chapter THIRTY-SEVEN
They saw the mountains first—massive peaks that rose up from the plains of the Midwest like the wall at the edge of the world. The tops were white with snow, even in the summer. They reached the outskirts of the city soon after, a suburb called Bennett, washed pale by the acidic rainfall, the streets stained a sulfurous yellow and the brown plants dry and brittle. The dead plains lapped at the edge of the city like an ocean of poison grass, and no birds perched on the eaves or the power lines. The cities Kira had grown up with, even the massive ones like Chicago and New York, had stood like monuments in an overgrown cemetery, marking the site of death but covered with vines and moss and the signs of new life. Denver, in contrast, was a mausoleum, lifeless and bare.
The travelers had distributed their gear between the horses, Kira leading Bobo while Samm led Oddjob; the mare seemed morose without Afa strapped onto her back, and Kira wondered if even the animals’ diet of canned vegetables and instant oatmeal—the only clean food they could find in the toxic wasteland—was starting to take its toll. If they’d lost Afa back in Chicago, or sent him back on his own, they could have loosed the horses and spared them the horrors of the journey completely, but to loose them in the middle of the poison plains would have been the height of cruelty, and Kira wouldn’t hear of it. They had lost Afa, but she would save his horse if it meant her own life.
Except I know that isn’t true, she thought. If it really comes down to it, I’ll save myself. It made her feel guilty and nauseous to think of it, and she did her best to think of something else.
The city they passed through was, if anything, bigger than Chicago. The suburb of Bennett stretched west into the suburb of Nieveen, then Lawrence, then Watkins and Watkins Farm, and on and on in an endless sea of housing developments and shopping malls and parking lots. Lonely wind rustled through the piles of brittle leaves and broken glass that clustered in the gutters and collected against the walls of crumbling buildings. Heron ranged far ahead, scouting their path more out of habit than necessity, doubling back at regular intervals to report that they were coming up on first one airport, then another, then a golf course. There was nothing meaningful to report; nothing to see but the bleached bones and rusted metal frames of the millions of people and buildings destroyed in the Break. Samm found another road map in a broken-down gas station, folding it out on the hood of an empty car. The roads coiled together on the page like a cluster of nerves.
“According to Afa’s records,” said Kira, “the ParaGen complex was here, tucked up against the mountains.” She pointed to the western edge of the city, in an area called Arvada. She read the name off the map. “Rocky Flats Memorial Preserve. Why would they build an industrial facility on a preserve?”
Samm pinpointed their current location and measured out the distance. “That’s forty miles away. How big is this city?”
“Forty miles across,” said Heron. “We’re walking from one end to the other. It’s at least twice that north to south, so be grateful we came the way we did.”
Kira looked at the sky, estimating the position of the sun. “It’s already . . . three in the afternoon? Three thirty? We’re not making it forty miles by nightfall.”
“Not even tomorrow by nightfall if the horses don’t perk up,” said Heron. “I tell you, we need to just leave them and move on.”
“We’re not leaving them,” said Kira.
“Guilt won’t bring Afa back,” said Heron.
“And callousness won’t make the distance any shorter,” said Samm, folding the map. “Let’s keep walking.”
Kira had held a vain hope that the toxic wasteland would be better here, shielded in some way by the mountains or the skyscrapers or some foible in the weather patterns, but the city proved to be somehow more dangerous than the land they had already crossed. Acid runoff collected in potholes and dips in the road, forming caustic lakes where drainage grates were too clogged with garbage to let the slurry escape. Truck beds open to the weather had formed miniature salt pans, evaporating the poison particles out of the rainfall in an ongoing cycle until they were filled with crystalline masses that kicked up in the wind and burned the travelers’ eyes and throats; they wrapped their faces with spare clothing and peered cautiously through their eye slits, always on the watch for danger. Some of the chemicals that saturated the city were flammable, and fires smoldered here and there as they passed, sometimes reigniting in the heat, all the time feeding the poisons in the air with a never-ending stream of smoke and ash.
They stopped for the night in what looked like it used to be a luxury hotel; the rich green carpet in the lobby was bleached at the edges and covered with windblown dust. They led the horses through a wide double door and made camp in a former five-star restaurant, sealing the way behind them to keep out as much of the toxic wind as possible. Samm built the horses a corral from old hardwood tables, and they fed them from a massive store of canned apple pie filling they found in the kitchen. Kira ate canned tuna mixed with canned beef bouillon to hide the flavor; if she never saw another can of tuna again in her life, she’d count herself lucky. They didn’t bother setting watch, collapsing on the deep pile carpet without even untying their bedrolls.
Kira rose the next morning to find Heron already gone, presumably scouting ahead, if she hadn’t already abandoned them completely. They hadn’t talked much after the fight, and while Heron seemed resigned to go with them to Denver in the end, she had not been her usual self since.
