The Darkest Path

21

“Where am I?”

A white-robed companion was sitting at the edge of my cot. There was a bowl of water and a cloth in her lap.

“They’re calling it Kestrel.” Her voice was tentative with a light Southern accent. Her eyes were soft shadows beneath her mesh veil.

“How long have I been here?”

“About a week,” she said. “Your fever broke a few nights ago.”

“What was it?”

“Something waterborne, they think. We’ve been seeing a lot of it.”

The companion filled a cup from a water pitcher near the bed, then slipped her hand beneath my neck to lift me up so I could drink. I was lying in a large canvas tent that was packed with cots just like mine. Companions and medics glided through the room, ministering to the sick. Outside were the familiar sounds of a Path base, helicopters, Humvee engines far off near the command center, voices giving crisp orders.

I ran through the flashes of my memory — the truck, voices, sounds of engines and helicopters.

“We’re at the front,” I said.

“A few miles south of it,” she said. “Near Richmond. Everyone they take is being brought here now. Getting ready for the big fight, I guess.”

“Have they taken Philadelphia?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But Oregon and Nevada fell. Everyone says Philadelphia is next.”

The companion dipped a cloth into her bowl and mopped the sweat from my forehead. Cool water ran down the side of my face, loosening knots that seemed to run through my entire body.

“So it’s almost over,” I said, dreamy, my eyelids drooping. The companion moved on to wash my neck and my chest.

“Mara!” the shepherd called from across the room.

“Rest,” the companion said, laying a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

When she was gone, a lonely stillness fell over me. Somehow the bustle of bodies moving around me only made it worse. I reached under the sheets to my pockets but my clothes had been traded for Path-issued pajamas. The jeans I had been wearing were in a neat stack by the bed. I leaned over and rifled through them, digging one hand into my pants pocket until I felt a bit of metal. I drew out Bear’s collar and held it under the sheets, both hands pressing into the tough fabric. I felt an empty place inside me, but I imagined him in that cabin sitting by a fire, safe, and the gnaw of it eased a bit. I closed my fist around the collar and held it tight, wishing he were here, thankful that he wasn’t.

There was a gap in the tent flap across from my cot. Through it I could see a thin trail leading away from the tent and out into the camp. Bodies dressed in forest camo passed and a black helicopter streaked across the sky and disappeared. Despite the ache and the exhaustion, I could already feel a drumbeat starting up inside of me. Get up. Get dressed. Keep moving. I drew the blanket off my legs but stopped when I saw another companion standing across the aisle.

She was watching me, ignoring the rush of medics and orderlies around her. Blurred beneath the veil, her face was visible only as shadows and worried lines. I could tell she was new just by the way she stood, her body drawn in tight like she was trying to collapse in on herself and disappear.

The other companions were being led in prayer by their shepherd at the far end of the tent.

“You just got here,” I said.

The companion nodded. I waved her over and she drifted across the aisle, stopping at the foot of my cot.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “Just do what they tell you and you’ll be fine.”

“Is that what you did?”

I sat up slightly. There was something familiar in her rasp of a voice. “What do you mean?”

The companion checked the far end of the infirmary and then drew closer, coming up along the side of the cot.

“Don’t,” I whispered urgently. “If they see you they’ll—”

Her hand grasped the side of the cot and she leaned down by my ear.

“Looks like I was wrong, Cal,” she said. “I guess this is where you really belong.”

I peered through her veil until the lines of her face resolved into a sharp jaw and amber-colored eyes.

“Nat?”

I reached for her arm but she jerked it away from me. The shepherd called out to her across the infirmary.

“I guess we both do now,” Nat said. Then she backed into the aisle, sweeping across the infirmary and melting into the white sea of her sisters.

I sank into the cot, any scrap of energy I had gone, my head buzzing with a flat hiss of static. If they got Nat, then what chance did I have? What chance did any of us have? Beyond the tent flap, soldiers marched back and forth and engines revved. I held on to Bear’s collar and searched for the drumbeat that would urge me on, but there was nothing there. We were all lost.

Two days later I was put on my first work detail.

A young corporal showed up with a pair of standard-issue novice fatigues and led me out of the infirmary to where I would be helping to dig latrines.

I covered my eyes from the blast of sunlight that came when we stepped out of the gloom of the infirmary tent. My body was still weak, loose limbed, from days on my back. I kept my eyes on the corporal’s back and tried to keep up as he led me through the base.

Kestrel sat in what had once been a grassy clearing before it was trampled into muddy ruts by thousands of Path boots and Humvees. It seemed to be laid out in a mirror image of Cormorant, only bigger and more hastily put together. One quick walk through it and I had picked out the novices’ and citizens’ barracks and the sequestered ops center. A canvas-walled Lighthouse towered over everything in the center of camp.

The base was surrounded by a high fence topped with rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire. Plywood guardhouses, stacked with sandbags and bristling with heavy weapons, sat at every turn. The camp had clearly been constructed with a typical Path focus on security, but it was new and partially unfinished. I told myself there had to be a hole somewhere, that all I had to do was find it, but then I remembered all the years that James and I spent in Cormorant thinking the exact same thing.

I scanned passing groups of companions, looking for Nat, but I didn’t see any trace of her. She hadn’t come back to the infirmary since the day we spoke and part of me wanted to believe I had imagined the whole thing, that she had been some kind of fever dream. The idea that Nat could have been taken, and that she would have submitted to the Choice if she had been, seemed too impossible to be real. Of course, I knew it was. The Path had swept across the whole of the country, and now controlled nearly two-thirds of it. Anyone could be taken, and once they were, no one was immune to wanting to live.

The corporal led me up a hill at the southern edge of the camp and gave instructions to me and a group of ten or fifteen other novices. Since I still had my cast, I was on gofer duty, ferrying supplies and water, while the rest of them dug in the noonday sun. It took us till nearly sundown to finish the pit and construct the latrine housing. The group was almost ready to drop when the corporal led us to the novices’ barracks, where we were allowed a tepid shower before being shuffled off to dinner and prayers.

The Kestrel Lighthouse was nowhere near as impressive as Cormorant’s had been — it was simply a large tent full of chairs facing a makeshift altar. Drained from the sun and the day’s work, it was actually a relief to find my place among the others and rest on the flat pew. I helped a bewildered young novice find the right page in the book of prayers and then Beacon Radcliffe emerged and began the service.

“I am the Way and the Path…”

The voices around me fell into a tentative unison. The beacons stalked the aisles, their eyes hardest on the newest of us. Luckily, the service was still deep in my bones and I followed along easily, making myself nearly invisible in the cadence of the prayers and the flow of kneeling and standing. The rhythm of it was so familiar that I felt myself dissolving into it.

After prayers I followed the men to the novices’ barracks and found an open bunk, falling into it without even bothering to turn back the thin blanket. The men talked for a while and then one by one the lanterns were blown out and the tent fell quiet.

I was tired, but sleep seemed impossible. One look at the bunk above me and for a second I felt sure that all I had to do was stand up and James would be there, reading The Glorious Path by candlelight. When I turned onto my side and set my hand on the rough wool blanket, all I could feel was the warmth of Bear’s fur.

I slipped out of my bunk and stepped into my boots. A private was supposed to be keeping an eye on us but he had stepped away. I ducked through the flap in the barracks tent and into moonlight. Kestrel was restful in the dark, quiet except for the rhythm of helicopter landings and the distant artillery booms out at the front.

The ops center glowed with its electric lights. A few soldiers moved importantly from building to building within it. I could predict their every twist and turn: from the command center to the drone operators’ room or, if it was the end of their shift, to the cleansing tent to pray for forgiveness amid the scent of sandalwood. I hated the part of me that grew calm watching them. I kicked at a tent pole as I passed it, welcoming the jolt.

I found myself at the northern edge of Kestrel. Directly in front of me was the perimeter fence and a guard tower. I could see the soldiers inside, one leaning against a wall while the other stood over a machine gun, barrel pointed north. There was a blind spot along the side of a plywood hut. I stepped into it, pressing myself against the boards to watch.

Over the course of an hour a guard with a dog moved along the base of the fence and then vanished around a bend in the line. Later, two new guards emerged from their barracks and crossed toward the tower. The replacements climbed the ladder, and once inside, the four of them gathered in the center of the platform. I could hear a whisper of talk and even laughter. Lighters flared as illicit cigarettes were lit. The place may have looked like Cormorant but these were not her soldiers. I felt a twinge of disgust at their lack of discipline.

Gravel shifted out in the dark. I turned as a figure stepped out of a doorway and down the far side of the street. The last thing I saw before it disappeared into a dark patch was a flutter of white robes. There was no reason a companion should have been out at this hour.

The guards in the tower were still talking among themselves, so I slid along the length of a deep shadow, then across the road. I spotted the companion again, moving through a tight alley behind a line of tents. She stayed low, moving quick and decisively, not like a scared capture, like a soldier. I knew at once that it was Nat. But what was she doing?

Keeping my distance, I followed until she came to the end of the alley and crouched down with her back to me. She pulled her robes off and hid them just behind a tin garbage pail. Underneath them she was wearing nondescript gray coveralls.

The eastern fence was directly ahead of her, a hundred feet down a shallow slope. When she moved, she didn’t look left or right, she just ran straight toward it. Once there, she knelt near the struts of an unfinished guard tower, disappearing into the darkness.

Of course, I thought. Nat would have been looking for an escape route from the second she was taken. I couldn’t say I was surprised that she had already found one. I was just happy she saved me the trouble. A rattle of steel came from the fence line, followed by footsteps dashing away across the grass on the other side. I hesitated, certain I should go back and gather supplies, food and water at least, but then I heard the guard dog bark across the camp. His master was bringing him back this way. I left the cover of darkness and raced across the yard, running for the fence.

I was just barely able to keep up as Nat moved from empty streets and crumbling homes into an industrial area of boarded-up shops and abandoned warehouses.

There was a lull in the fighting at the front but there were signs of old battles all around me. Fast-food restaurants bombed into barely recognizable ruins, pitted streets, and the charred husks of destroyed vehicles. We weren’t alone now, either. Here and there other refugees — whoever hadn’t been swept up in the Path’s net as they ground forward — skulked about in the thin moonlight, scavenging for whatever they could find. They were all horrifyingly thin, with sunken eyes and wasted limbs, little different than the packs of stray dogs that emerged from every alley and shop I passed, their old tags chiming. I tried not to linger over the dogs’ matted fur and too-prominent ribs. Their mournful whimpers as I passed were like fingers probing a raw wound.

Nat stopped at a street corner by a string of warehouses. I thought she was taking her bearings in preparation for moving on again, but she backed into a dark doorway and didn’t emerge for some time. What was she doing? Was this as far as her escape plan had taken her? If so, I was safely away from the base. I could press on alone from here — keep moving north and hope to find a weak point in the Fed line.

I was about to start down the street again when the faint rumble of an engine rose behind me. I pressed myself into a doorway as a civilian pickup truck appeared on the street. Its lights were off and it moved slow, navigating around the craters and piles of debris in the roadway. When it came up alongside me, I saw there were two men inside.

Nat didn’t wait for the truck to stop; she emerged from the shadows and climbed into the bed as it rolled past her. Once she was in, the truck turned a corner and was gone.

Even better, I thought. If Nat had hooked up with Feds who were helping to move refugees across the border, then all I had to do was follow along. I shadowed the truck as it weaved through the streets, ducking into an alleyway when it came to a stop in the parking lot of a warehouse. Two men stepped out and, after scanning the buildings and street around them, knocked on the side of the truck’s bed. Nat emerged and the three of them crossed the parking lot and went inside. I stood in the quiet dark, watching the building. The front was a few miles to the north. What were they doing here?

A rusty-looking set of stairs was bolted to the side of the building, leading up to a second-floor entrance. I made it across the street and started up it, freezing at every creak and rattle of the old metal. At the top was a landing and a door with a narrow window set above the handle. I peered through it and saw a faint glimmer of light coming from the first floor, but there was no trace of Nat or the men.

I eased my shoulder into the door and stepped inside, finding myself on a narrow catwalk high over the warehouse floor. Below were empty boxes and wooden pallets lit by the beams of flashlights. I stole along the length of the catwalk until I came to another staircase, then flattened myself against the deck.

Nat was standing below with her back to me, facing the two men from the truck and another two who held the flashlights. The men were all in civilian clothes, old jeans and flannel shirts, but each of them moved with what I recognized as military precision.

One of the men took a hammer from a bag on the floor and carefully pulled the nails from the top of a wooden crate that sat in front of Nat. He lifted off the lid and reached inside. It was hard to tell what it was he pulled out at first. All I saw were canvas straps and lengths of white material. Nat held her arms up over her head, and the man lowered it over her body.

It looked like a bulletproof vest except it was larger and the fabric was far too thin. The man circled Nat, tightening straps until the vest fit snug against her body. When he was satisfied, he reached into the crate and set another box at Nat’s feet.

