by Kyla Stone
Her mouth tightened. Her eyes were shards of obsidian reflecting the firelight. “We’ll meet you on the other side of the city. If you make it.” She walked over to Benjie, limping with her left leg. Was it a wound that predated the end of the world, or a more recent injury? He doubted Raven would tell him if he asked. She was taciturn, a loner who kept her cards close to her chest.
She shoved her hand inside the pocket of her pants and thrust an object at Benjie. Benjie turned it over in his hands, his face lit with awe. Gabriel caught a glimpse of a wooden shape—carved wings, an elegant head, and curved beak. A bird. Likely, a raven. A ghost of a smile passed across her face. “Keep it safe for me.”
Benjie nodded solemnly and protectively tucked the carved figurine inside his own pocket.
She turned to Jericho. “You’ll follow I-575 once you’re through Atlanta. There’s a small town, Ball Ground. Exit 27. We’ll wait for you there.”
Raven yanked her hoverboard out of her pack, activated it, and set it on the ground. It hovered six inches above the grass, beating down the dry, brown blades with tiny, whirring rotors. “Be careful of the rats. They’re scared of fire. Be more careful of the Pyros. They make the fire.”
Unease twisted his gut. Harmony had warned them of the same gang. “What do you mean? What do you know about the Pyros?”
But she didn’t answer. Raven stepped onto her hoverboard and whisked out of the clearing, passing between Silas and Horne, who both stared after her like she was some sort of ghostly apparition.
“You forgot your dog,” Silas said, his expression petulant.
“He’ll come when he comes,” she said over her shoulder. She weaved expertly between the shadowy hulks of cars and houses and trees. The wolf heaved himself to his feet and bounded silently after her. Just like that, they were gone.
“Good riddance.” Silas glowered at the fire.
Willow just laughed.
Micah stood up abruptly and crossed the clearing, stepping around the fire and coming to a stop in front of him.
Gabriel looked up in surprise. They’d barely spoken in the week since they’d left Sweet Creek Farm. Though Micah hadn’t seemed quite so angry, there was still a deep tension between them, a yawning chasm Gabriel wasn’t sure how to cross.
He had lied to his brother and betrayed him—the brother he’d sworn to protect all those years ago when their mother had died of cancer and their father had wasted away from grief and Silk. Back when it was only them against the world.
Every night before he slept, Gabriel repeated to himself the words he longed to say and hear in return: Just us. Always. He wasn’t naive enough to believe he’d ever hear his brother say those words again. But he held them close to his heart anyway.
“What is it?” he asked now.
“Can I trust you?” Micah said evenly, his face tense, his expression unreadable.
“Yes,” Gabriel said without hesitation. He couldn’t hope for anything. He wouldn’t allow himself to hope, to believe…but he sat up straighter, his heart beating fast.
Micah turned to Jericho, who stood half in darkness, turned toward the house but still listening. “I think we should uncuff him.”
Everyone else fell silent, watching. Gabriel didn’t move, didn’t speak. Some part of him was afraid to break this spell, whatever it was. What was Micah doing? What was he thinking? His face was still inscrutable, the firelight reflecting in the lenses of his glasses.
Jericho rubbed his square, stubbled jaw and stared at Micah for a long minute. He was broad-chested and muscular, his brown skin gleaming darkly in the firelight. Jericho was tough and no-nonsense, a stickler for the rules, and the reason Gabriel was still a captive locked in cuffs. “You believe he can be trusted?”
Micah cleared his throat. “I believe he has proven so with his actions. He had plenty of chances to run, but he didn’t. He had plenty of chances to turn on any one of us, but he didn’t. He fought with us.”
“To protect his own life,” Horne spat.
Gabriel didn’t speak. It wasn’t his place. This decision was out of his hands. He gritted his teeth and waited, though every bone in his body thrummed with dark energy.
“And others,” Micah insisted. “He almost died saving Amelia.”
Gabriel’s heart constricted. He hadn’t died like he was supposed to. Nadira had died instead.
“Maybe we could give him a chance,” Finn said amiably. He stuffed a hunk of rabbit in his mouth, then tore another chunk off the bone he was holding, which looked like a toothpick in his large hands.
