Three (Article 5 #3)(2)

The other two that stretched into the dining room were from the Chicago resistance, and hadn’t given up hope that their families had somehow lived through the attack on the safe house, that they’d managed to escape and flee south.

From outside came the sound of twigs snapping. I rose silently and wove through the bodies to the open door. The air smelled strongly of salt and mold, both fresh and dirty at the same time. From over the sandbank whispered the ocean, the ebb and flow of the waves, the hush of the long grass between the beach and this decrepit seaside village where we’d made camp. It was called DeBor-something. The “Welcome to…” sign had fallen victim years ago to someone’s target practice; little copper punctures distorted the right side.

Once, DeBor-something had been posh; the gates that blocked out the poor had fallen, but were still there, stacked beside the burned security booth. There had been riots here during the War, like in a lot of the richer communities. What remained of the empty Easter egg–colored beach houses were ruins: scaffolding stretching like burned, blackened fingers into the sky, foundations half-collapsed on their weathered stilts, walls muted by layers of white salt and sand, and gagged by crisscross boards that blocked what remained of their windows. Somewhere close a rusted screen door slapped against the frame.

From the bottom porch step came another delicate snap. It was only Billy, all sharp elbows and shoulder blades, hunched over his knees. He was peeling the bark off a stick, and hadn’t seemed to notice my arrival.

A frown tugged at the corners of my mouth. If Billy was on watch it was near dawn. He’d relieved Chase earlier in the night. But Chase wasn’t here; the towel he’d slept on had been tossed near the window beside a trash bag that held our only possessions—two cups, a rusty kitchen knife, a toothbrush, and some rope we’d harvested from the wreckage.

Billy didn’t so much as shift as I tiptoed across the porch to sit beside him.

“Quiet night?” I asked cautiously. He gave me a one-shouldered shrug. The red light of a CB radio we’d harvested from one of the carriers’ trucks blinked on the step between his electric-taped boots. It was metal, and half the depth of a shoebox. Not as convenient as a handheld, but it was strong enough to connect to the interior.

At least, we thought it was strong enough. The red light was supposed to glow green when we had an incoming call, but had yet to do so.

My gaze lifted back to Billy. He’d been quiet since we’d been reunited in the safe house ruins. I knew he held out hope that Wallace, the one-time leader of the Knoxville resistance—and more important, his adopted father—was still alive, that he was among the survivors we tracked. But that was impossible. Wallace had burned to death in the Wayland Inn. We’d all seen it go down.

“There’s some canned stew left,” I offered. Hunger gnawed at my own stomach. Rations were running thin. He grimaced and kept picking the bark off that stick with his fingernails, as though it was the most fascinating thing in the world.

Billy could hack into the MM mainframe. A stick wasn’t all that interesting.

“Okay. Well. One of the guys found spaghetti noodles, did you—”

“Did I say I was hungry?”

Someone sleeping near the front door stirred. Billy lowered his chin back to his chest, hiding his defiant brown eyes under a greasy curtain of hair.

The silence between us strained. He’d lost a parent; I knew how that felt. But it wasn’t like we’d killed his father.

Not like we’d killed Harper.

A sudden chill crept over my skin, despite the balmy temperature.

“How long has Chase been gone?” I asked.

He shrugged again. Irritated, I stood, and made my way around the side of the house toward the beach, hoping Chase had gone in this direction. The grass was thinner to the right so I took that path, and winced when the climb up the dune sent a burning jolt up my shins. My legs had become their own war zone: purple and yellow bruises from the Chicago blast, blisters from my boots, and dime-sized welts on my ankles and heels from the gravel that had worked its way into my socks. But when I reached the top of the embankment, my pain was forgotten.

A burst of stars reflected off the black ocean, pure and bright as diamonds, with no competition from the lights of a city or base. The exact line where the water met the shore was hidden in the darkness, but its murmur was as constant as a heartbeat.

The vastness of it swallowed me. The cool, fresh air played with the ends of my hair, in the absentminded way my mother used to when we would talk. It was times like these I missed her most—the quiet spaces, when no one else was around. When I closed my eyes, it was almost like she was back.

“Still no tracks. Not since yesterday morning,” I said aloud, hoping she could hear me. I didn’t know if that was how things worked. All I knew was that I wished I could hear her answer back, just one more time. I twisted my heels in the sand. “No word from our people at the mini-mart. Chase thinks their radio is probably dead. It was on its last legs before we left.” I sighed. “No word from the team we sent to the interior, either.”

Each of us that was searching for the survivors took a shift carrying the radio, anxious to hear news from the other resistance posts. No one spoke the truth: that our team could have been captured. That the chances that anyone had made it out of the safe house were slim. That our friends, our families, were all gone.