The Dead Lands

Chapter 41

TWO WOMEN. Sisters. The Field sisters. Old enough to thread their hair with gray, but how old exactly, they don’t know. They don’t keep a calendar. They keep their hair short, a shaggy cut. Their faces and shoulders are broad. One of them has a mole on her upper lip, and the other doesn’t, and one of them stands six feet tall, the other a little less, but otherwise they could be the same person. Maybe this is why they don’t talk very often. What use are words when you can communicate with a narrow-eyed glance, a pointed finger, a pat on the back.

They go still when asleep. Otherwise, they move quickly and efficiently, when digging clams, when robbing birds’ nests of eggs, when cooking and eating, when mending clothes, when scavenging houses and stores. Right now, in a half-moon bay walled in by cliffs, one of them splits logs with a maul while the other digs a wide, shallow crater in the sand. The ax chucks the wood that is piled into the crater and then set aflame. When it burns, they look to the sky, worried who might see the smoke, comforted by the long-hanging clouds. They stir the fire with a length of rebar, then rake it down to coals and let it cool and collect the charcoal.

They already have the rest of what they need. First the potassium nitrate, deposits of bat guano they scraped from caves and attics. They soaked the gray mud of it in water for a day and then collected the crystals. And then the sulfur they salvaged from the cobwebbed shell of an ag store.

They merge and screen and granulate the ingredients and fill up ten ten-gallon drums that weigh several hundred pounds each. The sisters manage to roll them and heft them into the back of a pickup truck that has been welded and patched with sheets of metal so many times that it appears like many vehicles clapped together. The bed sags with the weight. The tires’ tubes are full of salt water. The engine runs poorly but runs all the same, rebuilt to process biodiesel, the algae the sisters harvest. The key cranks and the engine bellows and lopes and settles into a steady chug punctuated by the occasional rattling pop.

They keep it in first gear. The speedometer is broken, but their speed couldn’t be more than five miles per hour. The pickup breaks down twice on the way to Youngs Bay, and they spend an hour, then another hour, fixing it. One of them hunches over the engine block while the other surveys the road in either direction with a rifle ready.

The road is more an impression than a reality. A place where trees aren’t. The asphalt has ground down to gravel. They drive around the occasional fallen limb and rockslide, but mostly the way is clear.

The Warrenton-Astoria Highway reaches across the bay. It is passable but crumbling in sections, the steel caging within visible like bones peeking out of a melting snowdrift. The sisters park and unload the drums and roll them down the bridge and situate them at ten-foot intervals. They are made from a thick plastic that has aged gray. This matches the color of the bridge, camouflages the barrels, makes them appear like short pillars. Their fuses are made from fabric, glue, and oxidizing agents decanted from old weed killer. The sisters run a long web of them that wind together into one thick rope.

They drive the pickup back down the road and next to a tumbledown building and throw clumps of moss on it along with a few sticks. Then they hike back to the bay wearing backpacks and carrying rifles. They lead the thick coil of fuse into the woods and park themselves on a log with a clear view of the bridge. They unzip their backpacks and withdraw binoculars and oil and rags and books and dried fish and berries and nuts and canteens of water. They eat. They wait.

Across the bay, the city of Astoria. A vast hive. Some fifty thousand live there. Chimney smoke dirties the air. If it was night, its hills would glow with lamplight.

Six hours pass. Seagulls screech. Waves lap. Wind hushes. The rain comes steadily here, rarely pausing for more than an hour. And the ocean breathes its salt into the air. Even the buttons on their jackets and jeans rust. So they take good care of their rifles, breaking them apart now to wipe down everything, the receiver, the barrel, the magazine, and then they dampen a rag with oil and wipe the parts down again and fit it all back together. They reload. They lever a round. They set the safety. They lay the rifles beside them in easy reach.

They read in shifts, one of them turning pages while the other peers through binoculars. Then, from across the bay, a caravan starts across the bridge. It is a long train of cows harnessed to empty wheeled cages. Metal clanks. Hooves clop. Leather and rope creak. Their approach will take a good five minutes.

The sisters have paced out the fuse and calculated how quickly it will burn down. One of the sisters holds up a hand, as if to say, Steady, steady, steady, while the other readies her matches. Then the hand drops, chopping the air. One match sparks and dies in the wind. Another splinters in half. The third one sputters out against the fuse. The fourth catches.

A long, spitting snake works its way toward the bridge, sizzling its way through underbrush, around trees, across gravel, splitting up and following the ten threads, rising into the barrels. The caravan is nearly upon them and the sisters can see the man at the front of the column standing up in his carriage, pulling back on his reins. But it is too late.

The sisters see the explosion before they hear it. An overlapping series of bright orange flashes surrounded by black roiling smoke run through with chunks of concrete and animal. The bridge drops and rises and expands all at once. The sound thumps the sisters, makes the trees around them shake and drop their leaves. The water in the bay dimples with the debris hailing down.

The sisters remove their hands from their ears. They do not smile or raise their fists in celebration. They simply watch with composed but satisfied expressions as a burning man crawls a few paces and goes still, as smoke stains the air, as a forty-foot section of the bridge collapses into the bay and sends a wave rolling to the shore.

Then they collect their things and zip their backpacks and shoulder their rifles and hold hands when they hike back to their pickup.

Chapter 42

LEWIS MARCHES steadily west through a world laced and spired with ice. The wind never stops and the snow lashes his eyes and scrapes them red. He lost his hair to the lightning. It grew back as white and bristled as the hoarfrost along the riverbanks.

When he first left the Sanctuary, he wondered more than once what the hell he was doing. He buried that question long ago, but it has been replaced by another. How the hell is he going to do it? If he is to survive, if he is to traverse this unforgiving place and avoid threats human and animal and elemental, if he is to arrive in a wondrous American landscape, a new Eden, he will be more than a long way geographically from his old self in St. Louis. He will be a new person entirely. This drives him through the snow. The green promise of a better place, the whispered promise of a better self in the voice of Aran Burr.

Lewis wishes he could simply sweep a hand and knock a hundred pounds of snow this way, another hundred pounds that way, as if he were the wind itself. But whatever powers he possesses are limited, accidental, uncontrolled, as if he were a toddler finding his legs or forming his mouth around a word for the first time. He does not understand what he can do, only yearn and puzzle over whatever happy accidents he produces.

Colter and Gawea hike beside him. They wear snowshoes. Their pants stiffen and fringe white and beneath them their legs feel separate, leaden and thudding with every step, so that sometimes they feel they are clopping along on their hipbones. They do not complain. They do not speak at all.

As far as he can remember, the last time he said anything might have been back in Bismarck, when he told the doctor to rest, and once rested, to watch after Clark. “She’s not well. She’s going to need you.”

He kneeled next to the doctor’s cot. She had lost a lot of blood, grown anemic. But she had stubbornly risen back to health, just as Lewis had risen from the smoldering crater in the parking lot, weakened but determined. The silver hair spiraled around her head like roots without purchase. She fumbled for his hand and found it and squeezed it. Her voice came out as if through a filter of sand. “I wasn’t so sure before, but I’m certain of it now. You’re the best of men.”

“Most would call me horrible, I think.”

“It’s the world that’s horrible. But you’ll finish what we started?”

“Yes.”

She ran a thumb along the ridgeline of his knuckles as if imagining the landscape he must yet navigate. “You’re carrying everyone’s dreams with you.”

Lewis was never one to smile, but he smiled for her then. “We’ll see each other down the trail.”

“We will indeed.”

That seems so long ago, what must be weeks, though he can’t be sure, having lost track of time. That is easy to do when everything seems the same. The sky is gray ceilinged, absent of sun and moon and stars, lit by the oil fires that make the air taste like ashes, that make him cough up black slugs every morning.

Sometimes, when he is trudging along, he believes he sees others around him. He believes he is walking with the dead. His mother wisps in and out of sight. Reed coughs up bullets. His horse — rotted down entirely to bone — gallops along with a clatter. A decapitated York juggles three of his heads. And not just them, but others, too, the shades of people driving roads and walking sidewalks and hanging laundry, as if history were a nightmare he can’t escape. Their footsteps match his, so that he feels like he is traveling with them, for all of them.

This is not the first time this reach of country has been void of human life. Everything rises and falls, everything cycles, and maybe he will play some small role in the next rotation. He hopes so. How else can he justify pressing on except by imagining himself a seed in the wind, a hero in a song?

They would be lost if not for the river, which grows narrower by the day as they approach its headwaters. Now and then something distinguishes the featureless landscape. A windbreak of trees next to a farm. A cluster of bushes or bunches of wild grass that — frosted with ice — look like white antlers breaking from the ground. A town where they find a house to hunker down, escape the wind.

It is a squat brick home, the gutters wearing glassy fangs of ice. Gawea stomps on a wooden chair to make kindling. Colter shudders with the cold that possesses him. His skin flares pink with white spots. His fingers might be made of wood, stiff and curled, and he shoves them in his armpit to heat.

There was a time when Lewis always felt cold. But now, even when surrounded by snow, he feels warm, as if he carries a torch inside him. He can start a fire with his hands. He grips the wood until it combusts. The process feels a little like blowing out a hard breath until your chest hitches and your lungs have nearly collapsed. This is the only time he feels chilled, when the energy he expels leaves him temporarily empty, husked. He owns fire but fire owns him. They share a dangerous dominion.

Colter holds out his hand to the fire, trying to warm it, and then just as quickly uses it to shield his face as a dark cluster of bats escapes the chimney and fills the room in a twittering rush before breaking apart, escaping to the far corners of the house.

Gawea kicks apart another chair and adds it to the fire, then drags in some wood from outside and adds it, too, and before long the chimney is whistling from the draw. Several bricks fall on the flames and knock embers on the floor. The blankets crack like glass when Colter stomps on them and lays them by the fire to thaw, and they give off wisps of vapor.

