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  When I’m done, I drag them over, one by one. I lay Danica and Will down first, shoulder to shoulder, then free Marco and arrange him by their side. Death has made their bodies heavy and unwieldy, and I barely have the strength I need. Last is Ellison. He stares wide-eyed at the blue, blue sky, mouth parted, as if he’s surprised to find himself this way. The scavengers have taken his rifle. I lift his hand and hold it in my lap. It’s cold, the same temperature as the clay.

  Not now. I grit my teeth. Hold it together.

  I drag him to the grave and nestle him among his team. I brush the dirt from his clothes, even though I know it won’t make any difference soon enough.

  I reach for the shovel again, but I feel a flutter of unease. This isn’t right. Something is missing. I drop the shovel and kneel next to the grave. Marco is the only one who looks truly peaceful, I guess because he died so quickly, without really knowing what was going on. I wish I could wash them and dress them in clean clothes, the way the scavengers did for their dead, or fill their hands with flowers. It seems wrong to cover them with dirt without some word or gesture to mark their passing.

  But I have no flowers, much less words. My friends’ bodies blur and my throat tightens. I see my father again—his blank stare, the falling snowflakes, and then the crack of dry winter branches behind me. . . .

  No, no, no.

  . . . the branches cracking and my heart’s sudden jump. I turned, and there was a woman, leveling an assault rifle at me. . . .

  Rosalie.

  . . . leveling a rifle at me and speaking into her coms. He’s got a whelp with him. Advise.

  My breath came hard in my scrawny bird chest, looking into the mouth of that gun. . . .

  But Rosalie would never shoot you. She saved you, remember? She brought you in from the wilderness.

  . . . terrified, and its mouth was still staring me down, and the woman was still waiting with it leveled at me. And then she touched her ear.

  Roger that. She shouldered her rifle, and suddenly all the menace lifted. She held out her hand. Here, kid. Come away now. Come with me. You’re safe.

  And then walking away from my father’s body and the sniper’s mark, the hole in his forehead.

  For a long time, all I can do is breathe and hold myself and rock back and forth over the grave. Rosalie killed my father. Did we ever bury him? Or did we leave him to rot outside the perimeter fence or be dragged away in the night, like we do with most scavengers? I don’t remember.

  Something scuffs the dirt behind me. I lunge for the shovel and whirl around, raising it in the air like a bat.

  Alder stands ten paces away. He holds an old bolt-action hunting rifle, angled down at the dirt. He frowns at me as if I’m some type of animal he’s never seen before.

  I step back. “What do you want?”

  Alder’s eyes are fixed on the bodies behind me. “I . . .” He glances at my face. “The Deacon told us she tied you to the sitting oak.”

  “Yeah.” I swipe at my eyes and adjust my grip on the shovel. “She did.”

  “I thought . . .” He clears his throat. “I thought she was making a mistake, leaving you there like that. I thought you might . . .”

  “Live?” I finish for him. I’m raw. Raw, and too angry to get killed now, after so much.

  Alder steps forward. I feint with the shovel and shoot him a look of pure menace. He holds up a hand—wait—and lowers his rifle the rest of the way. He walks to the edge of the pit and looks down at my teammates laid out in the dirt.

  “You’re burying them.” He looks back at me. “Deacon Ward always told us you burned your dead.”

  “We do. So we can use the land for farming. But that doesn’t matter now.” I wave my hand at the destruction around us.

  He looks down at the grave again and swallows. “We did this. Eden and me.”

  “Yes.”

  We both stand, awkward and tense, as if we’re waiting for some signal to tell us what to do.

  Finally Alder lays down the gun and holds out his hand. “Give me your shovel.”

  “Why?”

  “You want them buried, don’t you?”

  “Not by you,” I spit.

  “Look, just . . .” He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Just give me the shovel, okay?”

  “Fine.” I toss it at his feet. He doesn’t have a filtration mask, and if he ends up killing himself filling in Ellison’s grave, that would only be sweet justice.

