have been. Figured out I knew about it.”

“And you saw a way to escape.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bear finished his bread and returned to Grey to beg for more. Grey pulled him close and scratched at his side.

“Where you headed?”

“Utah,” I said. “North of Salt Lake City. I have a few relatives up there.”

Grey considered a moment. Bear yipped as a driver behind us cranked his engine to life.

“Look,” I said, getting to my feet, “I don’t want to cause anybody trouble. I’ll take Bear and go. You can—”

Grey stopped me with a hand to my chest. I could see his mind turning fast as he stared out the back of the truck. More engines started up ahead and behind. The convoy was getting ready to move. The truck behind us blew his horn, and Grey waved him down.

“Okay, kid, you just stay here and I’ll—”

“Yo! Mr. Solomon! Time to go!”

Three Path soldiers jumped up into the truck. The leader stopped cold the second he saw me. He was bald and sinewy in desert-tan fatigues. A subtle nod from him sent the other two to opposite sides of the truck. Everyone’s hands were on their weapons. Bear jumped forward, eager to meet his new friends, but I held him back by his collar.

“Who do we have here, Mr. Solomon?”

I was about to jump in, but Grey beat me to it.

“Mr. Vasquez! This here is my sister’s boy,” Grey said, as smooth as could be. “Adopted. He lost his folks in a Fed bombing raid. He was supposed to join us back in Yuma.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Grey.”

Grey turned to me. “And you brought that damn dog.”

“He just followed me!”

Grey rolled his eyes, then dug through a box on one of the shelves. “Look, fellas,” he said with a smile. “He missed the convoy and just now got caught up. I told his mom I’d try to get him back on Path and if I don’t, my mom is going to have my hide. You understand.”

Grey lifted his hand from the box and held three big bars of chocolate out to the men.

“He won’t cause any more trouble. I promise.”

Vasquez ignored him, staying sharp, his eyes moving from me and Bear to Grey and back, his index finger tapping his trigger guard.

“Your pack,” he said to me. “Take it off and kick it over.”

I slipped out of my backpack and tossed it between us. Vasquez took a knee and tore through it, scattering my clothes around the truck. The revolver in my back felt like it was on fire. What if they wanted to pat me down? There was nothing behind the soldiers but highway and desert. Even if I managed to run, there was nowhere to go.

“Satisfied, Mr. Vasquez?”

Vasquez looked up over my things, eyeing me hard before turning back to Grey.

“Like you said, Mr. Solomon, he’s your responsibility. He causes any trouble, he’s mine. Got it?”

“I do. Yes, sir. No worries here.”

Vasquez took the chocolates from Grey. Both of us nearly jumped when Vasquez’s comm squawked on his shoulder.

“Wanderer One, this is lead. We’re alpha charlie and on the move in five.”

Vasquez took the mic off his shoulder. “Understood. Wanderer One out.” He looked at me like he was memorizing my face, then signaled to the other two. They lowered their weapons, and the three of them jumped off the back of the truck. Neither of us moved until we heard the soldiers’ boots pass the side of the truck and disappear down the line.

Once they were gone, Grey looked down at me and Bear so hard it was like he was trying to see straight through us. He didn’t need to say a word. He was praying we were worth it.

10

“That’s not the first time you’ve done that.”

Grey didn’t take his eyes off the road. “First time I’ve done what?”

“Lied to somebody like Vasquez.”

Grey flicked his headlights on. We had been driving for hours and were now somewhere in Utah. The Californian front sat out in the darkness to our west.

“I think he’s calling me a liar, Mr. Bear.” The dog made a pleased snuffle as Grey rubbed his ears. “Mr. Bear says it takes one to know one, Henry.”

My mind spun for a denial, but if Grey planned on turning me over to Vasquez, he would have done it by now.

“When’d you know?”

“Pretty much right away,” Grey said. “You’re slick, I’ll give you that, but not half as much as you think. So what’s the story? You a capture?”

I nodded. “About six years ago.”

“Why run now?”

“Commander decided I should be helping give people the Choice.”

Grey downshifted as we came up a steep rise. “He the one who did the work on your face?”

“One of his men, yeah.”

“And now you’re trying to get to…”

“New York.”

Grey started to say something but pulled it back and shook his head.

“What?”

Grey glanced over at me. “Look, things may not be perfect here, but over in the Fed… I mean, do you even have any idea what the world was like before Hill?” Grey held up his hand before I could say a word. “Course you don’t. What are you? Twelve?”

“I’m fifteen.”

“Whatever. Back then, we were smack-dab in the middle of three wars and a depression that was getting ready to celebrate its tenth birthday. And you think anybody was trying to do anything about it? Heck no. Before Hill came along, politicians and their buddies were raking in billions while regular folks starved in the streets. And that’s still the way it is in President Burke’s Fed. I bet there are folks over there right now who are so rich they barely even know there’s a war going on and wouldn’t care if they did.”

The cab lit up red as brake lights flared in front of us.

“Ah, man. Not this again.”

Grey’s air brakes squealed as he brought us to a shaking stop in the middle of the road. Bear stood up to peer out the window as we sat there, engine rumbling. This had happened throughout the day. Scouts at the front would see something and the whole convoy would stop, waiting for the bomb team to check the road for IEDs.

Every time it happened, tension settled over the convoy like a fog. Grey tapped the fingers of one hand on the big steering wheel, while the other lay ready on his gearshift. I could feel the entire convoy leaning forward and waiting. Fingers on triggers. Muscles taut.

“They always find them?” I asked.

“Last run I did, a troop carrier ran smack into one of those new ones the Brits are sending over. A bloodier mess you’ve never seen. Twenty men torn to shreds.”

“The British are helping the Feds?”

“It’s all hush-hush since Hill promised any foreign country caught interfering is getting a nuke for their trouble, but yeah, they’re helping. Just can’t be too obvious about it.”

A trio of soldiers trudged up from their places in the rear of the convoy. I sank into my seat until they passed us by. Outside, the darkness lit up from artillery fire at the front. Tremors moved through the ground and up into our bones. Bear dug himself into my side with a whine and I stroked his side until he calmed.

“You think he’ll win?” I asked.

“Don’t think anything,” Grey said. “I know.”

“How?”

“You ever heard Hill speak?”

“I’ve read speeches.”

Grey scoffed. “Not the same. Not by a mile. I was at a rally out east, near the front, and he made this surprise visit to see the boys….”

Grey was quiet for a moment, reaching over to scratch Bear’s head, while he puzzled something out.

“You know how you read in history books about people like George Washington and Alexander the Great, and you get to thinking that’s the only place folks like that live? In books. Well, I saw Nathan Hill standing not one mile from the front and I’m here to tell you, he’s one of them. He talked to those boys for hours and when he was done, it was like…” Grey’s eyes shone as he remembered. “It was like all their lives they had been living on dust, and someone finally gave them a drink of water. Mark my words, the minute California falls, this whole thing is as good as over.” Grey laughed a little to himself. “So I guess it won’t matter where you end up, huh?”

Static came through the radio mounted over our heads. Bear woofed at it, and Grey reached up and switched it off, leaving just the rumble of engines around us in the dark.

“So if you’re such a true believer, why do you help people like me?”

Grey shrugged.

“You’ve done it before, right?”

Grey glanced up at me and then went back to petting Bear. “Hill and the beacons,” he said slowly. “They’re smarter men than me. I know that. But I don’t like giving folks the Choice. Simple as that. People ought to come to the Path on their own. Give ’em the chance and they will.”

Grey reached across the cab to smooth down a curled piece of tape on the dash. It was holding up a picture of a pretty, fine-boned woman with a heart-shaped face and springy curls.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I also just got a feeling for people who aren’t where they want to be.”

Grey tapped his fingertip against the dash, then sprang up suddenly, like he was snapping himself awake.

“Man, we cannot be stopping this long.” Grey snatched the radio and keyed the mic. “Patel. This is Solomon. I can feel those Fed drones circling, my friend. What is it? Private Weims spot another weaponized tumbleweed up there?”

The radio crackled with static. A few seconds later a heavily accented voice came back. “Nope. It’s a roadblock this time, Sol.”

“A roadblock?” Grey said, then lifted the transmitter again. “What are they looking for, Patel?”

Static filled the cab as Grey waited. Bear sat up, suddenly alert. The air in the cab seemed heavier now. I put my hand on Bear’s shoulder and held on tight.

“Yo, Mr. Patel!”

“Sorry. Just through it now,” Patel said. “They’re looking for a kid, Sol. A kid and a dog.”

11

Both of us sat mute until the convoy moved again, this time at a painful crawl. I was holding Bear down in my lap, but he was anxious and shaky, trying to throw me off.

“How many until they hit us?” I asked.

“We’re tenth in line,” he said. “But Vasquez is third. Soon as he hears what they’re looking for…”

“Can we run?” I asked. “It’s dark. Maybe—”

“No. They’ll see.” Grey pulled aside a set of curtains behind us that led to a cramped room filled with a blanket and pillows. “There’s a cutout panel at the bottom of the sleeping quarters. It leads outside to the space between the cab and the trailer.”

“What about Bear? They’ll hear him. I can’t—”

“I’ll hold on to him. Once we’re through the roadblock, I’ll slow down enough for you to run and I’ll let Bear out too.”

I started to go, but Grey held me back.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s a man named Wade who lives in a little speck of a town called Bride Creek. Runs the post office, so he’s got a truck and a tech dispensation. He’s helped runners like you cross over into Wyoming before. I haven’t heard anything from him in a few years, but he’s a good man.”

Grey pushed a map into my hand. There was a small town circled in northwest Utah.

“I’m heading east, Grey. I can’t—”

“There’s a lot of desert between here and Wyoming, and a lot of Path. If you’re smart, you’ll go west and take the ride.”

Brake lights went out ahead of us and we moved up another space.

“What are you going to do?”

“See if I’m as slick as I like to think I am. Now go!”

My eyes met Bear’s as I sank into the back. He was shuffling from paw to paw and whining, nearly frantic. I took his shoulder and squeezed, trying to pass him all the reassurance I could.

I grabbed my pack and dug to the bottom of the compartment. Once I found the outline of a panel, I pushed it open and was hit with a blast of desert air mixed with the stink of diesel. The truck shook as Grey hit the gas and moved one step closer.

I dropped my pack on the other side, then wriggled through, finding myself on the steel platform where the cab coupled to the trailer. I closed the panel behind me and crouched low.

“Cut your engine!” someone called from up ahead.

There was a pause, and then Grey powered down. Heavy footsteps approached the truck. When they got closer, four of them peeled off and began a search down either side of the truck. Flashlights knifed through the darkness. I dropped off the platform and hid behind one of the big tires just underneath the cab. Beams of light glinted off the steel where I had been hiding just seconds earlier.

“Mr. Solomon! Step down out of the cab, please.”

The driver’s-side door clicked open, and there was a bark from Bear as he followed Grey out.

“Move to the side of the road, please.”

I watched from around the edge of the tire as soldiers escorted Grey toward the shoulder. Once there, headlights from the truck behind us slammed into him, making him stand out starkly against the night. He was surrounded by five soldiers, including Vasquez. Bear had moved away from the group and was sniffing along the front of the truck.

“What’s up, fellas?” Grey asked brightly.

Good, I thought. Keep cool, Grey.

“Where’s your nephew, Mr. Solomon?”

It was Vasquez. I stopped breathing in the pause that followed.

“Look, guys…”

“Why’d you lie to us, Grey?”

Grey swallowed hard. “I know I shouldn’t have,” he said, looking them each square in the eye. “But he seemed harmless, you know? I mean, you saw him. Ninety pounds soaking wet and busted up all to hell. He gave me a line about trying to see some relatives, and I wanted to give him a break. I should have been straight with you.”

“Where is he now?”

“He got twitchy a few miles back and bailed.”

“Leaving you the mutt?”

“Said the dog slowed him down. Asked me to keep him. I know. I should have figured something was up and given you guys a call. I’m sure if you backtrack a little, you can find him. He was only—”

“He tell you he was a murderer?”

A pulse of fear struck me in the chest. Grey said nothing.

“Killed a kennel master back at Cormorant,” Vasquez said. “Shot him in the back three times and stuffed him in a toilet. Worked for the man for three years. You got anything to say to that?”

I lifted myself into a crouch, muscles straining, ready to run.

“Grey?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Grey said. “I fell off my Path, boys. I swear I did, but that’s all. I repent. I honestly do.”

“We can forgive you, Grey, but only if you tell us where he is. Right now.”

The side of the road was just feet away; after that, there was nothing but black. If I ran straight and hard, maybe they’d lose me.

“I told you, he—”

“Where was he headed?”

When Grey didn’t respond, I turned back. The guards hadn’t picked up on it, but he was looking beneath the truck, right at me, his eyes bright with terror. The blood in my veins turned to stone. Grey turned back to Vasquez.

“I don’t know, sir.”

Vasquez looked to one of the other soldiers, who nodded.

“Fine,” Vasquez said. “That’s fine.”

He pulled his sidearm and shot Grey in the chest.

12

I hugged my knees to my chest, trying to stifle the scream that was rising in the back of my throat. I wanted to close my eyes, wanted to look away, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move.

Two soldiers stuffed Grey into a black body bag and then dragged him off. A slick of blood gleamed in the headlights. Down the road, Bear was barking a percussive stream, his claws digging into the roadway, teeth bared. A soldier turned and unleashed a volley of gunfire that hit the road and sent Bear fleeing into the darkness.

There was the slam of a door and then Grey’s engine came to life above me, snapping me out of my trance. I grabbed my pack and darted out from under the truck just as the big tires began to turn.

I sprinted across the road and into the dark, half blind, every other step sending me crashing to the ground. Pain sang through my wrist, my back, my side. Each time, I forced myself up and kept going, running to a drumbeat of images that pounded through my head: Grey standing in the glare of his headlights, his eyes on me, Vasquez lifting his weapon, Grey falling. Over and over: Grey falling, like a suit of clothes suddenly empty.

One word and I could have saved him. The truth of it was like a dull blade, gouging into me. I crumpled to my knees in the dirt, gasping, lungs shredded. The taillights of the convoy had disappeared down the road, leaving me surrounded by darkness. I saw myself stepping out from under Grey’s truck and saving him again and again. It was like some part of me was trying to convince myself that I had actually done it.

Claws scraped my side. I recoiled to find Bear beside me, ears back, eyes wide with fear. I shoved him away and got to my feet, staggering deeper into the desert. Bear returned a second later and I hurled a clump of dirt at his feet.

“You can’t follow me anymore. You have to go!”

Bear growled and started forward again but I kicked up a shower of sand, forcing him back.

“Go, you stupid dog. Just get away!”

Bear shadowed me as I took off again, alternating between angry barks and a pained whimpering that cut into me almost as keenly as the image of Grey falling. Every time he got close, though, I whipped around, stomping at the ground between us and ordering him off. Each time he’d look up at me bewildered and hurt, but I persisted until the chime of his tags and the padding of his paws grew distant. Soon it was swallowed up in the thick of the night. Gone.

I pressed on alone, an ache clamping down through the center of me. Someone would find him, I told myself. And even if they didn’t, he was better off without me.

The temperature dropped fast as the night deepened. Pinprick needles of wind tore through my clothes. Images of Grey dogged me, and soon they were joined by others — Quarles and Connery and Dr. Franks. Even James. Because wasn’t he just as dead as the rest of them? I saw that day six years ago when the Path officers led us from our aunt and uncle’s car. They were taken one way and us the other. When they put the Choice to me and James, I didn’t hesitate. I killed us both and didn’t even know it.

I tried to drive it all away, tried to tell myself that I wasn’t to blame. Grey could have sold me out, but he decided not to. Each man walks his own Path, I thought, sickened to feel Monroe’s words in my head.

Exhausted, I collapsed again, onto my knees and then my back. The sky above me was choked with stars. I listened for Bear, expecting that any second I would hear the clink of his tags coming out of the dark. But there was only a low moan of wind and the distant tread of the war out on the front.

After the Path had taken us, we were loaded into the back of a truck. James and I sat trembling side by side with the other captures, while a beacon patiently explained what our new lives would hold. He said we had been given an opportunity to find a new life and a new purpose. He told us that the way would be hard and painful and most of all uncertain, because a man never knew what he would find when he looked deep inside himself. The only promise he could make us, he said, was that our Paths would inevitably lead us to one of two things — what we desired or what we deserved.

The moon arced over the vast emptiness of the desert and my body grew slowly numb in the cold.

I thought I finally knew where mine had been leading me.

I didn’t expect to see the dawn but I guess the desert wasn’t done with me. I woke the next morning to the sun beating against the land. Shards of glass seemed to lie in my bones and muscles. I forced myself up with a groan, making my head spin and my vision collapse to a dark tunnel. I breathed deep until it passed, then I looked around, squinting from the glare.

I expected to see a field of sand, but instead there was a plain as flat as glass and blazing white, like I was sitting in a field of snow. I thought it was a trick of the heat until I lifted my hand from the desert floor. White flakes crumbled from my fingertips and fell away like ash. I brought my fingers to my lips and touched them to my tongue.

Salt. Not snow. Salt. I was in the middle of a salt flat that stretched nearly to the horizon, the crystals glittering, broken only by a range of bare mountains in the far distance. There was no cactus or brush as far as I could see. I might as well have been on the surface of the moon.

I turned toward a metallic chime and found Bear sitting tall amid the white, watching me, his tags gleaming in the sun. As soon as he saw me looking, he turned away like I was beneath his notice.

“I told you to go,” I said. My throat felt coated in sand, the spiny granules shredding my flesh as I spoke. How long had it been since I’d had water? Twelve hours? More?

I searched for my backpack and found it a few feet behind me. The second I had it in my lap, my heart fell. It was empty. At some point during my flight from the Path, the zipper had come open and all of my supplies — food, water, Grey’s map — were now scattered between where I sat and a highway that was lost somewhere in the distance. I reached around behind my back and wasn’t at all surprised to find the revolver gone as well.

I threw the pack away with what little strength I could muster, then looked out at the barren plain around me. I wondered if Grey would still have saved me if he knew how pointless his sacrifice would be.

There was a rustle as Bear crossed the salt field. He stuck his nose into my side and I reached out to push him away. When my hand brushed his side, everything inside of me went still. I took his collar and drew him back. His fur was wet. I moved my hands over his ears and paws and found them all covered by a thin film of water.

“Where’d you find it? Where’d you find the water?”

Bear jumped back with a growl, confused at first, but then he wheeled around and flew out across the desert. I somehow found the energy to chase after him, stumbling and weaving, and after a few minutes, the salt beneath my feet disappeared and we were back on hardpacked sand. A few ancient-looking shrubs appeared. They were little more than gnarled trunks and spindly branches, but they meant that water had to be somewhere nearby.

Bear disappeared over a hill, and when I came down the other side, I saw a circle of reeds and grasses rising around an oasis no bigger than a manhole cover. Bear dropped to his belly and lapped at the water.

There was a scummy haze of algae clinging to the edges of the pond, and tiny bugs flitting over its surface, but I was too thirsty to care. I cupped one palm awkwardly and filled it with the dark water. When that was too slow, I simply leaned over the edge and slurped the water up. Together, Bear and I nearly drained the pond. When he began chewing on the thin grasses around the water, I followed suit, pulling up handfuls of the bitter roots. My stomach tried to rebel but I forced them down. When I had eaten and drunk all I could manage, I fell into a heap beside Bear.

The water and food lifted some of the fog that had settled around me. I looked across the span of sand and sky. Mountains rose in the west, and to the east a few outcroppings of cacti reached up toward the sun. I studied their curves and the tan horizon behind.

The roadblock had forced Grey to drop us early so I could only guess where we were. I was sure that Bride Creek was still to our northwest, but how far was impossible to say. As close as sixty miles? As far as a hundred? More? And all of that through solid desert. The closest city was almost certainly Salt Lake City. In all likelihood it was just out of sight to our east, possibly as few as thirty or forty miles distant. Of course, being close didn’t change the fact that landing in a Path jail meant my death just as surely as starving in the desert.

But what if I’m smart? I wondered. Move at night, fast and quiet. Could I slip through the cracks and cross the border?

Bear squirmed onto his back, rubbing himself against the torn reeds with his feet in the air. I could still hear his bark as it echoed through the back of Grey’s truck. How was I supposed to sneak through the stronghold of Salt Lake City with him by my side?

And there’s more too, I thought, recalling the voice on Grey’s radio as we waited at the roadblock. They’re looking for a kid. A kid and a dog.

Bear had settled down to a nap by the side of the pond. He huffed and mumbled in his sleep, one paw twitching as he dreamed. I moved closer, laying my hand along his side. His fur was warm and smooth. His ears, velvety. I drew my hand along the lines of his ribs as he breathed gently in and out.

I knew what I had to do. The night before, I was half mad and blundering through the dark. If I was careful and if I moved fast, he wouldn’t find me this time. I’d be miles away before he even realized I was gone. Thinking of it, my breath went short, but the idea that Bear could make it all the way to New York with me was a little kid’s fantasy. He had survived on his own in a desert before he came across me and could do it again. The fact that he had found this oasis proved that.

I stroked his back and he shifted in his sleep. “Maybe you’ll find somebody better.”

I drew my hand away and stood over him, fixing my eyes on the eastern horizon. Out beyond Salt Lake City, beyond deserts and mountains, Ithaca lay waiting.

But before I could move, my thoughts drifted back to Grey, the memory of him like the edge of a bruise. I saw him standing on the side of the road, then flinched when I heard the clap of the shot. Why had he done it? That was the question that clung to me. He could have saved himself so easily. A single word and he would have been the one headed home instead of me. Instead he chose to die for someone he barely knew. Why? I didn’t think I’d ever understand, but the fact of it was there, stark as the desert around me.

I looked down at Bear, suddenly seeing him as clearly in the future as I saw Grey in the past. Hours from now he would shake off sleep to find himself alone, wondering why I had abandoned him when he had never abandoned me. And where would I be then? Across the border and safe in Wyoming? Would Bear’s memory sting as keenly as the memory of Grey?

I knelt down beside Bear and gently nudged him awake. His eyes opened with a great yawn and he batted at me with his paw. I placed my hand on his side and looked west.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

13

We staggered into Bride Creek just after sundown five days later, half starved and aching from the road. The town itself was nothing but a few weathered buildings set back from a road that wound up into the hills. Still, it felt like there were a thousand eyes on us, watching every step. I kept us off the road, creeping through a drainage ditch, freezing at every sound.

The post office was a white box at the end of a dirt road. A gravel driveway led away from it to a ranch house not much bigger than the office. Its windows were dark and a gate hung open in front of it, turning lazily with a squeak that seemed massive out in the emptiness.

I wanted to go up and start pounding on the door, but we had to be careful. Knock on the wrong door at the wrong time and we were through.

There was a field of knee-high brush on the other side of the road from the house. I patted Bear’s side and he followed, head low from exhaustion, limping on his right paw.

Bear crept off into the brush to hunt while I struggled to stay awake and watch the house. Every joint in my body felt like it was filled with rust. I pulled a handful of sandy grass from my jacket pocket and chewed on it. It was gritty and bitter, but days of constant hunger helped me force it down.

For the last five days, Bear and I had rested through the heat of the day and walked at night. Two nights through the desert. Two nights more along a razor-straight and abandoned rail line. We spent the final night climbing a single-lane road into the mountains. When Bear managed to find more pockets of marshy water, we drank all we could and then devoured reeds and grasses and tiny translucent things that scuttled through the muck. At first my stomach growled incessantly, but eventually that muted to an empty gnawing.

I walked in a kind of mindless trudge, memories and old songs floating through my head, there and then gone again. It was as if some long-buried clockwork forced my legs to keep pumping. Whenever I felt certain I was about to fall, I would reach out for Bear, holding him close until some bit of resolve passed between us and we would set off again. In the last miles, I kept Ithaca at the front of my mind every second, like a lantern I was striving to grasp. How Bear kept going and where he found the strength in that tiny half-starved body, I’ll never know.

I was about to nod off when a pair of headlights appeared up the road. A small pickup truck emerged from the dark and turned into the driveway. It was covered in dents and rusty bruises. POSTAL SERVICE was clearly emblazoned down one side.

