The Dead Lands

Chapter 29

NORTH DAKOTA CONTAINS one of the richest oil fields in the world — estimated at one time as 503 billion barrels deep — and there are thousands and thousands of gas and oil wells there among the derricks and refineries and pipelines, the herds of snow-humped trailers and clusters of water trucks, the power transmission towers, the radio towers, the wind turbines, the natural gas pumping stations, the oil-loading train yards full of black tankers.

Once the wells were abandoned, the emergency generators kicked on, but after two weeks they ran out of diesel. High pressures matched against high temperatures resulted in explosions resulted in fires. There was no one to man the water sprayers, no one to cap the wellheads. The relief valves only fed the flames that could not be stopped, that will never stop. North Dakota will burn forever.

The air is thick with carbon, with dioxins and furans and lead and mercury and chromium. There is no night here, the horizon lit by flares, snapping pennants of colors red and white and blue. They flame against a black sky made blacker by the rank, sooty smoke.

This makes for a kind of nuclear winter, Lewis tells them.

The cold begins soon after they cross the state line. The wind skins the leaves from the trees. The river crusts over with ice and they abandon their canoes. The cattails shatter like stems of glass. Icicles hang from the trees, like the claws of dragons that might perch there. Snow falls. Sometimes thickly, sometimes in sputtery bursts. But the snow is not as they imagined, not the bright white frosting they have seen in cracked paintings and faded postcards. It is gray, ashen. It smears muddily against their skin. When they open their mouths and let the flakes fall on their tongues, the taste is as bitter as that of a chewed willow stick.

* * *

Colter lost his left arm at the elbow. The doctor sliced away the charred remains and treated the injury with yarrow leaves and snowberries mashed to a cream. From logs she kicked conk fungus, what look like the plates on a dinosaur’s back, and ground them into a powder and stirred them into water and made him drink and fight the possibility of infection.

He smelled like seared meat, burned cinnamon. His hair crisped away in places. His clothes scorched. But he is alive. His horse and the wolves were not so lucky. The lightning soaked into them and funneled through their bones and seized their hearts with an electric fist. Colter does not remember much of that night, only strobe-like flashes, and not much of the days that followed either.

They thought he was here to punish them. To cut off their heads and make a garland of them to bring back to the Sanctuary. They were right. That’s what the mayor asked him to do. But he does not serve Thomas Lancer. He serves the Meriwether family. He made a mistake when he broke the old man’s arm. The worst mistake of his life, it turns out. And the old man, damn him and bless him, clapped him away in a cell — the same way a father paddles a bottom and sends his son to his room to consider his bad behavior. Colter has had a long time to think about this. If the surgery hadn’t given the old man an infection, and if the infection hadn’t caused a heart attack, and if the heart attack hadn’t killed him, everything would be different, all would be forgiven. Colter has no doubt. He would have been released from his cell, humbled, forgiven, a prodigal son. That is how Colter thinks of himself, as a son, which makes Lewis his weakling brother — but a brother all the same.

For too long he has let hate and hurt take hold of his heart. If there were a word that captured dreams of bodies set aflame, glass smashed into open eyes, blades drawn slowly across genitals, then that would be the name of the demon that so often possessed him. He is here to seek atonement. He is here to serve the son of the one he served before. He shouldn’t have come in the night and he shouldn’t have come in the storm, but his eagerness for reunion was such that he could not stop himself once close.

“Hold your fire!” That was what he tried to yell to them that night. “I’m here for you.” It was hard to say then and harder to say now that his wolves are dead and his arm ruined, but he says it all the same: “I’m here to help.”

At first they don’t believe him, and at night they tie his wrist to his thigh and his ankle to a tree. Every now and then Clark will wander over and stand beside him with a gun dangling from her hand. She watches him curiously, as he alternates between sweating and shivering. “I could put a bullet in your head and no one would complain.”

“Don’t.”

“Because you want to join us?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a long way from earning our trust.”

“And you’re a long fucking way from mine.”

“Language like that isn’t going to help.”

He doesn’t hold back. That’s not his way. Prison won’t stop him, the desert won’t stop him, lightning won’t stop him, and neither will she, no matter if there’s a gun in her hand. “You listen. You listen good. You might think you’ve got a dick, though you’re a woman and one I’d like to lay, and you might think you’re stronger than me, but that won’t last and I’ll be strong again, and you might think you can tell me what to do, but you can’t, because I came here for Lewis and not for some red-haired, hatchet-faced bitch to tell me my business when my business is my own. I’m here to help and that’s the short and the tall and slow and the fast of it.”

She points her revolver at him, twists it one way, then the other, and makes a soft explosion with her lips. Then she drops her arm and says, “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

“Guess we will.”

At first they carry him in a thick plastic utility sled, maybe two feet deep, once used to haul gear for ice fishing. They take turns dragging him, and Colter uses the front lip as a backrest, so that everybody else looks forward while he looks back.

The doctor bandages his stump. Twice a day, when she unwraps it and cleans it, the blackened flesh sputters and crackles and he cries out for her to help, to make it stop, in a voice he doesn’t recognize as his own for its jerky neediness.

Afterward he raises his head to swallow from the canteen she brings to his lips. The water dribbles down his chin as the tears dribble from his eyes. “What the hell did Lewis do to me and how the hell is it possible? I don’t understand, and don’t tell me you do either.”

“We don’t.”

“You don’t know that and you don’t know this. You don’t know how far we have to travel and you don’t know what lies ahead and you don’t know why a man can piss lightning. I go away for a year and nobody knows one fucking thing.”

“Are you always so angry?”

“Who’s angry? I’ve got no arm and my wolves are dead and it’s so cold my dick has curled up inside me so that it looks like I’ve got a second belly button between my legs. This is me in a good mood.”

She gives him a mirthless grin, the best bedside manner she can manage. “I’m going to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you come here to hurt us?”

“No.” It is the truth. “No, I don’t want that at all.”

She wraps the bandage tight and offers it a gentle pat. “I believe you.”

And maybe she does and maybe she says something to Lewis, because Colter wakes the next morning to find him standing nearby. His long, thin figure towers over him, like one more tree in the dim-lit forest. He has been avoiding Colter, and maybe that has something to do with guilt or maybe that has something to do with fear, since back in the day, on more than one occasion, Colter crushed him against a wall and made him eat dirt and told him to stop being such a book-eating puss.

But now he’s here to talk, Colter can tell, give him the eye-to-eye, make it clear where he stands and figure out where Colter stands and see if they can find a balance. He looks different than Colter remembers him. Not a boy, but a man, and maybe not a man at all. His forehead is marked with weary lines. His firm mouth beneath the black beard he has grown seems to suck on something bitter. But it’s his eyes — the blue-gray eyes, like cold moons — they glint with some curious power and make Colter shrink back a bit and feel small and chastened, aware of his defeat in a way he had never felt when jailed.

“How do I know,” Lewis says, “that this is not all some convenient lie to keep you alive?”

“Swear it.”

“On what?”

“Your father’s grave.”

Something splits open in Lewis’s face and just as quickly resolves itself. “You put him there. Swearing on his grave means nothing.”

“It means everything. Don’t you see? Don’t you see why I’m here? The old man is why.” He is not one to show any emotion beyond anger. He sometimes jokes that the last time he cried, a pebble fell from his eye. And then a rat came along and tasted the pebble and died. But he feels something now, cracking the edge of his voice and dampening the corners of his eyes. “Don’t you see that the old man was like a father and I did him wrong?”

Lewis doesn’t say anything for a long time. Snow falls and melts on his face and dribbles down his cheek.

“You could have killed me,” Colter says.

“I could have, yes.”

“But you didn’t. You let me live. A part of you must want to believe in the good. There’s some good in me once you get past the shit. A man can change, Lewis. You’re living proof of that.”

* * *

They complain about following the river. If they cannot canoe it, then why bother? Why not bear west more directly? Gawea tells them, more than once, that with the constant clouds, she cannot guide them using the stars, and with the vast gray sameness of the snow-swept plains, their maps are made useless. The river is their known conductor, the channel that will lead them. This is the way she came and this is the way they will go. And the water, even when scrimmed with ice, attracts life. Their best chance in finding game is to follow its course. The water will eventually thaw, and when that time comes, perhaps they will find more canoes and take to paddling again.

Questions. They have so many questions for her. And the way she must answer them, always guarded, always worried she will forget or contradict one of her half lies, exhausts her. No, no one ever goes hungry in Oregon, and yes, there are pastures busy with sheep and cattle, pens with pigs, houses with hens, just as there are fields of corn and oats and barley and soybean and wheat, orchards of apples, tangles of blackberries. Hops for beer, grapes for wine. No, there isn’t a wall. There isn’t a curfew. There are ever-expanding towns and cities with roads threaded between them, the ligature of a larger organism. In the Sanctuary, they were trapped. Because of this, because they were walled in, they considered time and construction vertically, a layering — but out west, people have a horizontal perspective, spreading their fences and buildings outward. “Everything is bigger there.”

This keeps them going. The dream of what awaits them. And sometimes she can’t help but believe in it too. That everything will be better when they arrive. They trust her. This pleases her and hurts her. At night, they all cram together for heat. York always manages to tuck in beside her and she often wakes up to find his arm around her. She does not knock it away. The closeness feels good.

* * *

Clark asks them to stay strong, to cheer up, look alive. She really believes, in the same way sailors and astronauts must have when launching themselves into an unknown darkness, that they have some higher calling, that their survival and whatever they discover might profoundly affect others, the future. “Gawea did this on her own. We can do this together. We’re in this together.”

That includes Colter, who is now strong enough to hike alongside them, cursing the cold. They will not give him a gun, not yet, not until he’s proved himself, and he complains about this too, but with a hand tapping his bandaged stump and a smile cutting his face. “I’m unarmed. You’ve unarmed me, you fucks. An unarmed man’s worth as much as a teatless heifer in thirsty times.”

The temperature drops steadily. They have come from the Sanctuary, where the holes rotted through the ozone layer created a land of perpetual summer, to the frozen plains, thick with ashen snow and thundering clouds. The seasons do not turn. The seasons have been imprisoned.

There was a time, in South Dakota, when they could still forage for nuts, blackberries, button mushrooms, bolete mushrooms, and now that time is over. At night Clark sets traps in the woods, and when she checks them in the morning, she finds them empty but spotted with blood, clumped with fur, the snow around them crushed flat. Something is stealing from her. She tries to study the tracks. Sometimes they are lost to the falling snow and sometimes there are many of them trailing off in different directions. She does not recognize them, big footed, with a long stride.

Sometimes they hear noises in the woods. What could be deep-throated laughter.

Chapter 30

THIS IS SIMON’S chance to prove himself to Ella. She thinks of him as her ward, a clumsy child. He will show her what he is capable of, his guts and prowess, by breaking into the Dome to deliver the letter and search for whatever Lewis wanted them to find.

He will go there at night, when only a few guards haunt the halls and he can whisper in and out without any trouble. He will fold the letter into Danica’s panties, they decide. Not her pillow. There it might be discovered by a servant or her husband. And not a gown hanging in the closet. There it might wait undiscovered for a month or more. “No,” Ella says, “only her panties will do. A good everyday pair. Faded, worn, maybe even holey.”

“Woman like that would never wear a pair of holey panties.”

“Every woman has a pair of holey panties. They’re her favorite panties.”

Simon is disturbed by the two letters, the very different realities they present. Lewis talks of water and Reed talks of death. When he brings this up to Ella, she dismisses the question. “Lewis doesn’t lie. And he loves to complain. So let’s trust in his version of things. There’s water out there. There’s hope. And one day, we’re going to leave this place and join him.”

We. She uses the word so often these days, as if they are one. He likes the way it sounds.

In the museum, in their room, the windows are dark and a candle burns on the bureau. The flame flutters and sends furtive shadows dancing when Simon holds out his arms and turns in a circle and asks, “Am I ready?”

He wears all brown, except for his cast, which earlier she painted black, so that he might better merge with the shadows. She scans his body, then buttons his back pocket so it won’t scrape or catch on anything. She tells him to jump up and down, and when he does, his pockets rattle with some coins and a small ivory carving of a heart he hands over to her. “That’s from one of the exhibits,” she says, and he says, “Sorry. I just wanted to keep it for a little while.”