  He picks up the shovel and digs into the pile of loose dirt beside the pit. The only sound is the heavy patter of dirt on cloth and flesh. I watch him for a few minutes, and then circle the grave and crouch. I sink my fingers into the soil and scoop wet clumps into the hole. I try to do it gently, pretend I’m covering my friends in a warm blanket, rather than burying them forever.

  We work in silence until the grave is nearly full.

  “Where will you go after this?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Won’t your company take care of you? Send you to another compound?”

  I shake my head. My company. How could my company have done the things it’s done?

  He falls silent again, looks off at the afternoon sun sinking lower in the sky, everything gold light and lengthening shadows. “Deacon Ward will have missed me by now. She’ll be wondering where I am.”

  “And I care . . . why?” I snap.

  His eyes flash, and I hope he’ll come at me, hope he’ll hit me. I want to pound his face into the dirt. I want something brutal and simple. But then he glances down at the mound of earth between us. “You’re right. You don’t.”

  “Did you bury her?” I ask. “Eden?”

  His head snaps up at her name. Our eyes catch, and then his shoulders drop. “No. The Deacon said there wasn’t time.”

  “Is that why you haven’t left?”

  “No.” He looks at me. “I was going to kill you first.”

  Surprise flushes through me, and then something else. . . . Respect? If our roles were reversed, I might have done the same.

  I try to keep from smiling, but I can’t. “You probably should have waited to fill in the hole, then.”

  A ghost of a smile flits across his face.

  “I thought it was cruel, leaving you to die slow. It wasn’t justice. The Deacon would have regretted it.” He nods to his gun. “So I came back to make it quick.”

  “But I was gone.”

  “But you were gone,” Alder agrees. “So I tracked you. And now here we are.”

  “Here,” I dig into my backpack, pull out an extra filtration mask, and toss it to him.

  Alder catches it. He hesitates, looks at it, then me. “Thanks.”

  “You should leave,” I say. “Crake—before he died, he said they were coming to quarantine the area. You’ve got to clear out before they come.”

  Alder freezes. “Quarantine?”

  “Yeah, Crake said . . .” I look up, and the words die in my mouth.

  Alder stands stock-still, all the color drained from his face. “Quarantine?” he says again.

  “Yeah.” I frown at him. “What, you never heard the word?”

  “We have to get out of here.” Alder drops the shovel and tries to grab my arm.

  “Hey!” I shout, dancing out of the way.

  “You don’t get it.” He checks the horizon. “That’s not what you think it means.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s code.” Alder snatches up the rifle and snaps it open to check his cartridges. “Whatever’s left, they’re going to burn it to the ground. Make it like this place never existed.”

  I bark out a laugh. “They wouldn’t.” After all, what’s left to burn? But then I remember Crake, blood flecked over his chin. “They can’t let anyone know.”

  A sick feeling creeps into my stomach. “How . . . how do you know?”

  “The Deacon.” Alder slings his rifle back over his shoulder. “She used to be one of you.”


  The earth turns under me, slow, slow, like the minute hand of an old clock. “She told me,” I hear myself say.

  “We’ve got to move.” Alder grabs for my arm again.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Fine.” He holds up his hands in surrender and backs away. “Don’t believe me. You want to stay and get yourself killed, that’s nothing to me. But I’m going.”

  “Good,” I shout after him, picking up the shovel. “I’ll finish this myself.”

  Alder turns to say something else, but then his eyes go wide. “Listen.” He scans the sky. “Do you hear that?”

  I hold my breath. At first I don’t, but then I hear it, far off in the distance. The drone of a plane. No, more than one. They pop into view on the horizon, two specks tearing toward us at top speed.

  “Run!” Alder yells.

  I’m already off, scooping my bag from the dirt and throwing myself onto the motorcycle. “Come on!” I shout, kicking the starter.

  Alder hesitates. For a split second, hate and suspicion cross his face, but then he’s clambering onto the back of the bike. He grabs my waist and holds tight. I gun us forward, onto the road leading to the nearest substation.

  “No, left!” Alder shouts in my ear.

