“That’s not entirely fair, though,” said Marcus. “All the other plans you’ve ever heard have been designed by Partial strategists, and I’m just like a regular . . . guy.”
“The worst part,” said Vinci, “was when you revealed the entire plan right in front of the guard. You were intending to trick him, and then I asked you one question and you said everything out loud, right in front of him.”
Marcus stuttered, trying to protest.
“Maybe that was actually the best part of the plan,” said Vinci, “since it meant that we never attempted to carry out the actual plan, which as I mentioned was terrible. This way you just look stupid instead of all of us getting killed.”
“None of us would get killed,” said Marcus. “It was a great plan.” He made vague karate-style movements with his hands, though no one could see them with his hands still cuffed behind his back, and the raw skin on his wrists burned from the effort. “Super Partial combat prowess, you could totally have—”
“Will you please shut up!” said the guard. “Holy hell, it’s like listening to my little sisters.”
“You have little sisters?” asked Marcus.
“Not anymore,” said the guard, “thanks to that mongrel sitting next to you.” He pointed at Vinci, his face growing tenser and angrier. The room fell silent for a moment, but then Marcus spoke softly.
“Technically, he’s less mongrel than anyone else in this room. He was grown in a lab from custom-engineered DNA; he’s like a perfect . . . specimen, and all the rest of us are the mo—”
The guard leapt to his feet and crossed the narrow room in a single step, lashing out with the butt of his rifle to crack Marcus hard across the side of his face. Marcus reeled back from the blow, bright lights flashing behind his eyelids, his skull ringing, his entire consciousness focused on the intense, mind-ripping pain.
Somebody slapped him, and he struggled to open his eyes. Woolf knelt in front him, his hands free; behind him the guard lay unconscious on the floor, and Vinci and Galen were stripping him of his weapons and gear.
“Holy crap,” said Marcus. “How long was I out?”
“Just a minute at the most,” said Woolf, examining his head. “You’re going to have a massive bruise here. If you remember back when we made this plan, Vinci was the one who was supposed to get hit in the face. He heals faster.” He reached behind Marcus and unlocked his handcuffs.
“Vinci didn’t take it far enough,” said Marcus, examining his chafed wrists before touching the side of his head gently. It was already swollen, a rigid band of raised blood and tissue as hard as bone. “We got him all riled up and ready to pounce, and then Vinci didn’t step up with the final insult. The moment was passing; I had to do something.”
“You didn’t have to push him quite that far,” said Woolf. “That little speech about a Partial being a ‘perfect specimen’ would have gotten you punched in a nunnery.”
“I didn’t realize he needed further incentive,” said Vinci, checking his rifle. “I’m sorry. I suppose I’m not very good at insulting humans.”
“Marcus is a damned expert at it,” said Woolf. He claimed the guard’s sidearm, a semiautomatic pistol, and gave the combat knife to Galen. “Now let’s get out of here before he wakes up.”
“One thing first,” said Marcus, crouching back down by the guard’s feet. His head swam slightly as he did, and he paused a moment while the room stopped spinning.
“What are you doing?” asked Vinci.
Marcus began untying the guard’s shoelaces. “Buying us an extra thirty seconds.” He began tightly knotting the shoelaces back together, tying one shoe to the other; Galen groaned as soon as he realized what Marcus was doing.
“Oh, come on,” said Galen, “it’s taking you at least thirty seconds just to do that. You’re not buying us anything.”
“I’m buying a happy memory,” said Marcus. “I didn’t like this guy even before he tried to crack my skull open.” He looked at the fallen guard and grinned. “Have fun falling down idiotically twice in one day.” He stood, reaching out a hand as the world swam again. Woolf grabbed him and held him firm. “Tell me about the first time he fell,” said Marcus. “I missed it.”
“Vinci swept his legs and then head-butted him on the way down,” said Galen.
“Was it awesome?” asked Marcus. “Tell me it was awesome.”
“Both of you shut up,” said Woolf. “We’re leaving now.” He put a hand on the back door—it was locked, but the guard had held the key in his shirt pocket. The guard took the prisoners out through it at regular intervals to pee, which had given the three others their brief time alone to plan this escape. Woolf listened cautiously at the door, slid in the key, and turned it with a scrape and a rusty click. They froze, listening again for any sign that the noise had been noticed, but there was nothing.
Marcus shivered, ignoring the pain of the air brushing the skin around his wrists. “Are you sure I was only out a few minutes? I’m freezing—it feels like it’s already night.”
“One minute only,” said Vinci. “It’s late afternoon.”
“But it is cold,” said Woolf. He turned the creaky handle, as slowly as he could, and pulled the door open. “Holy . . .”
The parking lot outside was half-filled with cars, old and rusted, the pavement run through with seams and cracks as plants pushed up from underneath—and over it all, white and ethereal, was a gauzy curtain of falling snow.
“What on earth?” said Galen.
“Well, now we know one thing,” said Marcus. “That crazy story about the big red giant was apparently true.” He made a face, staring at the snow. “Actually the big red giant was easier to believe than this part. Is this really snow? I’ve never even seen it except on old holovid shows.”