He jumps again, this time without any noise except the patter of his bare feet.

Ella moves to give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder but it feels more like a punch. “Ready.”

First the letter, then whatever Lewis alluded to, some thing they might use to their advantage. He has no plan except to sneak room to room, to inventory every drawer and closet. Whatever he seeks, he will hopefully know it when he sees it.

The night is wrapped in many sheets of silence. There is the silence of the night sky — flecked with stars, a glossy granite black — an imposing, powerful silence that makes him feel like eyes might very well be watching his every move. There is the silence of the streets, where by day brooms scrape and people walk and cats scamper and carts rattle, a place so often bustling that its barrenness feels like a skull once wild with hair, like branches stripped of leaves by a winter wind, like death. And then there is the silence inside him — the calm he feels whenever he readies to sneak his hand into a pocket or scramble through an open window — every fiber in his body under his control, awaiting his command.

An iron fence, with bales of barbed wire along the top, surrounds the Dome. Simon patrols its perimeter and finds one deputy on watch. He smokes at the front gate, and when he breathes, a bright red eye seems to throb in the dark. Simon slips off his backpack and holds it in one hand. He has been here before and knows he is just thin enough, if he turns his head, to mash his body through the bars. It takes a little more effort this time, maybe because Ella’s cooking has rounded him out.

Once through, he pads to the edge of the building, scraping through the bushes that grow along it. The windowsills are spiked with metal and glass, to keep birds from nesting and people from climbing. He removes from his backpack a pair of leather gloves, one of them slit along the wrist to accommodate his cast. Though it is past midnight, the metal still throbs with the heat of the day. He can feel it when he curls his hands around the spikes and hoists himself up. He does so crookedly, his left arm mostly useless except to stabilize his body as he draws it upward.

The first floor is barred with iron, but not the next level, the living quarters, where the windows remain open through the day and night to accommodate a breeze. Over the years, he has studied these enough to know where there is movement, where there is light, where he needs to worry about running into someone once inside.

The window above him, he knows, will deposit him directly into a hallway nook with a wingback chair and a round-topped pedestal on which rests a vase of dried flowers. He must climb to get there, nearly ten feet, and the stone is impossibly sleek, with no place to grip a toe or finger. While he balances on the ledge — his toes on, his heels off, his knees pinched around a bar — he removes his backpack and slips out a telescoping antenna that he salvaged from an electronics store. Once extended, it locks in place. He has welded to its tip a V of metal that serves as a kind of claw. At the bottom of his backpack he has stored a coil of climbing rope, each end of it threaded into a hook. He fits one of these hooks into the claw at the antenna’s tip.

The bottom windows are divided by three vertical bars and two horizontal. He steps onto the first and then the second bar and stretches until his calves bunch painfully and his vertebrae feel like they might pop, finally reaching the rope to the sill above, the hook gripping one of the pigeon spikes on the sill. To climb, he uses his feet as much as his hands. The rope is knotted every twelve inches or so to accommodate his grip. He dangles beneath the second sill, shrugging off his backpack and tossing it over the spikes, shielding his belly when he drags himself over.

He allows himself only a moment’s rest before retrieving the rope and coiling it neatly into the bottom of the backpack. He is tempted to leave the pack here, hidden behind the chair in the hallway, but he has learned not to trust the way in as the way out, depending on what trouble he might encounter — maybe nothing but maybe something.

The hallway is socked with darkness broken by blue beams of moonlight. He keeps his feet flat and brings them down softly, so that he makes no more noise than a cat gliding across a rug, when he sneaks his way three doors down, Danica’s.

The knob is made from decorative brass. Maybe a minute passes before he turns it completely, and maybe a minute more before he opens enough of a crack to slip through. Her room smells spicy with perfumes. The bed is hers alone; her husband sleeps down the hall.

She is so thin, he cannot make out her body beneath the sheets, but her hair gives her away, as white-blond as thistledown, whiter even than her bed linens. He tries to detect her breathing but cannot, with the window open and the thrum of the city in the room. She has not drawn her curtains and the air is silvered with moonlight. He takes in his surroundings — its desk and dresser, its paintings of wildflower meadows, of lily-padded ponds, of women in white lace twirling sun umbrellas at garden parties — before starting forward.

His hand reaches first for the top left drawer of her dresser and he finds there the skins of stockings and many slips as thin as paper. In the next drawer he finds her panties, so many of them the drawer catches when he slides it out. He digs around, but every pair seems fresh off the sewing table — not a filthy, holey pair of panties in sight. He can’t wait to tell Ella.

He has the letter folded in his pocket. He slips it now into the topmost pair of panties. His fingers tease the fabric. Heat spikes inside him. He felt calm until now, his heartbeat fluttering up to the burning tips of his ears.

There is something about stealing he misses. With Ella, his life has grown comfortable, and the other side of comfort is boredom. He feels more alive now than he has in weeks. When you have no home, you find pleasure in taking from others who do. It is about the money, the value, yes, but it is also about energy. Harvesting from them some object that might be worthless — a photo, a trinket — that must matter to them: that seems somehow electrical, and making it his own, energizing himself.

That is how the panties feel to him. Charged. He cannot help himself. He slips a pair from the drawer and bunches it into his pocket — just as he feels a dagger at his spine and breath on his neck.

“Those are mine,” the voice says.

Chapter 31

GAWEA SHARES A blanket with Lewis, the two of them bundled together for warmth. She watches him scribble in his journal. The rest of them stare at the campfire and at each other. They gather at the leeward base of a hill as tall as four men stacked upon each other’s shoulders. It appears to have been cut by a great knife, its side is so steep. The sky is black, with the moon and stars forever bundled in clouds. Everyone huddles close to the fire. A column of heat and smoke twists upward and the snow vanishes into it, extinguished in little wisps of steam.

Lewis brought the journal with him to chronicle, author the new world. Map the landscape. Sketch whatever flora and fauna he observed. Such as this plant, with its thin-jointed, odd-angled stalks topped by purple flowers in the summer, now wilted to a bony brown and bristling with frost. He lifts his pen and the ink freezes and he blows on the tip to warm it.

Every day, he has another set of questions for Gawea, and though she once found him pestering, she now feels a kinship in their secret sharing. He tells her he has come to understand that knowledge is not enough. Observation is not enough. He no longer wishes to be a scholar, a gatherer, a chronicler, but a creator, too. The same impulse that drove him to tinker with inventions now compels him to tinker with the world.

“What are you writing?” Clark says.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just playing around with some theories.” Then he notices all their eyes on him. They want to know. They want something from him in the same way he wants something from Gawea. He looks to her, as if for permission, and she says, “Go ahead. You’re the teacher now.”

The wood pops and the wind hushes and Lewis licks his lips several times before he finds the words he wants. “Did you know that humans used to bite like other primates? Their incisors clipped, edge to edge, the bottom and the top coming together to tear and gnash. Then, somewhere around the late eighteenth century, two things happened. People began to braise and pound and cook their meat. And to slice up their food to pop into their mouths with forks. Almost immediately the European population developed an overbite, their incisors now coming together like scissor blades.”

Clark says, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“The body changes. People adapt, sometimes in an instant.”

He holds his journal upright for them to see. Next to the sketch of the plant he has written down its common designation — skeleton weed — and then its scientific identity—Lygodesmia texana—and then its chemical and cellular structure, and then he knows it in a way he never has before, like a lover undressed and drawn to bed, a name whispered in an ear, an accommodating body, submissive to his wants. “Gawea taught me this.”

He looks at her and smiles and she smiles back.

“When you know something, really know it, its chemicals, its strings and charges, its clustered atoms, in essence you know its secrets, and when you know someone’s secrets, they answer when called.”

Clark says, “You ask, they answer.”

“Pretty much.”

Gawea says, “They don’t always answer.”

Everyone huddles down into their blankets and no one looks particularly convinced.

“Show them,” Gawea says. “Show them with the weed.”

In a five-foot ring around the fire, the snow has mostly melted. He holds out a hand to the skeleton weed, as if in offering, his fingertips spotted with ink. He looks at Gawea questioningly and she says, “You can do it.”

He closes his eyes. The arm shivers from the cold or the effort. After what feels like many minutes it listens. Greening. Blistering with a lavender bud.

York’s eyes seem to grow wider. The doctor shakes her head and sucks her teeth. Clark’s face is impassive, her head crowned by a red nimbus of hair. Colter might be grinning, but it’s difficult to tell with his torn cheek. Reed has his head in his hands, lost in some private darkness.

The fire snaps and hisses, the wood wet. The wind rises, scuttling leaves, curling snakes of snow around them. “It’s magic,” York says.

“No,” Gawea says. “Magic is just a word people use for what they can’t understand. You should know that better than anyone. You and your tricks.”

York flinches, hurt.

Lewis tucks his journal and ink and pen away. “My mother once said that she knew when I was in trouble. If I fell and scraped a knee, or if the other boys picked on me”—here he looks at Clark meaningfully—“or girls. If something happened to me, she always knew. She found me once, you know. That time you hog-tied me and hung me from a balcony? She found me and she cut me down. She didn’t carry knives but she had a knife in her pocket that day. As if she knew she would need it. Every parent has a story like this, and I suppose it makes sense. We are them. We are made from them. In this same way, everything is born of something else, everything twinned.”

Gawea doesn’t know why she’s being so generous. Maybe it’s the enormity of the night, the way it seems to crush them together, make them one instead of many. She says, “You’ve heard the saying? We’re all made of stardust? We’re all made of stardust. We’re all made of the same thing.”

A few of them look up, as if to consult the sky for an answer, but the night and the clouds muddle whatever they might hope to find.

“In a way it’s true,” Lewis says. “And once Gawea helped me recognize that, to see how everything is connected, it was a little like growing another eye. Or another hand, another nose. Another level of sense. And with that sense comes the ability to manipulate.”

Gawea can’t help it. She likes it — she does — when he talks about her admiringly. It makes her feel like she matters inside of someone instead of outside, more than a mere guide leading them through a maze.

For a while there is only the fire snapping; then York says, “I hear you, but it’s just a bunch of words.”

Everyone is staring at the skeleton weed, now unfurling into a purple bloom, a small shoot of life in the season of dying. The wind is ceaseless, whistling around the edges of the hill and whipping up snow. The fire bends and flattens, struggling to right itself against the gusts.

It is then that the body falls.

There is a crack — as the logs break beneath its weight — followed by a concussion of air filled with embers that sting their exposed faces. They cry out and roll away and try to calm their minds, not knowing at first what has happened, not even knowing where they are, still caught up in the unreality of Lewis’s demonstration.

It is a deer, they discover. A buck with a sizable rack of antlers. At first they think it might have, in confusion, in the whirling snow, wandered off the edge of the ledge. Then they hold a flaming log closer and examine its body and see its throat torn away.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Gawea wished them all dead, considered them an annoyance, an impediment. Now she is the first one to reach for a gun, eager to defend them. She remembers what Burr said about how she might discover camaraderie, something to fight her perpetual loneliness, and how resistant she was to that suggestion. They need her — that is clear — but now she feels, with some reluctance, she might need them too. Could she call them friends? Was that the right word? It implied a valued closeness at odds with where and why she led them. If only they could remain everlastingly in motion, if only their journey would never end. Because when it ended, this would end, the fond nervous connection she feels to a huddle of bodies shivering in the night.

She does not sleep and nothing comes out of the snowy dark. But she knows the danger is out there. And she knows if it does not find them, she will eventually lead them to it.

Chapter 32

REED’S EYES FOCUS on nothing. He won’t speak unless pressed, responding yes or no with the barest whisper. He whimpers when dreaming. He waves people away when they come near. His eyes, when closed, look as black as shadows, as if two holes have been bored into his head — and when open they are no less disturbing, threaded with capillaries. His skin is pale, so sunken and drawn against his skull it appears to have given way to bone. He often reaches a hand into his pack to fondle the tiny coffin he keeps nested there.

One day they find him with a knife in one hand and his braid in the other, the long black coil of it sawed roughly from his head, twined around his knuckles. Clark says, “Why would you do that?” and shakes her head sadly.