When he pulled out what was inside, a sick chill ran through me. I understood what it was that Nat was wearing.

The gray bricks he took out of the box looked like blocks of modeling clay, but the explosive power in each one of those slabs of C-4 was enough to demolish a small car.

He fit the bricks of explosive into slots that had been sewn into the canvas vest Nat was wearing. Two in front, two in back, and one on each side under her arms. Then he took a small battery out of the crate and ran wires from it to each of the bricks. The wires were gathered into one cable and concealed in a channel built into the vest. At the end of the cable he attached a trigger that was about the size of a small lighter.

Once Nat was wired up, the rest of the men moved around her, critiquing the bomb maker’s work and making adjustments. When they were done, the vest hugged her body so tightly that her companion’s robe was sure to conceal it. No one would notice what she was wearing until she pressed the trigger.

The men gathered into a circle while Nat stood before them. They murmured among themselves, then returned to Nat, slowly removing the vest and packing it into an ordinary-looking backpack. Nat slung the pack over her shoulder and was led out of the warehouse by the two men who had brought her.

The men with the flashlights spoke for a moment more, then went their separate ways. A door below opened and then whispered shut. The warehouse was perfectly dark and silent.

I lay on the edge of the catwalk, a dull buzz in my head, too stunned to move. It wasn’t possible. Surely I hadn’t seen what I thought I just did. Nat would never—

An engine cranked outside, shocking me out of my daze. I scrambled up the catwalk and to the door, stepping onto the landing just as the truck pulled away, retracing its steps back to Kestrel.

The ground trembled as the nightly barrage of artillery fire began. I turned toward the front, imagining soldiers on both sides of the border running in a hundred different directions with a hundred different concerns — certainly the least of them would be one raggedy-looking kid slipping across the border. Every muscle in my body was taut with anticipation, ready to run, but the image of Nat standing in that warehouse — motionless as those men dressed her — wouldn’t fade.

Far up the road the pickup truck accelerated, turning deeper into the warren of crumbling buildings. In seconds it would be gone. I took a last look at the front and then followed.

Nat slid out of the pickup’s bed at the same corner as before and set off through the streets, the backpack around her shoulders.

She took a different route back, veering from the warehouses into a winding suburb of abandoned houses. She dipped in and out of patches of moonlight through overgrown yards and cracked driveways. I trailed her around the fenced-off edge of a drained swimming pool, but when I came around to the other side, she had vanished.

I stood panting amid a wall of hedges and scanned a trio of houses across the street, trying to see into the woods behind them. Nothing. Everything was gray and still. My heart was pumping hard, on high alert. Where did you go, Nat? Where — A branch cracked near the middle house. I took off after it but the second I passed the row of hedges, I knew I had made a mistake.

Something slammed into my back, knocking the wind out of me and sending me sprawling to the ground. My cast hit an exposed root and I nearly screamed from the pain. Nat emerged from the bushes, a thick branch cocked over her shoulder like a bat.

“Nat, wait — it’s me!”

She paused, her face lost in the darkness. The branch didn’t move.

“Who else is with you?”

“No one,” I said. “It’s just me.”

Nat checked down the street and in the dark between the houses. “You followed me?”

I nodded.

“Plan on running to your friends in the Path and telling?”

“I told you. They’re not my friends.”

“You didn’t look too upset digging latrines for them.”

“I was captured. What did you expect me to do?”

Nat threw the branch into the bushes. “Nothing.”

I pushed myself off the ground and followed as Nat crossed the street, heading for the dark woods behind a track of houses.

“This is insane. You can’t do this.” Nat ignored me, head down, striding away. “Do you think your dad would want you to do this? Or your mom?”

Nat whipped around to face me. “I don’t think it matters what they want anymore.”

Her glare was cold and blank. The breath froze in my lungs and I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to — But killing a couple Path officers…”

“It won’t be a couple.”

“A hundred, then. A thousand. It doesn’t matter. They have the West Coast. At this point—”

“He’s coming here, Cal.”

“Who?”

Nat stared back at me.

“No. There’s no way he’d—”

“We hooked up with a Marine unit not long after we left you,” she said. “They were doing border raids into Arkansas and we decided to help them out. One day we came across a courier. Just one guy traveling alone. No phone. No radio. All he had was a satchel filled with encrypted messages. Once we broke the encryption, we were able to read them.”

“What did they say?”

“Hill knows this is the last battle,” she said. “He says God wants him to give a speech to the troops before it starts.”

“So tell the Feds,” I said. “If they know Hill is there—”

“We took it to them,” she said. “But they think as soon as the Path realizes the courier is dead, they’ll decide he was compromised and cancel Hill’s plans.”

“They’re probably right.”

“You know they aren’t,” Nat said. “If Hill believes that God is telling him he has to come here, do you think a lost message is going to keep him away?”

I searched for an argument, but she was right. If Hill thought coming here was his path, nothing would stop him.

“When?”

“We think tomorrow night,” she said. “In the Lighthouse. They’re already getting set. Flying in supplies. More security.”

“No,” I said, shaking the idea out of my head. “The Feds can’t make you do this.”

“No one is making me do anything,” Nat said. “I volunteered.”

Half in the moonlight, Nat’s skin was smooth and gray. She was thinner than I had last seen her, making her cheekbones stand out in thin ridges. Her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. I reached out to her but she pulled away from me.

“There’s a soft point in the Fed line three and a half miles to the west,” she said. “That’s how my people got through. The password of the day is streetcar. Say that to a sentry and you’re on your way home.”

“Nat, wait.”

“Go on,” she said. “Mommy and Daddy are waiting.”

Nat turned her back on me and there was a whisper of grass beneath her feet as she slipped into the dark. A flash of sickly light came from the front, throwing Nat’s shadow across the trees and the abandoned houses. There was a deep rumble beneath us and when it passed she was gone.

The house in front of me was two stories with a soaring front porch and large picture windows, all of which were shattered. Its door hung limp on its hinges. I climbed the stairs and pushed it open. The floorboards creaked as I moved from the hall to the dining room and into a kitchen.

A winding set of stairs led up to the second floor. There were four bedrooms there, each one larger than the last. I visited each of them in turn, walking around fallen curtains and the strewn clothes that people had left behind as they fled. Inside the last one, there was a small bed stripped down to a dirty mattress. Next to it was a nearly empty bookshelf and a single window with torn Spider-Man curtains.

I drew the curtains out of the way. The neighborhood spread out below, black and pale gray where the moonlight struck. I tried to picture the place before the war, the drab houses painted in bright shades of yellow and blue, surrounded by yards so lush they seemed to smolder beneath the summer sun.

Now the empty houses made me think of seashells washed up on the beach. I imagined you could put your ear to them and hear the echoey sounds of the people who had lived there — bodies moving from room to room, distant voices.

I ran my hand down the dusty spines of the books that had been left behind on the shelf. An odd warmth came over me as I recalled a time when James was four and I was six. We had both fallen to the flu and collapsed into our beds for three full days, sweating with fever and groaning from aches that made it seem like our muscles had been tied into thousands of tiny knots.

Those three days had been torture — I knew that — but when I recalled them now, the pain and fear seemed distant, like things I had heard about but never actually felt. The only times that seemed to have any weight at all were when Mom and Dad crowded into our room to feed us ginger ale and read to us in low soothing tones. I could still feel my mother’s palm resting on my forehead, and my father’s voice, and the feeling of the four of us in that room, bound together in a way that seemed unbreakable.

It was strange that memory could do this, reach into our history and twist it into simpler, happy shapes. But didn’t I already feel the agony of our trek across Utah’s desert less keenly than the warmth of Bear in my lap as we watched the stars turn? Wasn’t the horror of our first days with the Path less present in my mind than the nights James and I laid up in the barracks whispering back and forth in our bunks? I wondered if this was a gift our memory gave us, or a curse.

There was a flash and the walls of the house shook from another bombardment out at the front. I looked down at the bed, which seemed as small as a dollhouse toy now, and then left the house to stand on the overgrown lawn.

The fighting had kindled a fire out on the northern horizon, a red streak singeing the black. Beyond it Ithaca sat like a bend in the earth, the gravity of it pulling at me. One word and I was through the lines and on my way. And if Nat succeeded, the war might be as good as over. Ithaca would remain untouched.

I pictured myself there and wondered how long it would take before the sting of the price Nat paid for my freedom faded in my memory too. A year? More? When would her death seem like just another detail, known but not felt?

Would the memory of Grey fade then too, along with James and Bear and Alec and all the rest? And if they did, if I looked back into my past and nothing was there, who would I be then?

A helicopter came in over the treetops, heading for the front. I stepped back and then made my way quickly through the streets, past the houses and the woods and the ragged little town. The next thing I knew, I was crouching in the brush outside the perimeter of Kestrel. I found the break in the fence and slipped through and across the silent camp.

I fell into a bunk and lay there sleepless, hoping I had the strength to carry out the plan that was clicking together in my head.

22

When Beacon Radcliffe arrived at the Lighthouse the next morning, he found me feigning sleep at the tent’s entrance.

“Son?”

His hand touched my arm. I leapt away in terror. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, cowering away from him. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s all right,” he said, backing off with his hands up to reassure me. “Don’t be afraid.”

He took a step closer and held out his hand. I regarded it warily for a moment and then reached out to take it.

“Rough place to sleep,” he said as he pulled me up. I shrugged and kept my eyes on the ground. “There’s a little time before services still. Why don’t you come in?”

Radcliffe threw aside the tent flap and I peered inside.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s all right.”

I stepped through the tent flap, moving hesitantly like I expected someone to come along and strike me at any moment. Radcliffe followed and let the opening fall back into place. There were already a few lanterns burning, filling the Lighthouse with an amber glow. He set his copy of The Glorious Path on the altar and said a prayer.

The place had changed since I’d been there just the night before. A stage had been built beneath the altar, raising it high above several added rows of pews. Racks of folding chairs sat in one corner, ready to be placed behind them. When they were, I guessed the Lighthouse would hold a hundred more people than usual.

“Is there something going on tonight?”

Radcliffe looked over his shoulder. “Oh. Yes. There’s a… special service. I’m sorry to say that very few novices will be invited.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, I can go if you need to—”

“No. Please. How can I help you, ah…”

“James,” I said.

“There’s no need to be afraid, James. Sit down. Please.”

I took a seat in the second row of pews, and Radcliffe sat in front of me. He was a kindly enough looking man, plump, and bald on top with a weathered face. I looked up at a brand-new Glorious Path symbol hanging over the altar. The old one had been brass and aluminum. This one’s gold and silver curves gleamed in the lantern light.

“Couldn’t you sleep in the barracks?”

I kept my eyes on the altar and made my voice far away and dreamy. “It was fine, I just — I guess I felt… drawn here.”

The beacon smiled. “Yes. I feel like that too,” he said. “I used to be an accountant. Can you believe that? I sat at a desk all day long, looking at pages of numbers and fiddling with a computer. Now I never want to be more than ten feet from this place.” Radcliffe looked down at my cast and my old bruises. “You were badly hurt when we found you. Sick too.”

I nodded, cradling my broken wrist and wincing as I did it.

“What happened?”

“There was a battle,” I said. “Not far from where I lived. After it was over, there were so many injured people but there was only one doctor. He used to work for my dad, so I got this cast, but everyone else… they waited for more doctors to come, from the Army or the government, I guess, but no one did.”

Radcliffe shook his head. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

I stared at the floor and answered him with silence.

“Why did you come here, James?”

My head throbbed at the sound of the name. Why had I chosen it? “Some of the other men said they had to make a… a…”

“A choice.”

“Yes. They said when it came time for me to do it, I should just tell you whatever you wanted to hear because you’d hurt me if I didn’t.”

“And do you think that’s true? Do you think that’s how it works?”

I raised my shoulders weakly. “The doctors told me I might have died if you hadn’t been there to save me.”

“Well, I’m glad we could be, then,” he said. “There are a lot of rumors about the Choice. But do you know what it really is?”

I shook my head, and Beacon Radcliffe turned toward me on his pew.

“We believe there is a light inside all of us that comes from God. The Choice is simply you committing yourself to following the path that it illuminates.”

“How do I… ?”

Beacon Radcliffe returned to the altar for his copy of The Glorious Path. He kissed its cover and whispered a prayer before opening it in his lap.

“All you have to do is repeat after me.”

Radcliffe read from the book, and I repeated all he said back to him, making sure to fill the words with all of the cautious reverence I could muster. As I spoke, I felt a strange doubling inside me, like past and present were synching together.

When I was done, Beacon Radcliffe smiled warmly and I returned his smile in kind. He said I should go get something to eat before duty but that I’d be welcome in his Lighthouse anytime. He left me then, returning to his book and his altar.