“This is the real thing,” said Woolf. “Now come on.” He stepped out into it, leaving a boot print in the thin layer of white that covered the ground.
“That’s going to make us easy to follow,” said Vinci.
“Only if they’re right behind us,” said Woolf. “Another few minutes and our tracks’ll be completely covered. We couldn’t have asked for better conditions.”
“Then let’s get going,” said Marcus. “I want to be at least a hundred yards away when Yoon’s giant panther hunts me down like an alley cat.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Preserve sat against the base of the Rocky Mountains, on the outskirts of the Denver ruins. Before the Break, the sprawling city had become a megalopolis stretching all the way from Castle Rock to Fort Collins, from Boulder to Bennett. In the years since, it had become an acid-drenched hell, the western edge of the vast poisonous Badlands that consumed the Midwest. Every gutter and depression was filled with cracking salt pans, smoldering phosphorus, or the scattered dust of crystallized bleach. Not a single living plant or animal remained.
Samm and his group set out early in the morning on their journey back to East Meadow—back to bring the humans the cure, and the incredible news that the cure was self-sustaining. He worried about how, if at all, they would convince the humans and Partials to work together, but he supposed their group was a good demonstration: himself, Heron, Ritter, Dwain, and two more recovered Partials named Fergus and Bron; Phan had come with them as well, and Calix on one of their two horses. The Preserve had no horses of its own, just the two that Samm and Heron and Kira had brought with them from New York. Kira had named them, and Samm allowed himself a brief, wistful moment to think of her. The other Partials looked at him, immediately aware of his thoughts through the link. He thought of the horses again, worried about their ability to find food in the Badlands. Calix was riding Bobo, Kira’s horse, and following behind her on a lead was Oddjob, Afa’s curious, disobedient mount, now relegated to a pack animal. He’d always hated being ridden, stubbornly going his own way and ignoring their commands, but he seemed content to follow Bobo. Samm hoped it would last.
Thinking of Oddjob made him think again of Afa, t
he childlike genius they’d brought with them through the wilderness, the only human on their journey out—and, not coincidentally, the only one who hadn’t made it. He’d been injured in Chicago and finally died in the toxic fields of Colorado. Samm still didn’t know if any human could survive the journey, and Calix was particularly at risk. Her injury made her slower and tied up her body’s resources in healing; if anything happened to her it would slow down the entire group, making them all more vulnerable. Worse still . . . I would miss her, he thought. Afa was my responsibility, but Calix is my friend. If it becomes a question of abandoning her or dying myself . . . I don’t know if I’ll be able to make that choice.
He glanced at Heron as they walked through the corroded city. Several times during the Isolation War he’d envied her detachment, her ability to let all her pain, both physical and emotional, slide off her like she was changing clothes. She had lived through the worst that war had thrown at them, and the worst times since; she could face any problem they came up against, and could make any decision she needed to survive. Even if all of them died crossing the Badlands, she would live. She would make it home, because that was the mission. She was frightening, even to Samm sometimes, and she was hard to understand and even harder to befriend, but she was the group’s best hope. He would have to talk to her in private and put together a contingency plan.
It took them three days to cross the city, and when they reached the eastern fringe, the Badlands spread out before them as far as the eye could see: flat, featureless, and dead. Here and there a bone-white tree twisted up from the poisoned soil, murdered by the rain and baked brittle by the sun. No longer forced to weave between buildings, they were able to pick up speed, and their first day east of Denver they traveled nearly as far as they had in the first three days combined. Heron took the lead, ranging far ahead to scout out the territory. Phan kept up admirably, not quite as resilient as Samm but still managing to show more endurance than the four Partials still healing from their comas. The horses were the slowest, built not for speed but for distance; they fell behind in the morning, Calix and Dwain staying with them, but then gradually caught up again as night began to fall. The group had been traveling northeast all day, following I-76 as it curved to follow the path of the South Platte River, and Samm couldn’t help but notice that the night air was abnormally cold. Calix caught up to the others along the side of a foul-smelling river. She was shivering.
“We need to camp soon,” said Dwain, accompanying the statement with a silent link message: THIS HUMAN’S NOT DOING WELL.
“It’s cold,” said Phan. “Much colder than usual. We’ll need shelter.”
“We’ll need shelter from more than just cold,” said Heron. “If we’re caught outside when it rains, we’ll be dead in minutes.”
“It’s not going to rain,” said Calix. “I’ve been reading these skies since I was four.”
“Color me unconvinced,” said Heron. “We go forward or we go back; we’re not staying outside.”
Now that he’d stopped walking, Samm felt the chill air creeping through his arms and chest. “Is it supposed to be this cold?”
“No,” said Phan. “The last few weeks have been cooler than usual, but this is like nothing I’ve ever felt. Is this always like this out in the Badlands?”
“It wasn’t when we came through here before,” said Samm.
“The horses need to stop,” said Calix. “They can’t keep this pace much longer.”
“We should have stopped in the last town,” said Ritter. He looked at Heron sharply, his displeasure strongly evident on the link. “Too bad our scout led us into the middle of nowhere.”
“This is the Midwest,” said Heron. “Everywhere is the middle of nowhere. The next town is only another two miles, maybe less if we can find an outlying farmhouse.”
