chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
Kira and her companions were on their way to Denver.
They’d left the data center at first light, wrapping Afa’s injured leg as tightly as they could before helping him to slog through two miles of filthy floodwater. The rowboat was right where they’d left it, and they paddled back to their horses in silence, Samm rowing with long, powerful strokes while Heron and Kira watched the overhanging trees for signs of attack. A lone dog stood on a bridge to watch them float by, but it didn’t talk or even bark, and Kira couldn’t tell if it was a Watchdog or simply a feral animal.
The horses were unhurt but terrified, and it took Samm and Heron several minutes to calm them down enough to be saddled. Kira rewrapped Afa’s wound with dry bandages, and together they boosted him up onto Oddjob’s back, where he swayed and grimaced in pain at the change of pressure on his shredded thigh muscle. Kira bit her lip, angry that they had to take Afa even farther from home—not angry at him, or at anyone really, just angry. Angry that life is hard, she thought. Nandita raised me better than this. “If you have the strength to whine, you have the strength to do something about it.”
They were almost halfway from Long Island to Denver already, and it would be two full months out of their way to take Afa back home; two months they didn’t have. They couldn’t leave him, obviously, so they had to take him, hard journey or not. Besides, Kira thought, if there’s another computer system at the lab site in Denver, we’ll need Afa to access it. He’s the only one who can.
We just have to make sure he survives.
When they were all mounted and ready, Kira led them not to the freeway but to a large hospital on the other side. “St. Bernard’s,” she said, reading the weathered sign at the mouth of the parking lot.
“Should we look for antibiotics in the pharmacy?” asked Heron. “Or in barrels hanging from the collars of giant shaggy dogs?”
“As long as the dogs don’t talk,” said Kira, “I don’t much care.” The talking dogs still freaked her out, and she’d dreamed about them again last night—of herself living with them, wild and feral, unaccepted in both human and Partial society. She knew it was unfair of her to hate them. They couldn’t help being what they were any more than she could. She pushed the thought aside and entered the hospital, showing Samm how to sort the meds they needed while Heron watched Afa and the horses. They filled an entire satchel with antibiotics and painkillers, and mounted up to ride west.
Into the toxic wasteland.
The fastest way out of town was a railroad track, which cut across the river highway in a straight line south-southwest, high on an elevated beam that kept them well above the worst of the flooding. They followed it for miles, past rail yards and schoolyards and old, sagging houses, past flooded churches and fallen buildings and across an overflowing river. The train tracks were straight and the way was mostly dry, but it was rocky and slow going for the horses, and they hadn’t even made it to the freeway when it grew too dark to travel. They took shelter in a crumbling public library, letting the horses graze on the tall, marshy grasses outside before leading them carefully up the access ramp to the dry floor inside. Kira checked Afa’s bandages, shot him full of painkillers, and cleaned his wound while he slept. Heron caught frogs and lizards in the bog outside and roasted them on a fire made of old chairs and magazines. The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.
In the morning they found that they were just a short walk to Interstate 80, the same massive road they’d been following since Manhattan, but nearly a hundred miles farther west than where they’d left it at the eastern edge of Chicago. They got back on it, finding it higher and dryer than the railroad and much easier for the horses to walk on. The followed it all day, the city sprawling out endlessly on every side: building after building, street after street, ruin after ruin. Subcities came and went—Mokena, New Lenox, Joliet, Rockdale—their meaningless borders blurred together into a single, unbroken metropolis. When night fell again they reached the edge of Minooka, and the road curved south around it, and Kira looked out for the first time on open grassland stretching far into the west. The horizon was flat and formless, an ocean of dirt and grass and marshland. They slept in a giant warehouse, in what Kira assumed was an old break room for cross-country truckers, and listened as a rainstorm drummed furiously on the broad metal roof. Afa’s wound was no better than the previous night, but at least it was no worse. Kira curled up on her bedroll and read by the light of the moon, a thriller novel she’d picked up in the library. Sure this guy’s being chased by demons, she thought, but at least he has a warm shower in the morning.