The lights winked out and there was a squeak of hinges. A tall man with shaggy hair emerged. He stuffed his keys into his jeans pocket, then reached into the back of the truck for a pair of turkeys and what looked like a 20 gauge shotgun. He hung the shotgun from his shoulder and then made his way across the yard and to the house, game in hand. Once inside, lantern light illuminated the thin white curtains. The man’s silhouette moved back and forth in a front room.

Bear returned with a field mouse in his teeth and settled down to eat it. He paid me no mind as I moved out of the grass and into a ditch, watching for any movement on the road.

A light came on at the side of the house. I dropped low and circled the house until I stood alongside it and peeked in. The man was sitting at a table in a small candlelit kitchen, looking down at a yellow mug. His face was deeply lined and thin, framed in long gray hair and a scraggly beard. He spooned some sugar into his mug, then stirred and sipped. In the center of the table was a plain-looking cake dusted with sugar and cinnamon. My stomach growled, urging me to the front door, but I stopped when a girl appeared in the hallway.

She was maybe ten years old with curly auburn hair, wearing a blue top with red swallows embroidered at the neck. She wiped the sleep out of her eyes, and the man snatched her up under her arms and lifted her into the air. Even through the closed window I could hear the trill of her laugh. He pulled her close and nuzzled her neck, eliciting even more laughs, and then dropped her down into a chair at the table.

I watched as he cut her a piece of the cake and pulled a jar of milk out of an icebox. When she was done with her cake, the man had her clean up the dishes. Then he poured himself another cup of coffee, blew out the candles, and together they vanished into another room.

Bear pushed his snout into my shoulder when I returned to our hiding place but I elbowed him away. I stared at the house, trying to tell myself that the girl didn’t matter, that I could still march up to Wade’s door and demand a ride to the border. But even as the thought formed, I knew I couldn’t do it. Grey said he hadn’t heard from Wade in years and it was clear why — choosing to risk his own life for people like me was one thing, but risking hers would have been unthinkable. If the Path found out that Wade had helped me, they would kill him for sure. But what would happen to her? Would she be made a companion? Something worse?

I looked for an alternative as the lights in the house winked out one by one. Once they were gone, the white body of the old pickup truck glowed faintly in the moonlight.

Something snapped into place. Maybe I didn’t need Wade at all.

I slipped back across the road, avoiding the driveway for the soft grass in the yard. My heart beat in my throat as I stood on their front porch and reached for the doorknob, hoping that, like any good Path citizen, Wade saw no need to lock his door. There was a soft click and I eased it open an inch at a time. The inside of the house was lit in dim shades of gray moonlight. I stood in the doorway until my eyes adjusted and then I crept inside.

I moved down the hall, muscles tight as iron, stepping carefully so none of the wood slats in the floor would send up an alarm. There were two bedroom doors, but which was Wade’s and which was the girl’s? I took a guess and pushed one open. Inside, a cool night wind streamed in through gauzy curtains to where the girl lay on her side beneath the sheets. A rustic-looking desk sat under the window, covered with papers, pencils, and books. A stuffed bear sat in the corner. The girl turned over, sending a jolt through me, though she didn’t wake.

I drew her door closed behind me and kept going. The last door opened onto a larger bedroom where Wade slept beneath an ornate gun rack. There was a hunting rifle, but I didn’t see the 20 gauge.

My heart was thrumming in my ears as I searched the room. His nightstand was empty except for a lamp and a book. The dresser top was barren. My nerves buzzed. How long had I been in the house now? Ten minutes? An hour? Either seemed possible and either was too long. I was pushing my luck. Bear and I had made it this far on our own; maybe…

But then I saw it. Just below the open window was a pile of discarded clothes. Boots, a shirt, a pair of jeans. I checked that Wade was still asleep and then I made my way across the room. When I lifted the jeans, there was a faint metallic clink and I knew I had found what I was looking for. I slid my hand into the front pocket, and Wade’s truck keys spilled into my hand.

“Stand up and raise your hands.”

My world collapsed to a single dark point. I stood slowly, the keys dangling from my hand. Wade sat up in bed, the 20 gauge steadied on one knee, pointed straight at my chest.

“Grey Solomon sent me,” I managed to say, my voice trembling.

“Don’t know anyone named Grey.”

“I’m not Path.”

Wade kept the shotgun trained on my chest as he went to the window. He turned from me just long enough to draw the curtains back and scan the grounds outside.

“He told me you used to help people like me,” I said. “But I didn’t want to get you and your girl involved.”

“So you figured you’d just steal my truck.”

“I was going to get myself to the Wyoming border and then leave it somewhere it would be found easy.”

Wade closed the curtains and returned to the bed. I took a step forward, but stopped when the barrel of the shotgun rose again.

“So you’re a capture, then.”

I nodded.

“Where from?”

“Cormorant. In Arizona.”

“And Grey Solomon brought you here.”

“Most of the way. There was a roadblock and I bailed out.”

“Grey doing okay these days?”

I flinched and tried to hide it. “He’s fine,” I said, my voice husky. “He sends his regards.”

Wade studied the wrinkles on the bedsheets in front of him. Close up he looked hawkish and severe, with a sharp nose and piercing eyes. His gray hair hung in untidy waves around his head.

“Got any supplies on you?” he asked. “Food? Water?”

“No, sir.”

Wade looked me up and down, then sighed deeply and slid out of the bed.

“Well, come on. Guess you can add stealing a pack and some food to your story if you get nabbed.”

Wade dressed in the dark before leading me out quietly past his daughter’s room. He lit an oil lamp in the entryway and carried it to a door at the edge of the kitchen. Wade nudged it open, revealing a rickety flight of stairs that led down to a dirt-floor basement. It was lined with steel shelves full of supplies.

“Have at it,” he said, standing at the doorway. “But I hope you like Spam.”

I hurried down the stairs, eager to be on my way and out of Wade’s life as soon as possible. I was halfway to the floor when I heard the basement door slam behind me.

I turned back and found Wade looming at the top of the stairs, his back to the door, his shotgun aimed at my head.

“On your knees,” he said. “Do it.”

I rushed him, hoping to catch him off balance and make it through the door, but days on the road made me too slow. Wade grabbed a fistful of my jacket and threw me down the stairs. I hit the dirt with a shock and my vision grayed out. I could feel myself slipping away, but I thought of Bear out there alone and I reached up and grabbed hold of the nearest stair, feeling myself sink even as I climbed. Wade’s boot pressed into my back, pinning me to the floor.

“Please…” I said in a thready mumble. “I was just trying to…”

There was a rattle of chains and I felt a steel cuff locking onto my ankle. Wade pulled me off the steps, then dropped down by my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Some Path folk I know will be stopping by tomorrow. Gonna have to turn you over to them, son.”

“No,” I said. “You can let me go. I won’t say anything. I swear. They’ll never know I was here.”

“Sorry, son,” Wade said as he climbed the stairs. “I’ll leave you a lantern to see, and you’ve got enough slack to get to the food and water on those shelves. Looks like you could use both.”

“They’ll kill me.”

Wade stopped. He gripped the barrel of the shotgun and stared at his feet, his back to me.

“I’ll put in as good a word for you as I can,” he said in a near whisper. “They’re fair people. They’ll listen.”

Wade moved a single lantern onto the top step and then started out the door. The sound of Bear’s barking came from somewhere outside.

“Wade. Wait!”

He closed the door and threw the lock home. I made another stab at getting up, but I was too weak. The chain tangled my feet and I went down again. A door upstairs opened and closed shut again. Bear’s barking became louder and more hysterical — then there was a yelp and he went silent. I scrambled to my feet.

“Bear!”

Seconds later the basement door flew open and Wade dragged Bear down by his collar. He said nothing, just dropped Bear in front of me and then went back up the stairs, locking the door behind him.

I pulled against the chain until I could reach Bear. He was lying on the bottom step, looking up at me with a dazed expression. I pulled him into my lap, forcing him to stay still while I ran my hands over his body. My heart raced, but there was nothing. No blood. No broken bones. I let him go and he squirmed out of my lap to explore the basement.

I stared at the door, trying to control the rage building up inside me. I jerked hard on the chain around my ankle, but the other end was padlocked to one of the steel shelves. My head swam from the exertion. I breathed deep and slow until it cleared and then I made myself search the rest of the room for anything I could use. Nothing. Dirt floor. Concrete walls. No tools. No windows. Only one door and a lantern that I couldn’t reach.

I fell back into the dirt, staring at the door. It seemed impossible that we could have come so far for this. End of the line. I heaved at the chain in frustration and hissed in pain as the steel cuff bit into my ankle.

Bear barked behind me and I turned. His front paws were up on the shelves, scrabbling at the stacks of food that sat there. Crackers, beans, tuna, cases of water. Trapped or not, we were both still starving. I grabbed anything with a pull-top lid and tossed it into a pile on the floor. We ate four cans of tuna between us, along with handfuls of saltines. I filled the empty cans with water and let Bear drink.

There was a rattle as the lock at the top of the stairs was thrown. I sat there, struggling for some kind of plan but feeling myself crumple under my own bone-deep weariness. I reached for one of the bottles of water and my hand brushed an aluminum lid. I hissed and yanked it back. A thin trickle of blood ran down one finger and into my palm. I held the lid up into the light and ran my thumb along its keen edge.

Footsteps thudded above us. Bear growled and the short hairs at his back and neck raised. I slipped the sharp bit of metal under my leg and waited. The door creaked open. I expected to see Wade, shotgun in hand, but instead it was the girl.

She stood in the doorway, barefoot in pink-and-gray pajamas. She lingered there, her hand on the doorknob, looking down at us. Bear whined, but I stilled him with a hand on his back and drew him toward me. She took the lantern and closed the door just enough so that only a sliver of light escaped.

“I heard your dog barking,” she said. “My name’s Ellie.” She descended another stair and stopped. “Can I… ?”

Bear made a breathy sound of anticipation as her foot hit the dirt floor. He stretched forward onto his belly, ears at attention, back end shaking. I kept my eye on the door as she approached, that infinitesimal streak of black. Freedom.

My hand dropped down by my leg, my fingertips resting on the jagged piece of metal. Ellie knelt in front of Bear, just out of my reach.

“Is he friendly?”

I drew my finger along the metal lip of the can. “Yes.”

Ellie edged forward, but Bear was faster. He belly-crawled over to her and buried his head in her lap, sniffing at her until she giggled and fell back onto the bottom stair, delighted. Ellie rubbed at his head and his ears and scratched his muzzle when he forced it into her hand. Bear flipped over onto his back and kicked at the air, with his tongue hanging out. As I watched them play, something sank inside me. My hand fell from the can’s lid. This girl wouldn’t be my ticket out.

“What’s his name?”

“Bear,” I said.

“Does he do tricks?”

I took a cracker out of a nearby package and held it over Bear’s head. He popped up onto his back legs and pawed at the air. Ellie laughed and clapped and I dropped the cracker into Bear’s mouth. When he was done, he shoved his face into Ellie’s lap, searching for more.

“He can catch a stick if you throw it to him.”

Ellie looked up. “Really?”

I frowned, studying the walls of the dank basement. “Course there’s not really enough room in here to show you. If—”

“I can’t unlock you,” she said. “Sorry.”

Ellie went back to wrestling with Bear, and whatever strength I had left me. Every pointless mile Bear and I had walked stung.

“Why does he have you locked up anyway?” she asked. “Are you running from the soldiers too?”

I nodded slowly.

“I’m supposed to hide down here when they come,” she said casually as she petted Bear. “So they don’t see me.”

“Why doesn’t your dad want the soldiers to see you?”

Bear huffed as Ellie stroked his side. “Wade’s not my dad,” she said.

“No? Who is?”

Ellie looked back to the door, suddenly wary. “Maybe I should—”

“Do you want to give Bear a cracker?”

I held the box out toward her. Ellie’s eyes locked on it but she hesitated. It wasn’t until Bear yipped and clawed at the box that she grabbed it out of my hand. I inched closer as she fed a cracker to Bear in pieces, a look of intense concentration on her face.

“How about your mom?” I asked, trying a different tack. “Where is she?”

“Mom got sick when I was little,” she said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I only remember her a little bit.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my mom too.”

Ellie glanced over at me as Bear ate out of her hand. I checked the door and moved a little closer. Ellie finished feeding Bear. He lay at her feet, staring up at her as she stroked his head. Bits and pieces clicked together in my head. I decided to take a leap.

“I was taken away from my mom and dad by the soldiers when I was around your age,” I said. “I was trying to get home again, but Wade is going to give me back to them. To the soldiers.”

“I told you. I can’t—”

“I know,” I said. “I just thought that, after they take me, they’ll probably bring me to a base nearby, right? Maybe I can try to find your dad for you.”

Her hand went still on Bear’s side.

“Your real dad’s a soldier,” I said. “Isn’t he?”

Ellie said nothing.

“What’s his name?” I asked. “Do you know?”

She nodded, eyes still locked on Bear. “Wade doesn’t think I do. But I heard my mom say it once.”

“Maybe if you tell me, then I can find him for you. He’d probably like to know you’re doing okay. ”

“I’m not supposed to talk about him.”

“Why not?”

Ellie took one of Bear’s front paws, but he snapped it away and then they wrestled back and forth for it. They played for a while, until Bear’s lids went heavy and he fell asleep sprawled out in front of her.

She stroked him as he slept and slowly began to talk.

The basement door opened again early the next morning.

This time Wade was there, towering in the door frame with a rising sun behind him and the shotgun by his side. Bear growled as Wade came heavily down the stairs, but I held him back. Wade took a seat on the bottom step, the shotgun across his knees. His eyes were dark and lidded, like he hadn’t slept.

“Anything you want before they come?” he asked. “Any message you want me to get to your folks or anything?”

I shook my head, and Wade started to go.

“What are you doing this for?” I asked. “Money?”

Wade stopped where he was, his back half to me. He looked up into the house and shook his head.

“Then what?”

“Goodwill,” he said. There was gravel in his voice along with a hint of what sounded like real regret. “These days you need just about all you can get. I don’t mean you any… Things just are what they are. Like I said, I’ll vouch for you as best I can. Tell ’em you were repentant. Whatever. I just thought, I don’t know, maybe we could get some kind of story together before they come. Ease your way a bit.”

“Will they take me to Salt Lake City?”

“I suspect they will. Yeah.”

“Camp Eagle?”

Wade raised an eyebrow. “Why? You know folks there? Could help if you do.”

“Don’t know anyone,” I said. “But there’s someone I’m looking forward to meeting.”

“Who?”

“Jeff Sinclair.” Wade didn’t move an inch. The old walls of the house settled around us, ticking like a clock.

“He’s a colonel there,” I said. “Or was. Maybe he’s higher up now.”

“Don’t know the man.”

“Really? I’d think you would, since you’ve been hiding his daughter from him for the last five years.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Ellie’s mom was a woman named Larissa Kenning,” I said, sick of playing games. “She was a companion at Camp Eagle. From what Ellie said, I’m guessing Colonel Sinclair took a liking to her. Want to hear what else I’m guessing?”

Wade said nothing.

“I’m guessing she got pregnant, which isn’t exactly something that can happen to a companion of the Path, especially if it’s by an officer. If Sinclair found out about it, he would have had the problem taken care of, so I’m guesing that Larissa ran. Eventually she found her way here to you, but she died not long after — Ellie didn’t really know how, just said she was sick.”

“Cancer,” Wade said in that raw voice. “Hit her when Ellie was five.”

“And you’ve been taking care of her since then,” I said. “That’s why you have to turn in people like me, isn’t it? Got to look like the perfect citizen.”

Wade had gone dead pale, his hand limp on the stair rail.

“Sinclair even know she exists?”

Wade shook his head. I stood up in the middle of the basement.

“Then this should be easy for you,” I said. “A one-way trip to the Wyoming border guarantees he never will.”

Wade looked at me for the first time since I’d mentioned Sinclair’s name, staring a fire across the basement.

“Doesn’t matter to you that she’d end up a companion just like her mom?”

“Like you said, things are what they are.”

Behind Wade, the crack of sunlight had grown brighter along the edge of the door.

“We don’t have much time.”

“No,” Wade said. “I guess we don’t.”

Wade climbed to the top of the stairs and shut the door with a dull clap. All the air seemed to vanish from the room. Bear began to growl.

“Wade…”

I stumbled backward as he came down the stairs, shotgun in hand.

“You don’t want to do this,” I said, my heart racing and my hands up, trying to ward off the shotgun that was now rising toward my chest. “I’m just asking you to help me like you helped people before. Like you helped Ellie.”

Wade jammed the barrel into my chest and pushed me down to my knees.

“And then what do I do?” he asked. “Sit around waiting for the day you need to trade Ellie’s name for something else?”

“I won’t. Wade, listen to me—”

“Get up,” he said. “Turn and face the wall.”

“How will you explain it to her, Wade? She knows I’m here. You think she wants to grow up with a murderer?”

“She won’t know a damn—”

“What are you doing?!”

Ellie was standing in the open door at the top of the stairs. When Wade turned, I eased back to the steel shelf I was chained to. Bear ran to join me, cowering at my feet.

“Go to your room, Ellie.”

“No!”

I began to draw the slack chain toward me, gathering it into a heavy loop.

“He’s just trying to get home,” she cried as she came down the basement stairs.

“He’s a liar, Ellie! Now get upstairs.”

“I won’t!”

“Then I’ll drag you up there myself.”

I swung the length of chain the second Wade started to move, knocking the shotgun to the floor. Wade scrambled for it, but I grabbed it first. I jumped back, training it on him, balancing the barrel across my cast.

“Unlock me,” I said. “And then I’ll—”

The blast of a car horn sounded outside. No one in the basement moved. The horn went again, followed by two car doors opening and slamming shut. Boots crunched across the gravel. Wade swallowed hard, his face a sheen of sweat. The Path officers called Wade’s name and banged on the front door.

“Tell them you came downstairs to check on me,” I said. “But when you got here, I was gone.”

“They’ll search the house,” Wade said.

“Mr. Wade!” a voice called.

“Keep them talking out front. I’ll go out back until they’re gone. Once they are, you get us to Wyoming and we’re done.”

“I’ll give you the keys to the truck,” he said. “You can go your—”

I dug the shotgun’s barrel into Wade’s chest.

“You will drive me yourself. And if we’re caught, I talk.”

The soldiers pounded on the door, harder now. Wade nodded and I backed off.

“Go.”

Wade moved toward the stairs, stopping to take Ellie’s arm.

“She stays with me until it’s done,” I said. “Give her the key to the padlock and leave.”

Wade swallowed his protest and handed her the keys. The soldiers knocked again and Wade was gone, up the stairs and out the basement door. Seconds later I heard the front door open and Wade’s voice greeting the soldiers.

I lowered the shotgun and waved Ellie over. She kneeled down beside me to undo the lock on my ankle. Bear stayed away, deep in a corner, watching her. The lock popped and the chain fell from my ankle.

“Would you really have told?”

Ellie looked up at me wide-eyed. She cringed when I grabbed her by the arm and pushed her toward the stairs.

“Let’s not find out.”

I waited until dark and then led Wade into the driveway at gunpoint. The night was still, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes watching us from behind every tree and blade of grass.

Wade threw one of his packs into the bed of the truck. When he was done, I waved him over to the driver’s-side door. He stood there, keys in hand, staring up at the dark house.

“Move.”

Wade pulled the door open and slid into the driver’s seat. I slammed it shut, then helped Bear up on the other side. Wade’s hands were limp on the steering wheel, his big frame sunken.

Bear gave an anxious woof at a squeak of hinges across the yard. I looked up to find Ellie in the light of the half-open door. She was barefoot in jeans, her arms crossed over a red sweater. The house was bright and warm behind her.

“Start the truck,” I said.

Wade nodded feebly, then threw his shoulder forward. The key turned and the truck grumbled to life. He looked up at Ellie one last time. The way he looked at her, it was like he was trying to will every bit of himself out across the yard and by her side. Without thinking, I pulled Bear down and held him close, his back against my leg. Wade grabbed the gearshift and started to pull.

“Wait.”

Wade turned to me. My stomach churned as I looked up at Ellie. Wade started to say something, but I stopped him before he could.

“Give me till morning,” I said. “Then report the truck stolen. I’ll leave it near the border. Somewhere easy to see.”

“I don’t under—”

“Just tell me how to get to the border.”

Wade gave patient directions, which highway to take and when to leave it for a few off-the-map dirt roads that avoided checkpoints. When he was done, I told him to go, but he didn’t move. He sat there in the driver’s seat, looking out the windshield.

“What happens if they stop you?”

“If I find out you had anything to do with it, I start talking. If not… then it’s on me.”

“Listen, son, I wish things were—”

“The longer we sit here talking, the better the chance someone sees us.”

Wade put his shoulder to the door and stepped onto the gravel. Ellie came farther out onto the porch, backlit in the lantern light from inside. I could see her trembling.

“It scares me sometimes,” Wade said. “The things I’d do to keep her safe. Maybe one day you’ll understand.”

Wade shut the door, and the driveway crackled under his boots as he rejoined Ellie on the porch. She was crying when he put his arm around her and led her back inside. The door closed behind them.

I moved Bear into my lap and slid in behind the wheel, leaving the shotgun on the passenger seat. The gearshift clicked into reverse and I backed slowly out of the driveway and onto the road.

I sat there, engine idling, looking back at the house. It was like an island glowing in the dark. I let go of the steering wheel and drew Bear up to my chest, hugging him tight with my eyes closed. He draped his head over my shoulder, breathing in short puffs that warmed my back. In that moment, the boundary between us felt as thin as a wisp of smoke.

14

We stole through winding back roads, watchful, headlights out wherever we could, following Wade’s instructions to the letter. A few times we saw Path vehicles, but we managed to pull off and go quiet in the dark. Every muscle in my body hummed, tight as steel, until they passed us.

We drove until just before dawn, when exhaustion forced me to find a place to pull off the road and hide the truck. We ate as much of Wade’s food as we could and then slept through the day. Bear snored with his head in the palm of my hand, heavy and warm. When night fell, we set out again.

An hour into the second leg of our trip, we came around a turn in the road, and I could see a line of lights miles out on the roadway. A checkpoint. This was it. Wyoming lay on the other side. I put the truck in reverse and hid it behind the bend in the road. Bear looked up at me when I cut the engine.

“We’ll have to go on foot again if we want to cross. You up for it?”

Bear curled around and began to chew at his paw. I tried to take a look but he snatched away with a throaty growl. I looked out the window, imagining the hard miles lying out there in the dark.

“As soon as we’re across the border, we’ll find a place to lay up for a while,” I said, rubbing his ears. “Okay? And once we’re home, it’s feather beds and steak dinners. I promise.”

Bear stood up and stretched, which I decided to take as an okay. I opened the door slow, sure a rusted hinge would be as good as a thunderclap out here in the middle of nowhere. Bear clambered out, his metal tags tinkling when he hit the ground. I knelt down beside him.

“Better do something about that too, I guess.”

I undid his collar and stuffed it in my pocket. Free of it, Bear shook himself out vigorously, then sniffed his way across the road. I collected the bag Wade had packed for us, then stopped and looked back in the cab. Wade’s shotgun lay on the seat, black as a snake. I didn’t know what was coming, but I could still feel the kick of Quarles’s revolver. I hated the hot violence of the thing. I shut the door and left it behind.

I led us about a mile north of the roadway and then turned east, moving as fast as I could while staying low and quiet. Bear moved along beside me, his dark coat making him nearly invisible. As soon as we were within sight of the checkpoint, I hit the ground, and Bear followed suit. The blockade consisted of two Humvees on each side of the road. I belly-crawled to get a better look.

There were two soldiers currently outside manning the gate, one facing out to Fed territory, the other watching the Path side. I was pretty sure there were more soldiers than the ones I was seeing, probably doing patrols out on either side of their position. The only thing to do was get as far from the roadway as possible and cross where the land went rocky and uneven.

I crawled to Bear and together we headed north. Once we were a couple miles from the road, I stopped and listened. Not a sound. I turned east, heading toward the border. A half mile or less and we’d be in Fed land. Not home free, but a good sight closer. I felt a racing excitement build in my chest. No more Path, no more running, no more—

Footsteps sounded in the dark.