She must feel some sympathy for him. Every now and then she places a hand on his shoulder, reminds him to drink, to eat. But a part of her — he can feel it — wishes he would die. He is an emotional liability, a smear of human waste. He should die. But really, they should all die. They’re going to die. He can taste it like ashes on his tongue.

* * *

The treetops — some pine, mostly ash and oak — cut through the low-sailing clouds. The air is so cold it hurts to breathe, as if their lungs are crystallizing and might shatter. Their faces and hands are a raw red, windburned. Their lips crack. So do their knuckles. They can never get warm, not fully, as if their very marrow has hardened into a chalky freeze. “Are you sure this is the way?” they ask Gawea, and she says, “This is the way.”

They allow Colter to walk and to sleep without restraints. The world is his prison. He will die if he departs them, and he will die if he attacks them, and everyone seems resigned to this. He stops trying to convince them he’s on their side, understanding they need time. He plods along with his head down, occasionally reaching for the place where his arm used to be as if to scratch it.

Whatever hurled the deer on their fire, whatever steals the food from their traps, is following them. In a shed Clark discovers an old trap, big enough to look like the jaws of some mechanical beast. One day, when they have settled on a place to camp, she heats the trap in the coals of the fire and limbers the gears, works free the rust. Then she hikes into the woods and buries it in the snow a few feet from a wire trap, in the open space between two trees, the most likely hallway in this tangle of bushes. She drives the spike deep into the ground.

That night, they add more and more wood to the fire, building up the flames to their standing height, and they turn their backs to it to preserve their vision and face the forest. The heat thrown by the fire is so tremendous that sometimes their skin feels as though it might split and peel, but they dare take only so many steps away from it, the black perimeter of the night as solid and forbidding as a wall.

Colter asks for a rifle, and they give him a club. They keep their hands out of gloves, despite the cold, so that their fingers might be free to pull the trigger, snatch a knife. Their breath ghosts from them. They see eyes glowing like twin candle flames. They see shapes, sometimes low to the ground, sometimes standing upright. They hear broken branches, crunching footsteps, growling and huffing. And, at one point late in the night, a high-pitched cry — an animal unmistakably in pain.

They assign a watch in two-hour shifts — while the rest try to sleep, huddling together for warmth. Gawea cozies next to York and pulls his arms around her like a coat.

The next morning Clark works her way through the woods, following her old footsteps between the ice-frosted trees. The sun is only a hazy light seen through the clouds, like a candle buried in cotton. She clicks off the safety on her rifle when she nears the trap.

The wind rises and briefly lifts the branches like so many skeletal arms beckoning her forward. Through the bushes, she sees blood on snow and an uncertain shape caught in the trap. She picks it up. The chain rattles and clanks.

It is two times the size of her hand — white furred and black padded and yellow clawed — severed at the joint, torn or chewed off.

* * *

Reed has no words for the others and they have few for him except to occasionally ask how is he feeling, how is he holding up? He does not respond except to stare back the way they came, at the long dark channel crushed into the snow, reaching off into the distance, his link to the Sanctuary.

He longs for the time when he mattered, the place where he mattered. He cannot understand what compelled him to leave. There was his opposition to the mayor, his gnawing worry that his dalliance with Danica would be discovered, and his belief that they had to leave behind the Sanctuary to survive. But all those feelings have turned to dust. And all his memories seem like happy ones, lit with a sunset glow. He remembers the thousands of faces that cherished him. He remembers the wind lifting dust from the streets and rooftops like banners. He remembers the chiming progress of jingle carts dragged by tinkers and pharmacists. The laughter in the bars and the shouted parley at the bazaar. The wind turbines creaking and the electricity sizzling. The sun flashing off thousands of points of metal and glass. Swallows flying in dark murmurations that looked like clouds, the only thing marring the blindingly blue sky. He remembers people despairing their lives, sure, but isn’t that always the case, everyone wanting more than what they have, expecting something better on the horizon? If this was it, then they could have it.

So when Clark returns to camp, when she shows them the severed paw, Reed says, “I think we need to face the facts.”

Clark throws the paw on the fire, where it spits and bubbles and blackens.

“I think we need to turn back.”

“Shut up, Reed,” she says.

His voice was calm before, but now he hurries out his words. “This is suicide.”

“We trust the girl. She said there was an end to the desert, and there was, and she says there is an end to the snow, and there is.”

“There’s death. If we keep going, we have nothing to look forward to except death.”

“What’s happened to you?”

“What’s happened to me? What’s happened to you? You used to love me.”

“I used to fuck you.”

“There’s a difference, isn’t there?” He smiles terribly. “So now you hate me?”

“I don’t know. I might. I don’t respect you; I know that.”

“People change, you know? I’ve changed. You’ve changed. Lewis has changed. Everyone is changing and the change is not good. Not good at all.”

She grabs him by the arm and tries to drag him away from the others. “We need to talk.”

“No!” He jerks from her grip. “No. I know they feel the same. I know they do.” He makes a sweeping gesture with his arm. “How could you not? This is suicide. Am I right? This is suicide.”

Their faces, wrapped against the cold, give nothing back.

“You’re wrong,” Clark says. “They don’t. They believe that we’re going to get through this, like we’ve gotten through everything else, and our lives will be better for it.”

His vision shakes. He can’t seem to settle his eyes on anyone or anything. “Let’s vote, then.”

“Don’t be weak, Reed.”

“Let’s put it to a vote.”

Her hand tightens around his arm, as if it were a neck to strangle. “Shut up, Reed. Please, please, please shut up.”

He reels against her and breaks her grip, but it turns out she was the only thing holding him up and he falls to the ground. “You talk about America. You talk about democracy.” He knows he sounds out of breath. “So let’s vote. We’ll vote. We keep going or we turn back.”

Everyone is motionless, studying him. He knows how he must look. Like a crazy person. Kneeling on the ground. His arms outstretched, beseeching them. His hat has fallen off and his hair thorns from his head. He stands and brushes away the snow that clings to him. “Who thinks we should turn back? Who thinks that?” He holds a hand up, as high as it will reach. He tries to smile but can feel the smile failing. He studies each of them in turn. They all look away except for Lewis. “Not even you, freak show? No one?”

“That’s right.” Clark crosses her arms. “No one. Now, pull yourself together.”

The horizon is lit red by the oil fires. A black snow begins to fall and blur the air, filling up their tracks, the way home. He cannot do it alone. The distance traveled and the dangers faced already feel impossible. He will starve or he will freeze or he will bake. He will fall or something will fall on him, a boulder or branch. He will succumb to a snakebite and wander for hours in a fever while one of his limbs purples and swells. He will be torn to pieces, a feast for the beasts and birds and bugs. There will be no marker for his grave except a half-buried pile of sinewy bones riddled with tooth marks. And even if he made it, even if he somehow stumbled out of the desert and into St. Louis, toothless from scurvy, mad with loneliness, what then? Maybe he would knock on the gates and shout, “Let me in, I’m back, so sorry to have worried you, it was all a dreadful mistake!” Or maybe he would sneak in, wait outside the Dome until Danica emerged for a walk, then grab her by the wrist, say, “It’s me!” She would pull away from him, he felt sure. She wouldn’t recognize him, just as Clark didn’t recognize him. He didn’t recognize himself anymore. And then Thomas would lop off his head and hang it somewhere for everyone to admire. It is clear now: if he returns, he will fail, and if he keeps going, they will fail. He is a failure. Life is a failure.

“Fine.” Reed nods. “Okay. You’re right. I can see that you’re right.” He keeps nodding, even when he withdraws his revolver and puts the muzzle in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

Chapter 33

DANICA KEPT THE dagger. The one she found on Resurrection Day, in the stadium, when the girl was marched to the gallows, when her husband applauded, when she snuck away and Reed bent her over the table littered with weapons. He filled her, again and again, until she felt something unraveling inside her, as if every ligament and tendon and muscle fiber and nerve ending were loosening at once — and she reached for something, anything, to stabilize her, before she came undone. It was the dagger her hand curled around then. In a way she never let go.

The blade is six inches long, the hilt four, the guard the same. It is flat, meant to be worn close to the skin. She spears cockroaches with it. She tosses it, end over end, into wood floors for the satisfying thunk it makes. When she holds it up to a band of sunlight or moonlight, it makes a shadow like a cross on the wall. When she draws it across the skin at the inside of her thighs, it traces a thin pink line that wells into red dots. She keeps it sheathed beneath her dresses. She sleeps with it beneath her pillow. There is something reassuring, boosting, about always having its sharpness nearby. Maybe that’s how men feel about their cocks.

She had a blade when she was a girl. A belt knife. Her grandfather gave it to her, said it wasn’t a toy but a tool, said she should learn it like a limb. She carved her name into stucco, carved dwarves and goblins out of wood, carved up meat and cheese, carved off the ear of an older boy once when he tried to get between her legs.

Her hand is on the dagger and she is awake the moment her door cracks and the boy steals his way into the room. She watches him with her eyes half-lidded. Watches him watch her. Then study his surroundings. He wears a backpack. No shoes. When he whispers toward the dresser, she expects him to reach for the jewelry box atop it, but he does not. He slides open one drawer, then another, her underwear drawer, and reaches in. He is a pervert, then.

She could call out for help. But she has always preferred to take care of matters on her own. So she slides out of bed, slides across the floor, so quietly the air seemingly cannot grip her. She wears a silken slip that makes no noise.

And then the knife bites the boy’s back, just above his pack, the place where his neck meets his shoulders.

He spins around. He is such a little thing. Narrow headed and wide-eyed and slim limbed, like a skinned cat. He does not seem capable of lust. And when she takes in the sight of him, his hand gripping a bouquet of panties, she feels somewhere between amused and disgusted.

“What is your name?”

He says nothing until she leans the blade into his chest and then he says, with a whimper, “Simon.”

“You’ve come here to steal my panties, Simon?”

“No.”

“That’s certainly what it looks like.”

His eyes flash between her and his fistful of underwear. “I’ll admit, I was going to grab a pair.”

“Good. It’s good to tell the truth.”

“But that’s not why I came here.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Out with it, then. Before I open you up.”

“I came to deliver a letter. He sent you a letter.”

“Who did?”

“Reed did. That’s who. Reed.”

She takes two steps back and lowers her arm, nearly dropping the knife when it swings limply at her side. At first she cannot say anything, cannot make words, all of her attention on the flower of blood blooming at his breast where she nicked him. He reaches to touch it, as if bitten by a bug, and examines his red fingertips.

Then she goes to the hallway and checks to make sure it is empty before closing the door and gathering her breath and saying, “Show me.”

* * *

Ella asked how long Simon would be, how long it would take him to break into the Dome, creep through its many rooms, find whatever it is Lewis meant for them to discover. You must expose what is hidden in the Dome, he wrote to them — and there the letter trailed off.

Simon told her he might not find anything at all. And he didn’t know how long it would take. He would do his best and doing your best takes time. This sort of thing can’t be rushed. The necessary silence of his trade came with stillness, slowness. He might be two hours or he might be four hours.

“Four hours, then,” she said. “I’ll start to worry after four hours.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t want you worrying and I don’t want to feel rushed.”

“Four hours. It will be dawn in five, so you’ve got no choice but four.”

She tries to sleep but can’t. Of course she wonders what he might find — locked away in some closet or hidden in a drawer — whatever secret might serve them. But that seems secondary to him coming home to her. Home — that’s how she thinks of the museum — as belonging to them both. They share a room — with beds opposite each other — just as they share meals and duties and conversation. She might bully him, but with tenderness, every rough shove another opportunity to touch, every hard word a breath between them shared.

She waits in the kitchen — a long room crowded with cupboards and counters — where he will enter through a side door. She paces the floor and then collapses in a chair and rests her head in her hands. She imagines him whipped. She imagines him dead. She imagines him trapped somewhere, hiding beneath a bed or in a closet while people move all around him. She hates to admit it, but she cares about him, feels about him as she would a cherished possession, not wanting to let him out of her sight.

Dawn comes. There is a soft knock. The knob rattles. She hurries from her chair and yanks open the door and hisses, “Where have you been?” Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the light, blinking through a red haze, and then she makes sense of what she sees: Simon standing before a hooded figure.

