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  Something heavy and soft knocks against the sole of my boot. Two bodies lie on the floorboards, jackets thrown over their faces. A lock of white-blond hair escapes the smaller bundle. Her shoes have been stripped off, and her naked feet rock limply with every rut we hit.

  Juna leans down next to my ear. “Not me,” she whispers. She’s wearing the dead girl’s boots, and her makeshift mask is sharp with vinegar. “I told him I wanted you dead.”

  I ignore her and bring my eyes back to Alder’s. “What happened? Our crops—”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Was it you?” I tug against the zip ties, even though I feel like I’m going to vomit. The air smells wrong, too. “You did this, didn’t you?” But even as I say it, I realize it doesn’t make sense. Why would the scavengers try to wipe out our crops? Steal them? Yes. But destroy them?

  “More like you.” He shoots me a disgusted look.

  “We would never—”

  “There’s no limit to what AgraStar will do,” he says.

  But no. He’s wrong. The company would never do this. Why would it wipe out its own product, its employees and contractors’ livelihoods?

  Alder holds something up. “Where’d you get these?”

  I drag my eyes back up to him. The wire cutters. I forgot about them.

  “Was it you?” Alder tries to trap my gaze.

  I look away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Nowhere,” I say. “I found them.”

  “Where?”

  “In a field.”

  He slumps into silence. The perimeter fence comes into sight. A convoy of white company trucks passes us, speeding the other way, toward the R&D facility.

  “Hey!” I scream and try to stand. The zip tie allows me to rise, but only to a stoop. “Help!” The wind whips my voice away. I jerk at the tie, even though I know it won’t break. It cuts deeper into my flesh.

  “Sit down.” Alder pushes me back to my knees.

  Juna gives him an appreciative smile. “You’d better cut that tracker off her, too.” She turns her own wrist to show the naked patch where her data band should be. “Otherwise they’ll find us later.”

  I press my lips together and glare at her. I can’t believe I felt sorry for this kid. She’s as much a hardened criminal as her parents.

  Alder shoots a weary look at my wrist, and then at Juna. “You do it. I’ll mess it up.”

  Juna shrugs. “You got a knife?”

  Alder pulls a folding knife with rusted hinges and a fat, serrated blade from his belt. “That do?”

  Juna nods. She leans in close and cuts her eyes at mine. “Hold still.” She smirks and fits the blade between the soft flesh of my inner wrist and the data band’s polymer backing. “Wouldn’t want me to slip, would you?”

  A faded gold AgraStar emblem inlaid in the knife handle catches the light as she pries upward with the blade. I grit my teeth. The shirks must have taken this knife from another company soldier, and now here they are, using it on me. An electric burn sparks my nerve endings, and the band pops free. It clatters to the floor. Two pinpricks of blood well in the center of the pale strip of exposed skin, like a snakebite, where the power prongs used to feed in. A tremor passes through me and my body turns rubbery, as if I’ve just finished a five-mile run.

  I wrestle my face into a blank mask, refusing to show how much it hurts. I slump on the floor and stare at my wrist. I’ve had my data band since I was a kid. A flash of memory—my feet dangling off a table covered in crinkly paper. “Just a pinch,” the medic says, pressing the installation gun against my wrist. My eyes water, but I don’t cry, and Rosalie claps me on the shoulder and says I’m brave. That band has always been there, monitoring my heart rate, keeping time, tracking my duty roster, helping me tell north from south and poison sumac from harmless ferns. How am I going to get back to my station if they take me out past the perimeter fence?

  A cloud of sharp-winged chimney swifts funnels overhead, overtaking us as they streak to the trees.

  I look up at Alder. “They’re going to stop you at the gate.” I fight to keep my voice even, so he won’t hear the pain and panic growing in it. If I can get him to cut the zip ties, maybe I can wrestle the gun out of his hands, take control of the vehicle. Or at least jump out and disappear into the fields. I lift my bound hands. “This isn’t going to win you any favors with the border guards.”

  Another truck streaks by, barreling toward the chaos we’ve left behind.

  Alder nods at it. “You seriously think anyone’s watching the perimeter now?”

