“Junk … junk food…,” she said. The words were coming easier. It was a good sign. If she could hold on, she could push it back.
“Girl after my own heart. Pick your poison, then. What would you have right now if you could? Twinkies? Red Vines? Oreos?”
“Hostess CupCakes…”
Holt laughed. “Now,
that
is a stellar choice. I haven’t thought about those in a while, but I remember them. The chocolate cake, the icing, right?”
“The … cream in the center…”
“Yeah,” Holt said, holding her, remembering. “The cream in the center. How they came two to a pack. Do you remember that? And that little zigzag of white on the top?”
“Yes…”
“You know what the good news is about that choice, right, Mira?”
“What?” she said weakly but coherently. It was easing.
“Good news is, those things are virtually indestructible. Hostess CupCakes, along with cockroaches, would survive a nuclear holocaust.”
Mira laughed softly. “And an alien holocaust?”
“That, too,” Holt said. “In fact, if you found an unexplored place, a place no one had picked over yet … you could probably find Hostess CupCakes, still in their packages. And they’d taste just as good now as they did back then.”
“I doubt that,” Mira said, opening her eyes and looking up at him. “Eight years on, they’d have to be a little stale.”
Her green eyes were even more full of the black now. The Tone had spread; it was taking her over. Slowly. Day by day. She had a year left, at most, Holt realized as he studied her. The realization twisted his stomach.…
“A little, maybe. But you wouldn’t notice,” Holt said, looking back with his guiltily clear eyes. “Doing better?”
Mira nodded. “It was … awful. I didn’t know … I didn’t know it would be so bad. The voices … they were…”
“I know,” Holt said. He did know. It was the worst part, hearing them in your head. At least that was what Emily had said. Older kids started to hear voices buried within the static. The language was incomprehensible … at first. But, frighteningly, the older they got, the more it seemed to make sense. The more you could understand it. Suggesting things to you, calling to you. “The next few will be easier as you get used to it. Then … it starts to get harder.”
“How long?” Mira asked.
Holt had hoped she wouldn’t ask. But he wasn’t going to lie to her. “Depends on how strong you are. Average age is twenty. Some people last longer. Some less. But I’ll help you. As long as I can.”
“Until you turn me in?” she asked evenly. Holt stared back silently, but didn’t answer. What was there to say?
They lay like that awhile longer. Holt had come to enjoy the warmness of her body beneath him, how soft she felt in his grip.
Then the roar of two more Raptors flying overhead broke the spell. Holt remembered everything. So did Mira. They separated, once again saw the enormous red army blanketing the valley below, in between them and their path north.
Zoey was studying both of them and grinning. Holt and Mira frowned at the little girl.
“What?” they both asked in unison.
Zoey just chuckled, hid her face under her arms.
Holt shook his head, got them all up. They would have to move fast. The first part of the journey would be the most dangerous. At least from an Assembly perspective. They’d be the closest to the reds then, where the tributary they intended to follow below passed near the alien patrols.
When they were ready, Holt moved to Mira. He pulled his father’s Swiss Army knife from his belt, opened the blade … and touched it to her bonds.
Mira looked at the knife curiously.
“You can’t go back. You can’t go forward,” Holt told her. “You want to survive, your best chance is with me. Yes?”
Mira considered him calmly, weighing her options. “Yes,” she said. “Assuming you know what you’re doing.”
“I said your
best
chance, not a guaranteed chance. I’m making this up as I go along.”
Mira smiled at him as he cut her bonds, let the ropes fall to the ground. She rubbed her wrists appreciatively.
Holt whistled two sharp notes. Max darted westward, hugging the tree line as he scouted ahead of them. Holt, Mira, and Zoey walked after him.
“When can I ride the Max?” Zoey asked. “I’m not too big for it.”
Holt and Mira shook their heads as they followed after the dog.
* * *
LONG AFTER HOLT HAD
left, new shapes emerged from the tree line and climbed the same ridge that overlooked the expansive river valley. Initially, the only sign of their presence was a shimmering in the air, a slight wavering of light not unlike Mira’s Shroud artifact.
