The Dead Lands

Prologue

SHE KNOWS THERE IS something wrong with the baby. She has known from the very beginning. First there was the nausea that left her bedridden for weeks, dizzy and barely able to eat, chewing on cucumbers, filling up on springwater. Then the surges in temper, the blackening headaches. And finally a stillness inside her when there should have been movement — a fluttering, like the tail of a trout; that’s what her friends told her — so that she would twist her body and prod her belly until the child readjusted itself, assuring her it was there, it was alive.

They live in a windowless cabin high in the mountains. Others live not far away, some near a spring-fed stream, others cut back in the woods. Together they form a village of sorts, happily isolated, wary of outsiders and change, fearful of the stories told by their elders, stories of an illness that causes a bloody cough and blistering fevers, stories of missiles raining from the sky and cratering the earth, stories of scavengers with meaty breath and teeth filed into points.

Outside the snow is knee-deep. Before long it will be taller than her husband, taller than the cabin, and every day they will need to shovel a wide passage from their door in case they should be trapped, shrouded.

Sometimes she dreams the child is not a child. It is a grub, fat and white and segmented, with black eyes. It is a beast with tiny yellow fangs and tiny yellow claws, its body covered in fur as sleek as an otter’s. Or maybe it is a nothing, a dark spirit, a possessed vapor, and her body the house it haunts.

So she is relieved when she gives the final push and feels a tear, a gush, an emptying — and then the midwife smiles and coos and says, “There now.” She cuts the cord with a knife. She carries the child to the table and wipes it clean with a rag.

Juliana bunches towels between her legs and watches the child through heavy-lidded eyes. Everything is fine. Everything will turn out all right after all. She is, as her mother always said, a worrier.

Then she notices something. The absence of something. The baby is not crying. The baby has not made a sound. The midwife stands over it, the red rag in her hand like a crushed rose.

“What’s the matter? Is it alive? It’s alive, isn’t it?”

The midwife nods.

“Is it all right?”

The midwife looks at her, looks at the baby, with a mouth that quivers with words she cannot express.

“What is it? A boy?”

“A girl.”

“What’s wrong?”

Her voice comes out a choked whisper when she says, “Her eyes.” She drapes a blanket around the child and hurries to the bed in a rush to be rid of it.

Juliana accepts the child and tears away the wrappings. Her face — splotchy and wrinkled and coned from birth — looks like any baby’s face. But her eyes — they are wide open, seemingly lidless, with no whiteness to them, all pupil, no iris, as if splashed full of ink.

The midwife says they will worry about it later. For now the child must eat. The midwife thumbs down the baby’s chin and plays its mouth along her nipple, while Juliana massages her breast and brings from it a thick, yellowish bead of colostrum. The baby nods toward the taste but will not latch on. She keeps pulling away to stare at Juliana. It may be a trick of the light — the cabin so dim — but the baby’s large eyes appear somehow sorrowful. Juliana struggles to hold the baby’s head in place. She does not believe the baby should be strong enough to do so, but she is, arching her back and twisting her head to study Juliana’s face.

* * *

Robert cannot take the sound of her screams. Or the sight of his wife writhing naked in pain. He tries to help at first, packing snowballs to rub along her wrists and ankles and forehead, but he cannot stop staring at her belly, which seems somehow separate from her, the skin so tight it appears ready to split, almost purple in color, with a white line running down its middle. He thinks he sees shapes in it, what look like hands, a face pressing against the skin, the baby trying to claw or chew its way out.

So he pulls on his boots and doeskin jacket and escapes outside. Snow falls and accumulates on his shoulders when he paces. He is a simple man who pleasures in small things, the song of a nuthatch, the last flare of sunlight on the horizon before night rushes in, the taste of rare lamb and oak-aged whiskey. His wife confuses him. She is a woman of many moods, rarely steady in her feeling, weeping when she says she loves him and draws him into a hug, weeping when she laments him and hurls a dish at the wall. He has learned, when her anger spikes, not to say anything. Not saying anything is the best medicine for their marriage. And making himself scarce. After one of her spells — that’s what she calls them, as if they were dark magic — he might chop wood or weed their garden or wander around the bend to his nearest neighbor, Colson, for a game of cards or dice.

He hears another cry from inside — the loudest yet and the worst sound imaginable, like an animal dying, falling from a cliff or rent in half by an ax — and he can only hope that the baby is here, that this is the end.

The snow is thick — and his mind distracted — so he does not look east, where through the falling snow he might notice a faint orange glow, his neighbor’s cabin burning. And when he paces, the snow creaks beneath his boots, so he does not hear the hushed passage of the two men clambering up the hill toward him.

They appear as beasts, robed in bearskins, the hollowed heads of which rest atop their own, the snouts like toothed visors that throw a shadow over their faces.

They run a few paces, their boots splashing up snow, and then crouch down. Run and then crouch. In this way they progress up the hillside, threading through trees, trampling icy bushes, plunging over frosted logs. Then they duck down and scuttle close and lift their heads slowly over a lip of snow to observe him pacing and muttering — and then, with a white, sparkling explosion, they rush forward.

At first, they try to wrestle him down, shoving him, trying to kick out his legs, but he puts up enough of a fight that they stop trying and jab a knife into his stomach and then drag it across his neck. They hold him down in the snow until he bleeds out into a red slushy puddle, until his body stops struggling.

* * *

When the door first crashes inward, Juliana is fatigued enough by the labor and distracted enough by the child that she does not scream. She only thinks, How strange, a bear. Hurrying out of the night and into the cabin. Shaggy and caked with snow and thudding across the floorboards.

It pauses near the fire, the snow melting in the heat, steaming off its fur — and only then does she see the bearded man beneath the skins, the light brightening his eyes into orange coals. In one hand he grips a knife. Its metal is bloodied — a red patina with ice crystals flowering from it.

The midwife edges her way along the far wall and tries to dart past him, and he lets her — but just before she reaches the doorway, another bear-suited man steps through and seizes her and drags her into the night, her screams muffled by the snow.

The first man starts toward Juliana. She is naked. She is physically ruined. She is beyond exhausted after eight hours of contractions, two hours of hard labor. But still, she tries to fight him. She nestles the baby into a blanket on the bed, then lurches her body to the edge of the mattress, reaching for the rifle her husband keeps there.

The man dulls her with a fist to the temple. A momentary hush falls over the world, and her vision narrows. She notices the lantern flickering on her night table. She notices a knot, like an eye, peering down from one of the ceiling’s crossbeams. She notices the skis and poles hanging from the wall, the wedding afghan her oma knitted draped over a rocking chair. Then the world widens and comes crashing into motion again and she realizes she is no longer in her bed. The man is dragging her across the floor, toward the door, his hand a crushing manacle around her wrist.

She cannot walk, though she tries. Her legs stumble and collapse beneath her. Her knees thud the grooves; her feet needle with splinters. Her belly feels carved out by a hot spoon, but the anger boiling inside her gives her strength. She cries out and throws back her body, battling his grip.

He strikes her again, knocking the last bit of willfulness from her body, and then mummies her in a blanket and hefts her over his shoulder.

She does not scream, My baby, though she knows she ought to. She only looks back to the bed, where the child lies in a nest of blankets stained with her blood and embryonic fluid, watching her curiously with eyes as black as the night that soon envelops her.

Chapter 1

THE WALL IS A constant in Simon’s life, everywhere he looks, impossible to miss. Yet it is as common as dust, as heat, as the sun’s blazing path across the sky, and it is easy to go days, weeks, without noticing it. It is of uneven height but at its tallest point reaches a hundred feet from the ground. In some places it is made from plaster and mortared stone, and in others, heaps of metal, the many-colored cars of another time, crushed and welded together into massive bricks that bleed rust when it rains.

There are those who guard the wall, who every day climb ropes and rebar ladders to position themselves as sentries upon its flat top, wide enough for ten men to walk abreast. They carry knives at their sides and bows on their backs. They wear wide-rimmed brown hats. Their skin is sunburned and sand scoured and their eyes pale and pocketed from the dark-glassed goggles they wear while staring into the wastes surrounding them. From the ground, they appear specks, no bigger than birds.

There is life inside the wall. There is death outside the wall. That is what they, the citizens of the Sanctuary, have been told over the 150 years since it was erected. Here, in what was once downtown St. Louis, they have laws, elections, currency, farms, wells, markets, a hospital, a prison, even a museum that offers the vestiges of the lost world. But outside — in the Dead Lands — in the sun-washed sandy reaches of the desert, among the dried wigs of sagebrush, the pines that twist upward like tormented souls, the sunken grocery stores and corroded gas pumps and crumbling weed-choked subdivisions, there are nightmares. And now someone is on the way to face the nightmares alone.

He can hear the drumbeats of the death parade echoing through the Sanctuary. A few minutes ago the sun sank below the wall. Twilight is approaching, the end of the day and the end of a life, the traditional time for the police to escort their worst offenders to the execution site — through the gates, beyond the wall, to the altar.

Shadows drape the streets, but the last light still flames the tops of the highest buildings. The Dome — the home of the mayor, once the capitol building — glows like a half-moon against the paling sky.

Simon hurries to the gates. Not because he cares who has been sentenced to die, and not because he wants to witness the spectacle of the parade, but because others do. The roads and pathways there will be full of people. Distracted people. Distracted people who won’t notice a hand slipping into their purse or pocket.

He crosses a wooden bridge that spans a sewage canal. He zigzags through a garden of agave, its serrated leaves biting at his ankles. Sotol and prickly pear and date palms and even a few gnarled cherry trees. He pauses briefly to pluck a handful of fruit and pop them into his mouth before starting on his way again. The cherries are shrunken and bitter and he sucks on them while darting down an alley busy with trash and rats and lean-tos and a VW minibus that has been converted to a shelter. This leads him to the central avenue, a wide, cobblestoned thoroughfare jammed with people. Some wear burlap and cotton and wool stitched from fresh materials. Some wear the leftovers of the world before — hoodies, jerseys, jeans, sneakers, boots — decayed polyester and threadbare denim patched with leather or plastic squares. Some paint their lips and their eyelids. Some wear necklaces that rattle with teeth and keys and bottle caps. Many are deformed, with shrunken arms or six-fingered hands or ears that look like babies’ fists or slitted noses or blind white eyes. Many are tumored and blotched with burns and cancers from the sun. Many of the men have beards and many of the women long braids with feathers nested in them. Aside from the occasional bright flare of orange or red or yellow, most of what they wear is the color of stone and sand, shades of gray and brown. They all wear hats. And all of their mouths are raw and chapped from lack of water.

Simon spits out the cherries’ stones and joins them. He is short and slender for his age, so he is able to slip through the crush of bodies. He is good at this, sneaking his way through things — his body through buildings, his hands into pockets and drawers. His mousy hair and narrow face make him unnoticeable, forgettable, which suits him perfectly.

A jingle cart rolls by, dragged by a man with a mossy beard that reaches his waist. Dust rises in a cloud behind him, the dust that is everywhere. The cart — a welded collection of rusted license plates anchored to two different-size wheels — is covered with tiny bells that chime at every rut in the road. The man calls out his wares, medicines and candies, medicines and candies. No one pays him any attention. All eyes are on the procession worming its way down the avenue.

The deputies are dressed in black — broad-rimmed black hats, black shirts with a star on the breast tucked into black jeans tucked into black boots with sharp silver tips — their standard uniform. They wear holsters — for machetes, not for guns, since all firearms were long ago outlawed in the Sanctuary.

The first man carries a drum, a yellow hide stretched across a broad round frame. A skull is painted across its face and he slams a mallet against it. He walks in rhythm to the beat, every other step intoned by a deep, hollow bong. He is followed by two women with torches, the smoke trailing behind them, threading together in a black cloud that hangs over their prisoner. He is obscured by the smoke and by the crowd. He hunches over, his hair masking his face, his wrists and ankles bound by chains that rattle with his every trudging step. He is followed by two more deputies, who shove him along whenever he slows.

This is early summer. The day was as hot as an oven and twilight has brought little relief. Simon tries to breathe through his mouth. The odor of so many unwashed bodies unsettles his stomach. He jostles, trips, tickles, blows in an ear, making people move, and when they move, he takes advantage of their momentum and distraction and filches coins from pockets. Everyone’s clothes are coated with dust, so that when they move little puffs rise off them. A girl watches him sneak a loose ring off a woman’s pinky. She is clutching a naked plastic doll with no eyes and half a head of hair. He smiles at her and brings a finger to his lips and she smiles back and hides behind her father’s leg.

Everyone peers over each other’s shoulders, trying to glimpse the prisoner. The drum sounds — again and again — and over its tolling a voice calls out loudly for them to move aside, move along. The crowd does as the man says, separating and then converging around the deputies once they pass by.

The voice belongs to Rickett Slade, their sheriff. He wears the same uniform as his officers. He is a massive man, thickset, with broad shoulders, a head like a pocked boulder, and hands the size and texture of rough pine planks. His eyes are too close together and lost beneath baggy folds of flesh. What little hair he has ringing his head is as pale and downy as corn silk. “Make way,” he says. “Make way for the dead man who walks.”

Simon slips a bracelet off a wrist, unclasps a necklace, some made of gold, some made of plastic, all worth something, even if only a trade at the bazaar, a brick of cheese, a loaf of bread. His pockets are nearly full and he has pushed his way to the front of the crowd when he looks up and sees the prisoner, really notices him for the first time. The jowly cheeks. The nose and cheeks brightly filamented with capillaries. The same mousy brown hair as his own. It is a face he recognizes. It is a face others in the crowd recognize, several of them whispering his name, Samuel.

His father.

Simon is familiar with death. It is impossible not to be in the Sanctuary. He has witnessed the lashings at the whipping posts. He has dodged the knives that flash in the streets and bars. He has seen his pale-skinned, rib-slatted mother laid out on a slab of stone with her breasts scarred over, both removed, though not in time to stop the tumors bulging like toads from the glands beneath her neck. But that doesn’t stop him from feeling a dagger jab of dread. His father is being marched to his death.

His father is a drunk, and when he is drunk he makes loud pronouncements about everything from the unfairness of the rations to the foolishness of their new mayor. He often spirals into dark moods that round his hands into fists, sharpen his words into blades. For this reason, the two of them haven’t spoken much over the past year, ever since Simon took to the streets.

There was a time when they used to get along — when his father would wrestle with him or tell scary stories or play Billy Joel and Beatles songs on his guitar, when they would work together on the small garden that grew in their windowsill boxes. That was before Simon’s mother died, before his father tried to purify his grief with gallons and gallons of tequila. On more than one occasion, after getting slapped across the face, knocked to the ground, or shoved in a closet, Simon wished him dead. Now the wish will come true and he wishes he could take it back.

Beyond the wall, hairless sand wolves roam with eyes as yellow as candle flame. There are giant spiders, with trapdoors netted over and dusted with sand. Snakes longer and wider than any man’s arm, with fangs that can pierce leather. Big cats with claws that can shred metal like paper. Some say the flu — the cough and fever that brought about the ruin of the world — still hides in the throats of caves, in the closets of old buildings, riding the breeze like the spores of some black flower that will take root in your lungs, though most believe it perished alongside everything else.

A ranger once told Simon about a dead deer, found in the outlying forest, that looked as though it had been peeled open and turned inside out. The same fate he met a few weeks later, his head torn off and his belly emptied and his limbs gnashed down to bones. Beyond the wall, wildness took over, things with big claws and sacs of poison lay in wait. This — Simon can hear in the voices that tremble with fear and sadistic anticipation — is what awaits his father.

People begin to cry out and pull back, mobbing away from the gates, knowing they’ll soon open, afraid of what might come hurrying out of the twilight. The sharp, reedy call of a bone whistle precedes the steel arm being lifted from its hangers. The double doors — made from logs reinforced with metal — are heaved open and the deputies continue into the gloom. They will take his father to the altar in the woods, a stone platform to which he will be chained.

Some people linger with ghoulish fascination, while others disperse, off to pursue whatever business remains for them this evening. The farmers in the stables milking heifers, butchering pigs. The tailors shearing sheep and spinning wool into yarn or treating the hides of animals with chemicals that bleach their hands a cancerous yellow. The tattooists inking designs onto arms and necks and faces. The whores spreading their legs on flea-specked mattresses. The bartenders filling tumblers full of eye-watering, throat-burning liquor. The jingle carts and pharmacists hawking snake poison and medicinal jellies and pills for coughs, kidney stones, genital infections. The vendors in the old warehouse selling clothes, pottery, tools, fruit, charred meat on a stick, whatever scraps the rangers bring back from their excursions beyond the wall: cracked and faded Happy Meal toys, dented espresso machines, football helmets with rotted-out padding, shattered tablets, laptops with sand spilling out of their keyboards. They are eager to return to normalcy — opening a window, tying a shoe — while his father will be torn to pieces.

Simon remains fixed in place. His eyes are on the wall. As if it has betrayed him. Betrayed his father. There are those whose jobs concern mending and fortifying the wall. That was his father’s trade. His arms were crosshatched with cuts and his hands colored with bruises and caked with cement. He broke his leg once, after a fall from the upper reaches of the wall, and he healed oddly so that he seemed to drag himself about more than walk. And now the man who spent his life repairing and making fast the thing that holds the danger outside is now the man thrust from its safety.

* * *

The bird perches on the wall. It observes the prisoner hauled away, the crowd scattering, and then, with a creaking snap of its wings, it takes flight. It appears to be an owl, though not like any other in the world, made of metal and only a little larger than a man’s fist.

Torches flare up all around the Sanctuary to fight the intruding night, and the owl’s bronze feathers catch the light brightly when it flies from the wall, then over the gardens, the stables, the ropes of smoke that rise from chimneys and forges and ovens, the twisting streets busy with carts and dogs and bodies that stumble out of doorways. The wind blows cinders and dried bits of grass up into dust devils, and the owl blasts through them.

The skyscrapers and high-rises needle upward from the center of the Sanctuary — Old Town, they call it — and the mechanical owl darts between the canyons of them now. Some of them still have windows, but most are open-air, so that they appear like a vast and rotting honeycomb inside which people crouch like brown grubs.

The owl’s wings whirr. Gears snap and tick beneath its breast. Within its glass eyes, an aperture contracts or expands depending on whether the owl casts its gaze at light or shadow.

The remains of downtown St. Louis have been built over and repurposed to the degree that someone who stepped across the centuries would not recognize one for the other, everything sunken and leaning and crumbling and patched together in a way that appears accidental, the city covered with a dusty skin and seeming in this way and many others a dying thing, its windows and archways hollowed eyes, its streets curving yellowed arteries, its buildings haggard bones, with its footsteps and hammer strokes and slammed doors like the beating of an arrhythmic heart and the many swarming bodies like black mites feeding on whatever might be scrapped, salvaged.

Turbines spike the tops of many buildings. They are made from rescued metal and they creak and groan and spin rustily in the wind that never stops blowing. They feed into unreliable wiring that snakes through some of the buildings so that lights sputter on and off and empty sockets burn red and sometimes flare into fires. And the lives of the people here are energized in a similar manner — frayed and sizzling, capable at any given moment of burning out.

The signs are still there — Supercuts, Subway, McDonald’s, Curves, Chili’s, Chipotle, LensCrafters — though they are hard to spot, their colored plastic fractured and lichen spotted and dulled to the yellowy shade of an old man’s teeth.

What was once a sandwich shop is now a blacksmith and welding studio. From its doorway steps a man who holds a clamp that grips a red-hot square of metal — maybe a door hinge or hoe blade — and he dunks it into a bucket of horse piss and follows the steam trailing upward and through it sees the owl blur overhead like a comet.

What was once a salon is now a dentist’s office. In the corner a dryer chair sits like a dead astronaut. The studs grimace through the places where the drywall has rotted away. Near the open window, a dentist peers into a mouth of butter-colored teeth, one of them black, and, just when he secures it with his pliers, the owl flashes past his shop and he startles backward with the tooth uprooted and his patient screaming in his chair.

On a balcony an old woman lounges in a threadbare lawn chair that nearly sinks her bottom to the ground. She wears stockings that are wrinkled at the knees and rotted through to reveal her bony ankles. Her feet are stuffed into an ancient pair of laceless Nikes, the soles as hard as concrete. She drinks foul tea from a dented thermos. Above her hangs a wind chime of old cell phones that clatter in the breeze. When the owl buzzes by her, she shrieks and the thermos falls thirty feet before clanging and splattering the street below.

She knows whom the owl belongs to. They all do. And they fear it as they fear him.

The museum — once city hall — is one of the grandest buildings in the Sanctuary, six stories high, with a vaulted red-slate roof and marble floors and walls made of sandstone. It has the dark-​windowed, stained-stone grandeur of a haunted mansion. Swallows squawk and scatter where they appear as scratches against the purple-black expanse of sky. The owl skitters to a stop on one of the upper windowsills. It approaches the glass pane and taps its beak.

In the street below, a few people pause to point at and whisper about the owl. “Magic,” some say. “Freak,” others say.

* * *

A richly patterned threadbare rug covers the floor. The walls are hidden behind bookshelves weighed down with leather tomes and yellowed maps carrying the geographies of unexplored worlds and an ancient US flag that bears seventeen stars, its red stripes faded to brown, its blues to black. The ceiling is angled with exposed timbers. Despite the heat of the day, a log flames in the fireplace, flanked by two stone horses made from onyx. The man seated at the desk is always cold. He wears an oversize gray wool cardigan. His hand now gathers the fabric tighter around his neck.

