Ruins

In ten more days the next batch would expire, and they would be down to seventeen thousand. A month later they’d lose six thousand more.

He was done being honorable.

A messenger walked toward him but kept his distance, probably because of the shattered table and the angry link data still boiling through the air around his head. He took a breath to calm himself before speaking.

“Report.”

“One of the prisoners is talking,” said the messenger. “Apparently the rebels have been spreading word of the nuke, telling people to flee south before it went off.”

“And we never discovered this?”

“You had given explicit orders not to torture anyone,” said the messenger. “Now that we are, they’re . . . We’re learning a lot.”

“Who was behind it?”

“A resistance group called the White Rhinos,” said the messenger. “They’ve been in operation since just after the occupation of East Meadow began.”

“I know who they are,” said Shon. “They’ve been notoriously hard to catch—do we have any in custody?”

“Just one, sir.”

“Lead the way.” He left his aides to pick up the broken table, pausing only to grab his sidearm from the rack by the door. The prisoners were kept in a pair of basement restrooms, chained to the pipes of molding sinks and dank, broken toilets. Shon nodded to the guards standing alert in the hall outside and marveled at the fierce, almost desperate anger that seemed to permeate the entire camp. As soon as they had a target for their vengeance, they would fall like a thunderbolt.

They opened the door, and Shon reeled back slightly at the smell. The messenger led him to a short, skinny girl in the back corner, who showed signs of having been interrogated.

“This is the White Rhino?”

The messenger nodded. Shon crouched down in front of the battered girl, showing her the gun. “What’s your name?”

“Yoon-Ji Bak.”

“And you worked with the rebel Marisol Delarosa?”

The girl’s face was hard, steely and determined even through the blood and grime. “Proudly.”

“Where are the rest of the humans you have been attempting to evacuate?”

The girl said nothing.

“Tell me where they’re gathering, and I’ll make your death quick.”

The girl said nothing.

Shon raised his voice, trying to emulate as much of the sound of human anger as he could. “Where are they?”

“Shoot me,” said Yoon.

Shon looked at her a moment, then handed the gun to the messenger behind him. He clamped Yoon’s left wrist tightly in one hand and grabbed her little finger with his other. “You are a terrorist, a murderer, and a war criminal,” he said. “That broken nose is the nicest treatment you’ll get here, unless you start telling me what I want to know. I’m going to find all of you bastards, and I’m going to do what I should have done months ago—years ago. What is the rendezvous point for the human evacuation?”

“I don’t know.”

Shon snapped her finger backward, breaking it with an audible crack. The girl screamed, and he grabbed the next finger in line. “Let’s try again. Where are the humans going?”

She screamed again, gritting her teeth against the pain. “We’re getting everyone off the island.”

“Be more specific, please. Where and how?”

“You’ll have to kill me,” she gasped.

He snapped another finger, and moved his hand to the third. “Eight more chances before I start to get creative. Where exactly can I find them?”

She was grunting now, tears streaming down her face, clenching her other fist into a tight white ball against the pain. “I don’t know!”

Snap.

“Seven,” said Shon. “Where?”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The snow started again soon after the explosion, and Kira could only hope that the weather would diminish the spread of the fallout. Green said the windstorm was a side effect of the bomb, brought on as the fires in White Plains sucked in air like the eye of a tornado. They waited in the hospital for Falin and the others, and Kira led them all to Nandita’s house, hoping to find some trace of her sisters. The wind slashed the falling snow into their faces, stinging their cheeks and eyes as they hiked through the city. When they arrived at the home it was empty.

“Sandy said that Haru was here in East Meadow,” said Marcus. “If he knew about the nuke, he would have gone straight to Madison, and she wouldn’t have left without Ariel and Isolde. They’re probably . . . south, I guess. That’s where everyone’s going. They wouldn’t dare try to evacuate through Manhattan, with all the bridges all booby-trapped, so I’m guessing boats.”

“Do you have that many boats?” asked Green. “Thirty-five thousand people is a lot to move over water.”

“We have fishing villages all along the southern beaches,” said Kira. She closed her eyes as she spoke, collapsing on the old living room couch, battered and broken. She tried to remember the last time she hadn’t been running, either from or to something. Even the effort of searching through her memory made her tired.