She fell asleep with her nose in the book, and woke up wrapped snugly in a blanket. Samm was staring out the window as the sun rose over the cityscape, and glanced at her a moment before turning back to watch the sky grow light.
Kira sat up, stretching her back and shoulders and popping a stiff joint in her neck. “Good morning,” she said. “Thanks for the blanket.”
“Good morning,” said Samm. His eyes were locked on the window. “You’re welcome.”
Kira stood, pausing to hang her blanket on a row of nearby chairs before squatting down to open her pack. Heron and Afa were asleep, so she kept her voice down. “What sounds good for breakfast this morning? I have beef jerky, an indistinguishably different flavor of beef jerky, and . . . peanuts. All pre-Break, picked up at that place we stopped in Pennsylvania.” She looked again in her bag. “We’re running low on food.”
“We should forage through the city before setting out,” said Samm. “We’re not far from the toxic waste, and I don’t know if we can trust anything we find there.”
“We passed a grocery store last night,” said Kira, grabbing all three of her food selections and placing them on the table next to Samm. She sat on the far side and opened the peanuts. “We can head back there before we move on, but for now, dig in.”
Samm looked down at the food, selected a bag of jerky at random, and tore it open. He sniffed it carefully before pulling out a piece of black, twisted meat as solid as rawhide. “What do you have to do to meat to make it stay good for twelve years?”
“Define ‘good,’” said Kira. “You’ll be sucking on that thing all day before it’s soft enough to eat.”
He tore off a strip, long and whip-thin and almost hilariously fibrous. “We’ll have to boil it,” he said, dropping the strips back into the bag. “Still, though—edible food that’s almost as old as we are. That cow might actually have been as old as we are, and he died before that tree was even born.” He pointed at a twenty-foot poplar sprouting up through the cracks in the buckled asphalt parking lot. “And yet we can eat it. We don’t have anything in the world today that can preserve food like that. We might never have it again.”
“I don’t know if we want to,” said Kira. “Give me some fresh Riverhead jerky any day.”
“It’s just . . .” Samm paused. “One thing after another. Cars that won’t run. Planes that will never fly again. Computer systems we can barely use, let alone re-create. It’s like . . . time is flowing backward. We’re caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future.”
Kira said nothing, chewing on the soft peanuts as the sun peeked over the mountainous city beyond. She swallowed and spoke. “I’m sorry, Samm.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Not the caveman thing,” she said, “or the jerky or . . . I’m sorry for getting mad at you. I’m sorry for saying things that made you mad at me.”
He watched the sun, saying nothing, and Kira tried and failed to read him on the link. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
“We’re in a war,” said Kira. “We’re not even in a war we can win—humans and Partials are killing each other, and themselves, and everything they can get their sights on, because it’s the only way they know to solve problems. ‘If we don’t fight, we’ll die.’ What we need to face is that we’ll still die even if we do fight, and we don’t want to face that because it’s too frightening. It’s easier to fall back into the same old patterns of hate and retribution, because at least then we’re doing something.”
“I don’t hate you,” said Samm, “but I used to. When you first captured me, when I first woke up and saw you and realized that everyone in my unit was dead. You were there, so I hated you more than I even knew I could. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I’m not exactly innocent either.” She smiled. “All we need to do now is send each human and each Partial on a deadly cross-country trip together, so they can learn to trust and understand each other.”
“I’m glad there’s such a simple solution,” said Samm. He didn’t smile, but Kira thought she felt a whiff of one on the link. She ate another handful of peanuts.
“That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” Samm asked.
Kira looked at him, curious.
“A united world,” he said, still looking out the window. “A world where Partials and humans live together in peace.” He glanced at her from the side of his eye.
Kira nodded, chewing her peanuts thoughtfully before swallowing. It was exactly what she wanted—what she’d wanted ever since . . . Ever since she’d learned what she truly was. A Partial raised as a human, connected to both groups without really being a part of either one. “Sometimes I think—” and then stopped. Sometimes I think it’s the only way I’ll ever be accepted. I don’t belong to either group, not anymore, but if both groups joined, I wouldn’t be the weirdo anymore. I’d just be one of the crowd. She sighed, too self-conscious to say it out loud. “Sometimes I think it’s the only way to save everyone,” she said softly. “To bring them all together.”