“What’s this?” Ella says, her whole body suddenly numb. “What’s happened?”

Simon drops his eyes and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Ella looks to the figure for answers. The hood holds a shadow, the face lost to it. “I’m supposed to just let you in?” Ella says, and Simon says, “Do it, please,” and she steps aside to accommodate them, then checks the alley before closing and bolting the door.

She doesn’t know what to do. She alternately wants to smack Simon and smash him into her chest as if to smother him with her heart. But before she can act on either impulse, the figure pulls back her hood, revealing the white-blond hair and sharply cut face of Danica Lancer.

There is a held breath of a moment before Danica says, “Let’s sit down, everyone.”

They gather at a table in the corner of the kitchen. Simon and Ella sit on one side and Danica on the other. “We certainly have a lot to talk about.” She looks at them and talks to them as a mother would her disobedient children. Ella knows that Danica wants them to feel that way, as children, because children do as they are told. Lewis would do the same to Ella and she would not tolerate it then and she will not tolerate it now. She crosses her arms and pinches her mouth into a frown.

Danica says, “No one knows I am here, and no one will know I was here, so long as we all understand each other.”

The second bell is ringing. The day is brightening, beginning to heat up. Sweat dots their temples. Danica reaches below the table then and withdraws a black dagger like a nightmarish piece of cutlery. “You must realize how complicated this situation is.”

Ella has a biting way of speaking when she says, “I realize that very well, thank you.”

“I am grateful to you for delivering the letter, but I am worried about you too.” Danica runs the blade along her arm, tracing its bare length, pausing a moment in the pale hollow of her elbow, continuing to the snaked veins of her wrists, across her palm, to the very tip of her middle finger, where she scrapes away some sand embedded beneath the nail. “You know things about me you shouldn’t. You know things about me that could get me killed.”

“We’re even, then,” Ella says. “You know things about us could do the same.”

Danica’s eyes narrow. Ella knows what’s going on behind them. Danica believes, as a rule, women want to be her, and because they cannot, they choose to hate her. She knows Ella hates her and hate is a great motivator for foolish behavior. Ella tries to release some of her hate by turning to Simon and saying, “You said you could be quiet as a cat. You said you could sneak in and out of there like a shadow.”

He wilts with every word, his posture conveying his apology.

Danica says, “Where do we go from here, children?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The boy says Lewis asked you to spread news of their success.”

Ella stabs Simon with her elbow. “Are you an idiot? Do you want to die? Why did you tell her that?”

He does not respond except to shrink even further into his chair and look at her sidelong.

“He had a blade on him. He didn’t have much of a choice.” Danica twirls the dagger in her palm, spinning it like a clock dial. She wants them to look at it, to acknowledge the power and the slicing threat of it, but Ella refuses, keeping her gaze steady.

Danica says, “In these desperate times, it’s hard to know how people will respond to that kind of information. If they learned that there was water — if they knew the expedition had traveled safely to it — they might do nothing. Or they might do something. Something dramatic. Fiery.”

Ella shifts in her seat but keeps her face flat with seeming disinterest. “Fiery?”

“Would you like to start a fire? I think we can help each other start a fire. This city is dry enough that it should burn right up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand, dear?”

“Your husband is the mayor. Why would you want to threaten his power?”

She slams the dagger into the table, where it hums upright like an exclamation mark. “Because I hate him.”

Chapter 34

IT HAS BEEN a long time since Lewis saw the moon. How long, he doesn’t know, because its cratered face is his clock and calendar. Ever since they crossed into North Dakota, ever since the oil-black clouds thickened, they have been cut off from its rhythms, lost in time. The new moon is when it is darkest, when its surface is shadowed. In myth, in folklore, in witchcraft, it is associated with death. Since they are living in a world absent light, they are living in a permanent new moon. They are living with death, Reed’s.

The ground is frozen, so they don’t bother to bury the body except with a gray mound of snow. No one utters any words — except for Lewis, who says they ought to carry on. He believes they are a half day’s hike from Bismarck. “That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?” He is not the type to utter hopeful phrases, but Clark has gone silent and he feels the need to serve as her mouthpiece, lift their spirits and pressure them onward.

They trudge on and they can see so little, with the snow ripping up and down, left and right, a swirling vertiginous gray-black blur. And they can hear even less, with the wind gusting and the snow making a constant patter against their hoods and hats.

Finally they decide to stop and build a shelter, an igloo. When they shove and pack the snow, it molds nicely to their liking. They build it up into head-high walls, making a half circle that connects to the downed tree. Enough room for all of them, but barely. They use the branches as rafters. And hack down more to drape over the open sections of ceiling so that they can shingle it with snow.

For ventilation, they punch a hole in the center of the ceiling and six more in the walls, each of them small enough to fit a fist through. The air grows instantly warm from their breathing and the small fire. The walls go blue and slick, melting and freezing into a lacquer. In the dim light, they strip off their hats and mittens and scarves. One by one, they curl up their bodies and shut their eyes, exhausted by the cold. The doctor takes the first watch.

* * *

She leans against the wall and warms up with her pipe. She lights it, and then dozes off, and lights the bowl again. She has seated herself next to one of the ventilation holes. Now and then she rises to her knees and peers out of it but sees only a thick veil of snow.

She plops down and studies Clark. Her eyes shudder and her body twitches. Even when dreaming, she cannot stay still. The doctor wishes she could get closer. Comb her fingers through that red hair, over and over, to clear away the burrs and tangles, to massage her scalp, to help calm her. She is so tense, like a body stiffening with death, and the doctor understands why. Clark is the reason they have made it this far, and if they make it any farther, it will be because of her. She, the dear girl, feels responsible for them all. And that responsibility must be sickening. Maybe she’ll do better now that Reed is gone, as if he were an excised tumor, a lanced boil. Maybe they’ll all do better now. But for the moment the poor dear is sick with guilt. There was a time when she shared a bed with Reed, and the memory of that connection must be poisoning her now. But she’ll get over it. She’ll heal.

The doctor lights her pipe again and fills her mouth with smoke. When she exhales, she realizes her smoke is twinned by a cloud of steam above her head. As she breathes out, it breathes in, the gusts storming together near the ventilation hole. By the time she realizes what is happening, it is too late.

To either side of her, arms stab through the walls, arms bristling with coarse white hair. She begins a scream that is cut short when the arms wrap around her chest and drag her back and leave a rough cavity in the wall through which snowflakes quietly tumble.

* * *

Clark rises on one elbow, still somewhere between waking and dreaming, still seeing Reed, the hopeless look on his face when the gun kicked and the brains coughed out the back of his skull. By the time she realizes what has happened and screams at everyone to arm themselves, it is too late — the walls of the shelter are already crashing inward.

For a moment a storm of snow obscures the air, buries their bodies. She thrashes her way out in time to see the doctor dragged by the long gray rope of her hair. What has her, Clark cannot say, but there are many of them.

They are huge and white, ghostly in the snow except for their red tongues and red eyes that appear like flames crushed into tiny caves. Bears, she realizes, loping and bounding in all different directions. Humpbacked, spade faced, their fat trembling beneath their shaggy white coats.

One dodges toward them. York digs in the snow, unearths a shotgun, fires from the hip, and sends the bear careening into a tree. It bellows, collapses into a heap.

He empties a shell, loads the breech, fires again, this time in the direction of the doctor. The bear opens its jaws, releases her ponytail, flinching back and whimpering in pain from the wound brightening its shoulder. Then it bolts for the woods. Clark counts four others. Their white hair silvered with snow. Their teeth like the shards of a kicked ice puddle.

One of them approaches York from behind and knocks him facefirst into the snow, and then turns to face Gawea. She tries to fire a shotgun but finds it jammed with snow and uses it instead as a club. Another bear has the doctor by the forearm, its teeth clamped down, its head shaking back and forth as if to tear her arm from its socket. And another slashes and lunges at Lewis and Colter, who have not grabbed their weapons in time and now swing sticks and fists.

And the last, creeping toward them, keeps an arm tucked protectively against its chest. Clark sees it is missing a paw — severed, a red nub not fully healed — and remembers her trap in the woods, the scream in the night.

Now she is the one screaming. Screaming until she doesn’t have any breath. Screaming her brother’s name. Because he lies there, knocked out, half-sunk in a snowbank. He shudders awake only when the bear mashes its mouth into his belly. He throws back his head in a silent cry and grabs its ears and pulls as if to draw the creature more fully inside him.

Then the bear vises its jaws around his shoulder and lumbers toward the woods, dragging him there and leaving behind a bright red runner of blood.

Her feet cannot kick fast enough as she pursues them.

* * *

Whether it is a knee or a branch or the stock of a rifle, Lewis doesn’t know, but when the shelter collapses and the bears attack, something strikes his temple and slows his mind, muddies his vision. He wobbles when he stands beside Colter. He grips a stick in his hands and swings it wildly when any of the bears draw near. All this seems to happen outside him. His head throbs. His legs feel glass stemmed. Distantly, he hears Clark screaming — and then sees her running for the woods, disappearing between the trees.

He stares after her, lowers his stick, and at that moment a bear darts forward and knocks him flat. Its weight sinks him into the snow, empties his lungs. He cannot draw a breath. Above him black clouds roil, his vision of them eclipsed by the triangular snout of the thing. It leans in, blasts him with its hot, carrion-reeking breath. He can see down the tunnel of its throat, the place he will soon travel, the last of this journey.

He closes his eyes, waiting for the worst. But the worst doesn’t come. He hears a guttural roar that heightens into a shriek. Then the bear’s head thuds into his breast. Its body slumps onto him. He pokes at it, shoves at it. He can barely breathe. It does not move — not until Lewis arcs his back, painfully, rolls its three hundred pounds off him.

His mind is still struggling to keep up. He didn’t hear a gunshot. Colter must have stabbed or struck it dead. However it happened, he is saved for now. He takes a deep, aching breath. Blood flows to places pinched off. He struggles to sit up. “Thank you,” he says to Colter and Colter says, “Don’t thank me.”

That’s when Lewis sees — in the slack face of the bear — a fletched arrow buried in its eye with blood jellying around it.

Colter remains stiffly where he stands, as if the wind has frozen him in place, and it is only then Lewis follows his gaze.

The snow has stopped. He can see now what they could not before. They stand on the outskirts of Bismarck. Only thirty yards away, ice-mantled houses cluster together, the beginnings of a lost neighborhood. In the distance he spies two collapsed sections of freeway — and beyond them, still soaring over the river, a rusted bridge.

Strangers surround them. Whether men or women, he cannot tell, not at first. They wear stitched gray furs, maybe made from rabbits, coyotes. Their faces are hidden beneath scarves and goggles. Their hands are the only part of them exposed — in order to better grip their bowstrings.

The bears lie in dead heaps, blotched with blood and quilled by arrows.

Lewis counts ten strangers, standing beside trees and snow-shrouded bushes, crouched next to cars, motionless. For a moment there is no noise except the wind hissing and their bowstrings creaking.

Chapter 35

ELLA DOESN’T TRUST Danica, but you can’t trust a dagger either. You can use it skillfully, keep its point and edge away from your skin, or you can be harmed by it. So she’ll do as Danica requested, as Lewis requested. She’ll make some noise.

They leave when darkness cloaks the city, when curfew begins and everyone settles into sleep. They wear black pants, black shirts, mash spit and charcoal into a paste and smear their faces and hands, working together. Ella isn’t letting Simon out of her sight, not after what happened last time. She’s not as careless as Lewis. She won’t abandon those closest to her.

“Worried about me, are you?” Simon says. “I like that.”

“I just don’t want you to screw things up again.”

The streets are dark and dead. They slide from alleyways to doorways, moving as quietly as they can from every pool and wedge of shadow. The moonlight feels like a spotlight. Their skin bristles with fear and excitement. They go still whenever they hear a noise — a rat scurrying, a snore spiraling from an open window — and then move on.

When the city council wishes to share some announcement — about the curfew, rations, a death march — they paint it in black capital letters across the windowless wall that rises beside each of the Sanctuary’s wells. Simon and Ella will do the same. They will write the news.