This is Lewis Meriwether, the curator. He is clean-shaven, unlike so many men, his milk-pale skin offset by the black hair sprouting stiffly from his head. He looks older than his thirty-three years, his posture slouched from all his time at his desk, his face long, with flattened cheekbones and a nose as sharp as the quill he keeps next to his inkpot. His eyes are blue but red rimmed. They bulge from all his time spent reading. He has been here all day and was here all of last night. He rarely sleeps, prefers night to day. The sun gives him headaches and burns his fair skin and drags all the people from their beds. He has never been fond of people. And they have never been fond of him. They whisper about him when they pass through the museum, startle from him when he makes a rare appearance, the wizard in the tower, the hermit in the cave.

Lanterns are lit throughout the room. The logs smolder in the fireplace like dying suns. His desk is a lacquered red, its sides and legs carved into so many dragons twisting into each other. A map is unrolled before him, weighed down with a teacup, a yellow agate, a chipped plate carrying a black heel of bread, a candle burned down to a blistered nub. Every now and then he stirs a spoon through a bowl of cold corn mash. Otherwise he studies the map with a bone-handled magnifying glass that roams a ring of light across the brittle, yellowed paper. Here are snowcapped mountains, lush forests, rivers as thick and blue as a lizard’s tongue — a landscape alien to the one he knows, what lies beyond the wall. His whole life he has spent dreaming of distant worlds. They call to him. And though he might imagine himself elsewhere, he feels safest and most comfortable here, at his desk, a voyeur.

His focus is so deep that he does not hear the owl tapping repeatedly at the glass. Nor does he hear the door open, the footsteps thudding across the floor. They belong to a muscular girl with short hair, square bangs. This is Ella, his aide. At the edge of his desk she stacks a tall armful of papers, brittle and torn and tied with twine, mismatched in size and font, some the computer printouts of another time, others the remains of books that have lost their binding. When Lewis does not address her, she says, “What you asked for. From the archives.”

He lifts a hand to acknowledge or dismiss her.

She makes no move to leave. Her mouth tightens into a bud.

He sighs through his nose and sets down the magnifying glass with a click and looks at her with his eyebrows raised in a question he doesn’t bother asking.

“My hands are paper cut. And blistered from the lantern I’ve been carrying.” She holds them up as evidence. “It took two hours to find what you wanted. I’ve been gone two hours. For two hours’ worth of work, you’d think I deserved a thank-you. Wouldn’t you think that?”

His fingers are as long as knitting needles. They lift the magnifying glass again, but before he peers through it, his eyes settle on the window, where the owl waits. “You may leave now.” He spits out his words like chips of ice.

She nods at his plate, his bowl. “You haven’t eaten.”

“I said you may leave. Now. Thank you.”

When the door clicks closed behind her, he rises from his desk and approaches the window. He lifts the latch and holds out his arm for the owl to climb upon. He can hear the ticking of its cogged wheels, the creaking twist of its knobs and gears, beneath which he detects a grinding that might be dust, the dust that creeps into everything. Later, he will have to unscrew the owl, brush it out, wipe clean and oil its guts.

But first he draws the curtains. The room falls into deeper shadow. He holds up his arm, as if to send the owl into flight. Instead it goes rigid. Something clicks and snaps inside it. Its eyes glow, circles of light. A milky projection spills quaveringly across the wall. Without expression he studies the march of the death parade, the crowd of people surrounding it, until the owl’s eyes dim and the projection sputters off and leaves him in darkness.

* * *

Simon hates what his father has become, but he doesn’t hate him. They share good memories. They share a complicated love. They share the same blood. And this is what compels him to do what he does next.

He brags that he knows his way around any door and into any room in the Sanctuary. Their new mayor talks often about how everyone needs to do their part, now more than ever, contribute to the common good, specialize in a trade, and Simon likes to think that this is his role: he is a thief, the very best of thieves. Light-fingered and considerate. He doesn’t hurt anyone, not like some brute in an alleyway. And he never leaves behind a mess — splintering a door, upending a drawer — never takes more than needs to be taken, redistributing wealth.

But what he never brags about — what he never tells anyone — is that not only can he sneak his way into any corner of the Sanctuary; he can also sneak out.

His father is the one who told him about the sewers, the many tunnels that run beneath the ground, all of the entries cemented over. For safety, it was said. So that nothing could get in. “And so that no one, not a one of us, can get out of this reeking pit,” his father said. He was always saying things like this, calling the Sanctuary a prison, the politicians its wardens.

It was in the museum that Simon found the passage. He liked to go there sometimes — after hours, when no one could follow him around and yell at him for getting too close, for touching the artwork and artifacts. He liked to touch. But he never stole from the one place that belonged to everyone. Late at night he would crawl through a window and wander the many long, high-ceilinged rooms and put his face right up to the paintings, run his fingers along the brushstrokes. He would duck under the ropes to an exhibit — petting the scaled spine of an alligator, clacking his fingers across the keyboard of a dead-eyed computer, climbing into the Toyota on display to twist its many knobs and wrap his hands around the steering wheel. One time he fell asleep inside a covered wagon exhibit.

People said Lewis — the thin, strange man Simon saw sometimes at a distance — kept company with the devil. They said he studied black magic. They said he knew everything that ever happened and would happen. They said nothing escaped his notice in the Sanctuary. The owl was one of many spies, the rats and bats and cockroaches also in his service. Simon did not believe them enough to stay away from the museum, but he believed them enough to stay away from his quarters on the upper level. He looked often over his shoulder and one time startled at the sight of a lantern floating down the staircase, a figure descending and speaking softly, maybe talking to himself or maybe uttering some incantation.

Simon ran then, bolted down to the basement, a vast storage area filled with wooden boxes, draped paintings, dust-cloaked specimens. He hid there for hours. A faint dripping caught his attention and he found in the floor a grate — and beyond the grate, a metal ladder that descended into darkness.

It was several weeks before he gained the courage to return and wander the tunnels below — and several weeks more before he discovered another grate with moonlight coursing through it. He climbed up to find himself outside the Sanctuary, along some ruined street where houses and storefronts had collapsed upon themselves and trees rose through blisters in the asphalt. He outsourced his thieving then. As if he was a ranger. From buildings and cars he pirated metals, plastics, leathers, to then pawn to vendors at the bazaar. If anyone ever asked where he came upon such a thing — a toaster, a phone, a trumpet, DVDs, a plastic tote full of eyeliner and brick-hard foundation, things that often had no value outside of curiosity — he would say he found it. That’s all. He found it.

Just as he now finds his father. Chained and kneeling at the altar. Simon has been here before, what he believes to be some sort of town square, the altar at its center once a fountain, with the crumbled faces of children as spouts. The stone is painted with the blood of those chained here before his father.

At first Simon thinks it is too late. His father’s skin appears gray and waxen in the moonlight. His head hangs low. Then Simon sees his chest rise and fall, hears a wheeze. He is sleeping or weeping. Weeping, Simon discovers when he climbs the altar and his father raises his head and widens his damp eyes and says, “Simon? No. No. What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? I’m here to save you.”

“You shouldn’t. You can’t.” There is no venom in his voice, none of the nastiness that made Simon leave him, just exhaustion, sadness, worry.

His father continues to protest as Simon examines his wrists, assessing the locks that hold him in place so tightly that his fingers are cold and lifeless. Simon keeps a thin knife with a hooked tip at his belt. He uses it now to pick at one of the keyholes at his father’s wrist, prodding and twisting, feeling for the lever, listening for the click. He is well practiced at this, but it still takes a long three minutes before the one hand, his right hand, falls free.

His father’s wrist is bloodied and he cries out briefly at the cramps wracking him. Then he throws an arm around his son. Simon struggles against him, but his father has always been a big man and has put on even more weight from his drinking. Simon heaves but his father clings to him — not fighting him, the boy comes to realize, but hugging him.

“Dad! Quit it. There’s no time for this.”

“Shh. It’s too late, son.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you hear?” Both their bodies still for a moment. Then his father leans in, his mouth at Simon’s ear, so that the whisper sounds like a shout, “Do you hear it?”

Simon listens. The adrenaline coursing through him creates a barely traceable hum at the edge of his hearing. At first that is the only sound. He studies the black buildings and the black trees and the blacker shadows between them. The wind rises and falls, as if the night is breathing. The branches murmur. Then comes a snap, a stick underfoot. Gravel crunches.

Something is coming. No, not one thing, but many, he realizes, as more sounds crackle and whisper and thud out in the darkness. Simon brings the knife to his father’s other wrist and hurriedly stabs at the lock.

His father knocks away the knife. “You need to go,” he says — and then, “Please, son.” The desperate kindness in his voice is impossible to ignore. “Please. Go. Now.”

Simon wants to stay. He wants to fight. But his father pushes him and he stumbles away from the altar just as something humpbacked and four legged creeps into the square. The moon has sunk from sight, the night now lit by stars alone, and he cannot make out anything more than that: a hunched darkness, as if the night has congealed into a figure.

“Go!” his father says, and Simon finally listens, hurrying away as a second and then third creature join the first.

“Here I am!” his father is yelling. “Over here!” Rattling the chains and whooping, making as much noise as possible to distract from Simon’s escape.

The yelling soon gives way to screaming. Simon runs. He cannot stop the tears that make the spaces between stars blur and the sky appear to gloss over with a phantasm.

Chapter 2

THIS MORNING, as the sun rises and reddens the world so that it appears it might catch flame, Clark stands at her sentry post atop the wall. Around it reaches a burn zone of some seventy yards. Beyond this grows a forest with many broken buildings rising from it, black-windowed, leaning messes of skeletal steel and shattered stone. The remains of the St. Louis Arch, collapsed in the middle, appear like a ragged set of mandibles rising out of the earth. In the near distance, where once the Mississippi flowed, stretches a blond wash of sand.

Somewhere out there, hidden from view, hide yammering sand wolves, cat-size spiders, droves of javelinas with tusks longer than her fingers. These are the dangers that find those chained to the altar. Twenty minutes ago, the deputies departed the Sanctuary — and they return now with a stretcher bearing the body of a man. The man from last night’s death parade. His face is unrecognizable, hidden beneath a seething mask of flies. His body is shredded or chewed to bone in most places. His belly is split open and his entrails dangle from him like red ropes.

For as long as she can remember, this has been the punishment doled out to those who committed rape or murder. But now they have a new mayor. And with a new mayor come new policies. He has made it treason to complain about the rations, to so much as speak ill of his administration. He wants them to know his ears are always listening, his eyes always watching. Now this body, this so-called traitor, will be paraded through the streets, an example for everyone. These are difficult times, with their water running dry, and difficult times call for unforgiving measures. Everyone has a job, the mayor says. That job is to serve the Sanctuary. They are all part of the same organism, and if anyone does anything to threaten it, they will be excised like the melanomas that stain the skin of so many.

The gates open and close behind the deputies. Clark walks to the edge of the wall and balances precipitously there. She imagines what it would feel like to slip, to fall, the wind roaring in her ears, the ground rushing toward her face. Join the fate of the man. He, after all, believed what she believes. He said aloud the same things she keeps caged inside her. For her to call this place home — to feel not sheltered but imprisoned — and do nothing? It’s too much.

That’s why last night, after the death parade, she drank herself into oblivion. She tried to hurry past the bar. Then she heard the laughter spilling out of it, and she paused in the wedge of lamplight that fell from its doorway into the street. She could see, through the rib-cage doors, beyond the swell of bodies, a man onstage plucking a guitar and stomping his foot and singing “Paint It Black”—and she gave in to the excuse that she would stop in for one good song, one strong drink. She had promised she wouldn’t, but her mood was foul and the night was hot and she was so thirsty.

Her name is Wilhelmina, a family name, a name she despises, a weak, perfumed, lacy thing she can tolerate only if shortened to Mina. But mostly she goes by her last name, Clark. Depending on the light, her hair appears red or blond, same as the sand. With a knotted strip of leather she keeps it tied back into a short tail. Her face is hawkish, her eyes always narrowed and her mouth always tightened as if tied at the corners by knots.

Though the bars serve other liquor — gin, vodka, whatever else is in the well, some hooch that goes down like snake venom — people drink mostly whiskey and mescal and sotol and tequila, and that was what she was drinking last night, tequila. The liquor was distilled in better times, when water ran more freely, aged now to potency and costing too much coin. The floor was wood shavings, the stools were old tires, and the ceiling scrap metal welded carelessly so that through its many holes she could see the stars spinning above like the ringworms in her glass.

People hurled feathered darts. They huddled together in card games with mismatched decks. They played pool with leather-tipped steel rods and rocks ground and polished into balls. The warmth of the liquor raced to her fingertips, pulsed at her temples, and before long she was burning inside like the cigarillo pinched between her lips, burning like the candle she held her elbow over too long on a bet, burning like the pain in her hand when she broke the nose of the bartender who asked her to leave, told her she had had enough.

She had had enough all right. This morning she can feel her heartbeat in her forehead, like a door slammed over and over again. She wears a wide-rimmed hat and shaded goggles, but still the sun seems too bright when she stares off into the ruined wilderness that reaches to the horizon, where sometimes she believes mountains are visible, though no one else will say so. They claim she is seeing what she wants to see. They claim it is a mirage, a trembling image brought on by the heat, like some hellish counterpart to her wall, spiny and manned by the spirits of dead giants.

She takes a pull of her canteen to try to fight the cottonmouth, but her body barely lets her swallow. The wind gusts. It sighs. It whistles through the many hollows of the wall in which swallows and wasps nest. It carries sand in it that stings skin and eats holes in cloth and dulls the edge of a blade. It nearly knocks her from the edge, and she wobbles back onto the landing.

The Sanctuary reaches across a mile in some places, a half mile in others. The wall is not a circle or a square — it is shapeless, an improvisation that became a permanent corral. She is a sentinel. She rotates in her duties, either scavenging outside the wall as a ranger or patrolling its perimeter on sentry. Every sentry is assigned a two-hundred-yard section of the wall marked by iron braziers filled with wood with torches lit beside them. If any threat emerges from the forest, whether man or beast, they are to hurl the torch upon the brazier as a flaming alarm.

Her uniform is not the night black of the deputies, but gray and brown, as though mended from stone and wood. Her job is to stare out at a fractal landscape of umber and dust and ruins, guarding against whatever awaits them in the Dead Lands. She does not answer to the sheriff. She does not serve as an enforcer. She does not hurt others, only protects. But still, her job feels like a betrayal of conscience, since she patrols the very wall she believes they need to escape, no matter the risk. Better to seek out life than wait for death in this dried-out fishbowl. She used to loudly debate this with others at the bars; these days, sharing such an opinion will only get her killed. But she is right. She knows she is right.

There were eight wells in the Sanctuary, all of them broad-mouthed pipes with metal ladders built down their throats. Three of them have collapsed, their casing pinched off and deemed impossible to repair due to some shifting beneath the earth. Another has gone dry. The remaining four are guarded by deputies who regulate the long lines, the people who come dragging jugs for their daily ration. A wind turbine lifts the water and shoots it from a spigot. The motor sits directly over the well, grinding away and dusting the water with rust and turning the impellers that reach deep into the aquifer beneath them.

The water used to come in a mineraly gush. These days the spigots dribble and sputter. The mayor says he is meeting with workmen who might worm their way down and extend the pipes, dig deeper, find the cold, good water that must be waiting to be tapped beneath their feet.

People are worried. Buckets and barrels and leather bags hang from every corner of the city to capture any rainwater — and a network of canals funnel water and sewage to their meager crops — but the clouds have not gathered and burst in more than three months, the standard of the past few years, the stretches between downpours longer and longer. People boil their urine for drinking water. They sleep below tarps that gather moisture from their breathing and channel it into a pot. They ration out the stores they keep in buckets and barrels. They drink the blood of bats and rats and birds. This is not a sustainable existence — the Sanctuary slowly knuckling in on itself like a dried date.

Below, Clark can hear the sentinels gathering into a ranging party. The stamping and snorting of horses, the creaking of leather, the clinking of spurs, the shifting of arrows in their quivers.

The sun rises high enough to crest the wall, and in a rush last night’s shadows retreat and the windows flash and the canals brighten into many diamond points. The sun, the cruel orange eye that cooks the sweat from their skin and the water from the ground and the clouds from the sky. The temperature in the Sanctuary immediately spikes fifteen degrees. The space beneath the gates, though, remains a pocket of shadow, and it is here that the riders gather.

The bone whistle sounds, the gates groan open, and the rangers ride out two horses abreast. They all wear hats to battle the sun and neckerchiefs to battle the dust. At their lead is Reed, the chief of the sentinels. Even from here she can see the long black braid twisting down his back like a shorn noose. She wills him to turn in his saddle and look for her, but he does not. She imagines she can feel his disappointment radiating off him. Earlier, when she stumbled out of her quarters and reported to the stables, he took her face in his hands and shook his head and told her to climb the wall. She was in no shape to ride, still drunk from the night before.

A great wing of dust rises behind them — and the wind carries it toward her, the grit pattering her clothes, biting her face when she watches them depart. It will be another week, she’s guessing, before he allows her to rotate back from sentry to ranger. He disapproves of her drinking not only because of the hazard to her body, the interference with her duties, but because he cannot risk her speaking loosely to others. The risk is too great — given their plans. She doesn’t know when they will leave, where they will go, or how they will get there, but she will not die here. She will escape.

She understands why Reed punishes her, but she hates him for it. Because she hates the wall. She prefers to move, to escape. Ride at a gallop with the reins wrapped around her fist and the wind knocking her hair. Fire a whistling arrow into a buck’s breast. Collect jackrabbits and coyotes from her many traps. Fill satchels with juniper berries for the distilleries. Salvage steel and copper from buildings as dark as tombs. Kick through the skeletons that lie everywhere and rip the drawers out of dressers, pull open cabinets, upend toolboxes, dig through closets. By comparison the wall is stillness…the wall is control…the wall is imprisonment — that she finds maddening.

There is much she finds maddening. As a child she bit her grandfather when he wouldn’t give her another one of the salted nuts they ate for dessert. After being teased and tripped by a group of boys, she picked up a fist-sized stone and knocked the teeth from one of them. She kicked the leg of a table and sent supper crashing to the floor. She dropped a beetle in her baby brother York’s mouth when, as an infant, he wouldn’t stop crying. Not much has changed. Her whole life she has been told this is her greatest weakness, her inability to control herself. She tries. But whenever she is provoked, like a bees’ nest disturbed, something swarms out of her, something out of her control, making her capable of anything. Of escaping this place.

An hour later she remains so deadened by her hangover, so caught up in her thoughts, she does not notice the panicked voices or the smoke billowing from a torchlit brazier until it has risen so high that it occludes the sun.

* * *

People wear hoods or hats with squared tops and crisp round rims, but Lewis has never paid any attention to what might be fashionable. His keeps the sun out of his eyes — that’s all that matters. Its rim is floppy and its peak high and its color a speckled gray. He wears a long duster of the same color. Its many pockets hold many things. It billows around him and makes him appear like a wraith.

People make way for him and turn to watch him in his passing. He knows their nicknames for him: the gray man, the freak, the magician. He hears them whispering now, just as he hears them whispering in the museum. They say he once turned a crying baby into a croaking toad. They say his heart is made of cogs and wheels and his veins run black with oil, the same as his mechanical owl. They say he creeps around the Sanctuary at night, crawling through windows and approaching bedsides and experimenting on people when they are sleeping, dosing them up with potions, cutting them open and sewing them back up with invisible thread. Sometimes parents say, to naughty children, you better be good or the gray man will steal you away and stuff you full of sawdust and make you into an exhibit in his museum.

He walks among them now, and they startle away from his figure. “Look,” they say. “There he is.” Horses snort. Carts rattle. Men shout. Forges glow. Swallows twitter. Meat sizzles over cooking stoves. Dust flurries like snow. He shades his eyes with his hand and looks up only briefly at the smoke rising from the wall. A black cloud of it roils, as threatening as a thunderhead, backlit by the sun.

Then he pulls his hat brim low, his gaze once again downcast as he approaches a narrow concrete building tucked into a street of narrow concrete buildings. The sign over the door reads YIN’S DRY CLEANING, but it has been splashed with black paint and a hand-carved wooden sign next to it reads APOTHECARY.

Apothecaries, tinkers, blacksmiths, seers. Old words, old ways. So much about the world has reverted, so that it is not so much the future people once imagined, but a history that already happened, this time like a time long ago. Lewis read a story once about the birth of a baby who looked like an old man, with silver hair and wrinkled skin and eyes fogged by cataracts. As the years passed, his appearance grew younger, and by the end of his life he was a drooling infant barely able to care for himself. In this way Lewis sometimes feels they have as a society cycled back without the hope of moving forward again.

A bell jangles when he walks inside. The shop is dimly lit with candles and the linoleum floor has been worn down to pitted concrete. The man behind the counter has skin as brown as bark. His shoulders are thin and bony and from them rise a head topped by a thinning crown of gray woolly hair. This is Oman. He does not fear Lewis, not like the others. They deal with each other regularly and have developed not a rapport, but a comfortable business relationship. Behind Oman rises a wall full of cubbies and shelving units. A snake is curled up in a jar full of foggy green liquid. In another bottle float black eggs. In another, hairless mice. There are hundreds of baskets, brightly colored vials, bottles. Spiders spin webs in glass cages. Herbs hang from the ceiling like roots from the roof of a cave.

