Ruins

It had been snowing for a week. Wet mounds of it weighed down the trees, cracking the branches, and deep drifts of it piled three feet high in the streets, with no sign of stopping. It’s like something out of a fantasy novel, Ariel thought. The world looked unfamiliar and alien. She and her group moved from house to house even slower than before, slogging barely twenty miles through bitter cold and waist-deep snow. In each new shelter they hacked up the furniture to build as big a fire as they dared, ever wary of Partial patrols, and then peeled off their cold, wet clothes and put on new ones, desperately scavenged from whatever the house had available—a grown man’s pants, shoes that didn’t fit, summer dresses layered until they were warm. Ariel remembered her early days with Kira and Isolde, running giddily from house to house in the post-Break wasteland, finding cute new clothes in a hundred different styles, trying on rich women’s jewelry, collecting shoes of every shape and color until their closets couldn’t hold them. Now she raided old men’s dressers for moldering jeans, and cut them in half to use as extra sleeves to save her arms from frostbite. The few good jackets they found they gave to Isolde, and wrapped the baby in old flannel shirts and blankets. Their one heavy coat, pulled from deep storage in the back of a rest home, was rotated between all six of them, and painstakingly dried each night by the fire.

The fires were easier to build, obviously, in homes with fireplaces, but thirteen years of neglect had left the chimneys clogged and useless, and even with the windows open, the rooms would fill with smoke. They lay on the floor, where it was easier to breathe, and hoped that no one was close enough to see the smoke and come looking—Partials were the main worry, but Ariel was just as concerned about desperate humans, starving and freezing, who would see a group of women and get all kinds of thoughts. Even with the dangers, though, it was simply too cold to forgo a fire completely. They kept their guns close and ready, and always had at least one person on watch. In spite of the fact that they disliked him—or perhaps because of it—Senator Hobb always took a double watch.

The conditions, though, did nothing to deter them from their mission to find the lab Nandita spoke of, and the first week of winter brought them as far as Middle Island, a small community that was exactly what the name implied: halfway between the west end of the island and the east.

“This is good,” said Isolde. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with black circles, and she stroked Khan’s blistered cheek as he screamed feebly. “We’re halfway there, baby. You’re going to be just fine.”

“Halfway from Brooklyn,” said Ariel. “We started in East Meadow, so we really haven’t come that far.”

“Thanks for the pep talk,” said Isolde, too exhausted to manage much of a glare.

“We only made it two miles today,” said Xochi. The baby was slowing them down. “The farther east we go, the worse the snow is going to be; the rain was always worse farther out on the island, at least, and I imagine the snow’s going to be the same.”

“We won’t give up,” said Hobb firmly. “This is my son we’re talking about.”

Ariel and Xochi gave each other a look, but said nothing.

“We’re almost to Riverhead,” said Kessler. “Another fifteen miles or so; a week at the most.”

“We’ve made worse time every day,” said Xochi. “Who knows how long fifteen miles could take us?”

“Riverhead is the largest community outside of East Meadow,” said Kessler. “The Partials relocated everyone during the occupation, but their supplies might still be available—clean water, stored grain, smokehouses full of fish. At the very least we’ll find houses with good windows, working chimneys, and clean clothes.”

“We’re not planning to stay there,” said Xochi.

“I’m just saying we’d have the option,” said Kessler. “A few days to recuperate and get our feet back under us, or a few weeks to sit out this storm.”

“We don’t have a few weeks,” said Hobb. “There is a nuclear bomb—”

“This storm will hinder Delarosa’s progress just as much as ours,” said Ariel. “There’s no way she’s going to make it to White Plains and set that thing off.”

“That only makes it more likely that she’ll set it off early,” said Hobb. “That she’ll set it off closer.”

“But if the storm ever breaks—” said Kessler, but Nandita cut her off, speaking up for the first time that evening.

“This storm isn’t going to break,” she said. “You heard the giant as clearly as I did—this isn’t a freak storm, it’s the return of winter; the first great backswing of Earth’s pendulum, struggling to rebalance itself. And as far as that pendulum swung in one direction, it’s going to have to swing just as far in the other. This winter could last a year or more, and this storm? I shudder to think of it.”