“That’s going to be a lot harder than just curing our diseases,” said Samm.
“I know,” she said. “We’ll find the ParaGen labs, we’ll find their plans and formulas, we’ll cure RM and the expiration date and everything else, and then it still won’t matter because our people are never going to trust each other.”
“Someday they’ll have to,” said Samm. “When it comes down to trust or extinction, to trust or oblivion, they’ll see that they’ll have to and they’ll do it.”
“That’s one of the things I like about you, Samm,” said Kira. “You’re a hopeless optimist.”
For the first few days the road was straight and flat, almost disturbingly so. Farms crept by on either side, reclaimed by grassland and herds of wild horses and cattle, but each new sight seemed the same as the last, a single farm repeated ad infinitum, until Kira began to feel that they were making no progress at all. Occasionally the Illinois River on the south swerved close enough to be seen from the road, and Kira began to track their progress this way. They traveled slowly, keeping the horses fed and watered and Afa well supplied with medicines. His wound was healing poorly, and Kira did what she could to keep his spirits up.
Three days outside of Chicago they came to an island city at the conflux of two rivers; they crossed the Rock River into a town called Moline, finding it swampy but navigable, but the river on the other side stopped her cold. It was the Mississippi, and the bridges were gone.
“Not good,” said Kira, surveying the wide river. She’d heard of the Mississippi, more than a mile wide in parts. Here it was narrower, though its widest gaps looked to be at least half a mile if not more. Much too far for the horses to swim, especially with Afa. “You think this was the war, or just wear and tear since then?”
“Hard to say,” said Samm.
Heron snorted. “Does it matter?”
Kira watched the water roll by and sighed. “I suppose not. What do we do?”
“We’re not getting Afa across without a bridge,” said Samm, “plus we’d soak the radio, and I don’t trust its claim of ‘water resistance.’ I say we follow the riverbank until we find a bridge intact.”
“North or south?” asked Heron. “This time the question actually does matter.”
“According to our map we’re still slightly north of Denver,” said Kira. “We’ll go south.” They turned their horses around, Kira whispering encouragements to Bobo and patting him softly on the neck. The riverbank itself was impassable, not just along the shoreline but several yards back from it, nearly a full quarter mile in some places. The ground was either too steep or too swampy or too dense with trees, and more often than not all three. They followed a narrow highway as far as they could, though more than once they found that it had wandered too close to the river and sloughed off, washing away into the relentless flood of water. When that road turned away they moved to a different one, though the story was similar there and occasionally worse. The first bridge they found looked across to the biggest city since Chicago, but this bridge was destroyed, just like the last one. The second day they found themselves trapped where the road had been completely washed away, surrounded on one side by the river and the other by a lake, and were forced to backtrack several miles. Here the wetlands stretched well over a mile from bank to bank, probably more than two, though Kira couldn’t help but wonder how much of her estimate was accurate and how much was helpless frustration. It was beautiful, alive with birds and flowers and fireflies turning lazy circles over the marsh, but it was also insurmountable. They found a new road, prayed that it would take them to a bridge, and followed it south.
After two days of searching they came to the village of Gulfport, more under the water than over it. Heavy stone pylons marked where a bridge had once stretched across to the much larger city on the far side, but except for some girders peeking forlornly from the surging river currents, nothing but the pylons remained. Kira swore, and Afa slumped painfully in his saddle. Even Oddjob, usually eager to wander during their pauses in search of green shoots to munch on, seemed too depressed to move.
“It’s got to be the river that took out the bridge,” said Samm. “These cities were too small to be a factor in the war, and none of them are military targets. I think the river’s just too . . . big for its own good.”
“Two big for our own good, too,” said Heron.