“Where are we again?” Colter says.

“Still in North Dakota,” Gawea says.

“I wouldn’t wish North Dakota on anyone.”

In the kitchen Lewis digs through the cupboards and pulls out a dried bundle of noodles, as brittle as straw. He fills a pot with snow to melt. He looks out the window and sees, still hanging from a pole, the tatters of an American flag, nothing but barely colored threads.

At night they are a small cave of light in a never-ending darkness. That is when the noises begin. In uneven waves, the wind howls and moans and mutters, the nightmare sounds of a zoo on fire. Gawea sleeps without any seeming trouble, but Colter wraps a blanket around his head to muffle the sound. Lewis tries to sleep but cannot. The night shrieks. It pleads and threatens and whines.

When he does dream, he dreams of terror. Clark waits for him outside, her face transformed into a wolf’s. A lighthouse flares and profiles the figure of Burr standing before it. A lump swells painfully along Lewis’s rib cage. He lances it open and finds an eyeball blinking redly at him.

He is awake long before dawn. He watches the fires pluming out in the darkness. He misses the stars he hasn’t seen in such a long time. They remain hidden — along with the moon, the sun — behind the suffocating mantle of clouds. He thinks of them now, thinks about how, just out of sight, all that light is streaming down, light that has traveled millions of years, billions of miles — for what? For nothing, all that time and distance sponged away. He worries that is what is happening to them, to the group of people that set out from the Sanctuary, all the energy that made them press across what felt like an interminable nothing, now dissipating, in danger of being lost altogether.

He kneels by the fireplace and unsleeves his journal from the oilcloth that surrounds it. It feels warm in his hands, as if blood courses through it. He fingers through its pages, with a bird-wing flutter. Here is a song York sang around a campfire. Here is a mixture of several herbs the doctor told him would heal an infection. Here is a sketch of the river alleying through the woods. And another of a mutated squirrel. And another of an unusually large and spotted egg, something waiting to be born.

And another of Clark atop her horse, profiled against the sun. He has left her behind, but in a way he feels he still follows her. He closes the journal with a sense of loss and longing.

They travel farther and farther still, into eastern Montana, where the oil fires cease and the snow thins and gives way to browned grass and sagebrush. In the distance rises the massive spine of the mountains. Their footsteps cut across the grass, the frozen ground, with a shredding sound.

“What were you thinking, Colter?” Lewis says.

“You mean when I was running naked across that field of ice from a group of madwomen who wanted to stick me full of arrows?”

“I actually meant why did you come with me?”

“What was the alternative? Stay behind in the iciest asshole of the world? Besides, you’re such good company. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Lewis stops. “Really. I want to know.”

“Oh, we’re getting all shitty and serious, are we?” Colter pulls down his scarf and reveals his scarred face. He studies Lewis a long time before saying, “I said before, I thought of your father as if he were my own father. I meant that. I guess that makes you a kind of brother. However you want to think about it, we’re in common cause. We’re both serving something bigger. That’s what I used to think about the Sanctuary. That’s what I think now. You feel the same, don’t you?”

“I do.” Lewis trudges forward again and Colter matches his pace. “I wouldn’t be able to do it without you.”

“Not going to argue with you on that one.”

They are so thin the veins stand out from their skin like wires. They kill pheasant, grouse, possum, rabbits, rats, sheep, coyote, deer, antelope, some mutated and some with cancers blooming like mushrooms inside them. Though Lewis has no appetite, every nerve in his body frayed by exhaustion, he forces himself to eat.

Colter believes they are being followed. It is hard to tell, with the wind searing and his eyes welling with tears and blown snow obscuring the air. In a bare passage of land, nothing but bunchgrass, they walk for several miles, making sure there is nothing around they might mistake for a person, and then they spin around. Nothing. “I swear,” Colter says. “The hair on the back of my neck swears.”

Lewis knows whom it is Colter senses, the same man he feels tugging them forward. The man in white. Aran Burr. In Lewis’s dreams, he dropped a stone and the stone fell. And then the stone rose. The stone flew from the ground and snapped into his palm, caged by his fingers, as if he possessed his own gravity. That is how Burr feels to Lewis: gravitational. There was a time in his life when he saw his father everywhere — on a stage before a crowd of people, in a painting in a hallway, at the head of a long table — and even when he didn’t see him, he thought of him, anticipating his command or disapproval, straighten your posture this and get your head out of a book that. And now, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember his father’s face. It has been replaced by Burr’s. He sees him in the snow and in the clouds and in any mirrored surface. Burr visits him when he sleeps. He holds out a hand, beckoning him, and Lewis feels a pull — he feels as the stone must.

“We’re being watched,” Lewis says. “But there’s no one there.”

Every day he asks Gawea to tell him more — about Oregon, about Burr — but she no longer wishes to talk. “Just wait and see,” she says. Or “It won’t be long now.” Or sometimes she says nothing at all.

He tries not to feel bothered by this. York’s death did something to her. She has regressed, grown guarded and reserved again, as if contained by her own personal wall, not wanting to let anyone get close. Sometimes her eyes look like black puddles that with a blink will go streaming down her cheeks. He hopes time will heal her, bring back the girl they were just getting to know.

Chapter 43

SLADE IS TIRED of clearing paths through the whores and beggars on the streets, shoving aside those bone-thin and swollen-bellied and bent-kneed rabble who ask him for money, for food, for water, for a fuck that might come with a favor. He is tired of people speaking to him with voices that range only between pleading and accusatory. He is tired of the blinding sun. He is tired.

So he goes where no one can bother him, to his windowless basement room, where the shadows are as deep and cooling as water. Here he keeps company with his dummies. He walks among them, the mannequins with cracked faces and glued-on hair and torn fingernails and the patchwork ensemble he gathered gradually for all of them. One was Jillian, a baker’s daughter, whose hair smelled like flour and whose breasts reminded him of mounds of dough. Another was Becca, the sister of one of his deputies, who liked to whistle when she walked, like a little bird beckoning him. And Manda and Ankeny. And now Ella — so fierce — his favorite so far.

His ears still buzz with the noise of the city — his mind still aches with the brightness of the day — but if he closes his eyes and stands as still as his dummies and breathes deeply through his mouth, he feels like he is drinking in peace, filling himself with a cool, blue calm.

Every day, he enlists more deputies. But he has no illusions about their loyalty. They are devoted only to the food and water that come with the job. And though a man with a weapon and a uniform is worth five without, his police force is outnumbered many times over. The Sanctuary could be overtaken, if only people weren’t so afraid. He must keep them that way, as a manager and profiteer of terror.

The other day, when he was walking without an escort through the Fourth Ward — a collection of deteriorating buildings full of cutthroats, gamblers, whores — someone hurled a bag of filth at him. It exploded against his chest and then plopped to the ground. He stood there a moment, incredulously wiping his hands through the oozing smear, before looking around and noticing the streets crammed with crook-mouthed, thin-eyed people who studied him with a collective ferocity that made him feel, for the first time in his life, small. He hurried away, knowing that they might be seconds away from swarming him. For all his administration, Thomas has relied on the enemy beyond the walls, but he must worry now about the enemy within them.

If Thomas knew about Ella, she would be dead. And if Ella were anyone else, Slade would have killed her himself. But so many months ago, when he first questioned her in the museum, he immediately noted her as a favorite, like a special passage earmarked in a book. It was a feeling he knew well — the same spark of recognition he experienced around Jillian and Becca and Manda and Ankeny. His gallery of favorites.

He can harm her. He can harm anyone. He has the power to accuse strangers, beat them senseless, cuff them and noose them, with nothing in the way of consequence except more hatred directed his way. He is omnipotent. And omnipotence comes with boredom. That is why the Greek gods used to assume human form. To play with stakes that at least felt more real. He likes to play. He likes reducing himself to a kind of suitor.

Of course she knew something about Lewis departing the Sanctuary. Of course he would communicate with her by owl. Of course she was responsible for the rabble-rousing graffiti. That was one of the reasons she was a favorite. Because she wasn’t a common fool like so many others, but a worthy adversary, a mind sprung with claws. Which made it his job to tame her, cow her.

He follows her sometimes. Through the sun-soaked streets, the cluttered aisles of the bazaar, not because he believes he will learn anything professionally valuable, but simply to make a study of her. He likes the way she marches instead of walks, always square shouldered. He likes the way she bargains with people — pointing a finger and setting her mouth — and the way she touches whatever interests her — a carved door, an overripe melon, a one-armed doll — lets her finger linger as if to taste.

This morning, after she collected her daily ration of water, he followed her back to the museum, trailing her like a shadow. She sensed him only when she keyed open her door, and by then it was too late. She turned in time to see him shove her inside.

Her jug fell and the cap spun off and the water glug-glug-glugged across the floor, and for a moment that was the only sound besides their breathing as he rammed her up against the wall with a palm cupping her shoulder, a thumb horning her clavicle.

Then he said, in a calm, quiet voice that hardly paused between words, “You stupid girl. You stupid, stupid girl. You think I don’t know about what you’ve been up to. You think you can go on pretending you’re not a part of what’s happening. Let me tell you something. Let me give you a little lesson. Some believe love is the most powerful of all emotions. But that’s just a nice lie people tell themselves. Terror wins. Terror beats love any day. No emotion can control a crowd, can imprint itself so fully onto the human mind. You run this museum, so you know all about this, don’t you? You know about how this country — if you can call it that, a country — has been held hostage by terrorism? The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the terrorist attacks of September eleventh. Yes, I know a thing or two. I’m not as mindless as some people think. Those stories — of long ago and far away — might not seem real. But they happened. And when they happened, they owned everyone. They paralyzed everyone. By the millions. That’s what terror can do. That’s what I can do. To you. And to this city.”

