Ruins

In her mad race to escape, Kira had gotten disoriented, and she pulled out her compass with trembling hands. North was behind her, which meant she’d been running south; obviously not too far, as she hadn’t run into any houses. She looked up, trying to get her bearings. Do I keep running, or stay on track? She was too scared to speak out loud. The Ivies are “opposed to medical experimentation,” and if this is how they tell people to stay away, it looks like they’re a lot more opposed than I realized. And maybe that’s not all they oppose. Morgan’s record focused on experimentation because that’s all she cares about—they don’t want to help with her work, and they’re too far away to interfere with it, so she forgets them and moves on. Never mind the details.

She slowed her breathing, calming herself, forcing herself to think clearly. It was harder than it should have been, and she wondered how much of the warning pheromones were still in her nose, still filling her bloodstream with adrenaline. She closed her eyes, trying to focus. They still might be my allies, she told herself. They post these as warnings to Partials, to Morgan’s forces. Their community might be sympathetic to the humans, and almost certainly amenable to a plan that opposes Dr. Morgan. And if nothing else, they’re expiring. I can offer a possible solution to that. She thought again about the pain and fear it must have taken to produce that warning on the link, and shuddered. Is that really who I want to align myself with? All the things I was worried about Morgan doing—would they do the same?

She shook her head. I might be misinterpreting everything, not just how they created the border marker but the fact that it’s a border marker at all. For all I know, one of the Ivies was ambushed by Morgan’s soldiers and carved that mark as a warning to his friends. I can’t judge them without more information.

She checked her compass, set her jaw, and hiked east toward the lake.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Marcus sat as still as he could, trying not to pull against the handcuffs tied around his wrists to a metal bar behind him—he’d struggled a lot the first night, hoping to get out of them, and rubbed his skin raw in the process. Now any movement at all brought lances of pain so sharp they made him bite the inside of his cheek. Woolf, Galen, and Vinci were tied up next to him, sitting silently against a wall in the back room of an old supermarket, but none of them seemed to be in quite as much pain. Marcus wondered if they were better at masking it, or if they’d just been smarter about their wrists in the first place. Either way he felt stupid.

Which was to be expected, he decided, when you found yourself tied up by a terrorist you went looking for in the first place.

“This is what we get for trusting her,” said Marcus.

“She was our only option,” said Galen.

“She is also a convicted criminal,” said Marcus. He looked at the others with as bemused a grin as he could muster. “I kind of feel like we should have given that point more weight when we made our plan to find her.”

“She was working with the Senate and Defense Grid,” said Woolf. “Since the start of the invasion she hadn’t done anything suspicious or illegal—that we knew about,” he added.

Marcus closed his mouth, swallowing his snarky comment.

Woolf shook his head. “Obviously if we’d known she’d managed to round up a nuclear warhead, we would have thought twice about it.”

“If we’d known she had a nuclear bomb, we would have done exactly the same thing,” said Vinci. “We just would have handled the meeting a little differently. Infiltrating her army would have been the best bet.”

“I suppose it’s too late for that now?” asked Marcus, looking at the guard on the other side of the room.

The guard nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Bummer,” said Marcus. “Thought we had something there.”