I stayed in my pew, staring up at the Path symbol. “I am the Way and the Path,” I said, full of devotion, and just loud enough for Radcliffe to hear. When he turned back to me I left my pew and headed up the aisle.

“Wait!”

I froze in place, making sure to erase my smile before I turned back.

“The service tonight,” he said. “I think perhaps we can make an exception. Be here at seven.”

After morning mess and prayers, Corporal Connors led us up the hill to the site of our newly dug pit and set us to building the latrine structure around it. On one trip across the hill to fetch a bucket of nails, I found myself looking down at the Lighthouse.

Thirty or forty soldiers had surrounded it, followed close behind by several horse-drawn wagons. As soon as the wagons were parked, the soldiers threw themselves into the task of unloading them. More canvas. More folding chairs. The walls of the Lighthouse were taken down and half the soldiers set about expanding it to nearly twice its size.

Even though no announcement had been made, everyone knew something big was happening. An electric tension jumped from person to person in the camp.

Was Nat watching the preparations too? Or was she serving meals and tending to the sick with the vest strapped under her robe, sweating beneath the weight of the explosives? Was there any part of her that wished she’d be caught and stopped before she could step into the Lighthouse and press that trigger?

I worked the rest of the day in a dream, floating from one assignment to the next. It felt like barely any time had passed before the sun began to sink into the trees and Corporal Connors led us off the hill and down to the barracks.

The Lighthouse towered in front of me. The flaps were drawn back, and inside I could see the ranks of chairs, split by a razor-sharp aisle that led to the raised altar. The Path insignia glowed in the candlelight. I shuddered and imagined Nat standing before it in her white robes, her finger falling on the trigger, felt the breathless moment before the detonation.

“Okay, everybody. Showers. Let’s go.”

The men around me moved with a weary groan, but I was distracted by a flash of white as a group of companions moved across the camp. They were heading toward the soldiers’ barracks, and as they passed a wooded rise near the outer fence, one companion drifted away from the group unnoticed. As the rest continued on, she climbed the hill and disappeared among the trees.

“Hey. Kid. Let’s move.”

“I… I’m having a hard time, sir,” I said, looking up at Corporal Connors, with one hand clutching my middle. “I’m wondering if I might run to the med tent.”

“We got a schedule kicking into high gear here.”

“I know, sir. I won’t miss anything. I’m on Path, I promise.”

Connors considered a moment, then waved me away. I moved slowly until he got the men into the barracks and then I skated around behind the med tent and climbed the hill.

The trees at the top were few but thick and gave a small umbrella of shade. I crossed into the shadowed ground, and Nat turned at my footsteps. She was still in her companion’s whites. The backpack lay at her feet.

“My mother trained me to fight since I was six, Cal. If you think you can take it from me—”

“I don’t.”

“You can’t talk me out of it, either.”

“I know.”

“So why are you here?”

I took a step back and then found a place near the edge of the hill among the roots of a nearby oak. Below, soldiers poured from their duty stations to the barracks and the mess. Lit from within by scores of flickering candles, the Lighthouse glowed. There was a pause and then a rustle of fabric as Nat crossed the hilltop.

“Where’s Bear?”

Nat was standing alongside a nearby tree with the backpack at her feet.

“Had to give him up.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She sat down and pulled the backpack close to her. It was gray with black piping and a small logo, no different from one a thousand kids threw on their backs before jumping onto a school bus.

“Did they make it out?” she asked. “Alec and the others?”

I shook my head. “Alec is dead. Two of the soldiers too. I think the others made it.”

There was a sharp draw to her breath but Nat said nothing. Her fingers went white on the straps of the pack as she pulled at them and looked down at the camp.

“How did you get into the service?” I asked.

“They always want a few companions around to do their bidding. I played the pious game until I got an invite.”

Bells within the Lighthouse began to chime and the first wave of soldiers responded, flowing from the mess toward the open tent. Soon the novices would follow and then the companions.

“Do you know when you’ll do it?” I asked.

“As soon as he gets on the stage.”

“Too many people will be watching then,” I said. “After he speaks he’ll probably do the Receiving. Security will be expecting people to come up, and by the time the companions get there, they won’t be paying as much attention. That’s the best time.”

Nat stared at me a moment and then she nodded and hooked her fingers beneath the backpack’s straps. When she stood, she pressed one shoulder into the oak beside her to steady herself. I followed her into the copse of trees, where it was nearly dark and smelled richly of grass and honeysuckle. Nat set the pack at her feet. Her hands trembled as she unzipped it and lifted out the vest.

“Let me help you,” I said.

Nat hesitated a moment and then handed me the vest. She lifted her arms up over her head and I stepped forward, lowering it onto her shoulders. I tightened each strap until it fit her like a second skin. Next came the explosives. I lifted each brick and slipped it into its slot in the vest’s pockets. I did the sides and the front and then the back.

“The detonator,” Nat said. “It’s in the front pocket.”

I pulled out the battery pack and a tangle of wires that ended in the trigger. Nat turned around and I paused, staring at the connections. Maybe if I could find a way to disable it now, then I wouldn’t have to—

“Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m just adjusting the—”

“Let me.”

Nat turned around and took the battery and trigger from me. She stepped away and finished up herself, tucking the battery into a pocket at the small of her back and running the wires into their channels. When she was done, she pointed to her robe and I helped her with it. Once it was back on, the bomb was invisible beneath its snowy folds.

Nat looked up at me. She was shaking now, her veil in one hand, and the bomb’s trigger in the other. Down below us the Lighthouse bells chimed. There was no breath in my lungs. My blood had gone still.

“Do you believe in God, Cal?”

My throat tightened. I didn’t know the answer. Didn’t know what to say.

“I thought after Mom and Dad and Steve, I would stop,” Nat said. “But I didn’t.”

Nat’s tears came silently, sliding down her face and darkening the collar of her robe. I put my arms around her and pulled her toward me. She dropped her forehead onto my shoulder. Her breath was hot on my neck and ragged. I could feel her heart pounding through the plates in the vest.

“Maybe we can still go,” I said. “We know the way out. Maybe there’s still time to—”

“No,” she said. “There’s no more time.”

Nat raised her head and kissed me, her fingers curled into my back as she pulled me tight against her and I pressed her closer to me. When the bells rang again, Nat broke away. Her eyes closed tight as if she was making one last desperate wish. When she opened them again, they were dry and clear. Her hands no longer shook.

Nat lifted her veil and set it down to cover her face. Her robes fluttered behind her as she descended the hill and walked out into the camp.

23

I fell in behind a few citizens crossing from their barracks toward the Lighthouse. They were all talking excitedly, but I was thousands of miles away in my head.

“Have you heard, brother? They say he’s come to see us. They say it’s Nathan Hill.”

“Glory to the Path.”

“Glory.”

And then I was inside and the flaps were closing, trapping us in air that ran thick and hot. The first rows of pews were already full with soldiers, all of them with board-straight backs and heads held high. Only three other novices were considered devout enough to attend and I was moved with them into a precise row behind the citizens.

The temperature inside seemed to mount every second along with the waves of voices rising and falling. You could hear the intensity packed behind every word. The soldiers and most of the novices were practically vibrating, threatening to shake the very walls down to the dirt. It became harder and harder to breathe.

A blast of cool air washed through the space. Everyone turned as the tent flap lifted and a band of veiled white moved into the theater and took their places behind the men. Nat was standing on the aisle. There was no bend to her; her shoulders were thrown back, her head was up, staring resolutely at the stage. Her right hand, the one that held the trigger, was down by her side, closed in a fist.

Behind the companions, two armed guards stood on either side of the tent flap, their hands on the sleek black of their weapons. Weapons outside of the ops center, much less in the Lighthouse, were forbidden. They clearly weren’t taking any chances. I turned, sure to keep a look of religious awe on my face as I searched out the rest of the guards.

There were three along each wall and one at either side of the stage. I recognized some from Kestrel, but others were strangers to me. Hill’s private security forces, I guessed. I scanned their faces, all of them filled with the same unyielding focus, until one stopped me cold.

He was standing at the edge of the stage. Average height, sunburned skin, dark hair. Unremarkable. That was, until he turned and I saw the scar along his cheek. Then, I saw him not as he was but as he had been, standing in the midst of a desert, a mad gleam in his eyes as he raised a baseball bat to his ear and let it fall.

Rhames.

My skin went cold. Of course. Cormorant housed the top special forces the Path had, most of whom were focused singularly on the overthrow of California. Now that it had fallen, where else would they be but by the leader’s side?

Cormorant is here, I thought, and then, with a jolt, Is James?

I had no time to wonder. There was a rustle of uniforms as the soldiers snapped to attention. The theater fell silent. Every eye was on the stage.

There was no fanfare. No warning. He simply emerged from the darkness at the back of the stage and walked toward us, the glowing Path insignia over his head. No one clapped. No one breathed.

I had seen Nathan Hill in pictures and had heard him described in awed detail by the people who had been in his presence, but still I wasn’t prepared for the experience of being less than fifty feet from him. I don’t think anyone was. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me, and when I turned, a bald man I had entered the theater with was weeping.

Hill had the kind of face that seemed ageless. It was unlined, almost boyish, but wise and deeply troubled at the same time. His eyes were dark blue beneath gently curving brows and waves of red-brown hair. Peaking out from the collar of his uniform I could see the topmost edge of the burn scars he received in Saudi Arabia. Everyone said they covered the whole of his back and arms and chest.

But none of those details really meant anything. He could have been tall or he could have been blond. It would have made no difference. Something radiated off of him — a force, gentle as the wind, but overwhelming. Even I felt calm descend upon me as he looked out over us. It was a feeling of rightness, of certainty, of being one of the few people who had the honor to be standing at the axis of the world.

I held my breath as he began to speak.

“With these words, I consecrate my life to the Glorious Path.”

The congregation repeated his words back with one voice.

“God, lead me to my Path. Let me be a light in the darkness and the rod that falls upon the backs of the defiant. The lives of my brothers and the lives of the Pathless are in my hands. If I allow them to fall into the darkness, then so must I. Their loss is my loss. Their death is my death.”

Hill opened his eyes and looked up at us again, his full lips turned up in a smile.

“A lot of very smart people told me not to come here tonight,” he said. “And since I know they’re smart, I guess it follows that I must be monumentally stupid.”

He smiled again, giving permission for the laugh that rippled through the audience.

“We have been told that this great thing could not be done and now here we are, standing on the edge of it. There was once a great light that shone from this country and illuminated the whole of the world. Every one of us lived through that light’s dimming. We were there as brother reached out to brother, not to help him up but to tear him down. We were there when a million backs turned from God to venerate worldly things. When I think of that time, I think of a pit of dogs driven mad by a hunger that can’t be quenched.”

He stepped back and the silence hung, crystalline.

“But then I stood in the desert of Saudi Arabia with my brothers, Riyadh burning behind us, and I was struck dumb by the beauty of the world. There was sand and there was sky and at night there were stars. Finally, I thought, I can find my way.”

He paused again and the silence was crushing. I wanted to turn, to look for Nat, but I couldn’t move.

“We decided then that we would not make a new world. We would find our way back to the one we were never meant to leave.”

The crowd rose as one, applauding wildly. My paralysis broke and I moved low and fast toward the aisle. The Receiving would come soon, and I had to be ready. Just as I expected, the beacons moved toward the altar to assist Hill. But Hill bypassed it and came to the edge of the stage. He stepped off into the crowd and my stomach sank. What was he doing?

The Path discipline vanished and the crowds rushed toward him. Hard-faced soldiers and novices alike knocked aside their chairs until there was a wall of bodies pressing their hands through a circular perimeter that security quickly came in to establish. I looked to where I had last seen Nat, but she was gone.

Hill moved through the space, and the crowd accommodated him, splitting ahead to re-form behind. They all reached out to touch him, and Hill struggled to meet every hand, beaming as he did so. People’s cheeks shone from tears. Their faces glowed.

Bodies pressed in all around me, pinning my arms to my side and dragging me along. I managed to look behind me and saw a band of gray uniforms, unbroken except for a single dot of white making her way through them toward Hill.

Nat was twenty feet out and closing quickly. I tried to push through the crowd, but there were so many people. Hill appeared and disappeared in the confusion, reaching out to grasp people’s hands, to embrace them, to kiss them, tears in his eyes. But then there was a gasp and the movement of the crowd ceased moving and a hush fell.

I pushed through the final layer of bodies until I saw Hill, barely five feet away from me. A young novice, overcome with emotion, had thrown himself past Hill’s security to fall at the man’s feet. Hill touched the novice’s arm and drew him up. Once he was standing, Hill embraced him and then turned the young man around for all of us to see.

The novice beamed up at Hill, his face rosy, joyous. Hill smiled, lost in the moment, but then his eyes fixed at a point across the circle. Everyone turned to follow his gaze and came to a lone companion who had just stepped out of the crowd.

Nat’s face was bare of her veil, but no one was looking at her face. Every eye in the room was locked on her right hand and the silver cylinder that rested in her palm.