  “Maybe.” I grimace. “Maybe not. But if they are, don’t you think having me trussed up like this is going to tip them off?”

  He and Juna share a look over my head.

  “She’s right,” Alder says.

  Juna makes a face.

  Alder pushes the revolver into her hands. “Keep that on her.” He clicks open the same rusted knife and takes hold of my hands. His touch is positively gentle compared to Juna’s. “Don’t move, okay?” He looks briefly into my eyes, and then goes to work sawing at the zip tie.

  I glance at Juna. She scowls and adjusts her grip on the gun. She looks like she wouldn’t hesitate to use that thing on me, but if I’m fast enough, I can be over the side of the truck before she has time to aim. Juna’s a little thing. Even the kick from a standard pistol will throw her off.

  My hands spring free. I see Juna clench the trigger, but I knock the gun from her hands and bolt.

  I clear the Humvee’s tailgate, hit the ground rolling, and jump up again as the truck screeches to a halt. I make for the wilted corn and crash through the dry, rustling stalks. But my adrenaline is spent. Every inch of my body aches. Keep moving. Boots crunch behind me in the corn. I dart left, into another row, and hunch down as I run. My chest burns, but I force my breaths low and quiet.

  A blur streaks by. Alder throws himself into a side tackle. I stop short and try to lurch out of the way, but he catches me around the shoulders, and we both hit the ground. For a moment, my lungs stop working. They won’t draw air. I remember the time Seth accidentally-on-purpose kicked me in the throat in combat maneuvers training when we were thirteen, and how our instructor used our accident as an opportunity to demonstrate more disabling strikes. The fingers present an excellently sensitive yet nonlethal option. . . .

  I grab Alder’s splinted fingers, pull back. He yelps and throws a punch, knocking me into the dirt. My head spins.

  In the few seconds it takes my vision to clear, Alder has my wrists cinched together in front of me with a new zip tie. He hauls me to my feet. We trudge along in silence for a few minutes, back to the road.

  “What do you want me for, anyway?” I say. “It’s not like I’m going to stop you from getting back to your precious forest.”

  Alder pushes me along wordlessly.

  “I could be helping with the fire.” My eyes sting and blur, and a bubble of helpless panic rises in my chest. “They need me. They need all the security personnel they can get.”

  Alder shakes his head. “You killed Eden.”

  He speaks so quietly, I don’t think I’ve heard him right. “What?”

  “You killed Eden,” he repeats, louder this time. He looks up at me through red-rimmed eyes. Is it the smoke, or is he close to tears?

  “And you killed Ellison,” I shoot back. “And Marco, and Will, and Danica. What about them?”

  He clenches his jaw. “That’s different. Eden wasn’t doing anything to you. She—”

  “—was pointing a gun at us,” I finish for him. “She was interfering with an authorized prisoner transport. You all were.”

  “You didn’t have to shoot her.” He drops his head. “She was only bluffing. She would never have hurt anyone.”

  I remember Ellison’s smile the moment before he fell. I make my face hard, and shrug. “That’s the chance you take when you pull a rifle on an arme
d security detail.”

  Alder rounds on me. “Is that the chance she took when she tried to feed us last night, too?”

  I’ve lost people, too, I want to spit. Who knows what might have happened with me and Ellison if you hadn’t killed him? I could have had friends. People I trusted. Even love.

  But I’m not going to waste my breath. I’m not going to let some shirk in on my sappy half fantasies. I’m not going to let him know the least little thing about me. I stare evenly back at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Eden was right,” he says after a few seconds. “Cogs really don’t have souls.”

  I stumble to the Humvee with Alder’s pistol at my back. Juna meets us at the side of the road, a rifle over her shoulder. Her face falls when she sees me. Clearly she was hoping Alder would finish me off and leave me to rot alongside the crops.

  The two of them boost me up into the Humvee. I sink down on the empty bench and lean forward, elbows on my knees. My head pounds. Juna and Alder position themselves on either side of me, weapons at the ready.

  “Loaded up?” Mrs. Kingfisher calls.

  Alder nods. “Did you raise the Deacon’s team?”