Bear turned toward them but I pulled him to the ground and clamped a hand over his muzzle. The footsteps grew louder until I saw the faint outline of a sentry making his way down the line toward the roadway. He was about thirty feet from us and closing fast. If we kept still, I thought there was a good chance he’d walk right by.

The sentry moved to within twenty feet of us, then ten. Then five. I could hear his breathing and the crunch of his boots on the sand. Bear struggled in my arms. I cursed myself for removing his collar. I tried to hold him down but with only one good hand I couldn’t stop him as he wriggled himself free and shot away.

The guard reacted immediately, lifting his weapon and turning in our direction. I wanted to scream at Bear to stop, but a single word from me and we’d both be dead.

“Who’s there?”

The sentry barely got the words out before Bear leapt up at him, panting and wagging his tail.

“Hey, fella, what are you doing out here?”

And just like that, the guard was down on one knee, with Bear jumping all over him. I dropped my head into the dirt.

“Anybody else out here with you?”

It would be only seconds before the sentry stopped being distracted by Bear and started searching. The guard post was out of sight, two or more miles away. A low hill stood between us and them.

“Yeah,” I said, easing up off the ground with my hands up. “I’m with him.”

The guard pushed Bear away and snapped his rifle up in my direction.

“Whoa!” I said, keeping my voice down as much as I could. “Wait a second. No harm here. Just me. I’m unarmed.”

“On your knees,” he ordered.

I did as I was told, careful to keep my hands up where he could see them. Bear left the sentry’s side and bounded over to me, looking up at me with a panting grin like he couldn’t believe his luck finding us a new playmate. I swore that if we lived through this, the first thing I was doing was buying him a leash.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Camping,” I said. “Me and my dad, we’re back that way a few miles. Bear here ran off and I was just looking for him.”

“Ain’t a very smart place to be camping, kid.”

“I know,” I said, forcing a nervous laugh. “Me and Dad, we were never outdoorsy or anything. But Hill says men of the Path should be resourceful and self-sufficient in all weathers and landscapes. We’re trying to do our part. Didn’t mean to cause any problems. Honest.”

The soldier tipped the barrel of his weapon up. “Okay, hands behind your back.”

“But I said—”

“I don’t care what you said. We’ve got reports of an escapee traveling with a dog.”

“Escapee? No, I told you I’m just—”

The sentry placed the cold O of his weapon’s barrel squarely on my forehead. Bear growled, low and deadly sounding.

“Hands behind your back,” he repeated. “And if the dog jumps, he’s getting one in the chest.”

“Okay. Okay.” I slowly lowered my hands, pausing only to draw one down Bear’s back. “Shhh. It’s okay. We’re fine. Okay?”

Bear glanced at me and then the sentry. His growl eased.

“We’re all fine.”

I put my hands behind my back as the guard slid around me. He pulled out a zip tie and I winced as he bound my right wrist tight to my cast. Once he was done, the sentry reached for his radio. This was it. If he called us in, we were as good as dead. I slipped one foot underneath me, ready to push off, but the sentry stood motionless in front of me, his hand on the mic, poised to key the transmitter. What was he doing?

The sentry dropped the radio and then sank to his knees, his arms raised over his head. A dark figure appeared behind him, a rifle in his hands, the barrel pressed into the back of the sentry’s skull.

“Let’s take it easy,” the sentry said. “I’ve got backup just down the line. Way more than you can handle, so just—”

Before he could finish, the man smashed his rifle’s stock into the back of the sentry’s head, just under his helmet. The sentry collapsed in front of me, and Bear barked wildly as four more soldiers appeared out of the darkness.

“Mark, shut that dog up,” someone whispered. “Now.”

The one with the rifle advanced on Bear and I threw myself at him, slamming my chest into his side and knocking him face-first to the ground. His knife shot away into the dark and then Bear was after him, snarling.

A gun barrel dug into my temple. “Call him off. Now.”

“Bear, get back.”

Bear turned, his lips revealing a row of sharp teeth.

“It’s okay,” I said, and nodded him away. Bear looked up at the soldiers beside me and backed off with a growl.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

It was a woman’s voice. No. Not a woman. A girl. Were these Fed soldiers?

“I… I’m camping,” I said. “With my father. Whatever you’re doing is none of my business. Just cut me loose and let me go. You’ll never see me again.”

The collapsed soldier’s radio squawked and a voice emerged, full of static. “Wolf Three, this is Den. We heard something up your way. Confirm contact. Over.”

There was a pause and then the barrel fell away from my temple, allowing me to turn and see my captors. There were four of them, but they weren’t soldiers. It was three boys and a girl. All about my age. The girl carried a sawed-off shotgun. All the boys were looking to her as the radio sounded again.

“Wolf Three, this is Den. Confirm contact. Over.”

“I know what to say,” I said. “Cut me loose and I’ll talk to them.”

The girl looked down at me, uncertain.

“If someone doesn’t answer, they’re coming here in force and we’re all dead.”

She glanced to the boy with the rifle and he took the radio off the soldier’s belt and held it up to my mouth.

“Cut me loose or I say nothing.”

The girl’s glare didn’t waver and neither did mine.

“Wolf Three, this is Den. We are in motion. Over.”

There was the distant sound of engines coming to life down the line, and the girl nodded at one of her friends, who disappeared behind me. When the zip tie binding my hands popped, I grabbed for the radio, but her friend held it back.

“Say the wrong thing,” the girl said as she leveled her shotgun at Bear’s head. “And you watch the dog go down before you do.”

I snatched the radio away from him. “Den, this is Wolf Three,” I said, deepening my voice and hoping the connection was bad enough to make it indistinguishable from their comrade’s. “I am alpha charlie. Repeat. Alpha charlie. Came across a stray dog, but the mutt ran off. All is on Path now. No need for assistance. Over.”

There was a deadly pause when we all held our breath. The engine-revving sound stopped.

“Wolf Three, this is Den. Understood.”

I dropped the radio in the dirt and fell to my hands and knees, panting, my heart thrumming in my ears.

“Okay, people,” the girl with the shotgun said. “The plan hasn’t changed. Take him and the dog and move.”

“You don’t need me,” I said. “I called them off. Let me—”

The shotgun rose to my forehead. “You go where I say you go. Now call the dog to you and move.”

Bear and I were pushed deeper into the Path side of the border until we came to a trench that had been dug into the sand. We dropped behind it. Bear stayed close to me, the tension in the air having cured his natural friendliness.

“Carlos,” the girl in charge said. The boy named Carlos slung his weapon and disappeared into the night.

None of them were in uniform, just ragged-looking hiking gear and scavenged weapons. The girl was an inch or so taller than me, with a square jaw and arms that were covered in rangy cords of muscle.

“Look,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing, you don’t need me to—”

“I don’t know you,” the girl said. “So if you think I’m going to let you and your mutt wander around in the middle of my operation, you’re crazy. If you’re good, we let you go when we’re done. It’s either that or you take a short walk out into the desert with Hector here.”

Hector was tall with a shaved head and massive shoulders. He stood behind her, grinning, one hand balanced on a hunting knife that hung from his belt. I let my head fall against the berm behind me, cursing under my breath. The girl reached her hand back and one of the boys handed her a pair of binoculars. She lifted them and looked out toward the road.

“Hitting the checkpoint is useless,” I said. “They’ll just have a new crew here by the morning.”

The girl said nothing, continuing her scan. I turned onto my stomach and looked over the berm. The lights of the checkpoint were about a mile to our east. The road cut across the desert right in front of us.

“Something else is coming, isn’t it?”

Her eyes flicked over to me and I knew I was right.

“A supply truck?”

“Look, just keep quiet, and when we’re done you’re free to go, okay?”

I scanned the landscape again, counting off soldiers and vehicles. A plan started to form. “That promise isn’t going to do me much good when you’re all dead.”

She dropped the binoculars to glare at me. “You remember that short walk I mentioned?”

I scooted closer to her through the dirt. “I’m guessing from the way you’re set up, you figure on sending these guys to flanking positions on either side of the checkpoint and then hitting them all at once when the supply truck is stopped. With that plan, you’ll last about two minutes.”

“We have the element of surprise.”

“Which is what will buy you the two minutes. I’ve been living with a Path special forces unit for six years. Trust me. You can’t take them all on at once; that’s what they expect you to do.”

Carlos reappeared and crouched on the other side of her. “Target’s five miles out, Nat.”

Nat nodded and he melted into the dark. She examined the terrain a moment, gnawing on her bottom lip, and then turned to me.

“And so what don’t they expect?”

I locked eyes with her. “If I help, you take me with you back to Fed territory and then help me get transport east.”

“You’re not in a great position to make a deal.”

“Fine, stick to your plan. I’ll wait here while you all get killed.”

“Nat,” Carlos said. “Time to move.”

Nat’s eyes narrowed on me, sharp as spikes. “Deal. Now tell me your idea.”

Nat listened, and once I was done, she waved everyone in. The three heavily armed boys gathered around her.

“We all know how important this is,” she said, speaking slow and calm and looking her men in the eye just like I had seen Path commanders do before an operation. “Our friends are counting on us, but we gotta remember that this isn’t hero time. This is working-together-and-doing-our-job time.”

Each boy nodded solemnly.

“Now,” she continued, glancing over at me. “We’ve got a little change in plan….”

Minutes later I was kneeling in the middle of the highway with Bear at my side and Nat’s prone body lying in front of us. I had pulled Wade’s truck nose down in a ditch around the bend in the highway, out of sight of the checkpoint. We were lit in the yellow blinking hazard lights.

“You ready?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Nat said. “I’m suddenly wishing I had taken drama class instead of metal shop. You sure this is going to work?”

I shrugged. “They say no plan—”

“— survives contact with the enemy. Yeah, I’ve heard that one too.”

Nat peered down the road, then tucked a length of hair behind her ear.

“So you were really living with Path special forces? And now you’re a runner?”

“Name’s Cal,” I said. “The dog’s Bear.”

“You named your dog Bear?”

“Yeah, he—”

Two lights appeared in the western dark. Nat sucked in a breath and held it. I leaned over her, my hands on her arms, my face close to hers. Her eyes were closed. Bear whined and I rubbed his head to calm him down.

The supply truck strained up a hill and then its lights were filling the roadway around us. I had the sick feeling of being a spider in a web. Part of me hoped they’d swerve around us and keep going.

“Almost here,” I whispered in Nat’s ear.

“Showtime.”

The truck was a three-axled monster with a boxy cab. There were two shadowy forms inside. There was no going back now, so all I could do was hope there wasn’t extra security hiding in the rear of the truck. When it was less than fifty feet out, I jumped up and started waving my arms over my head. Bear ran to my side, keeping up a steady stream of barking.

The truck didn’t slow. Thirty feet. Then twenty. What if they had been told to not stop for any reason? My heart pulsed, but then their air brakes squealed and they came to a halt just a few feet ahead of us. Engine rumbling. Headlights beating down at us. There was a pause and then the doors opened and boots hit the ground. Nat was right. It was showtime.

“Thank God!” I exclaimed. “Thank God you stopped. Please help us. I don’t know what’s wrong with her!”

Two soldiers rushed into the pool of light; one had a sleek MP5 rifle and the other was toting a black shotgun. As soon as he saw them, Bear ran up and began prancing around their feet and barking eagerly. For once his instincts were perfect. If he had been a bigger dog, they might have already been shooting, but the last thing the soldiers expected was his tiny whirling excitement. They looked from him to us and back again.

“Back,” one of the soldiers said. “Get back.”

“Bear! Come here! It’s okay. He’s harmless.”

Bear backed off with a yip but stayed between us and the soldiers, dancing around, his claws clicking on the asphalt.

“What are you doing here?”

“We were camping with our dad,” I said as Bear spun. “He said we had to get on Path, but we wanted to go home, so we took the truck, but then she just collapsed on the way back. I don’t know what happened. Please help us!”

“Take the dog and step back from the girl,” the soldier said. “Now!”

I took Bear by his shoulders and pulled him away. “Just help her. Please. Come on, Bear.”

The lead soldier slid his MP5 around behind him. “Keep an eye on the boy, Turner,” he said as he knelt by Nat’s body. Turner put the shotgun on me as his partner eased closer to Nat.

“I don’t know what it is,” I said. “She won’t wake up. She’s had seizures before. Maybe—”

Nat began to whisper, rolling her head back and forth. “I’m sorry… I don’t… the truck just… Dad…”

The lead soldier leaned in to hear her better and that’s when Nat started moving. One hand grabbed his wrist while the other swept Carlos’s handgun out from beneath her. The soldier jerked back, and Nat used the momentum to get both of them standing. She turned his arm behind him, then jammed the gun into his side. Turner pivoted to get a bead on her, but Nat swung her man’s body between them as a shield.

“Put it down or he’s dead!” she ordered. “Do it now!”

Turner hesitated and that was my chance. I sped in on his blind side and ripped the gun out of his hand.

“Okay,” the leader said, his hands up. “Let’s all just take it easy here. You gotta know this ain’t gonna happen, girl. There is an entire outpost right ahead of you. Taking our rig isn’t going to do you a bit of good.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Nat said, stripping his MP5 off over his head. “Now, on your bellies on the side of the road. Move.”

Nat got them down and I pulled out a handful of plastic zip cuffs I had taken off the first sentry. I bound their hands behind them and stepped away. Nat pressed her pistol into the leader’s skull, but I batted the weapon away before she could fire, earning me a deadly look.

“There’s no need,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Nat climbed up into the driver’s side while Bear and I took the passenger seat. She handed me the shotgun.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Get down, Bear.”

Once he was safely in the wheel well, I leaned out the window and fired three blasts into the sky. Boom. Boom. Boom. The shock of it sent a painful jolt through my wrist. Bear yelped at my feet, pushing himself farther into the darkness. Nat angled the MP5 out her window and peeled off a stream of fire. I grabbed the radio mic off the dash and keyed the channel open.

“Den, we are under attack. Repeat — we are under attack.”

I nodded to Nat and she put the truck in gear, accelerating around the corner and onto the straightaway.

One of the Path Humvees had abandoned the checkpoint and was racing toward us. I found myself wishing they’d stop and turn back, but it was too late. There was a flash from the side of the road as Hector fired his RPG. The smoke trail streaked toward the side of the vehicle, but at the last second the driver gunned the engine and swerved. The rocket slammed into the dirt on the other side of the road and went up in a cloud of fire and sand. The Humvee kept coming. The turret gunner was in his place, hands on his weapon.

“What do we do?”

“Keep going,” I said, trying to control the panic in my voice. “As far as they know, we’re on their side.”

Nat laid on the gas, but in the next second I was proved wrong. The gunner in the Humvee leaned into his turret and squeezed off a stream of fire from his .50 cal. The rounds ricocheted off the roadway, chiming against the hood and shattering a headlight. Nat’s side-view mirror exploded in a shower of glass and metal. She clapped a hand on her shoulder with a gasp but urged the truck faster.

The gunner let go another salvo. This time he walked his fire over to us, tearing up the roadway before a string of bullets tore into a corner of our engine block. There was a screech of twisting metal and then I braced myself as the truck went into a spin, pinwheeling down the highway until our back end smashed into the side of the Humvee. The mass of the truck sent the Humvee skidding off the road and we all came to a dead stop. There was broken glass everywhere, and smoke was pouring out of our truck’s ruined engine.

I ducked to check on Bear and found him cowering but unhurt. By the time I was back up, Nat was already diving out of the truck.

“Nat!”

I grabbed the shotgun and followed her. The Humvee was half on the road, half in a ditch. The gunner was slumped over his weapon, unconscious. Nat had her rifle up and was stalking toward the vehicle.

“What are you doing? Nat, let’s go!”

The driver’s-side door flew open and a soldier leapt out, his sidearm out and zeroing in on Nat. I lifted my shotgun, but before I could even get it leveled, Nat squeezed off three rounds. They hit the soldier in the chest and he crumpled onto the road.

There was a clatter as Nat’s rifle hit the asphalt. She stumbled backward and to the ground, her legs sprawled out in front of her. She had gone chalk pale, mouth open, her eyes fixed on the dead soldier bleeding out into the road. He was young. Nineteen or twenty with the broad features and blond hair of a farm boy.

An explosion down the road rocked the ground beneath us. The checkpoint was now engulfed in flames. Black figures circled it, spraying the remaining Humvee with gunfire.

“Nat,” I said, my voice shaking along with the rest of me. “We have to go. Someone must have gotten a com out in the middle of all of this. More will be on the way.”

Nat didn’t respond, didn’t move. She just stared at the boy. His eyes were glassy, lifeless. I dropped the shotgun and grabbed Nat, turning her toward me and shaking her hard by her shoulders.

“We have to move. Now!”

Nat pushed me away and rolled over onto her hands. Her back heaved and she vomited into the roadway. When she was done I helped her up and we went around the truck to get Bear. He jumped into my arms, shaking, and I held him tight.

“Come on,” I said to Nat. “We’ll meet up with the others and walk across the border.”

Nat was bent over her knees. She shook her head. “No, we need what’s in the truck.”

“Nat—”

“I’m not doing all of this for nothing!”

Down the road, Carlos and the others were already on their way back to us. The fire raged behind them, lighting up the sky for nearly a mile. Even if no one got a signal out, the Path was going to see the fire and send help. We didn’t have much time and certainly couldn’t afford to walk out.

“Start unloading,” I said. “Fast.”

I left Bear with Nat and ran into the dark toward Wade’s truck. When I got there, the hazards were still going, flashing yellow in the ditch. I got in and cranked the engine, but then it was like my brain locked down. I sat there, my hands on the wheel, the engine idling. My fingers were ice-cold. I kept seeing that dead soldier’s eyes, blank as a doll’s.

The world outside the truck was spinning madly, a flickering show of darkness and flames. I closed my eyes and breathed deep, but it did nothing. I bit down hard on the side of my lip, and the world snapped back into focus. I spit blood out onto the road and got moving.

By the time I got back, a fire had started in the supply truck’s engine. Flames overwhelmed the front of it, but Nat and the others had the cargo laid out on the road. Cardboard boxes and wooden crates were stacked four feet high. I brought Wade’s truck to a halt and they packed all they could into its bed.

“Move over,” Nat said. “I know the way.”

I shifted over to the passenger side. Nat let Bear in, then got behind the wheel. He was shaking badly, his tail between his legs. I pulled him close to me and he curled up, burying his face in my leg. Nat made sure Carlos and the others were in the bed and then drove away.

She slowed to navigate through the wreck at the checkpoint. Flames tore through the last remaining Humvee, putting off intense heat and billowing smoke. Its charred black skeleton was clearly visible inside, along with other dark shapes I made myself look away from. I tried to tell myself that the people inside were Path, that they would have killed us if they could have, but it didn’t seem to matter. My stomach roiled.

I turned to Nat to tell her we had to go but her eyes were blank and locked on the burning vehicle.

“Nat?”

I touched her shoulder and she snapped out of it with a gasp. Nat steered delicately around the wreck and then stepped hard on the gas, hurtling us down the highway as fast as she could.

No one said a word for the rest of the trip.

15

Nat pulled Wade’s truck into the parking lot of a sprawling building and slid out of the cab. I was frozen in my seat, astonished, staring at the banner by the front doors.

WAYLON HIGH SCHOOL. HOME OF THE WYOMING WILDCATS.

“We did it, I whispered into Bear’s ear, my hand clutching his back. “We’re out.”

“Cal!” Nat called. “Let’s move it!”

Bear leapt out of the seat, and I followed him. Nat grunted as she grabbed the truck’s back gate. Her arm was slick with blood from her shoulder to her elbow. I went to help, but she pushed my hand away. The gate fell and the three boys jumped out. One of them switched on a big flashlight and drew it around the truck’s bed.

I expected weapons, but what I saw was box after box marked as carrying medical supplies: bandages, surgical instruments, drugs, antibiotics — an entire hospital’s worth crammed into one truck.

Nat straightened up and squared her shoulders. “We did it, guys,” she announced. “Everything we needed. Good job. Now let’s get this stuff unloaded and to the people who need it.”

“Then we sit and wait for the party they’re going to throw us,” Hector said. “Right, Nat?”

Nat smiled, but it seemed forced. “Yeah, right,” she said. “Bet my dad’ll give us the keys to the city.”

They loaded their arms with boxes and began ferrying them across the parking lot and up to the school’s front doors. I winced as Nat dropped a box into my arms and pushed me into the school. Bear stayed close through a maze of locker-lined halls until we came to a crowded gymnasium.

The air in the gym was dense with the stench of blood and decay. The floor was packed with rows of steel-frame cots. Medics in stained smocks tried to minister to the men, women, and children who filled them, but there were too many wounded. Some of the inhabitants were still, but others were thrashing and moaning. Every few moments, there was a scream that burrowed into my spine. Bear whimpered and pressed his body into my leg.

“Drone strike,” Carlos said quietly beside me. “Right in the middle of town. Path mostly ignores us out here, but every now and then, they like to make sure we know they’re still around.”

“Enough chatter, ’Los,” Nat said. “Let’s get this stuff where it needs to be.”

“You got it, boss.” Carlos and the others fell to it immediately, ducking out of the gym and jogging toward the truck. Nat set her boxes down and waved over one of the medics.

“Truck’s out in the lot,” she said. “Send everyone you can spare.”

“But your arm,” the medic said. “You’re—”

“I’m fine,” Nat said. “Go.”

The medic withdrew, pointing everyone in sight out the door and into the parking lot. The few who stayed behind tore into the boxes as they were delivered and then sprinted across the room, delivering what was inside to the patients.

When I turned back, Nat was gone, mixed in with the rest of the citizens of Waylon. If there was a time for me to disappear, it was probably right then. The Path would almost certainly retaliate for her strike, and I needed to be long gone before that happened.

I scanned the room for Nat, wanting to at least thank her for helping to get us out. I found her sitting beside a cot a couple rows away, leaning over someone’s body. I took a step forward but stopped when I saw that she was crying.

Bear kept going, though, dodging through the rows of cots and piling into Nat’s side. He thrust his head underneath her arm and I expected her to push him away, but she wrapped her arms around him instead.

The boy in the cot next to Nat was unconscious. A partially bandaged burn, red and crusted black, ran from his chest to his forehead on his right side. From the way the blankets fell over him, I could tell he was missing his right leg and most of his right arm.

Nat kept her arm around Bear as she talked quietly to the boy on the cot. She ran her fingertips along his good arm and then set her hand in his, bending his limp fingers around it so it was like a seed curled up in soil. When a medic appeared with an IV stand, Nat jerked her hand away. She wiped her tears and moved into the aisle as he ran a line into the boy’s arm.

Bear looked back at me, and I nodded him ahead. He followed Nat across the gym and through one of the back doors.

I looked to the door as medics and civilians raced in and out. Sitting on a table nearby, there was a stack of sterile dressings and a suture kit. I grabbed them and crossed the gym toward the back door.

I found Nat in an empty science lab, leaning against a large marble-topped workstation, Bear on his side in front of her. When I pushed the door open, Nat whipped around, sniffing and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Sorry,” I said, my voice overloud in the little room. “I can get Bear and go if you—”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine. I mean, if you don’t mind. He can stay.”

I let the door close behind me and stepped inside, squinting at the harshness of the fluorescent lights. Nat looked different now that the aura of command that surrounded her at the checkpoint had evaporated. She seemed younger. Smaller too. She sat quietly examining one of Bear’s paws, pushing him away if he tried to protest.

“His pads are cracked,” she said. “And he’s skinny.”

“We’ve come a long way, I guess.”

Nat placed a hand over his still-too-prominent ribs. “Gotta look after your troops.”

“He’s fine,” I said, but when Bear crossed the room to meet me, I couldn’t help but notice he was limping. She was right. He was clearly favoring one of his front paws, wincing when the other hit the tile.

Just hang in there, I thought. We’re almost home.

I swung the pack off my shoulder and cracked open one of Wade’s cans of tuna. I set it down in front of Bear and he devoured it.

“I thought you might need this,” I said, holding up the bandages. “For your arm.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Gotta look after yourself too.”

Nat glared at me but yanked up her blood-soaked sleeve. I cleaned the wound with antiseptic and a length of the bandage, then opened the suture kit and selected a threaded needle.