There were screams and then the rush of security as they swarmed through the crowd and raised their weapons. I recoiled, anticipating a roar of fire, but then Nathan’s voice rose over the crowd.

“Stop!”

The soldiers hesitated. Hill lifted his hand, then slowly lowered it until it rested once again on the boy’s shoulder. As one, the guards returned their weapons to their sides. The crowd pulled back, but I stayed where I was, ending up alongside the first line of soldiers, Nat to my left and Hill to my right.

Nat’s eyes were red and swollen, moving from Hill to the novice boy in front of him.

“You’ve been crying.”

As soft as Hill’s voice was, it filled the Lighthouse. Nat didn’t move, didn’t take her eyes off him. Her hand was out before her like a lance. The room felt very small as everyone in it except Nat and Hill and the boy seemed to fall away.

“People you love have been killed in all of this,” Hill said. “Haven’t they?”

I moved behind the front line of the crowd, drifting closer to Nat.

“Let him go,” she said.

“Was it your parents?”

“I said let him go!”

“Were they soldiers?”

The muscles in Nat’s jaw stood out like bands of iron. “My mother was a soldier.”

“And your father?” Hill asked. “A firefighter? No. A police officer.”

Nat said nothing and Hill nodded, sadly.

“My dad was a cop too,” he said. “He was killed in the line of duty after patrolling a neighborhood in Dallas for twenty-five years. I didn’t really know my mom. Your parents were killed trying to protect you. Weren’t they?”

Nat nodded, uncertain. A line of sweat was breaking out on her brow.

“They gave you an amazing gift,” he said. “Why would you reject it now?”

Her hand began to tremble and tears had started to form at the corners of her eyes. Nat gritted her teeth to hold them back, but they came anyway. Hill eased the boy into the crowd and then waved them all back to a safe distance. He took a step closer to Nat.

“Kill me if you want to kill me,” he said. “The Path will go on.”

As if on cue, the canvas walls shook like they were caught in a sudden gust. A jet flew overhead and then another. I slipped closer to Nat, my eyes on her thumb as it hovered over the trigger.

“Would your family want you to die defending a world that was already gone?”

Nat’s fingers went pale around the metal cylinder. Her thumb rose over the trigger.

“I don’t give a damn about the world.”

I leapt out of the crowd and hit Nat hard, throwing my arms around her waist and knocking us into a pile on the floor. There were screams above us and a rush of bodies. Nat struggled to get out of my grip, finally managing to lift her hand free and bring it up between us. The trigger flashed. Her thumb fell toward it, but I wrenched it out of her hand before she could press it.

Hands fell on my arms and back and I went flying away from her. A black mass of security grabbed Nat and pulled her away while she thrashed, eyes wild, screaming.

“What did you do?! What did you do?!”

The soldiers tossed me aside and I crashed into the floor on the other side of the Lighthouse. I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me up, and I suddenly found myself staring into the wryly smiling face of Nathan Hill.

“My hero,” he said.

A soldier appeared at Hill’s side. “Sir, the Feds are heating up at the front. If they know you’re here—”

“Take the girl to Shrike with us,” he said. “We’ll talk to her there. Our hero is coming with us too, so make room.”

“Yes, sir!”

Hill clapped me on the back. “Can’t let anything happen to my rescuer, can I?”

Another soldier appeared to hustle us off toward the exit. The battle sounds outside were louder now and closer. I looked over my shoulder as we ran. Rhames and the other security guards had Nat on her knees, her robe and bomb vest stripped off, her hands cuffed behind her back. Her eyes burned through the air at me. I turned and followed Hill.

A line of vehicles was idling behind the Lighthouse — two Humvees with .50 cals on top and a Stryker armored personnel carrier. A soldier patted me down thoroughly, then pushed me into the back of the Stryker. I settled onto a bench and watched out the open hatch as the horizon north of Kestrel lit up with tracer fire and the glare from artillery strikes. A flight of Apaches and Kiowas spun up and lifted off their pads, angling out toward the front.

Hill conferred with a group of soldiers just out of earshot. He talked to them quietly and slowly, turning his attention to each in turn. Behind them, Rhames and a scrum of soldiers dragged a bound Nat into an armored Humvee. I imagined her sitting in the back of it, a would-be assassin surrounded by soldiers who looked at her target as only one step removed from God. Hill told them he wanted to talk to her, but that would only keep her alive a little while longer. My plan had bought us some time but if we were going to get out of this, I had to stay focused.

Once Nat was locked away, Rhames broke off from the group and came toward Hill. I pushed myself into a dark corner, out of sight.

Had Rhames recognized me? And if he had, would saving Hill’s life be enough to keep me and Nat alive until I could get to the next part of my plan?

The back hatch of the Stryker slammed shut. I looked up to find Nathan Hill was sitting on a bench directly across from me. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His hands, surprisingly thin and small, were clasped in front of him. Scars stretched from his knuckles up into his sleeve.

“So,” Hill said with his ever-present, gentle smile. “Why don’t you tell me about Benjamin Quarles.”

24

I stared at him, openmouthed, without words.

“Sergeant Rhames told me his version. I’d like to hear yours.”

Anything I said could cause those hands clasped in front of him to reach out and take me by the throat. I grasped for a lie but nothing came.

“Callum?”

“I… found a dog,” I said. “Quarles was going to kill him. Me too.”

“And so you killed Quarles first.”

I swallowed back a dry spot in my throat and nodded.

“How did you feel?” he asked. “After you killed him?”

I saw Quarles lying there on his belly and smelled the sunbaked dust of the market mixing with the metallic stink of his blood.

“Sick,” I said.

“But later? After that had passed.”

Hill waited, but no words came.

“You knew you had done the right thing,” Hill said. “Didn’t you? Rhames told me a little about the man. The things they found out about him once he was gone. He was so far off Path he never should have been in that place. People like that” — Hill looked toward the back of the Stryker, his eyes far away — “my father was a shoe salesman, and to relax after a long day at the shop, he liked to garden.”

Hill saw my look and chuckled, caught.

“Yes. It’s true. I lied to the girl with the explosives who was trying to kill me. There was a vacant lot near the house where I grew up. It had been an old basketball court, I think, only then it was just cracked concrete and trash, and Dad decided that the neighborhood would be better if it was a garden. He was a good gardener, but his biggest problem was weeds. He’d poison them, but they’d always come back, choking off everything he had planted. Eventually he had to get down on his knees and tear every one of them out by the roots with his bare hands.”

The blue of Hill’s eyes seemed to pulse in the dim light, binding us together.

“Is that true, sir?”

Hill smiled. “Does it matter?”

The Stryker shook as it took another hill.

“Good men try to do good things,” he said. “Great nations try to make the lives of their people better, but there are weeds that hold them back. Weeds like Mr. Quarles. Are we supposed to value the weeds above the garden?”

I kept my eyes steady on Hill’s and slowly shook my head.

“But it wasn’t just that,” Hill said. “Was it? Why you left, I mean.”

“No.”

“Mr. Rhames said Captain Monroe was about to make you take part in the Choice.”

The Stryker shook from an explosion nearby and then accelerated. Hill didn’t even flinch. I dug my hand into the bench beneath me to steady myself.

“Stupid,” Hill said. “The Choice is necessary, but it’s not a place for children. I don’t blame you for protecting yourself against a monster, Callum. I don’t blame you for running, either. Sometimes I think you have to stray far from your Path in order to find your way back again. It’s a truth not many people understand, but you do. Don’t you?”

There were helicopters above us now, at least three, flying low. The Stryker strained up a hill, then fell onto a roadway, and the ride went smooth and fast. Hill was waiting. I said that I did.

Hill reached across and took my hand in his. His grip was strong and firm. My fingertips lay along the waxy plain of his scars.

“You were sent to me in a time of need, Cal. I can’t repay you for my life, but if there’s anything I can offer you, tell me what it is and it’s yours.”

This was it. I knew I should play the selfless novice and deny him at first, but there was no time for that.

“The girl’s name is Natalie,” I said. “We came to Kestrel at the same time. You were right. Her parents had just been killed. She was in pain, confused. The Feds took advantage of her. They made her do this. She can find the Path. I know it. Please spare her life.”

“She’s been in contact with the Feds, Callum. She has to talk. Tell us whatever she knows about their plans.”

“I can talk to her,” I said. “She’ll tell us everything she knows.”

“And she has to choose,” he said. “She may have done it before coming to Kestrel, but she needs to make a real choice for the Path. An honest one.”

Somehow I managed to not let my eyes slip from Hill’s.

“She will,” I said. “I promise.”

The Stryker came to rest and the hatch fell. The war was far enough away that I could only hear an occasional thump, like a book falling from a shelf. I searched for the Humvee carrying Nat, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found.

We were parked outside a low concrete building, one of many that were huddled within a tall perimeter fence. Streetlights glowed around us. I could see signs of an old battle. Charred walls and broken windows. I guessed that Shrike must have been an old Fed base the Path took over as it advanced.

The soldiers swarmed Hill as he moved from one to the next, taking in information and issuing orders. Rhames stood on the outer ring of the group, glaring at me, but once Hill spoke with him, he turned away and didn’t look back.

“Callum,” Hill said, returning to me with a heavily freckled soldier. “Sergeant Parker here will get you something to eat and then take you to have your talk with the girl. You’ll report to me when you’re done.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, falling easily into the crisp obedience of my days at Cormorant.

Hill flew up a set of concrete stairs and was gone, leaving me with Parker.

“This way, Private.”

“I’m just a novice,” I said as I followed him up the stairs and inside.

“Well, looks like when you save the president’s life, you jump to the head of the line. Congratulations. Come on, I’ll grab you a uniform and show you to the mess. You missed dinner, but I’m sure they can find a hero of the Path something to eat.”

I had to hustle to keep up with him. Hero of the Path. All I could do was ignore it and stay focused. Parker and I weaved through a stream of soldiers, most of whom were wearing more stripes and stars than anyone I had ever seen. You could feel purpose sparking off the place like a live wire. They all knew they were about to win.

“Here you go.”

Parker held out a stack of camouflage and a pair of boots. A private’s stripes hovered over the Path insignia on the arm of the shirt. I hesitated, knowing I should reach out and take them but unable to do it.

“Let’s move, Private. Latrine is that way. I’ll give you five.”

I took the clothes out of Parker’s hands and pushed through the latrine door. The bathroom was empty and stark, smelling of bleach and soap. I dressed as fast as I could, struggling with the awkwardness of my cast. I moved my good hand through my unkempt hair, trying to smooth it back and match the men I had seen in the hallways outside.

When I was done, I stared at the strange figure in the mirror. A flash of gold winked and I reached up to touch the pin on my collar, a sun bisected by a single line. There it was again, that feeling of the present rushing into the past like two rivers into one.

Parker banged on the door. I knelt by my old clothes and dug through them until I found Bear’s collar. I stuffed it in my pocket and then stepped out of the latrine.

As Parker and I made our way down the hall through the masses, I walked faster, my shoulders squaring to match the others. The mess was empty except for a few novices moving from table to table, cleaning up plates and glasses from dinner. Silverware clattered as it dropped into their trays. Parker sat me down at the end of a table and returned a moment later with a tray full of meat, corn bread, and green beans.

“Real Texas barbecue,” Parker said. “President Hill insists on it everywhere we go. Some of us think that’s what the whole war is really about: bringing proper beef barbecue to the heathen masses. You have fifteen minutes for chow. I’ll be waiting down that hall in the third office when you’re done.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and then Parker was gone.

I drained the glass of milk next to my plate in one gulp, then lifted my fork and poked at the glistening pile of meat. Real Texas barbecue. Just looking at it made me ill, but I forced it down, watching as the novices scrubbed and polished the mess. It was hard to believe that an hour north, an entire world was slipping away.

“Are you done with that, sir?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I pushed the tray toward the novice’s hand, but the tray and everything on it crashed onto the linoleum floor. Shards of glass glittered amid the charred pile of beef. I looked to see if the novice was okay and was met with a rush of vertigo. The room spun around the young novice’s face and I sat there, mouth open, fingers splayed weakly on the plastic tabletop.

“James?”

25

I knelt by the table and helped James gather the shattered dishes into a bin he carried. He reached for a piece of glass and it pricked the tip of his finger.

“Careful,” I warned.

“I got it.”

James glanced out the open door into the hall.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as he picked up the remaining shards. “If you’re a spy, President Hill will find out.”

“So it’s President Hill now?” James glared at me, then went back to his work. “Someone had a bomb at his speech and I saved his life.”

“Why?”

It was a knife-edge of a question and I didn’t know how to answer it. A speck of barbecue sauce flew off his rag as he scrubbed, striking his uniform. James hissed and rubbed at it with his thumbnail. I took the rag and found its single clean corner.

“Here.”