Oman has the habit of chewing the leaves of a smoke bush. They have stained his teeth a tarry black. “How is she?” he asks.

“She is the same.”

The counter is made of Formica curled up at the edges. Oman sets a mortar and pestle upon it and grinds up a combination of herbs. Then he removes a blue bottle from a shelf and takes a dropper to it and squirts out several ounces of the medicine and stirs the herbs into a paste that he stores in a small yellow vial once meant for pills, the remains of some prescription still smeared across it.

“And how are you?”

If Lewis was the type to share, the type who offloaded all his aches and worries and displeasures onto others, then he might complain about the dreams that bother him nightly. In them he sees a man. An old man. His veins are as stiff and pronounced as roots. He is so ancient he cannot walk without the help of a cane made from a twisted length of wood, cannot eat unless his food has been mashed up. His face is never clear, always blurred or hidden by the long white hair that rings his bald, spotted head. Sometimes he sees the man waiting by a window. Sometimes he sees the man sitting in a library. Last night, the man stood by a river, all his attention focused on an eddy, the sort of deep black pool where a fat fish might surface. Lewis feared the man might fall when he waded into the water up to his knees. With his cane he stirred the eddy until a whirlpool formed. In the dark funnel the man saw a familiar face and whispered a name, Lewisssss.

But he says nothing to Oman. He only takes the vial on the counter and secrets it up his sleeve — then in its place sets a square silver canister.

“More?”

“Yes.”

“You look tired.”

“Double the order for this week.” He clatters out a pile of coins, nickels worn down to silver discs that bear the faintest ghost of Jefferson’s profile. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, the occasional half or silver dollar, all smoothed like stones in a river. This is their currency.

“Double it?” Oman collects the coins and pulls down a wide-mouthed bottle full of white powder. He pulls off the lid and scoops four generous spoonfuls into the silver canister. “You are tired.”

“Not tired enough. Do you have anything for sleep?”

“I’ve some opiates that—”

“No. No dreams. No hallucinations. I just want to put my head down and for there to be nothing.”

“Of course.”

Lewis keeps one of his fingernails long, his pinky. He digs it into the pile of powder and lifts it to his nose. Snorts. A shudder goes through his body. His eyes tremble closed — then snap open a second later when the door jangles and a blade of sunlight falls across the floor.

A woman with a shaved head and black uniform clomps into the shop. A deputy. She has heavy-lidded eyes and a nose with a raised worm of a scar at its bridge. “Lewis Meriwether,” she says.

Lewis sniffs, wipes his nostril clean with a knuckle. “What?”

“The mayor wishes to see you.”

Lewis stares at her for a long few seconds. “But I do not wish to see the mayor.”

She hesitates, takes a step back. “He said you’d say that.”

“Tell him I haven’t made any progress.”

“He said you’d say that, too.”

“Good. Then we’re both clear.”

“I’m afraid.” She swallows hard. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

I’m afraid, she says. Yes, she is. She is afraid. Lewis can tell from the muscles bulging in her jaw, the twitching of her eyes. She is afraid and so must fight the fear with bluster. A machete hangs from her belt and she rests a palm on its handle. “You’ll have to follow me,” she says.

* * *

Clark might hear hoofbeats. Or maybe it is just the slamming of her pulse. She stares down the road that leads from the Sanctuary. It extends a quarter mile before petering into many avenues of broken asphalt and trampled earth. This place, where the road ends and the ruined wilderness begins, is marked by a massive tree. The Witness Tree, Clark calls it, as it has been there longer than any person, longer than the Sanctuary itself, a spectator to the rise and fall of humankind. It carries no needles or leaves, its branches as bare as bones. But so many crows roost in it this morning that it appears laden with some dark, poisonous fruit. They shift their wings and scrape their claws and mutter among themselves — until the rider appears. The horse screeches out a whinny and clomps its hooves, and the crows take to the air in a swarm, caw-caw-cawing.

The rider is at first mistaken for a ranger, one of their own. Then the sentries glass her and see her horse is unarmored, plainly saddled, its tack unlike the jeweled black leather guards that run along the muzzles and flanks of their stable. Her body is caked with dust the same dun color as her doeskin leggings. She is small, her feet barely reaching the stirrups, but confident in her posture so that the horse seems a rocking extension of her. She slows to a trot at the clearing that surrounds the Sanctuary, just outside the gates, where the ground is raked of weeds and scorched black.

It is then that one of the sentries hurls down his torch. The wood in the iron brazier crackles to life. The blaze that signals alarm, the blaze that will draw every eye in the Sanctuary to the wall with wonder and fear.

No one has been seen outside the Sanctuary for decades. Its citizens have long been told that they are the last human survivors, that the rest of the world has perished. Something Clark has never wanted to believe. Years ago, she remembers touring through the museum and pausing to study an exhibition on space. There was a faded, wall-size photograph of the moon’s surface and a man standing upon it in a thick white suit with a glass-visored helmet. Lewis appeared beside her. They’d known each other growing up, never friends. For years, in fact, she made games out of teasing and torturing the thin, sickly boy — one time hog-tying him and hanging him from a balcony, another time pegging him in the ear with a stone fired from a slingshot so that to this day its tip is torn. But that was fifteen years ago, and though she has never apologized, that has not stopped Lewis from nodding to her in the streets, standing beside her quietly that day at the museum. So many people feared him, but she saw him only as a wiser, longer version of that same sickly boy.

“Why did they do it?” she asked him.

“For the same reason humans always explore. To satisfy their curiosity. And to see what they might exploit.” He pointed to a squat metal device with insectile legs and a broad dish wrapped in gold foil. He explained it was a transmitter, a way of yelling into space. “They hoped there was something else alive out there.”

“Did they ever find it?”

“No.”

“Do you think they would have?”

His voice was cold and clean, each word delivered as if printed on tin. “In the sky spin trillions of galaxies. In each of those galaxies spin trillions of stars. Orbiting these stars are trillions of planets. It is impossibly stupid and self-absorbed, within that mathematical construct, to believe that life could exist in only one case, on our tiny rock of a planet.”

There was a time, Clark knows, a time long before she was born, when her great-great-great-grandparents were children, when mobs of people would appear regularly before the gates, sometimes begging and sometimes trying to battle their way in. Some of these strangers gave up and wandered away. Many remained stubbornly in place or tried to scale the wall until downed by a rifle, which in those days the sentries still carried. And a few, so the stories go, built catapults and tried to hurl the dead into the Sanctuary — poisoned, bloated bodies that split open when they impacted the wall but never crested it. But that was a long time ago, and over the years survivors appeared less and less frequently, finally trickling away, vanishing altogether, the last one spotted sixty years ago.

Now a rider has come. At first the girl seems at a loss, much like the sentries. Her horse snorts and stamps its hooves and spins in circles, while she twists in her saddle, staring up at the wall, trying to make sense of it, its height and expanse and jumbled design a bewildering sight. She wears a broad-rimmed hat and pulls it off now to set on her saddle horn. This reveals a pale line across her forehead — and the dirtied face of a teenager beneath it, maybe sixteen, eighteen. Her hair is dark and cut shoulder length, a wild tangle of burrs and twigs. And though her eyes appear sunken with shadow, they are not. They are black. Totally black. Outer-space black even on the brightest day.

The fire in the brazier crackles and smoke continues to billow upward like the rain-laden cloud they have all been praying for. Clark can almost hear the whispers and gasps and mutters come fluttering up from the Sanctuary as everyone wonders what is the matter, what has been seen. Several sentries have gathered over the gates. One of them has his bow drawn and Clark puts a hand to the arrow and lowers it now. “No,” she says. “Don’t you dare.”

The girl does not call out to them and they do not call out to her. Clark is mute with wonder. They all are. This is not a moment they have prepared for. The girl is the equivalent of a ghost wandering a cemetery, something to fear as well as celebrate, because finally there is proof — that’s what this is, proof—that there is something else out there.

Then comes the thunder of many horses, the rangers returning. A storm of dust accompanies them.

The girl’s horse startles one way, then the other, uncertain where to turn — and the girl, too, whips her face back and forth between the wall and the fast-approaching rangers. She tightens her body and seems ready at one point to jab her heels and fly for the forest, but she remains.

The rangers slow as they approach her and then split their column and surround her in a half ring. Several draw and notch arrows. Behind the girl is the wall and before her their mounts. Whether it is her black-eyed gaze or her spectral emergence from the Dead Lands, several of the men are disturbed enough to mutter the word witch.

Reed drags off his hat and neckerchief. He has what Clark has always thought of as a fox face — sharp, cunning, the corner of his mouth often hiked up in amusement. So different than he appears now, his expression slack-jawed, fearful. Not the leader he needs to be in a moment like this, with the other rangers shivering their arrows in panic.

“Hands up,” Reed says. “I said, hands up!”

Slowly the girl lifts her arms.

“Where have you come from? Who are you?”

She opens her mouth to speak, but his voice barrels over hers in his panic. “What’s — what’s wrong with your eyes? Are you diseased? Where did you come from? What do you want?” The questions come so rapid-fire that he doesn’t seem to want an answer.

This is when Clark begins to run. She pounds along the walkway until she reaches a ladder, rebar welded and mortared into place. She swings her legs over the edge and lets gravity take her down, snatching and kicking at the rungs as she descends. People are always telling her to remember her place. “You’re not the boss,” they say. “Quit meddling,” they say. “Shut your mouth,” they say. She does not care what they say. She thinks with her guts. And her guts are telling her Reed is about to lose control.

Clark loses her grip, barely catching herself, then continues down, down, down, leaping the final ten feet and landing with a roll and popping up into a sprint and yelling, “Open the gates!”

A crowd has gathered. Their eyes are on the smoke in the sky and on her as she approaches. The guard stationed at the gates shakes his head and crosses his arms and says, “Not on your orders.”

She pushes past him and slams a palm against the barred double doors and tries to yell through them. “Reed! Reed, stand down! Please! Let me talk to her!”

The guard grabs her by the elbow and she twists around and chops his larynx with her hand. He doubles over, trying to catch his breath. With a kick, she sweeps out his legs. The keys rattle at his belt. She swipes them, jams them into the deadbolt, twists it open. A two-hundred-pound beam hangs across the doors, and she gets her shoulder beneath it, grunting it off on one side, then the other. It lands with a clang.

By the time she pushes open the doors, it is too late.

She can hear their voices — Reed is yelling, the men are yelling.

“Get away from here! Now!”

“You need to leave!”

“What’s wrong with your eyes, witch?”

The girl is cantering one way, then another, reaching into a leather saddlebag and saying, “I came here to—”

Her words are cut short by an arrow to the hand, another to the shoulder, her body quilled. She hunches forward with a garbled scream. And then another arrow catches her in the throat and the scream is silenced.

In the chaos that follows — when her horse, driven mad by the smell of blood, bucks and hurls her to the ground and races in a circle and pounds off for the woods, when the rangers surround her and wrench her arms behind her back and bind them, when Clark asks Reed what the hell is wrong with him and he tells her to shut up — no one notices the letter.

The letter the girl had been producing from her saddlebag. A square the color of an eggshell, folded and sealed with a red circle of wax. It has been flung and stamped and blown aside, nearly lost at the edge of the clearing.

It lies there, like a scrap of bark, until a bronze owl drops from the sky and collects it between its talons and takes off with its wings creaking and gears twittering.

* * *

This morning Simon wakes in the lean-to he calls home. It is built against an alley wall, made of stucco and corrugated metal, tall enough at its peak for him to stand upright. The wall is plastered with salvaged images. A man with a stubbled jaw and a cowboy hat mending a barbed-wire fence with a pack of Marlboros rising out of his breast pocket. A sleek red car blasting along an open highway. A woman in a yellow bikini kicking her way out of the ocean. The torn covers of a few old books by Stephen King, Louis L’Amour, J.R.R. Tolkien. They are all brittle, faded, tattered. He doesn’t understand them, not completely, but they pull him in some way, give off a charge. These are the only treasures he keeps here — the rest stashed on rooftops throughout the Sanctuary — his lean-to merely a place to sleep.

He feels nauseous — his stomach an acidic coil — but cannot stop himself from filching a rat kabob from a market booth. He takes a few rubbery bites before tossing it aside. He makes his way to the morgue, in the basement of the hospital, a pillared marble building that shares a block with the museum. Here he worms his way through the ventilation pipes — navigating his way left, left, right, shimmying down one level, then right, right, right again, trying not to sneeze at the dust he stirs up, trying not to clank his knees and elbows against the metal — to see his father one last time before he is processed. Another hour and his body will be rendered into fat for candles, bile for ink, ligaments for stitching, bones for tools, meat for the pigs, every part of him translated into something useful.

The morgue is one of the few cool places in the city. He has been here before, to steal medicines and instruments — and to view his mother’s body after the cancer ate its way through her. He stares through the ventilation grate, not expecting to get any closer than this, watching the morgue attendants deconstruct the dozen or so bodies cooling on their slabs.

Then a white-jacketed nurse pushes through the door and says the sentry fires have been lit, that something is happening outside the wall. Everyone departs the room in a hurry. Simon slides aside the grate. Dust spills out and he drops to the floor. He approaches the slab upon which his father has been laid.

Lamps glow and pulse and their shifting yellow light makes the bodies appear to tremble in their sleep. A bucket and a tray of instruments sit next to his father. Simon breathes through his mouth to try to fight the smell, the nausea that makes the floor feel unsteady. His father’s skin is gray-green where it isn’t red. He is slashed and chewed in so many places, his stomach torn open completely, a tangled pile of yarn Simon tries not to look at, studying instead his father’s face, the remaining half of which appears serene, transfixed by a pleasant dream, as if death were the only way to find peace in this place.

His father prized above all else a guitar strung with rusty baling wire. He kept the fingernails long on his right hand for plucking. Simon takes that hand now — the hand that made music, the good hand, the best part of his father — and kisses it and makes a silent vow to one day revenge him.

* * *

Lewis has known the mayor, Thomas Lancer, longer and better than anyone else in his life, though they can’t be called friends. Not anymore. There was a time, so long ago, when they were children, when they would thumb marbles beneath the table while their parents dined or ride bucking sheep for sport or play prey/predator in the gardens, one sneaking up on the other with his hands made into claws.

Lewis remembers especially loving the drum game. One of them would race off with a handheld drum while the other tied a blindfold around his eyes and waited for the thumping to sound. Thomas always preferred that Lewis pursue him — beating the drum sometimes softly, sometimes loudly — leading him through the Sanctuary, down alleys, through stables, over bridges, into and out of buildings, until finally Lewis crabbed out a hand and caught him.

The game has not changed so much. Thomas beckons him now with a deputy instead of a drum.

The Dome is gold leaf and during the day shines like a second sun. Its halls are made of marble interrupted by grooved pillars and oil paintings and frescoes and sculptures and staircases that spiral into many dark-wooded chambers where the lights sizzle on and off depending on how hard the wind blows.

Lewis needs no escort. When the deputy guides him by the shoulder, around a corner or down a hall, Lewis shrugs her off and says, “I know.” He grew up here, after all, sliding down the staircases, reading books in the library, exploring the crypt, his father the longtime mayor. Then came his death, and Thomas’s election.

One hundred and fifty years ago — when the world began to fall apart, when the flu mutated and millions began to die, their lungs hitching until they coughed up blood — several businessmen and politicians and National Guard units fortified downtown St. Louis with the improvised panic of people scrambling for cover against a sudden storm. There was no time for committees, for debate, for a show of hands. There was not even enough time to collect toothbrushes, rifles, photo albums, to call upon family members to join them. They had to make the immediate decision to live or die. The flu was airborne. It was burning brains with fevers, choking lungs with blood. And it was coming. So the wall rose around them, like a swift buckling of the earth.

A constitution followed a year later. They did not call themselves a country. They were a sovereign city, a temporary haven awaiting reincorporation. The United States would rise again, and in the meantime, they would uphold as many democratic principles as they could while maintaining strict control. They elected their mayor and city council to two-year terms. All firearms were abolished, all currency collected and redistributed.

Lewis’s father was elected and reelected for more than thirty years. When he died, Thomas, a member of the city council, announced he would run for mayor. He had such an easy way with people, always smiling, looking deeply into eyes, taking a hand with both of his and not letting go. His campaign slogan, Evolve, asked that people reconsider the Sanctuary. Previous administrations insisted that the world was not lost, that the Sanctuary was a temporary haven, that one day the country would reunite. Thomas argued for an end to the lies. He wanted everyone to recognize that they were on their own, that they needed to change, to progress. The Sanctuary was more than an old city — it was the new world. He designed a flag — what would become the flag of the Sanctuary — red, white, and blue, but carrying a single star.

Several approached Lewis and begged him to put in a bid. They said people liked familiarity. His name, Meriwether, carried currency, had history. People would vote for him because he would make them feel safe.

Lewis said they were fools. People detested him. He was not familiar, despite his last name, but the very definition of unfamiliar. Different. Weird. Unsettling. If his father walked through a crowd, they swarmed him; if Lewis walked through a crowd, they scrambled to escape him. And he had no interest in politics. He only wanted to retain his stewardship of the museum, the place he served as an aide throughout his childhood, the only education available in the Sanctuary after children left school to work at the age of ten.

A few put in bids against Thomas, but he dominated the ticket. People believed in his platform. They wanted to evolve. They were ready for change — and they got it.

A heavy oaken door swings open and tendrils of steam escape it. Water splashes. Someone titters. Lewis enters the bath, the marble floor rising into a rectangular tub bigger than a bed. Three square windows are cut into the wall and they flood the room with light that swirls with steam through which Lewis observes Thomas.

He sits in the middle of the tub, joined by a long, lean boy who couldn’t be more than twenty. Lewis seems to recall his name as Vincent. It is hard to remember them all. Some are male, some female, all young. Thomas once told Lewis he would screw anything, as long as it had skin and yielded to him. His wife, he claimed, was made of bone. So he found other ways to entertain himself. Vincent must be special — he has lasted longer than the others. The boy licks his sponge across Thomas’s back and shoulders, his neck and belly. His face is a foaming mess of soap, costuming him with the beard he cannot grow. His eyes appear glazed — perhaps from sex, the heat, the glass of brown liquor resting at the edge of the tub.

Lewis clears his throat and says, in the pause that follows, “You demanded my audience.”

Thomas blearily observes him, then startles to attention. “Lewis.” Waves of water slosh when he lifts his arms in greeting. “I’m so glad to see you, so glad you could come.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

Thomas dunks his head and works the soap from his hair and then rises sputtering. His face appears to sulk even when he smiles. A trail of gold hair drops from his belly button to his groin — otherwise his skin is as bare as an infant’s, maybe shaved. “Yes, well, you know how you are.”

“Reluctant.”

“Always busy. Always working. You never have time for old friends.” He turns to Vincent, who smiles at him curiously, his sponge oozing soap down his thigh. “Go away. Though I may call for you later.”

Vincent climbs from the bath and wraps himself in a robe and splashes through the puddles on the floor on his way out. Thomas watches him go before eeling his way to the head of the tub, hooking one arm over the edge. On the ledge rests a tray piled high with baked grubs. He snatches one, pops it in his mouth.

“There is no life without water, Thomas. That is the immutable law of the universe.”

Thomas suckles the grub. “What are you getting at?”

“Do you know how upset people would be if they knew you were taking baths?”

Thomas makes a dismissive gesture, then lets the beak of the grub slip from his lips. It drops to the tray with a tick. “We recycle the water. Everything here will be bucketed into the gardens.”

“How generous of you.”

His eyes narrow and his voice drops to a whisper. “So have you done it?”

“No.”

“Have you even tried?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lie. If you can build an owl, you can build a gun. You can build me whatever I ask for.”

Thomas is right. Lewis is lying. He has not tried and he will not try. Three months ago, when someone began painting protest slogans across buildings, when a brick crashed through one of the Dome’s windows, when an effigy of the mayor was found floating in the sewage canal, Thomas approached Lewis about the possibility of black powder, of guns. Their forebears had thought it unwise, in such a contained community, to make it any easier to kill what few people remained in the world. And in the second amendment to their constitution, all rifles and pistols were destroyed. When Lewis reminded him of this, Thomas raised an open hand. “I know. I know what they said. But times are different. They had water. I need to be able to better control my people.”

Thomas has never appeared physically threatening, but his mind has a shrewd capability for violence. Even when they were children, he knew how to hurt, placing a hand to the chests of those who wanted to be with him most, saying, “You may not play with me.” Now Lewis sees a similar sharpness in his expression, a barely controlled fury that twitches the corners of his mouth. “You wouldn’t want to see your precious museum closed, would you? Then all the knowledge would be left to those who know what to do with it. Men like us. The less people know, the better off they are.”

“The better off you are, you mean.” Knowledge is a threat. Lewis is a threat. It isn’t the first time Thomas has mentioned closing the museum. There was even a motion to do so last month during a city council meeting — so that the space might be occupied, its many treasures repurposed — but it was struck down.

Thomas says, “You are deeply unpleasant, you know that?”

“Closing the museum is an empty threat. People would riot. It’s one of their only pleasures.”