  “Left?” I yell back. “Kingfisher’s?”

  He says something, but a sudden roar overhead mutes his words, and the horizon to the west ripples with fire. Orange flames blossom, and then the aftershock hits us, a ripping series of booms that echo through my chest.

  “Holy hell.” I push down the throttle and lean forward over the handlebars. “C’mon, faster!”

  Another line of fire blooms to the west, closer this time. I catch sight of one of the planes, a sharp black shape circling out of the smoke. It strafes the land as it comes in for another pass, and more fire leaps up in its wake.

  “They’re trying to kill us!” I scream.

  “No, really?” Alder shouts back. “What did you think they were going to do?”

  Smoke billows up and blankets the sun. The whole world turns a sickly yellow, the same jaundiced hue that creeps in before a hurricane. The Kingfisher homestead comes into view a mile out. I can see farther without the corn, but that also means the pilots overhead won’t have so much trouble spotting the bike, unless the smoke is thick enough to hide us.

  “Where?” I yell over my shoulder.

  “The house!”

  Another line of fire ignites behind us, closer than before. Glowing cinders rain down on the road and the dead corn, as if all the stars have burst and fallen from the sky. Points of heat sear my shoulders and arms. I smell my hair burning.

  The Kingfishers’ tin roof sharpens into detail. Scorch marks score the side of the house, where the honeysuckle grew, and laundry still droops on the line. I brake and swing the bike into a sudden stop. Alder races to the porch and I follow, close on his heels.

  As I pass the front stoop, something red flashes in my periphery. I look back. Tomatoes, ripe and full. Something alive in the midst of all this rot. Time stops. My heart stops. How is this possible? The blight has killed everything, but it hasn’t touched them.

  “Alder.”

  He turns. I read terror all over his face, but then he sees.

  “Hurry.” He holds out his hands. “Give me your bag.”

  I shrug it off and pull open the drawstring top. Alder grabs a handful of ice packs and painkillers and extra gauze and chucks it all on the porch. He rips the tomatoes from the vines with both hands and stuffs them into the bag.

  Overhead, the planes fill the air with a heavy buzz.

  “Alder,” I say.

  “Done.” He cinches the bag closed and pushes it into my hands as he brushes past me into the house.

  Antique junk clutters the space, in the way of homesteads that have been in a family for years, and the air smells of must. I catch only fleeting glimpses of the front room as I hurry after Alder: a sunken couch, a camp stove, pictures of trees done in coffee grounds and red clay hanging on the wall. I nearly trip over an old wooden footstool.

  Alder flips back a rag rug and reveals a trapdoor. “The Kingfishers’ cellar. We’ll be safe here.”

  “I’m not going down there.”

  Alder grabs the pull ring and yanks the door open with a squeal. “I don’t think you’ve got much choice.”

  “What good’s that going to do if they bomb the house?” I shoot back. “Then we’re trapped beneath a burning building instead of inside it. Either way, we’re dead.”

  Outside, a sonic boom claps the air. The walls shake and a lamp falls to the floor and shatters.

  Alder hops down onto the stair leading to the cellar. “Trust me,” he says. “If I were going to kill you, I’d have done it already.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I mutter, but I follow him into the dark anyway.

  .8.

  CHEROKEE PURPLE

  SOLANUM LYCOPERSICUM

  Alder strikes a match and feeds it into a lamp at the bottom of the stair. An oily circle of light fills the room. Another impact shudders the ground, and a dusting of silt rains down between the floorboards.

  “Great,” I say. “You’d rather be buried alive than burn to death. Is that it?”

  Alder glares at me. “You want to go back up there?”

  “No.” I roll my eyes.

  “Then will you shut your cog mouth for a second? I know what I’m doing.”

  I briefly entertain the idea of ramming Alder’s head into the dirt wall and digging an escape route that way.

  “Fine,” I say through gritted teeth.

  Alder stalks to the far end of the room, where black metal shelves stocked with AgraStar brand pesticide tanks and fertilizer line the wall. He grabs a full bag and throws it on the floor.