“Somebody had to cross it first, right?” asked Kira. She nudged Bobo’s flanks and walked him farther toward the water’s edge, peering around the bend in the trees as far south as she could see. “I mean, somebody had to build the bridges, and somebody had to cross before that.”
“Not with Afa they didn’t,” said Heron. Her tone of voice seemed to imply that they should leave him behind for the sake of the mission, but Kira didn’t even bother to glare at her. She did shoot a glance at Afa, though, mostly asleep tied into his saddle, head bobbing in and out of consciousness as the painkillers warred with uncomfortable sitting position.
“We could build a raft,” Kira said. “There are plenty of trees, and if we want to brave that sunken city, we could find planks and boards all over the place. If we build a raft big enough, we could ferry the horses across, and Afa with them.”
“The current’s a lot stronger than it looks,” said Samm, but Kira cut him off.
“I know,” she snapped, more harshly than she intended. “That’s why we haven’t tried crossing it before now, but what are our options? We’re on a tight schedule as it is, even before we took a two-day detour in the wrong direction. We need to go west, so let’s . . . go west. It’s that or head south for another couple of weeks.”
“You’re right,” said Samm, “but we don’t build our own raft unless we have to, and if we get to the point where we have to, we’ll know we’re essentially doomed. Look at that town over there—these were all shipping towns, using the river to haul freight back and forth in the old world. All we have to do is find a boat that still floats and use that.”
“So far all the big towns have been on the far side,” said Heron. “Unless you want to head back north two days to Moline. I don’t remember any convenient barges lying around up there.”
“Then we keep going south,” said Samm, and angled Buddy farther down the road. “We’ve come this far, we may as well keep going.”
“Is that a good reason to keep going?” asked Heron. “‘We’re getting really good at failure, we may as well stick with it?’”
“You know I’m not very good at sarcasm,” said Samm.
Heron snarled. “Then I’ll put it more plainly: This is stupid. Kira has her own reasons for coming out here, but I’m here because of you. I trusted you, and I’m trying as hard as I can to keep that trust alive, but look at us. We’re in a swamp, lost in a dead country, just waiting for the next attack, or the next injury, or the next little stretch of muddy road to just fall off into the river and drown us.”
“You’re the best one of us,” said Samm. “You can survive anything.”
“I survive because I’m smart,” said Heron. “Because I don’t get myself into the kinds of situations that could kill me, and frankly, that’s the only situation we’ve even been in for weeks.”
“We can do this,” said Kira. “We just need to calm down a little.”
“I know we can do it,” said Heron. “As much as I complain, I’m not an idiot—I know we can cross the damn river. I just want you to assure me that we should.”
Kira started to speak, but Heron cut her off. “Not you. Samm. And please tell me it’s not because of this”—she waved her hand angrily at Kira—“whatever-the-hell-she-is.”
Samm looked at Heron, then out across the river. “It’s not enough, is it? Just to follow; just to have faith in someone bigger and smarter and better informed. That’s how we’re built, that’s how every Partial is wired—to follow orders and trust in our leaders—but it’s not enough. It never has been.” He looked back at Heron. “We’ve followed our leaders, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose; we do what they say and we play our part. But this is our decision. Our mission. And when we’re done, it will be our victory, or our defeat. I don’t want to fail, but if I do, I want to be able to look back and say, ‘I did that. I failed. That was all me.’”
Kira listened in silence, marveling at the strength of his words and the force of his conviction. It was the first time he’d really explained himself—beyond the simple “I trust Kira” statements—and the sentiment was the opposite of “I trust anyone.” He was here because he wanted to make his own decision. Was that really so important to him? Was that really so rare? And how could it possibly sway Heron, who was already so fiercely independent? She might have been a Partial, like them, but Samm was appealing to something in his and Heron’s collective experience that Kira was realizing she didn’t understand. Samm and Heron stared at each other, and she could only guess at the link data flowing between them.
“Okay,” said Heron, and turned her horse to follow him. They started south, and Oddjob followed, and Kira brought up the end of the line, lost in thought.