“It’s a shadowy junk pile, a haunted house. You’re the only one who takes pleasure in it.” Thomas is smiling, but he clenches his jaw as if to keep himself from swallowing something bitter. “What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“I would hate it if something had to happen to your mother.”

“Be quiet.”

“Death might actually be a favor. It’s not as if she knows whether—”

“I said, shut up!” With that Lewis kicks the tray and it splashes into the bath and the grubs dirty the water and a small wave rolls into Thomas.

The two men stare at each other for a long moment, and then Thomas’s severe expression breaks and a bright laughter overtakes him. The water ripples around him. “You know what I love about you? I can always count on you to speak your mind. That’s what I love about you.” He climbs out of the bath and water trails off his body and makes a silvery path on the stone floor. He pulls a towel off a shelf and wipes himself dry. He is a short man, the top of his head coming to Lewis’s shoulder. Though he is lean, he is also soft, cushioned, not a bone on his body visible. “You’ve heard about the rider?”

“I have.”

“A girl. Amazing. They say her eyes are as black as night.”

“So they say.”

“She’s a mutant. She’s poison. And when everyone hears about her — when they begin to dream about other worlds and doubt the wall — what then?”

“It has nothing to do with doubting the wall. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is why the Sanctuary has survived. Hope.”

“You’re wrong. The Sanctuary has survived by keeping people afraid.”

“You’re worried they’ll leave. Maybe they will. Shouldn’t that be their choice?”

“We’re talking about the survival of the human race. Forty thousand people. I am responsible for them.”

“The rider proves there are others. Maybe your responsibility isn’t so great after all.”

Thomas throws the towel over his shoulder and goes to a window and looks out it and heaves a sigh. Lewis joins him there. From this high vantage, in the center of the Sanctuary, so much of the city can be seen, the topography of streets and buildings arranged around the Dome as if they have begun to orbit around a drain.

Thomas lays a damp hand on Lewis’s shoulder and says, “Something bad has been coming for a long time, old friend, and I’m worried it’s finally here.”

Chapter 3

OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL a crowd gathers. Their low muttering is like the thrum of a hundred wasps’ wings. Their hats shadow their faces and their expressions twist through a range of emotions — dread, hope, disbelief, curiosity — refusing to settle on a single one. They want to know if the rumors are true. They want to know if a rider has come out of the Dead Lands.

“Is she sick? What if she’s sick? They shouldn’t have let her in.”

“Someone said her eyes were black. Like a doll’s eyes.”

“They shouldn’t have let her in.”

“You know what this means, of course? This means there are others out there. We’re not alone after all.”

“Wherever she came from, it must be worse off than here. Otherwise, why would she leave it? Maybe she’s the first of many. People looking for help when we don’t have help to give. This is the beginning of some trouble; I can feel it. They shouldn’t have let her in.”

Far from all these voices, deep within the hospital, in a stone room with no windows, she sits in a wooden chair. A lantern hangs from a chain and presses the shadows into the corners. Her face is hard-edged, sunbaked. She wears a doeskin vest and leggings, but no shoes, her feet as thick and gray soled as hooves. Her skin is deeply tanned, filthy except where her wounds have been dressed, the dirt and sweat and blood wiped away from her shoulder, her hand, her stomach, wrapped with cotton bandages. Her wrists remain bound. What looks like a white scarf is tied around her throat. A rose of blood blooms from it.

There is a scarred metal table before her. On it Clark sets a bowl of salted sunflower seeds and a mug filled with water murky and warm, but the girl doesn’t seem to mind as she rushes it to her mouth and guzzles it down. Then she sputters and doubles over and brings her hands to her throat, to the place where the arrow pierced her. She does not emit a sound, gritting her jaw through the pain before righting herself and staring at Clark where she leans against the wall and then at Reed, who sits opposite her.

Clark demanded to be here. She berated Reed, calling him a fool, calling him reckless, calling him a failure. To allow this to happen. The arrival of this girl might be the most important thing that has ever happened to the Sanctuary, and he stands by with his mouth hanging open as his men pincushion her with arrows. Clark said she would speak to the girl and he conceded to her then just as he conceded to her in bed, letting her take the lead, telling him where to put what and how fast or slow to move.

Clark will take care of the questions. She will ask them kindly. She will try to make the girl forget about her injuries, and she will try to distract her from thinking about the fate that awaits her. Clark has no doubt that the mayor will isolate the girl, pervert the situation, use her to his advantage. There isn’t much time.

The girl’s eyes, black and empty, seem to look through them. Many in the Sanctuary are born with deformities — cleft lips, stunted legs, misshapen skulls — blamed on the radiation, the same as the cancer that afflicts so many. But Clark has never seen anything like this. The girl appears insectile, as if she were less than or more than human.

“She’s not sick?” Reed says.

Clark says, “Of course she’s not sick. No one’s sick anymore. That’s all in the past. You know damn well that’s just a ghost story meant to keep people afraid.”

“Maybe so, but still, I’m asking. You’re not sick, are you?” He asks this with the half-joking, half-worried tone of someone who says, “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

The girl shakes her head, no. She cannot speak. Her injured throat makes even breathing difficult.

They lay a sheet of paper and pen before her. She makes no move to pick it up. “Please,” Clark says. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I’m sorry you’re hurt. Not everyone here is a friend. But I am. And if I’m going to help you, I need to understand why you’re here.”

There is a long pause — punctuated by another please from Clark — and then the girl slowly and clumsily picks up the pen. She can write. Not very well and not very fast, maybe because her dominant hand is injured or maybe because she is unpracticed. Literacy is never a given in this time. Her writing looks like a bird’s scratching, and her eyelashes, bleached from the sun, like little feathers.

Clark asks for her name and she writes, Gawea. Clark asks how far she has come and she writes, Far. Clark asks where she has come from and she writes, Oshen.

Reed says, “Impossible.”

Clark shushes him and then asks the girl where, what part of the ocean, and she writes, Oregon.

Reed shifts in his chair, wanting to say something but holding back.

Clark speaks, with hopefulness rounding her voice, “Describe it.”

Her pen scratches paper. Fish. Lots of rane. Grene gras. Apals. Blakbary. Mowntins.

This is enough to silence them for a long time, the thought of a place where clouds share the sky with the sun, where rain falls every week and fills rivers and lakes darting with trout. The trees weighed down with apples red, green, and gold. Corncobs growing to the size of a man’s forearm. The woods tangled with blackberries, their juices and your blood oozing together as you fill a bucket and gladly risk the threat of thorns.

The girl’s eyes might be alien and remote, but her face is earnest and pleading. She believes in what she is telling them, and that makes Clark want to believe too. It is as if, like some seer, the girl has sketched to life a dream she thought was hers alone.

Help me, she writes.

Reed has not washed up or changed out of his ranging gear. His hat is in his lap and his face looks like the cracked remains of a mud puddle. When he leans forward, laying his hands flat on the table, his leather vest creaks. Normally his posture is straight, but this afternoon his body appears bowed, the shape of a question mark. At moments like this Clark can’t help but consider him weak. He should be taking orders; she should be in charge. His voice is hushed when he says, “How can we help you? Why are you here?”

Sent.

“By whom?”

Burr.

Reed says, “Who is Burr?” at the same moment Clark says, “Why were you sent here?”

The girl’s attention flits between them, then settles on Clark. Brot letter. Letter tels yu.

“Letter?” Reed says over the top of Clark saying, “What letter? We searched your horse — there was no letter.”

Letter for—

At that moment the door crashes open and the sheriff, Rickett Slade, fills the doorway, and then the room, the space seeming smaller. He moves swiftly for such a big man. He does not pause to acknowledge any of them but stalks directly to the girl and pouches a hand behind her head and slams her face into the table and knocks her unconscious.

Slade breathes fiercely through his nose. Clark can never tell where his eyes are looking, pocketed as they are into his face, but he seems to regard them both at once. “I will take it from here,” he says. “You are excused.”

“On whose authority?” Clark says.

Slade says, “Your girl has a mouth on her, doesn’t she?”

Before Reed can respond, Clark says, “I said, on whose authority?”

“As always, I speak for the mayor.”

* * *

Heavy brown curtains choke away all but a cool white line of moonlight running down their middle. There are no paintings on the walls, no decorations on the bureau except for a single short candle sputtering on an iron tray, illuminating this room in the upper stories of the museum. There are, in abundance, books. Some yawning open. Some closed with a ribbon or feather marking his place. Stacked along the walls, piled and tiered across the floor, like their own kind of furniture.

Lewis stands between the room’s two narrow beds, his own empty, the other occupied by a woman. Her body is so slight it barely dents the blanket that covers her, tucked all the way to her chin. Her downy white hair twists across her pillow like the silk from a split milkweed pod, and Lewis runs a comb through it now. His movements are delicate, with first the comb, then his fingers, as he untangles the snarls, neatens her hair into a white halo that surrounds her ruined face.

His mother suffered a stroke three years ago, and since then, he has cared for her as she once cared for him. He was so often sick as a child — wracked by fevers that sweated into his mattress the imprint of his body — and many of his memories are of her hovering over him in the dark, laying a cool washcloth on his forehead, humming lullabies.

Now the left side of her face appears melted. She sometimes yammers at him, as if reciting some foreign alphabet, but mostly she remains still and silent, propped up in a chair, curled up in bed, sleeping with one eye closed, the other half-shuttered.

He sets down the comb on the night table between their beds and picks up the vial from Oman and uses a dropper to squirt some of the tincture into her mouth. It is meant to increase brain activity, speed recovery. Whether it works, he does not know and does not particularly care, as long as he is doing something for her. She smacks her mouth at its bitterness and regards him with her one good eye. He gives her a pained smile.

The owl, too, sits on the bedside table like a little brass clock. When Lewis sets down the dropper, he notices beside it a letter. It is sealed with a red circle of wax that bears the imprint of what looks like an eye.

“What’s this?” he says and tears open the letter. He holds it before a candle whose flame trembles like his hand as he reads.

The entry to the museum is a fanned set of stone stairs. Lewis rushes down them with the letter in his hand and then secreted up his sleeve. He pauses for a moment on the sidewalk, listening to the small sounds of the city at night, the groaning of the wind turbines, before hurrying in the direction of the prison — where he knows the rider is being held — and where he does not plan to sign in with the guards or request permission to speak with their prisoner. In his gray duster he appears yet another shadow sliding along the street, and he has ways of making himself unseen, of distracting and then sliding past whoever might block his way.

He does not know what hour it is — he has trouble keeping track of time — but guesses it late, the streets empty. There are no lamps lit. The buildings are stark and silver-gray. Beyond them the black mass of the wall rises into the less-black sky, and above it hangs a half-moon, the shadowed side of it visible, but barely.

He has so many questions. He tries to keep them straight in his head, but they crawl all over each other and merge into a swarming mess like so many fire ants. It is because of his distracted state of mind that he does not notice the two men charging out of an alleyway until they are upon him.

The last thing he sees, before they drag a bag over his head and carry him bodily away, are the black sacks that shroud their faces.

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. At first he can see only blackness interrupted by the four torches flaring around the room — as if he is floating through some region of outer space lit by many competing suns — and then the room begins to take shape.

He knows he is underground, from the staircase they dragged him down, the steadily cooling air, and its sulfuric, mushroomy smell. The floor is crumbling concrete. Square stone pillars are staggered throughout the space, the basement of some store that must have once sold children’s toys. There are heaps of rusted bicycles and baby strollers, a life-size clown with hair made of red yarn, moldy stuffed bears, shelving units full of video game consoles.

Among the stone columns stand a dozen or so bodies — whether men or women, he doesn’t know. They surround him, he discovers when he spins in a circle, all of them wearing black sacks over their faces.

“Go ahead. What do you want?”

When one of them speaks, he can tell the voice is a put-on, roughened to sound deeper than it is. “What do you know about Oregon?”

He checks his sleeve to make sure the letter is still there. “Oregon.” Until now, he has never said the word aloud, though he has read it countless times on maps, in books, and only minutes before in the letter. He feels as if someone has reached into his head and stolen what preoccupies him. He tries to keep his voice as calm as possible, but still it quivers. “Why do you want to know about Oregon?”

“Do you know the way there?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I know maps. I know paper. But that’s not the same as—”

“You want to leave this place, don’t you, Meriwether?”

That voice. Husked over, but familiar. He stares at the black sack. Holes have been cut into it for the mouth and eyes. He wonders if he can recognize someone by the eyes alone. The figure retreats a step.

Lewis says, “What do you know about—”

“You want to. Who wouldn’t want to? You’ve always dreamed about leaving this place. That’s why you bury your face in books and maps. You like to imagine that there might be more to life than this. You aren’t alone. We feel the same. We want you to take us beyond the wall. We want you to help us find the way to Oregon.”

“Absolutely not.”

“We need your help.”

“I am needed here.”

“We need you.”

“I am needed here.”

“By your mayor or your mother?”

“I am needed here.” He feels something rising inside him — boiling, spilling over. If it was a taste, it would be bile. If it had a color, it would be red. “Don’t make me upset. I’m getting upset.”

The ceiling seems to lower and the stone pillars to crowd around him like bars. The masked figures sneak closer, knot around him. His breath is whistling through his bared teeth. He is blinking back tears. He imagines that beneath their clothes are bones, that they are a horde of skeletons beckoning him into an open grave.

“Or what?” the voice says. “You’ll call for help? No one can hear you. We are asking you nicely. But we don’t have to ask you at all. We can make you—”

He tries not to let happen what happens next, but he cannot stop himself. His hands rise, unbidden, as if separate from him. Something takes form on his mouth, not words but sounds no one else would recognize, long vowels and flat, hard consonants uttered with speed and volume unlike him.

He feels a woof inside him, as fire makes when it finds a pocket of oxygen, and he can feel a heat in his hands. He hurls it — he does not know a better way to describe it than this, as if the heat were a heavy ball — at the figure across from him. The room brightens. The figure flies backward, as if dragged by an invisible wire, until stopped by a stone pillar. He cannot be sure over the thunder of his own voice, but he believes he hears a woman screaming.

She — yes, it is a she — writhes against the column and cries out, tells him to stop, calls him by name. “No, Lewis! Stop!” But he does not. He is outside himself, taken over by some current he only moderately understands. When he breathes, it is with a concussion of heat, and when he sees, it is through a scrim of hot, floating sparks, as if he is burning up inside. Her feet rise off the ground — she is suspended in the air — her arms lashing as if she might cast off whatever grips her. Her mask peels away from her face, and he sees then the copper-colored hair, sees the face twisted in pain. Clark.

He goes silent and drops his hands, and in doing so releases her. She falls heavily to the floor, a knot of limbs. She coughs and gasps for air.

Lewis feels a sudden exhaustion, as if all the energy in his body is spiraling down some pipe, and he knows he must escape this place before he collapses himself.

He looks at the masked figures around him to see if they will test him. But they are retreating, clutching and tripping over each other, falling back onto the bikes, bringing down a shelf of stuffed animals, and so he brushes past them contemptuously.

Chapter 4

THERE HAS ALWAYS been something different about Lewis.

When they were children, playing the drum game, Thomas could not understand how Lewis so expertly pursued him, despite his blindfold, always stepping around holes or over piles of excrement, climbing ladders, navigating alleyways, so that sometimes he was accused of cheating, peeking. But he wasn’t. He just had a way, if he concentrated deeply, of seeing without his eyes.

There were other things, too. The way he occasionally dreamed things before they happened — a conversation, a dropped dish, an illness. The way he sometimes saw colors around people, like windblown shawls, green, red, purple, the occasional black. When he told his mother this, she would silence him, put a finger to his lips, telling him the fevers were to blame, telling him not to say anything to anyone else. Especially his father.

His father did not have time for him, but when he did — when his eyes seemed by accident to settle on him — they inevitably narrowed. If crying, Lewis needed to toughen up. If struggling with a stuck door, he needed to thicken out. If reading books, he needed to get outside and express interest in the things other boys his age cared about — fistfights, slingshots, hunting rats, chasing girls, building things. Lewis wasn’t leadership material, his father said. He wasn’t someone others wished to be.

Lewis could endure his teasing and scolding, but not the hate, not the biting spittle-flecked words when his father discovered what he was capable of. There was the time, when he was seven, he could turn the pages of a book or nudge a bird off a high ledge or roll a ball by merely sweeping his hand through the air, for which his father kept him locked in his room for days. There was the time, when he was nine, he built a mechanical beetle that helicoptered its wings and flew a fifteen-foot circle before returning to his hand, after which his father crushed it beneath his heel. There was the time, when he was twelve, that he told his father not to ride in a parade because something bad would happen; and then something bad did happen when an assassin’s arrow took him in the shoulder: his father came home not to thank Lewis but to slap him so hard he left a red and then purple and then yellow slash across his face.

Lewis spent so much of his time in the Dome’s library, climbing ladders, pulling books off shelves to study. He loved novels like Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies, The Wizard of Oz, stories about escape, about worlds within worlds. And he loved histories as well, pretending himself back in time, learning the mechanics of how people and their countries had risen and fallen so many times before. But he favored science, especially physics, the motion and energy of the world.

He likes things that are quantifiable, that can be labeled and understood logically. This is why he was drawn to a book called The Evolutionary Ladder. He found it in the Dome’s library and it concerned the next big step, what might happen to humans in the coming centuries. It spoke at length about a film and comic book character named Tony Stark, who developed a robotic suit that made him into the hero Iron Man. The suit was the equivalent of an exoskeleton, something that offered a shell of defense while also enhancing strength and speed, allowing Stark to hurl cars or punch through walls or blast through the sky with rocket boosters. For years, the army had been chasing something similar, an enhancing armor. Though their version — at the time only a prototype in a lab — did not make a soldier super. It made him more efficient, able to do better the things he already did, like carry gear weighing more than one hundred pounds and decrease musculoskeletal injuries. It wasn’t about rocket boosters. It was about basic augmentation. As if hurrying along evolution to suit the soldiers’ tasks. There were other examples. Such as a hundred-thousand-dollar battery-powered exoskeleton that helped a man, paralyzed below the waist, walk again — and even finish a marathon, though it took him twenty hours. And a technology — called electroencephalography, built into a pair of goggles — that could sense signals in the brain associated with the unconscious recognition of danger, a threat-warning system that would blend mind with machine to enhance defensive response.

“You don’t need much of an imagination,” the author wrote, “to see that humans will continue to adapt to these technologies by developing ever-more sophisticated means of neurological control. The day will then inevitably come when some people have the ability to control such machinery with only their thoughts. The mind becomes a muscle, able to wirelessly interface with objects separate from the body. This is our next leap as humans,” the book concluded, “so that several centuries from now the seeming magic of telekinetics will be reality.”

Sometimes that made a kind of sense to him. When he felt a headache coming on and a crack reached suddenly across a window. When he took a breath and a candle across the room snuffed out. When he snapped his fingers and a pencil rolled off a desk. Maybe his mind was like the world: sometimes certain things came together by chance and by fate — like the sparking of electrons, the merging of species, the mutation of a virus — and modified the rules.

The thought frightens more than excites him. One day, when he was a teenager, after a group of boys teased him, shoved him around, he came home with a split lip and a pouched blue-black eye and a poisonous sense of self-loathing. One of his cats happened to rub between his legs and then hissed and backed into a corner and curled up on itself and died. He did not understand then what he was capable of. He still isn’t sure.

Anger — or any heightened emotion — seems to key a lock, help him into a hallway full of dark happenings. So he tries to keep his temper muted. He tries to keep his emotions as gray and blank as stone. He tries to focus his energies on more practical matters, managing the museum, studying history, tinkering with his inventions. But he has been having dreams lately — dreams about an old man with long white hair and a warm whispering voice, dreams about pressing his hand to sand and green grass growing in the shape of it, dreams about blowing fire from his lungs like a dragon, dreams about splitting open trees and even mountains by concentrating hard enough, dreams about, no other word for it, magic. The old man spoke to him in his dreams. He wanted Lewis to stop hiding from himself, embrace the strengths he kept contained. And while these dreams at first made him uneasy, he has come to find them weirdly comforting, as if someone out there regarded him with a paternal kindness, wished him well.

Ever since his hands burned and he hurled Clark — the room brightening with the expended energy — his body has felt achy, his mind slow, as if hungover. He wishes it was all a dream, but he knows better. He still feels in a dream now, as he stands in the museum’s Sun Room, the largest of its galleries, a high-ceilinged space with tall, rounded windows running the length of it. He is holding the rib of a stegosaurus in his hand, the long, sharp curve of it like a yellowed scimitar. He rotates the exhibits every month. The Rise of Egypt. The Fall of Rome. The Space Race. The Great American West. For the past two days — with the help of Ella, his aide — he has been building dioramas, bolting together bones, hanging posters, readying one of their most popular displays, When Dinosaurs Ruled.

Whenever people walk through the museum to study their enormous skulls, their spiked teeth, their rib cages like baskets big enough for several men to fit inside, they seem in disbelief that something so fierce and powerful could be wiped out so easily. From there, he knows, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize that at any moment something can come blazing out of the sky and change everything.

He hears a voice, Ella’s. She is saying his name as if it were a curse. She stands on a stool and wrenches a bolt into place that will secure a section of vertebrae. “You aren’t listening to me?”

“Apparently not.”