“He’s a New Patriot.” Willow shot him a look, daggers in her gaze. “A terrorist. Don’t forget what he did.”
“I’m not forgetting,” Micah said quietly but firmly. “But we’re going into a dangerous city and we don’t know what we’re up against. We need every fighter. And Gabriel is good at keeping people alive.”
“When he wants to,” Willow muttered under her breath.
Gabriel ignored her. He knew why she hated him. His people had killed her sister and her mother on the Grand Voyager. But her hatred was harmless. He already loathed himself more than she ever could.
“I trust your judgment, Micah.” Jericho gestured for Gabriel to hold out his cuffed hands. Jericho swiped in the code. The cuffs released and fell to the ground. As simple and easy as that.
Gabriel flexed and unflexed his fingers and rubbed his chafed wrists. He knew better than to believe this meant more than it did. He was strong. He knew how to fight. He was an asset to the group, but not in handcuffs.
They trusted him not to kill them in their sleep. That was still a far cry from earning their respect. Or their forgiveness. “Thank you.”
Micah returned the cuffs to Jericho. He gave Gabriel a grim smile. There was something in his eyes. Not absolution, but something else. His gaze didn’t hold as much bitterness or recrimination as before.
The realization hit him. Amelia must have told Micah the truth about the Hydra virus. He’d hated that Micah believed him capable of such an atrocity. He was guilty of great evil, but not that. He already had a lifetime of sins to make up for.
Gabriel glanced sharply at Amelia. She stared back at him, unflinching. Her beautiful face was carved in alabaster, her white-blonde hair cut into a ragged, wispy fringe, her ice-blue eyes steady.
He nodded in thanks. And then, amazingly, she nodded back.
He tried to ignore the tightness in his chest, the tingling that spread through his whole body when she looked at him. He wanted to push her hair behind her ear, to tilt her chin toward him, to feel her breath on his skin and her lips on his. He longed to hold her and never let her go.
But that was an impossible dream, futile and useless. The sooner he stopped wanting it, the better. The truth was, some things couldn’t be fixed once you’d broken them—no matter how much you regretted it, no matter how deeply you wished things were different.
He knew this. Yet it was so easy to forget.
Jericho rose to his feet with a sigh. “Get some sleep, people. We need to rest as much as possible.”
“I’ll take the first watch,” Gabriel said.
He took a shovelful of dirt and threw it on the fire. Sparks danced in the air like a hundred pairs of red eyes watching them in the night.
3
Willow
It wasn’t the way Willow would have chosen to spend her eighteenth birthday, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Not these days.
Amelia and Jericho’s waning SmartFlexes still recorded the time and date, though they did little else. The morning of December eighth dawned cold and brittle.
Willow had made Benjie wear three layers of long-sleeved shirts they’d scavenged from someone’s garage several miles back. He wore a turquoise knit hat low over his eyes. The bright color bobbing through the world of gray and brown made her heart ache. Turquoise had been her sister Zia’s favorite color.
The sky was overcast, thick with a dreary, drizzling rain, an
d clotted with pillars of smoke. What leaves remained on the trees were shriveled and brown, clinging to their barren branches in defiance of coming winter. A white haze of frost filmed the overgrown grass and weeds choking the edges of the asphalt.
Two days ago, they’d abandoned the trucks just past Hartsfield-Jackson airport to the west. The road was too clogged with vehicles. They continued on foot, trudging past signs for communities with names like Lakewood Heights, High Point, and Summerhill. As they headed into South Atlanta, townhouses and tenement tracts gave way to restaurants and shops, infotainment stores and grocery delivery warehouses. Above them, gleaming corporate towers, dazzling luxury apartments, and soaring skyscrapers cast long shadows.
“No talking above a whisper,” Jericho had instructed. “Communicate through gestures when you can. This is hostile territory. The sooner we make it through, the better. Look alive, people.”
“You hear that?” She squeezed her brother’s hand.