The Mississippi led them to more flooded towns, most even smaller than Gulfport: Dallas City, Pontoosuc, Niota. Niota held another former bridge, reaching across to the first major hills they’d seen in weeks, a promontory bluff and a town called Fort Madison. Niota was in better condition than the last three villages had been, and they waded in as far as they dared, searching for anything they could use to float across. Samm found one end of a barge tipping up from the river at an angle, but nothing still holding to the surface. The current was, indeed, stronger than Kira had expected, and she waded back out of the eerie, underwater town as soon she as she could.
“Well,” said Heron, flopping down beside her on the grass. “We’re still stuck, but we’re soaking wet. Remind me again how that’s an improvement.”
“Don’t worry,” said Kira. “As hot and muggy as it is here, you’ll have something new to complain about any minute now.”
“Let’s get back to Afa and the horses,” said Samm. “We can make it another ten miles today if we keep moving.”
“Wait,” said Kira, staring at the sunken city. Something had moved. She scanned it carefully, shielding her eyes from the bright glares and flashes reflecting up from the surface of the water. A wave surged, and it moved again, big and black against the glimmering water beyond. “The barge is moving.”
Samm and Heron looked out, and Kira whispered to wait, wait, wait . . . and then another wave sloshed against it and it moved, almost lightly. “It’s still buoyant,” said Samm. “I thought it was sunken.”
“It’s moving too freely to be pinned,” said Heron. “Maybe tied down?”
“And if we untie it,” said Kira, “maybe we can use it.”
They shucked their guns and heavy gear and waded back into the city, this time kicking off and swimming when the river grew too deep to stand in. The river was strong, but they kept to the lee side of the buildings, moving hand over hand along the roofs as they picked their way toward the barge. It flapped faintly against the current, nearly the farthest object from the shore. They hoisted themselves onto the last building out, watching the trapped barge from the roof.
“It’s definitely moving,” said Kira. “As soon as we cut it loose, it’s going to pop right up and float away.”
“We’ll have to tie it to something else on a longer line,” said Samm. “We’ll want a safety line on whoever goes out there anyway.”
“One-two-three not it,” said Heron. “But I will get you a rope. The last building we passed was a hardware store.” She slipped back into the water and Kira followed, not wanting to let anyone—even someone she vaguely mistrusted—enter a ruined, flooded building alone. They touched off from the wall and felt the current catch them, carrying them south between the buildings even as they tried to swim east to catch the next one. Heron caught hold of the rusted rain pipe with one hand and reached for Kira with the other, grabbing her as she rushed by. Kira felt something solid beneath her feet, probably a car or the cab of a truck, and pushed off from it as Heron pulled her toward the hardware store. Kira caught the windowsill, grateful there were no shards of glass poking out from it, and ducked her head below the surface to swim inside.
There was a foot or so of air in the building, trapped between the ceiling and the top of the river, though a faint breeze and a shaft of light showed that the air was kept fresh by at least one hole in the roof above. The damp atmosphere had covered the ceiling and the visible portion of the walls with moss, and Kira brushed some from her hair as Heron surfaced beside her. “Looks pretty well scoured out by the river,” Kira told her, for most of the Sheetrock on the walls, and anything once attached to it, had long ago been washed away.
“There’s bound to be something lower,” said Heron, and they maneuvered to the widest stretch of southern wall—it was less likely here that the objects they needed, and indeed the swimmers themselves, would be swept out to the river beyond. Heron dove first, staying down long enough that Kira began to get seriously worried, before popping to the surface and brushing her coal-black hair from her face. “No rope,” she said, “but I think I found some chain.”
“Let me look,” said Kira, and tucked herself into a duck dive down against the wall. She tried to open her eyes and found the water too dark and muddy to see in. She felt something heavy and coiled, slicker than rope but smoother than chain, and tried to lift it. It budged slightly, but was too heavy to move. She jumped up, breaking the surface and grabbing the wall for support. “I think I found a hose.”
“Is that strong enough?”
“It should be, if it’s long enough.”