Samm was searching boxes stacked along the wall next to the kitchen for anything they could take with them. “Most of the cans have gone bad,” he said, tossing Kira a bloated metal can of tomato paste. “Hotels are always crappy anyway—they use too much fresh food, and most of the canned stuff is bulk.”
Kira nodded to the five-gallon can of tomato sauce on the table beside him. “You don’t want to haul that thirty miles today?”
“Believe it or not,” he said. He paused in his work, turning to face her. “I’m sorry about Afa.”
“So am I.”
“What I mean to say,” said Samm, “is that I’m sorry I was so . . . pretentious. In the beginning.”
“You were never pretentious.”
“Arrogant, then,” said Samm. “Partial society is so regimented, we always know who we report to and who reports to us—who we’re above and who we’re below. I didn’t treat him like an equal because . . . I guess I’m just not accustomed to the concept.”
Kira laughed hollowly, collapsing in a nearby chair. “Okay, that actually does sound kind of pretentious.”
“You’re making it very hard for me to apologize.”
“I know,” said Kira, looking down at the floor. “I know, and I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to. You’ve been more than helpful, and Afa wasn’t exactly the easiest person to take seriously.”
“What’s done is done,” said Samm, and continued to work on the food supplies. Kira watched him, not because it was interesting but because it cost too much effort to look away.
“You think we’ll find what we’re looking for?” she asked.
Samm continued to search for usable cans of food. “Don’t tell me you’re starting to pay attention to Heron.”
“I used to think there must have been a plan,” said Kira. “That even though I didn’t know how RM and expiration and whatever I am all fit together, they still did, somehow. But if there was any plan, I can’t help but think it went wrong a long time before now..”
“Don’t say that,” said Samm, setting down the cans and walking over to where she was still sitting. “We won’t know until we get to ParaGen. No point in doubting yourself now. For the record, I never have.”
Kira smiled, in spite of everything. She had begun to wonder if Heron was right, if this was more about her own frustration about her entire existence being an accident or an evil plot or an outright lie than it was about saving the races. And yet, Samm didn’t. She found herself again at a loss for words. He reached a hand toward her cheek.
They heard noise in the lobby, and Samm had his gun in his hand before Kira even realized he’d brought it over with him. He lowered it quickly, though, when Heron appeared. She paused for a moment in the doorway as she saw them together, but only for a moment.
“Pack up,” she said. “We move out now.”
Samm looked at her, silent, then quickly rose to finish packing the food. Kira followed Heron from the kitchen to the main room of the restaurant, where she began saddling Oddjob. “You saw something?” asked Kira.
Heron pulled the buckles tight on Oddjob’s saddle and moved on to Bobo. “Green.”
“What do you mean ‘green’?”
“The color,” said Heron. “I assume you’re familiar with it?”
“You saw the color green?” asked Kira. “You mean, like, grass?” Heron nodded, and Kira’s jaw fell open. “How far did you go?”
“Twenty stories,” said Heron, finishing with Bobo’s saddle. “You gonna help?”
“Sure,” said Kira, jogging to her bedroll and packing her sparse gear as quickly as she could. “Just keep explaining things so I don’t have to stop every five seconds to ask another question.”
“This is one of the tallest buildings in the area,” said Heron, “so instead of scouting out into the city I climbed to the top to see what I could see. And I saw green—grass, trees, everything—in the direction of Rocky Flats. A little patch of it pressed up into the foothills of the mountains.”
“Right where the ParaGen building is supposed to be?” asked Samm.
“I couldn’t tell,” said Heron, throwing her gear onto her back. “But I’m pretty sure I saw smoke over there as well.”
“There’s smoke everywhere,” said Kira. “Half this city’s on fire.”
“Those are chemical fires,” said Heron. “This one looked suspiciously like a cooking fire. That’s why I want to make sure I get there before dark—if there’s someone there, they might find us before we find them, and that could be a problem. You can try to catch up, but I’m not waiting for you.” She slipped out the door, rifle in hand, and ran through the lobby to the city beyond.
Kira looked at Samm. “People?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then let’s go find out.”
They finished packing in a frenzy, wincing with stiff, ragged muscles as they secured their final pieces on the horses’ backs and raced out into the city. It had rained in the night, and the city was even more treacherous because of it: Showers of acid dripped off the roofs, and twisted, alien plants had bloomed like tumors from the cracks in the street, soaking in the poison like sponges and streaking it in painful burns against the legs of anyone who stepped too close.
They followed the best landmark they could find—a tall, dark building that seemed to rise up more or less in the right direction. As the day wore on, they began to suspect that the black skyscraper might actually be the ParaGen building—nestled at the base of the mountains, a lonely spire beckoning them onward. Samm and Kira made the best time they could, pushing the horses beyond their limit, but when night fell again, they had only reached the outskirts of Arvada. The city here was as acid-washed and desolate as the rest.