He let her go then and stepped back and the last of her water hiccuped from the jug.

She rubbed her chest where his arm had been. “You’re a no-good bully. And you’re wrong.”

He laughed then. He couldn’t help himself. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds. He could crush her like a cockroach. But she would not flinch. She had such fight to her. “Oh, do tell. How am I wrong?”

“It’s like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don’t you see, that’s a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.”

Her eyes wander away from his and seem to zero in on something, but when he turns, there is only an empty doorway. “What were you looking at?”

“Get out of here,” she says. “Leave me alone.” She tries to push past him. He slaps her and forces her to the floor with an elbow to the throat, and she burbles like a toad at the pressure. “No,” she says, but seems again to be looking behind him. “Don’t!”

From his pocket he removes a pair of pliers. He fingers open her mouth and shoves the pliers inside and says, “Steady now.” With a wrenching crack he removes one of her molars.

He holds up the red-rooted tooth as he departs her. “That’s for what you wrote on the wall and all the trouble it’s caused me. The next time you do something stupid, I’ll come back for the rest of you.”

Now, in the basement, in the dark, he holds the molar in his palm. He pops it in his mouth and sucks on it and tongues its grooves and tastes her sour blood. Then he spits it out and dries it on his shirt and retrieves a pot of glue and patiently holds it to the mouth of her dummy as if suffocating it. When he lets his hand fall, the tooth remains, jeweled to the face of the thing.

Chapter 44

THE MOUNTAINS grow nearer, gradually dominating the horizon, their peaks cutting into the clouds. In their foothills the snow begins again, whiter now than before. They rest in Billings for several days, and again in Bozeman. Here the downtown is surrounded by a defensive perimeter made from logs with sharpened points. It has been burned and breached. Blackened wood and blackened bones rise out of the snow. The smell of smoke still lingers in the air. The people here have been dead weeks, maybe months.

“Who did this?” Lewis says. He kneels beside a skull, small enough to fit into his hand, a child’s. “What happened here?”

“Are you sure we should be going this way?” Colter says.

Gawea shakes her head — maybe she doesn’t know or maybe she doesn’t care or maybe she doesn’t want to tell.

Not so long ago Lewis believed in the end of the rainbow. A shire. An emerald city. Elysian fields. What his childhood storybooks promised. He believed, back when they first set out from the Sanctuary, that something arcadian awaited them. Not anymore. Not now. Not when he sees the bone-riddled ruins of Bozeman. It is not only the landscape that disappoints. It is humankind. Inside and outside the wall, humans remain the same, capable of wonderful things, yes, but more often excelling in ruin. And Burr is human.

He cups a handful of snow over the skull and stands and wipes his hands off. “Is there something you need to tell me, Gawea?”

“No,” she says and keeps her head down and continues hiking forward.

At the edge of town they enter a pole shed with rust trails weeping from every bolt. Inside they find a sign, BOZEMAN FOUNDRY, hanging above a desk with a pile of paper squared on it. Lewis picks up a work order for two dozen horseshoes, a sharpened saw, a repaired scythe. There is some dust but not a lot that he runs a finger through. This was a working site, a working community, home to however many thousands.

Gawea shrugs off her pack and lies on the floor and shoves her fists against her eyes. Colter says, “You all right?” and when she doesn’t respond, he begins opening and closing drawers, closets, cupboards, not knowing what he might find, something of use, while Lewis walks through the entry office and into the cavernous work space. His boots crunch over metal shavings. Hammers and clamps and files hang from the wall. He wanders past forges, stacks of casings and molds, an induction furnace and an electric arc furnace, a small hill of firewood. The air is dirty with the scorched-nut smell of molten metal. His foot clatters a ladle lying on the floor and the noise brings Colter out of the office.

He’s gnawing on something and holds out a handful of it. “Found a stash of jerky. Not bad.”

Lewis tours the equipment and then settles his gaze on Colter.

“What?”

“I’m sorry I doubted you.”

“Only a fool wouldn’t have doubted me.”

“I want to do something for you.”

They spend the rest of the day burning wood, pumping bellows, stirring coals, scraping designs into sand castings. They melt scrap metals and refine the alloy and pour it into the molds and let it cool before tumbling the component from it. They sweat. Their skin blackens with soot. They wield tongs and sledgehammers and scythe hammers and embossing hammers that chirp against the heated metal set upon the bullhorn anvil. Red and yellow sparks fall around their feet. They grind and sand and polish. They fit together hinges, tighten bolts, oil gears, and when they finally finish, Colter slides the stump of his arm into the prosthetic and Lewis tightens the leather straps around his shoulders and buckles them.

In the place of bones there are fitted pipes, and in the place of a hand, three barbed fingers that open into a claw and close into a fist. He experiments with it, bending his elbow, extending his arm for a slash.

“They used to call me the Black Fist, you know?”

“I know.” Lewis crumples onto a stool and wipes the soot from his face with a rag. “What do you think?”

Colter bends over and picks up a cinder block. His claw crushes it and a spray of gray gravel dusts the air and dirties the floor. “I think it will do quite nicely.”

* * *

Gawea presses her fists against her eyes and pushes until colors violet and rose red and dandelion yellow explode against the lids. They remind her of flowers, fields of flowers that she might dive into, roll around in, tangled in their stalks, bombed by their perfume. It’s so much easier to dream in color than to open her eyes to the gray nothing of the world.

She should have known better. She shouldn’t have let herself get close to them. But York wouldn’t leave her alone, his face always dodging into her field of vision, his hands always touching her on the shoulder, the waist, the cheek. That day she swiped the trout from his plate and shoved it in her mouth was only the beginning of the tastes shared between them. Now he is gone, just like her parents, like her oma, everyone close to her punished and then killed, so that living feels like a rehearsal for dying. She was just so lonely and felt antidoted by his company, warmed by his touch.

She was sent to retrieve Lewis. Not Clark, not Reed, and not the doctor and not Colter. Not York. Just Lewis. But she had no choice. They came as a group. She planned to deliver Lewis, as promised, and then Burr would give her what she requested. Whatever happened to the rest of them, she did not care. Initially, if they got in her way, she might have killed them herself. They were irrelevant to her. That’s what she told herself. That’s why she maintained such a cool distance, until she couldn’t anymore. They became relevant to her, more than names, but people, friends.

The hard part was supposed to be the journey. The unforgiving temperatures, the cruel landscape, the scarcity of food and water. But it is the mental assault that has been unendurable. Maybe this mission means nothing. On the one side, Burr is a false prophet. On the other side, Lewis strives for irrelevance. There is no human endeavor. No matter how much people clung to family, breeding more children, and to community, building more houses and businesses and roads to bind them, everyone dies alone. Whether from sickness or injury or old age, you die alone, and there is nothing bad or good about death, just as there is nothing redemptive or admirable about being human. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are or how far you travel or how many books you read or where you live — that’s all one big distraction from the open grave waiting to swallow you in the end. There is no escape for humankind, and there is no escape for her, and none for Lewis either.

But despite all these feelings thrashing inside her, she has continued to put one foot in front of the other, leading them toward Oregon. Trees don’t love and they don’t mourn, but they strive for sun and for water. They live. That is the one true impulse, she supposes, that everything wants to live. Something waits for her in Oregon that is the equivalent of sun and water. A promise. Burr promised her.

Lewis trusts her. He handed over his life to her. He follows her still, as if they are corded together. He follows her through pillaged and burned communities and the best answer she can give him when he asks what happened is “I don’t know.” Though she does. The same thing that happened to these villages happened to hers. How can she ignore that? She is betraying herself as much as betraying Lewis. But she guides him and he follows her and she follows the river, and in Three Forks, the river finally dies, a gray wash of seep that they give wide berth, not wanting to get stuck in the slush. They follow the remains of the freeway for three days, before the mountains rise severely before them.

Slabs of stone, like altars and pillars, peek out of the snow with lichen stitched across them like the cipher of some dead race. They pass through Butte and the mountains become a toothy maw that surrounds them. The elevation steepens and the cold makes the air feel thinner than it already is.

In a narrow pass, the road has washed away entirely, replaced by trees and boulders that create a labyrinth of ice. The ground is angled steeply. Its snow-swept corridors cut this way and that way, and it is soon difficult to tell which direction she faces. At one point she looks down, at a slick floor of pure ice that mutters and cracks beneath her weight, and feels certain she is standing hundreds of feet in the air and might plummet through at any second and maybe that would be for the best.

Night comes. When they finally step out of the labyrinth and into the open pass again, a frigid wind roils over her and knocks her back a step before she presses on with her head down and her eyes watering and her tears freezing to her lashes. The road begins again, a white ribbon curling around the mountain, and here she finds a jackknifed semi.

They climb inside and the three of them fall asleep with their arms wrapped around each other, shuddering like old lovers. Her teeth won’t stop chattering, a skeleton’s song, so she draws closer to Lewis, so close that her mouth is nearly at his ear, and she whispers, “I’m sorry,” but he is sleeping and does not hear.

They wake at dawn. The men are weak and sick. They are cold one minute, feverish the next. Every small movement brings a painful pulse to their foreheads. They limp along. They wear snowshoes that sink into the powder, snow collapsing onto them, burdening every footstep. Sometimes they pause for a minute or more to gather their strength before continuing on, making slow progress.

They fall now and then. It takes longer and longer for them to get up each time. And then they don’t get up. She does not go to them. She stands over them, wavering in the wind. It would be so easy to leave them there. Then she wouldn’t have to see their faces when they realize her betrayal.

Chapter 45

ELLA LIES IN BED all day with the curtains drawn, nothing but shadows to keep her company. She tries to empty her mind, but her tongue always finds the swollen cavity at the back of her mouth. Probing it reminds her of Slade, his oniony smell, his pitted cheeks and slitted eyes, when he leaned in to her, smashed her down, ripped out the tooth and held it aloft like a prize.