I held the cloth of his uniform between my fingers and worked at the stain until it began to fade. If I closed my eyes, I could have sworn we were back at Cormorant.

When I was done, I stepped away and caught James staring hungrily at the private’s stripe on my shoulder. He had been dragged across the country to scrub floors and clean plates and he still lusted after a stupid stripe. I remembered dogs in Quarles’s kennel that were the same way. The harder you kicked them, the more they tried to please.

“Private Roe!”

James jumped to attention as soon as he saw Parker standing by the door.

“Everything okay here? This novice bothering you?”

“No, sir. Everything is fine.”

“Good. Then let’s move out.”

I nodded and Parker strode away down the hall. James started toward a door to the kitchen.

“Wait.” I took his arm but he snatched it away from me. “James—”

“I didn’t tell Monroe anything when I got back. Nothing. But if you’re planning to do something here—”

“I’m just trying to get home.”

“Fine,” he said. “Do it and leave us alone.”

James shoved the door open and disappeared into the kitchen. I wanted to tell him what I thought of a kitchen boy’s smug superiority, but then a single thought came from nowhere and stopped me dead.

It’s because of me.

There was no one in Cormorant more on Path than James, and yet he had been stripped of his place as a valet and hauled across the country to scrape food off trays. How better to humiliate the brother of a traitor? It wasn’t Monroe who had done this to him, it wasn’t the Path, it was me.

I backed away from the door. I had done enough to James. It was time to leave him alone.

A cheer broke out down the hallway. I left the mess as the hall filled with soldiers. I joined the stream, bouncing from officer to officer.

“Sir!” I said. “Sir, what’s going on?”

A major grinned mid-stride. His hand found my shoulder. “It’s about over, son,” he said. “We just punched a hole in the Fed’s lines north of Richmond. We’re taking territory faster than we can secure it!”

“Philadelphia?”

“We’re on our way!”

I eased out of the flood of bodies and into a nearby doorway. The major ran a key card through a reader next to a set of double doors down the hall. He stepped through and before the doors could close, I saw banks of computer screens and the dark silhouettes of soldiers. In the middle of it was Nathan Hill.

“Roe!”

Parker was standing beside an open door. Inside was a small room with a table and two chairs. On the far side of the table was Nat, her wrists cuffed and secured to the table.

He pushed a notepad and a pen into my hands. “We’ll be recording everything you two say, but we also want a signed confession and details on Fed forces.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nat didn’t look up when I entered the room. She was wearing a gray pair of Path work pants and a gray T-shirt. Her feet were bare. Her skin was waxy-looking, but I couldn’t see bruises on any of the skin that was showing. So far Hill had kept his word. She hadn’t been hurt.

The door shut behind me, and a lock was thrown.

“You’re a private now,” she said, her brown eyes sunken and dark. “Not bad pay for a job well done.”

I sat down across from her. There was a large black microphone in the center of the table. I pulled the notebook toward me and began to write.

“Do you need water?” I asked, pausing for an answer I knew wasn’t coming. “Something to eat? Are you injured at all?”

I held up the notebook so she had to see it.

I won’t apologize for wanting you to live.

Nat looked at the paper without reaction.

“I was able to make a deal with President Hill—”

“President Hill,” she said.

“I explained to him why you did what you did and he’s prepared to forgive you and let you go.”

“You explained why I did it?”

“Yes.”

“And why did I do it, Cal?”

I took the notebook back and started to write. “You were distraught over the deaths of your parents. Like I said, the president decided to be merciful and is willing to let you go. You just have to tell him everything you know about the Federal forces.”

“I don’t know anything about the Federal forces.”

I held up the notebook again.

The Path broke the Fed line a few hours ago. They’ll be in Philadelphia by the morning. Say something about forces at the front. True or false, it won’t make any difference now.

When I put the paper down, Nat had a thin smile on her face.

“I’m not afraid to die, Cal.”

I scribbled another note.

Do you think all they’ll do is kill you?

Nat’s smile vanished. Her chains rattled as she put her hands flat on the table, like she was bracing herself.

“We’re going to win,” I said. “We were always going to win. Keeping things to yourself won’t do you or anyone else any good.”

Nat said nothing.

Please, I wrote.

Nat flexed her hands into fists and then let them go. Her hair hung down in greasy locks along her cheeks. She looked so tired. I wanted more than anything to touch her.

“Their numbers aren’t what you think they are,” Nat said, her voice steady but lifeless. “They have maybe ten or fifteen thousand good fighters left. They moved them all to the front so the Path would assume they must have more in reserve. They’re going to rely heavily on armor and artillery, which they have a lot of. More than the Path.”

Nat took the pen and a sheet of paper from the notebook. Moments later she pushed it back at me.

“Show them that.”

Scrawled on the paper was a rough map of the front, indicating where their artillery was, along with the location of a small airfield and a brigade of armor. The plastic pen clattered to the desktop. We sat there beneath the buzz of the fluorescent lights.

“What else, Cal?”

The microphone was crouched between us like a rat. I wanted so badly for this to be over, to take Nat’s drawing and walk out of the room, but I forced myself to meet her eyes.

“You have to make the Choice, Nat. You have to say the words.”

She stared back at me, motionless.

“Once you do, this is all over. You’re free.”

“Free to be what?” she asked. “A companion? Ministering to men of the Glorious Path in my robe and veil?”

“You’ll be alive.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

Sick of the paper, I covered the microphone with my hand and whispered.

“They’re just words.”

Nat pushed my hand away and spoke directly into the microphone.

“My name is Natalie Marie Whitacker. My mother was Staff Sergeant Eliza Whitacker of the U.S. Army rangers. My father was Deputy John Whitacker. Both were murdered by Path forces. In retaliation, and to defend the republic, I attempted to assassinate the traitor Nathan Hill. I am proud of my actions.”

Nat dropped into her chair.

“Those are just words too,” she said.

There was a metallic click behind me as the door opened. I crumpled the notes I had written Nat in my hand and stuffed them in a pocket. Parker’s presence was heavy in the doorway.

“Nat, please.”

She said nothing as Parker stepped inside and unlocked the chain that bound her to the desk. He took her arm and led her out into the hall and away.

“Private Roe?”

A young novice stood in the doorway behind me. “President Hill has asked that you meet him in his ready room in one hour. He thought you might want to go to your quarters until then. They’re this way.”

I followed him out of the building and through the streets of the base, mixing with the soldiers and the novices. The sounds of the war filtered in from far away. I stopped across the street from a long building with a peaked roof.

“That’s our Lighthouse.”

I looked over the novice’s shoulder at another building. “My quarters are that way?”

“Yes.”

I thanked him and crossed the road. Flickering amber light warmed the windows of the Lighthouse and spread onto the concrete below. I remembered years ago when Beacon Quan explained that anyone looking for light should always be able to find it in God’s house.

The Lighthouse was large and empty, carpeted in burgundy with black walls and a thin stage that held the altar. It looked like it had been a movie theater before the Path came. The air was warm from the lanterns hung all around and the thick candles that lined the stage.

The Path insignia hung over the altar, radiant in gold and marble. It was more than simply quiet within the Lighthouse. It was as if time stopped within its walls.

I dropped into one of the seats and thought of Nat, wishing that time could stand still for her too. In less than an hour I would meet with Hill and he would know that I failed to bring her to the Path. After that it wouldn’t be long until someone like Rhames showed up in Nat’s cell. I wondered if she would welcome him when he came.

“Cal?”

Startled, I turned and found James standing behind me in the aisle. He had changed out of his dirty kitchen things and into rumpled novice fatigues.

“Mind if I…”

I moved over and James sat next to me. He closed his eyes and mouthed a prayer. His copy of The Glorious Path was on his knee.

“Not where I expected to find you,” he said.

“Just looking for someplace quiet, I guess.”

James sunk down into his seat, gazing up at the altar, its varnished lines gleaming in the candlelight.

“You remember the first time we came to Lighthouse?” he asked.

I nodded, remembering the two of us as we were then, fresh from the Choice and trembling in our pews as we sat through services for the first time.

“I was so scared.”

“I know,” James said. “You were holding my hand. I remember thinking — why is my brother holding my hand? And when will he stop?”

James laughed and I glanced over at him. “All of this always just felt right to you. Didn’t it?”

“No. I fought it at first too.”

“I wasn’t fighting it, James. I was—” I cut myself off, hating the angry snap of my voice. I looked over my shoulder at the Lighthouse door. Time was still turning on the other side. Why had I come in here? What had I hoped to accomplish?

“You remember those nights we would sleep in the backyard?”

James was looking up at the altar, a half smile on his face.

“Our bunk beds,” I said.

“I remember how Mom and Dad would go to bed and we would stay up talking, you know, just about—”

“Your crush on Mrs. Hurley.”

“I didn’t have a crush on Mrs.—”

“You told Mom and Dad that if they didn’t get you into her class, you were going to run away.”

“Well, what about you and — what’s her name?” James asked. “That girl down the steet. The redhead. Cassie!”

“No no no,” I said, waving him off. “I definitely didn’t have a—”

“I saw the poetry. I saw it. Would you like a quote? ‘Oh, Cassie! With hair of fire —’”

“Enough!”

James laughed and so did I, the sound echoing off the walls and brightening the inside of the Lighthouse. Once it faded, James and I sat side by side, a little breathless.

“The best thing about home was me and you,” James said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

“I can’t believe this is a coincidence. God wanted you here.”

“Why?”

“You have to ask Him.”

“God doesn’t talk to me, James.”

“You don’t listen.”

An old anger began to smolder and I tried to hold it down. “How can you — I mean, the things Hill does. The Choice—”

“We’re trying to fix something that’s badly broken,” James said, repeating the line we had heard from a dozen beacons. “The Choice is a tool. Once we get where we’re going, it won’t be necessary anymore. Until then—”

“How can you say that?” I asked, my voice rising. “How can you believe that?”

“Because it’s—”

“How did they get to you?”

“No one got to me! I just—” James stopped. He closed his eyes for a moment and then continued. “I was just as scared as you after they took us. Just as angry too. Without Mom and Dad, everything just seemed… It’s like we were in the middle of this hurricane all the time. You know? But then I went to Lighthouse one night and Beacon Thomas explained that there was a path that ran through the center of the world. He said that no matter how chaotic things seemed, there was a plan and everything and everyone had their place in it. He said that once I pushed the fear and anger and doubt out of my head, I would know mine.”

A glow washed over James as he remembered.

“And he was right,” he said. “Once I saw it, once I let myself see it, I couldn’t see anything else. I didn’t want to. And it can be the same for you, Cal.”

“James.”

“I know you don’t believe it, but you have a path too. There’s a reason that you—”

“Maybe there are some things we just shouldn’t talk about.”

James fell silent. He turned away from me, staring down at the concrete floor, his hands on The Glorious Path.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Neither of us said anything more for some time. The quiet in the Lighthouse made it feel like we were trapped in amber.

“Guess they’ll want everyone at their duty stations soon.”

I nodded weakly, and James left his seat and started toward the aisle. The feel of him drawing away stopped my breath. If he left, if he opened that door, time would start up again and everything would be lost.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

James stopped. “I thought you were going home.”

“I think there’s something I have to do first,” I said. “A friend I have to help. But I don’t know how.”

James’s footsteps whispered down the carpet until I could feel him standing just at my shoulder.

“I don’t know if I even can.”

“God’s not cruel,” he said. “He wouldn’t put you on a path you couldn’t reach the end of. You have to trust that.”

I turned around. James stood like a pillar in the middle of the aisle. The way the candlelight struck his face, deepening the hollows of his eyes and cheeks, made him seem so much older. It was like we had switched places and he was the older brother now and I was the younger. Or maybe it had been that way for a long while and I had never noticed.

“Good luck, Cal.”

The noise of the war broke the spell of the Lighthouse as he opened the door. When it closed again, that same timelessness gathered around me — only now, I could feel the lie of it. Seconds ticked away inside of me like the fall of an axe.

I leaned forward over the seat in front of me. The altar and the glimmering sign of the Path seemed huge, overwhelming. Without thinking, I laced my fingers together and closed my eyes. Terror of the beacons had led me to spend months hiding in our barracks, rehearsing all the gestures and expressions of faith until I had them down perfectly. But sitting there in that Lighthouse, peering into the darkness of my closed eyes, a prayer unspooled deep inside me and for the first time it felt like something reaching out from the very center of me.

“God,” I prayed. “Lead me to my path….”

I stepped out of the Lighthouse and into the chaos of the battle. A siren was screeching and scores of soldiers ran by in a blur of camouflage, sprinting for their duty stations. There was a flash as a missile battery on the outskirts of the base fired. Veins of smoke shot into the sky, and seconds later, there were three explosions high overhead.

With all the confusion, it was hard to be sure, but I thought I heard small-arms fire just beyond the perimeter of the base. I joined the rush of traffic headed into the command building.

“Cal!”