“What are you doing with that?”

“You need stitches.”

“I’ll wait for a medic.”

“They’re busy,” I said, and hooked the needle into her arm.

“Ow!”

“Sorry.” I slipped the needle in and out of her skin, remembering our survival instructor’s admonitions to keep the stitches small and tight.

“Your friends in the Path teach you that?”

“They’re not my friends.” I said. “Your friends in the Fed teach you how to assault a supply truck?”

“My mom did.”

I looked up to see if she was joking.

“Oh, right,” Nat said. “You Path guys prefer your women in veils instead of body armor.”

“I’m not Path,” I said.

“Maybe, but you sure looked surprised when you figured out it was me who was in charge tonight.”

There was a teasing glint in Nat’s eye.

“Well… maybe a little,” I said. “This is going to sting.”

I finished the suture, then pulled to make sure the edges of the wound were tight together. Nat hissed as I did it.

“Sorry.”

I tied off and unrolled the bandages. Bear left his dinner to lie down between us, presenting his belly to be rubbed. Nat obliged.

“I learned everything from my mom,” she said as I began to wrap her arm. “She was in the Army since I was little. Became a ranger as soon as they started taking women. Most of my friends were playing with dolls while I was learning how to strip an AR-15.”

“She out east now?”

Nat shook her head. “Her unit got hit by a Path drone a few months ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I—”

“Forget it,” Nat said. “Everybody’s got a story, right?”

Neither of us spoke as I finished wrapping her arm. The building was silent, just the distant sound of bodies moving in other rooms, and the rise and fall of Nat’s breath. I had the awkward realization that I hadn’t been alone in a room with a girl since I was nine years old.

I quickly packed up the suture kit, then looked over my shoulder at one of the science lab’s windows. It was still dark, but it couldn’t be much longer until sunup. I thought about all those vehicles sitting outside and all the miles me and Bear still had to go.

“I thought I’d feel good about it.”

I turned back. Nat’s hand had gone still on Bear’s side and she was staring at the tile floor.

“I mean, they were Path,” she said. “Right? And we needed the medicine. But when I think about it, when I see that guy lying there I—” Nat cut herself off, overcome. “He didn’t look much older than Steve.”

“That’s your friend?” I asked. “The one who got hurt in the strike?”

She nodded. “He hasn’t been conscious much since the attack. And when he is, he’s in so much pain that it’s like…” Nat faltered, searching for the right words. “It’s like he’s right there, alive, in front of me, but at the same time…”

“It’s not him.”

Nat’s pale brown eyes met mine. She nodded, then looked away. Her jaw clenched as she gritted her teeth, determined not to cry in front of me.

“I think all you can do is try to push it away,” I said. “Move on.”

“Move on to what?” Nat demanded.

“I just—”

“I don’t want to move on,” she said. “I want to find the part of me that makes killing them hard and rip it out.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah,” she said, eyes blazing, “I do.”

“Natalie!”

The door to the science lab banged open and a man in a brown police uniform came storming in. Before either of us could say a word, he grabbed me by the arm and slammed me into the lip of the table.

“Hey! What are you—”

Bear started barking as the man yanked my elbows behind me. Steel cuffs closed on my arms, just above where my cast ended.

“What are you doing?” Nat said. “Dad, answer me!”

“The guys told me he’s Path, Nat. He’s going to jail.”

“He’s a runner,” Nat said. “And he helped us.”

“Helped you do something you had no business doing!” Nat’s father pulled me off the table and moved me between him and his daughter, his big hands clamped on my arms.

“You and your friends could have been killed.”

“But we weren’t!”

“And it’s a miracle! If your mom was here—”

“She’d be proud of me!”

Nat stood with her chin thrust out, her face reddening with anger.

“We will talk about this in the morning,” her father said. “For now I want you home. And if you so much as set a foot outside the front door, one foot, I swear you will end up in a cell beside his. Now go.”

“He doesn’t belong in jail,” Nat insisted.

“And how do you know that, Natalie? How do you know that some kid you just met isn’t a spy? How do you know the Path isn’t going to come running when they hear their post was overrun? You think they’re going to let that go?”

Nat looked away from her father and stared at the floor.

“Yeah, you might have helped save some of these people, but what if what you did helps put a hundred more in their position? Or a thousand? You think Steve would have wanted you to make that trade?”

“You don’t know what he’d want,” Nat hissed.

“Pretty sure he’d want you to think a minute before you nearly get yourself killed,” he said. “Now get home.”

Nat’s father yanked at my arm, leading me and Bear through the gym and outside, where he pushed me up against a police cruiser. Wade’s truck sat two rows down. If I had just taken Bear and walked out when I had the chance….

“Gonna tranq that dog if you can’t keep him calm.”

“Bear,” I said, pulling out of the man’s grip and kneeling beside him. “Take it easy, pal. It’s fine. We’ll get this worked out and then we’ll be on our way. Okay?”

Bear whimpered and pushed his muzzle into my cheek.

“I’ve got a kennel back at the station for our dogs,” Nat’s father said, his voice softening somewhat. “We can keep him there until we get you sorted out. He’ll be fed and watered, just like you.”

A police van pulled up behind us, and another deputy hopped out. He threw open the back door and waited. Bear whined and I leaned into his ear.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” I whispered. “I swear. Now go.”

Bear didn’t resist when the deputy led him into the van. Once they were away, Nat’s father opened his door and pushed me into the back. He slammed the door and started the engine.

I looked out the window and saw that Nat and her friends had gathered on the sidewalk. Nat watched, arms crossed angrily over her chest as her father took me away.

16

Nat’s father and I wound through the streets of Waylon on the way to the police station. I was in the back, leaning painfully against my side to keep from crushing my bound arms.

Most every house we passed was dark, with windows and doors boarded up. The cruiser’s headlights caught scarred and crumbling buildings and lots full of ashes. In places, it looked like entire neighborhoods had been flattened.

“Admiring your people’s handiwork?”

“They’re not my people,” I said. “Let me talk to the Feds and I’ll explain.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I’m pretty sure some intelligence folks will be very eager for a chat.”

He pulled the car around a low brick building and parked next to the van that had taken Bear away. Once he hauled me out, we made our way through three locked doors and into the jail. There, cops milled about amid a near-constant screech of radio traffic. Fluorescent lights pounded down on white tile. My eyes ached from the glare. How did these people stand it?

Nat’s father led me to a cell and popped off my cuffs before shoving me inside. The steel door slammed shut.

“This is how it’s going to be,” he said. “You’re Army property now, not ours, so don’t expect to see a lawyer or a judge. My guess is they’ll come pick you up sometime tomorrow for questioning.” He leaned against the cell, crossing his arms. “ ’Course, since they don’t really share any of that intelligence with us, if you have something worthwhile to say right here and now, I’m sure we could work something out.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I was taken by the Path six years ago and I’m trying to get home. That’s all.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Someone will bring you supper.”

He unlocked the outer door and started to open it.

“She was amazing.”

Nat’s father stopped at the doorway.

“The Path didn’t stand a chance against her,” I said. “You should be proud.”

Nat’s father turned his head slightly toward me, said nothing, then walked out the door. It closed with a boom, and I was alone.

I lay on the bunk staring at the bars. The adrenaline charge that had kept me going for hours was gone and I felt weak and empty. I told myself that the Feds would listen, that once I explained the last six years, they’d help get us back home. They had to.

I closed my eyes and slipped a hand into my pocket. Bear’s collar sat at the bottom, twisted into a ball. I drew it into my fist and held on tight.

A few hours later, there was a buzz and the door that led back to the cells opened, silhouetting two guards and a prisoner.

“Sorry about this, kid,” one of the guards said.

“No problem.”

Nat stepped inside the cell next to mine and flopped down on the cot. I looked at her through the bars, stunned.

Nat shrugged. “I took one step out of the house.”

“Your dad threw you in jail?”

“He’s trying to make a point,” she said. “He’ll let me out tomorrow when he remembers that the Feds haven’t sent us any medical aid in three months.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “The Feds can’t send medicine? They can’t help?”

“Ha! Help the white trash of Waylon, Wyoming? Please, they have to save their pennies in case some trillionaire’s son gets the sniffles. You want some advice now that you’re back home in the Fed? Get rich. Fast. ’Cause, I tell you, if you’re far enough from the front and have a little money, this whole war is something you see on TV.”

I could barely process the idea. In the Path, citizens gave the war effort everything they had, and in return they were given everything they needed. I had no love for Nathan Hill, but he’d never abandon his own people like that.

“Oh, hey. I swiped this for you.”

Nat handed me something through the bars and I raised it into the light. Black paper and silver foil. I tore it open and the smell of chocolate hit me like a wave. I nearly laughed out loud.

“I haven’t had one of these in six years.”

“Seriously? Well, it’s no steak dinner but think of it as a thanks, I guess.”

I traced my fingers over the logo pressed into the chocolate and then over the bumps on the other side. Almonds. My favorite. I snapped the bar in two and handed half to Nat.

“Thanks,” she said, and bit off a corner.

I chewed slow, drawing the chocolate over my tongue, savoring it until it dissolved. I suddenly remembered the smell of fallen leaves and chimney smoke.

“After my brother and I went trick-or-treating, we’d trade candy and I made it my goal to get every one of these he had.”

“Did it work?”

I laughed. “He was easy,” I said. “He loved Nerds. You know? The fruit things?”

“Right.”

“So I pretended that I did too — in fact, I loved them so much he was going to have to trade me two or three chocolate bars to get just one box. Worked every time. Sucker.”

“I always looked for those caramel things. The ones on a stick?”

“A Sugar Daddy.”

“Right,” Nat said. “A Sugar Daddy. Every cavity I ever had as a kid can be directly traced back to a Sugar Daddy. So where’s your brother now? Still at home?”

I felt a twinge and forced an image of James out of my head. “Still at Cormorant.”

“Why?”

“He’s Path now.”

There was a distant buzz as another cell block opened somewhere in the building. Nat turned on her side and drew herself up to the bars.

“I didn’t just happen to get thrown in jail,” she said. “I stepped outside for a reason. Two reasons actually. First, Carlos knows a guy who can get us fake IDs that say we’re eighteen. We’re going to get them, then head to a recruiting station in Casper to enlist.”

“Why are you telling me—”

“Because you’re coming with us.”

“No, I’m going home. Your dad is calling the Feds. Once they get here I’m going to talk to them and—”

“Whoa,” Nat said, holding up her hand. “Hold on a second. Do you think they’re going to help you?”

I stared at her through the bars.

“You’ve been living with the Path. You worked for them.”

“They made me work for them. I ran away.”

“After six years,” Nat said. “They’ve converted half the country, Cal. Do you think our government is just going to take your word that you’re on our side now? Once the MPs finish questioning you, they’ll put you in jail for treason.”

“No, that’s not—”

“If you’re going to live here, you’re going to have to seriously get up to speed. But look, don’t worry, I can talk to my dad. Once he’s cooled off, he’ll listen to me and then he’ll go talk to the sheriff. He won’t let the MPs take you. And I know you’re trying to get home, but you know the Path. You lived with them. We could use you. I mean, if you want your brother back one day, if you want to stop them from taking anybody else, you have to fight.” Nat had risen to her knees and was grasping the bars.

If I say no to her, I thought, I’m never getting out of here.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“Perfect! I’ll talk to my dad tomorrow morning. Once you’re out we’ll—”

There was a buzz and the door to our cell block swung open. Two silhouettes stood in the doorway. Keys jangled as they approached with loose-limbed staggering gaits. I could smell beer from ten feet away.

“What’s this?” I whispered through the bars.

Nat moved from the cot onto the floor. “The other reason I got myself thrown in jail.”

A flashlight snapped on, blinding me.

“Not much to him,” one of the men said. “Is there?”

“There’s enough, I guess,” said the other, earning himself a laugh.

“Hey, guys!” Nat yelled from her cell, startling the two. “It’s me! Nat!”

The flashlight beam slid from me to her. I grabbed the blanket off the cot and took the opportunity to slip into a dark corner.

“Nat,” one of them said, surprised and trying to steady his slur of a voice. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Karl brought me in for pissing Dad off.”

“Oh, well, we were just—”

“Save it, Limon,” Nat said. “You came here for a game of bounce the Pather off the wall. Right?”

“We—”

“Relax,” Nat said. “Dad was going to let me go in the morning anyway, so how about you guys give me a little early release and then you can stay and have your fun. Seriously, something I don’t see is something I don’t have to tell my dad about. And if I don’t tell him, he doesn’t tell Sheriff Jeffords.”

The officer with the light laughed. Limon leaned in close to the bars, drunkenly grinning, his pale moon face just inches from Nat’s.

“Who do you think sent us, Nat?”

Nat said nothing and Limon laughed, clearly pleased to have stunned her. He turned away, but Nat grabbed his sleeve before he could go.

“He helped me, Limon,” she said, dropping her sarcastic lilt. “Jenny is in that gym too, right? She’s going to get antibiotics because of him.”

Limon tore away from her. “My wife wouldn’t be in there in the first place if it wasn’t for Pathers like him.”

“He’s not—”

“Enough talking,” the other officer said. “Let’s do it and report back.”

“But he doesn’t know anything!”

Limon unlocked my cell door, then made way for the officer with the light. As soon as he stepped inside, I sprang out of the corner and threw the blanket into the air between us. It hit the officer in the face, blinding him for the second it took me to dodge around him. I pivoted toward the still-open cell block door and it was almost within reach when something slammed into my back, knocking me to the ground.

He turned me over with his boot, then stood over me, grinning, a black baton in his hand. He kicked the cell block door closed with a dull boom. “Get him up.”

“Limon!” Nat called out from her cell. “Stop it!”

The other officer hauled me into the cell and put my back against the wall. Limon strutted in behind him, slapping the baton in his palm.

“Guess this is where your path gets you, kid. So unless you can tell me the Path’s plans for this region…”

“I don’t know anything. Honest. I’m just a—”

He pistoned the tip of his baton into my gut. Pain exploded through me and I started to crumple, but the other officer held me up to the wall.

“Okay, let’s try another one. What are the locations of Path safe houses along the border?”

“I told you! I don’t—”

The baton struck again, this time a stinging blow to the side of my arm.

“Limon, stop!” Nat yelled.

“What are the codes for incoming Path bombing runs?”

Before I could say anything, the baton slammed into my side, pinging off a rib. The pain was electric. I bit down on a scream, knowing that it would only get his blood racing faster. Limon pinned me to the wall with the baton, the tip of it grinding into my shoulder. He leaned in close.

“Now,” he said. “I want to know the numbers of Path forces on the other side of the border.”

“A hundred,” I said weakly, feeling unconsciousness tug at me.

“What?”

“A thousand,” I breathed. “A thousand men. And artillery. A Stryker brigade.”

Limon took my chin in his hand and turned my face up to his, examining me with watery, bloodshot eyes.

“Your friends murdered twelve of my buddies, kid. Damn near killed my wife. So if you think I’ve even begun hurting you, you’re mistaken.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Limon glanced at his partner. “Well, too bad for you, I guess.”

He stepped back and raised the baton over his head.

“Limon, no!”

He let it fall, but before it could strike, there was an explosion just outside the station. The floor of the jail shook violently, sending us all to our knees. Limon scrambled for the baton, but I kicked it into a corner and made for the door. The other officer grabbed my ankle and pulled me back just as the cell block door flew open.

“Natalie!”

Nat’s father stormed in, grabbing at the keys on his belt.

“Dad! You have to help Cal!”

Nat’s father stopped short when he saw the jumble of bodies in my cell. He reached into the cell and yanked Limon out by his arm. “What are you two doing? Get to your stations.”

He shoved Limon out the cell block door and then came back for the other one. Sirens were going off outside now, whooping shrieks that reverberated off the walls and steel bars.

“Get to your vehicles and sober up,” he said as he tossed the second officer out of the cell. “We’ve got Path incoming.”

The floor shuddered with another explosion. I struggled up onto the cot to catch my breath, my body vibrating from the beating Limon gave me. My cell slammed shut.

“Dad! What’s going on?”

There was a rattle of keys and a door opened. “Mayor gave the order to evacuate.”

“What about Cal? You can’t just leave him here!”

“He’s a prisoner! Now come on!”

Nat’s father had them halfway to the cell block door when the biggest explosion yet sent Nat crashing into his back. They both hit the ground. Nat was up first, digging for something on her father’s belt. The next thing I knew, my cell door was being thrown open. I started to run, but Nat pushed me back. There was a clatter of steel as she fumbled with something between us. Cold metal slapped against my wrist.

“What are you doing?”

Nat’s father appeared at the cell door. “Natalie, we don’t have time for this. We have to go right—”

Nat stepped to the side and her father stared openmouthed at the handcuffs that now secured my wrist to his daughter’s. Nat tore another key off the ring she’d stolen from him and threw it down the drain of the sink behind us.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “Looks like it’s both of us or none.”

The three of us ran through the police station. It was packed with a torrent of officers tearing up and down the hall, and the noise from outside was nearly deafening now. Emergency sirens wailed all around us.

“Is it drones?” Nat asked.

“Not this time. Manned bombers and ground troops on the way.”

The crowd parted and the front door of the station appeared before us. I stopped dead.

“Bear,” I said. “Where is he?”

“No time!” Nat’s father said. “We have to go now. There are trucks waiting outside.”

Nat turned, darting down a hallway, dragging me with her by our cuffs. Her father yelled after us, but then he was on our heels as we ran down the cell block.

“Here!” Natalie threw herself against a door and we found ourselves in the midst of a kennel full of furiously barking dogs in cages.

“Bear!”

“At the end,” Nat’s father said. “Last row!”

Nat and I ran for it as her father started opening cages to free the other dogs. Bear was cowering at the back of his cage, too terrified to bark. I got the gate open and he jumped into my arms.

“Okay, buddy, let’s get out of here.”

I pinned Bear to my chest with my cast and we all ran back out into the station and toward the front door. Outside, vehicles were already pulling away. Another officer appeared to lead the police dogs into a van as Nat’s father led us to a parking lot where one police cruiser still remained. I barely had time to push Bear into the backseat before Nat’s father was gunning the engine and pulling out. We left the station and tore through the town of Waylon.

The Path’s bombing run seemed to have subsided, leaving a ruined town in its wake. Everywhere we looked, there were fires. The frames of houses trembled within coronas of flame, and scores of trees burned, throwing off showers of sparks in the kicked-up winds. All around us, people were fleeing however they could. Cars careened through the streets, mixing with families on foot, loaded down with their possessions. Injured and dead lay on the sidewalks, some wept over, some abandoned. Nat’s father ignored them all, weaving through the streets, trying to avoid craters that pitted the roadway.

“Where are we going?” Nat shouted, but her father ignored her. He steered us around a traffic jam, half of the car on the road, half on the shoulder. We shot across a grass divider and onto a service road, where he shut off his headlights and sirens and pushed the speedometer to seventy.

Bear trembled in my lap. A blur of trees passed outside our window and then switched to a high steel fence. I leaned forward and saw the outline of a control tower and a few small private planes and helicopters.

“Get off the road!” I shouted, grabbing at the bars between us.

“What?”

“Get off the road now!”

“Why?”

I pointed out ahead. “Because of that!”

The entrance to the airport appeared in front of us. Parked outside were three Path Humvees and ten or fifteen soldiers. Nat’s father jerked the steering wheel and the car fell off the roadway and down an embankment.

“If there’s an airport, it’s the first thing the Path seizes,” I said as we bounced over the field. “They’ll have the place surrounded in an hour.”

Nat’s father cursed, then conferred with someone on the radio. We ended up on a dirt road, eventually meeting up with a small convoy of evacuees deep in the woods and out of sight of the Path. There were police and civilian vehicles as well as a single yellow school bus. All of them were parked with their lights out just off the roadway. Nat’s dad pulled over and got out of the car, leaving us inside with the engine running.

He joined a crowd of men, including Limon and his buddy, who were gathered around an older man consulting in low tones. All of them were armed, but I didn’t see anything heavier than AR-15s and shotguns. Dozens of terrified civilians surrounded the officers. They were a mix of young and old, men, women, and children. Entire families bunched together.

“This is because of me,” Nat said, staring darkly out of the window. “This is for what happened at the checkpoint.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “They’ve hit the town before.”

“Not like this.” I started to speak again but Nat cut me off. “Tell me what happens next.”

“Once they have control of the town, they’ll gather everyone together and give them the Choice.”

“And my guess is the people who refuse to join up don’t really go to cozy little concentration camps to wait out the war.”

The windows of the yellow school bus were full of the faces of children, most of them younger than us. I thought of a little boy holding a toy out to me in the middle of the California desert, his relieved family smiling behind him.

“No,” I said. “They don’t.”

Ahead of us, the sheriff was arranging the armed men into teams, pairing them off and pointing them toward vehicles.

My God, I thought. He’s going to try to take the airfield.

The door was locked and there was no catch or door handle on the inside, so I threw my shoulder against the window, making a racket until Nat’s father noticed and returned to the cruiser.

“You can’t do this,” I said as he pulled us out of the car. “All you’re going to do is get yourselves killed.”

He grabbed the cuffs attaching me and Nat and worked a key into them. “We don’t have a choice.”

“You do,” I said. “Surrender. Say you make a choice for the Path. All of you. They’ll take you, but no one has to die. It’s the only way.”

He popped the cuffs off of us and then stared down at me. “Son, these people murdered my wife and tonight they put my town to the torch, killing God knows how many people in the process. Every person here will fight them until we don’t have breath left in our bodies. Anybody who’d do different is a coward.”

He waved another cop over.

“Get them on the bus,” he said. “Now. We move out in five.”

“Dad!” Nat shouted. She tried to go after him, but the other deputy held her back and started herding us toward the bus. Bear was on him immediately, jumping up and digging his paws into the man’s leg. When the deputy turned to swat Bear away, Nat twisted out of his grip and sprinted back to her father’s cruiser. I followed, jumping into the passenger seat as she slammed the driver’s-side door shut.

“Nat, what are you—”

She threw the car into reverse and took off, barely giving me time to close my door. She sped out of the field and onto the roadway. I looked back at Bear barking after us.

“Whatever you’re planning isn’t going to work,” I said. “We need to get your Dad to—”

“What?” Nat said. “He’s not going to surrender, Cal. This is my fault. I’m not just letting it happen.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think you’ve got a little less than three minutes to figure that out.”

Nat gripped the steering wheel as the road to the airport vanished beneath us. Up ahead the tree cover thinned and the airport’s perimeter fence appeared. Nat reached over and opened a compartment under the dash.

“See what we have to work with.”

I rooted around inside, pushing aside papers and pens until my fingers hit steel. I pulled out another pair of handcuffs and a gray case that sat beside them. I dropped the cuffs in my lap and opened the case.

“Pull over.”

“Cal, we don’t have time to—”

“Just do it.”

Nat cut her speed and moved us off to the side of the road. The airport entrance was just visible a couple miles down the road. I lifted the taser out of its case and held it up between us.

“Okay,” I said, suddenly calm. “Here’s what we do.”

17

The .50 cal gunner on one of the Humvees fired a warning volley and I brought the cruiser to a halt in the middle of the road. There were three Humvees sitting in the revolving blue and red of our dome lights, one dead center in front of the airport entrance, with the other two on either side. Four soldiers stood in the space between them, three with weapons pointed at us, and the other, a compact man with a steel-gray crew cut, watching grimly.

“He’ll be the one in charge,” I said, keeping my eyes forward, not looking at Nat slumped in the passenger seat beside me. “You sure you’re ready for this?”

“I just hope my dad is paying attention back there.”

“Yeah. Me too.” I swallowed a lump in my throat and stepped out of the car slow, careful to keep my hands where the soldiers could see them. No one reacted, so I went around to the passenger side and pulled the handle. Nat rolled out of the seat, her hands cuffed in front of her. I took her arm roughly and pushed her out ahead of me as I approached the checkpoint.

“Not a place you want to be right now, son,” the sergeant announced. “Got no quarrel with kids, but if you don’t want to get yourself shot, you better get in that car and drive back the way you came.”