“Keep moving,” said Samm, and the group fell back into step. They kept an even pace with the horses now, tired and thirsty and rubbing their arms in the cold. The temperature seemed to plummet even further as they walked, and when they finally saw a row of low houses, they left the road eagerly, numb and exhausted. The highway was on a slight elevation, and the hill running down to the buildings was covered with dry, brittle grass that crunched like eggshells under their feet. It was an old farming community, like Heron had predicted, the fields now barren and desolate. The first house in the row was too ruined to serve as a proper shelter—a sliding glass door in the back had broken years ago, and a decade of windstorms had filled the interior with toxic dirt and dust. The next house was better, but too small to house them all. Samm left the Partials there, telling them to seal the doors and windows as well as they could, and took the horses and humans to the third house down. Heron followed him, and he sighed. She was never good with orders.
“You need to show them how to cover the gaps,” said Samm. “I can show Calix and Phan.”
“They’re big boys,” said Heron. “They can deal with it.”
“So you want to deal with the horses?”
“I want to see if this godforsaken hole has anything resembling a downtown,” said Heron. “We’ll use almost all the water we packed just on the horses, and we need to find more.”
“Take Ritter,” said Samm. “We shouldn’t go anywhere alone.”
“I’m taking you.”
Samm glanced at Calix, but she was apparently too tired to have been paying attention. Even Phan seemed ready to collapse. “I need to take care of the horses.”
“So take care of them,” said Heron. “Just don’t take all night.”
Samm linked his frustration, but said nothing and got to work. If Heron wanted to get him alone, it was almost certainly because she wanted to talk, and given how rare that was, he decided it was a good idea to know what she was thinking. He took Phan and Calix inside and set them up in the basement storage room—there was no food or water, but more important there were no exterior windows, and the surfaces were clear of toxic buildup. The horses he set up in the living room, doing his best to cover the floor with plastic tarps—not to keep them from fouling the carpet, but to keep them from eating it. He found some metal pans in the kitchen and filled them with the water they’d brought with them, then wearily unloaded their packs and saddles while they drank. It was more than half an hour later when he trudged back outside; the sky was dark and starless, and the freezing air bit at his nose and cheeks.
“This way,” said Heron, hopping down from the hood of the rusted van she’d been sitting on. “There’s a school about a mile down the road, with three big plastic jugs of water in the teachers’ lounge.”
“I told you not to go anywhere alone,” said Samm, walking beside her down the road. “What if you’d gotten injured and nobody knew where you were?”
“If I get injured in an empty town a thousand miles from any possible enemy, I deserve to die.”
“Well . . . we wouldn’t leave without you.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Samm linked his exasperation. “I assume I’m here because you wanted to talk about something.”
“Interesting,” said Heron. “What do I want to talk about?”
“I have no idea,” said Samm. “Since you’re playing coy, I’ll start with the items on my own agenda. I need to know how dedicated you are to this mission.”
“I’m here,” said Heron simply.
“Here for how long?” asked Samm. “Here until something flips your loyalties backward again?”
“The Third Division survived for thirteen years because something in that Preserve kept them alive,” said Heron. “Whatever it is—maybe Williams, maybe their life support system, maybe the microbes in the dirt that keep the plants healthy—could keep me alive as well. The secret to my survival is back there, in the Preserve, along with all the food and water and shelter I could ever need. And yet I’m here.”
Samm understood. Survival was all she cared for, and for her to leave that behind was more meaningful than he’d giv
en her credit for. “You’re here,” he agreed. “You wouldn’t have left the Preserve if you weren’t truly dedicated to something even more important.” His emotions wrestled inside him, guilt and etiquette warring with the importance of his mission, until finally the latter won out. “Heron, I doubt it comes as much of a surprise to you when I say that I rarely have any idea what you’re thinking and what you are trying to accomplish. But I still trust you, and most of the time that’s good enough. Right now, though, I need to know what you’re trying to do by accompanying us. Maybe you want to help us on our mission to save the species, or maybe you just want to get back to Dr. Morgan. Maybe you’ll use us to get through the Badlands and then abandon us as soon as we’re back on safe ground. Maybe you’ll do something else I haven’t thought of yet. But . . . this is important. The information we have might save the human species, and you might be the only one strong enough to deliver it. What I need to know is if you will.”
Heron was silent a moment, and Samm sensed nothing through the link. He marveled once again at her ability to hide her emotions so completely. Why would the espionage models even need to do that? Why give them the power to deceive their own companions, when they were designed to deceive humans? Only after she turned a corner, and they started eastward down a long, bare stretch of road, did she speak.
“Badlands is a Preserve term,” said Heron.
“Excuse me?”
“We called it the toxic wasteland before,” said Heron. “That’s what Afa called it, and it’s the most descriptive term. Badlands is the term the humans in the Preserve use, and now you use it.”
“Are you saying I’m becoming one of them?” asked Samm. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
“I never said anything was bothering me.”
“Then why are you acting so strange?” asked Samm. “You wanted me to hurry, but you wouldn’t help me with the work; you brought me out here alone, but you don’t want to talk.”