CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next day would take her to Candlewood, but the route passed through a city called Danbury—several times larger than the town that had scared her so much the day before, and right on the shores of Candlewood’s southern tip. If the Ivies were really there, they’d see her coming for sure.
“That might not be a bad thing,” she mused to herself, falling into her old habit of thinking out loud. She’d spent a few months alone in Manhattan, the only living soul for miles in any direction, trying to track down an old ParaGen office; by the end she’d been carrying on entire conversations with herself, as if desperate for any kind of companionship. She felt silly doing it, but just as silly forcing herself to be quiet. When she got to the city she’d be quiet, but here in the wilderness, why not talk?
The question was, how much of the city should she actually pass through? She munched on an apple in the early morning light, sitting not in the living room but out on the porch, away from the skeletons and their ghostly faces staring down from the photos. She had the map out, spread across her knee, but it wasn’t nearly as detailed as she wanted.
“If the Ivies are there, and see me, that’s good,” she said, “because I want them to see me. That’s the whole reason I’m here.” She swallowed her bit of apple. “Unless, of course, they shoot me on sight. Which they probably won’t do, but what do I know? Do I want to take that chance? If they get close enough to link me, which they can’t do because I’m not on the link, they’ll think I’m human.” She took another bite of her apple. “But for all I know, thinking I’m human might make them more likely to shoot me, not less. I don’t know anything about them.” She swallowed her apple. “And what if Morgan really does have spies up here? What happens if they see me first? I think I need to stay hidden as long as possible. I need a more detailed map to plan this route.”
She repacked her scant possessions and headed back to the crossroads, where one corner held a weathered gas station. The wide metal awning had collapsed over the pumps, and this and the scattered hulks of rusting cars gave her cover as she dashed across the parking lot. The entire front wall had been glass, now shattered and crunching under her feet; years of rain had blown in, wrinkling the magazines in the rack by the front and washing out their colors. Kira picked her way through the shelves looking for road maps, finding them at last in a rotating wire rack that had long since toppled to the floor. Many of the maps were damp, and some had been nibbled by rats, but she found a Connecticut road map that seemed to be in pretty good condition. She found a spot of metal shelving, clear of broken glass, and sat down to inspect her route.
The highway she was on continued straight up to Danbury, where it widened and merged with Interstate 84, a massive multi-lane road that seemed to skirt the edge of Danbury and then curve up toward Candlewood Lake. “That will be the easiest route,” she said quietly, “but also the most obvious. If they’re watching anything, they’ll be watching that.” She searched through the city itself, following the major roads and looking for other options, and marked the two major hospitals with her pencil. All the post-Break settlements, human and Partial, tended to cluster around hospitals, and the Ivies might be the same. “Might be,” she reminded herself. Morgan’s records had reported them farther north, on or around the lake itself, and with lake and city so close together it was telling, she thought, that the scouts had placed them specifically at the lake. “Maybe they don’t like cities,” she mused. “I’m not a big fan, either, but I’m an outsider—if this is their home territory, they could secure the city and get a lot of defensive advantages the lake can’t offer. Unless they’re searching for advantages I’m not considering.” She looked closer at the lake, wondering what those advantages might be. Fresh water, certainly, and maybe the longer sight lines across the water. Any hunting or farming they wanted to do in the wilderness would be just as easy in the city; she had grown up doing the same in the dense urban areas of Long Island. It didn’t seem to make sense. She looked at her notes again: the Ivies were “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That was all the information she had. She stared at the map, still completely unsure how best to approach it.
“Better to be safe,” she decided at last, and plotted a course that curved west, around the edge of the city, and approached the lake through the smaller, suburban area called New Fairfield. She would be staying off the roads almost the whole way, and she worked out enough of the details to guide herself by compass instead, landmark to landmark, starting with the western edge of a place called Bennett’s Pond. The forest was thicker there, with steeper hills than she’d passed through before, and she found herself tiring more quickly in the rougher terrain. She crossed I-84 around ten in the morning, a wooded stretch of road well west of the city, and then tramped across a narrow stream and through another thick, old-growth forest. By noon she had reached another wide pond, ringed by a series of golf courses long ago gone to seed. The western edge of the water was a low marsh filled with empty nests. Cold or not, the need to migrate south was too ingrained in the birds’ tiny minds, and the wetland was still and quiet. She saw a cluster of small, gleaming curves, surprised to find a clutch of eggs, but when she drew closer they were simply golf balls, yellowed and cracking in the sun.
