“Max,” Ursula called from the driver’s cockpit of the RV as we bounced slowly along the pockmarked road, “come here a moment.”
I edged over into a crouch beside her seat, using her armrest to steady myself. Everyone else seems to have fifteen jobs, and I have only one. Map reader is definitely an important duty, maybe the most important one after driver—that’s what I keep telling myself—but it’s still only one. Whenever we stop for the night, Wes follows Victor and Lucius around and gathers firewood by copying their actions; Dhuuxo and Intisaar portion food and water for dinner; Ursula checks our remaining supplies and does a head count every few minutes until we’re all gathered back around the fire again, desperate not to lose another one of us; and Ysabelle helps me set up my tent after she does her own. I know. It’s so embarrassing. The first night, I was too nervous and humiliated to admit it, so I struggled with the poles and fabric sheets for at least half an hour before Ysabelle finally pushed me out of the way with a tired sigh, tossed her golden hair out of her eyes, and bent the little thing into shape in less than a minute. “You’ll get the hang of it,” she managed to say to me as she walked back to her own. My cheeks were on fire. I can skin a rabbit! I wanted to say. I can twist its neck to kill it quick without flinching! But that would have made it even more embarrassing, I think. And besides, there’s no need for that particular skill—every single person in our caravan can do it. It’s nothing special.
Have I told you how nice my tent is, by the way? It’s warm and dry, and so colorful when the light strikes the thin material. In the mornings it’s beautiful.
The only one who seems to do less than me—almost nothing at all—is Zachary. Strange, silent Zachary.
He was in the passenger seat as I crouched down next to Ursula. I tried to make eye contact with him, but he was lost, staring unblinking out the window with his pale eyes. I wonder if he’s forgotten too much to remember how to speak, but I’m afraid to ask in case it’s rude. I don’t know the rules yet, if there even are rules.
“You should keep this with you always now,” Ursula said when she realized I was waiting beside her, and she handed me our road map from the glove compartment.
“I will,” I said. When her gaze returned to the windshield, I turned the paper around as casually as I could, hoping that she wouldn’t notice she had given it to me upside down.
I concentrated, looking for our location. It’s not that I can’t navigate—you know that, Ory. It’s just, we were always on subways in D.C. Finding the right train line and then sticking to it isn’t the same as trying to compare a road map to a broken, shifting wilderness that no longer matches it at all. And especially when getting lost and losing a few hours or days could mean the difference between reaching our destination in time or forgetting we ever wanted to go there. I know you were a Boy Scout back in Oregon, but you should try map reading when almost all the signs on the road are collapsed or overgrown with choking vines, or flapping madly, trying to fly away like birds chained to a post by one claw. You would be proud of me, I think. I focused on the page roughly where I thought we might be, somewhere just south of Fairfax Station—that was where I’d found them the first night, when Ursula demanded I read the side of their RV—and waited until we passed a sign still whole enough that I could decode it. Ursula doesn’t remember anymore the way that maps work, but she knows that it has something to do with both the lines on the paper and the outside world, so she bit her tongue as patiently as she could as the seconds ticked by.
Finally I put my hand down on the swirling, colored shapes. “We’re still on the right path,” I said to her. “When we begin again tomorrow, we should stay on this wide road. It should take us almost all the way there if we don’t lose it.” We were on what was left of the I-85 South.
“You’re sure,” she said to confirm.
“I’m sure,” I said, truly confident this time. “I can still read it.”
Ursula nodded. “You should sit up here from now on,” she said. “Easier to see the road.”
“But what about Zachary?” I asked.
Ursula glanced at him, and he nodded. I didn’t know if it was because he’d understood her words or just intuited what she wanted. He unclicked his seat belt and rose from the chair as if in a trance. “He doesn’t mind,” Ursula said as he edged around me, and set himself up at the foldout table in the middle of the cabin. Dhuuxo and Intisaar scooted over to give him the spot closest to the window so he could stare out it. “He can draw from anywhere.”