If you weren’t looking for it, you would never see it.
When the shapes reached the top, their invisibility shields deactivated and dropped away, revealing them for what they were.
Ten Assembly walkers, unique from any seen so far. Eight feet tall at most. Tripods, three legs, smaller, lighter, less heavily armed, built for speed and agility, not strength. But clearly deadly nonetheless. Their feet, which came to sinister sharp points, punctured the soft soil as they moved.
They were Hunters. And most strikingly, they were not blue and white … or even red. Their bodies were colored
green and orange.
One of them moved forward, its body painted differently from the others. Its markings were sharper, more bold, more commanding. The other machines watched it with full attention.
The walker scanned the environment, its optics whirring as they did. Eventually, it found what it was looking for. A tangle of cut rope left on the ground. Evidence of its quarry.
Explosions flared up to the north, the sounds of plasma fire. The machine looked toward the distance and the bevy of red Assembly scouring the river valley below.
A flight of blue and white Raptors was strafing the red walkers. The reds were returning fire. One of the gunships exploded in sparks, spun out of control, and crashed to the ground in a trail of flame.
The green and orange Hunter emitted a strange, distorted trumpeting sound as it watched the fighting below. The sounds seemed … disdainful. The others echoed the sentiment, trumpeting electronically in response.
The walker watched the distant firefight a few moments longer.
Then it bounded off toward the west, following the path set by Holt and the others. The rest of the walkers followed without hesitation. They vanished as they moved, their cloaking shields activating and consuming them, concealing them from sight.
17.
TORRENT
IT WAS A SUNKEN LANDSCAPE.
What had once been a simple river was now an endlessly stretching cesspool of blackish water that stretched as far as the eye could see. The trunks of rotting, dead trees poked up from where they had been submerged and drowned years ago.
Cliff faces of sheer, sharp rock hugged the water on either side, making walking on anything dry impossible, unless you wanted to climb the cliffs and shimmy along the sides. Not the best option.
Holt, Mira, Zoey, and Max moved slowly through the Drowning Plains, sweating under the bright afternoon sun above. Of course,
moved
was only occasionally accurate. At times, the floodwater was so deep, it climbed past their waists, and walking gave way to swimming.
Right now, Holt was only up to his knees. Still, what was shallow for him was deep for Zoey. She would have been up to her neck if he wasn’t carrying her on his back.
Max swam through the waters with abandon. He’d been treading water all afternoon, but didn’t seem the slightest bit tired. Holt kept a watch on him nonetheless. The dog had a habit of tiring himself out with his enthusiasm, and this would be a very bad place for him to suddenly pass out.
Unsurprisingly, one person who wasn’t enjoying it was Mira, at the back of the line. Since they had first plopped their feet into the water, the complaints had been almost nonstop. The water was cold. The water was dirty. The water was in her shoes. The water smelled bad.
And then there were the snakes.
Holt had anticipated them. Mira had not. The first time she saw one slither through the surface, she’d screamed and almost pulled him face-first into the water in a frantic attempt to get away.
Each snake they saw meant a delay of ten minutes or more as Holt tried to convince her to start plodding forward again, in spite of his assurances that they were harmless (which was not at all true; water moccasins were not only aggressive but venomous as well, but that wasn’t something Holt felt Mira needed to know). Now when Holt saw the snakes, he kept it to himself.
For the last half hour they’d been seeing, in Holt’s opinion, something much worse than snakes. Evidence of fallen civilization was becoming more and more apparent.
Sunken cars, telephone poles jutting up from the water, floating debris of all kinds … including backpacks, clothes, shoes, and other evidence that many people had tried to make it through this route and didn’t succeed.
But there was no indication to suggest what might have stopped them. At least not yet. It would suit Holt just fine if that particular mystery remained unsolved.
They were also seeing more buildings. Or what was left of them, crumbling in the floodwater. Gas stations, motels, old diners, all partly submerged and jutting out from the glassy black surface. The buildings and the telephone poles that flanked Holt on either side suggested they were on what used to be a road. It also meant, as the buildings became more prevalent, that they were moving toward city ruins of some sort.