Lewis once called her belligerently confident. But now she feels so weak and small she wants to crawl in her own pocket and wither into lint.

Not even Simon can help. This morning, when she wouldn’t get out of bed, he nudged her and she said, “Leave me alone.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes, leave me alone.”

He did, though she isn’t sure she wanted him to.

So many hours later, her stomach feels flattened with hunger and her mind warped with loneliness. She ought to feel excited by the knock at her bedroom door, but it’s an anxious excitement, wanting and not wanting to be bothered.

In response to the first knock, and the second, she says nothing. Simon cracks the door and light falls across her face and makes her flinch. He is carrying something toward her, setting it on the night table, food maybe. An offering. Without even knowing what it is, she feels both flattered and compelled to reject it.

Then he yanks the curtains and lets in the painful sunlight. She props herself up on an elbow and squints at him. He remains a bit breathless from his climb up the stairs. His thin chest flutters beneath his shirt. He is smiling idiotically. “I brought you something.”

“You mean you stole me something.”

“Same difference.”

She looks at the thing — a dented metal box with a handle and clasp — and says, “What is it?”

“Oh, right.” He fumbles with the clasp and swings open the top to reveal a dial and a turntable and an arm with a needle on it. “A portable record player!”

She plops her head back on her pillow and Simon’s smile falls with her. “I thought it might cheer you up.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because it’s a record player.” His mouth gapes and quivers a moment before he finds more words to fill it. “For your record.”

She puzzles up her forehead.

“The one you showed me. From your treasure box.”

“Dream box.”

“That’s it.” He darts to the closet and digs around and retrieves the vinyl record in a brittle paper sleeve with Françoise Hardy scribbled across it. “I told you, my father used to have one of these.” He works the hand crank, grinding it in circles for a good thirty seconds. “That ought to do it.” Then he unsleeves the record and sets it two-handed on the turntable and drops the needle, and a rubbery scratch precedes the pop and syrup of the song. “This is called…” He studies the sleeve and shrugs and hands it to her.

Tous les garçons et les filles, it reads. She does her best to pronounce it.

“What does that mean anyway?”

“I don’t know, but it’s nice.”

“It is nice.” He bobs his head dreamily along with the music. “Do you want to dance?”

“No.” She says it so quickly she must mean it.

“Come on. Can’t lie in bed all day. We’ve got work to do, remember?”

“Then we don’t have time to dance.”

“Just a quick one. Then we’ll knock together our plan. Come on.”

“I don’t know.”

“Won’t take no for an answer.”

“I mean I don’t know how.”

“It’s easy. You just move your feet.” He holds out the hand with the cast still coating it — the very thing that brought him to her, that brought them together. “Here. I’ll show you.”

Her hand is tucked under the pillow. She withdraws it now and hesitantly allows him to take it. He tugs her to her feet and they stand opposite each other with the husky, hurried voice of Françoise Hardy filling the silence between them.

Then Simon says, “What Slade said to you — he’s wrong.”

She feels a jolt of pain and her tongue goes automatically to the wound. They haven’t spoken of what happened. She wouldn’t allow it. She knew he felt angry and disgusted and fearful — just as she did — but impotent, too. He had wanted to do something — she had seen him in the doorway with his pocketknife out and waved him away with a “No!” His knife, no bigger than a finger, would have pricked a man like Slade no more than a bee sting.

Now Simon puts one hand on her waist and holds out the other like an invitation she accepts. He pulls her one way, then another, and she allows him. Her feet feel clumsy, dragging a beat behind, but eventually they fall into a rocking rhythm.

“He was wrong about love, I mean. Love is stronger. Love is why we don’t give up. Love is the reason we’re alive at all.”

“We?”

“People, I mean.”

She wants to tell him to quit it already — she wants to drop her hands and plop back on the bed — but she doesn’t.

He chatters on, saying, “There’s a lot of love out there. There’s the love a mother feels for her son, which is different than the love a son feels for a mother. There’s the love for a dog. There’s the love for a painting. There’s the love for a warm rain. There’s the love for a song like this one.”

She doesn’t realize she’s going to talk until she does. “There’s love as infatuation and love that lasts into old age. There’s angry love and pitying love.”

He nods and shuffles his footing before finding his way again.

She says, “What do you think is the best kind of love?”

He thinks for a time and then says, when he was a child, he woke in the night and came out of his room to see his parents dancing with their eyes closed, turning in small circles. They looked like one person. “That seems like the best kind, I guess.”

He clears his throat and she smiles and they continue to twirl around the room until the needle scratches off the record.

Chapter 46

LEWIS DREAMS ABOUT the ocean. The waves roll over black and foam red and rattle with bones. The seaweed is made of scalps and the hermit crabs have embedded themselves in skulls that scuttle across dunes. Burr’s voice beckons him — but to what? To this? Is this the end that awaits him?

He wakes to the smell of woodsmoke. His eyes snap open, but they might as well remain closed, as it takes him a moment to make sense of what he sees, the ceiling of stone, veined with shadow and firelight, not so different from the underlids of his eyes. His head still pounds with fever. Every thought burns. Then he understands — he is in a cave. He can feel at once the coldness of the air and the heat of the fire beside him, but for the moment, he remains where he lies, dazed and studying the orange light playing across stone.

The cave wall is crowded with faces. Sketched with charcoal and painted with pigment. There are faces that smile and faces that frown. Faces with their mouths rounded in fear or surprise. They seem to move in the firelight. They are crude enough to be anyone and for a few minutes he imagines them as the faces left behind. His mother. Thomas. Clark. His world keeps shrinking, the company he keeps ever fewer. And where would his own face fit on this wall?

It is then he notices another face, bigger than the rest, with horns and pointed ears and forked beard and swirling eyes and a snake’s tongue. A face the other faces feared or worshipped, a stranger or a monster to all.

He escapes his fever daze and recalls his circumstances, his last memory of collapsing in the snow, and rolls over.

Colter and Gawea sit huddled beside the fire. She is watching him. He feels unsettled by her gaze, owned by it. The darkness of it darker than he remembers, as if her eyes were black holes, matter with such force, such powerful gravity, not even light can escape them.

“You saved us?” he says.

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“What’s the other?”

She shrugs.

Colter leans into the fire, his prosthetic arm extended. Its claw grips a cut of meat that cooks near the flames, the fat dripping into the coals with a sizzle.

Lewis feels a sudden hunger and wonders aloud how long he has been asleep.

“Can’t say,” Colter says. “Been in and out myself.”

“Gawea? How long?”

“Days,” she says, her voice monotone. “Weeks. I don’t know. Does it even matter?”

Lewis shares a look with Colter, who says, “Don’t take it personally. She’s being a real shit to me, too. I told her she should have left us to freeze and she gave me a look that didn’t exactly reassure me.”

Gawea tosses Lewis a canteen, tells him to drink, and he does, deeply. She offers him meat next — a venison chop — and he thanks her.

There is a lidless, frightless intensity to her eyes. “Don’t thank me.”

He doesn’t know what to say to this, so he asks where the meat came from, and Colter tells the story about how, a few hours ago, a deer wanders into the cave, stands before her, then kneels and lays aside its neck for her to slit. He makes a knife of his hand, cuts the air. He pulls his own meat out of the fire, blows on it, says, “Why couldn’t you stop those bears from attacking us, huh?”

Her voice is surprisingly sharp, almost a yell, beyond the emotional range they’ve seen in her for some time. “You think I didn’t try? You think I wanted that to happen?”

They flinch as her voice echoes around the cave.

“I can only ask,” she says through her teeth. Her face grows still again, impassive. Her eyes, glossy black pools, reflect the fire. “I asked the deer. It answered.”

“You asked,” Lewis says. “And it trusted you. It followed you to slaughter.”

She gives him an almost imperceptible nod and then whispers, “Yes.”

* * *

It is soon after this — as they push farther through the mountains and the air begins to warm and the snow thins to gray tatters and green shoots spring from the muddy ground — that Lewis discovers the coffin-shaped box. Reed had the larger backpack, and after he shot himself, Lewis crushed together their supplies into one. There is a zippered interior pocket he has not noticed until this day, when he digs around for a needle and thread to sew a tear in the armpit of his long-sleeve.

The box is the length of his hand. He recognizes it as belonging to Reed. Something he held often, almost like a charm. His thumb flips the lock. The lid swings open. He leans closer to see what waits inside it. Nothing but a shadow, it first appears, but then he tips it toward the sun and sees the vial. A long glass tube. There is a black powdery substance inside, and when he tips it one way, then the other, the shadow comes to life. The label across it reads Specimen: Live Virus: H3L1. He understands. The rest of the world blurs and the box seems suddenly to gain weight, to bend his arm.

He imagines the vial opened, the shadow within it escaping, its shape the shape of the wind, ribboning and clouding outward, filling the air around him like a thousand spores of rotten thistledown.

He claps shut the lid. His first impulse is to bury it, erase it. But something stills his hand. His role as a curator — one who preserves the past, both the awful and the regular — and the memory of the burned-down villages. The heads on sticks, the blackened bones unpuzzled in the snow. Whatever and whoever awaits him at the end of the trail. The lingering worry that humanity isn’t worth saving after all and would be better off extinguished.

“What’s the matter with you?” Colter says. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nothing,” Lewis says and hurries the box back into its secret pocket.

Chapter 47

FITTED WITH BACKPACKS and armed with compasses and clocks and lanterns, Simon and Ella work their way through the sewers. His goal has always been to escape the city as quickly as possible, so he has never gone this way before, down a branching series of tunnels with centuries-old muck scalloping their bottom. They are looking for the basement entry to the Dome, the one Danica told them about. “It was left open as an escape route,” she said.