  She shakes her head. “Nothing but static. Might be the mag-pulse rounds they were using took out their radios.”

  “Keep trying,” Alder says. “We have to get through to them.”

  The engine turns over. We crawl forward, past the unmanned security fence and along the road to the forest.

  We skirt the woods, coast down a hill blanketed with head-high grass, and pick up one of the old hardtop roads. The company’s ethanol tanker trucks still use the short section of hardtop leading to the interstate highway, so we keep it pretty free of new growth, fill in the cracks and potholes. But farther out, it disintegrates into a patchwork of crumbling asphalt, spidery goose grass, and horse nettle.

  Alder hoists himself up on the Humvee’s roll-over bar to keep watch. “Everyone quiet,” he says. “Eyes sharp.” Young ferns and undergrowth crackle beneath the tires.

  I swallow and scan the road for any movement. Out here, we’re as likely to run into hijackers as an AgraStar patrol. If I have a choice, I’d rather stick with the shirks than take my chances on a bunch of jackers.

  We roll through the shadow of an overpass and pull off onto a slight grassy incline leading up to the northern edge of the forest. Alder pulls the bandanna down around his neck and heaves in a deep breath. The air is wet and clean here. Whatever hangs over the compound hasn’t drifted this far yet.

  Vast shrouds of kudzu have overtaken this end of the wood. It looms above us as we approach, changing the familiar shapes of oak and pine trees to the corpses of half-hidden monsters slumbering beneath the green.

  Something about the kudzu forest has always frightened me. Maybe it’s the silence that hangs over it, as if the vines have wrapped around the forest’s throat while they suck the life from the trees. Or maybe it’s the childish fear that if I part the veil of leaves, I’ll fall out of my own world and into whatever uncanny land exists on the other side.

  Whenever I’m on duty guarding an eradication team outside the compound gates, I spare a few minutes to hack at the vines with my machete, drive the mass back at least a few feet. But the kudzu is always creeping closer to the compound, swallowing old power lines and the husks of abandoned, gasoline-fueled cars along the sides of the highway. Eradication spends half their time holding it off with flamethrowers and chemical sprays along the southern perimeter, but it always grows back. I glare at Alder and then up at the wall of kudzu before us. Maybe we should have taken some napalm to the whole thing, killed two birds with one stone.

  Mrs. Kingfisher slows to an idle. Alder hops over the Humvee’s side, tucks his gun in his belt, and wades through the scrub to the curtain of green.

  “What’s he doing?” I ask.

  No one answers. Alder reaches into the vines—no, it can’t be—and pulls back a tangled mat of leaves. A shadowy opening tunnels into the kudzu, large enough for the Humvee to pass through.

  The hairs on the back of my neck rise, and my peripheral vision darkens. The scavengers’ camp is through there, in the kudzu forest.

  Alder holds the vines aside as we drive into an archway of green. As soon as we pass through, he drops it again, plunging us into thick near-darkness. His boots thump on the Humvee’s tailgate, and the vehicle dips slightly as it takes his weight. Mrs. Kingfisher clicks on the headlights. Alder is across from me again, the glare of the high beams emphasizing the circles beneath his eyes. We roll forward, passing skeletons of dead trees muffled in kudzu. I make myself keep breathing. Stay calm. Stay limber. Stay ready.

  The tunnel’s ceiling lifts and parts, letting a smattering of daylight through the canopy high above. I smell smoke again, but not the acrid, chemical-laced stuff that choked our fields and left my lungs raw. This is the ancient, alien scent of wood smoke.

  Memory knocks the breath from me. A man’s hands—my father’s?—stripping the skin from a squirrel. Smoke drifting sweetly up to the golden sky. The spit of fat on embers. My father. His laugh, always fast and nervous, as though he wasn’t sure it was allowed—

  No. I don’t want to remember. My father was nothing but a shirk, and he made me one, too. I didn’t understand until later what our constant wandering meant—that he had most likely broken his contract somewhere. He was worse than those born outside the company’s embrace, who were raised to be stubborn or maybe didn’t know better. He knew what he was doing, what it would mean for me, and he did it anyway.