Holt wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.
He felt Zoey’s grip on his neck start to loosen, could feel her forehead buried in his neck.
“Kiddo,” Holt said behind him. “No falling asleep, you’ll land right in the water.”
“I’m tired,” Zoey said with a pout.
“You’re not the one carrying somebody else. Maybe you should try carrying me for a while. Or Mira.”
“Yes. Please,” Mira said testily behind them. “How much longer do we have to do this?”
“Until we find someplace safe,” Holt replied. “Or until you don’t complain for five whole minutes, whichever comes first. My money’s on the former.”
“I’ll give
you
something to complain about,” she mumbled behind him.
“Will we be at Midnight City tonight?” Zoey asked.
Holt almost laughed. Midnight City would have been days away if the reds hadn’t sealed off the river valley. Now, forced to maneuver through the Drowning Plains … it was a much more distant goal.
Zoey was welcome to go to Midnight City; it just wasn’t going to be with him. If they made it through the Drowning Plains, they’d be back along the Mississippi, and could find one of the floating trading posts. He’d get rid of Zoey there and leave this whole mess behind him.
But at the thought, Holt felt those same stirrings of guilt, and it angered him all over again. He’d be doing what he had to do by leaving Zoey. And besides, she’d be in a better position to survive with a River Rat crew. There was safety in numbers.
But Holt knew that wasn’t exactly the case. He’d remained on his own for so long precisely because he believed he was safer that way. And whomever he handed Zoey off to would have no idea of the threat she brought with her. They’d likely be caught unprepared when the full force of the Assembly finally tracked her down. But … would she be any safer with him?
The truth was far more simple than any of that, though. He liked Mira. He liked Zoey. As much as he valued his independence and his isolation … their presence had shown him it came at a cost. There was an emptiness inside him he was rarely aware of, a hollow feeling he thought he had suppressed. Being with them these past few days had begun its excavation.
A part of him wanted to get the ordeal over with as fast as possible, so he could rebury it. Another part … wanted to dig it free and pull it back into the light.
“What the hell is that?” Mira asked behind him.
Holt refocused, looked up. Something black and otherworldly loomed out of the water ahead of them. It wasn’t a building or any kind of car or truck. It was contorted and warped, frozen solid where it had fallen. As they approached it, Holt’s mind found shapes within it that he recognized. But just barely.
An Assembly Spider walker, one of the big ones. It normally would have stood thirty feet tall, but this one was crumpled in the floodwaters, resting on the bottom and near unrecognizable.
It had been difficult for Holt to make out exactly what it was, mainly due to the strange substance that had completely covered it. It looked like rust, if rust could be burned, blackened, and melted. The substance, whatever it was, looked weblike, almost organic, and the Spider had been consumed underneath it, losing all its distinctive shape.
Nearby, covered in water, were two Mantis walkers. Less of their bodies poked through to the surface, they were nowhere near as large, but the black rustlike growth had consumed what was revealed of them, too. Holt had never seen anything like it.
“What did
that
to them?” Mira asked.
“I don’t know,” Holt said.
“The water,” Zoey said into his ear. “They couldn’t escape it.”
“What couldn’t escape it?”
“Them,”
she said.
Holt looked at her, her chin on his shoulder, staring at him with tired eyes. He opened his mouth to ask what she meant …
… and then stopped as he noticed something disturbing.
The water was no longer at his knees. It was up to his thighs now. And he could feel it flowing past him in the direction they were headed. Up until now, it had been stagnant and still.
Holt’s eyes widened at the implication.
“What?” Mira asked, stopping next to him.
Max whined, sensing Holt’s discomfort. It didn’t stop him from swimming in lazy circles, though.
Holt didn’t answer. He turned around, looked behind him. The floodplains stretched backwards to where they had come from, endless and long, flanked by the cliffs. And in the far distance, they were swelling and moving toward them.