They make the paint out of chalk, linseed oil, glue, beets. They carry it in canteens stashed in backpacks with pans and brushes. They have enough for only one well. And they do not have time to whitewash the current notice, wait for it to dry, before slopping out their own message. The beets stain their paint red: the color of anger, the color of danger, the color of the fire Danica said she wanted to spread. They will slop it over the top of whatever is written there already.

A deputy guards the well. They can see him now, walking in slow circles around the stanchion of the wind turbine. The blades rotate and cast spinning shadows and make a rusty, grinding music. Simon isn’t worried about being heard over the top of them, but he is worried about being seen. If they can only get up the ladder, into the shadow of the wall, he thinks they’ll remain undetected.

He hurls a rock across the square. It sizzles through the air before finally striking a storefront awning made out of a sheet of metal. The sound startles the guard and he marches toward it with his hand at the grip of his machete. Simon tosses another rock — even farther — guiding the guard down an alley.

They scurry then to the wall, invisible in the shadow of it. There are two rebar ladders built into either side of it. They hurry to glug out their canteens, fill their pans, tuck their brushes into their belts, and climb.

* * *

At dawn, after the first bell rings, after the sun brightens and warps the horizon like hammered gold, people begin to line up for water. They are thirsty, and they are hungry, too, and they are ready for good news. They are ready for the giant red letters slashed across the wall near the well. LEWIS AND CLARK, the message reads, CANOE RIVERS AND SEND HOPE. A brief, bright message. Some people laugh and point their fingers. Others frown and wonder aloud whether it is true — how could it possibly be true? — and whether they dare believe. They share the words with those who can’t read. Some are so excited they depart the line without filling their jugs. By the time the sun lightens the wall, two deputies have climbed the ladders to whitewash over what they call graffiti. But they cannot erase words etched already in the mind, words whispered in the streets like a gathering wind that eventually reaches Thomas’s ear.

Slade delivers the news. He hunts his way through the Dome, looking for Thomas, finally pushing through the double oaken doors and discovering him alone in the council chambers. He wears a sky-blue silk shirt with an open neck and gold stitching along the collar. He sits in the dark, at the head of the empty table, his hands flat on the wood as though he were about to take up his silverware and carve a meal. The windows are shuttered, but bars of light fall across him.

Thomas appears to be speaking to himself — moving his lips, whispering to an audience of shadows — cut short by Slade clearing his throat.

Thomas twists in his seat and flickers a smile. “You know I’ve always liked the sound of my own voice.”

“I’ve been looking for you.” Slade enters the room fully.

“Bad news, I assume?”

“No other kind these days.”

One side of Thomas’s face jerks, as if he is uncertain whether he is suffering a barb, and then says, “Give it to me, then.”

Slade presses the door until it clicks, then walks to the opposite side of the long table, drags out the chair, and folds his body into it. “When you asked me to be sheriff, you told me you admired my brutal honesty. You told me you trusted me because of it.”

“I trust you.” And then, like an asterisk, “I trust your muscle.”

“Trust me when I say things are getting perilous.”

“Perilous. That’s a big word for you, Slade.”

“I’m more than muscle.”

Thomas gives him an assessing look. “Of course you are. Please. Tell me about how perilous things are.”

“The bodies are piling up at the morgue, some dead from the heat, some from illness, some from not enough of everything a body needs. But more and more of them are dead from murder. More and more dying because there’s more and more willing to thieve and to kill. People are talking. About how things were so much better under Meriwether. About how you’re going to ruin us all. How you’re fucking that—”

“Yes, yes, yes. Tell me what I don’t know.”

“I was working my way up to it, giving it adequate introduction.” He then explains to Thomas the red splatter of graffiti that appeared like a wound overnight. A message seemingly reported by Lewis and Clark. A message meant to excite and entice rebellion. “Maybe a thousand people saw it before we painted it over.”

His voice fires off questions like quills from a blowgun. “Do you think it’s true? Could they really be alive? Could there be water? Could they be maintaining communication with someone inside the wall?”

When Slade shrugs, his shoulders seem burdened by more than shadows. “Would it change anything if it was true? People seem to think it is. That’s what matters.”

“The owl. I bet he sent that ridiculous owl of his. Have you been to the museum? Have you searched it? Where else would he have sent it? He must have sent it there.”

“He might not have sent anything. The graffiti might be pure invention meant to cause this very response.”

His fingernails are long enough to staccato the tabletop. “What’s the answer, then? Enlist more deputies? Promise them food and water and we’ll have a wave of volunteers ready to serve and protect.”

“Done.”

“Punish anyone who so much as whispers anything treasonous?”

“Done.”

“Good.” Thomas leans back, his face escaping the sun, retreating into shadow. “Then there’s only one thing left to do.”

Chapter 36

CLARK FOLLOWS THE tracks in the snow — through the woods, through a ruined neighborhood — until she finds her brother. His body abandoned. Still warm but already dead. She has her revolver drawn, but nothing to fire at. She hears a deep-throated huffing — what sounds like laughter — chasing through this frozen world, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Some of the windows are broken, some shuttered with ice. They stare at her. She blasts a round into one of them for no reason except to unleash some misery.

Silence follows. She drags her brother into a brick house with half its roof collapsed. The walls are cracked and so water damaged they appear molten. She collapses in the living room and somehow day becomes night as she hugs and rocks his body. His skin grows hard to the touch, marbled many colors of purple and blue and white, like a winter sky just after the sun sets. His tears, or maybe her tears, have frosted white trails down his cheeks. And his carved-out stomach is a crystalline red.

It takes her a long time to realize she shivers from cold and not grief. She kicks apart a wooden chair and sparks a fire in the stone hearth that casts an orange glow. She does not move except to feed it more and more rotten wood. Thick gray smoke ghosts the air. Her mussed red hair falls across her face, matching the flames before her, as if she has caught fire.

Whatever she told York to do, he did, and now, because of what she told him to do, he is dead. It was a mistake. It was all a mistake. Her brother is lost and so is her confidence. She doesn’t know what has happened to the others. She might care in the morning, but she doesn’t care now, not in this cave of light she shares with her brother’s body. She feels momentarily numb to them, as she did when she stood over Reed’s grave. But York is her blood. York belonged to her. His death is like a diseased limb that has reached its rot into her heart.

She tries to sleep. At least then she can escape making any sort of decision. Or maybe she will wake to find this is all a dream. She clenches her body up like a big fist. But after only an hour or so, the fire has gone dead and she wakes, shivering. Even at this simple task, staying warm, she fails.

Now another storm has swirled over Bismarck. The wind carries sleet in it, whipping and tinkling the house with what sound like glass shards. She stirs the embers and tosses more wood in the hearth. A blast of steam escapes her mouth as a sigh or sob.

In the distance, over the noise of the ice storm, she hears grunting and chuffing, what must be the bear, and she cannot help but feel it is singing a hateful, mocking song for her.

Dawn comes. She stands over her brother’s body for a long time. Then she begins smashing chairs, splintering tables, ripping off cupboard doors, gathering whatever wood she can find to crush into the hearth. To this smoldering pile she adds his body.

She tells him she’s sorry. She should have taken better care of him. She turns to leave just as the flames catch his clothes.

* * *

They kneel in the snow, the cold creeping through their pants, with their wrists painfully bound behind their backs. Lewis twists against his restraints, testing their strength, until their guard comes by and kicks him in the back of the head hard enough to send him sprawling forward. He struggles upright, with snow powdering the side of his face.

The guard watches Lewis — as he takes a deep, steadying breath, as if swallowing a barbed string of curses — and then backs away.

Clark is gone. So is York. The doctor is hunched over in exhaustion, her eyes closed and her arm bloodied. Colter crouches beside her, still and watchful. And Gawea has been knocked unconscious. Wrapped up in their furs, masked by their scarves, their guards have no recognizable builds or faces, so they seem like replications of the same person. They skin and butcher the bears and load the meat onto sleds.

An hour later, as instructed, they rise and trudge against the wind, punching their boots through the snow. Some of their captors walk before them and some behind, keeping them enclosed. They drag sleds, one carrying Gawea, the others stacked high with slabs and ribbons of meat. The sun dips lower, merging with the hellish glow of the oil fires on the horizon. The shadows are gray, the clouds even grayer.

The doctor collapses. Lewis tries to help her, but the guards push him away. They prod her with a bow, then kick her softly, and she says, “All right, all right,” and rises, and they continue their march.

Lewis notices first the smoke of many chimney fires rising into the sky, barely distinguishable, thin gray cords of smoke that broaden and dissipate and merge with the low-bellied clouds. And then the building comes into view. The sign is cracked and faded and scraped, but he can still make out the words, KIRKWOOD MALL.

He knows the word mall—the Sanctuary had its own airy plaza where the bazaar took place — but this looks to him more like a medieval fortress, virtually windowless, with white patches of paint clinging to the crumbling concrete exterior. It is surrounded by a kind of moat, a sea of snow splashed over asphalt, making it easy to spy any approaching enemy. Tracks dirty the ground, packing down trails, like the one they follow now, its bottom a slick blue-black ice that makes his footing uncertain, though their captors crunch along without any trouble, wearing snowshoes, framed by wood and webbed by tendons and clawed at the bottom.

Two rust-pocked trucks have been shoved in front of the wide entryway. Once there were glass doors here, the space now sheeted with wood and metal. Someone drags an unhinged door aside and they enter the dark.

Lewis’s eyes take a moment to adjust. Slowly the mall takes shape. A long, low-ceilinged chamber catacombed with stores repurposed into living quarters, some of them glimmering with lamplight. The air smells of urine and leather and smoke.

At that moment, their escorts rip off their hats and goggles, unwrap their scarves, to reveal messy nests of hair. Women. And girls. More of the latter than the former. Not a man among them.

Lewis hears voices muttering, footsteps chuffing the floor. People are standing from their campsites, walking closer to observe them. They, too, are women. They number around twenty altogether. Some are brown and some are black and some are so pale they appear made from winter, carved and spun from ice, except where their skin has splotched red. All of their eyes and cheekbones are carved out by shadows. They are missing teeth. Some of their fingers are half-blackened with frostbite. They look familiar, as survivors. But their expressions offer no welcome.

A taller woman — with close-cropped gray hair and a commanding voice — speaks to the group of them, saying she knew this day would come, she knew they would come. “But we hunted them down before they could hunt us down. We’re stronger than them. Didn’t I tell you that? That we’re stronger than them?”

The girls nod, eager for her words.

“No,” Lewis says. “We’re not—”

But before he can say anything more, he is shoved, along with the rest of his party, into an empty store with a metal curtain that rattles across the entry and locks them in place.

* * *

There is not a lot of thought left inside her. Clark hears the click and scrape of her revolver, the hammer thumbed back, released, thumbed back, released. She smells the smoke and the puddle of orange urine she left in the corner. She feels the sleet prickling her skin when she steps into the day. Outside of processing these few sensations, her brain is unbusied, more singular, as if requiring only the stem. All this time she’s been battling toward human progress and now it is time to succumb to the world’s beginning and the world’s end. The rules are simple. The fastest claws and the biggest teeth win.

Millions of ice pellets blur and clatter the air. She slides her feet, skating her way out the door, into the street, and after only a minute, her clothes are stiff, cracking and shattering when she moves.

She tucks her revolver beneath her coat so that it doesn’t freeze over. Her pockets rattle with bullets. The sun is beginning to rise — and the storm is beginning to subside. She moves slowly. There is no other way to move, everything glassed over, so slick she must slide her boots and constantly readjust her body to keep her balance. Her eyes water in the wind. Her coat flaps around her knees.

“Where are you?” she says.

Everything appears like something else, sheeted and encased with a gray-white ice. A streetlamp is a gleaming proboscis. A tree’s branches appear like dead veins reaching up some milky arm. A skeleton, like a man made of glass, hunches in a doorway. She makes her way past the giant brown slab of the civic center, past bars and hotels and credit unions.

A few more ice pellets patter her face, and then the clouds quit. The wind dies. The city quiets except for the ice muttering and splitting. She stands in a shallow canyon of storefronts, the buildings gray squares and the streets gray stripes.

