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“Pryana got me out,” she says. “She suspected you would go to Cypress. To find Cormac.”
Amie waits for me to confirm this, but I only nod. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.
“Is he dead?” she asks me in a flat voice.
“Yes.”
Amie’s face contorts and I recognize the pain of confusion.
“Did you kill him?”
I can’t lie to her. Not anymore. Lying has never protected her. “Yes.”
She presses her lips into a thin line and neither of us speaks. My reasons for killing Cormac won’t absolve me of what I’ve done and her forgiveness won’t either. But she doesn’t leave my side. We sit in silence like two strangers who have nothing to talk about.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE REFUGEE CAMPS ARE FULL OF THE broken and the bruised, the angry and the grateful. Each camp is a press of bodies—living, working, and healing together. Although there are no elected leaders, the strong step forward to direct and guide until there is a working system. I stop at each camp, checking the wounded; the bodies have been buried by volunteers. The bo
dies that made it to Earth before Arras faded into space. The evacuation was dangerous, but the days after were worse. Peace is still a fragile reality here.
But in the camps along the eastern coast of America, they tell me stories of the ones who came to save them. They tell of the brothers with the same eyes, who fought the Guild forces when they came.
No one has seen them.
Amie travels with me, choosing to leave Pryana behind at the first camp, and I’m grateful for her company. Without transport, we walk, and the days become weeks until our new reality no longer feels new. We’ve been on the surface a little over a month, and Amie hasn’t questioned why I won’t stop looking.
I think she wants answers that I cannot give her—about what happened in Arras. But those memories are too tangled with grief for me to separate them into words, so we are mostly quiet as we travel. I am bound to a promise and haunted by hope. Alix said Sebrina made it to the surface, and I have to find her for Jost. But I’m on the east coast, about to give up, when news of an outlying camp on the northern end of the seaboard reaches us. We speak to one of the self-appointed leaders, hoping he can point us in the right direction.
“That outpost is a two-day walk,” he explains to us.
“Amie”—I turn to my sister—“you should stay here while I go to check it out.”
“No, I’ll come with you.” Despite leaving a life of luxury, Amie hasn’t complained once about the conditions on Earth. Our weeks here have been full of harsh travel as we walked in search near the coasts. I’ve spent so much time thinking of Amie as a liability—as a victim—that I never saw how strong she has become in the absence of our parents. We’ve both grown up too soon.
One of the men from the camp comes over to us and whispers in the leader’s ear. Their conversation is low and strained, but when it ends, he turns to us. “I can offer you two motocycles.”
“We can’t borrow them,” I say. “We’re heading west by week’s end. I can’t return them.”
“It’s a gift.”
He doesn’t look like he’s in a very giving mood—this is clearly the other man’s idea—and I shake my head once more, even as Amie squeezes my arm. She wants me to accept. I want to, too, but I also know how valuable a motocycle would be out here.
“It’s a generous offer,” I say, “but I can’t take them from you. You need them.”
“Miss Lewys, I don’t know how you did what you did,” the other man says. “And I know there are a lot of rumors flying around about what happened in Arras between you and Patton. Not everyone here likes you.”
So I’ve been recognized. I knew it would happen as the survivors’ shock dulled. I’d been on every screen in Arras only weeks before its destruction.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I’m not one of those people, and I want to say thank you,” the man says. He keeps his gaze level with mine; his eyes don’t blink, as though he’s challenging me to decline his offer again.
“Thank you.” I don’t say anything else. I know what it’s like to feel like you have nothing to offer someone in need. I know how hard it is to even say thank you.
The motocycles are slick, large beasts, recovered from Guild warehouses near the abandoned mine sites. Chrome tubes twist along their bodies and even parked they look nearly as large as motocarriages. The man gives Amie and me a tutorial on how to ride them. I don’t tell him that I’ve ridden one before or that I’m terrified of it now. Both because I don’t want to look ungrateful and to set a good example for my sister. More than anything she needs to see that I’m strong and capable in this world. The engine hums to life between my legs, the vibration traveling up through my fingers and dying on their damaged tips, and I grip the handles tightly and kick off from the dirt. We roar forward to our last hope.
With the motocycles the journey to the outpost takes only a few hours. We have a compass to guide us, but it doesn’t take us long to see signs of life. Now that the population of Earth has grown exponentially, travel between the new outposts is more common. And with the number of refugees and wounded on Earth, more and more people are reaching out to the fledgling communities that surround them. We pass two young men walking down the road toward the camp we came from. They wave hello and I slow to speak to them.
