There’s clean water a short distance from the old mall, and a wreckage of old houses and business offices that have yielded some usable supplies: a few cans of food still buried in the rubble rusted tools even a rifle, which Hunter found still cradled in a pair of upturned deer hooves, under a mound of collapsed plaster. “We buried him outside Baltimore.”īram adds quickly, “The others are fine.” He reaches out and places a finger on my procedural scar, the one he helped me fake to initiate me into the resistance. “Grandpa didn’t make it,” Hunter says shortly. “What about Grandpa and the others?” I am breathless, and there is a tight feeling in my chest, as though I am still being squeezed. The resistance is trying to get word to her sister.” “The homestead is thirty strong, and she won’t have to migrate. Hunter has new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, although his smile is as boyish as ever. The short months we have spent apart have changed both Hunter and Bram. It’s the first time I’ve felt truly happy in days. She has let her hair grow long, and brushed it forward, so it pools over her shoulders. “Well, well, well.” We break apart, turn around, and see Lu sauntering toward us. I reach out and wrap my other arm around Bram, who is shaking hands with Tack, and somehow we all end up piled together, jumping and shouting, our bodies interlaced, in the middle of the brilliant sunshine. Hunter sets me down, finally, but I keep one arm locked around him, as though he might disappear. Everyone is shouting and talking at once. I jump on Hunter, laughing, and he throws his arms around me and lifts me off my feet. Bram and Hunter are running too, and we intercept them in the middle of the parking lot. A sign in looping cursive script, streaked white with bird shit, reads EMPIRE STATE PLAZA MALL. The old parking lot flows like gray water in all directions, running up at last against a vast structure of steel and glass: an old shopping mall. They look small and faintly ridiculous, like ancient toys left out by a child. Cars, rusted, picked clean of various parts-rubber tires, bits of metal-still sit in the lot. Then, abruptly, we arrive: The woods simply run out at the edge of an enormous expanse of concrete, webbed with thick fissures, and still marked very faintly with the ghostly white outlines of parking spaces. It takes us nearly three days to cover the distance we are forced to circumnavigate a half-dozen Valid cities. Hunter, Bram, Lu, and some of the other members of the old Rochester homestead are waiting for us just south of Poughkeepsie. They will want to string the symbol up, and make it bleed meaning, so that others will learn their lesson. Julian Fineman is a symbol, and an important one. It isn’t safe, not after Julian’s rescue. By now, the warehouse has no doubt been totally stripped and abandoned. The others, those who were using the warehouse outside White Plains as a homestead, scattered south or west. But not my Alex: a stranger who never smiles, doesn’t laugh, and barely speaks. That’s Hana, reaching out across an expanse of time, through the murky-thick layers of memory, stretching a weightless hand to me as I am sinking.Ībout two dozen of us came north from New York City: Raven, Tack, Julian and me, and also Dani, Gordo, and Pike, plus fifteen or so others who are largely content to stay quiet and follow directions.Īnd Alex. I warned you, Aunt Carol says in my head. This is what they warned me about for all those years: the heavy weight in my chest, the nightmare-fragments that follow me even in waking life. It bubbles up through the cracks when I’m not paying attention, and pulls at me with greedy fingers. Since Alex reappeared, resurrected but also changed, twisted, like a monster from one of the ghost stories we used to tell as kids, the past has been finding its way in.
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