  We come to the bottom of a steep rise and park alongside an old steel-framed motorcycle with a sidecar and a pickup truck with a canvas awning suspended over its bed. Mrs. Kingfisher throws the Humvee into park while Juna and her brother help their father down.

  “Easy, now. No running.” Mrs. Kingfisher’s hands close in a bony grip around my elbow as she leads me to the embankment.

  I glance back as I stagger up the hill. Alder lingers behind. He stands at the rear of the Humvee, leaning heavily on it. As I watch, he reaches down and brushes something from Eden’s cold ankle. His fingers trace the arch of her foot and the jut of bone at her joint, as if he could tender her back to life. Then his jaw tightens, and he looks at me. I snap my head away. I won’t be sorry. Ellison and my teammates are just as dead. I have to focus on not slipping as Mrs. Kingfisher half guides, half pulls me to the crest of the hill. The tailgate slams, and Alder tramps after us.

  A pale, balding man with a rangy build and a single-action shotgun balanced across his shoulder awaits us at the top. He squints as we approach, counting our number, clearly coming up short, counting again. Alder jogs ahead to meet him.

  The older man lets the muzzle of his shotgun drop to the dirt. “Eden?” Everything—hope and fear and the unwanted weight of knowledge—comes loaded in that one word.

  Alder shakes his head. “I’m sorry. She and Malcolm—”

  The other man doesn’t wait for him to finish. He brushes past Alder, picking up speed as he descends the hill on a slither of decomposing leaves.

  “Grebe,” Alder calls after him. “Wait! Don’t go down there.”

  But Grebe isn’t listening. He slows when he gets to the side of the Humvee and looks down at what’s inside. Alder turns away and continues up the incline.

  A moan starts behind us. “No. No, no, no.” And then louder, breaking. “Eden!”

  “Keep walking.” Mrs. Kingfisher tugs at my elbow, and I realize I’m frozen in place.

  A glade opens at the top of the rise. Small groups of scavengers, maybe twenty people in all, cluster outside structures patched together from ragged plastic tarp, car hoods, rusted metal corrugate stripped from the perimeter fence, and woven branches. Inside one, I glimpse a jumble of radio equipment on a table. A low, smoky fire burns in a pit at the center of the makeshift village. The ground is mud and moss. No crops grow here beneath the overhanging trees.

  A skinny, shirtless boy
zips to us and crashes into Mrs. Kingfisher’s legs. “Mama!”

  Micah, I realize. The one who ran.

  At his shout, the other scavengers look up. They’re mostly kids, with a smattering of teenagers and adults.

  “Micah.” Mrs. Kingfisher bends to kiss his head. “Thank you, baby,” she whispers into his hair and holds him tight to her. “You saved us.”

  The older scavengers burst into murmurs and a flurry of sideways glances at me. I realize with a growing sense of dread that they aren’t all speaking English. I think some of them might be using the language my father spoke—I recognize the cadence of it, even if the meaning of it falls through me like a sieve—but others speak something I’ve never heard before. I can’t understand them at all. The children stare openly. On the far side of the glade, a middle-aged woman with one foot bound in rags and a burst of tight gray curls drops a bundle of newly shucked corn.

  “Malcolm?” She limps a few steps toward us and stops dead.

  Alder shakes his head again.

  The lines on her dark brown face deepen. She purses her lips.

  “I’m sorry, Laurel,” Alder says. “Have the other groups come back yet?”

  “Groups?” Laurel repeats. She blinks herself back to the present. “No, you’re the first.”

  “We need the Deacon.” Alder’s voice dips low and urgent. He turns his back to me and says something more to her, but I can’t make out his words.

  The muttering in the camp grows louder.

  “. . . that cog . . . without Eden . . . bodies in the truck . . .”

  “. . . con una prisionera pero sin su novia?”

  “. . . sǐ wáng . . . fāshēngle shénme shì?”

  “Alder?” Mrs. Kingfisher clears her throat. “Son, I think we’d better get the girl inside.” She glances meaningfully at the circle of scavengers tightening around us.

  Alder sees them, too. “Right.”

  Mrs. Kingfisher pats Micah’s back. “Go and help your sister with your daddy now.”