“Zu?” I yelled, taking another step forward. “Suzume? Zu?”
The forest seemed to let out a long sigh around me, settling back down into the night. If someone was there, it wasn’t her. She would have come.
Wouldn’t she?
I felt a sharp twist of despair low in my gut as I started backing away. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, I’m sorry—we’re going.”
Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw Cole lower his gun. I saw Liam come around the door to stand next to him, stretching a hand out in my direction, only to drop it back to his side. He took another step forward only to stop, his eyes flashing wide.
And when I turned back toward the woods, she was the only thing I saw.
A blur of white and pink and black burst out from the shelter of the trees, away from the pale arms that tried to snatch her shirt and haul her back. Gangly limbs slipped and slid through the mud, covering the space between us so quickly I barely had time to get my arms up.
Zu slammed into me with the kind of force that should have tilted the world onto its side. I fell back, taking her with me, letting out a noise that was halfway between a laugh and a sob as I wrapped my arms around her. She buried her face against my hair and all but wilted against me. Every limb in her body went lax, like she was molding herself to me.
The shot of pure, unwavering joy hit me like a bolt of lightning. It sang a sweet song in my head, warmed me down to my toes. I was so wrapped up in the feeling that it was a full minute before I realized how hard she was shaking, how cold she was to the touch. She was crying, small gasps of sound that didn’t signal happiness. I set her back so I could see her face and she only gripped my sleeves harder, shaking her head.
“I think this is yours?” I said, holding up her shoe. She let me try to wipe the mud from her bare right foot before I slid it back on and tightened it. It must have fallen off as she ran toward those trees. They’d heard us coming and panicked.
“Zu?” Liam came toward us so fast he slid through the last few feet of mud, landing on the ground with us. “Zu?”
All she had to do was turn her head and the elation on his face faded to panicked concern. He took her hands when she reached out to him, studying every inch of her for bruises, cuts, anything to explain why she was looking at us like we were back from the dead, why she was holding onto us like we might vanish with her next breath.
“Is it her?” Chubs called desperately, stumbling toward us. “I can’t see—”
“Here—slow your roll—” Vida turned back and retrieved him from behind the car door, guiding him around. He patted his front pocket, reaching in for one of the lenses.
“Hey, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” Liam asked, letting her small hands run over his wet hair, cup his face.
Chubs dropped to his knees, sending a spray of mud over all of us. He held out his arms in what he must have thought was her direction. “You’re not alone, are you? You know what happens when you try to travel by yourself, there’s—”
Zu tackled him to the ground. The mud smacked against his back at the same moment the air went out of him.
“Well...all right,” he murmured, carefully tucking her against his shoulder. “You are freezing. We need a blanket before she goes into hypothermic—”
Zu reached up and put a hand over his mouth, making Liam laugh and laugh. The smile she offered back was trembling, small, but still there. I felt like crying myself, seeing it.
I studied her, trying to align this new vision with the image I had tucked safely away in my memory. Her hair had grown back in long enough to curl around her ears. Everything else about her had changed, too. She was taller, but thinner. Painfully thin. The skin on her cheeks had sunken in. And even in the dark, I could see the same was true for the others who came out from behind the trees. They stumbled toward us, blinking against the cars’ lights. I counted twelve in all, different heights, different shapes, but all kids. All kids.
Kylie and Zu’s cousin Hina came out of the trees next. It only took seeing Lucy for me to remember the dozens of times I’d taken food she’d spooned out at all of East River’s meals. She made me think of fire smoke, of pine, of the sunset reflecting on the nearby lakes. And the three of them—all of the kids, really—looked at us like we were blinding them.
“I’m sorry,” Kylie said. “I didn’t realize it was you, otherwise I wouldn’t have fired, we just...the skip tracers and the soldiers and everything—”
Behind me, I heard Cole let out a long sigh.
“We’re going to need to find another car,” he said. “Aren’t we?”
FOR ALL THE HOPE I HAD that we’d find her, I’m not sure I ever thought about what would actually happen to Zu if we did. But it became clear, from the moment Liam saw her, that it was the only thought running through his mind.
“I thought you’d be at her uncle’s house,” I said. “What happened? Why did you leave?”