“I’ve asked three times whether this stage will be labeled Cretaceous or Jurassic.”

He rubs a hand across his face. “I’m not myself.”

“If you would simply sleep, like a normal person would, like I tell you to regularly, maybe this wouldn’t be an issue.” When she speaks, she punctuates her sentences with the wrench, jabbing it in the air as if to knock him about with it.

“You’re right.”

“Eight hours. That’s what I get. And I feel great.” She brings the wrench to her temple. “My mind is sharp. My body is healthy. Unlike yours.”

“Yes. I’ll try that. Eight hours.”

The museum is a sacred space, a cathedral sought out in dark times. People hush their voices and remove their hats when they walk through it. They close their eyes and lower their heads before the exhibits. Lewis knows he makes people uncomfortable, just as people make him uncomfortable, so he remains hidden away in his study during their open hours. Ella has become the public face of the museum. She watches over it, answers any questions people might have when they retreat here. The space is shadowy and cool, orderly and manicured, full of polished treasures. It is everything the Sanctuary is not. Its celebration of the long, difficult novel of humanity, the individual stories that make up the larger story of civilization, gives people hope, purpose. Others have endured and so will they.

But today it is empty, because everyone is at the stadium.

Lewis told Thomas not to do it, begged him not to sentence the girl to a public death, and on what grounds? Terrorism. That was what Thomas told everyone. Two decades ago two rangers had gone missing, believed dead, though in fact they had abandoned the Sanctuary. Somehow, all this time, they managed to survive on their own. This girl, their daughter, had come hoping to lure others out, to breach the wall and risk all their lives. It was an act of terrorism. She was a terrorist.

Lewis said, “Everyone will recognize that as a lie.”

“Fear beats logic every time,” Thomas said. “You’ll see. Everyone will be screaming for her blood.”

“She’s a child.”

“What’s the average life-span around here? Thirty? Forty? She’s practically middle-aged.”

This was yesterday in the Dome, where they met in a first-floor sitting room. Thomas lounged in a wingback chair while Lewis stood. He refused the offer of a seat, refused a plate of spiced grasshoppers, refused even a smoke. “Let me speak to her. Please.”

Thomas wore snakeskin boots and fondled a thin wooden pipe. He tamped a pinch of tobacco and sparked a match and brought the flame to the bowl and puffed until it glowed orange and smoke tusked from his nose. “How does this have anything to do with you?”

“If there are indeed outlying communities, we need to reach out to them.”

Thomas made an encompassing gesture with the pipe. “Do you know what has kept people alive all these years? They believe. They believe in the wall.” His voice was quiet, but Lewis knew this was how he yelled. Smoke swirled like a storm taking form. “What you’re talking about would threaten everything we’ve built here.”

“Their faith has already evaporated like all the water in the world.”

“The rains will come. They always do.”

They always had — this was true. But it had been so long, months now, that rain felt like a barely remembered dream, the same as his election promises. More than a year ago, when he took office, he promised he would rebuild the crumbling sections of the city. He would rid crime from the Fourth Ward. He would expand the gardens. He would drill a new well and repair those broken. He would make every citizen live up to their potential, live their best life, evolve, whatever that meant, and so on, none of it true. And with the wells failing and the storage tanks emptying, the weather felt like a punishment, like a reprimand for his election, the round reaches of the sky a magnifying lens that sharpened the sun that would crisp them to death.

For a moment Lewis considered telling Thomas about the letter, sharing its secrets, but only for a moment. In case Clark should actually make good on her promise and depart the Sanctuary, Thomas should know as little as possible about where she is headed. “I would like to speak to her. Before you do what you’re planning to do.”

“No, I don’t think so.” He sucked at the pipe and it sizzled with his breath. “But. If you give me what I’ve been asking for, if you give me my guns, I’ll consider letting you speak to her.”

“No.”

Thomas rose from his chair then. Even in his boots, he was a head shorter than Lewis. But somehow he made himself seem bigger, in the way of a petulant child, his pale face growing red as he approached Lewis. He held out his pipe like a weapon and Lewis backed away until he could retreat no farther. Thomas leaned in so that his smoking breath made a hot wind on Lewis’s face and he choked on the taste. “Do you know what I can do to you? I can do anything I want to you.”

“You’re threatening me again?”

“I’m telling you the way things are, old friend.”

* * *

The streets are empty except for dogs lounging in shadows, dust devils that die as they take shape. The wind carries the creak of the turbines and the distant cheers and whistles from the stadium. In an alleyway a figure appears — a woman dressed in the black uniform of the deputies — surveying the street before darting across it like the shadow of a crow. It takes only a moment for her — her face obscured by a black hat and neckerchief — to scale the wall of the museum and slip through an open window.

She pauses in the half-light, her eyes adjusting, taking in her surroundings, an interactive exhibit featuring the games of another era. There are chess- and checkerboards, tables strewn with playing cards and a jigsaw puzzle that comes together into a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, bins full of balls and bats and racquets and mallets, game consoles with slits in their sides and wires tentacling out of them.

She slips out of the room and into a hallway festooned with suits of armor from various ages and regions, some clad in reeds, others in metal, before climbing the stairs, fast but not so fast as to clomp her boots or whine a floorboard, every step a whisper. She glances over her shoulder often and sticks to the shadows.

Here, at the center of the museum, the building rises into a square tower, its highest story consisting of Lewis’s office and living quarters. She pauses on the landing with her head cocked — and then peers over the railing, back the way she came. Voices swirl faintly upward, Lewis and his aide, their voices sharp and bullying — but distant.

She seems confident she is alone now as she starts down the hall and knobs open the door to a room that remains as dim as twilight. The floor is a mess of books. The windows are curtained off, and the sheets of one bed are tidily made, squared and tucked beneath their mattress. The sheets of the other hold down an old woman who smells of lavender and rot and urine, who observes the approaching black-clad figure with one bulging eye. When the figure hovers over her a second before gently pressing a pillow to her face, she does not struggle except to lift a hand, let it shiver and fall.

The owl observes all of this from the night table, its glass eyes trained on the figure who remains hunched over the bed for a long time, long enough for her arms to quake, for her legs to collapse so that she kneels beside the bed as if overcome by a terrible prayer.

A lamp on the wall sputters and emits a dim, brown glow. Before it can brighten fully, she wobbles upright and stumbles from the room and in doing so trips over a stack of books and knocks into the bureau, and then the door, as if lost in some dark place, uncertain where she is.

* * *

Lewis and Ella are struggling up the stairs with a femur the size of a log. They have rested several times on their way up from the basement, and he has stumbled twice and nearly lost his grip. She is cursing him all the way, asking why they cannot wait, why this has to happen now. Normally they seek help from one of their custodians or guards, but the museum is closed and everyone is away, no one wanting to miss the execution.

Lewis lives most often in a state of poised stillness — seated at his desk, bent over a book. He has never been interested in any sort of exercise. But these past few days, ever since he hurled Clark against the pillar, he has felt a restlessness that needs some outlet. He doesn’t know if it is the lingering sense of power — the humming at his fingertips, as if they were orange-hot blades struck on an anvil — or the possibility of escape, stealing past the wall, exploring landscapes that he previously believed would exist for him only on paper and in dreams. But he cannot sit still. He cannot stop pacing, tidying. He desires movement.

He and Ella rest again when they reach the landing, setting down the femur with a thump. She wears the outfit of a boy: short pants, short-sleeve shirt with a leather vest. Her hair is damp with sweat, plastered to her forehead. “I’m sitting on this thing, whether you like it or not,” she says and collapses onto the bone, a yellow-brown bench with hairline fissures running through it. The cracks in it are like the cracks in everything — cracks in concrete, cracks in rubber and asphalt and glass, cracks in faces ruined by the sun. Nothing is new.

Above them rises the bowl of a rotunda, one of two in the museum, each bearing a fresco — the sky by day, the sky by night. Theirs is the night, star-spangled and moonlit.

Lewis would love to reach for the silver canister inside his pocket, shove his nose into it, snort his way into a numb, pleasant dream. But he has heard enough scolding from Ella this afternoon. He pushes his fists into the small of his back and stares upward. He breathes heavily and says between breaths, “I would love to walk on the moon.”

Before he finishes the sentence, he hears his echo, the ghost of his voice whispering back.

Ella glances up as if she might spot another version of Lewis hovering above them. Then she looks at him, smiles until dimples pocket her cheeks.

“Say something,” he says. “See if it comes back to you.”

She leans back her head, her mouth open and ready to call out, when — from somewhere upstairs — comes a distant sound, a slam and groan, like something heavy shoved across the floor. Then the patter of footsteps.

The two of them look at each other, startled, before pursuing the sound’s source, taking the stairs two at a time.

Chapter 5

THE SANCTUARY’S founders deliberately signed their constitution on July Fourth. They hoped to at once borrow and revise the sentiment of nationhood. They were America. A miniature version — living off hope, waiting for help — but America nonetheless. For a long time this worked. On what came to be known as Resurrection Day, people painted black circles beneath their eyes the night before, to indicate sickness, and washed them away the next morning, to signify health. Gifts were exchanged. A costume parade — full of dancing skeletons — marched through the city, ending at the stadium, where so many years ago men pulled on padded armor and crashed into each other while chasing a football, where the faded murals of the St. Louis Rams still adorn the pocked concrete tunnels and walls that surround the field, and where the citizens of the Sanctuary drank and feasted and danced.

The mayor always rode at the back of the parade — as Thomas does now — wearing a bone crown on a bone chair atop a horse-drawn wagon decorated with clattering bones. He waves at the people who fill the sidewalks, but no one waves back. They watch him with what can only be fear and distaste. His waving slows, then stops altogether, along with his smile, and he tells the driver to hurry up, hurry up already. His eyes dart about, as if he is worried something might be hurled at him.

Today, before the Resurrection Day feast, the rider will be killed. Many, including Lewis, including the city council, have asked Thomas not to do so. He would spoil the fun, they said. Ruin the holiday mood. People need something to celebrate. If he insisted on killing the girl, why not drag her out the gates and chain her to the altar, like everyone else? Because she comes from out there, Thomas said, so she must be punished in here. Here, too, he has a captive audience. He wants to put an end to the graffiti, to the effigies, to the underground mutterings of whatever faction is out to ruin his time in office. At the stadium he will force people to see what he wants them to see, a demonstration of his power.

The synthetic dome that once covered the stadium was long ago torn away and salvaged, so the sun beats down this July Fourth on the many seated now in the lower deck, more than twenty thousand bodies, all shading their eyes and squinting painfully. Everyone studies the four black-mouthed tunnels at the corners of the field. Their voices begin as a hesitant mutter that rises into a charged hum the longer they wait. Energy emanates from them like waves of heat, some combination of loathing and confusion and excitement for what they are about to witness. Afterward, there will be music and food. There is that at least. Not like the feasts of the old days, but something.

All around the stadium hang flags — Thomas’s flag — with the single star burning brightly at the center. There is a spattering of applause when the mayor and his wife take their place high among them, along with several deputies, servants, and members of the city council — at midfield, in a boxed-off suite with an open window from which they wave.

Her name is Danica. She looks like a piece of jewelry, she knows. Another ornament for the mayor. If he is deserving of her attention, he is deserving of theirs, the logic goes. Her hair is so blond it appears white. From a distance people find her beautiful, but up close there is something unnerving about her appearance. Her many sharp angles — her collarbone, her thin lips, her chiseled jaw, her sharp fingers — make her appear like something that can cut through its own clothes, shred its own skin. And though she keeps them hidden in her shoes, her toes are strangely extended, good for gripping. Pants are all anyone seems to wear anymore, but she never appears in public without a dress, this one white linen and already brown along the hem from the dust she cannot escape. She wears a gold chain around her neck that matches her gold belt, her waist as wide around as her husband’s thigh. Sometimes he calls her his lovely bone.

Thomas drops into a seat and brushes the powdery dust from its armrests. A servant brings him a plate stacked high with dates wrinkled like ugly little heads. “Oh,” he says, “this is just what I wanted.”

She prefers to stand and shakes her head stiffly when offered a seat beside him.

* * *

The day before, Clark sought out her brother, York. He was easy to find, a street performer who tumbled and juggled and blew fire and swallowed swords. He could send cards in a riffling arc from one hand to the other. He could lose a coin from his palm and find it in the mouth of another. He could sing a thousand songs and tell a thousand stories. She needed only to look for a crowd, a flurry of applause, and there he was, entertaining the long line of people waiting to fill their jug at the well.

Clark’s father died, like so many died, of cancer. A purple blotch swelled on his nose, then spilled across his cheek, a melanoma the doctors cut away, leaving a hole in his face, too late. He lost weight suddenly, lost his balance regularly, and soon began to lose his mind when the tumors took seed in his brain. Her mother did not marry again but a decade later became pregnant with York. He was Clark’s half brother but felt more like a son, as her mother died not much later, so blotched with melanomas she appeared splattered with some foul wine. The sun would kill them all, it sometimes seemed.

From a distance, for a few minutes, she watched him perform. He dipped daggers in linseed oil and set them on fire and tossed them in flaming ellipses. He was bareheaded so that people could see his face and so that he could see his daggers. His arms were a blur. His forehead was beaded with sweat. His smile so wide it reached his ears. His hands were too square and meaty for his arms, and his lean neck bunched into a fist of an Adam’s apple. She had tried to enlist him as a sentinel, but he resisted. “I don’t want another boss,” he said, “when I’ve already got you.”

She couldn’t lay off him. She tried, really tried, but couldn’t resist swatting the back of his head, bullying him with her words, every time he made a foolish decision. They shared the same blood. He was hers — that’s how she felt — like a hand or tooth. By taking care of him she was taking care of herself. He wanted to make people smile, give them some small escape, always goofing, whereas she was always serious. These days, most everyone is some shade of brown, but people still smile when the two of them stand beside each other as siblings, with his nut-colored skin and her fiery hair and freckled face.

She waited for him to catch the daggers — one, two, three — and extinguish them each in his mouth, waited for the applause and the coins people tossed his way, before approaching him and tugging his sleeve and saying they needed to talk.

“About?” He had a gap between his teeth he showed often in a smile.

“About the kind of thing that can get us killed.”

He packed his bag and swung it over his shoulder and blew kisses to three young girls before following Clark from the square.

She said, “You’re performing at Resurrection Day?”

“Yeah, but they want something different now. Not just for the feast, but before, too. Warm up the crowd before the execution.”

“Even better.”

“What’s going on?” He nudged her with his elbow. “Are we making a move? Is this it?”

They entered an alley, and its tight walls clapped away the sun. In shadow they walked and she whispered, “Consider this your final performance.”

* * *

In the stadium, hundreds of tables have been arranged into four squares, with two wide corridors splitting the space between them in the shape of a cross. At the center of the cross rises a freshly constructed gallows with a noose dangling from it that casts an eyelet shadow. The body will dangle there through the meal to follow, when people file from the bleachers to their seats and a band strikes up a merry tune.

York races out of a tunnel and along one of these corridors. A ripple of applause works its way through the crowd. He cartwheels and tumbles and finally pounds his way up the gallows and swings from its noose and then spins in a circle to survey his audience.

From his pants pocket he withdraws what looks like a black rope that he keeps pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling and then snaps like a whip. It unfurls then, ripples in the wind, opens up into a massive silk scarf, maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. He begins to manipulate its form, bunching it first into a storm cloud that dots the ground with rain. Then his hands slash and twist when he knots it into the shape of a giant raven. It caws and pecks at his hand before taking flight and fluttering one way and then another. His lips seem not to move when it calls out in its croaking way. Then he snaps the scarf and it unrolls to its full length, and he twists it into a rope, what appears to be a snake curling along the stage, before coiling up at his feet.

Again he reaches for his pocket. This time he produces a red stone, a blue stone, an orange stone. He transfers the stones one by one to his opposite hand until they fill his palm like a cluster of fruit. He shoots them into the air, spinning them upward in a colored blur. The stones rise higher and higher, ridiculously high, until they might scrape the sky. He adds to their rotation an apple he takes intermittent bites of, and the crowd erupts, crying out with pleasure, crashing their hands together in applause.

York can’t seem to help it — he smiles so widely his eyes vanish into folds — and then the smile vanishes and the apple core falls to the ground and the stones fall and clatter into his pocket, blue, orange, red, when the girl is escorted onto the field.

No one screams or boos or stomps their feet. Instead the stadium plunges into silence.

Her wrists are bound and she is led by two deputies who hold her by the elbows. Her face is puffed with bruises. She wears a scarf of bandages. Whether she is limping or resisting the deputies, it is unclear, but they drag and support her.

From her midfield suite, high above the rest of the crowd, the silence is such that Danica can hear the scraping echoes of their footsteps. A trail of dust rises behind them and ghosts away with the wind.

When the girl arrives at midfield, some of the people in the stands begin to yell, their voices swelling, some pitched high, some low, the many layers of sound eventually merging into one sustained note that seems to shake the air. Whether they are calling out questions or calling for mercy or calling for blood, it is hard to tell.

The girl appears so thin, like a piece of wood somebody whittled and gave up on. Though there remains something strangely vibrant about her. Her skin has an earthen richness. Her hair is the same black as the vultures that spin in the sky. Her posture is unyielding despite her circumstances. Danica watches her with grim curiosity when the deputies lead her up the steps of the gallows to the platform.

The people in the stands watch too — whether hopefully, judgmentally, Danica doesn’t know — but when the girl turns in a slow circle and tries to meet their gaze, they drop their faces and go silent, as if frightened her dark eyes alone might carry some contagion.

Vultures tornado the sky and she stands among the black, swirling color of their shadows. She looks as if she might say something, but the injury to her throat prevents it.

Then the deputies fit the noose around her neck, and Thomas stands up to cheer and clap his hands. He swings his arms so wildly that he knocks an elbow into Danica and she staggers a few steps. As she does, she looks to the doorway behind her, where Reed stands. He nods at her.

She runs her hands along her dress, straightening out the wrinkles. She leans in to her husband and tells him she feels ill, she will see him later.

“What?” he says, then, “Oh. Fine.” Not even bothering to look at her, his eyes on the field, his hands still clapping sharply together.

* * *

She follows Reed at a distance, down a staircase, along a concrete corridor with rusted pipes veining its ceiling. He slips through a door and she is not far behind him. Light streams from a single window. The air smells of metal and leather and oil. The deputies use these rooms for storage. Bows hang from hooks on the walls; knives and bats and arrows lie strewn across a table that runs the length of the room.

Just as she enters, Reed shuts the door behind her and presses her against it. What they are doing is kissing, though it looks much like eating. Their mouths opening and closing hungrily, their teeth biting down on lips, cheeks. When they pull apart, their faces are a splotchy red and he is bleeding from the corner of his mouth.

“What have you learned?” she says.

“They’re going to do it. They’re going to leave. They’re making every preparation.”

“They, they, they. Don’t try to separate yourself from them.”

“We, then. We’re going to do it.”

“Are you?”

“You can come. You should.”

“Hmm.”

“You must.”

“Are you still fucking that woman?”

He gapes at her, his hesitation all the answer she needs.

“I thought so,” she says.

“I don’t feel about her the same way I do you.”

“Is that right? She’s just someone to fuck?”

“I love you. I do. And I want you to come with me.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“We’ve been waiting for the right moment. It’s here. We’ve been talking about this for a long time. Now is the time.”

“We’ve been talking, yes. Doing is something else entirely.”

“We’re trying to get Lewis Meriwether to join us.”

She snorts through a smile. “Why do you keep bringing him up? What use is he?”

“He knows more about the outside world than anyone else. He knows more about everything than anyone else.”

“He knows paper. He doesn’t know blood or dirt or sweat. Besides that, he has the fortitude of a sick child.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. There are things about him that would surprise you.”

“Please. You’re not fool enough to believe in what people say about him. Lewis, the eater of children, the binder of spells, the freak in the dark tower.”

“I might be.”

She runs a hand along his beard, then pinches a whisker and rips it out. He flinches and she shoves him aside and walks to the table at the center of the room. “So you’re suggesting that we uproot, say good-bye to all we have built here, on the word of one girl?”

“If it’s true — if what she says is true — the country there is rich.”

“If it’s true.”

“Is there any future here? Really?” Her back is to him, but she can hear him slide closer to her, can feel his breath at her neck. “What does your husband say?”

“Do we really need to talk about him?” She picks up a dagger — black handle, black blade — and runs her finger along its edge. “He says it’s not true. Of course he says that. And he says — even if any of it is true — no good can come of it and we must put it behind us. The more people know, the less sure they will be of everything. That’s what he says.”

“Look at it this way. Even if we stay here, this is a chance to trade, to open lines of communication. To unite. Maybe even make a kind of country?”

“How patriotic of you.” She turns around and prods his belt with the knife. “The other possibility is that this is all a pipe dream.”

“I’d like to think it’s true. We’ve got to believe in something.”

She drops the dagger on the table and reaches her hands around his neck, massages him until his head lolls with her fingertips. “Relax,” she whispers. “Relax.”

His eyes shutter closed with her rubbing. “This could be a chance for us to start over too.”

Her tongue darts from her mouth and wets her lips. “Enough talking.” She releases him and turns around and lifts up her dress until it bunches around her waist and leans over the table stacked with steel. “Hurry up and take me.”