James was running from the kitchens and I shoved my way through the mob to meet him.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” James said. “Something’s gone wrong but no one will say what.”

Down the hallway, officers were streaming in and out of the ops center. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “Stay here.”

A soldier swiped his key card by the doors and I timed my stride to slip in right behind him. The room was packed with generals and their men, all of them huddling over communications gear and glowing computers. I eased back into the shadows and looked for Hill.

He was standing with a group of officers before a large screen that showed a map of the United States. Path forces were displayed as gold circles and Fed forces were blue triangles. One look and it was easy to see what fueled the chaos in the room. There was a lot more blue on the board than gold and much of it was south of the Path’s frontlines. It looked like Federal forces were streaming in from the east and west simultaneously and quickly overwhelming Path forces.

“I want to know what the hell is going on,” Hill said. “The Feds were not supposed to be able to do this.”

A general in a disheveled uniform stepped forward. “Mr. President,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “There was a wave of drone and cruise missile attacks followed by large-scale beach landings and paratroop drops from stealth aircraft in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland.”

“Which we weren’t prepared for,” Hill said.

“Sir, I—”

“Your assessment said that the Feds weren’t supposed to have half this many troops left.”

“We’re working on it now, sir,” the general said. “If we have more time, I’m sure we can come up with an—”

A junior officer spoke up from a bank of communications gear. “Sir, it’s confirmed.”

There was a pause as the general turned to the young man. “We’re sure?”

“Yes, sir. We have multiple visual confirmations.”

The general seemed to deflate. He glanced to a tech seated by the side of the main computer screen. “Go ahead. Change them.”

With the press of a button, a large concentration of the Federal blue triangles to our south and east turned into the Union Jack of British forces. Throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania, what had been marked as Fed forces changed into the blue, white, and red of France. Other flags appeared in smaller numbers across the map. Israel. Spain. Brazil. Germany.

“Sir, we’re ready to confirm that a coalition of at least six different countries is currently operating within our eastern theater,” the general reported. “There are also indications of Russian forces attempting landings in California, and the Canadians breached the lines at Washington State.”

Another communications officer spoke up. “Sir, the Two-Three reports sightings of small team forces within our own fence line.”

The general pulled a red folder from a nearby case and held it out to Hill. “Are we ready, Mr. President?”

The room went silent. Hill stared at the red folder in the general’s hand but made no move to take it.

“Sir? They knew the consequences when they did this.”

“Have the men from Cormorant repel the coalition forces within Shrike’s perimeter,” Hill said quietly. “Commit everything else to Philadelphia.”

“But, sir—”

“Do it!” Hill snapped as he took the red folder out of the man’s hand. “I need to pray on this.”

Before anyone could say another word, Hill left the group and strode past me and through a door to an adjoining room. The officers looked from one to another while the blinking armies advanced and retreated behind them.

The door Hill went through opened with a soft click when I turned the knob. I stepped inside and closed the door. The small room was almost suffocatingly hot due to the dozens of candles that lined the desk and shelves, filling the place with a flickering glow.

Just inside the door, there was a desk made of darkly polished wood. A belt was draped across it, holding Hill’s holstered sidearm and his combat knife. His uniform was on a hook near the door.

Hill was across the room, kneeling with his back to me, in a nook where an altar had been set up. He was shirtless and barefoot. Waxy burn scars covered the whole of his back. The way the light hit them made them look like flames.

“Have a seat,” he said without turning. “I’ll be done soon.”

I crossed the room to a small couch. The red folder sat on a table in front of me. When Hill had finished his prayers, he stretched into a khaki T-shirt and sat across the table. He said nothing for a time, eyes locked on the folder.

“Sir, I wanted to talk to you about the girl who—”

“You’re from New York.”

“I… yes, sir.”

“But not the city.”

“Ithaca.”

“There’s a lake there,” he said. “Did you sail?”

I sat forward on the couch. “Sir, I’d like to—” Hill fixed me with his icy-blue eyes. “No, sir. I didn’t.”

“I sailed with my father,” he said. “He took me out on the water the day his store finally went under. Everyone told him he should just torch the place and collect the insurance money, but Dad said that when he started out in business, he promised himself he’d be honest. A man of his word. He wasn’t going back on that just because it made his life a little easier.”

“Sir, Nat—”

“Sergeant Parker made a report, Cal. The girl will be dealt with in the morning.”

“But if I could have a little more time with her, I could—”

“Your friend admitted to treason and refused to join the Path.”

“But the intelligence—”

“Was worthless,” he snapped. “Anything that girl knows is out of date. It’s over.”

I started to speak again but Hill was done. He reached for the red folder, drawing out the papers inside and regarding each carefully. A cord of tension inside of me evaporated and I fell back against the couch, feeling foolish for my whispered prayers. I imagined Nat in a cell somewhere within the base. Did she already know this was her last night?

“It’s terrifying, isn’t it? The things God requires of us.”

Hill had dealt the papers out across the table so they sat in a snowy line between us. He was regarding them carefully, his chin in his hand. I looked closer and saw the name of a city printed at the top of each paper — Moscow. Berlin. London. Paris. Ottawa. Madrid. Below each name was a map and a list of numbers. A chill went through me as I remembered something Grey had said about a promise Hill made to any country caught interfering.

This was a list of targets.

The cities were the capitals of each country joining the coalition against him. The numbers detailed the quantity of warheads, their yields, and the estimated casualties. The numbers in the last column ran into the hundreds of thousands for each city. There was one more piece of paper sitting in the folder. I reached across the table and drew it out.

At the top of the paper was one word: Philadelphia. I looked over the page to find Hill’s otherworldly blue eyes locked on me.

“God can’t want this,” I said.

“Why?”

James’s voice fell into my head. “Because he’s not cruel.”

A peaceful smile settled across Hill’s face, but his gaze didn’t falter. “When God does it, it isn’t cruel. It’s what’s meant to be.”

Hill leaned across the table.

“God brought you across the country and set you down in that room, at that time, and gave you the courage to save my life. Why? To ensure that his will was done.”

“Sir, you can’t—”

Hill swept the papers into the folder and crossed the room to his desk. He reached for the uniform hanging by the door.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he pulled on a shirt and laid a tie around his neck. “There’ll be a place for you after this. And for your brother too! Sergeant Rhames mentioned he was here. Kitchen help, I think.” Hill chuckled. “I’m guessing we can find something a little bit better for him than that.”

I watched Hill as he knotted his tie in crisp strokes. I thought of Alec pulling away from me out into the moonlit lake. Maybe he was right. Maybe the future was coming and there was nothing I could do about it. All I had to do was be still and let it come. James and I would be together and safe.

Hill slipped on his jacket and buttoned it. I saw Grey Solomon standing on the side of the road, and Nat, defiant, in the interrogation room, and a prayer started to unspool in my mind. It was a whispered voice growing stronger by the word.

I am on a glorious path. I will not turn from it even if it means my death.

Hill turned as I threw myself across the room, reaching for the sidearm that lay on his desk. My fingers grazed the belt, but Hill came at me in a blur. One fist slammed into my ribs and then his knee found my stomach. The air shot out of me and I hurtled into a shelf, shattering it. I rolled over, groaning, and saw Hill’s belt on the ground. The gun was gone but the combat knife was within reach. I snatched it out of its sheath and slashed at Hill as he reached for me again. The blade bit into his flesh, buying me the second I needed to get up and stumble out to the center of the room.

I staggered backward, swinging the knife in front of me to keep him away, but Hill was too fast. He glided in between swipes of the blade, taking my cast in both hands and slamming it onto a corner of the table. I screamed and then a backhand to my temple sent whatever energy I had pouring out of me. The knife fell out of my hand and I tumbled backward, crashing into his altar.

I tried to get up, tried to keep fighting, but I had nothing left. I lay there, my arm throbbing, one eye swelling shut while the other filled with blood. My consciousness slipped in and out. I thought I heard gunfire and sirens coming from somewhere nearby. Hill stepped through the blur of my vision and fell on top of me, his legs pinning my arms to my sides. He found the knife by my side and held it over me.

“No one can stop what God has put in motion,” he said, barely out of breath.

I closed my eyes as Hill lifted the blade, but there was a crash by the door. Hill turned toward it, and three sharp reports rang out across the room. His body jerked and he collapsed over me. His chest struck mine. His face fell by my cheek. Streams of his blood poured down my sides.

I forced myself out from under him, scrambling until I struck the far wall. I coughed and wiped the blood from my eyes as someone staggered into the room from the open doorway. The knife was lying by Hill’s body. I grabbed it and held it out toward whoever was coming. A gun clattered onto the floor and a body came into focus.

James fell to his knees beside Hill’s feet. He stared at the body in front of him, his arms limp at his sides, his eyes wide. His chest began to heave.

“James?”

I dropped the knife and reached for him as several small explosions shook the walls of the office. There were shouting voices just outside, followed by the back-and-forth chatter of small-arms fire.

“We have to go,” I said, reaching for Hill’s gun, which lay beside James. “James?”

The door to the ops center flew open and three black figures appeared. I scooped up Hill’s weapon and fired half blind. Three shots shredded the door frame and forced them back. I stuffed the gun into my waistband and took James by the shoulders.

“Come on,” I said, but James didn’t move. “Get up!”

I grabbed James’s shirtfront with my one good hand and hauled his limp body up. My muscles screamed and the effort sent me crashing against the wall beside me. There were more gunshots out in the hall and fire alarms began to wail. I wiped the blood out of my eyes and dragged James toward the door.

There were bodies strewn across the ops center, generals and their servants torn apart and still. The computers and the communications gear had all been destroyed and were smoldering, filling the room with a haze of smoke. My eyes stung as we made it through and into the corridor outside. Weapons fire seemed to be coming from all directions. Somewhere there was the boom of a grenade.

I searched through the gloom and saw a door just past the mess. The glass was shattered and I could see streetlights shining on the other side. The way to it was clear, but we couldn’t leave. Not yet.

“Where would they keep a prisoner?” I asked, trying to shake James out of his shock. “James?”

He nodded down a hall across from the mess and I moved toward it, pulling him along, trying to ignore the pain that came with every step. The battle sounds grew louder, the deeper we ran into the base. I followed James’s direction, ducking into doorways at any sign of the soldiers who stalked the hallways, never knowing if they were Path or Fed. We passed bodies, fallen singly or in groups, torn, bloody, eyes open.

James pointed down a corridor where a young Path corporal was collapsed over a small desk, a pool of blood gathering around his temple. Behind him was a hallway lined with close-set rooms.

I set James down in the hallway, then searched the corporal for his keys. I found them and moved down the line of rooms, opening door after door, only to find the rooms empty or their occupants dead.

I stuck the key in the second door from the end and when I opened it, a body flew at me from a far corner. A fist connected with my jaw and I hit the floor in a heap, fireworks lighting up my vision.

“What are you doing here?”

Nat was leaning over me, one hand grasping my collar, the other ready to strike.

“We came to get you out,” I said, and when her glare didn’t soften, I shoved her away from me. “Trust me or don’t. You’re free. Do what you want. James, let’s go!”

I pushed us both into the hallway just as another volley of fire erupted. James flew out of my hands with a grunt, slamming into the wall and hitting the floor.

“James!”

He was sprawled on his back. His right side was gushing blood and he was breathing in ugly gasps. His skin was the color of paste. I pressed my hands into the wound to stop the bleeding and James screamed. I was dimly aware of Nat pulling Hill’s gun away from me. There was more gunfire and then silence. James’s eyes had gone wide and dark and then began to close.

I draped James’s arm over my shoulder. He cried out as I took a halting step forward. My knees went weak and I began to fall but then the weight suddenly lessened. Nat was beside us, James’s other arm around her shoulder.

The building was a maze, corridors blocked by bodies and collapsed walls. There were fires everywhere and clouds of smoke that burned our eyes and tore at our throats. We blundered through, coming to dead end after dead end. James hung between us, barely conscious, his lips moving soundlessly as he prayed.

“This way!”

Nat turned us down a hallway and I saw it. The door by the mess. We were almost there. Nat threw her shoulder into the door and we collapsed on the other side, coughing the smoke out of our lungs.

“James?”

His head lolled back and forth on the pavement. His eyes were closed and he was mumbling silently, incoherently. Buildings and wrecked vehicles burned all around us. Bodies littered the ground, and soldiers ran in and out of the darkness, firing constantly.

“Get somebody,” I said to Nat. “Get anybody. Please.”

Nat ran out of our small circle of light and disappeared down the street. There was a dead soldier facedown on the ground nearby. I took his combat knife and canteen and returned to James. His torso was slick with blood. His pants were dark with it. I stripped off his shirt and washed away as much as I could, revealing the ugly tear of a wound on his side. When I pressed the wad of bandages into his side, blood flowed between my fingers, but James didn’t make a sound. He pawed at my hands and I knocked them away.