She bites off her gloves and shoves them in her pockets so that she can better grip the revolver. “Come on,” she says, her throat raw and croaking. She coughs and swallows her spit and says, “Come on!” louder this time. The words echo away and come back to her mixed up and chittery, as if spoken over a nervous laugh.

She waits a long minute and then keeps going, dragging her feet, darting her eyes down the side streets, next to Dumpsters, anywhere shadows cluster. With a click, a fang of an icicle detaches from a gutter, falls, and shatters. At the sound — a splintering crack — Clark spins around and loses her balance and falls heavily on her side.

The ground knocks the air from her lungs. When she tries to breathe, there is nothing, a flattened ache. Then her chest opens and she recovers with a gasp. She is lying there, sprawled out in the center of the road, when she sees the bear. It is nothing more than a white blur that bounds between two distant buildings, but she knows. Her cheek lies flat against the ice, and when she tries to push herself up, it sticks, peeling painfully away, taking some skin with it.

She crouches, then wobbles into a standing position and turns in a slow circle, listening. Trees creak under the weight of ice. Something shatters in the distance, like a lightbulb popped underfoot. Then, she is almost certain, she hears it, a chiming.

The sleet has gathered in its hair, crusted it over, so that when it moves, it tinkles and chimes as if festooned with small silver bells.

She rotates toward the sound — slowly this time, not wanting to fall again — lifting her revolver. Her eye squints, looking for a target, but there is none, only the long, glassy channel of the street. The sound has vanished.

She doesn’t have to wait long before it comes again — the chiming, almost a ringing now, more frantic — this time to her left. But when she jerks the gun sideways, she finds only an empty sandwich shop with a tree springing through the roof. The chiming continues to evade her, in and out of range, rising from one alley and dying down another, nowhere, everywhere.

Out of the corner of her eye, a darkness where none existed before. This time she doesn’t turn to face it, but flits her eyes and observes the bear. There is a bar and grill with a railed porch that it moves along the edge of, slinking along quietly now, humped low to the ground. She wants to be sure. She wants no more than ten yards between them. She does not move her feet, fearing she will fall, but twists her body. When she lifts the gun, the bear is already scrambling back the way it came.

She fires. She probably shouldn’t, but she fires anyway. She doesn’t know what happens to the bullet, its report and impact lost in the icicles falling and shattering from eaves and lampposts and signs all up and down the block.

The many streets that surround her offer too many outlets to hide in and dart down and burst from, so she keeps moving, hoping to find a more defensible position, a more open space. The bear paces her. She can hear its chiming progress. She can see its body, just as tall as she but twice as broad, flit out of sight. She fires at it and it flinches away but always returns, always shading her.

She is lost in a crystal world, a labyrinth of ice, its walls several stories high. She wanders its corridors. Some of the eaves are messily roofed with nests — whether for birds or squirrels, she doesn’t know — and she thinks she can hear them peeping and scraping inside them, sheathed by ice.

A white shape shimmers across a glassy wall — and she startles away from it and fires and recognizes her reflection just as it shatters. There is a popping sound, followed by a scrape and a chuff as the two feet of snow piled on the angled roof come loose and avalanche toward her. She hurls herself down a narrow chute of an alley just as the icy slab crushes and piles brokenly in the place where she stood.

A crystal dust fills the air. Through it shambles the bear, blasting past her, snapping its jaws, dragging its claw across her arm. Her coat shreds, already red with blood. And then it is gone, out the other end of the alley.

She follows. The alley opens into another, where she finds loading docks, a cluster of Dumpsters, a delivery truck with an empty bed, all frozen. She crunches her way forward. She hears a growling, then a chiming, and spins around but does not know where to aim. Shapes slide across the ice so she cannot tell what is real and what is a reflection, a distortion.

She fires the gun. A wall of ice collapses into a thousand tinkling shards. She fires again, and again, and again, fumbling to reload. The gunshots clap off among the buildings and roam the sky. The splintering collapse of ice makes it sound as if someone has launched a china hutch down a staircase.

After the last shards fall, she is left in silence, alone except for the shard-edged piles glinting all around her. In one direction, she sees more buildings — and in the other, maybe a block away, a grayish expanse of rolling hills dotted with mature and stunted trees. A cemetery surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, as if the dead might rise and escape. She hurries there. Most of the tombstones are camouflaged by snow, ambered by ice, but she can see the larger crosses and a few crypts rising from the drifts. Nothing can sneak up on her here.

Ahead rises a hill topped by a single oak. Its vast branches sag beneath the weight of the ice it carries. Gray slivers fall from it like blighted leaves that glimmer in the cloud-filtered light. She walks as fast as she can, making for the rise. The chiming makes her skid to a stop. It comes from behind her, like a concert of bells. The bear waits in the street, its body porcupined with frost.

She fires, and fires again, and it bounds a few paces away before pausing. When she reaches for her pockets to reload, she finds them empty except for one last bullet. She has either blasted off the rest — or lost some from her pocket when slipping in the streets, careening around corners.

One bullet. She takes her time loading it, chambering the round with a snapping finality. Gun smoke drifts. She breathes in the sweet stink of sulfur. For the moment, she doesn’t feel poisoned by grief, she doesn’t feel guilty for leading a failed expedition to this icy nowhere, she doesn’t feel thirsty for whiskey. Instead she feels her hands curling around the revolver. She feels the cold air piping in and out of her throat. She feels an acidic rage boiling in her guts.

She does not bother running any farther. She crouches down among the graves, with a clear avenue between her and the gates and the street beyond. This is where the bear will enter, and when it does, she will be ready.

The bear teases by the entrance many more times, running in a rocking way, and then, when she doesn’t fire, it squats down and studies her. Then the bear — the one with the severed paw, the one who killed her brother — starts toward her at a lope, rounding the fence, passing through the entry; and once there, it rushes forward, more swift and sure-footed than she could ever be. Steam blasts from its snout. Its red eyes do not stray from her. The chiming of its ice-clotted fur is manic, matching the feeling inside her.

“Come on,” she says. “Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”

The cold brings tears to her eyes and she blinks them hurriedly away, keeping her focus. At first the bear runs low, ready to duck a bullet, and when the bullet doesn’t come, its body opens up, curling in on itself and snapping outward as it sprints. Twenty yards, fifteen yards, ten yards. The rest of the world falls away in a blur, all of her attention crushed down to a tunnel of ice through which the bear hurtles. She waits. She waits until she can be sure, until the bear is nearly upon her, widening its jaws.

Then she fires.

Through the teeth, down the throat, out the back of its neck, right where the spine nests in the skull, the bullet finds its mark. A feathery spray of blood. The bear drops, goes limp. Just like that. Like a flip switched, off. The gunshot claps through the cemetery. The body skids and rolls heavily into her, knocking her down. The gun skitters off. The back of her head clunks the ground. Her vision wobbles in and out. She is holding the bear, her arms wrapped around it, when it coughs and shudders and goes still.

Chapter 37

LEWIS CALLS her name, “Gawea,” and she wakes. Her head wobbles and her eyelids shutter. Her face is swollen and netted with blood that seems to contain her, trap her inside herself. “Please,” he says. “Are you all right?”

Gawea is supposed to guide, Clark is supposed to lead — and now he doesn’t have either of them. But his decisiveness surprises him when he tells Colter to help him and then the doctor out of their restraints. Once freed, he pulls off his shirt and tears it in half. Part of it he uses to tie off the doctor’s bitten arm — she has lost a lot of blood and her skin is cold and her breath comes in shallow gasps — and the other half he presses to the girl’s wound. “York,” she says, her voice muddled. “What happened to York?”

“Rest,” he tells her. “You need your rest.”

Lewis can smell their meat cooking now and hear the women speaking, but they are out of sight, around the bend of a shadowy corridor. He shakes the caging at the front of the store and calls for help. “Come here. I want to talk to someone this instant.” But no one appears except a toothless woman — older than the others — with a blind white eye and a bright red scar dividing her forehead.

She has a phone pressed to her ear, the curled cord dangling from it and wrapped around a finger. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I see,” as if plugged in to some lost conversation. When Lewis asks her to fetch someone else, to tell the others that one of their party is gravely ill, she goes still and cups a hand over the receiver and whispers harshly to the imaginary person on the other end of the line. Her white eye catches the light and brightens.

“Please,” he says. “Why are you doing this to us?”

She babbles something then about the bad people.

“I don’t understand.”

“The bad people. You’re the bad people. You come in the night. You steal us away. You make slaves of us.”

“No, we do not. We most certainly do not. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here—”

But she is already wandering away, again whispering into the phone, leaving him to wonder what has made these women so angry and fearful.

Chapter 38

IF YOU COULD observe the Sanctuary from above, as a vulture riding an updraft, you would see the brown and gray squares of buildings, the dusty complicated swirl of streets between, which all together, from this great height, would look rather like a desiccated brain, within which the dark specks of the deputies appear like clots, spreading, spreading, until their infection is complete, the Sanctuary taken hostage.

Smoke rises — from this building, then another — and stains an otherwise pure blue sky, clouds your vision, so you must return to the streets once more to see the deputies hurling torches through the windows of the Dirty Shame, where someone sang a ballad about Lewis and Clark the night before, a ballad that others are now humming in the streets, singing under their breath. The bartender tries to leave, but they push him back in. The flames make a noise like a thousand fingers snapping in excitement. The roof collapses — the metal sheeting sending up a swirl of sparks — as the clay walls blacken and crack. Where there was once a building, there is now a dark hull, like the disintegrating remains of a beetle.

Anyone caught singing the song — or any song — is hurled to the ground and beaten with cudgels until muscle pulps, bone shatters. Some try to help. A group of six men push the deputies, grab them by the wrists, try to wrestle them away. At first they succeed. Then more deputies come, and more still, and by the end of the day the six men are hanged — from balconies, from the wall, all over the Sanctuary — their bodies twisting in the wind, crows roosting on their shoulders and feasting their faces down to bone.

The wells are shut down for two days. Deputies surround them with fresh skins of water hanging plumply from their belts. For personal use. They guzzle from them theatrically. A barrage of people gathers. Before long it is a mob. They beat the bottoms of their buckets and jugs and make a storm of noise. They yell and their dry lips crack and make their mouths bloody.

Graffiti appears overnight, hurriedly smeared onto alley walls, scratched onto shop windows. THE SANCTUARY = PRISON and DEATH TO LANCER and BRING DOWN THE WALL and WHEN HOPE IS DOWN, THE SOLUTION IS UPRISING. The buildings burn. No matter if the people inside are not responsible for the graffiti.

When Oman arrives at his apothecary, the keys jangling in his hand, ready to open for the day, his black-toothed mouth unhinges in a silent scream. Because the shop is burning, crowned with fire that gives off many curious colors — green and purple and pink and gold — as his many powders and potions erupt.

This lasts for a few days, but there are too many buildings to burn now, too much danger in the fire spreading like the anger that reddens their faces and hoarsens their voices.

The deputies retreat, at Lancer’s request, still visible but disengaged, walking the streets like black shadows the sun can’t erase. The wells open. Long lines form, reaching down alleys, around buildings, no end in sight.

New graffiti appears. TRUST LANCER. And OUR HOME IS A SANCTUARY. Deputies linger nearby and menace anyone who means to scrub it away.

Bodies keep piling up. Two of the sentinels on the wall. A mother and her three children. A drunk in an alley. A tinker at his cart. They are robbed sometimes and sometimes not, killed simply because everyone is burning up with anger.

Then come the bodies reported to be those of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The rangers drag them through the gates one day, piled in a wagon. They are rotted and disfigured beyond recognition. They have been hiding out there this whole time, the rangers say. And now they finally met the end they deserved. Killed by wild animals.

“I don’t believe it,” some say, but some say they do. Some say the end of the rainbow leads to nothing but a pot of sand and spiders.

Chapter 39

IF THE WOMAN on the phone had not gone mad with grief after losing her husband and daughter, if she had lingered to answer Lewis’s questions, this is what she would have told him.

The slavers came in the night. Every man who fought back, they killed. Every woman too old and slow to follow their commands, they killed. Every baby, they abandoned or ran through with a knife. Everyone else they kept. They hurled them into wheeled cages — jerry-rigged trailers and truck beds — dragged by horses and oxen. There was a bucket of water, frozen across the top, refreshed daily. And another bucket for waste. And many blankets to share, beneath which they huddled together for warmth.