  “Come on,” he says. “Help me.”

  I drop my backpack and join him, shoving pesticide tanks, boxes of spare tractor parts, and bags of fertilizer out of the way. Alder grabs one side of the shelving and drags it away from the corner. I lift the other side, and slowly, we walk it away from the wall, revealing a stack of tin roofing corrugate.

  I glance at the ceiling. “This is supposed to help . . . how?”

  “You’ll see.” Alder slides the tin out of the way. A hole, three feet wide, maybe four feet tall, is cut into the cellar wall. He crouches down and holds the oil lamp out into the darkness. It’s a tunnel, a passage boring into the earth as far as I can see. Roots vein the walls and roof. We’ll have to duck, but there’s enough room to pass through single file.

  A bone-shaking boom throws us to the ground. The spaces between the floorboards overhead flash white. I lie stunned, my brain scrambling to make sense of the sound and light above me. Then the heat hits me, and the smell. Fire. The Kingfishers’ house is on fire.

  “Move.” Alder is beside me, tugging me to my feet, pushing me into the tunnel.

  “My pack!” I stagger back for the bag of supplies.

  The blaze moves fast, eating the floorboards overhead with a crackling fury. Heat pulses down from the ceiling and orange flames curl around the wooden beams. Behind me, a damaged beam gives way and plummets to the ground in a cloud of sparks.

  “Hurry!” Alder shouts.

  I run for the tunnel, duck, and barrel forward at a stoop. Alder follows. As he clears the threshold, a thunderous crack sounds and the floor collapses into the cellar in an avalanche of flaming beams and dirt.

  “Go!” Alder shouts. “Run, run!”

  But I’m already running, shoulders hunched, head low, hoping the many feet of earth above won’t cave in. The air is thin and hot, and Alder’s lamp dances crazily, illuminating flashes of terrain ahead me.

  The tunnel turns left, and the noise and heat fade. I stop and pull my filtration mask down around my neck. The sharp smell of smoke hits my nose. “Give me a minute,” I pant. “Not enough air.”

  The lamp lights Alder’s face. “It’s not much farther. Keep moving.”

  I stu
mble forward, catching my hair in the roots and tripping on the uneven ground. I’m about to give up when the tunnel widens and the ceiling rises and I can walk almost completely upright.

  “Here.” Alder jogs forward, and I step aside to let him squeeze by. Better. He can light the way, and I can see what he’s up to.

  The ceiling rises another foot. Alder’s lamp illuminates a rough-cut archway, and beyond it, a wide room. Three of the walls are lined with shelves, but the fourth is an enormous vein of muddy yellow quartz that curves up and forms part of the ceiling. The lantern light glimmers on its surface. Half of the shelves are empty, but labeled jars of seeds fill the others—runner beans and okra, tomatoes and yellow squash. Bins of tubers and garlic cloves sit at the foot of the shelves. Contraband.

  I let my pack drop and walk to the center of the space. “The Kingfishers weren’t the only ones, were they?” I shoot a look at Alder. There’s no way they stored all of this themselves, in addition to their other stash beneath the green-bean plot.

  “Of course not.” He turns his back to me and scans the shelves. I spot what he’s looking for at the same moment he does. An old sat phone. He grabs it from the top shelf and holds down the ON button to test the power.

  I take a step back. “Who are you calling? The Deacon?”

  “No one.” He frowns at the screen. “Can’t get any connection down here.”

  “What about the . . .” I struggle to remember what he and Grebe said last night. “Charlotte? The Latebra Congress?”

  Alder freezes. “Where did you hear about that?”

  “You said it. Back at your camp, when you were talking to Grebe.”

  He’s silent now, staring at me, and my anger and frustration rush back. It’s his fault this happened, him and the Deacon, and now he wants to play games?

  “Must be important.” I plant my feet. “If you don’t want me knowing about it.”

  Alder advances on me. I step back, ready to throw up an arm and block the blow I’m sure is coming, but he leans into my face instead.