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Jolt laughed out loud.
“What’s so damn funny?”
“Wow, the actual apocalypse was twelve years ago. I mean, we are living in the epilogue to the end of the world, and you’re telling me that we’re crazy for finding ways to have some fun in the middle of it? That’s fricking hilarious.”
She grunted. “The Z-Games . . . is that how that young’un got his face all burned up?”
A shadow crossed Jolt’s face. “Nah. We don’t know how that happened. One of the trade guards, Solomon Jones, found Gummi out on the sand. He was burned and half dead. Maybe three years old. No one else around, and no way to find where he belonged. Solomon brought him to us ’cause that’s what people do with orphans. Everyone in the Games is an orphan.”
“You too?”
“Me too.”
The dead had reached them now and were straining upward to reach them.
“Oops, time to boogie,” said Jolt. “We’re about a mile from the camp. It’s Tuesday, right? That’s chicken-and-bean burrito day. You hungry?”
“I—”
“Or did you fill up on Spam and pineapple?” he asked with a wicked grin. He laughed and ran on, leaping and jumping in the sunshine.
Riot—for that was now her name, and she knew that it was going to stay with her—nearly fell over.
“Well I’ll be a . . . ,” she began softly, but let the words blow away into the wind. In all the surprise and excitement of meeting these two boys she had somehow not connected them to the food placed in her traps. She thought that had been a kind act from a loner who wanted to help but didn’t want to interact. Now she could see the prankishness of the act. The wildness of it.
“Hold on, I’m coming!” she cried, but her inner voice clucked at her. Have a little self-control, girl.
“Hush,” she told that voice.
Riot ran to catch up.
14
During the last quarter mile the demands of running and jumping finally caught up with her. Twice she slipped and had to climb back up from the roadbed. To her satisfaction she saw that Jolt had slowed too. She hoped that he was getting tired—proof that he was human enough—and not that he was slowing down out of pity for her. The other boy, Gummi Bear, had sped on ahead.
Both times she fell, Riot’s first reaction was to pull her knife and wheel to face the oncoming zee. Jolt was far ahead and wouldn’t see her. She knew that she could make the kill quickly and be on her way without alerting him. But in each case she put the knife back, used a kick to knock the zee away from her, and hastily climbed up out of danger.
It made her feel strange and conflicted.
In the Night Church her mother and the elders occasionally had to silence the dead, though they always regretted it. There were complex spiritual reasons that were part of the church’s mission to create what Mom called a “quiet world.” At the same time the members of the church—called the Reapers in the Fields of the Lord or just reapers—wore colored streamers soaked in chemicals that somehow kept the gray people from attacking. And one of the elders, a strange and dangerous man known as Saint John, was trying to devise a way of controlling the countless hordes of living dead. The official church policy was to avoid killing the dead—though killing humans was allowed and even encouraged.
The farther Riot got from that group and the more she viewed it from a distance, the less sense it made.
After she’d fled, the girl realized that she had no choice but to deal harshly with any threat. She had no supply of the chemical that kept the reapers safe, and she had no sentries to watch over her as she slept, no teams of armed reapers to come to her aid if she was attacked by a dozen of the monsters. Since leaving the camp she had killed countless zees. It had become an automatic response.
Now she wondered if doing that had been wrong. How many of those kills had been unavoidable?
It was a dreadful question, and it throbbed like a canker in her mind. In light of Jolt’s disapproval, it felt wrong. Now this kind of killing felt like killing. The word was the same, but the meaning had changed.
Now killing these monsters felt like murder.
There was something dangerous hiding in that thought, but now was not the time to sit and puzzle it out.
She ran and leaped and flew through the air. When she caught up, they grinned at each other and ran together.
Jolt ran ahead of her, looking over his sho
ulder to throw smiles behind him.