* * *

The black-clad figure races the streets, cutting through alleys, breathing in panicked gulps, before finally collapsing in a shadowed alley. The neckerchief peels away to reveal a face — Clark’s — just in time for her to vomit freely.

She throws her hat aside. Her hair has come loose from her ponytail. Her stomach clenches and empties. With a line of spit hanging from her lips, she cries out with inarticulate shame and fury. Out of the cracks come several scuttling beetles, joined by a black-winged butterfly, to drink from the mess she has left for them.

She roughs her mouth across her wrist. There was a time when she found herself often in this position, hunched over, her throat surging, yesterday’s meal flecking her lips and a bottleful of tequila puddling the ground between her feet. She couldn’t stop herself. One drink always became ten drinks — and she would end every night swinging a fist or falling into bed with someone she couldn’t remember in the morning. She didn’t have any sort of excuse. Drinking was a way to antidote the boredom, the sense of purposelessness. Drinking was a way to numb the anger she always felt coiling inside her. Maybe. But in the end she believed it came down to the sort of person she was — a woman of great appetites.

Soon she will leave this place. And when she leaves, she will have escaped her old self, the old Clark. She will be able — they all will be able — to begin again. Lewis’s mother is dead, but she was already dead, a ruined vessel no different from the city presently rotting around her. Clark was doing her a favor; she was doing Lewis a favor. I am trying, she thinks. I am trying to make things better, trying to help. But she knows that the murder — no, the death; that’s a better way to think of it — the death of the old woman will weigh on her chest like a cold stone.

For the moment, though, she need only worry about Lewis. More than once in her life she has witnessed the unexplainable. A storm of dead crows raining from the sky. A plant, like a long green finger, that came twisting out of the ground when she spilled water from her canteen. The man with the parasite that grew so massive inside him that his belly distended and shifted as if from some alien pregnancy. The seers in the market who could read your past and future in your palm, in tea leaves, in the squiggly purple guts of rats. But never anything like the other night.

People have always spoken of Lewis as if he were and were not human. He has always struck her as a kind of weak phantom, a shade of a man, but it was not until he hurled her back against the pillar, not until she suffered against what felt like a giant, fiery pair of hands, that she understood what he was capable of and why they needed him on their side more than ever.

She knows — everyone knows — of his difficult history with the mayor. She knows about Thomas badgering him for guns and black powder. She came to the museum costumed as a deputy and made certain the owl observed her clearly. She is counting on his mutiny. But if Lewis discovers it was her — and who knows what he can see — then she knows her guilt over smothering an old woman will be the least of her troubles.

She rises to her feet and spits and takes a deep, calming breath. Over the years she has found ways to keep her temper in check. To breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth. To sketch out words on her palm with a fingernail: hate, mad, fuck, die. This helps settle her now — to loosen her coiled sense of confusion and loathing — as she races through the maze of streets.

She needs to hurry. If everything has gone according to plan, if her brother has done as she asked him to do, then they won’t have much time.

* * *

When York first climbs the gallows and swings from its noose, he uses a razor tucked in his palm to thin the rope to a few threads. Then the deputies march across the field, dragging the girl between them, and York descends the steps and momentarily loses his focus. In part it is her eyes, like polished balls of obsidian, but more than that it is her. The oval cut of her face, the regal way she holds her head. In her own way, she is beautiful. He stares at her dumbly until they march her up the thirteen steps of the gallows. Then he shakes off his trance and positions himself below, waiting for the trapdoor to open.

In his head he has rehearsed their escape so many times that it already seems a reality. There are four tunnels in the stadium, each as black as a skull’s sockets. Down one of them waits the mass of caterers and musicians who will take to the field following the execution. Down another tunnel huddle a few deputies, though most of them patrol the bleachers. The other two tunnels are unoccupied, the corridors to the south side of the stadium strewn with sand and half-collapsed. York has scouted them, picked the lock of a side door, stowed weapons and clothes in a nearby alley. The streets will be empty when he and the girl race to meet Clark.

But that’s not what happens.

The deputies fit the noose around her neck, and she looks to the sky as if in prayer. Her black eyes reflect the white-blue expanse swarming with vultures. Her body goes rigid, and York hears something then, though he cannot place the sound so much as he can feel the attendant shiver, the air like struck tin.

Vultures always swoop over the Sanctuary, but they come together now by the hundreds, more and more of them drawn from rooftops and thermals, coalescing into a spinning black funnel with the gallows as its axis. The crowd follows her gaze upward. They murmur and shrink in their seats as if they can sense what’s coming. And then it comes.

The cyclone collapses and all at once the vultures fall on the stadium. They are a terrible rain, but not the one everyone has been praying for. Big balls of air come rolling off their long-fingered wings, making a wind strong enough to raise dust devils all over the field. People squint their eyes and throw up their hands and cry out in voices that match the scratchy timbre of the vultures. Some of the birds land on shoulders and some of them swing by as if on wires. Their claws slash; their bald red heads dart in for a bite.

Four of them dive the gallows. Their wings are as wide as a man is tall, and so black that the sunlit air seems striped by midnight. The deputies do not have time to reach for their machetes. They barely have time to hold up their hands. One of the men reels back and falls from the ten-foot platform. The ground meets his back with a meaty thud that knocks the air from his lungs and leaves him momentarily paralyzed, too stunned to lift his arms and ward off the vulture that swoops onto his chest.

The other deputy — with a vulture pinned to his shoulder, his face cowled by its wings — falls onto the lever that opens the trapdoor. By this time, York has ducked beneath the platform, out of the sun, into shadow, away from the birds that sweep and dagger the air. So when the trapdoor swings open, when a square of light appears above him, when a body tumbles through it, when the noose catches and snaps, he throws out his arms and snatches her from the air.

They don’t have time to pause, but for a moment his body stiffens, arrested by the sight of her in his arms. Her expression is flat and her eyes give him nothing back, not hate or gratitude or fear, so he feels compelled to say something. “Hi.” And then, “I’m here to help.”

Something softens in her face and he feels relieved, as if from the pressure of a knife. She might fit easily into his arms, but she could hurt him if she wanted to. Impossible as it may seem, she is responsible for the vultures. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he does, and he accepts it with the awe of a child who watches a magician spit fire and spring bouquets from ears.

The crowd is still screaming and the vultures are still plunging when he puts her down and she slips the noose off her neck and grabs his hand and runs for the south tunnel. He finds himself hurrying after her, even though he is the one who should be yelling, Follow me!

Chapter 6

MOST OF THE sentinels live in a stucco building with shuttered windows next to the stables. There is a kitchen and latrine and common room on the ground floor, apartments on the upper three levels. Clark keys open her door and can barely shove her way inside, the floor so cluttered with rank piles of clothes and the named and unnamed objects she has salvaged from the Dead Lands. A broken blue mug. A golf club. A faded red can of Coca-Cola. A typewriter with rows of gleaming yellow teeth. A snow globe with a white-bearded, red-suited Santa inside it.

As soon as she closes the door behind her, she begins to strip, tearing off the deputy’s uniform and stuffing it beneath her bed. On the wall hangs a cracked mirror, mossy and veined with age, and she studies her reflection in it, her body pale, her face and hands rough and sunburned.

Then she picks up some clothes from the floor and smells them before pulling them on.

Her brother is safe, the girl is safe — for now. Deputies will gather. They will march the streets and knock on doors and overturn closets and pantries and basements and attics, and they will make black Xs on a map for the places they have already visited. Not only will the mayor appear a fool for losing the girl; he will appear a cruel god for upending every drawer in the Sanctuary in pursuit of her. Clark will be questioned once — within the next hour or so, she guesses — and Reed will vouch for her and her loyal service as a sentinel. A few days later, when the deputies seek her out again, she won’t be around for them to find.

Her mind vibrates; her guts feel feathery. She makes her hands into fists and presses them to her eyes. She could use a drink. Terribly. A few weeks ago, she promised Reed she would stop. Just like that. Like a door had closed, bolted. She relapsed once, the other day, after the death parade. She does get quivery when she passes a bar, when she sees people drinking or smells liquor on their breath, but the real trouble comes at night.

She dreams of drinking. Glass after glass. Gallons of whatever is being poured. Bathing herself in it. And when she drinks in her dreams, her knees do not wobble. Her words do not slur. Instead she is happy, unafraid. This feeling — a good feeling, warm and expansive — carries over when she wakes, feeling drunken, the world slippery around the edges, and sometimes it is an hour and two cups of tea later before she can shake it.

Now, as she lies back on her bunk, staring at the ceiling, her mind is drifting, her hand is reaching for a bottle that isn’t there.

When the door opens and Reed steps through it, she rushes out of bed and takes the back of his head and shoves her face against his and drinks deeply of him until he pushes her back with a confused laugh. “Okay,” he says, “okay. I assume this means everything worked out? They’re safe?”

“They’re safe.” She still holds him by the head, his braid wrapped in her fist. “You smell funny.”

“And you taste like bile. Want to trade more love poems?”

“You do. You smell.” Her eyes sparkle angrily. “You smell like some flower.”

“Forget about it. I sat next to some reeking woman at the stadium.”

“What woman? Her? You said you were done with—”

“I said forget about it.” He pushes her hair back from her forehead and kisses it. “What happened with Lewis?”

She releases him then and falls back into bed and forces her head into the pillow as if to suffocate the words, “It’s done. She’s dead.”

* * *

Lewis is not the only body in his bedchamber, but he is very much alone. He kneels over his mother in much the same posture as the one who murdered her. Her face is a ghastly rictus of pain. He draws back the sheet to reveal the slim length of her, like a bundle of sticks. He does not cry — he cannot remember the last time he cried; he doesn’t know if he is capable of it — but he embraces her, drawing her body toward him so that it arches, her head lolling painfully back. He holds her like this for a long time. And while he holds her, the night gathers outside and deputies shout in the streets and the room flickers with light as the owl projects over and over again the grainy image of the deputy smothering her.

* * *

As expected, the deputies come for Clark. They ask about her brother and she says, “Half brother.” They ask if she has seen him, and she says, “I throw him some coin if I see him performing, but we don’t talk much, not anymore.” She denies any knowledge of his whereabouts, expresses her disgust and astonishment, and says she will be the first to let them know if he comes crawling to her. Then she excuses herself. “I have to work.”

She paces the wall all through the night as a sentry and now it is dawn and her eyes buzz with exhaustion and with the competing thoughts that bump around inside her head like bees in a jar: the possibility that she may escape, the possibility that she may not, that she may spend the rest of her life caught in this globe, like the one she salvaged from the Dead Lands, with sand instead of snow churning through it.

She tries to concentrate on her hands and feet, finding a good grip on the ladder, the strips of rebar cemented into the wall, but even now her mind wanders, her hands curling around metal in much the same way they curled around the corners of the pillow pressed down on the old woman’s gaping face.

The sky is pinkening, the first bell ringing, the Sanctuary coming alive around her when she drops onto the roof of an ancient school bus, then its hood, then the ground. A halo of dust rises around her. The faded, sandblasted black letters of ST. LOUIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS still reach the bus’s length, but it has no wheels, the undercarriage sunken into the dirt like a wallowing beast. Its occupants stir awake. They tear aside the rags hanging in the windows and curse her for waking them. In response, she fights a yawn.

There are many farms in the Sanctuary, all of them guarded and gated off, and though she isn’t supposed to, she cuts through one of them now, climbing and jumping the iron-spiked fence, hurrying her way home. One of the sewage canals is diverted through the quarter acre, its many small channels oozing and buzzing with flies. She tromps past a raised box of sweet potatoes, another clustered with beans, another spiked with corn, others with barley, wheat. The dirt is dusted with bone meal and moistened with sewage, some cocktail of nitrogen and phosphate to increase yields.

Several gardeners wander around, irrigating and harvesting. One of them asks if she thinks she can do whatever she wants and she says, “Pretty much,” before climbing the fence and dropping down on the other side.

She walks down a tight, shadowy street, so tired that at first she isn’t sure she hears what she thinks she hears — a whisper — her name. But when she turns, she sees the man standing twenty yards behind her. The wind tunnels through this cement corridor and knocks his gray duster back to reveal the thinness of his figure. Lewis.

He is far enough away, and the wind gusting enough, that she cannot be certain how his whisper carried so far, as if he tossed his voice like a ball through the air. “Come.”

She feels her face redden with a rush of blood, her guilt announcing itself. She cannot find her voice at first but manages to strangle out a question, “What do you want?”

He says nothing, only stares at her with those cold blue eyes, before turning, his duster snapping grayly behind him like a spectral hand beckoning her.

She follows him, not knowing what he knows, not wanting to know. Everything hangs in the balance, as if poised at the edge of a great chasm, and she feels at once ebullient and fearful. She does not notice the street unscrolling beneath her feet — until she finds herself in Old Town and climbing the steps of the museum. They seem to shake, but it is she; she is shaking.

He does not hold the door for her and he does not pause once they enter, but continues forward without looking back, gliding through the entry with the golden compass emblazoned on the floor and continuing to a circular stone staircase that from the landing seems to wind down into tighter and tighter circles, like the inside of a shell.

“Where is the girl?” he says.

“Safe.”

“There are only so many places to hide.”

“They won’t find her. I can promise you that.”

“People are saying she called the birds down from the sky.”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“Only one way that’s happening.”

They descend three stories. At every landing, there is a doorway, and beside every doorway a lantern. By the time they enter the basement, shadow overpopulates light. Lewis tries a switch, but the bulb above them explodes with a spray of sparks. So he unhooks the entryway lantern and holds it ahead of him as he walks. She follows in her own private darkness while ahead he seems to float in a sputtering orange light that reveals the half-seen shapes of their surroundings — hallways that elbow into rooms full of shrouded paintings, glass-cased moths with eyes patterned on their wings, a harp with cobwebbed strings, a dust-clotted tiger with a raised paw and a snarl frozen on its face — stacked high all around them, sometimes with only a narrow corridor between. She rams her knee into a crate and six cockroaches come scuttling out from beneath it.

Lewis continues to creep along before her, his back hunched and bony. There is a smothering, airless feeling down here, and it is easy to imagine the light extinguished, the darkness collapsing all around her. It is easy to imagine Lewis pinning her to a velvet board, like one of his moths, making her a part of this vast, rotting collection.

Then he is standing before a giant American flag — a real one, not the mayor’s single-starred version — its stars and stripes stained and faded and untwining along the edges. He tears it away from the wall. They both cough at the dust that swarms the air and sleeves their throats, and when she calms her breathing, she notices the wooden door with the iron ring Lewis takes in his hand.

The wood has warped and the door has not been opened in many years, so Lewis must heave three times to expose even a thin black gap. He sets the lantern on the floor and takes the ring now with two hands — and at last the door opens with a groaning complaint.

The faint tang of oil breathes from the closet. Lewis holds the lantern into the space to battle back the shadows, and it takes Clark a moment to understand what she is looking at.

She recognizes them from books, from paintings and photographs. An arsenal of pistols and rifles, black barreled, with wooden and plastic grips, dozens of them neatly stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. “Are those—”

“Yes.” He clears his throat. “I’m not sure what else you have in the way of supplies, but we’ll need stores of water especially and—”

“What does this mean?” She is trying to read something in his face, doubting what he has shown her, doubting him. He does not appear excited or afraid, his expression resigned to a hard frown.

“It means I’ll go.” His face tightens and untightens. He speaks so quietly, as if he barely believes the words: “I’ll go.”

She is not the type to cry, but right then she feels a tear slip from her eye and down her cheek.

“But first, there’s one more thing you need to know.” With that said, he reaches up his sleeve and pulls from it a letter. “It concerns the girl.”

Chapter 7

NO ONE KNOWS where the flu came from. Some say a long black car pulled up to a gas station and from it stepped a black-haired man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm. Others say that late one night — for a few minutes, all over the town of Ames, Iowa — the faucets ran yellow, as yellow and as thick as melted wax, polluted by a terrorist or maybe some parasite loosed from deep beneath the earth. And still others say a featherless crow the size of a child tumbled down a chimney and onto a fire that charred it into a black pile of bones and sent a diseased cloud into the air all over town, one that people breathed into the pink pit of their lungs, where a burning sensation gave rise to a cough.

That was how the sickness began, with a cough, a needling itch at the back of your throat that grew steadily worse until it felt like your chest was clogged with burrowing ants that you must — you simply must — expel, barking raggedly into your hands until they were spotted with blood. Accompanying this was a fever so powerful that a wet washcloth steamed when placed on your forehead. Your brain cooked. Your vision went red, with twirling black flies along its edges. And all this time you were coughing, coughing, until it felt as though your guts might uproot and push out your throat.

One day, it was simply there, among the people of Ames, the virus rooting in their lungs like red-tipped mushrooms. The USDA labs were located there, level-four security clearance and host to every animal-borne pathogen in the world, from anthrax to bird flu to Ebola, and many speculated that it came from there, from an unwashed hand or an open laboratory window or a pricked finger. The deadliest viruses must meet three criteria. They must spread swiftly, by a cough, a kiss, a sneeze, a hand testing a melon at the supermarket or gripping a pole in a subway car. They must be unfamiliar to humans, so that antibodies cannot defend against them. And they must kill the infected. This virus met all three.

On average it took people five days to die. During that time, their chests collapsed inward with every hitching cough. Their throats rasped. Their lips bruised like wilting lilies. The blood vessels in their eyes burst and they wept blood and because they were propped up on their pillows the blood raked down their cheeks.

This was October and the leaves turned a shimmering gold and came loose from their branches and revealed the patterns of the wind, twisting and swirling along the streets, lawns, ballparks, making a clattering music. And when the wind kicked up and the leaves rushed past and clung to the leg of someone’s jeans, like a starfish, damp and splayed, they would hurriedly wipe it away, as if anything the air carried might cause harm.

When parents said, “You’ll catch your death,” they meant it, grabbing their children as they raced out the door to hand them a jacket, yes, but also a surgical mask. “Stay in the yard,” they said. Don’t breathe, they wanted to say.

It was unsettling, not trusting the air, lungs filling up like dark closets that might hide ghosts. Everyone bought masks. Not just surgical masks — because the stores emptied of them almost immediately — but carpenters’ masks, gas masks, even Halloween masks. Anything, no matter how ineffective, to make them believe they were choking away the germs.

Doctors prescribed medicine, but medicine did not help. Scientists gave the virus a name, H3L1—also known as Hell. It wasn’t long before the hospitals were full, before the schools closed, before the sidewalks in Ames crowded with reporters. Three people died. And then, in one night, three hundred. Everyone rushed to the grocery stores and pulled from the shelves cereals, pasta, granola bars, canned fruits and vegetables, bottled water, whatever would last even after the electricity snapped off. “The worst is happening,” they said. “The worst is here.”

In Ames, a Budweiser delivery truck pulled up to a Hy-Vee and an hour later pulled away. A Greyhound grumbled back and forth to Minneapolis, its tailpipe coughing along with its gray-faced passengers. A charter plane. A Japanese hatchback. A bicyclist stopping through on his way across the state. And all those letters licked closed. The sickness spread.

The infected rose from a hundred to a thousand to a million in a matter of days. There wasn’t time for quarantine. There was barely enough time to utter the word pandemic.

For a few days, everyone blamed Ames, so that the town felt like the eye of a black whirlpool with sunken lungs and broken ribs swirling through it. But then the sickness fingered its way across Iowa and into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri — spreading outward from the heartland — the country, the continent, the world. There was no one to blame anymore. And there was no difference between good and bad, young and old, or at least not that the sickness recognized. Everyone was eligible for death.

At a time when everyone should have stayed home — that’s what the television said, before the channels gave way to static, stay home—people instead went to church. At St. Cecilia’s in Grand Forks and at Trinity Lutheran in Chicago and at the United Methodist in Memphis, people wandered in and out throughout the day. The services and vigils were ongoing. The candles burned down to bubbling pools of wax. Everyone wore their masks, but the masks didn’t always help. They breathed each other’s breath and they tasted wafers and wine and they brought their hands together in prayer and they sang, how sweet the sound, until the coughing overwhelmed them and they hunched over and fell to their knees in awful genuflection.

The power went out. One minute refrigerators were humming, radios playing, lamps glowing, and the next, their mechanical brains went dark and silent. Those who were still alive brought matches to Sternos and sparked on their propane grills to cook. The police spray-painted black Xs across doors, the hieroglyphs of the infected, most of whom were already dead. All the windows of all the stores were gaping mouths broken by the bricks of looters, and in the evening the glass caught the last of the dying sunlight so that the streets of the towns and cities seemed to sparkle.

Then the horizon flashed, the air trembled, as if beset by constant thunderstorms. These were nuclear warheads. China was the first to fire. Then Russia. The United States responded in turn. And soon Britain and India joined them. The missiles scorched the sky, made blackened craters out of cities. When New York and then Boston vanished in a fiery pulse, the Atlantic Ocean poured into their smoldering craters and the steam of millions of ghosts blurred the sky. The nukes were meant as a last-ditch inoculation, to cease the spread of the virus, but they only hurried along the death of the world.

Nuclear power plants, one by one, after losing their power and their employees, after emptying their emergency backup generators, descended into a state of meltdown. Their containment caps cracked and the cracks glowed as red as magma and from them seeped a heated, poisonous breath.