Heron pulled her knife from its sheath, popped it open, and bit it in her teeth before diving down. Almost a minute later she bobbed up with the knife in one hand and an end of the hose in the other.
“How long can you hold your breath?” Kira asked.
“Biologically superior,” said Heron. “I keep telling you. Take this, the other end is still stuck to the shelf with a zip tie.”
“Probably why it’s still in here,” said Kira, but Heron was already gone. She surfaced a while later and nodded: success. Kira began coiling the hose as well as she could, and stopped after the first twenty coils. “This has got to be at least a hundred feet.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Heron, and gripped a portion of the hose as Kira ducked back out of the open window. Kira bobbed up farther south than she’d intended, looking up to see Samm watching from his roof. Was he smiling to see her? Of course he’d been worried with them gone so long, but Kira found herself hoping that he was worried about her, specifically, rather than just the success or failure of the search for rope.
She pushed the thought away and held up one end of the hose. “Hose,” she said simply, short of breath as she struggled against the current. She worked her way back to Samm’s roof, and he pulled her up. Heron clambered up behind her, not looking nearly as exhausted as Kira felt. Samm pulled up the looping lengths of hose and coiled them on the mossy shingles. He pointed back through the sunken city to the shore, where Heron’s horse Dug was watching them solemnly.
“I think that’s the best place to try to land it,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty clear shot, depending on how deep it rides, but it looks like a pretty shallow barge. If we head back that way and tie off one end of this to . . .” He paused, studying the bits of architecture that poked up above the water. “That light pole. I can swim out from here, tie this off, cut whatever’s holding it, and then we can tow it in to shore.”
“Just that easy, huh?” asked Kira.
“Unless the barge is tied down with metal chains,” said Samm, “yes. The hard part’s going to be getting it back out again laden with horses without foundering against those buildings.”
“I’m assuming we’re the first people to try to dock a boat at that end of Main Street,” said Heron. “I don’t think they designed the city with ‘barge maneuverability’ in mind.”
“We’ll just use poles to push ourselves away,” said Kira. “Against the pounding, bridge-destroying current of the mighty Mississippi River.”
“Just that easy?” asked Samm. Kira looked up and saw that he was smiling—a tentative smile, as if he was trying it out. She smiled back.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just that easy.”
It wasn’t. Samm could barely reach the barge with the hose tied off on the light post, and even after they moved it, he found the current almost too strong to work with as he dove for the docking ropes—not one, as they’d hoped, but five. He tied off the hose and spent nearly half an hour under the water, hacking on the series of ropes and coming up only briefly for air. Kira couldn’t see him well, but he had lost most of his color and was shivering against the cold. Each time he dove back down she found herself holding her breath in sympathy, seeing how long she could last, and each time he seemed to stay down longer, dragging the time out impossibly, until at last she was certain he had drowned. With a sudden lurch the barge shifted, the cut ties making it less stable, and still Samm didn’t come up. Kira counted to ten. Nothing. She waded in, counting to ten again, to twenty, and soon Heron was swimming with her, using the taut garden hose for balance as it stretched toward the breaking point. The barge moved again, spinning and slamming into the buildings downstream, and Samm erupted from the river, gasping desperately for breath. Kira caught him, holding his head above water as gulped down air.
“Got it,” he said, his teeth clacking together. “Let’s pull it in.”
“We need to warm you up first,” said Kira, “You could get hypothermia.”
“This hose is going to snap if we wait any longer,” said Heron.
“He could die,” insisted Kira.
“I’ll be fine,” Samm said, shivering. “I’m a Partial.”
“Back to the shallows,” said Heron, “or it’s all for nothing.”