Every minute or so they pause to listen. He wears a belt knife. Ella carries her baseball bat and keeps it constantly raised. Whenever a rat scuttles by or a spider drops on her shoulder, she swallows a scream. And because this is his opportunity to prove himself, to show Ella that he is capable and good on his word as a thief, he pretends himself unafraid, puffing his chest and crushing spiders with his palm and telling her not to worry.

Danica told them to wait until late night, early morning, when everyone slept soundly. That would be safest. Some of the ladders lead to manholes and some to grates, but in the full dark, it is difficult to tell if they are cemented over unless Simon climbs up to them. He loses track of how many he tries until he finds what he believes to be the correct entry, a grate that opens into a dark room.

“I think this is it.”

“You think?” Ella says. “What do you mean, you think?”

He cracked his cast off that day. It fell away like a shell and he did not recognize the arm within, the stick thinness of it. The skin was yellowish and scraped away beneath his fingernail. His tendons and muscles ache from lack of use and he finds it difficult to hold the lantern now while pushing up the grate with the other arm. The metal scuds across cement. He climbs up and knobs out a longer wick and a room solidifies around him.

“Hmm,” he says.

From below, her voice, “Hmm? What does that mean?”

“I don’t think we’re where we’re supposed to be.”

There is a chair — that is the first thing he notices — a metal chair with straps dangling from each of its arms. He swings the lantern around him and knocks a chain that jangles and sways. A hook curls the bottom of it. There is a table along the wall and above it a wall of knives and barbed metal instruments he does not recognize.

Then there are the mannequins. With hair and jewelry and whatever else glued to them, they appear like some demented child’s attempt to cobble together a person.

He feels breath against his neck and flinches. Ella comes up behind him with her lantern burning in her hand. “Where are we?” she says at a whisper.

“Not the Dome.”

They circle the room, working their way through the dummies but not touching them, as if they were strangers asleep. There is a bed against the wall. The blanket is thrown back and Simon puts a hand to the pillow and finds it cold. “Whoever lives here hasn’t been home tonight.”

“Why wouldn’t he be home? With the curfew, where else could he be?”

“Doing something creepy is my guess.”

Ella stands before a two-doored closet that takes up most of a wall. They each grab a knob. He steadies his breath and his eyes drop momentarily to his lantern. Because of this, he cannot see as well as he could, his vision smeared with light, so that when they swing open the doors, he believes in the monster. The monster in the closet is real.

It swings out at them, a dark shape, a twisting bunch of shadows. He sees then the hanger that holds it in place, the hollowed arms and legs with leather straps and metal buckles. A deputy’s uniform. As massive as a tent.

He runs his fingers along the fabric, and something pricks the pad of his finger. A drop of blood swells and he brings it to his mouth to suck. It tastes like the air of this room, like the air of the morgue. He remembers the pallid face of his mother laid out on a slab. He remembers his father there, too. He remembers the breath of Ella when she sobbed and he clutched her after the tooth ripped from her mouth. He remembers the rage he felt then, and now, when he says, “Slade.”

Chapter 48

THE DOCTOR HAS a new name now. Mother. That’s what the girls call her.

She doesn’t know what to think at first. They ask if it’s all right, if she minds, and she licks her lips and blows out a breath full of emotion. “If that’s what you’d like, I think mother will suit me perfectly.”

“It would mean a lot to us,” they say. “It really would.”

“That settles it, then. Mother.”

She rather likes the sound of it. And she, after all, calls them her girls, this den of young women she considers a kind of family. They helped her heal, and now she helps them build a life in Bismarck. They construct a greenhouse on the roof. From cellars they harvest mushrooms and lichens and mosses. They dig up roots. They shovel through grain bins and discover preserved cores of corn and soybean to plant and to eat. They mash medicines, vitamins to ruddy their skin and harden their bones and battle the scurvy weakening them. She teaches them everything she knows about anything she knows. For some of them, that means simple reading. For others, basic surgery.

Her injured arm — now scarred over — hangs useless at her side, good only for gripping the walking stick she uses to get about. She lost enough blood to permanently weary her heart. Her body feels shrunken, bent. But she gets by. Her girls keep her busy.

Every morning, they auger fresh holes in the river and bait their hooks with hunks of liver and drop their lines. By the time they snowshoe the banks and woods and fallen neighborhoods to check their traps — collecting into the back of their sleds the rabbits and beaver and otter and mink and porcupine — the tip-ups on the river have flared their fire-bright ribbons. There is no shortage of fish. The river surges with them, mostly carp, but plenty of catfish and bluegill and trout and smallmouth. Sometimes, on the coldest days, in an effort to stay warm, the fish swirl together beneath the water, coalescing like dark planets, and when this happens the auger holes splutter and the ice begins to thin and crack, and the girls move their tip-ups and find another stretch of river, because they have fallen through before, pulled away by the black current, lost.

They don’t see much of Clark. She ranges the outer reaches of Bismarck, the woods, sometimes hunting the plains, where she has shot elk and antelope, once a bison whose herd departed in a thunder that shook the ground.

The doctor is more grandmother than mother to them. They are by and large teenagers, except for Marie. No one knows how old she is, but she has gray in her hair and her blind eye is as white and bulging as a boiled egg. She carries a phone everywhere she goes and mutters into it. The girls treat her kindly, but Clark seems to hate her. “It’s that eye. It seems to probe you, see inside you.”

One time Marie removed the phone from her ear and held it out to Clark. The cord dangled like a vein. “It’s for you,” she said.

“Yeah. Who is it?”

“Lewis,” she said. “It’s Lewis.”

Clark knocked the phone from her hand and it went skittering across the floor.

Sometimes the doctor sees Clark staring at the horizon. She doesn’t ask, but she knows. She is thinking about Lewis. Something happened between them the doctor does not understand. And something has changed in Clark, turned over inside her like a big black dog, and if the doctor reaches out a hand she knows it will come away bloody. So she waits, hoping Clark will announce her problems when ready.

But she doesn’t. The optimism that once brightened her voice — the authority that once straightened her spine — is gone. The Clark she knows is gone. She disappears for days, returning with meat. Or she drinks herself into unconsciousness, seeking that numbing burn that expands inside her, spreading to her toes and fingers, the tips of her ears, fuzzing over any thoughts that might bother her.

Today the doctor finds her kneeling beside the fountain. Here the girls dump buckets of snow that island and melt into gray water for them to drink or wash their dishes and clothes. She splashes her face clean, rubs away what dirties her. She cups handfuls and handfuls to her face. Water was sacred in the Sanctuary, and the old women were always talking about how it cleaned more than your skin, and even wetting your hands, your face, could chase away something that spoiled you. The doctor hopes so. “Do you miss him?” she says.

Clark’s face drips. The fountain’s surface settles into a rippling mirror. A skylight wavers to life, a silver-shaped diamond that overwhelms her own reflection, her face a mere pale smudge, barely recognizable, barely her. The doctor thinks she sees what Clark sees. A thing. When Clark widens her eyes, the thing widens its eyes. And when she opens her mouth, the thing seems to snarl and spring fangs.

The doctor dashes a hand through the water, and when the image calms this time, it looks a little more like Clark.

“There’s a lot of men I miss,” Clark says, “but my brother most of all.”

“You’re not to blame for—”

“Shut up. Just shut up and leave me be. You might think you’re their mother, but you’re not mine.”

Chapter 49

IT TAKES ANOTHER hour, but Simon and Ella backtrack and discover where they took a wrong turn and follow the proper sewer channel and crawl into the Dome’s basement and discover there the thousands of oak and plastic barrels Danica promised. “Barrels and barrels and barrels,” she said. “More than I’ve ever counted. And far more valuable than any wine. Enough to share. Enough to remedy the Sanctuary’s drought for many months. But my husband bathes in it instead.” This is what Lewis alerted them to in his letter — a vast storeroom of water.

The smell — of mildew — is a new one. Breathing is a little like drinking. Some of the barrels sweat and drip. Simon runs a hand across one and licks his palm. “Son of a bitch.”

Ella says they need to hurry. Dawn can’t be far off.

They heft one from a stack — wobbling under its weight and nearly dropping it with a crash — and then hitch it with two lengths of rope drawn from his backpack. They curl the ropes around a pillar and stand on the opposite side and keep their grip tight when they hand-over-hand lower the barrel into the dark.

They climb down after it and drag the grate back into place. They do the best they can to secure the entry, threading the grate with a thin length of chain that they then knot around some piping below and anchor with a padlock. “Make sure there is no escape,” Danica told them. “The Dome should be watertight.”

They untie the barrel and tip it on its side. It sloshes and mutters and Simon imagines taking a knife to it, sucking out a drink to ease his dry mouth. With one hand they hold their lanterns and with the other they roll the barrel awkwardly along the sewer walkway, constantly readjusting their course.

By the time they return to the museum, they are both covered in grime and sweat, bloodied, burned, red-faced. Simon drags the grate back over the sewer entry and then drags a box over the grate and sits down on it and puts his head in his hands and says, “Thank God that’s done with.”

“Oh no,” Ella says.

He looks at her through his fingers. “What?”

He is always the one making mistakes. Falling off the ladder and breaking his arm, allowing Danica to surprise him with the dagger, climbing into the prison instead of the Dome. A small part of him relishes the idea of Ella making an error — until he notices the way she backs away from him with tiny steps and worry creasing her face. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”

“What?”

“I forgot my bat. At Slade’s.”

He lets his hands fall with relief. “I’ll steal you another one.”

“You don’t understand.” Her cheeks bunch up. Her eyes glimmer with tears. She explains how Slade toyed with it when he searched the museum, threatened her with it. “He knows it’s mine. He’ll know I’ve been there. He’ll come for me.”

