Ruins

She followed Route 123 north until it ended, then traveled east on something called the Old Post Road. Her route seemed to weave back and forth between New York and Connecticut, and she couldn’t help but wonder how those ancient divisions had been decided, and what they meant for the people who’d lived there. There were no gates or walls, no clear delineations of where one state ended and another began. She didn’t even know what that division meant. It had been so obvious to the adults, and so meaningless to the post-Break children, that they’d never bothered to teach it in school.

However the state relationship had worked, it was over now, the houses empty, the cars rusted and falling apart, the roads buckling and breaking as new plants and trees encroached relentlessly back into their ancient territory. Birds roosted in the upper windows of sagging houses, while deer and other animals stepped lightly through the overgrown lawns, nibbling the new young leaves that grew up between the ruins. In another hundred years, Kira thought, these houses would crumble and fall completely, and the forest would swallow them up, and the deer and the boars and the wolves would forget that there had ever been anyone here at all.

The thought of wolves made her worry about Watchdogs—the bizarre talking hounds that ParaGen had made as scouts and companions for the Partial soldiers. There were none on Long Island, but she had been attacked by a feral pack of them on her trip to Chicago with Samm. He had assured her that they weren’t fully intelligent, at least not to a human level, but Kira couldn’t decide if that knowledge made her more or less nervous; more or less disturbed. She had no idea how widespread they were, but prayed she wouldn’t encounter any on her trip to Candlewood Lake.

Eventually the Old Post Road ended as well, and she turned north on Route 35 toward the town of Ridgefield. The town wasn’t large by any means, but it was far more developed than the forest and scattered houses she’d been walking through since Greenwich, and the heightened visibility gave her pause. In all likelihood there was nobody here, nobody for miles—and if there were, it would probably be a scout or spotter for the Ivies, not a far-ranging agent of Dr. Morgan. Even so, the urban center scared her. Instead of trees and dirt on the edges of the road, there was simply more concrete, which meant the forest hadn’t regrown as heavily. The sight lines were longer and more open. An enemy would be able to see her from blocks away, instead of the few dozen feet allowed by the woods; she would be easier to ambush, or simply snipe from long range. She hesitated on the outskirts of the thinning forest, trying to convince herself she was being paranoid, but in the end she backtracked and cut through the trees and yards, pushing her way through dilapidated fences and dashing across each open street. The detour was barely an extra mile, maybe two, but she breathed easier when she finally passed the last shopping center and rejoined the narrow forest highway.

Eventually 35 merged into Route 7, and Kira made her camp in a small house just outside the crossroads. The windows were all broken—most were, outside the maintained areas—but the roof was holding, and despite a few cat prints in the hallways, it didn’t seem to have become a den for any animals. Two human skeletons lay in the bedroom, their bony arms resting loosely around each other, the decayed remnants of a blanket clinging in tatters to their ribs. Two victims of RM. She cleared a space in the living room and fell asleep looking at the old, faded photos of the family on the wall.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The next day would take her to Candlewood, but the route passed through a city called Danbury—several times larger than the town that had scared her so much the day before, and right on the shores of Candlewood’s southern tip. If the Ivies were really there, they’d see her coming for sure.

“That might not be a bad thing,” she mused to herself, falling into her old habit of thinking out loud. She’d spent a few months alone in Manhattan, the only living soul for miles in any direction, trying to track down an old ParaGen office; by the end she’d been carrying on entire conversations with herself, as if desperate for any kind of companionship. She felt silly doing it, but just as silly forcing herself to be quiet. When she got to the city she’d be quiet, but here in the wilderness, why not talk?

The question was, how much of the city should she actually pass through? She munched on an apple in the early morning light, sitting not in the living room but out on the porch, away from the skeletons and their ghostly faces staring down from the photos. She had the map out, spread across her knee, but it wasn’t nearly as detailed as she wanted.