No matter how they begged or screamed, no matter how desperate and plying their questions, the slavers would not respond except to say, “Hold your tongue. Or we’ll cut it out.”

They traveled two days across the plains — the snow infrequent here, a mere dusting — with the frozen ground crackling beneath them. They then arrived at a small town of cadaverous houses. Rusted grain elevators reached several stories higher than any other building in town and next to them sat a train station made from red brick with plywood nailed over the windows. Here they came to a creaking stop and the slavers unhitched the oxen and brushed them down and fed them hay while their captives pressed their faces against the bars and asked questions that vanished into vaporous clouds, unanswered.

The slavers retreated inside the train station, and minutes later smoke wormed from its chimney. Only then did the caged men and women notice the trampled snow and grass and the freshly split firewood stacked along one wall of the building with the occasional mouse sprinting in and out of it. The slavers had been here before. But why they chose this building, of all the places they might have taken shelter, their captives could not understand.

Nor did they understand what came a few hours later: the trembling that shook the ground, the banshee wail that split the air. They were already afraid, but now their fear heightened to the borderlands of terror, hysteria. Some of them whimpered and wiped tears from their eyes. Some shook the bars and screamed their throats raw. And some huddled in the corner of the cage and waited for whatever was coming, growing louder by the second.

They could not see it until it was nearly upon them, the black engine car with the pilot grille that looked somewhere between a triangular weapon and a toothy grin. Steam clouded from the smokestack. It continued past them, the crankshaft slowing, the brakes sparking and screeching. It was followed by three coal cars that gave way to a dozen more boxcars and cattle cars and flatcars.

Not all of them knew the word—train—but soon they were all uttering it the way some might say dragon or comet, with a mixture of fear and excitement and otherworldly awe. The train was something out of history, but the train was also now indicative of some strange future, so it made them feel out of time, completely at odds with the present.

There was a long hiss. And a clanking as the metal settled. The slavers exited the station and stood on its porch and watched the train creep to a halt and then set to work.

A metal ramp was drawn from each of the boxcars, and it rattled when the men walked up it. They hauled open the door and a crowd of men and women stood blinking in the gray light. A few tried to escape but were beaten back with the clubs the slavers carried. A joke made, laughter. Buckets of water were replenished. A crate of food was delivered. Waste was collected, along with several stiff, gray-skinned bodies.

And then the slavers came for those in the cages. Some had to be carried or dragged, they were so fearful of the machine. And then, within a few minutes, they were all crowded inside and the door clanged shut behind them. At first, the two groups remained separated, the old and the new, watching each other fearfully in the dim light. Then the train huffed and clanged and lurched and several lost their balance and fell. Their cries broke the silence, and before long everyone was talking, a jibbering flood of words. They hugged just to feel the warmth and support of another.

There was an inch-wide crack along the door, and through it they could see the rolling grasslands punctuated by dead towns. Then the clouds darkened and the snow became ashen and the air tasted acrid and the oil fires bloomed all around them. Every now and then someone would rise to look, but the wind whistled painfully through the crack and their eyes watered over and froze their tears instantly to their cheeks. It was safer to stay in a huddle, beneath the blankets, with their hands tucked into their armpits or crotches for warmth. Some of them could not stop shivering, their teeth chattering along with the wheels clacking the tracks.

Their speed ranged from five to fifteen miles an hour. They stopped often to clear or repair tracks, sometimes progressing only a few miles a day. A man began to cry and would not stop. He had long brown hair but was balding in a way that made his forehead appear tremendous. He was an ugly crier. Not just his appearance, like a red cabbage, but the sound, a phlegmy hiccuping. At first everyone tried to comfort him, but when he would not stop they grew irritated and then furious and struck him with their fists and told him to stop, but this only made him grow louder, wailing now. After six hours, no one could tolerate the sound and several people held him down and strangled him and the long silence that followed was not as comforting as they’d imagined it would be.

It was not long after this that the brakes shrieked and the train shuddered and rattled as it tried to stop too soon, too fast. The cars wobbled when they accordioned their weight. There was a sudden clanking, like the shuffling of a deck of metal cards, followed by an impactful crunch. They did not have time to cry out as they were hurled against the front wall, and then the side wall, and then the ceiling, tumbling one way and then the next, like one massive body that continually broke apart and coalesced, bone and metal, hair and blood. There was no sense of up or down, only a weightlessness interrupted by moments of severe gravity. Gashes opened in the walls. The door rolled open and several people were launched through it. The train was twisting off the tracks, rolling down a snowy berm, throwing up a wave of ice and dirt. The clanging and scraping progress of the crash was so loud it seemed the very world might be rent in half.

And when the last of the metal warped and yawned and settled, when the smoke shushed from the crack in the combustion chamber, when the first of the survivors began to creep from the wreckage, they saw what had caused the crash.

Bison. What appeared to be hundreds of them surrounded the train, but the air was cloaked in sick black fog that made it difficult to see. Shaggy and horned and humpbacked. Their goatees crusted over with ice. Smoke tusking from their snouts. They drifted in and out of sight. A half dozen of them had been struck by the train, their bodies torn apart, strewn across the tracks and berm, limbs that still shivered and red smears that still steamed. The surrounding horde stomped the ground as if impatient to revenge the fallen.

Three slavers crawled from the engine car. One of them bled from both his ears and kept putting his hands over them as if to clap away the ringing there. Another clutched an arm to his chest, an arm whose elbow bent the wrong way. Another seemed unhurt but kept touching himself all over to find the injury that must be hiding somewhere. For a moment they stared dumbly at the train and the captives staggering from it and seemed not to know what to do — but only for a moment.

Their surviving captives were all women, mostly girls. They ganged around the slavers, who held up their hands to defend themselves, but the women pushed through them and knocked their bodies to the ground and beat them with their fists and feet. They did this casually, not rushing, as if they were carrying out some chore. A chest caved. A skull dented.

The girls did not know what to do or where to go, but they felt gifted and cheery and a few of them could not help but hug and cackle nervously before being hushed by the more fearful among them. They checked the wreckage for survivors and found few, one of them a slaver they disposed of with a sharp piece of metal.

By this time the bison had departed and the fog had lifted and in the distance they could see a city, Bismarck.

* * *

There are twenty-two of them altogether, mostly teenage girls. They call the mall home. The hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel and concrete feel good. Like armor. As does the charred sky, the icy wind, the oil fires torching the horizon. No one will find them here. No one will harm them ever again. This is what Sasa tells them.

She is one of the oldest among them, certainly the loudest. They look to her as a mother. She is the one who tells them they will live in the mall. She is the one who tells them they must wake from their daze — as they stumble around, trying to get used to the ashen cold, learning how to navigate Bismarck, vacant eyed, hollowed by the loss of their families. She is the one who demands they construct defenses, salvage goods, sew clothes, auger holes in the river to fish, set traps and string bows, feed and arm themselves. In this unfamiliar world, being told what to do is a comfort. They listen to her. They do exactly as she says.

Sasa keeps her graying hair cropped close to the skull in tight curls. She is tall, thin shouldered, long limbed. Her nose and jaw, both strangely pointed, seem like they could come together as a claw. Her skin is the color of old wood and the tip of her nose purpled with frostbite. A long knife hangs at her waist. Her voice is deep and even in standard conversation comes at a shout. Six months ago, she wasn’t like this. Six months ago, she saw her husband hanged from a tree and her baby stomped flat. The only way to survive her grief was to harden, shield herself like some crustacean. She has a new family now, these women, and she will defend them from any injury.

Their lives are now a long winter, she says. She will help them endure it.

On this morning, they gather in the atrium, what was once the food court. The floor is cracked tile. The ceiling is a pyramidal skylight cloaked in snow. Three garbage cans crackle and give off waves of heat from the wood burning inside them. Smoke hazes the air. She paces on a short stage and punctuates her sentences with a fist to the palm. Her girls lounge in metal chairs. They nod and mutter their agreement.

Over the past few months they have mentioned the bison. The herd that caused the train wreck, that deposited them at the outskirts of Bismarck. They were saved and they were saved for a reason. The bison were an instrument of God. The world wanted them to live. But to survive, they must be strong. Being strong means making difficult choices. Making difficult choices means hurting back those who mean to hurt them.

“We knew they might come for us. And now they’ve come for us.” She makes a fist that matches her clenched face. “We won’t be victims this time.”

Her eyes narrow at the sight of the man escorted toward them. He has only one arm, the wrist of it secured to his thigh. He knocks against several chairs, which screech and clatter. He tries to yank away, tries to run, but he trips into a table and falls to the floor. He kicks at the women who huddle around him until they take out their knives and threaten to gut him, and then he goes still and allows them to drag him onstage. He refuses to fall to his knees. Every time they push him down, he struggles to his feet, until Sasa says, “I like this one. He’s a fighter. I’m going to give him a fighting chance.”

He stares hatefully at her.

Sasa asks for his name and he tells her Jon Colter.

“Why are you smiling, Jon Colter?”

“I’m not,” he says. “There’s something wrong with my face.”

“What’s wrong with your face?”

“A wolf bit it.” He looks around, as if seeking escape. “Whatever you think we did, we didn’t. We didn’t do anything to any of you.”

She raises her eyebrows and tells him with a placid voice, “You killed our parents. You killed our husbands and our sisters and our brothers. You killed our children.”

“No.” He laughs, but in an ugly way. “No, no, no. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care who you are.”

“Why else would you come here? A place this cold. A place this sick.” When she stands before a crowd, her voice takes on the same rhythms as that of the seer in her village. “Fires burn on the horizon. Ash falls from the sky. No one comes here. This is a place for no one.”

“You’re here.”

“To hide. From you. But you’ve found us.”

He is smiling now. Really smiling, showing all his teeth. “Listen to me. We came from St. Louis. We’re passing through—”

She laughs and automatically several of the girls laugh along with her.

The smile dies from half his face. The humor in the situation belongs to her. “What’s so funny?”

The fire barrels cough up sparks. Sasa nods and the guard takes a knife to the rope that binds his wrist to his thigh. He flexes his hand and looks around him as if seeking a way out.

She tells him to remove his clothes, and when he refuses, she tells her girls to do it for him, tearing off his boots, his pants, dragging him out of his coat and knifing off his shirt, until he stands naked and trembling before them. His body is a mess of scars that seem to whiten as his skin pinkens in the cold. He would cross his arms if he could, but as is, he can only clutch his middle one-handed.

Sasa studies his body and says, “You look like you’ve been chewed up and spit out.”

“Pretty much.”

“Here’s how this will work. I’m going to give you a head start of thirty seconds.”

“Fuck you.”

“And then I’m going to come after you.”

“Even if I outrun you, I’ll freeze.”

“You look like you’re accustomed to surviving.” She makes a shooing motion with her hands. “One,” she says. “Two, three, four, five,” and before she can count six, he has leapt off the stage, knocked aside tables, padding away.

Sasa continues to count aloud in a calm voice that matches her movements as she steps off the stage and retrieves her bow and quiver and walks down the corridor that leads to the entry.

The women follow her into the half-light of day. The air is bracingly cold. The clouds boil. The horizon burns. An ice storm has coated everything so that it appears as slick as glass. In the distance, almost halfway across the vast open parking lot, Colter races away from them. He keeps his steps short and his good arm outstretched for balance. He falls twice but does not pause, scrambling up to bolt forward again. His buttocks redden. His breath chimneys from his mouth.

She hears a few of her girls say, “Don’t” and “Let him go, Sasa,” but she doesn’t listen. She has to be strong for all of them. She has to expel the hurt stored inside her.

She pinches an arrow from her quiver and notches it into the string and lifts it to her eye and says, “Thirty.”

* * *

Simon and Ella expect a visit from Danica, but she doesn’t come for several days, and when she does, she is limping, she has a fat lip, and one of her eyes is plum purple, swollen so badly, revealing only a weepy slit. She tries to mask it with makeup. And she tries to walk without wincing.