“You’re here because of a raid on an outpost on Route 84,” I said. “Five soldiers killed, two Humvees and a supply truck destroyed.”

There was a brief pause. “You seem well informed,” the sergeant said.

I shoved Nat onto her knees in the gravel.

“This is the one who led the raid. Her mom was a Fed ranger. She got some of her buddies to help out.”

“And who am I to thank for this out-of-the-blue bit of good fortune?” he asked, his tone as dry as dust.

“Call sign’s Bloodhound,” I said. “I report to Captain Monroe, commander of Cormorant Base just outside Yuma, Arizona. I was detached about a month ago to infiltrate Fed territories. Ended up here on a fluke.”

“You’ll forgive me if I find it a little hard to believe that someone who looks like they should be in day care is working special ops for Cormorant.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s kind of the idea, Sarge. Look, you want her or not?”

The sergeant’s eyes flicked over to two of his subordinates.

“Cuff them both; we’ll figure it out later.”

“Wait!” I cried. “I told you, I’m with Cormorant special—”

The closest soldier reached for Nat, just as she scooped up a handful of gravel and tossed it in his eyes. When his hands went up, Nat was on him, throwing her bound hands over his head and pulling him back. He gagged as his Adam’s apple was trapped beneath the cuff’s short metal chain. The second soldier moved forward with his weapon up, but Nat dropped low behind her captive, fouling his shot.

“I will wring his neck right here!” she screamed as the man choked. “I swear, you people will not—”

I jammed the taser into the small of her back and hit the trigger. There was the snap of electricity and Nat convulsed, making an awful retching sound as she hit the ground. I dropped to my knees and pulled her hands from around the soldier’s throat. The second soldier was completely frozen, staring down at me over his rifle.

“Give me a hand!” I bellowed. “She got the brunt of it, but he’s out too. Let’s go!”

We got Nat up and started dragging her back to the checkpoint.

“Throw her in the back of Two,” the sergeant said, pointing us to a driverless Humvvee with a gunner standing up in the turret. “And you, the next time you end up with a prisoner, you cuff their hands behind their back, not in front. Now move it.”

“Yes, sir!”

We brought Nat to one of the Humvees and threw her into a heap at the turret gunner’s feet. When the soldier went to rejoin his team, I followed Nat inside and slammed the door.

“Hey,” the gunner called. “What’s going on down—”

I shoved the taser into this side. There was a flash of blue and he dropped into the rear of the Humvee, unconscious. I grabbed Nat and pulled her up.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” she said, groggy but shaking it off.

It didn’t take them long to notice something was wrong. By the time I got to the driver’s seat, machine gun bursts lit up all around us, pinging off the Humvee’s armor. Nat kicked the gunner out of the Humvee and took his place. A second later the .50 cal was sweeping the area, sending the Path scattering. The thunder of the thing was unreal, punishing.

“Cal!” Nat screamed between bursts. “To the right!”

I looked out the side window. The other gunner was rotating our way. I fumbled at the Humvees’s controls before getting it into reverse and jamming my foot on the gas. We escaped a volley of fire but crashed into the gate behind us. Nat’s next shot sent the gunner ducking back into his rig. After that she shredded the other Humvee’s engine.

I tried to get us moving forward, but there was a metallic grinding sound behind us. We were hung up on the steel fence. Sitting ducks. I gritted my teeth and stood on the gas, but the wheels just spun. Gunfire was erupting all around us now.

Nat turned toward her father’s cruiser, sending a stream of fire into its back end until the car exploded with a lung-battering woomf. The Path soldiers fled from the column of flames. Black smoke fouled the air.

“Helicopters are coming in!” Nat cried from behind me.

I gave up trying to go forward and put the Humvee in reverse, crashing through the gate. Once we were through, I got us turned around and we sped toward the runway. We had given Nat’s dad a chance; all I could hope was that he’d made use of it. We had our own problems to deal with.

Two Black Hawk helicopters had started their descent into the airport’s floodlights. Nat opened up with her gun, and the Black Hawks’ engines surged as their pilots aborted. Our reprieve wouldn’t last long, though. They’d find somewhere safer to land and offload their crew of Marines.

The airfield came into view. It was small, just a control tower and two runways filled with a few helicopters and private planes.

There was a blast behind us and I turned to see a fleet of civvy vehicles and police cruisers coming through the wreckage of the burning blockade. Mixed in with them was the last of the Path Humvees with a civilian up in the turret. The school bus was bringing up the rear. They made it. I pulled our Humvee to a stop at the edge of the runway. Seconds later, their vehicles were swarming around us.

Nat’s dad jumped out of the lead car and ran toward us, Bear close at his heels. “Natalie!”

Nat dropped down out of the turret just as he ran up. “Dad, wait! I had to—”

Her father’s knees went weak as he threw his arms around her, nearly dragging them down. Nat stiffened at first but then fell into it, clasping her arms around his back and pressing her cheek into his chest.

“I can’t believe you did that,” he said, his voice thick. “I can’t believe you just did that. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“So help me God, girl, you are getting in that helicopter this second and getting the hell out of here. You got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, both of you, go!” he said, running off to organize the teams that were prepping the aircraft. “I’ve got work to do.”

Bear’s paws hit my calf and I grabbed him up into my arms. I didn’t realize until then how much I was shaking. I held him close, taking a second to breathe in the grassy smell of him.

“Okay, pal,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The three of us ran across the tarmac to a waiting helicopter that had CHANNEL 9 TRAFFIC TEAM emblazoned on the side. The pilot was doing his preflight as we piled into the rear seats, Bear dancing at our feet.

“Never had a dog in here,” the pilot said. “Better get strapped in and hold on to him. Word is I’m taking off as soon as this bird is ready.”

“What happened to the injured?” Nat called up to him. “The ones at the school?”

“Don’t know,” the pilot said, shouting over the blades that had just begun to turn. “Plan was to load everyone that could be moved onto trucks and head east but it’s pretty chaotic down there. Now strap in and put on the headsets if you want to talk.”

Nat put on the headset and drew her harness over her shoulders. When she was done, she stared out the side window, her hands in a tense fidget in her lap. I pulled my headset down and adjusted the mic in front of my mouth.

“He’s okay,” I said. “They got Steve out and he’s going to be okay.”

Nat said nothing. There was a roar of engines as the first plane took off, with three more queued up behind it. Across the tarmac, another helicopter took to the air. I prayed the Path would see them for what they were, civilian evacuees, and let them go.

When the last plane took off, Nat’s father pulled in his perimeter force and stood on the tarmac, directing them to waiting choppers. Already I could see Black Hawks touching down at distant corners of the airport. Black-uniformed soldiers poured out of their sides and started toward us.

“Okay!” our pilot called. “I think the welcome wagon is here. Time to go.”

“What about my dad?”

“It’s okay — he’s with Billy.”

The pilot pointed to where a deputy was forcing Nat’s father into another chopper across from us. Their doors slammed and their blades started to turn.

The helicopter’s engine revved and I felt us lift into the air. Bear whined and I pulled him underneath my harness. The other choppers made it off the ground, and soon we were all up over the dark tree line. For a disorienting moment I thought an early dawn was creeping over the horizon, but as we climbed higher, it became clear that it was the town of Waylon burning out of control.

“Oh my God…” Nat breathed.

The pilot flew us in an arc north of the town to avoid the windblown clouds of smoke from burning trees. Inside Waylon the streets were black seams, marking the boundaries between grids of burning buildings. Hundreds of vehicles were lined up on the roadways out of town, but they stopped dead a few miles out. The Path had already set up checkpoints. Right now those unlucky enough to be stopped were being taken from their cars and massed into orderly groups for the beacons. I looked for signs that the Fed Army had arrived but found nothing. The town had been left to die.

Our trio of helicopters pulled away from Waylon, but the destruction didn’t stop. The sun came up, bloody and dim, through clouds of black smoke that rose from town after burning town. The Path may have come for Waylon, but they clearly weren’t stopping there. Nat stared down at the scene below, unblinking.

The pilot’s voice came through the static of our headsets. “Nat?” he said, turning back to us. “Hold on, I’ve got your dad. Billy, go ahead.”

One of the other helicopters rose beside us, a reddish dawn gleaming off its silver side. I could just make out Nat’s father through her window.

“Are you two okay?” he asked over the radio.

“We’re fine,” Nat shouted into the mic. “What happened to the hospital? Did they get away?”

There was a pause and a burst of static.

“Dad?”

“Honey, we don’t know. We can’t seem to raise anyone down there.”

“Have the Feds come?” I asked.

“Word is there will be reinforcements, but no one knows when. Sounds like there are battles going on everywhere now.”

“Where are we going?”

“We think we can make it into South Dakota. We haven’t heard anything about—”

His voice cut out and the line went from static to hurried voices all talking over each other.

“Dad?”

“—we have to turn, we—”

There were heavy booms below us. Our helicopter shuddered and pitched left.

“What’s going on?” I shouted up to the pilot, but he was too busy with his controls to respond. The helicopter next to us wavered, dropping out of sight before surging up again.

“Dad!”

A string of explosions thundered and then Nat’s father’s voice returned in our headsets.

“Don’t worry — we’re just going to climb to get away from this,” he said. He pressed closer to his window, one hand on the glass. “This will all be over soon and then we’ll—”

There was a roar behind us. “Up!” someone cried. “Up! Pull up!”

Nat’s father turned to us, his wide face framed in sandy hair, his big hand pressed against the glass like he was reaching out to her.

“Dad!”

Nat threw herself against the glass as the helicopter next to us erupted in a wall of fire.

18

The shock wave sent our chopper reeling, until the pilot somehow righted us again. Warning sirens screamed through the cabin, and the air was thick with smoke streaming in through gashes in the windshield. The smooth turn of the rotors above now sounded labored, straining, then slacking, over and over.

Nat was sitting limp in her chair, the shaking of the helicopter rocking her like a doll. I grabbed her chin and turned her to me. Her eyes were wide and there was a smear of blood on her forehead.

“Are you hurt? Nat?”

She tore away from me and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them close and letting herself fall onto the side of the chopper. Bear was cowering on the floor beneath me but he looked unharmed, so I popped my harness and leaned forward into the cockpit.

The pilot was wrestling with controls that jerked and shimmied in his hands. Dials were spinning wildly.

“Can I help?” I screamed over the blare of the sirens, but it was like I wasn’t there. I pushed myself farther forward and saw that the dash directly in front of the pilot was covered in a dark slick of blood.

Windows were smashed, and there was a long gash on his left side. Blood covered his hands and was pooling in his lap.

The air shuddered with explosions all around us.

“Strap in!” the pilot yelled.

Once back in my seat, I dragged Bear up into my lap, pulling the harness over both of us and fastening it tight. He struggled and whined, but I just pressed harder. The ride grew wilder by the second as the pilot struggled to keep us in the air as long as he could, constantly pulling us up out of sudden plunges while the helicopter pitched from side to side. The world outside the window spun madly and the smoke inside the cabin grew thicker, choking me and burning my eyes. The warning sirens screamed on and on.

I spared a look at Nat and she was terrifyingly still, huddled up like a child, not lifting her face from between her knees.

“We’re going in!”

The engines strained one last time and then a sea of green came at us from below. I grabbed Bear and held on as we went belly first into a stand of trees. Everything in the cabin pitched forward, loose bits hitting the windshield like bullets and smashing the glass. The belt around my waist cut into my middle and I screamed out in pain. Bear howled but I refused to let him go.

The helicopter tumbled onto its side, momentum carrying it through the trees, their limbs slamming into the helicopter’s steel hide over and over, sending body-rattling booms through the space around us. Glass shattered and metal tore. Nat began to scream, long and high. The still-turning rotors snapped as they tried to cut through the assault of trees.

When we finally came to rest, I lay over Bear’s body, panting, arms aching, but too terrified to move. He was still, but his heart thudded heavy against my thighs. There were a few metallic groans as the helicopter settled into place and then it was astonishingly quiet. Even the distant booms of the war were wiped away.

Every muscle in my body burned as I sat up. Nat was breathing but unconscious. A gash dripped blood down one arm. The window next to me was shattered by a heavy bough. What remained of the window was splattered with blood. I let go of Bear and touched my cheek. My fingers came back stained bright red.

I unhooked the belt around my waist and eased Bear over between me and Nat. He went to her, his small legs unsteady, sniffing at her neck and her torn arm. I grabbed the edge of the front seats and pulled myself forward into the cockpit.

The pilot was unconscious, hands at his sides, slumped against the harness across his chest.

“Hey,” I said, unnerved by the sound of my own voice breaking through the silence. I pushed at his shoulder. “We gotta get out of here.”

He didn’t move, so I dragged myself up farther into the passenger seat.

“Hey.”

I turned his head toward me and that’s when I saw a shard of glass as big as my hand buried more than an inch into his throat. Blood, thick and black, covered his chest. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at him. I didn’t seem to be able to move until Bear’s whine turned me around.

His paws were up on the helicopter’s door, scrabbling to get out. I looked into the sky behind us, and even though it was clear now, we couldn’t afford to wait around. We had to move. Nat was still unconscious, so I reached over her to force her door open. Bear jumped out first, stumbling when he hit the ground but quickly righting himself. I followed, crawling over Nat, then leaning back in to undo her harness.

She moaned. Her head, bloody from a spray of glass, lolled to one side. Her eyes opened, surveying the damage around her.

“Can you move?”

Nat looked at me but said nothing. Twin sonic booms split the silence above the tree line as two fighters streaked past. I dug one arm behind Nat’s back and the other beneath her knees. A knife of pain shot through my busted wrist, but I lifted her up and out of the helicopter anyway, easing her weight onto my chest.

I got us away from the helicopter, then set Nat down at the base of a hill. The forest seemed to stretch out endlessly on all sides. Were we in Wyoming still? South Dakota? I squinted up into the sky, hoping to orient myself off the sun, but a blanket of gray clouds were in the way. Without knowing north from south or east from west, I could walk us right into the Path and not have any idea until it was too late.

Nat stirred, drawing her knees up to her chest and hugging them close. She started to cry, her chest convulsing. I moved toward her but she shied away, hiding her face.

Gravel tumbled down the side of the hill we were on. I looked up to see Bear nearly at the top. Maybe if I got up higher, I could get some idea of where we were.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. Nat didn’t move.

I dug my fingers into the trunk of a tree and pulled myself up. Once I made it to my feet, my body wavered like smoke in a breeze, so I held on and waited for it to pass. I moved from tree to tree, grasping branches to hold myself steady. Every injury, old and new, gnawed at me as I climbed. Eventually the shock of the pain faded, leaving just an endless and dark exhaustion. It was as if there was a hole in the center of me and I was slowly draining away. My head reeled, and bursts of lights seemed to dance with shadows in my field of vision.

Whenever I felt like I had nothing left, I looked back at Nat. She grew smaller behind me, a single body nearly lost amid the rock and elms. If I didn’t find us a way out, we were done. The peak of the hill drew closer by inches. Bear sat at the top, his dark body outlined in the gray sky.

At the top of the hill was a rocky platform studded with scrub pines that held a commanding view of the land below. I slid down the side of a tree and sat beside Bear.

Below, for as far as I could see, was an unbroken expanse of trees, rising and falling as they climbed hills and fell into valleys, like a mossy blanket laid over the earth. I turned in every direction and that’s all there was, wilderness stretching out to the horizon. I imagined we could have sat where we were a million years in the past and seen the exact same view. I searched for the sun to try to at least find our bearing but the sky was still too overcast.

Even if we mustered the will to walk a hundred miles, we might discover we were going in the wrong direction the entire time. Instead of finding civilization, we would only end up deeper and deeper in the gradually darkening woods, more and more alone.

I thought of Nat lying below and told my legs to move, to walk anywhere, in any direction, but the commands grew cold somewhere along the way. I fell back into the dirt and watched as night enclosed us.

I was lying in the dirt, barely conscious, when I heard the footsteps.

I tried to open my eyes, tried to move, but it was as if I had been lashed to the forest floor, half in and half out of a dream. Bear growled low beside me.

A hand grasped my shoulder. “Hey. You okay?”

It was a man’s voice. I opened my eyes, but my vision swirled and it was like I was seeing him from very far away. All I could make out was brown hair shining in a flashlight’s beam. Wind blew in the trees around us and a sleepy warmth moved through me.

“James?” I said, my voice a woozy drawl.

Another voice came up the hill. “Someone else down here.”

Thunder shook the earth somewhere far away. “There’s a storm,” I said. “We have to go in now. We have to…”

There was a blast of radio static and then another voice. “Pick them up. We’ll take them with us.”

It was another man’s voice, deep and strong from somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes and saw a tall man with dark skin.

“Grey?”

I struggled weakly as hands dug beneath me and lifted me up. Bear barked, but the sound of it was distant and dreamlike. My consciousness slipped away as they bore me off. I swayed in their hands, drifting back and forth as though I was on the deck of some great sailing ship.

19

I woke with a gasp, feeling like I had been buried alive.

I thrashed and twisted, until a great weight fell off my chest and I could breathe again.

When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I was able to make out the dim contours of a room. It was large and nearly empty. Across from me, there was the outline of a closed door, its gaps letting in enough light to fill the room with gray and black shadows. Next to the door was a large cabinet. I saw no other doors or windows.

My muscles ached as I sat up, finding myself in the center of an enormous bed. The weight I felt on my chest was a blanket with down filling, heavy as lead. My clothes were gone and had been replaced with nothing but a pair of soft boxers.

“Bear?” I called. “Nat?”

My body protested as I slid off the bed. The soles of my feet hit the ground and I almost drew them back in shock when they sunk into a thick pile of soft carpeting. Where was I?

I stood up and limped across the room to the door. I grabbed the handle and turned. Locked. In the half-light, I could make out a small table and lamp sitting beside the bed. I made my way back and fumbled underneath the shade until I found the switch and clicked it on. The light stabbed at my eyes, but when they adjusted, I found a tall glass of water, beaded with sweat, beside the lamp. Icy rivulets coursed down my cheeks as I drank. I set the empty glass down, panting.

The bed was nearly seven feet long, covered in a thick gold-and-tan blanket with sheets the color of cream beneath. I searched the drawer on the nightstand and the ones in the dresser, but they all came up empty.

The lamplight revealed a second door on the other side of the room. It led into a bathroom filled with glittering chrome fixtures. I stood in front of the mirror that sat above the white sink. The blood and sweat-caked dirt had been washed off of me, replaced with a faint scent of lavender. Adhesive bandages closed my wounds. Even my cast had been scrubbed clean of dirt and blood. Why would someone go to all the trouble to wash and heal me only to lock me up?

I scrambled for options, but anything I came up with seemed ludicrous. Bust down the door and escape? Even at my best, it was unlikely. Make a racket until my captors finally had to come for me? Maybe, but what then? Attack them and make a run for it, hoping I found Bear and Nat along the way? Ridiculous. I was wracked with cuts and bruises and my muscles screamed at nearly every move I made. There would be no daring escape. All I could do was wait.

I looked down at the floor’s marble tile. Of course that didn’t have to mean I was helpless.

I brought the water glass to the bathroom and wrapped it in a thick towel that hung by the shower. I set the bundle on the tile floor and stomped on it so that the glass shattered with a muffled crunch. A mix of shards remained. I picked through them, taking the largest and sharpest piece I could find. The rest went into the empty cabinet under the sink. The towel went neatly on the rack.

I returned to the bed, tucking the glass shard underneath the mattress where I could get at it quickly. Once it was set, I cut the light and drew the heavy blanket over me. Exhausted as I was, sleep didn’t come easy. I was plagued with thoughts of Bear and Nat. Were they somewhere nearby, alone and afraid?

I saw Nat’s father’s face pressed against the window of the helicopter just before the flash that took them down. What must Nat be going through right now? I hated that there was nothing I could do but wait.

I draped my hand over the side of the bed so my fingers rested by the edge of the shattered glass.

Wait and be ready.

I woke again to the sound of automatic-weapons fire.

It was coming from somewhere inside the building. A jet streaked overhead and then another, the roar of their engines followed by the dragonfly hum of helicopter rotors. I slipped the glass shard out from under the mattress and rolled out of bed. Maybe I could use the dresser to break down the door and then—

The door to the room was open.

“RPG!”

I flinched as the noise from an explosion rocked the house. A barrage of machine-gun fire answered, followed by a scream.

I moved to the door in a crouch. On the other side there was a hallway of sunlit hardwood beneath yellow walls. There were more voices now. Two different ones at least, talking back and forth. There was another explosion, but this time there was something off about the sound of it, something flat and distant.

“Awesome!”

I clung to the dull end of the glass shard and stepped into the hallway. The polished wood was warm beneath my feet. I crept along it, past framed paintings that hung beneath pinpoint floodlights.

“Whoa!”

“Got it! You suck! You! Suck!”

The hall opened up into a sunken den. There was a black couch against one wall facing a TV screen that was at least two feet high and three across. On the screen, three burly soldiers moved down a street that was hemmed in by crumbling skyscrapers, shooting at adversaries that leapt out of alleys and fired from smashed-in windows.

“Use your grenade launcher.”

“Dude, I only have like two left.”

Two guys sat in the center of the couch facing the TV, video game controllers in their hands. They were both thin and tan in shorts and T-shirts, one guy with shaggy brown curls, the other blond. A coffee table in front of them was cluttered with game cases, magazines, and piles of junk food. The room trembled as an in-game F-18 thundered across the screen.

“Oh my God, would you two idiots turn that down?!” A black-haired girl appeared from an adjoining kitchen, a paperback book open in one hand. “For real, I can barely hear myself—”

Her book hit the floor with a smack the moment she saw me.

“What, Kate?” the blond gamer shouted. “I can’t hear—”

He turned to Kate, then followed her gaze to me. My fingers tensed on the glass in my hand.

“Uh… hey, man,” he said, elbowing his shaggy-haired friend in the side. “How, uh, how are you?”

On the screen the soldiers had paused in the middle of the street, their barrel chests panting.

“Where am I?”

The blond kid popped off the couch and jogged over to the steps.

“Hey, no worries, man,” he said, extending his hand as he came up the stairs. “I’m Reese. We’ll—”

I caught him off balance, throwing my shoulder into his side and slamming him against the wall. The girl screamed when I pressed my cast into his throat and raised the shard of glass.

“Are you Path or Fed?”

“What?”

“Path or Fed?!” I shouted, keeping my eyes locked on his. “Where are my friends?”

“Take it easy. We can—”

Reese tried to move forward and I pushed him back again, wincing as my cast hit his throat. The tip of the glass touched his cheekbone.

“Dude, seriously, we’re just trying to help you. Okay? I swear.”

“Then why’d you lock me up?”

Kate piped up from behind me. “Because you were acting like this!”

I glanced at her, leaving my cast and the glass right where they were.

“Sergeant Mitchell and his guys found you and brought you back here,” she said. “But you went crazy, like you were going to kill us. You even broke Christos’s nose.”

She nodded over toward Shaggy, who had a white bandage plastered over the bridge of his nose. Red and blue bruises radiated from it.

“So we shoved a couple Valium down your throat and locked you up. Figured after you got some sleep you’d be, I don’t know, thankful or something. You know? For saving your life? That’s why we left the door open this morning.”

“Where’s Nat?” I asked. “And my dog?”

“The girl’s in the bedroom next to yours,” Reese said, voice shaking, eyes on the jagged tip of the glass. “The dog was acting like he needed to pee, so the others took him out. I think they went down to the lake. He’s fine. We fed him and everything.”

The bitter taste of adrenaline filled my mouth. I swallowed it and stepped away from Reese, keeping my eye on him in case he decided to try to take advantage and come at me.

“Okay!” Christos exclaimed after a pause. “We’ve made some serious progress, folks!”

“Christos,” Kate warned.

“What? Reese isn’t going to have his throat cut. I think that’s an achievement. Others may disagree, but I’m all for it.”

“Who are you people?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh, just, you know,” Reese said. “Playing video games.”

“I don’t think that’s what he means, Reese,” Kate said. “Why don’t we take things one step at a time? We made some burgers a while ago for lunch. Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”

My stomach rumbled but I ignored it. “I want to see Nat.”

“She’s that way,” Christos said, pointing down the way I had come. “Last room on the right.”

“There a key?”

