Ruins

“If the Ivies are there, and see me, that’s good,” she said, “because I want them to see me. That’s the whole reason I’m here.” She swallowed her bit of apple. “Unless, of course, they shoot me on sight. Which they probably won’t do, but what do I know? Do I want to take that chance? If they get close enough to link me, which they can’t do because I’m not on the link, they’ll think I’m human.” She took another bite of her apple. “But for all I know, thinking I’m human might make them more likely to shoot me, not less. I don’t know anything about them.” She swallowed her apple. “And what if Morgan really does have spies up here? What happens if they see me first? I think I need to stay hidden as long as possible. I need a more detailed map to plan this route.”

She repacked her scant possessions and headed back to the crossroads, where one corner held a weathered gas station. The wide metal awning had collapsed over the pumps, and this and the scattered hulks of rusting cars gave her cover as she dashed across the parking lot. The entire front wall had been glass, now shattered and crunching under her feet; years of rain had blown in, wrinkling the magazines in the rack by the front and washing out their colors. Kira picked her way through the shelves looking for road maps, finding them at last in a rotating wire rack that had long since toppled to the floor. Many of the maps were damp, and some had been nibbled by rats, but she found a Connecticut road map that seemed to be in pretty good condition. She found a spot of metal shelving, clear of broken glass, and sat down to inspect her route.

The highway she was on continued straight up to Danbury, where it widened and merged with Interstate 84, a massive multi-lane road that seemed to skirt the edge of Danbury and then curve up toward Candlewood Lake. “That will be the easiest route,” she said quietly, “but also the most obvious. If they’re watching anything, they’ll be watching that.” She searched through the city itself, following the major roads and looking for other options, and marked the two major hospitals with her pencil. All the post-Break settlements, human and Partial, tended to cluster around hospitals, and the Ivies might be the same. “Might be,” she reminded herself. Morgan’s records had reported them farther north, on or around the lake itself, and with lake and city so close together it was telling, she thought, that the scouts had placed them specifically at the lake. “Maybe they don’t like cities,” she mused. “I’m not a big fan, either, but I’m an outsider—if this is their home territory, they could secure the city and get a lot of defensive advantages the lake can’t offer. Unless they’re searching for advantages I’m not considering.” She looked closer at the lake, wondering what those advantages might be. Fresh water, certainly, and maybe the longer sight lines across the water. Any hunting or farming they wanted to do in the wilderness would be just as easy in the city; she had grown up doing the same in the dense urban areas of Long Island. It didn’t seem to make sense. She looked at her notes again: the Ivies were “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That was all the information she had. She stared at the map, still completely unsure how best to approach it.

“Better to be safe,” she decided at last, and plotted a course that curved west, around the edge of the city, and approached the lake through the smaller, suburban area called New Fairfield. She would be staying off the roads almost the whole way, and she worked out enough of the details to guide herself by compass instead, landmark to landmark, starting with the western edge of a place called Bennett’s Pond. The forest was thicker there, with steeper hills than she’d passed through before, and she found herself tiring more quickly in the rougher terrain. She crossed I-84 around ten in the morning, a wooded stretch of road well west of the city, and then tramped across a narrow stream and through another thick, old-growth forest. By noon she had reached another wide pond, ringed by a series of golf courses long ago gone to seed. The western edge of the water was a low marsh filled with empty nests. Cold or not, the need to migrate south was too ingrained in the birds’ tiny minds, and the wetland was still and quiet. She saw a cluster of small, gleaming curves, surprised to find a clutch of eggs, but when she drew closer they were simply golf balls, yellowed and cracking in the sun.