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NINETEEN

THE AMMUNITION FACTORY IS WELL KEPT ON the outside, but when we enter we’re met with cobwebs and rust. Each step sends dust swimming into the air. The roof is glass, made opaque by years of neglect, and only a hint of light breaks through the muck. An abandoned conveyor belt hosts a line of rusted stools and little else, and images in faded paint still decorate the walls. I slow down to study them.

A man in a uniform, rifle in hand. A woman gazing at him in admiration. THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND IS STILL BEHIND HIM.

Another poster urges viewers to KEEP THE DANGER OVERSEAS. A woman smiles, her hands full of bullets. A shadow passes across the overlarge portrait. I turn, but no one’s behind me.

“We lucked out. This place is empty. Let’s find the storeroom,” Dante calls, and I jog to catch up.

As we cross the factory, I reach for the arm of the person beside me, but come up empty. The other three are ahead of me and yet I would have sworn I felt Jost right beside me a moment ago.

“The Guild leaves these here?” Jost asks as we come up on a row of motocycles.

“It’s where the Remnants are outfitted when new batches are brought in. They wake up here and are herded out into the Icebox with transport and weapons,” Dante explains. He gestures to a stockpile of firearms along the wall, tossing a rifle each to Erik and Jost in turn.

“How did you know it would be empty?” I ask, refusing a weapon of my own.

“I didn’t.”

Something dashes along the periphery of my vision. It’s probably a wild animal, but it’s enough to raise goose bumps along my arms. There’s no reason to discuss the Guild’s methods since we’ve found what we came for, so I grab the handles of a motocycle. “Let’s get these out of here.”

As we wheel the cycles out of the building, my dread dissipates a little until Jost asks, “Where’s Dante?”

He isn’t with us. We wait by the door, but he doesn’t come, and then an acrid odor drifts out to where we’re standing. I don’t waste any more time. The air stings my eyes when I reenter the factory. Sulfur prickles along my nostrils. It smells like a fire, but who would be stupid enough to light one here? A body materializes, fading in from a shaded corner, but it’s not Dante.

Question answered.

The factory isn’t empty. The shadows weren’t tricks of my imagination. I spot Dante as he sends an old stool cracking across the head of a Remnant. He yells something that I can’t make out, but I think it’s a warning.

A Remnant leaps in front of us and Erik doesn’t lose a moment—he knocks off a shot. He doesn’t hit our would-be attacker, but the Remnant skitters away from us, disappearing back into the dark recesses of the factory.

“Should we be shooting in here?” I scream, but no one answers me. The acrid odor is replaced by smoke, and I see the beginning licks of a fire. It grows larger, consuming the machines, which pop and crack in the heat. We need to get out of here fast.

The inferno is building inside the ammunition factory and I can’t think of a worse place to be trapped. We’re only steps from the exit, but I whip around, grabbing for strands, and move and tuck and weave to build a trail of protection behind us. The rush of fear makes it easier to see the wild strands, but their unruliness slows me down. I have to look closely to differentiate the time strands from the matter. As we reach open air, the Remnant that Dante hit over the head jumps toward me, landing so close that I panic and miscalculate my work, yanking the wrong strand. It wrenches out from the strands surrounding it, brushing against the flames. It slides across the plant, shooting sparks that amplify the raging fire and then the factory shatters into smoke and debris.

Black plumes billow up from the burning plant, and as soon as we’re a safe distance away, I drop to my knees, hacking against the fumes I’ve inhaled. It could have been worse. No one seems to be hurt and we have what we came for.

I’m stumbling back to my feet when Dante grabs hold of my shirt and pushes me back down. “Want to leave any more proof that you’re here?”

“It was an accident,” I mumble, but it sounds weak even to my ears.

“Like that ship you unwound from the sky? You claim to want answers, to want to help us fight the Guild, but what I see is a stupid girl bent on blowing things up.” His words sting.

“Maybe next time I’ll let them kill you,” I scream. He’s hit his target though; I’m wounded by his accusation.

“Get control of it or don’t use it,” he seethes, towering over me. “You jeopardize everything because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

A hundred jibes tumble into my brain, but before I can settle on the one that will be the most hurtful, a Remnant limps from the plant’s remains. Erik’s on his feet, heading toward him, when Jost jumps in front of him.

“Let him go,” he commands.

“He’s going to run back and tell the others where we are,” Erik says.

“And by then we’ll be long gone,” Jost says. “We aren’t ready to take on another pack and these cycles will get us back to the crawler. The Guild will come to investigate what’s happened, so we need to get out of here.”