In the nineteenth century, the sun had bulged and erupted and lashed the earth with billions of tons of protons and electrons, a geomagnetic storm unlike any other. The sky had whirled with auroras of colored light. Telegrams had vanished midtransmission. Telegraphs had smoked and erupted in flame, along with anything else plugged into the now sizzling circuits. Many believed the gates of heaven or hell had opened.

The effect was much the same when thousands of missiles shocked the ground and mushroomed the sky, when hundreds of power plants cracked open and disgorged their core. Those electrical grids still functioning now sparked and fried. Satellite and GPS signals scrambled. The energy released by the flares and explosions, caught in the earth’s magnetic field, splattered and raped the world. The wind rose and the clouds swirled in and took on a purplish red color and the air smelled like ozone. Radiation spiked. Rain blistered skin and yellowed grass.

For millions and millions of years, the biosphere was a contained environment. Nothing came from above, save for the occasional meteor, and nothing came from below, except for lava spewed from volcanoes. This changed when people began burning fuel, choking the seas and skies with CO₂, cranking up the temperature decade after decade. But there were more than four hundred nuclear power plants around the world, and the colossal radioactive energy released by them and by the missile strikes resulted in a supercharged global warming, the equivalent of a million volcanoes erupting at once.

The Gulf Stream, the northward current that followed the East Coast of North America and crossed to Europe and dropped to Africa, was one of the principal ways the world regulated its temperature. When the northern ice caps suddenly melted, the rush of frigid water shut down the circulatory cycle. At the same time, holes opened in the ozone layer, holes big enough for the moon to roll through. This created permanently unbalanced temperatures, unbalanced pressure systems, some sections of the globe hardening into permafrost, others furnacing so that anything green began to wither and crumble to dust.

Some people headed north; some people headed for the woods. Some hid in caves, where they gathered their rifles and sleeping bags and filled their backpacks with matches and food and clothes for all seasons. They chose the caves because they were isolated, easily defended, and maybe they chose them, too, because people felt already as though they were slipping back in history, to a simpler time dedicated to the gathering of food, the warding off of danger. They made fires and with the cinders drew upon the basalt walls pictures of bodies lying all about with Xs for eyes, a cipher for future generations to behold and puzzle over.

And some, like the citizens of St. Louis, made their last stand. They used bulldozers and cranes from construction sites to help fortify a perimeter, and then they killed any who approached it. Several National Guard units, outfitted in hazmat suits, disposed with a shot to the head any who exhibited the slightest symptoms. The bodies they hurled daily over the wall became part of their defense, a warning against any who might trespass. Some buildings, such as the hospital, they painstakingly drenched with alcohol and bleach. There were a million ways their plan could have gone wrong, but somehow it went right, and a year later, long after the observable world perished, they continued to thrive, and many believed the Sanctuary sterilized.

They were wrong.

This is why Danica descends the staircase with a lantern held before her. Her blond-white hair matches the cobwebs that cling to the walls and singe in her passing. Spiders scuttle from the light. She curls her lip but does not fear them. Even when they drop onto her arm or dash across her feet, she merely shakes them away. Maybe like isn’t the right word, but she has always admired spiders, their deadly elegance. As a child she would sometimes pluck gently at their webs, as if they were a harp’s strings, to draw their fat black bodies into the light. And she made a game out of hunting grasshoppers to tangle in their webs so that she could watch them feed.

This was once a basement, now a crypt. By law the dead are delivered to the morgue, where their remains are harvested. But the ruling class made an exception for itself, their bodies entombed beneath the Dome. The coffins are wood — it is dry enough that they will never rot — the name and likeness of the deceased carved elaborately into each lid. When they were married, Thomas took her down here and led her among the coffins and asked where she might like to be interred. He seemed taken by the place. She knows he comes down here often to lay his hands upon the coffins.

She is not here to commune with boxes of skeletons. She seeks something else. After Thomas toured her through the rows and rows of coffins, he said, “You’ll like this,” and led her to a metal door with a combination dial. He spun it one way, then the other, and back again — as she spied over his shoulder and committed the numbers to memory — before dragging open the vault. She was not sure of its original purpose, whether for money or safety, but it had since become a place where the Dome’s occupants store valuables, relics. There were stacked pyramids of red wine that long ago had turned to vinegar, canned food that no one had bothered or dared to open, velvet-lined jewelry boxes, stacks of crisp, worthless green paper money, a short-wave radio, a diamond-studded watch, satellite phones, memory drives, slick black tablets with fingerprints still streaked across them, all the useless valuables of another time. Among them she spotted some things that might still serve a purpose: city plans, the blueprints of buildings, vials of medicine with yellowed labels, vaccines that might have gone stale. Everything looked new. Nothing aboveground looked new. She marveled at it all, touching everything, until she came upon a polished black box in the far corner. Thomas grabbed her by the wrist when she reached for it. “No,” he said, and when she asked why, he told her.

She stands before it now. It is rectangular, like a miniature coffin, small enough to cup in one hand. She reaches for it, the first time without success, withdrawing her hand as if burned. She checks the doorway behind her. Her hand trembles when she reaches again, when she seizes it, and on the shelf leaves behind a dustless space.

There are many things that can kill a virus. Detergents can melt through their lipid envelopes. High temperatures can cook their proteins. Enzymes can damage their nucleic acids. And time. Most viruses, when exposed to air, will survive no more than forty-eight hours.

But there are ways to keep a virus, too. They are made of DNA or RNA, enclosed by proteins. So long as the proteins are maintained, the virus is preserved. Their small size, simple structure, and lack of water allow this. Scientists have discovered the DNA of Paleolithic men, even of velociraptors and megalodons, crushed into stone or ice. Chemicals can sustain them, as can low temperature, as can air-locked pressure, as can freeze-drying. This basement is full of coffins meant to preserve the remains of the elite — and she holds in her hand a miniature version of the same. The greatest of viruses.

When she asked Thomas why, why keep such a thing, he gave her a small smile and said, for the same reason we keep bears in cages, for the same reason this country stored fatal missiles in underground silos. “Because we like feeling we own death.”

She nearly forgets to close the vault behind her on her way out — and, twenty minutes later, at the stables, she nearly cries out when Reed lays a hand on her shoulder. She spins around to find him smiling at her. This is where he said he would meet her. He has hay in his hair and a pitchfork in his hand. He is mucking out the horse stalls with the rest of the sentinels. The air buzzes with flies. A horse with a white diamond on its muzzle whinnies and she flinches from the sound. His smile grows wider — and she feels the simultaneous urge to slap him and bed him.

There are others in the stables, brushing down horses, carting away manure, and her eyes dart to them before settling meaningfully on Reed. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.” He keeps his voice low, nearly a whisper. “Will you come?”

She pinches her mouth in a frown. “You know I can’t.”

He looks like he wants to argue the point further, but she shakes her head.

He closes his eyes and sighs through his nose. “You said you had something for me.”

She holds out the box — to show him, not to give him. “I do.”

“A gift?”

“Not a gift so much as a defense. A weapon.” She beckons him to follow her into an empty stall. “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying. About starting over. If the group lives — and you will. You will live. If the group lives and you make it as planned to Oregon, and if the landscape should appear as promising as you hope, you will come back for me, yes?”

“Of course I will.”

“But,” she says and taps his chest with a finger. “But.” If something goes wrong — if the people there prove hostile — he should find a way to gift this box to them and then ride as fast and as far as he can. It will wipe the area clean, and in another year, maybe two, they can return there and make it their own.

“What’s inside it?”

She presses it into his open hands. “The end of one world, the beginning of another.”

Chapter 8

AFTER LEWIS LEADS Clark into the basement, after he shares with her his store of arms and willingness to accompany them, he shows her the grate in the floor, the black square with a rusted ladder and cold, stale breath puffing from it. “We can use the tunnels to escape,” he says. “No one knows about them.”

She snorts a laugh and he asks her what’s so funny.

“You. You’re always convinced you know more than everybody else. Where do you think I sent my brother and the girl? There’s more than one unsealed grate in this city.”

She tells him the plan then. Now that Lewis is in, there will be six of them altogether. This past week, they’ve been humping supplies through the tunnels, secreting them in a building more than a mile beyond the wall. Matches, flour, knives, lanterns, needles, thread, bedrolls, hardtack, jerky, dried fruit, but mostly water, canteens and leather sacks sloshed full of water. And now they will add guns. The revolvers and rifles from the museum’s hidden arsenal.

The tunnels cannot accommodate their horses, and on foot they will not make it far — even if they escape pursuit. Summer is here. The burning face of the sun seems closer every day. By midmorning it hurts to breathe, like sucking on a pipe lit with dust. They will need horses — at least twelve of them, six for riders, the others to rotate out and carry supplies — and they will need to ride hard, before their water runs out, hopefully finding a more forgiving place.

“We leave tomorrow morning. Be ready.”

Lewis packs and unpacks and packs again. He paces his office and rubs his hands together with a dry, papery whisper. He does not know how to occupy himself, how to channel his excitement, near giddiness, such an unfamiliar feeling. So he tinkers. He loves to build things, puzzling together gears, soldering wires, fitting joints, creating something mobile and useful out of the scraps of a broken world. A clock that spins with the cycles of the moon. A sturdy set of glasses, each side hinged with a dozen lenses that fold up and down to magnify or telescope. A repurposed coffeemaker that sucks moisture from the air and pools it into a cup for drinking. For the past week, he has been building what he will never finish. A short-wave radio. He gathers parts, mostly from the bazaar, picking out tubes to clean, wires to thread. Knobs. Diodes. Switches. Capacitors. All of them cracked, decayed. He corded the radio into the outlet the other day and the thing popped and fuzzed with static, then grew suddenly hot, several of the tubes exploding in a glass shower. So he began again.

He imagines spinning the dial, for days, weeks, maybe months, finally coming across a voice. Maybe the voice would speak English, maybe not, someone hoping to be heard, no different from the transmissions fired into space so long ago. He would speak into the microphone, saying, Hello? Can you hear me? and the voice would go silent for a moment before calling back to him excitedly, manically.

The unfinished radio sits on his desk now. He fastens the antenna mast to the cabinet just as Ella enters the room without knocking.

“What is that?”

“A radio.”

“What use is a radio?”

“What use is anything in this museum?”

“I’m calling it a night. What do you want me to do tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.” He hands her a sheet of paper with a long list of errands, all of them outside. He needs her gone.

“This is going to take forever.”

“Yes.”

She starts for the door and he calls after her, “Oh, and Ella—”

“What?”

He opens his mouth. There is so much to say. Come tomorrow, he knows she will feel betrayed, and he worries about leaving her — worries what will happen once Thomas learns of his escape — but he cannot leave his life’s work unattended. For all her annoying qualities, he recognizes her as a fierce, clever girl. She will care for the museum and, if need be, fight for it should anyone try to shut its doors, salvage its materials.

She folds the sheet and then folds it again before giving up on him, vanishing down the hall. “Good-bye,” he calls after her.

* * *

Every morning, the gates open and a ranging party of eleven sentinels rides into the Dead Lands, the last among them seated on the back end of a Ford F-150 cut in half, retaining only its bed and rear wheels, two horses drawing it forward. They arrange their route in advance, working in a wider and wider radius of the wall since so much has already been scavenged. Sometimes they harvest whatever they happen upon — these are called opportunity strikes — as they work their way methodically through cars, homes, businesses, ripping open drawers, closets, cupboards, taking a hammer to a wall and wrenching out its guts. And sometimes, on targeted missions, the city engineers put in orders for copper, steel, wiring, wood, tires, brick, and when they return to the Sanctuary, the bed of the F-150 is heaped with rattling goods.

But not today.

Reed is already waiting at the gates. Clark nudges her horse forward, drawing up next to him. He will not look at her. His eyes are trained on the gates before them. She can see a forked vein throbbing in his forehead. She can hear the other horses falling into place behind them, the creak of leather, the rusty moan of the truck bed. She wonders if he feels as she does now, her stomach a roiling pit, as if she is at once starved and ready to throw up. There is no going back. They are leaving — they are leaving everything and everyone they know — and they can return only if they want their heads decorating pikes.

A slump-shouldered guard tromps toward them. He fights a yawn, barely awake. His hand rattles a set of keys, the keys for the lock, the lock meant to keep people in more than keep the world out. He fumbles them and the keys fall between his feet, like a brass insect that might scurry away. Clark resists the impulse to loosen her foot from her stirrup and kick him in the head.

“You ready?” she says to Reed.

A thought seems to pass his face. What is it? The way his jaw tightens, the way his eyes flit sideways to briefly acknowledge her, she thinks it might be hesitation. She hopes not. The others will look to him as an example. Any weakness on his part will be contagious. She feels the very opposite of indecision — a wild, desperate propulsion that makes it nearly impossible to steady her horse, keep from charging forward.

The sentry scoops up the keys and shakes them until he finds the one he wants. He scrapes it into the lock, twists it sideways. There is a click. He then, with the help of another, hefts the bar bracing the two massive doors. They moan under its weight, staggering to the edge of the doorway, where they drop it with a clang.

The sentry then brings to his lips a bone whistle — and blows — signaling their departure.

She tries to concentrate on anything else. Something tangible. Something to distract her from what they are about to do. The crow’s feather caught in her horse’s mane. The bluebottle fly that orbits her head. The thin crack of sunlight running down the middle of the gate, splitting open now to accommodate their horses as they spur forward.

* * *

Clark chooses a Kwik Trip gas station as their meeting place. The pumps are strangled by brittle brown vines. A skeleton in a leather jacket sits at the wheel of a van parked out front. The trees surrounding it are thickly spiderwebbed, like sick clouds that might rain the bones and shrouded bundles tangled up in them. The convenience store was long ago raided, the shelves empty of anything but dust. The glass doors remain intact, though scoured and filmed by wind.

They stack their supplies in the entryway — weapons and food and clothes — bunched into piles to load onto each horse. Lewis waits with three others. The first, a doctor with a pruned face and long gray curiously knotted hair. She accompanied him through the sewers with a lantern and a brittle map. She pinches a pipe between her lips. In one breast pocket she carries sulfur-tipped matches and in the other tobacco. The pads of her fingers are stained the same yellow as her teeth. Her words carry smoke when she tells Lewis how Clark came to her, just as she came to him, and told her the way it would be. “There’s no denying her. She’s a force.”

“But why you?”

“I suppose we can rule out physical strength, so that leaves me to guess you all might need a little mothering along with your medicine. Far as I can tell, that’s what’s brought her back to my office again and again these past few years. A little mothering.”

“And you’re willing to say good-bye to everything you know to serve as our wet nurse?”

“I’m a doctor. And you won’t be sucking on my tit; that’s for sure. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing for any of us. Anything is better than nothing.”

The second man Lewis knows, but not well. York, the street performer, Clark’s half brother. They nod at each other in greeting but don’t offer a hand. He sits on the counter with his legs swinging and his mouth crooked into a smile. Lewis has always considered him a fool. This has something to do with his appearance — with his brightly dyed clothes and the triangular sideburns carved onto his cheeks — but more so his behavior, his voice always loud, his manner always theatrical, everything out of his mouth seeming to twist into a joke.

And then there is the girl, Gawea. The mere thought of her seems to weigh down the pocket where Lewis keeps the letter. Since it came into his possession, he has read and reread it. The one addressed, impossibly, to him. He doesn’t know how to explain it any better than he can explain the curious energy that sometimes possesses him. Maybe he will begin by describing his own disbelief. How, when he first picked the letter up, he thought he misread its script. He tried to untangle the letters and weave them into other names, but they kept coming back to his own.

To Lewis Meriwether—

That is how the letter opened. He sees its contents everywhere: written in pitted concrete, in beetle-bitten bark. A centipede tracks a sentence in the sand. Smoke from a chimney wisps into words.

Your dreams are true. You are not alone. I don’t mean there are others alive. There are, of course, but you have always guessed that to be the case. I mean there are others like you — gifted, special — including the girl I have sent to you, Gawea. She will guide you in more ways than one. Come west. I insist.

Aran Burr

He asks where Gawea is and York throws up a hand, his thumb indicating the square of space behind the counter. Lewis slowly approaches. He does not know what to expect from her, what she might look like or how she might greet him. She does not appear in a shaft of sunlight. She does not levitate several feet off the ground. She does not shout out his name. When he rounds the counter, he finds her lying on the floor, curled up in a nest of blankets, asleep. She is just a girl, not much older than Ella. Her skin is tanned and drawn tight over her bones, offset by the white bandages that wrap her wounds. Her black hair falls over her cheek like a tattered wing.

“Leave her alone,” York says. “She needs her rest.”

At that her eyes snap open. They seem at odds with the daylight. Their blackness reflects his looming figure, as if he were an amorphous pupil floating in them. He takes his hands out of his pockets and then puts them back in and says, at a stutter, “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

* * *

When Clark exercises, jacking out push-ups or lunging to the floor, rather than rushing through fifty reps, she focuses on intervals of five. It cures her of her impatience and makes the overall sum seem more manageable. For this reason she keeps her eyes on the Witness Tree. It is like some giant bony hand escaping the underworld, its bare branches reaching up to claw the sky. She rides toward it, and only it, knowing if she thinks only about the horizon, about the many months and thousands of miles that lie ahead of her, she may go mad with impatience. One step at a time. She will focus on a tree, then a building, then a hill, maybe a mountain, whatever increments might draw her forward.

But first, the Witness Tree. This, she knows, is where she will lose sight of the wall and the wall of her. And now, with one last dig of her heels, she hurries past it, and the dark-eyed buildings pinch around her. She slows her horse, and the others match her speed, clopping over broken bits of asphalt, threading around cars, kicking through tongues of sand, trotting down tree-lined avenues with the branches knit loosely overhead and the sunlight falling through them to brighten the ground like shards of glass.

They make their way through a business district and enter a neighborhood of ruined bungalows corralled by chain-link fences clotted with leaves and needles and rust. Today they are supposed to return with screws and nails and lumber, two-by-fours and two-by-sixes especially. She can hear the cart twenty yards behind her, bouncing along and rattling with hammers and saws and screwdrivers and crowbars. With these tools they check decks and porches for treated cedar or polyethylene, tear open drywall for the studs hidden beneath, coffined all this time, only some of them free from rot by weather or termites. But not today.

To their right, the houses fall away into a park whose lush green lawn long ago gave way to patches of yellowy cheatgrass. A rag-tangled body with a thatch of hair still clinging to its skull lies on a bench and gapes at them. A plastic slide has faded from red to a faint pink, cracked like a dried-up tongue. The jungle gym is hairy with weeds. A flower-patterned bike lies abandoned, half-buried in the dirt.

She leads her horse into the park and the others follow. She knows what she needs to do, but for the moment she can only stare at the jungle gym and imagine this as a place where children once played.

A voice calls behind her. “Is something the matter?” When she doesn’t answer, the voice calls out again, “What are we doing?”

She hopes they won’t fight back. She wants them to make their way home safely, to tell everyone what has happened, to spread the dream of their mission and the promise of their return — before Thomas can warp Clark into a traitor. She plans to cuff their ankles and wrists, to steal their horses. They are only a little more than a mile from the wall and should be able to hop or crawl home before dark. Unless something — spiders or snakes or worse — finds them.

Clark swings her horse around and nods at Reed. The two of them separate from the nine, their horses slowly retreating. Reed withdraws two revolvers. She does the same. Their hands shake. The nine rangers — two women, the rest of them men — stare at the sunlight gleaming from the gunmetal and then settle their gaze on Reed.

“It’s time for us to say good-bye,” he says.

* * *

Gawea might smile at Lewis, but her face has a woodenness that makes it difficult to read. She stands. She walks toward him and he can’t help but take a step back. A bloodied bandage scarves her neck. She motions to it, excusing her lack of voice. He is more than a foot taller than she, but there is something about her that makes them seem the same height.

She reaches out both her hands, one of them bandaged, the wrappings looping her palm and binding her wrist. It takes him a moment to realize he should respond in kind. He is not used to touching others, not to embrace, not to shake hands, not even to brush up against on the street. It’s more than the intimacy — it’s the sense of getting rubbed away. But in this case, when his hands fall into hers, he does not feel drained so much as he feels charged, fuller. More confident and excited than ever about what might lie ahead.

“It’s true? It’s really true? You’re going to take us — you’re going to take me to him?”

She nods.

“Why?”

Again she motions to her neck. Then she brings a finger to the counter and cuts through the thick dust, writing out: U R THE NEXT.

“I am the next? What does that mean?”

Gawea is about to write something more when the doctor says, “Think I hear something.” The sun is reaching higher — the windows are beginning to glow — and the doctor leans into the glass with pipe smoke coiled around her, her stare fixed on the road.

Something scuttles by the glass doors. A shadow falls across the floor, just for an instant, as if the sun blinked. Lewis cannot distinguish a shape. It is too fast, moving at a blur, and the doctor is standing in the way of it. “There’s something out there,” she says, taking several steps back.

A rasping sound comes from the wall, as if something is trying to claw its way inside.

“Arm yourself,” Lewis says, and they each snatch up a rifle. The doctor and York hold theirs awkwardly, studying them, rearranging their grips.

Lewis has never fired a weapon, but he has studied them, cleaned them, broken them down and built them back up, and he models for them now: finger off the trigger, palm beneath the forestock, butt against the shoulder.

A long silence gives way to a thundering, the swelling sound of horse hooves headed their way. “They’re coming,” York says, and all of their attention now swings toward readying their supplies.