“It’s okay,” he said weakly. “I’m okay.”

His eyes opened, shockingly bright. The sky lit up nearby and the pavement shuddered.

“Where are we?” he asked, in almost a singsongy kid’s voice. “It feels like we’re on a train.”

I smoothed the hair off his brow. His skin was hot and wet. “Yeah,” I said. “We’re on a train.”

“Where are we going? We going home?”

“That’s right,” I said. “We’re going home.”

I lifted the canteen to his lips and poured a stream of water across them. He gasped and drank. When he was done, I set the canteen down and took his hand in mine and squeezed. A strange smile rose on his face.

“Why is my brother holding my hand?” he said dreamily. “And when will he stop?”

I searched the dark of the base for Nat and saw nothing. A scream was rising in my throat, but I swallowed it.

“My friend is looking for help. She’ll be back any time now.”

“I killed him, Cal. I was looking for you, and then I heard the fight. I just saw someone on top of you. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t—”

“You saved my life.”

James shook his head, and then his eyes narrowed like he was searching for something in the sky. Across the street three figures emerged from the dark and were coming our way fast. I gripped the combat knife and leaned over James, but when they moved into the light, I saw it was Nat followed by two soldiers. I waved them over frantically.

“James, we’re going to get you out of here, okay?”

When I looked down, his eyes were wide with horror, staring up into the dark. Tears ran across his cheeks.

“James?”

“… I didn’t know it was him.”

26

More than a month later, I stepped out into what used to be Camp Kestrel.

It was a bright day and hot, dusty from the dried mud kicked up by the Fed vehicles tearing through the streets. I gathered my things and left the barracks I had been staying in since Nat helped convince the Fed MPs that James and I weren’t a threat to national security.

I walked through the camp toward the infirmary, watching the Fed soldiers. Some went about the work of packing for the push south diligently, but most lounged on hillsides and across the hoods of vehicles. They smoked cigarettes and laughed. Their uniforms were ragged. The officers tried to keep order but few listened.

Path tents lay in molding piles of canvas all around the camp, but the command buildings still stood, gutted of intelligence and repurposed. Fed drone crews now sat in the place of their Path counterparts.

I paused by a blighted rectangle of ash and trampled grass. The Lighthouse had been the first thing the Feds destroyed, torching it to the cheers of their men. The altar was now a pile of scorched wood. The Path insignia had fallen and was facedown in the dirt, black and twisted. Soldiers still gathered to have their pictures taken with it, thumbs up and grinning. I knew I shouldn’t have cared, but for some reason, I was glad I hadn’t been there to see its destruction.

When I arrived at the infirmary, an orderly was pushing James’s wheelchair out into the sun. James looked as much like a ghost as Kestrel did. His skin was a waxy gray and all the weight he had lost gave him a skeletal look. His deep-set eyes seemed to stay permanently fixed to the ground. He’d barely spoken since we arrived.

“You ready?”

James said nothing. I passed the orderly a small wad of cash and he gave me a bag of medicine that I tucked into my backpack. After he left I reached for the back of the wheelchair, but James waved me away.

“James…”

“I can walk on my own.”

He planted his hands on the wheelchair’s armrests and pushed, his face white with strain. He wavered once but he closed his eyes for a moment and it passed. I led him around the infirmary and pulled open the door of a rust-and-blue hatchback. James dropped into the backseat and I shut the door.

“Nice of them to give you a new cast.”

Nat was standing on the other side of the car in a swirl of dust. I had only seen her a few times since we’d arrived at Kestrel. Each time was from a distance, as she tried to talk her way into companies of Marines heading south to pursue the Path.

“Yeah,” I said, holding up the clean white plaster. “The old one had seen better days, I guess. They say I still have a few weeks with this one, though.”

I came around the front of the car and saw the backpack on the ground next to her. Behind her a group of soldiers were loading supplies into a trio of Humvees.

“They finally let you sign up?”

Nat shook her head. “They’re dropping me off at home on their way to California. Figured I could help with the rebuilding for a couple years until I can enlist.”

“President Burke says it’ll all be over by then.”

“Yeah,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I heard that too. If he thinks this guy who took Hill’s place is going to fold, he’s crazy or stupid.”

“I’m betting on stupid.”

I threw my pack into the front passenger seat and shut the door. Nat peered into the car where James sat staring out the back window at the base.

“How is he?”

“Fine,” I said quickly. “It’ll take some time, I guess.”

“They should give him a medal.”

“Captain Assad tried,” I said, spreading my arms wide to present the rattletrap hatchback. “But I said we wanted this instead.”

Nat’s laugh was small and reluctant, but it was good to hear. “So you’re headed home too.”

I nodded. “Assad slipped us enough cash to get there and not eat MREs for a while too. We should be okay.”

There was a clap behind her as the soldiers closed the Humvee’s hatch.

“Nat.”

She looked back at one of the men and nodded.

“Well, I guess I better…”

“Yeah.”

Nat started to go but then she jumped forward and threw her arms around me. She pulled me close and her head fell to my shoulder. Everything seemed to go very still around us. I lifted my arms to her back and held her, breathing in the dusty heat that clung to us. I closed my eyes.

“Thank you,” she breathed into my ear.

“Whitacker!” one of the soldiers called. “Let’s move!”

Nat stepped back, her amber eyes shining, the sun lightening her brown hair. She slipped a piece of paper into my hand and then ran to catch her ride. I stood by the car, watching as she slung her pack over her shoulder and jumped into a Humvee. Her door slammed and they pulled out, joining the long line of vehicles waiting at the main gate.

The car door opened with a rusty squeak. I got in and unfolded the piece of paper. On it was a phone number and an address in Wyoming. I stared at it a moment before putting it into my pocket and checking the rearview.

James was watching the line of departing Fed transports as they pulled through the gate and then vanished in a cloud of dust. Sitting closed on his lap was a small green book, stained with faded blood. His hands lay on it as if he was warming them over a fire. The gold leaf of the title, torn and dull, said The Glorious Path.

Time, I thought, pushing past the sick feeling in my gut. That’s all he needs. All any of us need.

I cranked the ignition and guided us away.

We spent the morning driving through a landscape struggling to return to normal. A steady stream of refugee traffic surrounded us, moving north past bombed-out restaurants that sat next to gas stations that were open and lit in neon.

A detour brought us directly through DC, where we saw the worst of it. Even though the government had moved out years before, the Path had hit it with a vengeance. The roads were rubble-strewn and pitted, and most of the gleaming white government buildings we could see were covered in black scorch marks. The White House and the Capitol were ruins of white marble.

Only the ivory needle of the Washington Monument stood nearly pristine. A tent city had sprung up on the mall around it and along the edge of the reflecting pool. Refugees milled about in tattered clothes beneath a ring of American flags.

The signs of war became less frequent as we moved up into Maryland. For miles at a time it was possible to forget the last six years except for the occasional checkpoints staffed by bored-looking privates in lightly armored Humvees.

Once we crossed the border into Pennsylvania, I sat up straighter and gripped the steering wheel. I counted the miles, sure I could feel the bright line of the next border in the distance. One hundred. Fifty. Twenty.

My pulse raced. Even James was sitting up now, peering out the windshield, The Glorious Path on the seat next to him.

“Look!”

A sign appeared at the side of the road, green and white, just beyond the line of trees. The car’s engine gave a wheezy complaint when I stood on the gas, but I didn’t care. The sign grew larger by the second and then we were on it.

I held my breath as we blew past it, and New York surrounded us. And this wasn’t the ugly glass and steel of New York City, this was trees and grass and the rolling hills. This was small towns and snaking rivers and crumbling barns. We passed Binghamton and then Whitney Point, turning west onto 79 for the final stretch that brought us through the dense green of state parks. The side of the road teemed with ferns and white oak and maple trees. I rolled the window down and let the wind blow around us. It smelled of damp leaves and grass warmed by the sun.

I could feel home sitting out beyond the trees, sending tremors through the air and the ground, until my heart pulsed along in time. I knew James felt it too when his hand, thin and weak, clasped my shoulder. I heard myself laugh as the little car struggled on.

We rode the last miles in a silence greater than the inside of any Lighthouse. Even the engine settled into a quiet thrum. James leaned forward between the seats and, as I urged the car faster, everything around us faded into a blur of motion. Only the road remained, a bright seam cutting through the forest. At first it was pockmarked and rough and then, as we grew closer, there was the slick whisper of fresh asphalt that made me feel like we were flying.

I could see Mom’s face and Dad’s and Grandma Betty’s. It was like we had just left only days ago.

We came around a bend in the road, and the trees parted and shops appeared with hanging signs and shining windows. We went over a bridge above a seething falls and the Cornell campus rose and fell away. We were flying again, alone on the road beneath a bower of branches, winding through the bright day. We crested a hill and houses emerged from the woods, one or two at a time and then clusters of them, paneled in wood and brick and surrounded by runs of hedges and sun-dappled lawns. We came to a hill leading to a cul-de-sac and there it was, down at the end of the lane. Cobalt-blue walls surrounded in roses.

“James,” I said, my voice thick with wonder. “James, look…”

27

I parked at the top of the hill and cut the engine.

Down the street, brightly colored mailboxes peeked out from ranks of lilac and honeysuckle. Gutterman. Royce. Egan. Bell. And then, at the edge of the cul-de-sac, surrounded by rosebushes — Roe. The simple black letters seemed to pulse against the white of the mailbox.

I felt rooted to my seat, unable to move. The back door creaked open and I watched James step onto the sidewalk, dazed. He took a few tentative steps before turning to me and waiting. I pushed my door open and tumbled out of the car and onto the sun-warmed road.

We descended the hill without a word, each of us holding our breath. Most of the houses we passed had signs of wartime neglect — curtainless windows, overgrown yards, peeling paint.

And then the hill flattened and we were there. I stared down at the base of our front gate, the white paint dry and chipped, exposing the graying wood beneath. Crabgrass and dandelions grew in untidy clumps. The gate squeaked as James opened it and stepped through to the other side.

“Look,” James said.

The grass at his feet was brilliantly green and the rosebushes that ran the length of the fence were voluminous and dotted with red and pink and white flowers. He climbed the front steps and stood framed in the front door.

I tried to call out to James as he reached out for the doorknob, but my voice was strangled in my throat. The door was locked, so he reached down into the bushes by the porch and, after searching a few moments, retrieved a small stone. He slid open its compartment and exposed a single brass key. Laughing to himself, he fit the key into the lock.

I thought of an ancient ship locked inside a glass bottle. What would happen if you broke the seal? Would all those accumulated years rush in at once, turning it to dust?

I called out to James as he turned the doorknob, but it was too late. The door swung open. He looked back at me and then stepped inside. I closed my eyes as his footsteps clicked across the wood floor.

“Cal, come on!”

The stones of the front walk passed slowly beneath my feet, giving way to brick stairs and then slats of blond wood stretching out before me, gleaming in the sun. I ran into the house, following the sound of James’s voice as he called for Mom and Dad. I moved from room to room, a giddy energy bubbling through me as I saw how little had changed.

The living room was a dim cave with thick brown-and-gold carpet. A TV sat at one end and at the other was the lumpy brown couch where Mom and Grandma Betty would drink wine while Dad played guitar. The kitchen glowed in shades of pink and yellow, with dishes sitting unwashed in the sink and stacks of mail teetering by the coffee machine.

“Mom! Dad!”

I threw myself at the door to our bedroom and there was our red shelf full of books and our stacks of games. Loose Legos were scattered across the floor between our beds in piles of red and yellow and green, like raw jewels. I bent over laughing, out of breath, wanting to throw them all into the air. I felt James in the doorway behind me.

“Can you believe it?” I said as I turned. “Mom and Dad are probably just out. They’ll be here any—”

James was holding a yellowing piece of paper. On the front it said JAMES AND CALLUM.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it.”

I paused, thinking of that crumbling ship, but then James pressed it into my hands. I unfolded a single sheet of paper covered in our mother’s neat hand.

The letter slipped from my hands and fell to the floor.

“Cal…”

I found myself running back through the house and toward the front door. This time I saw the layers of dust and the empty shelves I had missed before and smelled the musty air of a place abandoned.

“Cal! Wait!”

I collapsed onto the front porch, my head in my hands, breathing in the cloying smell of the roses that had grown unchecked all around the house. The floorboards creaked behind me.

“It’s been six years,” James said.

I nodded but couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. James hovered a while and then he drifted inside. I looked up at the empty houses tucked in among the oaks and the grass-lined streets.

I remembered how the school bus would let James and me off at the top of the hill and we would race each other down the sidewalk, kicking at the russet piles of fallen leaves, before bursting inside and yelling for Mom. I remembered lying in the front yard in the summertime, the warm air around me full with the hum of Dad’s lawn mower and the smell of cut grass. I remembered our neighbors and our friends and how I ran thoughtlessly through the streets to the shores of the lake.