“So you’re going to let him go rat us out? These cycles better have lots of gas, because the second we stop they’ll catch up,” Erik scoffs.

“Cormac already knows we’re on Earth,” I say, trying to defuse the situation.

“He doesn’t know you’re here,” Erik reminds me.

“Let’s go,” Dante says. His anger at me still flames in his words, but he sounds distant now. Determined.

I’d lost track of how far we’d traveled to find the mines, but I know the crawler is hours away. With the motocycles we can get back to it fast, but I know it might already be too late. It won’t take the Guild long to realize something has happened. I can only hope they assume the explosion was caused by the Remnants. I can’t imagine that they haven’t had problems controlling them before, especially if the Guild keeps them locked in a factory.

The only roads between here and where we left the equipment are cracked with age. It’s probably not a top priority to maintain roads out here, but it makes riding the cycle trickier. I’ve nearly skidded off course twice but manage to keep my motocycle upright. It’s a good thing too, because we’ve lost Dante and Erik, who are now so far ahead of us they would never hear a crash. It’s cold out here as night really settles in, and save for dark piles of bones that I hope are those of animals, there’s not much to see.

I’m finally getting the hang of riding the cycle when it begins to make a spluttering noise. Jost responds by speeding up to cut off the others, and by the time they turn back, I’m waiting next to the immobile motocycle.

“Out of gas,” Dante proclaims, and we redistribute so that I am now riding with Jost.

“How much farther do we have to go?” Erik asks.

“Not much longer, especially now that we can keep pace with one another,” Dante says, and I feel heat flood my cheeks.

We race through the crumbling roads, zipping around large cracks and holes. My suspicion that I was holding Jost back was right. The ride is terrifying. It’s harder to trust the safety of the cycle when I’m not the one controlling it. Whirling through the crisp air, my hair beats across my face, and I clutch Jost’s waist. The speed results in a sort of paralysis of mind and body, and I keep my eyes shut. The only parts of me that seem to be working are the arms that squeeze around him tighter with each jerk of the motocycle, and then the hum of the motocycle fades down, and I realize that we’re coming to a stop. Carefully opening one eye, I peer over Jost’s shoulder, not sure what to expect.

The crawler sits before me, and I can’t believe how happy I am to see it, considering I hate riding in it. Dante wastes no time gathering the charges and panels. Shame over our screaming match seeps into my chest. Dante came out here to do work, and I messed everything up.

“Did you get any solar energy?” I ask him, trying to make conversation.

“Enough,” he says with a grunt. He hoists a panel onto his shoulder and turns away from me.

“Enough?”

“Enough that Kincaid might not ask questions about where the hell we’ve been all day,” Dante says.

He ignores me as the boys help him load up the back of the crawler. Erik throws me concerned glances, but no one says anything more about what happened at the ammunition factory.

“Sit up front?” Dante asks when we go to leave. I’m surprised that it’s a request and not a demand.

I look to Jost, and he leans down to my ear and whispers, “You should talk.”

I take the front seat and wait for the lecture to begin, but when Dante finally speaks, it’s not what I’m expecting to hear.

“You should know why I agreed to let you come along—”

“Because you knew I wanted to see the mines,” I guess, but Dante shakes his head.

“I didn’t take you to see the mines or to learn about Sunrunning. I brought you because I didn’t want to leave you at the estate with Kincaid after his little play,” Dante says.

“Kincaid doesn’t realize he’s scaring me,” I say, fully believing it. Kincaid thought unwinding Deniel and staging that play would help me feel safer. In his own way, he’s as twisted as Cormac Patton.

“He knows what he’s doing, Adelice. Kincaid is many things, and you would do well to remember that,” Dante warns. “But I’m sorry, Adelice. I shouldn’t have attacked you like that.”

“No.” I stop him. “It was stupid of me. I clearly don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Dante pauses, shifting the crawler into a higher gear. His eyes flick over to me. “I think we should work on that. You have a magnificent talent, but it won’t do you any good if you can’t control it.”

He’s being reasonable, but I still feel smaller as he speaks. The words are a carefully disguised reprimand—once again, he sounds like my father. I dreaded Benn Lewys’s gentle rebukes more than any punishment he could dole out, usually because I knew he was right. Apparently Dante shares that quality with his brother.

“You’re probably right,” I mumble.

Dante opens his mouth, but then he shuts it again. We’re both trying. Only we have no idea how to do this. The rest of the ride, I concentrate on thinking about how to approach this problem, how to accept what we are to each other, but when we pull through the estate’s gate, I’m no closer to a solution than I was before.