Benjie nodded and tugged on her arm, pointing at something above them. Thirty feet over their heads, the AirRail track arced gracefully, winding between skyscrapers and hovering on slim columns over the congested streets. Constructed a decade ago, it was a sleek white hyper-speed maglev train that levitated over magnetized tracks.
The holoscreens attached to every building stared silent and empty, like giant blind eyes somehow still watching their every move. The scanners wouldn’t read any SmartFlexes now. They wouldn’t instantly glean a lifetime of purchasing history or social media data or tailor ads specifically to your unique preferences, no annoying advertisements directed at you every time you traveled down the street.
Her stomach lurched. She never thought she’d actually miss a holo ad.
The further they walked into the city, the heavier and thicker the smoke grew. The stench burned their nostrils and stung their watering eyes. Ahead of them, smoke poured from an Italian deli. On their left, only a burned-out husk remained of the Metropolitan Historican Artifacts Museum. Windows and doors were broken or boarded up. Spray-painted graffiti marked the walls.
There were bodies crumpled on the sidewalks. Bodies lying half-inside doorways. Bodies slumped inside cars. All of them in various states of decomposition. For most of them, the tell-tale blood stains rimming the eyes, nose, and mouth told the same story—the ravages of the Hydra virus.
Acid burned the back of Willow’s throat. She tried not to gag. The N95 masks they wore did nothing to filter out the stench of rotting flesh mingled with burnt metal and wood and charred plastic.
Hawks and other carrion birds squawked over the bodies. A coyote with red on its muzzle growled at them, but scurried down an alley when Silas hurled a rock at it.
Crashed drones littered the streets, sidewalks, and roofs of shorter shops and cafes. Most were food and product-delivery drones, but there were plenty of surveillance and patrol drones. Many of them looked like they’d been blown out of the air, their metal bodies torn and mangled.
When she’d first learned of the billions of dead, her brain couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t comprehend the astronomical numbers, the sheer staggering mathematical figures. She still couldn’t. But here in a massive city constructed of steel and glass and concrete, everything designed by people, for people, the silence was deafening.
They trudged past a dozen bodies slumped over each other next to a stoplight. The Hydra virus hadn’t taken them. Bullet holes were drilled into the back of their heads.
She turned Benjie’s face away. He didn’t need to see that.
“What happened here?” Finn asked grimly.
“What didn’t happen? Maybe that’s the better question.” She took a closer look at the buildings. Bullet holes punctured the brick facade of a posh college prep academy, the tuition probably more than Willow’s mother had made in two years on the Grand Voyager. A massive infotainment center sported craters a car could drive through.
Evidently, something had happened, some sort of uprising or gang turf war fought right in downtown Atlanta. The question was: when?
“This place gives me the creeps,” she said softly.
“Tell me about it.” Finn gazed up at the skyline, the crowns of skyscrapers a thousand feet above them disappearing into the smoky haze. “Makes me more nervous than a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”
“It’s eerily quiet…where are all the people?”
Jericho paused, holding up his hand. “Don’t shoot your gun unless you have to. Even with a suppressor, it might be heard by the wrong people.”
Everyone nodded. No one spoke. Benjie kicked a pebble on the sidewalk. Horne kept clearing his throat. Amelia hummed to herself under her breath, the same classical song she’d been repeating all week, her hands skimming over an invisible violin.
Several city blocks later, a shattered skyscraper jutted into the sky like the shards of a broken bottle. A small granite memorial stood in front of it. She remembered the shaky videos from the newsfeeds. The terrorist group Right Hand of God had bombed it two years ago. No one bothered to rebuild it. Why put money into a crumbling city already choked with violence and hopelessness?
“Today is my birthday,” she said suddenly. She needed to tell someone. She needed to untangle the anxious knot twisting in her gut. She needed to talk, to laugh about something. Otherwise, this empty, gutted city was going to break her heart. “Happy eighteenth to me.”
“Congratulations!” Finn’s face broke into a delighted, lopsided grin. She couldn’t see it beneath his mask, but she knew it was there. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because…it didn’t seem right. With everything.” She gestured with both hands, encompassing the whole damn screwed-up world.
“Hogwash. Fiddlesticks. Balderdash!” Finn said.