“We didn’t lock her room,” Kate said.

“Why not?”

Reese and Christos looked to Kate.

“She hasn’t moved since we found you guys,” she said. “She won’t eat. Hasn’t said a word. She just lies in bed crying.”

There was no response when I knocked on Nat’s door.

“Nat?” I said. “It’s me. Cal.”

I opened the door into another room just like the one I had woken up in. The light from the hall spread across a small form curled up into a ball on the bed. Part of me thought I should just close the door and leave her be, that she’d come out when she was ready. But then I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

“Nat?”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Her back was to me and I hesitated a moment before reaching out and touching her shoulder.

“Hey.”

When she didn’t respond, I moved closer. Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the dark wall in front of her. She was still in her clothes from the day before, a sweat- and blood-stained T-shirt and jeans. They had wiped the blood and dirt off her face and bandaged up the deeper cuts, but I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t hurt worse, somewhere I couldn’t see.

“Are you injured?” I asked. “Natalie?”

She was motionless for a long time, and then she moved her head slowly from side to side.

“Do you want something to eat?”

Again she shook her head.

“Water?”

Nat’s eyes shut and her body seized as if she had been hit with an electric shock. Her knees rose up tighter to her chest. She looked like she was trying to disappear.

I drew away, but before my feet could hit the floor, Nat’s fingers had encircled my wrist. She was still facing away from me, curled up like a seedpod, one arm reaching back. I eased back onto the bed and drew my legs up, lying just behind her. There was only a thin border of darkness between us.

“I think I’m going crazy,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from a hundred miles away.

“You’re not going crazy.”

“I just keep seeing it. Over and over.”

I lifted a hand to smooth her hair along her forehead, which was damp despite the air-conditioned chill in the room. I searched for something else to say, hoping to stumble across something that would help push her out of the moment she was trapped in, but I knew it was pointless. I slipped my other arm, awkward in its cast, underneath her. My fingers pressed into her shoulder and drew her close until her back touched my bare chest. I closed my eyes and we lay there until our breath fell into sync and my heart pulsed against hers.

“Hey.”

I turned to find Kate standing in the doorway.

“Can I come in?”

Nat had been sleeping for about an hour. Her breathing, ragged and shaking at first, had calmed. I nodded and Kate came in with a pile of folded laundry in her hands.

“I washed your clothes,” she said, setting them down on the bed. “I also brought her some of mine, if she wants to change. They should fit, I think.”

Bear’s collar sat on top of the pile. I set it aside, then reached for my shirt, pausing at a flowery scent coming off of it.

Kate laughed. “It’s lavender. Sorry, we only have girly detergent. Drives the guys crazy walking around smelling like flowers all the time.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks.” I slipped it on and finished dressing. When I was done, I stuffed Bear’s collar back in my pocket.

“Oh, look who’s here!” Kate exclaimed.

Nails clacked against the floor in the hall and then Bear leapt onto the bed and piled into me. He sniffed at every inch of me, burying his head underneath my arm, his butt wiggling. I rubbed his ears, then wrapped my arms around him and dropped my face into his neck. He smelled soapy and warm. A lump formed in my throat and I had to swallow hard to get rid of it.

“Jumped in the lake with us like he was a puppy,” she said. “He even liked it when we threw him in the tub for a bath. We didn’t have any dog food, so we fed him some hamburger we had sitting around. He pretty much ate a whole cow.”

Bear settled down into my lap, licking contentedly at the palm of my hand.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“South Dakota,” Kate said. “This is our friend Alec’s house — well, one of his parents’ houses. You’ll meet him later.”

“So you’re all Fed?”

“I guess so. We’re not very political.”

I looked up at her. “But you have soldiers here. You said Sergeant Mitchell.”

“He’s the head of our security. Alec’s parents hired him and his guys to look after us when they decided we’d be safer here than in California.”

“Have you heard what’s going on in Wyoming? Did it fall?”

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” she said. “But I was just coming to tell you we’re getting supper together out on the back deck. Nothing big, just burgers and stuff, but it’s a nice night. You should come and join us. Both of you.”

I turned back and saw that Nat was awake. She lay in the dark watching Kate silently.

“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. That’d be good.”

“Okay,” Kate said. “Cool. I’m just going to hit the shower and then we’ll get started.”

Kate gave my leg a pat and padded barefoot out of the room. Bear glanced up as she went, then resettled. Above us the air conditioner cycled on, breathing cool air out into the room.

“I’m fine,” Nat said. “You go ahead.”

“You should eat.”

“I’m not hungry. I just want to rest. Okay?”

Music started up out in the house, filtering down through the hallways. A thump of bass pulsing beneath an electric fuzz. Silverware clinked together brightly.

I stared down at her lying motionless in the dark. “I’ll bring you something back.”

Bear jumped up to follow when I moved off the bed, but I nodded over toward Nat and he returned to her, crawling his way to the crook of her arm. Nat tried to shove him away, but he was persistent, wriggling closer until he had his nose buried in her neck. Finally she lifted one hand and began to stroke his side. I closed the door behind me and went out into the house.

Everyone fell silent when I slid open the screen door that led to the porch.

Kate was sitting on the opposite side of a large wrought-iron table with a magazine in her lap. Beside her, an Asian girl with a tattoo peeking out of her collar was drawing in a black leather-bound sketch pad. Reese sat across from them, slumped in his chair. The sun was just starting to fall, spreading golden light over all of them.

“Well, hello there!”

A stocky guy with exuberantly mussed blond hair stood at the head of the table, a bottle dangling from his fingers.

“Before you come any closer,” he said, moving behind Reese and planting his hands on his shoulders, “I have to ask: Do you intend to follow through on stabbing this young man in the face?”

“Alec!” Kate said.

“Keep in mind that none of us are against this,” he said. “I myself have always despised him because he’s so much better looking than me. A good facial scar might take him down a peg.”

The girl next to Kate spoke up, surprising me with a British accent. “Sorry, Alec, a good facial scar would just make Reese look tough as well as handsome.”

“Thank you, Diane,” Reese said.

Alec balled up his napkin and threw it at Diane’s head. “We have to stick together, D!” Alec mock whispered. “He’s prettier than you too!”

Diane laughed, then went back to drawing in her sketch pad.

“Over here, Cal,” Kate said, patting the chair beside her. “Me and D will be like insulation between you and our obnoxious host.”

“Obnoxious! Did you hear that, Reese? She called me obnoxious!”

“It’s almost hard to believe.”

I moved self-consciously around the porch as Reese and Alec argued playfully. The table was littered with food wrappers and green glass bottles covered in French writing.

“How’s Nat?” Kate asked as I took a seat beside her.

“She’s okay, I think. Tired.”

“Right,” Diane said with a gentle laugh. “If I’d been in a helicopter crash, I think I’d be pretty tired too.”

“Yes!” Alec said, dropping back into his seat. “The helicopter crash. They tell me you were fleeing the Path!”

“Alec,” Kate said. “Seriously?”

“What? Expressing curiosity about your guests is a virtue, Kate.” Alec turned to me. “Now, what was it like? They were shooting at you and stuff?”

Alec was leaning across the table, his green eyes wide, almost hungry. I looked down at the silverware by my plate. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“That is. So. Awesome.”

“Uh, I don’t think it was for their pilot, Alec.” Diane said.

“Yes!” Alec said. “Sorry. Thoughtless.”

“Obnoxious,” Reese chimed in.

“Ha! Yes, that’s true too. Sorry, Cal. Humble apologies. But that happens in war, right? Noble sacrifices? Dulce et decorum est and all that? The valiant private throws himself in front of a bullet to save the life of the general who will go forth and turn the tide of battle.”

“He wasn’t Army,” I said quietly, pushing at the heavy silver knife. “He was just a pilot.”

“Dinner has arrived!”

Christos came out from the house, bearing a massive plate that was overflowing with slabs of meat. Everyone pushed the debris on the table away so he could set it down. The array of food was mesmerizing — hamburgers and sausages and two-inch-thick steaks that were charred and dripping blood. Reese dashed inside and brought out bowls filled with potato chips, cut fruit, and a green salad studded with garnet-colored berries. A silver tray held a teetering pile of butter-slick corn.

“Gruyère?”

Christos had materialized beside me with a wooden board in his hands. It was covered with six overlapping piles of cheese.

Dumbfounded, I sat there with my mouth hanging open.

“On your burger?” He counted down the piles on the plate. “We have Gruyère, white cheddar, Brie, Havarti, a Danish blue, and… Diane, what is this one?”

Diane looked up from her sketch pad. “Gouda.”

“Gouda! Any preference?”

“Go with the Gruyère!” Alec said. “When in doubt always go with Gruyère!”

“Gruyère it is!” Christos loaded a thick slice onto a bun, along with lettuce and tomato and a half-inch burger. He paused, thought again, and added another slab of meat and three mahogany-colored strips of bacon. “You look like you could stand to put on a little weight.”

Everyone fell to their food. My body, used to canned tuna and desert reeds, was desperate to take in as much as it could. My stomach seemed to be bottomless.

“So are you from Wyoming too?” Diane asked, once most everyone had cleared their plates.

“New York,” I said. “I’m on my way back.”

“Alec!” Diane called. “Did you hear? Cal’s from New York.”

“That’s great!” he said. “I love the Plaza. Do you go to the Plaza?”

“God, you are such a ridiculous snob,” Kate said. “You’re like a New Yorker cartoon.”

“What? It’s a nice place.”

“Yes, it is, but I think what Diane was saying is that Cal here is from—”

Alec slapped the table, rattling the plates. “Hey! I just had an idea. It’s going to be a beautiful night and I think it’s time we got this party moving! Who’s up for a swim?”

“Yes!” Reese agreed, leaping up from the table.

“Aren’t we supposed to wait a half hour or something?” Diane asked.

Alec lifted a scholarly finger into the air. “Society,” he declared, “has convinced us that the universe is a place of rules and regulations when, in fact, it is a… what?”

Alec leaned over Diane, palms planted on the tabletop, a ravenous look in his eye.

“Don’t leave me hanging here, D.”

Diane sighed. “Life is a cabaret.”

“Yes!” Alec shot a fist into the air and led Reese and Christos from the table and down a hill leading away from the house. His voice rose up into the night, loud and off-key.

“Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!”

Kate and Diane rolled their eyes as one and pushed back from the table.

“Come on, Cal,” Kate said. “It’s time to join the cabaret, ol’ chum. You want to get your guitar, Diane? You might be able to drown out Alec’s singing.”

“Maybe we should just drown Alec.”

Diane went back into the house as Kate gathered up some of the trays from the table. She stacked a loaf of bread and the board of cheese awkwardly in my arms and we left the porch, moving across a patch of lush grass that surrounded the house.

“Sorry about Alec,” she said. “I mean, he’s always been a handful, but he’s been unusually intense ever since we got here. I think he flipped out when Daddy Dearest sent him away. Probably thought he was indispensible to the empire or something.”

“What empire?”

“La-La Land? Hollyweird?” Kate laughed when she saw my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take this one step at a time.”

As Kate led me down the hill, I felt like I was moving through a dream. Below the house, there was a shallow valley with a small lake fixed in its center like a jewel. The sun was slipping below the treetops, spreading a rich orange light across the grass and the peaks of ripples out on the water.

Kate led me down to a wood-plank dock that reached out halfway across the water. We set our things down and took a spot at the edge. Kate slipped her sandals off and dangled her feet in the water. At the end of the dock, Alec and Reese were stripping their shirts off and getting ready to dive. Christos was lying stretched out on the deck, his skin almost bronze in the twilight sun.

“One! Two! Three! CANNONBALL!”

Alec and Reese leapt up into the air, tucking their legs in and slamming into the lake. A fountain of water exploded over the dock, soaking us all in icy water.

“Hey!” Kate yelled, laughing. I found myself laughing too, shocked by the water’s chill. Christos didn’t even move; he just closed his eyes and smiled up into the sky. Alec and Reese raced across the lake, their arms slicing into the steely water.

I looked back over my shoulder at the house. From the dock I could see how sprawling it really was. It stretched from one end of the hilltop to the other, a rustic brown expanse, more like a resort or a hotel than a house. The entire property was surrounded by towering pines that blocked out any trace of the world outside. I searched for bomb craters or scorch marks, anything that might suggest that this place existed in the same world I came from, but found nothing. A dreamy vertigo washed over me. For a second it was easy to believe there was nothing in the world but this.

“Camembert?”

“What?”

Kate was holding out a crust of bread with a slice of cheese on it.

“Oh. Thanks. Sure.” I took the bread and sat with it in my hand, too thrown to even eat. “How long have you all been here?”

“Uh… about six weeks now, I think. I don’t know. The days are kinda running together.”

“You haven’t had any problems with the Path?”

Kate bumped her shoulder into mine. “Forget about the Path. Life’s a cabaret, remember?”

“Right. Sorry.”

Kate smiled. “I was just kidding. We haven’t had any problems. We’re pretty well hidden, and besides, Alec’s dad was nice enough to hire a small army to look after us.”

Kate tossed a bit of potato chip into the water, and a duck paddled over to nibble at it. The pier wobbled as Diane returned from the house, her guitar in hand. She sat cross-legged between us and began to tune it. When she was done, she played a song I didn’t recognize. Her British accent disappeared within a lilting melody.

We listened as Diane moved from song to song and the sun fell. Once it was low enough, strings of white lights that lined the dock winked on automatically, surrounding us in a crystalline glow. Fairy lights. I remembered how Mom would hang them all through our back garden. Suspended within the flower patches and the vines, they filled the nighttime yard with a ghostly twinkle.

Kate gathered the remains of dinner into neat piles at the end of the pier. When she returned, she sat down beside me, the tip of her knee touching my arm. They looked strange so close, her leg smooth and white, my arm covered in old bruises and partially healed cuts just like the rest of me was. Kate lightly traced the boundaries of one of the bruises with her fingertip.

“Some of these are old,” she said quietly, her voice slipping in beneath Diane’s strumming. “You didn’t get all of them in the crash.”

I shook my head.

“You were taken,” Kate said. “Weren’t you? By the Path.”

I turned to her, her violet-colored eyes shyly searching.

“How did you know?”

“A guess,” she said with a shrug. “You said you were from New York but you were running from the West, which is mostly Path. How long were you with them?”

“Six years.”

“Six years,” she breathed, looking out at the water. “Since I was in… fifth grade.”

“Does everyone know?”

“No,” she said. “Not that they’d care, really.” She thought for a moment, tossed another chip into the water. “After a while, everything outside of here starts to seem sort of… unreal. You know?” She looked back at me with a smile. “I think you’re the most real thing that’s come along in weeks.”

Applause erupted as Diane finished one song and then launched into another, this one faster, punctuated by Christos stomping in time against the deck. Kate clapped along, moving closer to me as she did it, her shoulder warm against mine. The notes suddenly felt strident and jangling. Overloud. I thought of Nat and Bear lying alone in the dark.

“I should go,” I said. “Check on Nat and Bear. Bring them something to eat.”

“I’m sure they’re fine.”

“But—”

“It won’t kill you to rest for a second,” Kate said, a surprising command coming into her voice. “I promise.”

“I…”

Kate took my hand as the song played on. Across the lake I saw Alec and Reese pulling back toward us. They planted their palms on the pier and slid out of the water, slick as seals. Alec stood at the edge of the pier, his pale belly hanging out, and began a lurching dance in time to Diane’s playing. Reese and Kate cried with laughter and clapped along. Soon everyone was laughing, making a sound as crisp and bright as the fairy lights around us.

I felt Kate’s hand take my shoulders and turn me around. I flinched away but she was firm, lowering my head down into her lap. Diane stopped singing and her guitar rang out alone. The sound of it was so familiar and so sweet.

I breathed easy for the first time in what felt like weeks. I closed my eyes, feeling like we were locked away in a bubble lit by fairy lights and so still. And even as the world revolved, we remained.

I glided up to the house with the moon’s broad face above me. Diane and Kate were just behind me, talking quietly. The rest were strung along behind them down the hill, singing as they walked.

The glass door slid open and I stepped into the den. A second later, Reese and Alec came around behind me, heading into a hall at the dark end of the house. Alec brushed my shoulder as he passed.

“Night, buddy.”

He drifted away, humming quietly to himself. Diane and Christos followed them off.

“Night, Cal.”

“Sleep good, Cal.”

Kate led me back to my room, where the light from my open door made her pale skin and her violet eyes glow. An anxious buzz started in my head and moved through my body.

“I’m the third door down,” she said. “On the other side of the house. If you need anything.”

“Thanks,” I said, surprised to find my voice hoarse.

I expected Kate to go, but she looked at me intently for a moment and then down at the floor, her eyebrows drawn tight together. “I shouldn’t…”

“What?”

“It’s not my place,” she said, seemingly to herself. “But… you noticed that Alec changed the subject when I brought up New York earlier?”

“Did something happen? Is New York—”

Kate placed her hand on my chest. “No, it’s fine. It’s just… a few days ago Alec and Christos decided they were getting bored, so they talked their parents into sending a plane to pick us all up. It’ll be at a small airport not far from here in a couple days.”

There was a wooden creak as someone moved through the house. A door opened and closed.

“I don’t under—”

“Cal, we’re going to take the plane and go to New York.”

My heart pounded once, sending a tremor through my chest, and then everything seemed to go perfectly still, like the world was balanced on the edge of a cliff.

“I can’t promise that Alec will agree, but Diane and I talked about it. We’re going to tell him that if he doesn’t take the three of you with us, then we’re not going to go either.”

“I don’t know what to—”

“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. And we should probably be prepared for the possibility that Alec prizes Diane’s guitar playing and my sparkling wit a little less than we’d hope. In which case the five of us might be stuck here for a while. Anyway…”

Kate dipped in and kissed my cheek. Her face lingered alongside mine afterward. The scent of lavender clung to her as it did to me. I closed my eyes, breathing in the flowery scent. When I opened them she was gone. The house was shadowy and still, quiet except for the phantom strains of Diane’s guitar that replayed in my mind.

Something brushed against my calf and then Bear jumped up and planted his paws on my knee. He looked at me, his stump of a tail twitching frantically.

“You need to go out?”

Bear exploded out the porch door as soon as I opened it, disappearing into the trees. Even he seemed to be feeling better, his limping run a thing of the past. I went to the kitchen and filled one bowl with water and another with crumbled hamburger and leftover chunks of steak I found in the fridge. I carried the bowls outside and sat down at the end of the table. The sky was clear, so I found the North Star and used it to turn my chair due east.

I could feel Ithaca, sitting out there like a fire in the dark, tendrils of its warmth brushing my skin. I saw myself climbing onto a plane and rocketing toward it, a thrill in my chest so great it was almost an ache. I imagined finding Mom and Dad and even Grandma Betty out in the garden. Mom would have a glass of wine in her hand, listening as Dad played. Once dawn cracked the sky, we’d all drift toward the house and settle down to sleep. No one would ask about the last six years, no one would ask about James; we’d all slip into the future without a word.

Bear trotted out of the woods and threw himself into his food, snuffling and slurping as he ate. I looked across the table and saw that Diane had left her guitar behind. I popped the clasps of the case and pulled the guitar out and into my lap, leaning over its body.

“Want some dinner music?”

The Path didn’t allow music outside of Lighthouse, so it had been a long time since I had played. My fingers moved across the steel strings, stretching against the restraint of my cast to press into the frets. I played slow and mechanically at first, chord to chord, but then it started to come back to me. I meandered for a while until a song settled in.

My fingers tripped, sending the tune flat. I backed up and started again.

“Hey.”

Nat was standing in the open doorway behind me, barefoot in her filthy clothes. Bear left his empty bowl and ran to her, butting her shins with his forehead.

“She doesn’t have any hamburger, buddy.”

Nat lifted him up, setting his forepaws over her shoulder and cradling his bottom with one hand. Bear nuzzled into her neck as she dropped into the chair beside me. Bear adjusted, dropping off her shoulder and curling into her lap. He rooted around in her hand, opening it up and then licking it thoroughly.

Nat stared out at the shifting trees. She looked exhausted. Her face was drained of color and her eyes were deep and shadowed.

“Who are these people?” she asked.

“They’re from California, I think. Their parents sent them here when the war was heating up. Sounds like they even sent a squad of Feds to look after them.”

“Seriously? Fed soldiers?”

“That’s who found us on the mountain. I guess they’ve got their own barracks out there somewhere.”

Nat’s brow furrowed as she turned to look deep into the trees around us.

“You okay? Sorry, that’s a stupid thing to—”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right.” A tired smile rose on her lips. “When they brought us here, that Reese guy patted my back and said, ‘Just remember — everything happens for a reason.’”

“He’s lucky you weren’t armed.”

A puff of a laugh escaped Nat’s lips. It was welcome, but fleeting. She picked up a plastic lighter from the table and turned it in her fingers.

“I keep thinking about that parade,” she said. “You know? The one they used to have at Thanksgiving?”

“Macy’s,” I said. “My parents took us down to see it one year when we were little.”

“You remember how they had those helium-filled balloons? The big ones?” I nodded. “I feel like one of them. Big and empty and just… floating.”

Nat sparked the lighter once, illuminating her face in flames, then tossed it onto the table.

“Me and James had never been away from our parents before,” I said. “So those first few weeks after we were taken, it didn’t even feel real. We kept thinking we’d just wake up one day and everything would be back to normal. Someone would come for us or…” I looked over at her, ashamed. I was saying everything wrong. “I know it’s not the same—”

“No,” she said. “I know what you mean. Does it get better?”

I wanted so badly to tell her that it did, that all it took was time and patience and then everything was okay again, but I couldn’t lie to her.

“You think about it a little less,” I said. “But it’s always there. Eventually you go a day or two without thinking about it, but then you walk by a particular street or hear something familiar…”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re back where you started. And you hate yourself for ever feeling good, because it’s like you’re the one abandoning them.”

“So what do you do? How do you…”

“I wish I knew.”

Nat’s gaze drifted to the table. Bear thrust his nose into the palm of her hand and Nat leaned down until their foreheads touched. She breathed in deep, shaking. I reached out and gently touched her arm.

“I should go in,” she said. “Get something to eat, then go back to sleep.”

Nat lowered Bear to the ground and rose from her chair. She was halfway to the door when I stopped her.

“They have a plane,” I said. “In a couple days they’re taking it and they’re going to New York.”

Nat stood with her back to me, staring at our reflections in the glass door. Bear went to stand beside her.

“Nat?”

“I’m tired,” she said. “I should…”

“The Army won’t take us. You know that.”

Nat started to go, but I slid out of my chair and took her wrist. Her pulse beat a dull rhythm against my palm.

“Cal.”

“There’s nothing we can do here,” I said. “All we can do is get as far away as possible. Ithaca isn’t — maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s better than being here. I know that.”

I slid my hand down her wrist and opened her hand so her fingers were draped across my palm.

“Just come. Okay?”

We were suspended there for a breathless moment and then Nat leaned in toward me. First there was the warmth of her breath on my cheek and then her lips touched mine, once, gently. Then she pulled back again.

I waited for something more but she turned away, striding across the porch and to the door. Bear and I both watched as she slipped into the dark house and vanished.

20

Diane scooted her chair next to mine when I sat down to breakfast the next morning.

“So Kate told me all about you being taken by the Path,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“I just think it’s soooo interesting,” she said. “My father says the way Hill co-opted progressive ideas about economic justice and then mixed them with this kind of pastoral religious fundamentalism was an absolute masterstroke. And you know I don’t believe any of that propaganda about the Choice and killing all those people. I mean, I don’t want them to win or anything, but all that talk is just total religious bigotry. I mean, agree with them or don’t, but they’re people, not monsters. Right?”

Diane waited for a response, but I pretended to be absorbed in digging my fingernail into the rough grain of the tabletop. I was relieved when the rest of the group filed out of their bedrooms and collapsed into chairs around the table.

Everyone’s eyes were half closed, their hair twisted into sleepy tangles. Christos brought coffee in thick earthenware mugs. Kate was at the end of the table. Her dark hair was bound with a paisley bandanna, her cheeks picking up a reddish glow from her rose pajamas. She glanced up at me over the edge of her mug and then quickly looked away. Diane shook her head and laughed softly. When Kate got up to get more coffee, Diane leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“Our Kate gets a little squirrelly when she decides she likes someone. Prepare for rough seas, sailor.”