Once again Simon stands in the sewer at the bottom of a ladder. He has not had enough sleep. He has not had any breakfast. He felt excited and driven before, but that has given way to exhausted fearfulness. He studies the tunnels branching all around him. He feels about this place — the Sanctuary — as he feels about the human mind. It seems contained, limited, and yet constantly opens into new corridors and closets, an endless vault, much of it dark.

Ella gives him a nudge. “Are you going or am I going?”

“I’m going.”

Slowly he begins to climb. His feet ring against the rungs. His lantern dangles from his bad hand, a clumsy grip, and rust crumbles against the palm of the other as he pulls himself up. He reaches the top and threads his fingers through the grate, ready to shove it aside, when a key sounds in a lock and the door to the room opens.

He keeps his fingers where they are but swings the other arm out, bringing the lantern up against the sewer’s ceiling, hoping to shield its light. Slade does not carry a lantern of his own, but the room nonetheless brightens, the residue of the hallway. The footsteps, slow, heavy, grind dust into the concrete. Simon’s fingers must be visible, white and rounding the grates like some cellar fungus, and he imagines a boot coming down on them, mashing them into the metal, clipping through bone. He fights the compulsion to pull back.

A foot clunks down on the grate — rust rains down on Simon — and because he turns his face away, he is for a moment unsure whether his fingers remain uninjured. And then the grate shifts again, loosened of weight, and the footsteps continue to the other side of the room.

Simon already knows who it is, but he wants to see. He presses his face up against the grate to study Slade, a massive slab of a man. He wears his black uniform. The back of his head is lined with fleshy rolls. If he spots the bat, wherever it might be, Simon knows it is only a matter of seconds before he checks the grate.

One of his hands rises. It carries a set of metal knuckles, bladed and rimed with blood. He hangs them from a peg like an ornament and there they sway. He spins around and Simon ducks down and cringes as a footstep once more clatters the grate.

All this while his other arm trembles with the weight of the lantern. His wrist feels stabbed through with hornets and he fears he might lose his grip altogether. When the door closes and the bolt turns, he drops his arm and nearly drops the lantern.

Only then does he look for Ella. She has crept back in the tunnel and lowered the wick on her lantern so it gives off only a little light and makes her look small, a hundred miles away.

He waits a long minute and then pushes aside the grate and pokes his head above the floor. The room is empty. For how long, he doesn’t know. He can see a crack of light under the door.

The bat remains where it was, unnoticed by Slade, propped against the wall by the closet. He checks the door again, the ribbon of light beneath it, and sees no shadows in the hallway, no indication that anyone might be near. He wills his breathing to quiet, but his lungs cannot fill fast enough to satisfy his body.

Across the room he pads, making no sound. He trades the lantern to his good hand and carries it before him, not wanting to set it down for fear he might forget something else in his haste. His free hand — his bad hand — closes around the bat. His grip is not good enough, ruined by the strain of the past few minutes. He makes it a few steps before the bat slips and falls with a clatter magnified by the concrete floor.

He watches it roll in a long parabola, spinning with the slope of the floor, toward the open grate. It catches briefly at the lip — and then falls through, into the dark square.

A long second of silence passes. Then the bat hits the sewer floor with a dong and rattle. Ella does not scream at him, call him a fool, but he knows she will. He can hear her voice call, “Hurry,” can hear the bat scrape when she picks it up. And then he hears something else.

Footsteps. The sound is more than a sound — it is a presence — powerful enough to be felt as well as heard. The very air seems to shake. He knows he cannot escape it. He does not have time to think. If he did, he would not do what he does next. He drags the grate back over the hole and crashes it in place. For a second he stares through the bars at Ella, far below him, her face oranged by her upheld lantern, but before she can question him, he is running for the door, snapping the lock, twisting the knob, yanking it open.

There is only one way to save her. He must steal time, what may very well be his last act as a thief.

When Slade rounds the corner, Simon hurls the lantern at his face and the big man raises an arm to swat it aside, but before he can, Simon has already dropped to the floor in a slide. Slade’s legs are wide enough apart to shoot through, and, once past them, the boy bounces up and into a hard run. All this before Slade knocks the lantern against the wall.

The shattering matches the feeling inside Simon. This might be the one building in the Sanctuary he has never visited — the police headquarters — and he can only guess which way he is going as he negotiates a series of dimly lit corridors. He enters a room of barred cells, and several men reach for him and rattle the bars and moan and cheer. One of them nearly snatches him, a raisin-faced man with black snot bubbling from his diseased gash of a nose. Simon makes it through one doorway, then another. He could turn this corner and just as easily find a closet, but his luck holds out. A stone staircase rises before him.

Behind him Slade does not bellow, does not scream or curse or growl. He merely pursues, all his noise invested in his movement, stomping his feet and crashing into walls and shoving through the doors Simon closes on him in his passing.

They race up the stairs and out of the basement and down a tiled hallway framed by dark wood and festooned with old photos of policemen who watch them forbiddingly. Simon has never moved faster in his life. His feet hit the floor so hard pain rifles up his calves. The ceiling bulges upward, into a meeting hall, where the noise of his footsteps and the footsteps pursuing him multiplies.

He races now toward the entry, where two deputies appear. They drop their hands to their machetes. They call out for him to stop. And he does, skidding, nearly falling. He does not bother turning around, knowing Slade can’t be far behind, but he spies to his left the staircase that leads to the second level, and he hurries there.

Another deputy appears on the landing, close enough to reach a hand and snatch his collar, but Simon twists from his grip, slipping off his shirt altogether and running bare chested down a long hallway.

He has no plan except to avoid the voices that pursue him. Halfway down the hallway, he pushes through the door of an office. He jumps onto the desk, shoves aside the chair, and worms his way out the window. The sill is spiked with nails and glass, but he does not have time to take care. He slices a finger, spikes his palm, when swinging himself over.

He tries to let go, but his hand won’t loosen, his bad hand. It has been run through by a nail. He yanks at it and the pain electrifies him, not from the nail, not yet, but the tendons twisting and snapping in his wrist. His legs dangle in the air, maybe thirty feet between him and the ground.

He feels eyes on him. He hears voices in the street, a gathering crowd.

In his mind, he calls up the vision of Ella — them dancing to the Françoise Hardy record — and wishes her face to be the last thing he sees. But it is not. Another appears above him, like a risen moon. Slade is not smiling or frowning. His slitted eyes study Simon with a predatory fascination. Then he takes hold of his hand and pats it comfortingly before dragging it off the nail — and letting go.

Chapter 50

AS OFTEN AS she can, Clark escapes the mall — its imprisoning walls, its stale air laced with the tangy smell of fish and woodsmoke — and surrounds herself instead with sky. She spends her days hunting, minding the traps and lures. Though she often finds herself distracted. Her eyes look west. Her feet walk west, her body naturally angling in that direction like the point on a compass. She imagines now, as she did when a sentinel on the wall, mountains. White mountains that appear like teeth nested in black gums.

Then she shakes her head or presses her fists to her eyes. If she thinks about the mountains, she thinks about Lewis. If she thinks about Lewis, she thinks about the final look he gave her — made of equal parts hate and sympathy — before escaping this place.

So she works, and when she doesn’t work, she drinks. That distracts her mind, numbs it, because when she starts to think, she starts to doubt and hate and grieve. The snow is ash and ash is the color of grief. Everywhere she looks, outside and inside herself, she sees death. There was a time she felt nothing but disgust for Reed, but now she understands. He had it right. There is no such thing as the future. The future is what you longed for. There is nothing left for her to long for, except an end to the pain. Death is an end to the pain. Death is the future. Death is curative, medicinal. In her darkest, drunkest moments, instead of Oregon, she feels beckoned by the grave, a deep black hole where she might find her brother. She thought escaping the wall was freeing, but now death seems the ultimate freedom.

She’s sorry she pushed Reed away and she’s sorry she couldn’t save her brother and she’s sorry she betrayed Lewis. She’s so goddamn sorry, and though it’s too late for the others, maybe it’s not too late for him. If she could only find him, if she could only tell him how sorry she was, if she could only get that word out of her, she thinks she might feel better, like coughing up an infection.

Today a warm front moves through, so that fog ghosts between the trees and flows down the river like a second current. The temperature hovers around freezing. Snow sluffs off roofs. The birds are busy, the red flashes of cardinals in the undergrowth, the black nets of crows thrown over trees. More seem to gather by the minute and the air is busy with their muttering.

She prefers to be alone, but the girls call for her this morning and ask her to help, and though she tries to resist them, they beg her and she relents. They are collecting fish from the tip-ups — slitting their bellies and pulling out their guts to use in the shoreline traps — but they can’t seem to reel in this one. It’s stuck.

“Stuck,” she says and tests the line and it hums with tension and when she takes it in her hands it feels like she has taken hold of herself, some central nerve that disappears into a dark place. She rears back — and the line drags — and she waits until it slackens, then reels in until it tightens again, and in this way it takes her a good five minutes before the fish surfaces. She leans over to peer down the hole, more than a foot deep. At the bottom of it, a broad, whiskered, fleshy-lipped mouth gapes. A catfish, a big one, too big, and she orders the girls to their knees to chip and saw away the ice, to accommodate the girth of the massive fish.

Twenty minutes later, her arms ache from fighting the drag, and just in time she hauls out the fish — two-handed, grunting — and it slips and flops and twists on the ice. Snow sticks to it in clumps. It opens and closes its mouth, gaping around the hook. One of the girls gets her arms and legs around it — wrestling it down — and Clark drives a knife into its head and it shudders and goes still. The girls laugh and so does she and the laughter feels strange, exotic, like a language she once knew but forgot.