She comes through the side door, into the kitchen, and Simon pulls out a chair for her at the table and she settles into it with a sigh. She wears a foul, rotten cloak so as not to be recognized, and he helps her out of it and hangs it on a hook and asks her if she needs anything and she says no. When he remains beside her, hovering, leaning into her as if she were a flower, she waves him away.

Ella can’t help but feel instantly annoyed. Annoyed by Simon, the way he behaves around her, like a cowed pet. And annoyed by Danica, not for anything she has said or done, just for existing. She cannot help it. She has always found pretty women — the kind who seem to waste time in front of the mirror, who seem to serve no purpose outside of lounging and preening — to be trifling, pathetic, even foul, like dead songbirds with maggots nesting inside their bright breasts. But when Danica rubs her knee, in obvious pain, Ella grudgingly allows her annoyance to give way to concern and asks, “What’s happened?”

“He’s angry. That’s what happened.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. I’m glad he’s angry. He’s angry because he’s worried.” Her hand rises from her knee to her thigh, where she keeps her dagger beneath her dress. She fingers it and her mouth twitches with a smile. She says she knows what they’re wondering. They’re wondering, if she hates her husband so much, why not poison him? That is the woman’s way, isn’t it? Poison. She has considered it. Of course she has considered it. These days, he has grown more and more paranoid, and before he would sip his wine, before he would knife into a steak, he made his chef or server — or sometimes even Danica — taste everything.

Every s she utters takes a little too long to get out of her mouth, so that her sentences sound like a spitting fuse. Ella can’t tell if it’s the swollen lip or some pain-relieving opiate that causes this.

Besides, Danica says, poisoning him, killing him, would accomplish little beyond her temporary satisfaction. She might get away with it or she might get caught. And then? Someone else would take his place of power and similarly abuse it.

Ella cannot help but wonder about her, cannot help but feel this woman is more than she appears. There is something far more substantial and dangerous about her. She is like the blade she carries. A blade is rigid and cold and sharp. A blade is a decoration. A blade is a tool. A blade is a threat.

In a cold voice, carefully enunciating each word, Danica tells them her reason for coming now: she has a plan — and the plan concerns them, and the plan could kill them, if they aren’t careful. But if it works, and it just might, then an uprising will come that the deputies will not be able to quell.

“Go ahead, then. What is it?”

“My dear husband,” she says, “has decided to throw a ball.”

“Who’s he going to throw it at?” Simon says.

Ella says, “She means a party, you idiot.”

“A party,” Danica says. “A costume party no less. With cheeses and meats and sweet liquors and desserts and everything else one might consider far too extravagant for these thin times. And he plans to invite everyone who matters, who has any influence. Just as he believes in terrorizing those who defy him, he believes in spoiling those who would support him.” She brings a hand to the corner of her swelled eye. “If there was a time for us to do something, it would be then, wouldn’t you agree?”

* * *

The first arrow misses, sailing to the left of Colter and embedding itself in the ice. The second arrow, too, skitters past him. The third arrow might have struck its mark if not for Clark.

The crowd of girls did not notice her when they charged out of the mall. Nor did they notice the gone guard, no longer at her post. They were too intent on the naked figure sliding jerkily across the ice-scalloped parking lot.

So when the woman named Sasa falls forward with an arrow nested in the back of her skull, when they spin around to see Clark standing there with another arrow notched, they can only stare dumbly. They are pale and thin and quivering and bent backed. No longer a mob, just a bunch of lost little girls. Then one of them asks, in the smallest of voices, “What have you done?”

Two of the girls hug each other. One of them — the only old woman among them — whispers into a dead phone. The others look around as if to wait for a command that never comes.

“Anyone else want any trouble?”

The girls shake their heads or study the ground, no threat to her. She lowers her bow and calls out for Colter, tells him to come back.

Then she settles her eyes on the girls and asks them where the rest of her friends are and they point to the mall and she says, “Show me.”

Chapter 40

FOR DECADES NOW, in the Sanctuary’s Fourth Ward, you didn’t want to walk around at night unless you were looking for trouble. Something to snort, someone to fuck or fight. Every morning, the first bell rang and the sun chased away the night and revealed the bodies. The bodies of those beaten and stabbed and the bodies of those who choked on their own puke and the bodies of those who decided enough was enough and dove out a window or fell on a knife. In the heat, they bloated and festered, attracted rats and vultures, spread disease. So the Sanctuary authorized a cleanup team. The gatherers, they were called, mostly teenagers without a trade looking for some coin. When she was thirteen years old, Clark joined them. Mornings, a donkey pulled a cart and she hauled the bodies into it, with an apron and elbow-length gloves and a bandana shielding her nose and mouth. She came to associate this color — the ashen color of early morning — with grief. Grief was a color.

And that is the color of this place, North Dakota, and that is the color of her current state of mind.

By the time Lewis finds her, she is already drunk. They have given her what she asked for — a drink, a real drink — a jar of moonshine derived from tree bark. She gulps from it, her thirst returned. This is on the roof of the mall, where her legs dangle over the edge, her body hunched over in the shape of a hook.

Lewis approaches and touches her gently on the back. “I was worried about you.”

“Was?”

“Am.”

“Yeah? You should worry about yourself.” She stiffens and his hand falls off her.

“York?” he says.

She shakes her head and drinks and roughs a sleeve across her mouth.

For a long minute they stare off at the ice-humped city and the furnace glow of the oil fires beyond it. She drinks again from the jar. Her eyes waver in and out of focus. “Hey, have you ever noticed something?” She licks her lips as if her mouth has gone too dry for words. “Have you ever noticed how my head is different shaped? How one side of my face looks different than the other?”

“No.”

“It’s true. Look.” She turns her head one way, then the other, arranging her face into a scowl. Her breath is sour. “See?”

“No.”

“It’s true. You’ve just got to look closer. One side is kind of pretty. You’re not supposed to say that about yourself, but I’ll say it. Okay? I’ll say it. I’m pretty. But not the other side! The other side, if you look at it on its own, is ugly.” She slaps a hand to her face in order to shade the one side of it. Maybe he can see it now. The drooping cheek. A broader ridge of forehead. The slight bulge of the eye, a little more lid around it. “I’m like two different people.”

The wind gusts and carries bits of ice in it. She wobbles on her perch before catching her balance, spilling some of her drink.

“You should come down from there.”

“Didn’t I say to worry about yourself?”

She looks at him with her red-rimmed eyes. In these long wordless seconds, during which time they stare painfully at each other, he wants to tell her how sorry he is about her brother. He doesn’t usually say things like that—sorry or thank you or please or any common pleasantry; it just doesn’t occur to him — but he knows he ought to. Sorry might be the medicine she needs. He wants to tell her how much he admires her fearlessness and impulsiveness, how he has learned from her, grown into a better man by her example. He wants to tell her he not only worried about her last night — he missed her, too, as if he were a lizard dragged from the sun, so that he felt enervated without her around, sour and cold-blooded. He wants to tell her he needs her. They all do. He gathers his breath, but before he can blow out the words, she says, “I’m a killer.”

“You—”

“I killed that woman outside. I killed my own brother. I killed Reed. I killed them all. I might kill you next, who knows? This was my idea, coming here. It was a stupid, deadly idea. And we’re all worse off for it.”

“Stop it. Don’t be so self-pitying. It doesn’t become you.”

“Do you know what I feel like right now?” Her voice comes sliding out of her like sharpened steel. “I feel like eating you.”

“Clark—”

“I feel like eating the whole world. Shoving all the metal and concrete and wood and bone and meat into my mouth until there is nothing left.”

“You need to rest. You’ll feel better once you rest.”

“I killed her, Lewis.”

“You did what you had to do. She was going to kill Colter.”

“I don’t mean her.”

It takes him a moment to process this. “Then who?”

“Her.”

“Her who?”

“Your mother, Lewis. I killed her. So that you would come with us.”

The world seems to dim. The sky seems to sag. The wind rises and slaps his face. He waits for the anger to come — he knows it is there, inside him, waiting to catch flame — but for the moment there is only a sick feeling, a green-tinged sadness. He opens his mouth, but no words will come.

“Go away, Lewis. Before I hurt you more than I already have.”

When he makes no move to leave, she says, “Go!” in what sounds like a half howl.

* * *

Now Lewis is running, pounding along as fast as he can, sliding, occasionally falling, but always scrambling to his feet, always moving, away from the world he thought he knew and into the world he does not. Snow kicks up beneath his heels. Though the air is cold, his throat burns with exertion. The mall is behind him, like a great tomb, and he races away from it. He can feel the rage growing, growing, so that his inside feels bigger than his outside. And he is so hot, not just his breathing now, but his head, his skin, the core of him furnaced. He could tear off his clothes, eat snow.

With this comes that familiar feeling — of the sky opening up to watch him. He can sense it homing in on his dodging figure, and he knows he cannot escape it. Above him the clouds begin to twirl, as if spun with a spoon, and he hears the kind of crackling sound that comes from thick wool socks sliding across a rug.

The parking lot reaches on endlessly. No matter how furiously he pumps his legs, the edge of it seems to grow no closer. He sees the vapor of his breath. He sees the ground, thickly floored with ice. He sees the flicker of light gathering in the sky, where the clouds darken and churn and foment, as the anger spills out of him and takes hold of the world.

The air around him seems to sparkle. He listens for thunder but hears only the panicked gusting of his breath. He tries to run faster, but the lightning stops him midstride. It shoots from the sky and spears him, jags through his body like a second spine. Several more bolts join the first, like so many whips lashing at him, their barbs caught in his skin, filling him with painful light.

He wakes naked. His clothes are ashes curled away by the wind. His hair has scorched and brittled, and when he runs his hand across his belly, his eyebrow, his head, it crisps away. He is purely skin, his body as white and rigid as alabaster.

He lies on his back, staring up at a night sky that looks like holes punched through black cloth, the biggest of them the moon. The moon! How he has missed it, as shadowed and pale as a favorite grandfather’s face. For a long time this is all he sees, his vision absorbed by the sky, so that he might as well be floating through space.

There is no sound except a distant ring, like the single undying chime of a silver bell. He sits upright and takes in a world he recognizes, but not quite. Here is the parking lot, but it is crowded with cars. Here is the mall, but it is glowing with light. A woman in a red coat approaches, carrying shopping bags weighted with clothes. A man carries a girl on his shoulders. A couple walk arm in arm, laughing at a joke he cannot hear. The woman pauses to cough, and the cough overwhelms her, bending her over and spasming her body, and the man rubs her back to comfort her.

The headlights on a truck flare beside him — and he stands in a hurry, spotlighted.

The truck does not seem to see him, rolling from its spot, and he darts out of the way. He calls out to the woman in the red coat, but she does not look his way, digging into her purse and removing a silvery flash of keys. He grabs her then, presses his thumb deeply into the basin of her elbow, and though she frowns, she does not pause. He releases her as she pulls away.

All around him, he now notices, lights glow, a galaxy of light. Stoplights, streetlamps, headlights, billboards, signage over stores and the windows beneath them. The starlit sky above cannot compare.

Lewis wonders if he is caught in a dream, even as he knows he is not. He is perfectly awake and cannot escape or manipulate what surrounds him, slash a hand through it and make it ripple like water. Yet like a dream, he goes along with whatever presents itself, in this case, a black tunnel toward the edge of the parking lot, the only break he can find in this weird-familiar world. A tunnel of trees, all the trunks leaning inward, arched and raftered with branches silvered with snow.

He moves through its darkness and the darkness moves through him. It is comforting. Familiar. Deep. Timeless. He walks the passage, not cold, not at all, despite his bare feet padding the frosted ground. The sound grows louder, more painful, the farther he travels. Instead of a bell it is now a knife in his ear. It warps and solidifies into a word, his name. A voice calls for him. Burr’s. He does not want to go forward but feels pulled there as if down an inhaling throat. A branch scratches his arm. Shadows shift among the trees, pacing him.

At the end of the tunnel a light awaits him — a light that brightens and blackens, brightens and blackens, like a great eye opening and closing. He fears the eye. It makes his breath come faster and yet he can never seem to get enough, as if his chest is leaking, pierced.

And then he is there, at the end, with the eye before him, burning from the top of a lighthouse with the great gray span of the ocean frothing and booming beyond it.