She kept heading north through the forest, skirting the invisible line between the states, until a cluster of homes signaled it was time to curve eastward again. More and more houses appeared as she drew closer to New Fairfield, the buildings fading and forlorn in the midst of the trees. Kira imagined them not as houses but as spirits of the houses that used to be here, persisting stubbornly, ethereally, long after the structures themselves had disappeared. She skirted the edge of Corner Pond, crossed a narrow road, and turned almost straight east. Her undeveloped forest was running out quickly.
And then she saw a bright white mark in the trunk of a tree; a recent carving, maybe three days old at the most. The roman numeral four. IV.
The Ivies.
It made so much sense, and so abruptly, that she marveled she hadn’t thought of it before: the Ivies hadn’t named themselves for the plant, but for their old military designation. IV. The fourth division or regiment or some such segment of the Partial army. They were real, and they were here; this was either a border sign or a trail marker, and she couldn’t help but wonder if they used this same forested corridor to avoid the developed areas on either side. It was possible, maybe even likely, but why? What did a defensive army have to fear from the homes and open streets of a long-abandoned suburb?
A sudden thought consumed her, and she crept closer to the mark to examine it. Dogs and other animals used smells to mark their territory, and the Partials’ link system was similar in a lot of ways. Could their data pheromones persist in the same way? It was possible that this sign was more than visual, that the mark merely pointed out where the real data could be found. She’d practiced with Samm to develop her own small connection to the link; if there was something there, she might be able to sense it. She walked up cautiously to the mark on the tree, breathing deeply as she went. She sensed nothing. When she reached it she touched the bark gently, feeling the edges of the three white lines: IV. They looked like they’d been hacked in with a hatchet, two quick chops per line to break through the bark and expose the white wood underneath. White except for an odd discoloration at the bottom of each letter, like something had dripped there, or been smeared on purpose.
It was blood.
Kira hesitated, glancing nervously at the forest around her. Nothing moved, not even wind in the leaves. She looked back at the bloody letters, wondering why the blood was there at all. Was it an accident? A warning? Was that the best way to make the link data persist long-term? She leaned in, steeling herself, taking a deep breath.
DEATH PAIN BLOOD BETRAYAL—
She staggered back, gasping for breath, rubbing her nose to get the smell out.
DEATH BETRAYAL PAIN THEY’RE KILLING US—
She tripped over a tree root, yelping as she fell, rolling to her feet and grabbing handfuls of dirt and leaves and grass as she came up. She ran through the forest, irrationally, helplessly terrified, clutching the ground cover to her face and sucking in the smell, trying desperately to drown the signal out.
DEATH PAIN—
DEATH
And then it was gone. Kira collapsed to the ground, her heart still racing, her blood pounding in her ears. The link was designed as a combat tool, a fast, wordless way for the Partials to warn one another of danger and coordinate their movements on the battlefield. When one soldier died, he released a burst of death pheromones, warning his companions that something was wrong; Kira had sensed it before, but it was nothing like this. That had been data, in its truest form: an announcement of what had happened, and where. This was a frantic, overwhelming warning, a pheromonal scream. A normal death would produce nothing like it, and she didn’t even want to think about what could. Partials had been murdered here, probably tortured, perhaps solely for the purpose of creating that data. She’d had to walk right up to smell it, but her link connection was weak.
Did the whole forest smell like that? Was this warning spread around the entire lake?
In her mad race to escape, Kira had gotten disoriented, and she pulled out her compass with trembling hands. North was behind her, which meant she’d been running south; obviously not too far, as she hadn’t run into any houses. She looked up, trying to get her bearings. Do I keep running, or stay on track? She was too scared to speak out loud. The Ivies are “opposed to medical experimentation,” and if this is how they tell people to stay away, it looks like they’re a lot more opposed than I realized. And maybe that’s not all they oppose. Morgan’s record focused on experimentation because that’s all she cares about—they don’t want to help with her work, and they’re too far away to interfere with it, so she forgets them and moves on. Never mind the details.
She slowed her breathing, calming herself, forcing herself to think clearly. It was harder than it should have been, and she wondered how much of the warning pheromones were still in her nose, still filling her bloodstream with adrenaline. She closed her eyes, trying to focus. They still might be my allies, she told herself. They post these as warnings to Partials, to Morgan’s forces. Their community might be sympathetic to the humans, and almost certainly amenable to a plan that opposes Dr. Morgan. And if nothing else, they’re expiring. I can offer a possible solution to that. She thought again about the pain and fear it must have taken to produce that warning on the link, and shuddered. Is that really who I want to align myself with? All the things I was worried about Morgan doing—would they do the same?
She shook her head. I might be misinterpreting everything, not just how they created the border marker but the fact that it’s a border marker at all. For all I know, one of the Ivies was ambushed by Morgan’s soldiers and carved that mark as a warning to his friends. I can’t judge them without more information.
She checked her compass, set her jaw, and hiked east toward the lake.