The fog is beginning to burn away. And the sun seems brighter in the sky, even when filtered by clouds. The crows, thronging in the trees along the river, have been muttering all along, but now they grow wild, kaak-kaak-kaaaking.

When they cut open the fish’s belly, they find a beaver inside, swallowed whole and socked by yellow jelly, like some malignant birth. Clark sits on the ice, for a moment too tired to care about the cold creeping through her pants, and everyone stands around her, commenting on the big fish and the beaver, saying gross and ick and nudging each other and still laughing so that their breath clouds.

Then the laughter dies and there is only the kaak of the birds. And something else, an undersound she can’t quite place. Like a drumming. The drumming of a death parade.

She tells everyone to be quiet and creeps up the riverbank and peeks her head over the berm and sees the men. They are stomping toward Bismarck. They do not roar and brandish their weapons. They come silently, marching in straight lines that match the set of their mouths.

Lewis once called her empathy-proof. Unable to appreciate any desire or despair outside her own. The girls have shared stories — of their village, their families, the nightmare train that brought them here — but Clark hasn’t listened, her ears plugged up with her own private pain. She has even seen the train wreck, way out on the plains, but never considered another engine might follow. It isn’t until now that she understands. Not only what they face, but what Lewis will face without her.

With that understanding comes fear. Fear for the girls’ lives and fear for her own. And if she fears for her life, that means she values her life. If she values her life, that means she’s willing to fight for it. Maybe there is such a thing as the future after all.

She counts them, thirty…no, fifty…no, seventy — as more slavers pour out of the fog as if born of it. She turns to the girls then and tells them to hurry and gather their things. They must run for the mall. They must run for their lives.

Chapter 51

THE PACIFIC EATS away at dunes and cliffs and the wreckage of towns built too close to the shore. Its waves battle, in a great foaming collar, the current of the long, fat snake of the Columbia River that oozes through the gorge dividing Oregon and Washington. And the rain. An acid rain that yellows leaves and spots skin and falls as many days as it does not.

Water encourages life but so does it promote decay. Birds break windows. Hail breaks windows. Branches break windows. The shingles on even the newest roofs last no more than two decades and then split with ice dams, peel away with the wind, scrape away with branches. Leaves rot in gutters and plants sprout from them, their roots groping their way into the house. Mice and squirrels gnaw their way inside. Termites and beetles, too. Woodpeckers. No matter how it happens, as soon as a hole opens, water penetrates, bringing the mold and rust and rot that dissolve the wood-chip subroofing and drop bricks and crack the foundation and make every building into a slowly collapsing planter box, furred over with moss and spangled with mushrooms.

Fires start. From lightning, from earthquakes cracking gas lines. But because the sewers have clogged, because water mains break, because fire hydrants crack, because basements have filled up like bathtubs, and because so much of the wood is rotten, they extinguish quickly. Winter comes and water freezes, thaws, freezes, thaws, and freezes, and in doing so splits cement, crumbles asphalt, shoves around everything man-made that was once laid or stacked in a straight line.

But not in Bellingham. Not in Walla Walla or Corvallis or Silverton. Not in many places, especially Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River, where houses stand stubbornly against the attacking rain, where the roads run in clean lines, and where slaves arrive every few weeks.

They cluster in wagons forged from pickup beds and drawn by oxen. They stumble in long lines, weeping and rattling, collared and cuffed by chains. They cram into rust-pocked cattle cars and boxcars dragged by steam engines.

The slaves have numbers and letters branded into their skin, but so do they have names, at least among themselves. They have their own fenced-in shantytowns, their own families. They are tools, but even tools must be treated with some care or they will rust and break. They are told they are part of something bigger, a process of renewal. Some of the slaves work on construction, raising barns, repairing fallen chimneys, hammering together houses. Some of them farm, digging irrigation canals, hoeing and planting and reaping. Some grade roads. Some repair train tracks. Some log trees and some mine for coal in the Powder River Basin. Some birth children. They are, all of them, building something.

Something that extends as far east as Laramie and as far south as Palo Alto. They are growing. And they will continue to grow. Not just as a society, but as a species.

There were sixty-five nuclear power plants in the United States. Their hot innards seeped through cracks and seams. And in Washington, along the Columbia River, there is Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, storing two-thirds of America’s high-level radioactive waste. Used nuclear fuel — in waste dumps containing rods that give off heat and beta particles and gamma rays — mutates into isotopes of americium and plutonium, making it a million times more radioactive than it was originally. When the facility was abandoned, the cooling ponds boiled over and evaporated. Exposed to the air, the waste ignited, creating a fire that clouds radiation into the air, spills it into the Columbia River, and to this day continues to burn.

The nearby reactors, in a state of meltdown, did not ignite when they overheated. They melted into radioactive lava that consumed the concrete and steel surrounding them, gelling into a massive silvery blob.

Aran Burr calls it the altar. So they call it the altar. Because his word is their word.

Astoria is close enough to the altar, and far enough away from it, kissed but not pummeled by the radiation. Some of them die of cancer. Some die of blood or respiratory disease. And some don’t. Some are born with mere deformities. A face that looks melted. A second set of teeth barnacling their shoulder. Cysts bulging and sacs of fluid dangling. Moles so plentiful that a body appears like some fungus found in the forest. But others are special, gifted. Some are born with oversize eyes that can see a mile, see in the dark. Some are born walking on all fours and able to outrun any dog. Some can lift boulders.

It is what makes them so special. Mutational genesis. Become the next. Evolve or face extinction.

That is what he says. And they all do as he says.

Chapter 52

GAWEA FINDS a river. The first canoe fills with water. The second floats. Colter takes the stern, Lewis takes the bow, and she nests between two gunwales in the center of the vessel. Sometimes they are walled in by basalt and rushing along whitecapped rapids and sometimes the river broadens and they can see far into hills dotted with sage. The world is not sand and the world is not snow. There are green-leafed trees and green-grassed fields. For the first time, outside of a map, outside of a book, Lewis can see the world the way it was, an inhabitable, living thing.

One night, in eastern Washington, Lewis slicks his cheeks with mud and shaves with a slow scrape of his knife. His beard falls away in white curls spotted with blood. And though the water runs cold, he bathes in it, scraping the grime off his body with handfuls of sand. Afterward, he feels better, tidier than he has in a long time.

He is ready. And they are getting close. New wonders await every bend of the river, but the thrill of discovery has worn off. They have escaped the sand and the ice. They have found the new country promised to them. One goal has been satisfied. Another remains. They can travel to the very edge of the ocean, but Lewis will remain an unfinished map until Aran Burr helps him find his compass.

Birds shuttle through the air and snatch the bugs that fly in clouds above the river. The water glitters with stars. He thinks about all the leftover light, the memory of light, millions of years old. Light streaming from distant stars, soaking now into the river and into his eyes while colliding with light sent forth from the earth thousands of years before, so that in a way that time still exists, the energy of it still present somewhere, and eventually, he knows, because of the shape of space, it will return; the past will intersect with the future. Aran Burr sent off his own message, so many months ago, and now Lewis has come. Now their energies will finally collide.

The river meets up with the wide, fat stream of the Columbia. They pass through a burning plain. The fire has spread for miles and walls them in with high flames and black smoke that makes them cough until they vomit.

They portage the canoe around dams. Some are still solid. Some cracked and seeping. And some split wide, gushing a white-collared rush of water. And then one night, to their north, they pass by the Hanford site, the storage center for nuclear waste, which Gawea calls the altar.

“The altar? Why do you call it the altar?”

“It’s just what people call it.”

“Why do they call it that?”

“It works invisibly. It brings good things and bad things. It’s like a god in that way.”

“What good things does it bring?”

She regards him with her nightmare-black eyes. “People like you and me.”

The air feels almost palpable, as if you could pack it with your hands and take a bitter bite. And it burns to breathe, smelling like melted plastic. The throbbing glow of it blots out half the stars in the sky. They paddle swiftly, trying to get past this place as soon as they can, and it is then that dark shapes begin to knife past them and riffle the water. Lewis sees a pale set of eyes staring back from the place where he is about to place his paddle.

In the gorge, along the Columbia, the river is dotted with islands, and all around them stacks of basalt rise like dried-out layer cake. Mount Hood looms in the distance, white hatted with snow and glowing at night. The lap lines of the floodwaters of millennia past stitch the canyon walls. Past The Dalles, at Seven Mile Hill, a vast hillside of huge-headed sunflowers wobble in the wind.

They travel through the day and all the next night, knowing the ocean is near, and before dawn they approach not a town but a city. “This is it,” Lewis says, “isn’t it? This is Astoria.”

It is lit with lights, like a net of stars dropped from the sky, lining the banks and rolling into black, humped hills. Lewis leans into his paddle, urging them forward — when Colter says, “Wait.”

“Wait?” Lewis says. “Wait what?” He feels a hurried need to get there, as if a sudden wind has risen inside him to hurry him these final few miles.

“I say we do this in the morning.”

“Why? We’re here.”

They raise their paddles and the canoe lists sideways.

“Don’t rush into things. I learned that from you. Remember?” He opens and closes his prosthetic claw. “I don’t know what to expect and neither do you. She’s hiding something from us. That much we know.”

“Gawea?” Lewis says.

In the middle of the boat, she is curled into a ball. He says her name again and she says, “I need to think.”

“What do you need to think about?”

“We’re waiting until morning,” Colter says. “This isn’t up for debate. Now, paddle.”

They keep their canoe to the far side of the Columbia, a safe distance. None of them say anything for fear their voices will carry across the water. Gawea tightens her body, hugs her legs to her chest.

A strange smell fills the air, briny, fishy, like the residue on his fingers in the hours after he guts a trout. Lewis hears something ahead of them, the distant growl of what turns out to be waves curling over, the river spilling into the surf, the ocean, the end.