They worked their back along the hose, Kira watching Samm and praying he didn’t shiver himself into a seizure. When they reached land shallow enough to stand on, she rubbed his back and chest, a quick furious burst of movement that probably soothed her conscience more than it did his condition. She felt a small thrill to be touching him—to feel the firm contours of his muscled chest—which seemed so enormously out of place she dropped her hands almost instantly, recoiling at the incongruity. She was a medic, not a schoolgirl; she could touch a man’s chest without going all gooey. He was still shaking, his teeth chattering with the cold, and she rubbed him again, working her hands up and down his pecs and sternum to force some warmth back into his body. A moment later the three of them seized the rope and started dragging the barge up the flooded street. Afa watched listlessly from the shore, almost too doped on painkillers to stand. The barge drifted toward them slowly, and when they gained about twenty feet of slack, Kira untied the hose and waded back to the next secure point, tying it off and then starting over. The barge scraped along the houses, catching on one of them so firmly Heron had to swim out and dislodge it with a plank of driftwood. After more than two hours they’d moved the barge close enough to shore for the horses to board it. It was barely three hundred feet.
They tied it off again, snapping the hose and almost losing it; Samm wrapped the trailing end around his arm and grabbed a brick wall with his other, straining red-faced at the pain as Kira and Heron scrambled to secure the barge more firmly. A heavy wooden door ripped from a nearby frame served as a steep boarding plank, and they walked the horses up one by one, Kira leading them with soft words while Samm and Heron guided them from the sides to keep them in line. Samm was still shivering, and his horse Buddy seemed more spooked in response, shuffling and backtracking so nervously that the door cracked. They coaxed him onto the barge before it broke completely, and then had to find a new one to get Oddjob on board at the end. Afa came last, his face slack, his massive arms wrapped around his backpack like an overstuffed life preserver.
“I can’t leave my backpack,” he said. “I can’t leave my backpack.”
“We won’t,” said Kira. “Just sit here, and don’t move, and you’ll be safe.”
Heron cut the lines and hurried to her place on the leading edge of the boat, reaching it just in time to pick up a board and push off against the row of buildings the current tried to carry them into. Samm was on the same side, his hands and arms still pale from the cold. Kira stood in the center, trying to soothe the horses; they whinnied in agitation at the instability of the barge, dipping and shifting exactly the way ground shouldn’t, and became even more spooked as the barge slammed into the small hardware store.
“Watch the buildings!” cried Kira, trying to keep Bobo from rearing up and breaking away from her.
“Go to hell!” Heron shot back, her teeth tightly clenched as she tried to keep the unwieldy barge, now firmly caught in the river’s sweeping current, from slamming into the building again. The river pulled them both into the buildings and out into the center, not quickly but powerfully; it was not a white-water river, but Kira was realizing that even a lazy river, when it got this big, had an immense amount of strength. Samm joined Heron at the back, and together they managed to keep the trailing edge of the barge from clipping the last building in the line, and suddenly they were out: free of the sunken city, free of the debris that cluttered the shores, free of the limited stability the buildings had granted. The barge spun slowly in the water, and the horses chomped and snapped in fear. Samm ran to help Kira control them, but Heron walked the edge, trying to keep herself at whatever part of the barge was the front.
“Sandbar,” she called out, kneeling to grip the side for balance, and the barge shook with sudden impact, sending Kira reeling for balance. Afa fell on his side, closing his eyes and clutching his backpack tightly. Samm and Kira separated, each taking two horses by the reins and leading them a few steps away from each other. The sandbar spun them in the opposite direction as they bounced away from it, and for a moment they straightened out. Kira found solid footing, readjusting her grip on the horses, and Heron called out again, more urgently this time: “Fallen bridge!”
“What?” shouted Kira.
“Just hold on to something,” said Heron, and suddenly the barge slammed into an outcropping of twisted steel supports, just barely visible above the water but solid and deadly below the surface. The horses screamed, and the barge screamed with them, metal scraping against metal. The barge tipped dangerously, then rocked back the other way as it rolled around the fallen bridge. Kira fought to keep control of her horses.
“We need to steer,” she called.
“Yes, we do,” said Samm, “but I don’t think that’s an option at this point.”