Benjie giggled.
At 6’6”, Finn towered above her, his meaty arms and legs like tree trunks. He was huge, an imposing, intimidating giant—until he grinned mischievously, flashing his gap-toothed smile. In reality, Finn was gentle as a teddy bear.
He peered down at her, his brows furrowed. “What’s wrong?”
She sighed. For such a giant goofball, Finn was perceptive when he wanted to be. Too perceptive. The truth was, Zia was on her mind.
Instead of fading like one of those pre-digital photos, she grew even more vibrant in Willow’s memory with each passing day. Her turquoise pixie hair framing her heart-shaped face, her nose always wrinkling up like a puppy, her exuberant laughter filling every corner of Willow’s mind.
She never wanted to forget her sister, but she didn’t know how much longer she could endure the pain and guilt. Today was yet another reminder that Zia would never have a chance to grow up, to graduate from high school, to transform from girl to woman. She would forever be stuck at thirteen, frozen in Willow’s memories.
Zia would never turn eighteen, and it was Willow’s fault.
How could she explain any of that? Besides, if she started to talk about Zia, she’d cry, and once she started crying, she might never stop. She had to be strong. For herself, and for Benjie. It was what her mother would want.
She was Ate, the big sister in her Filipino family, the one responsible for her siblings. She’d failed with Zia. She couldn’t fail with Benjie.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said with forced brightness. “Other than the obvious end-of-the-world angst. I’m fine.”
Finn grabbed her hand and gave it a quick squeeze, letting go before anything got awkward.
Her cheeks flushed for no damn reason. She ducked her head, letting her thick black hair fall across her face.
Finn didn’t seem to notice. He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Now, what kind of cake would you like? I’m partial to red velvet, but I know not everyone’s tastes are as refined as mine.”
“Anything but chocolate,” Benjie chimed from between them.
“What?” Finn said, aghast. “What could anyone possibly have against chocolate?”
“Lo Lo hates c
hocolate.”
She managed a smile for Benjie’s sake. “That’s not true.”
Benjie grinned sheepishly. “Okay, it’s me. I don’t like chocolate. But Lo Lo only wants a cake flavor that I want too, right?”
Finn shook his head in mock-horror. “How little I know thee. Obviously, you’ve never had the right kind of chocolate. We must remedy this, Sir Benjie.” Lately he’d been calling Benjie “sir,” telling him they were knights on a magnificent quest, to distract him from their harsh new reality. Benjie ate it up like a half-starved puppy.
“We both like white chocolate.” Even though she hadn’t had any since last Christmas. Her lola, her Filipina grandmother, had made faux candy canes with white-chocolate-dipped pretzels to go with nilagang baka and pancit. It had been a very special treat.
“White chocolate isn’t real chocolate,” Finn scoffed. “Everyone knows that.”
A noise came from somewhere ahead of them, a clanking sound like a can being kicked across the road. Willow caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye.
She seized Finn’s arm with one hand and tightened her grip on Benjie with the other. “Shhh.”
Jericho raised his right fist. Willow, Finn, Benjie, and Jericho ducked behind a bus parked crookedly across two lanes in the middle of the road. Celeste, Amelia, Horne, and Micah found cover in a narrow alley between a shoe store and a coffee shop. Gabriel was behind them, covering the rear. Silas was scouting somewhere ahead of them.
Willow slipped her gun out of its holster. Jericho raised his finger to his lips and gestured for her to creep around the left side of the bus, while he checked out the right. She nodded and glanced back at Benjie and Finn. Finn gripped his hand and drew him close, dwarfing the small boy beside his bulk.
Satisfied Benjie was safe with Finn, she dropped into a crouch and inched around the side of the bus. There were too many cars ahead of her to see clearly. Keeping her gun up and her back pressed against the bus, she made her way forward.
Anxiety swirled in her stomach, but not fear or panic. She’d trained with Silas and Jericho daily—sometimes hours a day—for weeks. She was no expert fighter or marksman, but she felt more capable than she ever had. With every lesson, she was stronger, smarter, and better able to protect herself and Benjie.