“We can’t just stop,” said Kira. “It’s, like, right there.” She pointed at the black spire and the mountains beyond, now so close that they towered over them. “I can’t just camp down for the night if the thing we’ve been looking for is right there, just . . . We have to keep going.”
“We can barely see,” said Samm, glancing at the myriad streetlights, useless in a world without electricity. “It’s dark, the horses are beat, and that much cloud cover means rain.”
Kira growled in frustration, clenching her hands into fists as she turned, casting around for anything she could find that might solve her problem. She spied a grocery store and pulled Bobo toward it. “There. We’ll leave the horses and go on foot.” They unsaddled the horses in a break room in the back of the store, filling a plastic tub with as much bottled water as they could scrounge, and closed the door to keep them from wandering away. Kira emptied most of her pack as well, bringing only the essentials: water, a heavy tarp for protection, and the depowered computer screen with all the information they’d downloaded at the Chicago data center; she didn’t want to go anywhere without it. Samm brought his rifle and several clips of ammunition, and Kira realized she should do the same. Prepped and ready, they stole out into the night. The sky was clearing, and the starlight made the city look blank and colorless.
Arvada was less industrial than much of the city they’d walked through, though this only made it more depressing in the toxic fallout—instead of bleached buildings, they walked through dry, dusty parks and residential streets full of drooping houses and stunted, misshapen trees. Samm seemed more nervous than eager, but his mood turned when they came upon a wide lake of fresh water—not just saltless but literally fresh, completely clean of the poisons and chemicals that had plagued all water they’d passed in a month. A breeze blew gently from the mountains, and Kira smelled clean air for the first time in weeks: green leaves, fresh fruit, and . . . Yes, she thought, just a hint of baked bread.
What’s going on here?
The land beyond the lake was green—they couldn’t see it, but they could smell it in the air, and feel it in the soft give of the healthy grass beneath their feet. Somehow, against all logic, there was a patch of healthy grass at the base of the mountain, stretching out from the fence that marked the borders of the Rocky Flats Preserve. Kira frowned and approached the fence carefully. It was old and rusty, but the land beyond it was rich and verdant, even in the darkness. An oasis of life, thriving in the midst of desolation. The black spire rose up like a gash in the sky. Lights flickered through the trees, and Kira raised her gun protectively.
Samm nodded to the right, and they followed the fence as quietly as they could, slipping through the healthy grass and bushes that surrounded the mysterious complex. Soon they came upon a wide gate, open and empty, and they watched it from the shadows for nearly ten minutes before determining that it was, indeed, unguarded. Thick undergrowth around the base of the gate made Kira suspect it hadn’t been closed in years.
“Does somebody live here?” Kira whispered.
“I . . .” Samm seemed lost for words. “I have no idea.”
“Is there an outpost here?” she asked. “Some kind of . . . Partial base or . . .”
“I would have said something if I’d known.”
“Well, who else could it be?”
They stared at the open gate, trying to work up the nerve to enter.
“We still haven’t found Heron,” said Samm. “She could be in there, or she could be hiding and waiting for us.”
“Only one way to find out.” Kira crept forward, gun ready. She wasn’t about to stall, not when they were so close, not if there was a Partial settlement here. After a moment, Samm seemed to agree and follow her.
They walked past the fence into the bizarre paradise beyond. Kira marveled, awestruck by the vibrant plant life that surrounded them, and again they saw the lights—fires, Kira was certain, but unlike the smoldering disasters in the city, these seemed small and controlled, just as Heron had said. Campfires, or bonfires. They crept through the darkness, and soon they heard them.
Voices. Happy voices, laughing and singing, with another sound in the midst of it, something Kira had thought she’d never hear again. She broke into a run, all caution forgotten, and when she saw them she dropped to her knees, too overcome with emotion to run or speak or even think.
Children.
The bonfire leapt and crackled in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by low buildings and a crowd of dancing people, and dancing through the midst of them were children—infants and preteens, ten-year-olds and toddlers. Dozens of children of every age and size, laughing and whooping and clapping their hands, singing as a small band played pipes and fiddles in the firelight. Kira sank into the grass and cried, weeping and sobbing and trying to talk, but there were no words. Samm knelt beside her and she clung to him, holding him, pointing to the children, and Samm was trying to pull her away but all she wanted to do was get closer, to see them for herself, to touch them and hold them. They had seen her now, the children and the adults and everyone; the music had stopped, and the singing, and they were rising to their feet in shock and surprise. Samm tried again to pull Kira to her feet, and she finally managed to speak to the crowd of strangers inching toward them.
“You have children.”
A semicircle of strangers spread loosely in front of them, and Kira noticed now that they were holding spears and bows and here and there a gun. A young woman about Kira’s age stepped forward with a hunting rifle, aiming it with practiced expertise at Kira’s chest.
“Drop your weapons.”