“What are you talking about?”

Diane patted my arm gently and went back to her drawing. “Don’t worry, love, you’ll figure it out.”

Alec sauntered in, stretching his arms over his head. A slip of belly hung out under a Superman T-shirt. “Well well well,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Sleep okay?”

“I did. Thanks.”

Alec dropped into his place at the head of the table, and Christos pushed a cup of coffee over to him.

“I had a dream that I stepped out onto the stage at Lincoln Center for my very first performance of Hamlet to find that I was not wearing any pants. It was disturbing for all involved.”

Alec took a deep drink of the coffee and then looked over my shoulder. His eyes brightened.

“Well, this must be the reclusive Natalie! Come, join us. Christos, our lady needs coffee! Oh, and Bear’s here too! Bear!”

Bear dashed across the floor and jumped up onto Alec’s leg. Nat hovered awkwardly in the doorway to the dining room. She had transformed since I saw her the night before. The traces of dirt and blood had been scrubbed clean and her hair was washed. She was dressed in a clean pair of corduroy pants and a black T-shirt. Seeing her filled me with a strange sense of weightlessness. I caught her eye and nodded to an empty seat next to me. Nat quietly folded herself into it.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“Morning,” Kate said, with an odd edge to her voice, looking from Nat to me. Nat gave her an awkward smile and nod. “You look pretty this morning. You get enough rest?”

“Yes,” Nat said, barely a whisper. “Thanks.”

“Chris, we got a girl here who needs coffee and food, stat!” Alec shouted.

“I’m on it!”

Nat’s hand moved beneath the table to take mine. It sent a tiny electric pulse through me. Our eyes met and she smiled.

“Breakfast is served!”

“Huzzah!”

As before, the food came out on platters, one after the other, an impossible abundance. It was an assault on the senses — vibrant yellow eggs shot through with gooey cheese and ham. I nearly laughed, seeing the stunned blank of Nat’s face as she watched it all paraded before us. Bear had his paws up on the table, bopping from one person to the next, gracefully accepting offerings of egg and bacon and toast. I dug in, devouring what was before me, and then the plate was refilled.

I turned to Nat, eager to see how much she was enjoying her first real meal in days, but her plate was still full. The eggs gleamed and the bacon lay in piles. She had gone pale, staring down at it all, fork in hand.

“Hey,” I said under my breath. “Are you—”

“So!” Alec announced to the table. “Who’s up for some post-breakfast rock climbing and then maybe a little high-noon fiesta?”

“Let’s do it,” Christos said, followed by Reese and Diane.

“Sounds great!”

“Perfect.”

“Awesome,” Alec said. “Cal, your gimpy arm means you’re useless to us, but I’m guessing Nat will be more than happy to show us all how it’s really done. Right, Nat?”

Nat didn’t look up. Didn’t move. Everyone at the table went silent, watching her. I nudged her under the table and she looked up with a start.

“Ah, there you are!” Alec said, grinning. “I was just asking if—”

“Where does all of this come from?”

Nat’s voice was flat and hard.

“Where does what come from?” Alec chuckled, his easy smile still gleaming.

“The house. The food. All of this.”

Alec laughed, wiggling his fingers in front of him like falling rain. “It cascades from the heavens,” he said. “Like manna. We go outside in the morning and there it is.”

“Don’t listen to him, Nat,” Diane said. “Christos’s and Alec’s daddies are beyond super rich. Christos’s dad is the last big Greek shipping magnate left, and Alec’s dad is an überproducer in Hollywood. You guys know Downtown Cop, right?”

“You will not take this monkey alive!” Reese called out in a guttural, German-sounding accent.

“I will now dance the dance of my people!” Christos echoed.

“Anyway,” Diane continued once the laughter died down, “it’s about the biggest movie series ever, and Alec’s dad produced them.”

“Along with many other notable—”

“—independent and Oscar-winning films,” Kate said. “We know, Alec.”

“You see,” Alec continued, “one of the benefits of being obscenely wealthy is that when you get tired of putting up with your children — who, let’s be honest, are pretty big disappointments — you send them off into the wilderness with an army of Secret Service types.”

“But if you’re all so safe here,” Nat said, “then why are you going to New York?”

“Because we’re sick of each other!” Christos hollered from the kitchen.

“And we’re bored!” Reese said.

“And,” Kate added brightly, “we’ve been talking about starting a theater company since school. We’re going to specialize in classic Roman comedy and the work that grew out of it. Commedia dell’arte. Molière. Maybe a little Shakespeare in the summer.”

“But there’s still a draft,” Nat said. “Last I heard, the age was eighteen, so I’m guessing most of you should be eligible.”

Alec glanced at Christos. “I suppose it was decided that our talents would be better used elsewhere.”

“By whom?”

“Nat.” I put my hand on her shoulder, but she batted it away.

“No, I want to know who decided!”

“Who decided what?” Alec snapped.

“That you deserve all of this.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with deserving things,” Christos said.

“Our parents made choices, hard choices, years ago,” Alec said in the patient lilt of a grade school teacher. “And because of their sacrifices—”

“Their sacrifices!”

“Nat,” I said. “Come on, let’s just—”

“My mother was an Army ranger,” Natalie said, a red fury burning her cheeks. “My dad just—” Nat dug her balled-up fist into the table. “My friends are all dead and you people sit here—”

“I’m sorry, Nat—”

“Oh, you’re sorry.”

“—but that doesn’t have anything to do with us,” Alec said.

“Your security guards should be in the Army,” Nat said, standing up now. “They should be fighting the Path!”

“Yes,” Alec said. “Absolutely. Because I’m sure this whole war would be over tomorrow if they were.”

“Alec,” Kate said.

“No, Kate.” Alec shot up from the table. “I’m sorry you got dealt a bad card, Nat, but I’m not going to be blamed for it. It’s the way things are and it’s not my fault.”

“Wait,” Diane said. “It doesn’t have to be like—”

“No, we gave them a place to stay and food to eat and now she wants to — Look, if you and Kate feel so strongly about this, then you two can stay and join up with the Feds too. I’m not making anyone do anything.”

Alec turned back to Nat.

“And I am sorry if my dad’s hard work allowed me to live like you wish you could. Honestly, I weep with guilt. But if you’re telling me that you’d throw it all away if you were me, then you’re either crazy or a liar.”

Alec and Nat glared at each other across the table. Nat didn’t say another word. She shot her chair away from the table and fled the room. Bear barked and ran after her. I looked back at the others, all of whom were glowering at Nat’s back, except for Kate, who was staring at me.

“Guys, listen, I’m sorry, she’s just… let me talk to her.”

I left the table and caught up to Nat at the far edge of the living room. She spun around when I took her shoulder. Her face was seething red and there were tears in her eyes.

“Nat—”

“How can you want to go anywhere with these people?”

I turned to see the group was breaking up and moving toward the living room. I took Nat’s hand and led her down the hall, away from the others.

“We’re using them for a ride,” I said in a hush. “That’s all.”

“We don’t need them,” she said. “We can’t be that far from Rapid City. We’ll get ourselves there and find a recruiting station.”

“I told you. They won’t—”

“We can talk our way in,” she said. “I know it. And even if we can’t, we can go back to Waylon and hook back up with Carlos and the others and enlist there.”

I flinched at the sound of a TV snapping on in the living room behind us. Kate and Reese had moved into the room and were being joined by the others. There was a rush of static followed by loud, hurried voices.

“Cal?”

Nat’s shoulders were squared, that aura of command pulsating off of her. I felt myself wilt beneath it.

“Listen, Nat, I…”

“Hey! Turn this up!”

I looked up at the edge of panic in Kate’s voice. Christos grabbed the TV remote and keyed the volume higher. A harried-looking man was on the screen. He had his finger to a monitor in his ear and was writing notes furiously.

“Reports are coming in now,” he said. “Some confirmed, some awaiting confirmation, but we’ll tell you what we know for sure right now. After months of stalemate, major elements of the Army of the Glorious Path are pouring over the border into California.”

“Oh God,” Nat said. Her hand moved to take mine.

A map of the country popped up onto the screen with Path states in gold and Fed in blue. The map quickly zeroed in on California, a mass of blue with four sets of golden arrows pointing into it, two coming in from the east and two from the sea.

“Four A.M. Pacific time saw an end to a brutal series of aerial bombardments that began in major strategic areas in the north and south. Following these assaults, mechanized elements pushed into Southern California from Path-controlled Arizona, while in the north an amphibious assault began on Northern California of a magnitude not seen since D-day in World War Two.

“U.S. forces were quickly overwhelmed and we understand that by eleven A.M., regional military commanders and the California governor met with Path general Jonathan Moreland, where they officially surrendered their state.”

On the map behind him, the blue of California switched to Path gold, linking up with other states to completely surround Nevada and Oregon.

“For more on what this means, we go to our senior military analyst, retired general Stanley—”

“Come on,” Nat said. “No way the Army says no to us now.”

She grabbed my hand but I pulled it back. “Nat, wait.”

“What?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but it was like there was a hand around my throat.

“Cal, what’s…”

I met her eyes and saw the realization hit her.

“You were never going to enlist with us,” she said. “Were you?”

I swallowed back a cold lump in my throat. “The MPs were coming for me. You said you wouldn’t help me unless I went with you.”

“I never said that!”

“Nat, two people signing up right now isn’t going to make any difference. You know that!”

“And what will make a difference? Running away to New York and joining their little troupe?”

“Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “I know what happens to people who try to fight them.”

Nat’s glare hardened. “So do I.”

“Wait.” I reached out for Nat as she turned to go, but she jerked away from me.

“No,” she said, glancing into the living room where Alec and the rest of them milled about the blank TV screen. “Maybe you do belong with them.”

Nat turned her back on me and strode toward the door. Bear heard her footsteps and scurried out of the living room to follow her. Nat threw open the back door, and a blast of sunlight filled the hall. Bear barked out after her but Nat stalked into the light, a black silhouette and then gone. The door slammed shut behind her.

After Nat left, Mitchell, the Fed sergeant who oversaw the house’s security, came in to brief us on the plan.

Their plane would be escorted into a landing at a nearby airport that evening. As soon as he had word that it was on its final approach, he would load all of us into a van and escort us to the airfield. Once we were safely away, he and his men would continue on to Philadelphia to join the forces getting ready to protect the capital.

Alec and the others took their last day in the house as an excuse to empty the place of food. Their party raged throughout the day, sending me down into the dark of a basement room to watch the news on a small TV with Bear in my lap.

What I heard changed from moment to moment as news teams struggled to keep up with a war that was moving almost too fast to be described. Reports of Nevada and Oregon falling were confirmed one moment, only to be retracted the next. There was talk of Path terrorists and hijacked planes and nuclear weapons, of pleas to Europe for assistance that were made and ignored. Late in the afternoon, there was breaking news that President Burke had been assassinated, but that too was disavowed within the hour.

All that was clear was that California was now in Path control and fighting was intense as they tried to push their advantage as far as they could.

The news cycle fell into a loop with ever more scant updates and one talking head after another. They were discussing a massive Midwestern blackout when I finally snapped the TV off for good.

A tense silence sat above me. No music. No movement. The glowing numbers on a digital clock across the room read 8:45. Where was Mitchell?

“Come on, Bear.”

Bear jumped down, staying right by my feet as we climbed up into the house. It was practically trashed. There were holes in the walls and burn marks on the furniture. Bottles and cans stood in piles among thickets of trash. The few scattered lights that were on filled the house with an eerie gloom.

Christos and Diane were passed out under a heavy blanket on the couch, their arms wrapped around each other. I tried to shake them awake, but they groaned and turned away.

I opened the porch door and stepped out into the night. Bear was tentative, sniffing at the empty porch before pressing his body into my calf and following me down to the lake. The fairy lights glistened over the dock and the water, filling the little valley with a white glow.

There was what sounded like a distant roll of thunder somewhere to our south and the ground shook. Bear whimpered, his head down and tail tucked between his legs as we continued on.

Alec was lying on his back at the end of the pier, arms spread wide and his feet in the water. Out on the lake, Reese was drifting on a large inflatable armchair.

“Cal?”

I turned. Kate was sitting cross-legged on the grassy shore, half in and half out of the light. She reached out to Bear, but he eyed her warily and moved behind the cover of my legs.

“Where have you been?” she asked in a sleepy drawl. “We were having fun.”

Even in the low light, I could see that her pupils had gone wide and were fringed in a maze of red.

“Inside,” I said. “Watching the news.”

“Any of it good?” she asked through a strange chuckle.

“The Path is on its way east,” I said. “We need to go. Has Sergeant Mitchell come back to—”

“What do you think it’ll be like if they win?”

“Kate.”

“Christos says it’ll be weird for a while, but sooner or later everything will go back to the way it was before because of, like, market forces, which are an inherently moderating force. Do you think it’ll be like that? Like a wheel? Or do you think it will be like something else?”

I felt a twinge of disgust and said nothing. A hard glimmer came into Kate’s eyes.

“Where’s your friend?”

“She left.”

Kate nodded, then went back to staring at the water. “It wasn’t nice, you know. What she said to us.”

“You should get ready to leave.”

Bear and I left her there, crossing the dock to where Alec lay sleeping. Out on the water Reese’s chair spun in lazy circles. When he saw me, he raised one hand in greeting, then paddled away into the dark.

“Alec,” I said, nudging him in the shoulder. “Alec, it’s Cal. Wake up.”

His eyes opened slowly. In the fairy lights they were shockingly blue with wide black pupils.

“Cal!” he said, then reached out to ruffle Bear’s fur. “Little dog!”

“Alec, you have to talk to Mitchell. We need to get—”

“Relax,” he said, moaning as he forced himself to sit up. “All is as it should be. Have a seat.”

“We don’t have time,” I said. “We have to get—”

Alec slapped the side of my leg. “Mitchell is getting ready as we speak, Cal. Now come on. Sit.”

Alec reached into the water and fished out a six-pack of cans. He tore two off and held one up to me. I looked back at the house, then took it and sat next to him. Alec cracked the can, and Bear settled down between us. There was another faraway rumble and the sky lit up in the distance.

Reese’s voice drifted to us from across the water. “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air…”

Alec peered into the sky and began to recite — “‘If destruction be our lot,’ he said. ‘We must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’ Honest Abe himself said that back before his Civil War started.”

“I don’t…”

“Everybody thinks this is just like Lincoln’s Civil War,” Alec said. “But this isn’t two sides fighting it out for the soul of a country. This is a suicide.”

Alec drained his can and threw it out into the water, where it spun among small eddies. He leaned forward, staring gloomily into the dark water, one hand on Bear’s side.

“We should start getting everyone together,” I said. “Get ready to—”

“We’re not going to New York, Cal.”

Everything around us seemed to cease all at once. The water went still and so did the sway of the trees and the air in my lungs.

“My dad got us clearance into Canada,” he said. “We fly west to meet him in Vancouver, then after that… I don’t know. We were thinking São Paulo, maybe. Or Shanghai.”

“Alec, if this is because of what Nat said—”

“I don’t blame you for that,” he said. “I asked my dad if we could fly to Toronto so you could get to New York from there, but the word is, it has to be Vancouver.” Alec turned to face me. “Look, you can still come.”

“Alec—”

“New York is done, Cal. This whole country is. There’s no point pretending that it’s not.”

He waited for me to respond, and when I didn’t, Alec rolled up onto his feet and threw his arms over his head. He stood poised for a moment and then dove into the lake, barely making a splash. He sprang up to the surface again and pulled away from me on his back with easy strokes.

“Think about it, Cal. The future is coming whether you like it or not. I promise you, in a few years, we’ll all wonder what it is we got so worked up about. No one will even remember this dump!”

Alec began to sing as he pulled away, aiming at Reese in his revolving chair. Soon his voice and the splash of his strokes dissipated and the water re-formed its glassy surface behind him.

I sat at the end of the pier feeling everything inside of me grow more dense by the second, like I was collapsing in on myself. Was Alec right? Would it really be so bad to leave with them? To leave all of this? I thought of Ithaca, trying to re-ignite the flame that drove me this far, but home felt so far away and so cold. This place was dying. I looked over at Bear, leaning eagerly over the side of the pier. Why should we die along with it?

I recoiled from the thought; even the barest edge of it felt like a betrayal. I set my knuckles against the wood of the pier and pushed until the grain bit into my skin. The pain snapped me into focus. Mom and Dad were waiting. Home was waiting. I wouldn’t let the Path turn me away now.

I scrambled for a plan. Walking out would be crazy. It was too far, and with the fighting heating up, I couldn’t imagine that we’d make it long before being picked up by one side or the other. We needed another way. Something fell into place. Philadelphia. I counted the miles between there and New York in my head and then jumped up and ran back to the house with Bear beside me.

I guessed that Mitchell and his men were quartered somewhere to the west of the house, so I passed it by and moved into the forest. When we came out the other side, we found a black passenger van at the end of an asphalt driveway, flanked by two Humvees.

Four soldiers were hurrying between one of the Humvees and a dock, loading it up with ammo and provisions. When I looked closer, I saw that Nat was one of them. She was dressed in scuffed combat boots and a set of fatigues that were too big. She set a wooden crate in the back of the Humvee and went for another. Bear ran to her, and I jogged over to keep up.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Go away, Cal.” Nat pushed Bear aside and bent over to pick up a crate of ammo.

“Where are you going?”

She hefted the box and brushed me aside. “Virginia.”

“Virginia?” I said, trailing her. “I thought after they dropped off Alec and his friends, Mitchell was heading to Philadelphia.”

“He is,” she said, slinging the crate into the back of the Humvee. “But the rest of us figured that instead of protecting a bunch of rich politicians who are in no actual danger at the moment, we’d go to Virginia, and help the people who actually are.”

“Think we’re set,” one of the other soldiers said.

She shut the hatch while the others took their places inside the Humvee.

“Nat, don’t do this.”

“California is gone,” she said, turning to confront me. “Pretty soon they’ll have the entire West Coast, and the odds are that Philadelphia won’t be far behind. So how long do you think you and your family can hide out in New York and pretend that none of this is happening?”

The Humvee’s engine rumbled to a start.

“Yo, Natalie, let’s go!”

Nat moved closer and I was surprisd to feel her hand taking mine, drawing me to her.

“You could help us,” she said. “You could help me.”

The anger in her had drained away, replaced by something raw and trembling that reminded me of sitting on that classroom floor with her and Bear, her armor of command wiped away. I started to speak but strangled the words off at the last second. Alec hadn’t turned me aside and neither would she.

Nat stood before me a moment more and then her boot heels turned and thudded across the asphalt. Bear went after her, barking as he ran around to the side of the vehicle. The door slammed shut and the engine revved.

“Rup! Rup rup rup!”

The Humvee pulled away down the dark drive. I stood there for a long time without moving. Eventually, Bear gave up the chase and returned to my feet, a small whimper in his throat.

“They about ready down there?”

Sergeant Mitchell had come out of the barracks and was standing by the loading dock. I nodded.

“Well, let’s get a move on, then. Don’t worry, kid, you and your friends will be singing ‘O Canada’ before you know it.”

“I’m not going with them,” I said, pushing my voice out harsh and quick. “I want to go to Philadelphia with you.”

“Looking to join up, huh?” he asked with a pleased grin. “Fight the big bad Path?”

Sergeant Mitchell waited for an answer, but the lie stuck in my throat. All I could do was nod.

Once the rest of Mitchell’s men got Alec and his friends in the van, we spent the next few hours creeping along back roads behind the remaining Humvee.

I was in the middle row of seats, with Bear in my lap. Kate was to one side of me, Diane to the other. Alec and Reese were in front of us, bouncing their heads in time to whatever was coming through their oversize headphones. Christos stared out the window at the dark.

Everyone was lit in the ugly green glow of the radio that sat between Mitchell and the private riding shotgun. Transmissions came through it in staticky bursts of code, panicked voices calling for assistance while gunfire snarled in the background. Eventually, Mitchell flipped the radio off and we were left with the rush of tires against the road.

An hour later we merged onto a highway that was clogged with refugees heading east. Mitchell forced his way through the jammed traffic and pulled up to an exit blocked by two Fed Humvees. We came to a halt and Sergeant Mitchell and his private got out to talk to the sentries.

Alec pulled one of the headphones off his ear and cupped his hand over the side window to look out.

“I would not want to be one of them,” he said. Reese turned to see what he was looking at and laughed darkly.

A rusty pickup truck had pulled off to the side of the road, just beyond the roadblock. One of its back tires was lying on the ground in shreds. A skinny man in a tattered blazer sat beside it, his head in his hands; a jack and a deflated spare lay in front of him. Standing behind him was a young woman staring at his back and clutching the hand of a small boy.

“What’ll happen to them if they’re here when the Path comes?”

Kate had turned away from the window and was staring back at me.

“They’ll be given the Choice,” I said.

“Is that really what people say it is?”

I nodded and Kate turned back to the family at the side of the road. The man was standing now and waving his arms for help, but everyone passed by, studiously ignoring him.

“We should help them,” she said.

“Sure,” Alec said over his shoulder. “Maybe we can cram all of South Dakota in our plane and fly them to Canada.”

“Alec—”

Before Kate could finish, Mitchell was climbing back into the van. Up ahead, the sentries drew aside and our Humvee pulled through the roadblock. Mitchell put the van in gear to follow. Kate pitched forward, about to say something, but as the Humvee started to move, she swallowed it and collapsed into her seat.

Behind us, the man by the pickup had given up trying to flag anyone down. He sat in a heap, the useless tools in front of him, watching us as we slowly rolled away. I pulled Bear closer to me and looked away too.

We went through the checkpoint, and the two Humvees re-formed the roadblock, like a gate slamming shut behind us. Mitchell switched the radio back on, filling the van with static and disjointed communications. Up ahead, the Humvee bristled with rifle barrels poking out of every window, scanning the trees. The turret gunner stayed low but kept his weapon moving, sweeping back and forth. The private in our van leaned out his window, his face lit by the glow of his rifle’s night-vision scope.

The war sounds were nearly constant, distant still, but seeming to come from everywhere at once, like hearts beating out in the darkness. The air felt warmer too and dense, weighing down on us. Even Alec and Reese noticed. They pulled the headphones off their ears and sat up straighter, watching out the side windows as bursts of yellow and orange lit the sky above the tree line.

I wondered where Nat was right then. Had she and her friends gotten stuck in this fight? Or had they managed to push through, eager to throw themselves into an even fiercer one ahead? I could still feel the heat of her hand on mine and hear her voice, hushed, asking me to come with her. Why did that sound make me feel so small?

I shut my eyes and counted out the miles from Philadelphia to New York. Once we reached the capital, all I had to do was slip away from Mitchell and all of this would be over before I knew it. I tried to fill my head with green forests and the crash of waterfalls, but the memories were slippery, gone as soon as they came.

Diane said something and as I opened my eyes and turned to her, a blast of yellow light erupted on the road ahead. The sound of the explosion followed a half second later, tearing through the inside of the van like a tidal wave. I bent over my lap, clapping my hands onto my ears. The world outside spun wildly and then there was the squeal of brakes, and the next thing I knew, the side doors were flying open. The world outside the van was lit in flickering yellow and orange.

“Everybody out,” the private ordered. “Move move move!”

He pulled Diane out first, followed by me and Kate. I reached for Bear but the private shoved me away and went back for Reese and Alec. Mitchell was at the rear of the van, his rifle locked into his shoulder, firing into the tree line. Christos crashed into me and I stumbled farther into the road, where I saw the Humvee lying on its side, consumed within a wall of flames.

“Across the road!” Mitchell yelled over the gunfire. “Run!”

Diane and Christos blew past me, but I turned back for Bear. I made it to the corner of the van just as Alec and Reese were jumping out the door. Reese hit the asphalt and dodged away, but as the private reached up for Alec, a volley of gunfire exploded from the tree line. The private crumpled to the ground and when Alec tried to jump past him, there was another roar. He took the full force of a blast in his chest and was pitched back into the van.

Someone screamed behind me but I couldn’t move. Alec was half in and half out of the van, his legs hanging out of the door, still. The private was on the ground in front of him, his chest torn, surrounded in blood.