They have organized a different pile for every horse, each containing clothes, food, canteens, knives, matches, ammunition, rifles rolled into blankets. Lewis’s pile, at the end, rises taller than the others, a tidy pyramid built from a compass, many maps, his owl, three silver canisters packed with his medicine, quills and ink and a blank calfskin journal kept shut by a long bicuspid braided through an eyehole loop.

Clark and Reed appear in a storm of dust and dismount and yell at everyone to hurry, move their asses, and Lewis finds his thoughts twined up and his body startled out of his control. The doors are swinging open and closed, open and closed, with rusty shrieks. Everyone is racing back and forth, scooping up their gear, yelling — yelling at him, he realizes — and only then does he rush forward and stumble and knock his pile in many directions.

Everyone is waiting for him, their horses snorting and spinning in circles. He processes his surroundings in flashes — Reed staring back the way they came; York smiling down at him and saying, “So this is the way it’s going to be?”; Clark jabbing her finger at an empty mount and telling him to move.

The horse — a roan with a gray muzzle and dark-socked legs — shifts away from him when he tries to fill her saddlebags. He chases her one way, then the other, slowly sorting his gear, wasting more minutes and earning the curses of the other riders. When he tries to foot his weight into a stirrup, he grabs hold of the reins and the horse rears and begins to clop slantingly away from him. “No,” he cries. “No. Stop.”

He is about to ask for help when he notices Clark go rigid in her saddle. Everyone has fallen silent, their eyes on something behind Lewis.

He knows he will not like what he sees. And he is right. A huddle of spiders slink toward them. A dozen of them. As big as dogs. They scuttle from behind the gas station, over and around the pumps, all of them long legged and big butted and spiked with tiny blond hairs. Their many eyes gleam like gems. Their mandibles dangle from their snouts like deadly mustaches.

They pause at the pumps, ten yards away, rasping their mandibles, stuttering their legs. The horses snort and whinny. They stomp their hooves, fighting the commands of their riders. Then, from around the side of the gas station, comes a spider larger than the rest. First there are only legs. They move with a hypnotic needling, like the whirring of a magician’s fingers before revealing some horror. Then its segmented body, a hairy fist of a face. Some of the eyes appear blinded, scarred through with what look like slash marks. It reaches one leg forward and pauses it in the air, as if to point.

The other spiders start toward them.

Reed lifts his revolver and Clark says, “No! The sound will carry to the Sanctuary.”

She spurs her horse toward Lewis, and he finds himself frozen in their shadow. She raises a hand. He wonders at first if she is going to strike him. Instead she gathers his reins into her fist, steadying the roan. “What’s wrong with you?”

He doesn’t like how high his voice sounds when he says, “I’m not used to moving so quickly!”

He can hear the patter of the spiders’ many legs closing in on him like a dry rain.

Her eyes flash between him and the spiders and the road ahead. Then she grabs him by the arm and helps him onto her own horse and tells him to lasso his arms around her waist and hold on for his very life.

* * *

Thomas receives the news in the atrium. This is a vast, high-walled garden built onto the Dome. Flowers spring brightly from pots and hanging baskets. Water drips from them like tears. Paths made from paver stones run between boxed beds crammed with potatoes, onions, corn, squash, beans, sunflowers. Some have, some have not. Thomas is happy to have. All those who have — among them the council members — have certain things available to them that others do not, including access to the atrium and a seemingly depthless access to water. Or that’s how it feels to Thomas anyway.

The ceiling is netted with wire mesh to contain the dozens of birds that nest in the colored boxes that stand on poles. Three peacocks roam about, their feathers a ghostly white and their eyes so red they do not look like eyes at all but the beaded blood that wells from blinded sockets. When they walk, their claws scratch the paver stones and their necks dodge forward and back. Every now and then they stiffen their bodies and fill the atrium with a banshee cry. Thomas likes to take his meals here, at an ironwork table, with the peacocks strutting and the songbirds whistling and flitting around him.

His wife sits across from him. Her hair is pulled back into a braid, making her face appear even more pointed than usual. Despite the heat, Danica wears a thin, open-throated sweater. Her plate remains full. She never eats much — but at a standard meal she will at least prod at her salad. Her chair is angled away from him. She sits so still that a yellow-breasted bird lands on her plate and pecks at the pile of grasshoppers braised with vinaigrette.

He peels a shriveled orange and eats it in three chunks and spits the seeds onto the ground. “Something is bothering you.”

“No.”

“You’re just not hungry?”

“I’m just not hungry.”

“Ah.”

The door to the kitchen swings open and Rickett Slade ducks through it and marches toward them without pausing to request an audience. A peacock stands on the path before him. At his approach, it unfurls its tail into a fan with a steely rattle of feathers. Slade does not pause. It appears he will crush it, or kick it aside, but at the last moment it skitters to make way for him.

Thomas dabs a napkin at the corner of his mouth. “What?”

Slade towers over them. The breath whistles from his nose. “Two rangers are unaccounted for, among them their captain.”

“Unaccounted for?”

“Gone. Missing.”

“Well, what do you think has happened to them?”

“They have left.”

His hand crushes the napkin. “The Sanctuary?”

“Yes.”

“You mean to tell me that they have left the Sanctuary and deliberately not returned?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because the sentinels they held at gunpoint told me.”

“Guns? Gunpoint? Who has guns to point? What are you talking about?”

“They do. We assume they are somehow in league with the girl.”

Thomas absently wipes his mouth. “This is a little hard to take.”

“There’s more.”

“Of course there is.”

“Your friend, the curator, Meriwether. He is also unaccounted for.”

“Impossible.”

The bird remains at his wife’s place setting. Its claws scratch the plate. Its head darts and its beak pecks at a grasshopper, punching holes in the body, mangling it beyond recognition. She will not look at him, her face as blank as the pale sky above. She seems to be holding her breath. So does the world. Everything motionless except the bird as it tears patches in the grasshopper.

Thomas clears his throat and straightens his posture and wipes the crumbs from his lap, and in a voice that sounds far too calm to be his own, he tells Slade thank you. He tells him to leave. He tells him to return in an hour. By that time he will have made a decision. In the meantime he needs to think.

Slade’s eyes flit to Danica before he departs the atrium.

When the door closes, Thomas lunges across the table and brings his hand down on the bird. Its wings snap open, but he strikes it before it can take flight. It has grown lazy, living in the atrium, imbued with a false sense of safety. He catches and breaks its left wing. The plate shatters. His palm bleeds. The bird calls out, then flutters off the edge of the table and flops on the ground, where he pursues it, stomping once, twice, until its body stills and smears. Blood bursts from its beak.

She will not look at him, not even when he says, “What do you know of this?”

“Nothing.”

He grabs her by the arm. The sweater is thick enough that he cannot feel her, one more thing coming between them. “I know you’ve been fucking him.”

“That’s how this marriage works, isn’t it? We fuck other people.”

He yanks her from the chair. It overturns with a clatter and her body spills to the ground. She gives him a baleful stare. Her hair has come loose from its braid in white filaments. Thomas says, “You share a bed with someone, you share secrets. What did he tell you?”

Her eyes shine with tears. “I said I know nothing.”

He stares at her — and she stares back, her eyes too white around the edges and her teeth bared. He grabs her by the throat with one hand and with the other scoops up the dead bird and mashes it into her mouth. That is how he leaves her, gagging out its broken body, scraping feathers from her tongue.

* * *

Lewis clutches Clark and keeps his eyes on the surrounding city, certain that at any second, more spiders will drop from trees, wolves will explode from doorways, snakes will twist from porches and pursue them.

He has read about Chernobyl. He knows, in the years that followed the nuclear meltdown, in the two thousand square miles surrounding the power plant, biodiversity exploded. Radiation can result in a kind of accelerated evolution, mutagenesis. Many of the mutations die out. Some are merely deformed. But others grow stronger, accommodating the harsh conditions. After World War II, mutagenic breeding in plants resulted in strange colors, better taste, tougher hulls, but also in disease- and cold-resistant strains of everything from rice to wheat to sunflowers to cocoa to pears that became a sizable portion of harvested crops. Useful mutants.

He knows that the world has become a furnace. St. Louis was not hit by nukes, but the radiation sloshes through the air and soaks the ground and will linger for centuries, cesium 137 and strontium 90 serving as a different kind of vitamin for animals and insects. This is why wolves are hairless and spiders oversized. This is why some people are misshapen with tumors, born with withered limbs and milky, blind eyes and veins that seem to grow on the outside of their skin. And maybe—maybe—this is why he is the way he is. A mutant. Another example of the world moving on. But he is not alone. He has the girl now, Gawea. She did not call him a freak. She called him the next. They are the next.

They ride. Sometimes they gallop and sometimes they canter, but for half a day, they do not stop. They take to the roads when the roads permit, but more often the asphalt is buckled, riven. So they ride through yards and over collapsed fences. They dart through the dried maze of Forest Park. They follow ditches. They chase the shoulders of highways. Stalks of mullein thwap and stain the horses’ breasts yellow. Dried brush claws at their flanks. Sand and cinders kick up in clouds and muddy their eyelashes. They tie handkerchiefs around their mouths to breathe. In the sand, every hoofprint leaves a clear impression, their granular passage there for any to follow, on occasion zigzagging, but otherwise unfurling west. They cannot hope for rain, but with time the wind should chase away some of their tracks.

Already they have gone farther than Clark has been before. They do not speak. The wind whisks dust off branches and it falls through their translucent shadows. With every clopping step, the air seems to vibrate. At strange noises before and behind them they pause and pet their snorting horses and try to shush them so that they might listen better.

When Clark hesitates, reining her horse one way, then another, confused about their direction, the girl waves them forward and digs in her heels and takes the lead. Clark and Reed make eyes — a question crushed into their stare — and then follow her.

They leave behind the city, the suburbs, and break away from the freeway to follow the cracked clay of the Missouri River. Here, in a silver pocket of shade beneath a bridge, they finally pause for water. Their horses foam with sweat. Their legs tremble and jump. They aren’t breathing so much as heaving. Lewis feels as though he is riding even after he dismounts from Clark’s horse, the ground seeming to rock, as if he is in two worlds at once.

York guzzles at a canteen, and Clark twists her brother’s ear and drops him to his knees. “Only a taste, you idiot,” she says.

The dry riverbed looks like the passage of an enormous snake, the stones running along its bottom like shed scales. A gabled house sits on a bluff overlooking it. The windows are broken, but curtains still hang from them. Their tattered forms move with the wind, rising and falling, so that it looks like there might be bodies in there still breathing. In a way, this is their great gamble — that out here, in the Dead Lands, there is yet life.

Gawea sits in the shade with her hand pressed to her throat. The doctor approaches her, asking if she’s all right, asking to check her bandages, and though the girl tries to wave her off, she eventually relents to the doctor’s fussing. The doctor makes a tsk sound at the dust-caked wounds beneath and digs around in her satchel for cleansing alcohol and fresh dressing. And she hands out to the rest of them a dented can of ointment and tells them to smear it anywhere they feel blisters rising. “You need to tell me where it hurts,” she says. “I’ll take care of you.”

Lewis leans his weight on one leg, then the other. The insides of his thighs burn. The muscles at the small of his back have gathered into a fist. His center sloshes. He opens his silver tin and fills his fingernail twice, snorting and sneezing and shivering with fresh energy.

He does not complain — but his expression is plain for any to read — because Clark approaches him and speaks with the steady, placating voice you would use on an aggrieved child. “No whining.”

“I haven’t said a word.”

“This is only the beginning.”

“I understand that.”

“From now on, you ride your own horse.”

“But I don’t—”

“Come here.”

She seizes the reins of the roan he earlier had not been able to mount, and she leads it toward him. Its sweat smells of sweet, scorched paper. Black jelly runs from one of its eyes. Its mane is clumped and wet, its coat spotted with burrs. It breathes with an asthmatic wheeze. “Why did you give me this horse?” he says. “It’s obviously a terrible horse.”

“It’s a fine horse. But it’s our oldest. And tamest. Tame seems to suit you.”

Clark digs into a satchel and scoops out a handful of dried corn. She indicates that Lewis should take it from her, and he does, with two hands brought together to make a bowl. The horse sniffs. Its lips curl back to reveal teeth that look more like broken shells. Its long pink tongue, filmed over white, works every last crumb from his hands.

When it finishes, it raises its muzzle to sniff him. He raises a hand, too fast, and it flinches. He says, “Sorry, sorry.” This time he draws his hand slowly toward its neck, and the horse lets him. There is hair and there is skin and there is muscle, not a trace of cushioning fat. The neck ripples under his hand.

“Does he have a name?”

“He’s a she,” Clark says. “We call her Donkey.”

Minutes later, when they straddle their horses and chase their shadows west, Lewis falls immediately to the rear of the company and chokes on the dust they kick up.

They ride on — into what was once a pasture or a field, now a flat stretch of land remarkable only for the scalloped texture and pink color, a vast nothing. That is how he quantifies these sand flats and bone-dry canyons and skeletal forests and sunken-roofed towns — as nothing. All these years, all those books — he has built kingdoms in his skull. The world within him is full. The world without, empty.

They come upon a town and ride through an amusement park, through the mouth of an enormous clown, through an alley of rotten stuffed animals and a dunk tank full of sand, past the rusted remains of Tilt-A-Whirls and roller coasters and drop towers and Gravitrons, past a carousel whose fiberglass horses have faded and cracked like the wings of dead butterflies.

It is then, as the Ferris wheel looms before them like a mechanical moon, that Lewis believes he sees a man. A man in white. He sits in one of the Ferris wheel cars, near the top, appearing at first a blaze of light, what must be the sun on metal, but no, from the rocking back of the horse, if Lewis concentrates, he can make out pieces of the man — hair blown about his face in smoky tendrils, a silver ring on a hand raised in greeting, a ragged robe like a dove’s torn wing. Lewis’s lungs constrict and can’t find enough air. Every hair on his body goes erect. The air seems to shimmer. He knows the man. He phantoms through Lewis’s dreams, always far away, always beckoning. And now the man has a name, Aran Burr.

Then the fairground barns close around Lewis, and he is traveling down a shadowy chute between them, the smell of cattle and hogs somehow still in the air. Every few minutes, the others are in the habit of turning in their saddles to check on him, dawdling their horses to make up for the sometimes thirty, sometimes seventy yards he trails behind. Now he slows more than ever, so enchanted by the sight of the man that he might turn around to assure himself he was real, when Clark drops back to pace him. She wears a neckerchief over her nose. It is damp in the shape of her mouth. He can barely hear her voice over the roaring wind and the pounding hooves. She is asking if he is okay.

“I thought I saw someone.”

She pulls down the neckerchief. Loose strands of her hair catch in her mouth and she spits them out. “You didn’t see anyone.”

“I swear I did.”

“You didn’t. Now, come on.”

They reach the edge of town, but before they head into the open country, they ride through a dozen pyramids, each one a heap of blackened bones, what must be hundreds of bodies, heaved here and splashed with gasoline and lit with a match in the hope that fire might stop the flu.

They ride through cars whose tires have rotted away like black socks. They ride by school buses full of skeletons. They ride past fallen barns bordered by silos that look like the missiles that once fell from the sky. They ride past what were once fields, now sandy barrens interrupted by dead cattle, their ribbed impressions like roots or tubers that failed to take purchase.

There is no trail to follow so they make their own. They ride in fear of what lies before them and what lies behind. They ride in pain, but they know pain already or they would not have come, so they ride through the pain in the hope that it will one day lessen. And when night comes, they ride still, following the stars, trying not to worry about what might await them in the dark. They ride through the night. Lewis wakes with a start when his horse lurches beneath him, sliding down a steep grade, and he wakes again in time to jerk his head away from a branch clawing toward him like a hand. Only when dawn breaks behind them and the sun rolls across the empty blue bowl of the sky and chases the shadows to the corners of the earth and glares furiously down at them do they stop to rest, at last.

* * *

The police headquarters is a rectangular, gray-stoned building with courtrooms in its upper stories and windowless holding cells in its basement. Thomas pushes through the entry, into a shadowy, squared-off room with the seal of St. Louis on the floor, benches along the walls, and a desk manned by a deputy. Slade leans over the deputy and jabs his finger at a map of the Sanctuary.

Thomas overhears the word mutiny and clears his throat and the two men raise their eyes to consider him.

“You told me an hour,” Slade says.

“It turns out I didn’t need that long.”

Everything will be all right. He has every confidence that he can manage a situation only temporarily out of his control. On the walk here he could feel his thoughts sticking, clumping, like dust on a wet eye.

Now Slade tells him, “You should have requested an escort.”

“I can’t walk around my own city?”

“No, you can’t. There are plenty who would like to kill you.”

“I want you to take me below.”

“Below?”

“I want you to take me to see Jon Colter.”

His lips might thin. The skin might tighten around his eyes. Otherwise, Slade’s face is as hard and featureless as the stone blocks stacked into walls around them. “I’ll get the keys.”

There is a wind turbine located on top of the building, and the lights pulse on and off at a steady rhythm, so that after a while you get used to the passing darkness, as if a great eye were opening and closing. Slade does not bother to fetch a lantern, so every few paces they pause and wait for the lights to brighten again.

When Slade keys open the door at the top of the stairs, the smell comes rushing out and nearly knocks Thomas back. It is almost tactile, something that grows hair and pisses and shits, something that can crawl down your throat and claw out your insides. He brings a hand to his nose so suddenly he slaps himself. His eyes film over with tears.

Slade says nothing, but his mouth horns at one corner, the beginning of a smile. He leads Thomas down the stairs. With each step his boots thump and his keys rattle, but over the top of this Thomas can hear something else. The sound of many people breathing, like an uncertain wind. A voice muttering. A moan that goes on so long it becomes a wretched song.

At the bottom of the stairs, before a caged door, the lights fade and black out and they wait there for a few long seconds. The noises grow louder. Thomas can hear feet padding against concrete. Hands gripping bars and rattling them. A stream of urine splattering the bottom of a bucket. Whispers.

The lightbulb above them sizzles to life. Slade unlocks the door and the two of them pass through and it shuts behind them with a clank. To their right reaches a cinder-block wall — and to their left, ten cells, their bars a chipped white. Several of the men are naked. Their hair is long and matted. The ones who are white are as white as grubs from lack of sun. Some of them crouch in a corner; some lie on their cots and observe the visitors with craned necks. Others press their faces between the bars, like this man, who looks like a skull with slimy hair and who hisses and spits until Slade slams a baton against his hand and sends him whimpering to the floor.

There are only two lights socketed into the length of the room. They dim and die just as Thomas and Slade reach the final cell. In the bewildering darkness Thomas tries to remember how close he stands to the bars and wonders how far a man might reach. He can hear someone, in the near distance, breathing. He imagines fingers ghosting through the air, grabbing hold of his neck.

He waits, and he waits, what feels like an interminable length, and just as he is about to call out a question to Slade and ask if something is wrong, a surge of light brightens the air. He blinks until he finds his focus.

The man at first appears like some shadow that clings to the cell. He stands with his back to them. He has been imprisoned here as long as Thomas has been mayor, a year now, but confinement has not softened him. One of his arms is raised and his back and shoulders jump with muscle. He is short but square, built like a blunt weapon. His attention is focused on the wall, which he has sketched over, made into a mural. In his fingers he pinches a piece of metal, maybe a nail, and he uses this to scratch the concrete. There are many-headed beasts battling men with swords, naked bodies twined together in lust or combat, severed heads trailing ropes of blood, skeletons dancing, every inch of wall etched into some curious detail. The floor, too, has been sketched over. And small bits of stone carved into what look like trolls, fauns, beasts.

“Turn around,” Thomas says.

The man adds some flourish, a horn on a head. “There.” He drops his hands to his hips and turns to face them. The light is faint, making every line on his body stand out with shadow. The muscles rippling across his stomach. The scars, too. There are many of those. He appears like several bodies stitched together, many membranes of skin pulled taut and discolored, the most noticeable of them across his face. The left side of it has been torn away, one eye like a white egg deep in a nest of scars. His ear merely a hole, the hair around it gone and the skin a mottled gray. His teeth reach across his cheek, so that half his face appears always gathered up in a grin.

“You’ve been busy,” Thomas says.

“Have to find a way to pass the time. Otherwise, a man’s likely to go crazy.” His voice sounds rough-edged, rusted out. “You’ve come to say you’re sorry?” His permanent half smile makes it difficult to tell whether he’s joking.

“I’ve come to offer you your freedom,” he says to Colter, first in darkness and then in light, as the lights sizzle off and on. “And ask for your help.”

Colter’s tongue worms along his bottom lip. “Why would I want to help you?”

“Because this”—Thomas steps close enough to the cell to knock the bars with an open hand—“is your alternative.” The clang of metal shakes the air.

Colter runs a finger along his arm, tracing the purple ridge of a scar. “What about my wolves?”

“Still alive. Still scaring children. We’ve kept them at the zoo.”

“All of us in cages, eh?”

“Not anymore. Not if you bring me back some heads.”

The lights crackle off again, and in the dark the men keep their silence. Several seconds later, there is a sputtering hum and the air goes from black to gray to yellow, and Thomas sees that Colter has crept closer, to the very edge of the cell, his fingers curling around the bars to either side of his ruined face when he says, “Let me out then. Let me out and bring me my wolves.”