I tried to remember the bad things too, the unhappy things, hoping they would drive away the ache of the loss, but it was no use. As hard as I tried, all I could remember were the times I had been so happy.

It was after nightfall when I made my way through the dark house and slid open the door to the back porch. James had built a small fire in the middle of the garden and he sat reading by its orange light.

The grass in the garden was overgrown and the flowers had gone wild and weed-strangled. Our hammocks still hung between the twin oaks though they were threadbare, the white ropes frayed and gray with mildew. James sat on the crumbling stone border that surrounded the small pond.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, setting his book down beside him.

“Walking,” I said. I drifted across the yard and sat down a few feet from James, staring into the flames at his feet. “Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. The Guttermans. The Bells.”

James pushed a tin plate my way. “Warmed up some of the rations we brought with us.”

It was spaghetti with red sauce and bits of sawdusty meat. I pushed at it with the plastic fork James gave me. “Guess we can go out tomorrow and spend some of Captain Assad’s money on real food.”

James said nothing. He cracked a branch in two and tossed half into the flames. It flared and crackled. Sitting on the cracked stone next to him was his copy of The Glorious Path. The cover was battered and stained. I took it and rifled through the dog-eared pages. Almost every one was worn glossy. The margins were filled with James’s careful handwriting. I set the book back down and stared into the fire.

“You’re going back, aren’t you?”

James poked at the campfire with a stick, arranging the coals. The fire surged and brightened.

“I was studying to be a beacon,” he said quietly. “I never said anything because I knew you wouldn’t like it. Beacon Quan told me he knew a place in Oklahoma that he thought would be good for my apprenticeship. It’s this town called Foley. It grows wheat and corn. Just a few hundred people living on farms with a small Lighthouse.”

James sat forward and stared into the flames.

“The Choice is wrong,” he said. “I know that, and I know other things are wrong too, but…” James stopped, struggling for the words. “Even now, I close my eyes and I pray and I can feel my path. It hasn’t gone away. I wish it would, but it hasn’t. And I know it doesn’t end here. Maybe if I’m there… maybe I can try to help make things better.”

“They’ll kill you if they find out who you are.”

“I know,” he said.

I took another branch and fed it to the fire.

“I keep thinking about the day they took us,” I said. “Maybe if I hadn’t been so afraid, we could have escaped, or if I had stood up to the beacon—”

“They would have killed us,” James said. “You were trying to keep your little brother safe, Cal. Just like you’ve been trying to do for the last six years.”

James moved off the stone border and sat down next to me.

“You put us on a path,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it, but I do, and I think it’s the one we were meant to be on. I don’t regret it.”

“Not even Hill?”

The wind blew through the trees, sending sparks across the yard like a swarm of bees. James turned to me, his eyes warm in the firelight.

“Not even Hill.”

We sat there in silence until the fire died down to a few orange coals. We kicked dirt over them and then we made our way inside. I paused at the porch door, looking at the tattered remains of our hammocks swinging in the breeze. I closed the door, and James and I drifted toward our old bedroom without a word.

The wood floor between our now too-small beds was hard and cold, but it felt right to be there, him on one side and me on the other. We brought in a couple dusty blankets and pulled the shades back from the window. Outside, moonlit trees swayed against the black.

“James?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what to do now.”

James thought a moment. “Well, last time we were here, you said you wanted to be Batman. Maybe you could get started on that.”

I found a loose Lego and tossed it at his head.

“Ow.”

“Maybe it was stupid to come here.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” he said. “It just isn’t the end of the line.”

James had propped himself up on one elbow and was looking across the room at me.

“It’s been more than a year since they left,” I said. “And even they didn’t know where they were going.”

“Where they are doesn’t matter,” he said. “Wanting to find them does.”

I said nothing more and eventually James lay back down. I sat up and looked out at the stars hanging above the trees across the street, restlessness buzzing through me. I found my shoes and my jacket and headed for the door.

“Where you going?” James asked sleepily.

“Just for a walk.”

“Want me to—”

“No,” I said. “I’m okay.”

Outside, the night was full of the rhythmic call of insects and the wind in the trees. The front gate opened with a squeak and I stepped through and out into the street. I didn’t remember the names of roads, so I followed a kind of muscle memory. I’d reach the end of one road and wait to feel a tug one way or another, following what felt like a compass that had been buried inside of me years ago. Most of the houses I passed looked empty but a few were lit, spilling their yellow glow out into their yards. In a few the bluish lights of TVs shone and voices came out onto the street.

The roads wound through trees and hedges, like the turnings of a knot. More than once I felt sure that I had become hopelessly lost, but every time I was about to turn back and go home I’d feel that tug and I’d press on. I followed a meandering lane through the yellow pools of streetlights until it came to a chain-link fence. I could hear cars passing on the other side.

There was a strange scent on the wind, something clean and mineral. It was like two hands had grabbed me by the shoulders and were pulling me along. I hopped the fence and crossed a string of two-lane roads. On the other side, there was a curtain of trees with a sign among them that said no trespassing after dark. I passed it by with a laugh, remembering all the times James and I ignored it when we were kids.

I ran across a parking lot and then more grass and I was there. I stripped off my shoes and socks and my feet sunk into sand and wind-smoothed pebbles. The air was full of the salty smell of decay and the breeze blowing across the top of rippling water. I dropped onto the sand and looked out across the face of Cayuga Lake.

The shores on either side of me, rolling hills against the dark sky, stretched into the distance, embracing water that was like a black mirror reflecting the moon and the stars. The red and white running lights of a few distant boats bobbed on its surface. The only sounds were the small waves crashing at my feet and the night murmurings of insects and frogs. I picked up a handful of pebbles and threw some out into the water, where they landed with a gentle plunk.

How many times had James and I come here after school? How many times had I stood in this exact spot, looking at this exact view? I almost expected I could turn and see another me standing there. A little boy with his brother by his side, their parents laughing on a park bench just up the hill.

As familiar as it all was, though, the restlessness that had forced me out of the house hadn’t faded. It was like a ragged edge running straight through me, keeping the contentment I had expected to feel to be back in this place, the rightness of it, at arm’s length.

I wondered where Mom and Dad were right then. Were they lying awake and thinking of us? Did some part of them think we would appear at any moment as they turned a corner or walked down an unfamiliar street? Or had they moved on, forcing themselves to accept the fact that their only sons were never coming back?

A cold weight settled in my stomach. James and I had been gone for more than six years without a word. Was it possible that Mom and Dad thought we were dead?

And worse, did they blame themselves, sure that if only they hadn’t sent us west, it never would have happened? I sat there on the shore, trying to imagine the torture of believing that day after day, but it was too big, too awful.

I let the rest of the stones in my hand spill out by my side. When I looked across the lake again, its waters seemed flat and gray. The distant shores nothing but black swells in the land. It was like a painting of another time, perfectly made and impossible to touch. I hadn’t come all this way for these things. James was right; the path I was on stretched far beyond this place.

I stepped into my shoes and walked away from the shore, striding into the dark without another look back.

28

“Careful. You’re going to cut my arm off.”

“Not if you stop squirming.”

My arm was laid out on the kitchen table. James jockeyed for position until he found the best angle and then slipped the teeth of the garden shears beneath the dirty plaster of the cast.

“You sure about this? Maybe the hacksaw would be better.”

“Do it.”

James put all his weight into it and the plaster cracked. He made it past my wrist and then across my palm, backtracking to cut through the thumbhole. When he was done he dug his fingers into the seam and pulled. The plaster crunched and then snapped in two.

I lifted my arm out of the debris. It was pale as milk, and the skin felt damp and puckered. I flexed my fingers and turned my wrist in a circle. There was a deep ache still, but the relief to have it free again was so great it was almost unbearable. James tossed the shears onto the table.

“There you go,” he said. “Free at last.”

James went out into the living room and pulled one of Dad’s old flannels on over his T-shirt. I was amazed it fit as well as it did. A month’s worth of rest and food had done him good. He had put on weight and when he walked, his hand no longer went instinctively to the scar at his side. He picked up his backpack and stuffed a pair of jeans inside.

“Sure you don’t want to wait another day? They say the fighting is dying down a bit,” I said. “Maybe—”

“Border’s gonna get tighter,” he said, filling a water bottle at the kitchen sink. “War’s not even over and the Path is already building a wall. If I want to get across, I have to move now.”

“Okay, but you should take the car.”

“Nah, you keep it.”

“What? You’re going to walk the whole way? You’re really pushing this whole biblical prophet thing.”

James set the bottle by his pack. “I never learned how to drive, Cal.”

“Oh. Right.”

I pulled a small box from my pocket. It was wrapped in the comics section of an old newspaper with twine ribbon. “I got you this.”

“What is it?”

“A going-away present.” James hesitated. “It’s not a bug, I promise.”

James took the box and unwrapped it. When he saw what was inside, he sat back against the edge of the sink.

“Got it before we left the base,” I said. “Good thing about those Feds is that they’re pretty easy to bribe.”

James reached into the box and pulled out a white asthma inhaler with a pale-blue stopper.

“Got a couple replacement cartridges too but they wouldn’t fit in the box.” I waited for him to say something but he was stuck, staring at the inhaler. “James?”

“I haven’t had an attack since that night in the desert.”

“And you won’t,” I said quickly. “Just think of it as a — Look, I don’t know what you should think of it as; just put it in your pocket and forget it’s there, okay? For me? Your big brother?”

James looked up and smiled. “Thanks, Cal.”

He pocketed the inhaler, then went over everything he had in his pack and zipped it closed. I expected him to head for the door, but he stood looking out the window at the back garden. With little else to do over the last month, James and I had cleaned it up the best we could. The grass was cut and the weeds had been pushed back so the flowers had a little room to breathe. We even managed to get the hammocks repaired and rehung, which naturally led to a discussion about sleeping in them instead of our cramped bedroom. In the end, we decided that nostalgia was a thing you could take way too far.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“I know.” James settled the pack onto his shoulders. “When you find them…”

“I’ll explain,” I said. “It’ll be all the ammo I need to finally be declared the good son.”

I followed James through the house and out into the front yard. He stood at the gate, looking across the street at sidewalks and trees and empty houses before pushing it open and stepping through. He looked back at me, his brown hair light in the morning sun as it rose. He waved one last time, then he turned to go.

Even though I had been preparing myself for weeks, standing there in the moment of James’s leaving was overwhelming. Every part of me wanted to follow him, but I held myself steady, eyes shut, and listened as he climbed the hill to the main road. His footsteps slowly faded away. After he was gone, there was a long silence. The emptiness around me seemed impossibly vast. I told myself that he’d always be out there, like a jewel in a box, or a heart beating in the darkness. No matter what happened I’d be able to turn south and for a moment feel like we were together again.

I drifted back through the empty house, my lone footsteps echoing off the bare walls. I moved from room to room, gathering up anything I thought I could use — matches, food, a half-dull kitchen knife — then pulled a crumpled road map out of my pocket.

Wellesley Island was circled in red ink, a speck of land on the Canadian border. I ran a finger along the route, feeling the lonely grind of the miles there and then all the ones that would come after. I had no way of knowing how long it would take me to find Mom and Dad, or even if I could. The only thing to do was start, but there was something that held me in place. It was this feeling like I was standing in a half-finished room, or the way a song, shut off before the end, stays inside of you, anxious until it can resolve.

I folded the map and stuffed it in my pocket. There was no sense dwelling on it. I reached for my pack, then remembered that I had traded the clothes the Feds had given me for some of Dad’s shortly after we arrived. I figured I could use the old ones as spares.

I found them in a pile in our room. The shirt was sweated through and full of holes, but the rest was worth taking. I stuffed the jacket into the backpack and then reached across the floor for my old jeans. There was a soft jangle of metal as I pulled them to me.

My heart lost a beat when I heard it. I reached inside and pulled out a thick pink band with a black buckle and a silver tag. I didn’t breathe as I drew the collar across my shaking hands. The collar felt impossibly heavy, as if all of those months and all the hundreds of miles had been compressed into its fibers. Bear. I traced the letters of his name with my fingertip and then held the tag in my hand until the metal grew warm. I could feel the heat of his fur and remembered his summery smell.

I imagined him in a cabin, safe and well fed, and wondered if it was home to him now or if he still thought of me. Did he wonder why I left him even now? And did he lie among the woman and her family, awaiting the day I’d come back for him?

The map rustled as I flattened it out on the floor. I found what I was looking for in a corner of Montana way out on its own. Bull Lake. A dot of a town next to a blue patch of water. I pulled the pen out of my pack and circled it in red.

Looking at both of the marks on the map, Bull Lake and Wellesley Island, I felt something snap into place, like my path had emerged before me, clear and straight.

I left the house with an old song turning in my head, its melody bright but distant. I hummed it out loud as I got into the car and set my pack and Bear’s collar on the seat next to me. I looked down the road and then I started the engine and drove away.