“Run! Get across the street!”

Mitchell pushed Kate into my arms. We tangled together as she tried to get past me and reach Alec. It was like time started up again. I shoved her away and kept her in front of me as we ran. We made it halfway across the road when I saw Bear. He was between the van and the Humvee, claws dug into the asphalt, barking at the gunfire that was pinging off the roadway. I handed Kate off to Reese and sprinted across the street. Terrified, Bear sank his teeth into my arm when I grabbed him but I held him tight and raced into the trees.

I found the others at the bottom of a hill. Reese was holding himself up with one hand braced against a nearby tree while with the other he mopped at blood pouring from a gash on the side of his face. Christos was on the ground, his face ghost white, his body limp. Kate was deeper in the woods, wailing, her fingers sunk into the flesh of Diane’s arms.

“We have to go back!” she screamed. “We have to get Alec!”

There was a crash behind us and I turned, expecting a squad of Path soldiers. It was Mitchell. He raced down the hill and dropped to his knees in front of me.

“Took us too long to get here,” he said, panting as he freed a spent magazine from his rifle and tossed it aside. “Drone took Rashad’s Humvee and now there’s movement everywhere. Path. Fed. I don’t know. You have to get them moving. Head west.”

He seized, digging one hand into his side. It came back shiny with blood.

“Sergeant—”

He knocked my hand away. “The plane is on an airstrip two klicks west,” he said. “Last we heard, no one controls it yet. You have to get there before they do. Get to it and get on it, all of you.”

“But you’re—”

“Go!”

Mitchell slammed a fresh magazine into his rifle and ran back toward the hill. Bear was barking again, wild and high-pitched, mixing in with the chatter of weapons fire and crackling flames coming from the road. Reese was the only one still on his feet, so I grabbed him first, turning him to face me.

“We have to go. Get Christos. Do you hear me?”

Reese nodded and lurched away. Kate was on her knees, slumped over with Diane at her shoulder. I took her arm but she thrashed away from me.

“We can’t just leave. We have to get Alec!”

“He’s dead, Kate.”

She looked up at me, eyes wild, uncomprehending. There was no time for this. I glanced at Diane, and she jerked Kate up without a word and got her moving.

Bear and I led the way, running until we were nearly out of sight of the road. I took one last look behind us and saw Mitchell on his back, arms thrown up over his head, his weapon on the ground next to him. Dark figures, silhouetted in the Humvee fire, were crossing the highway toward us.

Gunshots zipped through the air, slicing into branches and rocks all around us. There was a clear trail dead ahead, but I led the others off of it and into heavier woods. We ran over dark and uneven ground, crashing to the earth and pulling each other up again and again until the firing behind us finally died down.

We came out of the woods and entered a shallow valley that was filled with a pall of gray smoke heavy as fog. Explosions made deep bruises of red and yellow within it, and the rattle of gunfire came from every direction. Seeing no other alternative, Bear and I led the others into the smoke, trudging across ground that was a mix of torn grass and ankle-deep mud. It was like walking underwater.

I kept us as close together as I could, but there were moments when I’d look back and someone would have evaporated into the gray, only to reappear seconds later. Only Bear stayed by my side, but he was limping again and cringing at the rattle of fire. Every time we paused I dropped my hand to his side, petting him to try to still his shaking.

We’ll get them in sight of the airfield, I thought, willing it to somehow bridge the gap between us. And then they’re on their own. We’ll find the highway east and mix in with the evacuees.

We moved on, catching bits and flashes of the fighting through the haze. Men and women grappling hand to hand. Scattered, torn bodies facedown in the muck. Ranks of artillery like smokestacks vomiting fire and smoke into the sky. Once, we all dropped into the mud and watched as a company of tanks passed within feet of us. Close up, they were massive, their flat gray hides making them seem like something mythological — eyeless creatures clanking and grinding and spewing fire.

More than anything else we saw our own mirror images — ghostly scores of refugees shambling half blind in every direction. I shuddered to see them, feeling a sudden bone-deep terror that said there was no airfield at all, only this smoke and this battlefield, and we would all be out here wandering in the gray forever.

The base of a hill emerged from the smoke and I waved everyone to it. We all dropped to the ground, exhausted. Bear cringed against my leg, trembling at the blasts that shook the ground without a pause.

Kate and Reese looked to be the worst off, pale and blank eyed, their clothes torn and weighed down with muck. Reese’s wound had stopped bleeding but his face and neck were covered in blood. Christos looked unhurt but he was strangely listless, sitting draped over his knees and breathing shallow. Diane was as dirty and worn as the rest, but she seemed sharper than she had been before, more focused. She was crouched beside me, searching the hillside methodically. There were pockets of other refugees all around us — men, women, families — all of them clinging to the hillside like it was a life raft.

“Look.”

Diane pointed about a half mile above us just as the wind shifted, revealing a thin road that rose up the hill and, at the end of it, a small island of light. Within it I could make out the rotating lights of a control tower and a tall steel fence.

Diane moved forward, but I held her back. We weren’t the only ones interested. Muzzle flashes bloomed along the length of the hill, like strings of firecrackers.

“What do we do?”

I looked to our right where the ground ran straight and clear along the base of the hill and into the woods. The highway east was only a few miles on the other side of those trees. This was my chance.

I heard my instructions to them in my head — Keep your eyes on the lights of the airport. Keep running. Don’t stop no matter what. But when I turned back, Reese and Christos and Kate and Diane were all watching me. Behind them some of the other refugees had drifted down around our circle, all of them waiting.

“Cal,” Diane said. “What do we do?”

Bear was on the ground in the center of our group, turned in a ball, his head tucked into his belly. I placed my palm on his back and felt his warmth move through me.

“You follow me.”

Bear and I sprinted up the hill toward the road. Kate and Reese were behind me, followed by Diane and Christos. The other refugees were spread out below us, like links in a chain. Two or three at a time, spaced thirty seconds apart.

The hillside was a slurry of mud and debris that sent all of us down into the muck every few feet. Each time, though, we dug in and got back up and kept running, focusing on the lights of the airport and trying to ignore the sounds of the valley being ripped apart behind us.

I hit the road and made it halfway up before I was stopped by a roadblock of Humvees. They raised their weapons and shouted, but we darted off the track and back into the trees. An instant later I heard the swoop of a helicopter, and the roadblock was obliterated. The shock wave sent me into the mud. Bear dug his snout into my side, urging me up. I pushed him aside and started to move.

“Cal!”

Behind me, Diane and Christos were running up the hill to Reese and Kate. Kate was standing but Reese wasn’t. He was on his back, conscious but moaning and clawing at the mud. When I reached him I saw that his leg was shattered midway down his shin.

“What do we do?” Kate asked, her eyes electric with fear.

“Keep going,” I said and pushed her up the hill. “Christos!”

Christos left Diane and dropped by his friend’s side. Reese was sweating and pale, covered in mud. He gritted his teeth to try to keep from screaming.

“I’ll get his arms,” I said to Christos.“You take his knees.”

“But his leg—”

“Do it!”

Christos hooked his arms under Reese’s knees, and I slipped my elbows beneath his armpits. Reese shrieked as we lifted him, the veins in his neck bulging, his skin going scarlet. It got even worse when we began moving up the uneven ground and I was climbing backward, slipping and stumbling. He screamed until his throat was shredded and then he passed out.

We hobbled up the hill that way until the sky went bright around us. At first I thought it was another explosion, but then I saw my feet move from mud to asphalt. Floodlights were beating down on us. I looked over my shoulder and saw the open gate of the airfield. Kate and Diane had run ahead out onto the tarmac, where a single plane waited. Christos and I made it through the gate and then hit the ground when we couldn’t take another step. Bear rushed to my side, digging his nose into my arm.

He flattened to the ground when a drone shot over the airfield with a scream. It loosed its munitions on the valley. Where they fell, it was like a seam had been ripped into the earth and you could see all the way down to its molten core.

Two of the other refugees came over the lip of the hill at a run and moved Christos and me out of the way as soon as they saw us. They took Reese in their arms and brought him the rest of the way toward the plane. Its engines were spinning now, filling the air with their urgent whine.

Diane returned for Christos and then someone tugged at my arm.

“We have to go!”

Kate’s violet eyes were electric in the floodlights. She knelt down beside me and covered my hand with hers.

I looked over her shoulder at the gleaming white of the jet as the refugees filed inside. I saw myself in one of its seats, strapped in and climbing into the night sky, leaving behind the Path and the Feds forever. It should have made me feel like I was being sprung from a prison, but it didn’t. It was like there was a stake running through my body and deep into the earth and if I tried to leave, I’d be torn apart.

“Come on,” Kate said. “It’s over.”

Her hand slipped from mine as I backed away. Kate called out to me but I had already turned and started running. Bear’s claws scrabbled against the tarmac behind me, racing to keep up. I heard Kate’s voice one last time as we ran through the gate and turned east toward a patch of trees where the land dipped down into the valley. We hit the edge of it just as another bombing run completed out in the valley. The ground shook and my foot hit thin air, sending me tumbling down the embankment.

Rocks and twigs raked my arms and back as Bear and I went spinning down the face of the hill. We hit the bottom with a jolt and rolled into a thin stream of icy water. I lay there buzzing and numb, holding my breath against the rush of pain I knew was coming.

Far above me, there was a swell of engines, loud even over the sounds of the battle, and then the jet’s running lights appeared as it strained against gravity and rose into the sky. Trails of tracer fire chased it but they fell short. In seconds the jet was swallowed up by the dark.

I imagined all of them looking down at fires in the valley and then the snaking lights of the evacuees on the highway, relieved to see them grow smaller and fade away. I wondered how cold that relief would feel when they looked back and saw the place where Alec was meant to sit.

There was a whimper behind me and I turned to find Bear lying in the water, dazed and still.

“Bear?”

I crawled across the ground, grimacing from the pain, and reached out for him. Bear’s teeth flashed as he snapped at my finger.

“Hey. It’s me.”

Bear kicked himself back into the muck near the stream, coiling up and eyeing me warily. He growled when I went for him again, so I held up my hands and eased back onto my knees to examine him from a distance.

“Shhh. Shhhhh.”

There was a shallow gash on his belly and another on his side, but it was one of his front legs that was the real problem. It was bloody from a deep cut that ran nearly its length and the paw was badly swollen. It was the paw he had been avoiding on and off for days. It looked like one of the thin bones just back from his claw had snapped. I looked down the length of the ditch. It had to be a mile or more to the highway.

The fighting was still raging in the valley behind us. We had no choice. I plunged my hands in the scummy water of the ditch and scrubbed the soot and sweat from my face before drinking deep to purge the acid from my throat.

Bear growled steadily as I reached for him. Moving as slow as I could, I got one of my hands on his side and held it there. His fur was hot and his heart was racing. His growl rose in pitch as I moved closer. He snapped again, drawing blood, but I managed to get my hands hooked under his front legs and lift. My wrist throbbed and he yelped in pain but I got him up onto my shoulder, holding him steady and letting him settle as the icy water of the stream coursed around my feet.

When I felt his head fall to my shoulder I held him tight and started moving. I stayed as low as I could, stroking Bear’s back and whispering in his ear as I crept the length of the ditch. We finally came to a place where the water ran into another concrete pipe. I could hear honking horns and idling engines just above us.

I climbed the embankment around the pipe, awkwardly leaning forward so Bear’s weight wouldn’t throw me off balance and send us tumbling backward. He began a steady whine in my ear. The sound of it gutted me. I wanted nothing more than to stop and hold him until it passed, but I kept pushing us on, focused on the highway sounds ahead. A couple feet from the top, I set Bear down and belly-crawled the rest of the way until I could peek between two thin trees.

The highway was choked with a river of cars and trucks stopped dead. Horns and voices blared and miles of brake lights glowed bloodred, from where I stood out to the horizon. Bear stood watching it all, his injured paw held tight to his chest.

“Hey! Over here!”

A rusty Chevy sat a few cars down from us. The passenger-side window was open and a gray-haired woman was leaning out of it and waving us down. Bear lifted his head and then hobbled over to her. When he reached the car, he jumped up on his hind legs and hooked his one good paw over the window. The woman produced a bag of crackers and fed them to him one by one.

“This your puppy?” the old woman asked.

I nodded and dropped down beside Bear. “You know there’s Path just on the other side of those trees.”

“Yep,” she said. “Saw ’em a ways back and they waved us right by. Word is they decided that it was better to hand the Feds a refugee crisis than deal with it themselves. Say one thing about those Pathers — they ain’t dumb!”

She cackled, then turned to the man driving the car and exchanged a few words. Bear moved down the length of the car, sniffing around the backseat where an old mutt was curled up among their things. He lifted his head when he heard Bear and pressed his nose against the glass.

The woman leaned back out the window and waved me over. “Listen,” she said, her voice low. “The rest of these jerks are more than happy to leave people like you behind but we got room and, sorry to say, but you two don’t look so hot. Why don’t you jump in? We’re heading to my sister’s lake house out in Bull Lake, Montana. You guys can snuggle up with Roscoe back there. Rest a few days with us before moving on.”

I shook my head. “We’re heading to New York.”

Bear hopped back to us, and the woman continued to feed him, watching me over his shoulder.

“Not my business,” she said. “But I can’t say I like your chances, son.”

I looked down the miles of road that lay ahead. How many of them could I walk with Bear on my shoulder before we fell over? The woman’s offer made sense — go to Montana, rest, then continue on — but thoughts of Grey Solomon loomed. Surely these people would hit a Path checkpoint eventually. What if they were still looking for an escaped novice traveling with a dog? Did I want to see this woman lying by the side of a road too?

I watched as Bear devoured the food from the woman’s hand. Despite our time at Alec’s house, his ribs still stood out under his coat. He was filthy too, caked with mud and the blood from his injuries. I could only imagine what kind of infection was working itself into him from the filth of that sewer ditch.

Brake lights blinked off and the cars far down the line started to move. I looked back again and Bear was panting happily as the woman rubbed his ears. I felt a suffocating weight pressing down on my chest and imagined that my voice was something separate from me.

“Can you take him?”

The woman stilled Bear with one hand on his shoulder and looked over him at me. “You sure?”

As if he sensed something in the air, Bear came down off the car and limped over to me, pushing his nose into my leg. It took everything in me not to look down at him.

“Got a long way to go yet,” I said, fighting the hitch in my voice, trying to get it out before I stopped to think. “And he’s hurt.”

People behind us started to honk as the cars just ahead of the woman’s began to pull away. She said something to the man at the wheel and then reached behind her to pop the back door.

I threw my arms around Bear’s neck and pulled him close to me. I closed my eyes, burying my face in his side. He yipped and wiggled, his whimper growing sharper and more distressed. The cars ahead moved down the road. The honking grew louder.

“A cabin sounds pretty great,” I whispered into his ear as he squirmed and whined. “It’ll be better. Okay? There’s a long way to go still, and I don’t know if I can take care of you.”

“Rup!”

His anguished bark hit me like a punch to the chest. As much as I wanted to keep my arms around him, the honking horns were growing more insistent. People had begun to shout for the couple to move their car. I swept Bear up in my arms as an awful pressure built in my chest.

“Rup! Rup rup rup rup!”

The woman’s dog cleared out to the far side of the car as I laid Bear onto the backseat. Bear jumped up, barking, but I slammed the door before he could get out.

“We’ll take good care of him. I promise. Son?”

I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t look at Bear. I ran toward the tree line to escape the sound of his claws scrabbling madly against the raised window.

“Rup! Rup rup rup! Rup! Rup! Rup!”

His barking grew louder and more broken-sounding, mixing with the angry horns of the piled-up cars. All I could do was keep moving, stabbing my boots into the unsteady gravel as fast as I could to get away, into the safety of the trees.

“RUP! Rup! Rup rup rup rup rup rup!”

The woman’s car drew alongside of me and then the engine thrummed as they pulled down the highway. Bear’s barking peaked into an anguished wail as they passed and then it faded and I was alone.

I reeled through the woods, reaching from one tree to the next to hold myself up. Without Bear, the night seemed like a hand pushing me into the ground.

I walked until I couldn’t anymore and then fell onto a mossy bank in the midst of towering oaks. Skeletal branches and black sky hung over me. I rolled onto my side, curling around a keen emptiness, a void where the heat of Bear’s body should have been. I could still feel his chest rise and fall beneath my hand and hear the little yips and barks that escaped his lips as he slept. I tried to imagine him safe and warm in the back of that car, but it was no use. How could I have let him go? How was I going to make it home without him?

Exhausted, I felt myself dragged down and I passed in and out of fitful sleep throughout the night. When I woke for the last time, I was covered in sweat. I struggled to sit up, my body feeling like it was made out of lead. My head was pounding and my stomach churned. I planted one hand in the dirt and rolled myself up, legs shaking, half bent over. I made it twenty or thirty feet from my camp, then fell to my knees just off the highway’s shoulder.

There was a pause like being held over the edge of a cliff and then my gut clenched and I vomited up the foul ditch water until I was breathless. The sickness came in waves, one after the other. When there was nothing left in me, I collapsed onto my side, spent and trembling.

The wind moved through the trees all around me, but I couldn’t feel it. A fever was smoldering in my skin and I was slick with sweat. Cramps moved up and down my body, subsiding and then flaring up without warning.

There was a grinding metallic sound and then a bright light rose up all around me. I looked down the length of the road, squinting at the intensity of the sunrise coming up between the trees. No, not the sun. Headlights. Floodlights. I scanned the roadway through bleary eyes and saw that I wasn’t alone. Bodies emerged from camps on the highway’s shoulder and from their places at the backs of pickup trucks. They all turned to stare into the ball of light down the road. I stumbled forward, drawing closer to it, shading my eyes with a quivering hand.

One of the cars started up and began to pull away from the others, but there was a sound like a string of firecrackers going off and the car exploded into an orange ball of fire. I fell onto the roadway, watching the flames and some dark writhing thing deep inside the burning.

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. I watched as Path soldiers stepped from vehicles and into the headlight glare, fanning out, rifles in hand. One refugee charged forward and was shot. The others drifted together into a small grouping, trapped. I saw it then. The main body of the evacuees had passed; now it was time to deal with the stragglers. A figure stepped from a Path vehicle and positioned himself directly in front of the group.

“My name is Beacon Radcliffe,” the man said. “And I am here to offer you all a choice.”

Somehow I found the strength to run. The trees and the roadway blurred, shifting into patterns of black and gray with flecks of yellow from the fire behind me. But then I felt a crash and I was on my back, staring at the stars. How did I get here? I wondered, delirious, as two sets of hands reached down and grabbed me. I thrashed senselessly, trying to pull myself out of the grasp of the dark bodies that had gathered around me, but I was too weak.

“He’s burning up,” someone said. “He’s sick.”

My back hit the road again, this time surrounded by the glare of a truck’s headlights. There were voices all around, murmuring shadows.

“What do we do with him?”

“Son? Son? Can you hear me? My name is Beacon Radcliffe.”

“Where’s James?” I moaned, barely aware of the words leaving my mouth. “Where’s Bear?”

“Give him the Choice and move on,” said a voice far above me.

“He’s delirious,” the beacon said. “He isn’t able to make a choice. Get a stretcher.”

“Sir, we don’t have room for any more. We can’t—”

“I answer to God and Nathan Hill, Sergeant, not you. Now, have one of your men get a stretcher. Once he’s better, we can give him the Choice.”

There was a thump of boots, and the beacon was beside me again, his hand heavy on my arm. I screamed as they lifted me to get the stretcher underneath my back. Every muscle in my body was filled with gravel and glass. Somehow I bit back my screams, but tears coursed down my cheeks. They got me into a troop carrier, dropping me roughly onto the deck, and then the engines started and we pulled away.

What I remembered after that came in a series of bursts as I crashed in and out of consciousness — the weary faces of the other captives in the back of the truck, their hands tied, bodies bent and exhausted; the nauseating lurch of the truck as it went from crawling to racing over uneven roads beneath the pounding of rocket fire; the way the green canvas cover above me lit up, almost beautifully, as bombs burst around and above us. When I closed my eyes to block it all out, there was still the constant shriek of machine-gun fire mixing with screams of pain and fright and the smell of smoke and sweat and fear-soaked urine.

All of this was entwined with the fierce heat of the fever that had moved into every inch of my body. It seemed to grind muscles and bones as if they were in a mortar. I turned my head to vomit onto the floor. My body wasn’t my own.

Time slipped and lurched. Along with the present, the past was there too. I could feel a lake and trees and the winds moving through the flowers of home, like a hand brushing through someone’s hair and then letting it fall. I was lying in the hammock late at night, happily sleepless, with James below me.

Then I was nine and in school, tiny behind my big plastic desk, so much smaller than all the other kids in my class. I felt the weight of the textbooks in my hand, their glossy pages and the rough grocery store paper-bag covers. School let out and I ran out the doors and met James. We found our way down to the creek, where we would leap from boulder to boulder, the slate-gray water coursing just beneath us.

But now it wasn’t only me and James; Bear was there too, barking happily, his tail up and wagging, hesitating at a boulder’s edge until we coaxed him to leap toward us. He would land, his sides shaking with fright at what he had done. James or I would scoop him up and tell him he was a good boy and brave, and we would carry him down the trail until he wriggled out of our arms and took off, leading us on.

The future was there too, but it was so hard to tell from the past, like a circle turning back to itself. I was older, tall for the first time, and living in the same blue house at the end of the street, only now it was my house and it was me who sat in the garden and played guitar late into the night. James was somewhere close, but I wasn’t sure where. Living down the street maybe or in a nearby town. Bear was at my feet, ageless, sleeping, his stub of a tail pounding the grass in time to the guitar. As the night fell deeper and cooler, the back door opened and two women stepped out. It was my mother, beautiful with her gray hair, and Nat walking side by side. They came to join me, but when they did, my fingers fumbled on the guitar strings.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked. “Why isn’t he here?”

Nat looked to Mom, and Mom reached down and scratched Bear’s sides until the dog wiggled over onto his back, his legs kicking contentedly.

“Where is he?” I asked.

Nat took my hand.

“Mom?”

But she just went on stroking Bear’s sides while Nat held my hand. I asked again, standing up at the edge of the garden, but no one answered me, no one even looked at me. It was like they were caught in some loop, immobile, out of time, and I was barely even there.

“Mom?”

“She’s not here, son.”

My eyes ached as I opened them. Someone was dabbing my forehead with a cool cloth. I was in the present again. We had stopped and the truck was empty except for me and Beacon Radcliffe, who was sitting on one of the wooden benches that lined either side. He was leaning over me, the cloth in his hand, his beacon vestments stained with dirt and bulky from the body armor he wore underneath them.

“You have to pray,” he said. “Do you know how to pray?”

I closed my eyes again and my knees were aching from kneeling for hours with the other novices in Lighthouse with Beacon Quan. He had us repeat our prayers over and over again until we could say them without thinking. Until the words weren’t words anymore, but ritual movements of air and lips and tongue held in muscle memory.

“If you pray hard enough,” Beacon Radcliffe said, “then God may allow you off this Path and onto another. Just pray. God makes the world. He can make yours.”

What would I have to do? I wondered. How hard would I have to pray for God to put me on the path home, along with James and Bear and Mom and Dad? Because if he won’t do that, then I had nothing to pray for.

I turned my head from the beacon and he finally relented and disappeared. There was a great stretch of blackness and then I was rising up into the air, free of the close stink of the truck. There were hundreds of voices all around me as well as the sounds of engines and boots and the rotors of helicopters flying low.

Had I slipped back in time again? Was I back at Cormorant, about to start my time as a novice all over again? My heart seized. How much longer then until I sat by that lake and listened to the Choice being given to all of those people who had trusted me? How much longer until I watched Grey Solomon die? Or Alec? How much longer until I abandoned Bear?

The sound dropped out again and I was somewhere cool and filled with only the softest rustling of feet. My clothes were torn away and what felt like steel wool dipped in freezing water was worked up and down my body. I was left alone, shivering and sweating at the same time, my skin livid. I tried to open my eyes, but they were so thick with tears and grime that all I saw was a fiery light filled with a black blur of distorted bodies.

What did I do to deserve this? asked part of me, but another part of me knew.