“Here’s another one,” called Heron, and Kira held on tight as the boat rocked and splashed and shook. They were in the middle of the river now, the current faster and deeper, and Kira saw with dismay that it seemed to be carrying them straight through the path of debris from the bridge. They bobbed like a cork on the surface, thrown back and forth from stone to stone, steel to steel. A particularly bad hit brought a loud crack, and Kira looked around wildly to see if anything had broken. Heron scrambled across the floor and looked up angrily. “We’re taking on water.”
“That’s awesome,” said Kira. “Throw it back out!”
Heron glared at her, but found a discarded board and tried to stop up the hole—a crack in the side wall, thankfully, not the floor, or Kira thought they might have gone down almost immediately. The board didn’t seem to help, and Heron gave up, trying to use it instead as a rudder. The barge ignored her and went where the river wanted it. They shook with another impact, then another, and Kira cried out as the floor rippled beneath her feet. Floors aren’t supposed to do that.
“The floor rippled,” she said.
Samm held his two horses tightly, though they looked ready to tear him in half. “Rippled or buckled?”
“I think it was just—” Kira cried out as the barge hit another obstacle, and the metal floor groaned in protest at some unexpected movement.
“Buckled,” said Heron, bracing her board against the floor for stability. “This is not going to end well.”
“How poorly are we talking,” asked Kira, “assuming it at least ends with us on that side of the river?”
“Poorly,” said Heron. “We lose some gear, maybe most of it. A horse if we’re unlucky, Afa if we are.”
“We won’t lose Afa,” said Samm. “I’ll pull him to shore myself if I have to.”
“You’ll have to,” said Heron. “This rust bucket is falling apart around us, and the river is doing everything it can to speed that along.”
“Try to steer us closer to the side,” said Kira.
Heron looked at her with wide, incredulous eyes.
“What in the hell do you think I’ve been trying for the last five minutes?”
“You’re not trying it now,” Kira snarled.
“You’d better hope you can swim,” said Heron, shooting her an icy glare as she leapt back to the edge, “because Samm’s saving Afa and I’m not saving you.” She stuck the board back into the water, correcting the spin but failing to guide the boat in any particular direction. They almost hit a promontory on the far side, but the same current that had pulled them away from the east shore was now working to keep them from the west one, and even when they finally cleared the debris field, their barge was creaking and sinking and caught in a powerful current. The river turned south with water already lapping around Kira’s feet, and she looked down the river to see that it was rounding a wide U-shaped bend before turning back east again.
“Keep steady on that rudder,” she called to Heron. “The river’s turning hard enough that we might get thrown onto the bank up there.”
“That’s not a bank, it’s a dock,” said Samm. “Getting thrown onto it will hurt.”
“Just . . . save Afa,” said Kira, keeping her eyes on the shore. The river moved surprisingly slowly for something so powerful, and it seemed to take them forever to round the bend. She worried they wouldn’t build up enough momentum to get across at all, but slowly the west shore grew closer, their leaking barge turning just slightly wider than the river was. We’re going to make ground, she thought. Right in the middle of that city. She could see it now, buildings and docks rising out of the overgrown riverbank, masked with trees and tall marsh reeds. The placement of the city seemed almost perfectly designed to catch things as the river carried them around the bend, and Kira briefly wondered if it had been built there for that exact purpose. Her thoughts turned more urgent as the shore drew closer, and the hope of landing became a certainty of crashing into the riverside wharf looming up to meet them. It was flooded, like most of the riverside cities, and Kira guessed their trajectory would carry them straight into a tangle of boats, logs, and other debris caught in a cluster of old stores and buildings. “Can we take another impact?” she asked.
“No, we can’t,” said Heron, standing up and throwing her rudder over the side. “Save what you can.” She grabbed Dug’s reins from Kira’s hand and seemed to be readying the horse to jump over the side. Samm looked at the impending crash, then dropped both sets of reins and ran to Afa. The horses pranced back skittishly, and the sudden shift in weight caused the damaged barge to warp, knocking Kira off her feet and sending Oddjob completely over the side. Kira clung to Bobo’s reins, trying to stand, when the barge slammed into the mass of debris and crumpled like a foil model. Kira went down, and the river swallowed her.