She nearly forgets to close the vault behind her on her way out—and, twenty minutes later, at the stables, she nearly cries out when Reed lays a hand on her shoulder. She spins around to find him smiling at her. This is where he said he would meet her. He has hay in his hair and a pitchfork in his hand. He is mucking out the horse stalls with the rest of the sentinels. The air buzzes with flies. A horse with a white diamond on its muzzle whinnies and she flinches from the sound. His smile grows wider—and she feels the simultaneous urge to slap him and bed him.
There are others in the stables, brushing down horses, carting away manure, and her eyes dart to them before settling meaningfully on Reed. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.” He keeps his voice low, nearly a whisper. “Will you come?”
She pinches her mouth in a frown. “You know I can’t.”
He looks like he wants to argue the point further, but she shakes her head.
He closes his eyes and sighs through his nose. “You said you had something for me.”
She holds out the box—to show him, not to give him. “I do.”
“A gift?”
“Not a gift so much as a defense. A weapon.” She beckons him to follow her into an empty stall. “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying. About starting over. If the group lives—and you will. You will live. If the group lives and you make it as planned to Oregon, and if the landscape should appear as promising as you hope, you will come back for me, yes?”
“Of course I will.”
“But,” she says and taps his chest with a finger. “But.” If something goes wrong—if the people there prove hostile—he should find a way to gift this box to them and then ride as fast and as far as he can. It will wipe the area clean, and in another year, maybe two, they can return there and make it their own.
“What’s inside it?”
She presses it into his open hands. “The end of one world, the beginning of another.”
Chapter 8
AFTER LEWIS LEADS Clark into the basement, after he shares with her his store of arms and willingness to accompany them, he shows her the grate in the floor, the black square with a rusted ladder and cold, stale breath puffing from it. “We can use the tunnels to escape,” he says. “No one knows about them.”
She snorts a laugh and he asks her what’s so funny.
“You. You’re always convinced you know more than everybody else. Where do you think I sent my brother and the girl? There’s more than one unsealed grate in this city.”
She tells him the plan then. Now that Lewis is in, there will be six of them altogether. This past week, they’ve been humping supplies through the tunnels, secreting them in a building more than a mile beyond the wall. Matches, flour, knives, lanterns, needles, thread, bedrolls, hardtack, jerky, dried fruit, but mostly water, canteens and leather sacks sloshed full of water. And now they will add guns. The revolvers and rifles from the museum’s hidden arsenal.
The tunnels cannot accommodate their horses, and on foot they will not make it far—even if they escape pursuit. Summer is here. The burning face of the sun seems closer every day. By midmorning it hurts to breathe, like sucking on a pipe lit with dust. They will need horses—at least twelve of them, six for riders, the others to rotate out and carry supplies—and they will need to ride hard, before their water runs out, hopefully finding a more forgiving place.
“We leave tomorrow morning. Be ready.”
Lewis packs and unpacks and packs again. He paces his office and rubs his hands together with a dry, papery whisper. He does not know how to occupy himself, how to channel his excitement, near giddiness, such an unfamiliar feeling. So he tinkers. He loves to build things, puzzling together gears, soldering wires, fitting joints, creating something mobile and useful out of the scraps of a broken world. A clock that spins with the cycles of the moon. A sturdy set of glasses, each side hinged with a dozen lenses that fold up and down to magnify or telescope. A repurposed coffeemaker that sucks moisture from the air and pools it into a cup for drinking. For the past week, he has been building what he will never finish. A short-wave radio. He gathers parts, mostly from the bazaar, picking out tubes to clean, wires to thread. Knobs. Diodes. Switches. Capacitors. All of them cracked, decayed. He corded the radio into the outlet the other day and the thing popped and fuzzed with static, then grew suddenly hot, several of the tubes exploding in a glass shower. So he began again.
He imagines spinning the dial, for days, weeks, maybe months, finally coming across a voice. Maybe the voice would speak English, maybe not, someone hoping to be heard, no different from the transmissions fired into space so long ago. He would speak into the microphone, saying, Hello? Can you hear me? and the voice would go silent for a moment before calling back to him excitedly, manically.
The unfinished radio sits on his desk now. He fastens the antenna mast to the cabinet just as Ella enters the room without knocking.
“What is that?”
“A radio.”
“What use is a radio?”
“What use is anything in this museum?”
“I’m calling it a night. What do you want me to do tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.” He hands her a sheet of paper with a long list of errands, all of them outside. He needs her gone.
“This is going to take forever.”
“Yes.”
She starts for the door and he calls after her, “Oh, and Ella—”
“What?”
He opens his mouth. There is so much to say. Come tomorrow, he knows she will feel betrayed, and he worries about leaving her—worries what will happen once Thomas learns of his escape—but he cannot leave his life’s work unattended. For all her annoying qualities, he recognizes her as a fierce, clever girl. She will care for the museum and, if need be, fight for it should anyone try to shut its doors, salvage its materials.
She folds the sheet and then folds it again before giving up on him, vanishing down the hall. “Good-bye,” he calls after her.
*