“He wasn’t there. We would have stayed anyway, but there was...an incident just after we got there,” Kylie was explaining as we walked. The trees pulled back to reveal a small clearing, ringed with darkness. When they heard our cars coming, they’d smothered the fires, but the clearing was still filled with the smell of smoke.
“What kind of incident?” Liam asked.
“A bad one. There was a guy, turns out a good guy. He...never mind, it doesn’t matter.” Kylie shook her head of dark curls, smoothing down the front of her ripped shirt. “We’ve been moving from town to town since then. When I saw the trail of road code I picked it up, hoping we’d find some other kids, but they’re not having an easy time of it, either.”
I felt my eyes widen at the sight of the soaking-wet makeshift tents they’d strung up using bed sheets, and the old food cans and buckets they’d left out to catch water.
“You drove in, right?” Liam asked. “Where did you stash the car?”
“Behind the shed at the back of the house.” Kylie tried to wring her shirt out, without much luck. The others standing around her had introduced themselves in a blur. I didn’t recognize any of them. Lucy had been quick to specify that two of them, Tommy and Pat, had left East River a few months before we’d ever arrived. The other three members of their tribe had split when the going had gotten too rough for them, and they hadn’t heard from them since. The other ten teenagers, all about fifteen, were strays they’d picked up as they moved across the country.
Tommy was as long and narrow as the tree flanking him, his shocking head of copper red hair mostly hidden under a beanie. Pat was about a head shorter, and walked and talked with a frantic, bumbling energy that made it almost impossible to keep up with him.
“Well...” Cole said, looking at the sad camp set up around us. “Y’all tried.”
“I’m just wondering...” Lucy stepped out in front of us, her braided blond hair swinging over her shoulder. She was wearing an oversized 49ers sweatshirt and black leggings that were shredded at the knees. “What are you guys doing here? When did you leave East River?”
Oh, damn—of course they wouldn’t know. They couldn’t have found out. I glanced over to Liam, but he was looking down at where Zu clung to his hand.
“Save story time for later,” Cole said. “Pack up whatever you guys want to bring with you.”
“Wait, what?” Liam said. “Hold on—they don’t even know what they’re getting into.”
Cole rolled his eyes and turned back to the other kids, clapping his hands together. “I’ll break it down for you. We used to be part of a group called the Children’s League. Then the president decided he wanted to destroy us, the Federal Coalition, and all of Los Angeles. Now we’re heading up north to set up shop and figure out new, fun ways to kick his ass. Are there any questions?”
Tommy raised his hand. “They destroyed Los Angeles? Like, literally?”
“I don’t think we speak figuratively anymore?” Cole said. “It’s a flaming heap of rubble. You guys are welcome to park yourselves here, but the military has control of the borders and freeways, and they’ve likely got a new stranglehold on what gas and food is out there. Meaning life is about to get a hell of a lot harder if you don’t find yourselves a safe place.”
I think the kids were actually too shocked to cry. They traded stunned glances, clearly struggling to process this.
Starvation doesn’t help much on that front, either, I thought, looking at the way the rain made Kylie’s shirt cling to her sharp hip bones.
“And where we’d be going, that’s a safe place?” Pat asked.
“Tell them the truth,” Liam said sharply. “It may be a safe, secure location, but we’re always going to have targets on our backs. You’ve never done anything just out of the goodness of your heart, so what’s the catch, Cole? They come with us and they have to fight? They have to work for their food and beds?”
“Well, realistically, we’ll probably all be in sleeping bags,” Cole said, irritation simmering under each word, “but no, no catches. If they want to be trained, then we’ll train them. If they want to fight, then who the hell am I to stop them? But I have a feeling they’re just as invested in finding out what caused IAAN and learning more about this so-called cure. And I also have this here little feeling that they’ll be hard-pressed to find another group willing to help them get back to their parents.”
“Don’t manipulate them into thinking this is—”
“This is what?” I asked quietly, pulling him aside. “A way for them to survive? Liam...I get it, fighting is dangerous, but this kind of life is dangerous, too, isn’t it? Being sick and starved and constantly on the run? They don’t have to stay at the Ranch forever. We can get them out once we figure out a safe system for it, if that’s what they want.”