He stops paddling a moment, made dumb by the realization that after all these miles, all these months, so far and so long, his previous life impossibly distant, he has made it. A sense of accomplishment momentarily overwhelms whatever fears and questions bother him. He is in awe of himself and in awe of the ocean. He stills his paddle, transfixed by the sight of it. The chop rolls over. The moon is full and its white reflection smears the roiling water. A whole other universe exists beneath its surface. He can’t see it, but he knows.

The canoe is beginning to wobble, the current confused. The hills around them slump toward the ocean and fall away completely to reveal a fierce white light — flaring and then going dark, flaring and then going dark — like a great eye blinking in the night.

“There!” he says, yelling over the surf. The vision he dreamed, the lighthouse that beckoned him, now realized.

He feels so excited he might dive into the water and splash toward it. He leans into his paddle and realizes the canoe is turning away, steering them toward another section of shore. “You’re going the wrong way.” He twists around. “What are you doing?”

“Keeping us alive,” Colter says and rips his paddle hard against the current. “You don’t need me to tell you what happens to the moth that flies to flame.”

Chapter 53

THEY MAKE A small fire out of driftwood at the base of a cliff, notched in by high walls of chalky orange clay. From here Lewis cannot see the lighthouse, but it doesn’t matter. Even with his eyes closed, the light burns bright in his mind. He hears a whispering, what could be the surf but sounds like his name said softly a thousand times. He feels something almost tidal. Whatever drags the waves to the shore and crashes them against the sand, he feels too.

They try to engage with Gawea, but she refuses to answer their questions, and when Colter grabs her by the wrist, she rips away from him and says, “Don’t touch me.”

Her tone implies this is more than a command — it is a threat — and Colter takes a few steps back with his prosthetic held before him in defense. But Gawea only stares at him long and hard before saying that she has to pee. Then she turns her back on them, walks from the campsite, from the circle of light thrown by the fire, and lets the dark swallow her up.

They wait five minutes and then ten and then twenty — watching the fire dance on the driftwood and listening to the waves boom — before Colter says, “Well then, I suppose it’s time we came up with a plan.”

In a few minutes, Colter says, while they retain the advantage of darkness, they will approach the lighthouse. If they find someone there, or more than someone, they will sneak close and then attack. Not to hurt, though that might be necessary, but to detain. To question and better understand what it is they face. “We go to it before it comes for us.”

Colter opens and closes his claw when he says they cannot risk an alarm sounded. If they find the lighthouse empty, they will return here before the sun rises and then scout their surroundings.

Normally, at the end of the day, after so many hours of hiking or paddling, Lewis has to force his body to move, as if his joints were calcified and his muscles hardened to wintry stones. But he finds it effortless now. His body does not complain. It does not want to rest. It wants to go where it has been beckoned, as if there awaited the end of pain, a solution to pain.

They belt on their holsters. They walk near the water to camouflage their tracks. The beach rounds a corner and the cliff face falls away into a rocky hillside, the lighthouse speared at the top of it. They push through manzanita clusters and a cedar forest and moss-slick rocks and finally enter a moonlit clearing that anchors the lighthouse.

They wait a moment, studying the structure, white columned, black capped. A cone of light pours from it, swooping in circles, cutting through the night.

Colter lifts an arm and Lewis follows the line of it. He spies movement. A grated catwalk. A figure walking along it. The red glow of a pipe or cigarette. The figure leans against a railing, staring out at the silvered waves. He will not hear them, with the roar of the surf, and he will not see them, so long as he keeps his eyes on the ocean.

The moon makes a long shadow that reaches from the lighthouse to their feet. Colter waves Lewis forward and they duck down and follow it like an avenue, maybe thirty yards, before reaching the base of the structure. They flatten themselves against it. The stone is furred over with moss and slick with moisture that dampens their backs. Colter waits a few seconds, then steps back and cranes his neck, making sure the figure remains where he stood before, a shadow darker than the rest high above them.

There is a black door with a brass knob that they try and find loose. It pushes open with a screech, but the noise is drowned out by the waves crashing below, high tide, full moon. A metal staircase spirals up and up and up to a square of light, a hinged trapdoor. They unholster their revolvers and begin to climb.

The lighthouse lantern spins and creates a strobe effect, so that they are alternately cast in shadow and light. Colter uses the railing to steady himself, his claw gripping it, clicking and tonging their progress. His revolver is raised beside his face as if he is listening to it. He pops his head through the open trapdoor. “Bunkhouse,” he whispers. “Come on.”

They enter a low-ceilinged room with a wraparound bench, a squat cupboard, a ticking woodstove, a tiny desk with a map wrinkled across it, a bunk bunched with blankets.

A ladder rises through another trapdoor to the lantern room. Colter scales it, darts his head up, and ducks down again, a second’s glance. “I see him.”

“Do we wait?”

“We could be waiting until dawn.”

“Then what?”

“Up above, one of those glass panels opens as a door. I’ll push through it and take him out. The more movement, the greater chance he’ll spot us. Stay put for now.”

“What are you going to do to him?”

“Hopefully nothing. But maybe something.”

He climbs through the trapdoor, and Lewis follows him halfway up the ladder. His head breaches the lantern room at the wrong moment, his eyes seared by the light swinging toward him. Lewis curses and blindly descends the ladder and blinks away the bright cobwebs clinging to his vision.

For this reason he does not see the bunk stir, does not see the blankets pull back, does not see the man squinting confusedly at him. He only hears a voice he does not recognize say, “What are you doing here? Who are you?”

Lewis stiffens.

A gauzy face — with traceries of light glowing around it — floats before him. Gaunt. Bearded. Lewis lifts his revolver, too late. The man knocks his hand aside and the trigger snaps and a gunshot batters the air.

Lewis is not sure what happens next, only that he is on the floor without any breath after a fist or a foot pounds his stomach. His vision is returning, and when he clutches himself and gapes for breath and struggles upright, he sees the man walking to the far side of the bunkhouse and cranking a metal handle attached to the wall. An unearthly wail sounds, rising and falling. A siren.

The man cranks the handle another few seconds. He has a face like a knotted piece of driftwood. He wears a gray sweater with one sleeve coming unstitched. He kneels and collects the revolver from the floor and starts toward Lewis.

His progress halts when a body drops through the trapdoor and knocks him flat.

The lantern above wheels and the bunkhouse alternately glows and dims and Lewis barely has time to process the two bodies tangled on the floor before Colter climbs down the ladder. He lifts his prosthetic claw above his head and brings it down on one man, then the other, stilling and silencing them.

“This isn’t going well,” Lewis says.

“Time to run.”

They pound down the staircase and out the door and into the sea spray. There they see the red line of dawn brightening the horizon and hear the thudding footsteps of the dozen people running toward them.

Chapter 54

THOMAS NEVER WEARS black, but he does today. Everything — from his calfskin boots to his cotton pants to his silk shirt with silver buttons that jangle when he walks and embroidery curling like vines along the collar, the shoulders, the sleeves — is a shade of midnight. The hat, too, that perches on his head like a crow. He believes it fitting, given his duty this morning.

He departs his chambers and follows the staircase to the main level, his hand hissing along the railing. Many servants hurry down the marble-floored hallway framed by dark wood and festooned with oil portraits. They bunch flowers into vases. They fill lanterns with linseed oil. They climb ladders to pin streamers from the ceiling. They are getting ready for the ball, the costume party he will throw this evening, the first he has hosted since his inauguration. It will serve as an inoculation, just the dose of goodness they need, with enough liquor and water to drown in. And dressed as they will be — as swans and wolves and dragonflies and devils — they can happily pretend themselves away from their troubles and come together as a community.

The servants do not greet him. Their eyes fall and they stiffen when he moves past.

Vincent approaches and rattles off a series of questions about where he would like to set up the stage for the band, about hors d’oeuvres and drinks and any number of other things that Thomas waves away.

“I can’t be bothered with that now.” He has other business to attend to.

He finds Slade waiting for him outside. A hot wind stings his eyes and the sun instantly reddens his skin. A single wispy cloud dashes across the face of the sun and for a moment filters the light, making the Sanctuary go from sandy yellow to wintry gray. And then the cloud is gone and all the metal and glass seem to blaze even brighter than before.

Slade holds out the whip, coiled around his hand like something alive. Thomas takes it and his hand drops with the weight. “You’re sure this is a good idea?”

“As a show of force, yes.”

A pod of deputies escorts him through the Dome’s gates and into the streets he has not visited for weeks. People stop to stare. No one says anything, not yet, but he can hear them muttering and can feel their eyes flaying him to the bone.

It is only a short walk to the whipping post. He is relieved to find it shadowed by the museum, some reprieve from the heat. Only a few dozen huddle around it. The news was announced this morning: a terrorist would be punished. No mention was made of Thomas’s appearance — they didn’t want to tempt a mob — so the crowd buzzes when he takes the platform.

A boy is chained to the whipping post. He kneels before it, his arms and body held upright by restraints, because his legs are swollen, blackened, broken from his fall. Thomas feels a twinge of pity.

Slade addresses them all. He points to the boy chained to the whipping post. The boy caught trespassing in the prison. A terrorist, Slade calls him. A terrorist who intended to release those jailed there. “He will be justly punished — by none other than our mayor.”

Thomas feels their eyes on him now. They despise him, he knows. They want him dead, he knows. They want his brains dashed out, his bones broken, his eyes gouged. They would sever his head and tar it to slow the rot and parade it through the streets and cheer when the birds roosted and shat upon it. He is serving himself, of course — there is no other way to justify his baths, his clothes, his meals — but so is he serving them. He is doing the best he can. He does not punish unless someone gets in the way of his vision, the vision for which they elected him into office. Until the rains come, this is the only way they can survive, strictly. Why can’t they understand that?

He hears someone call out the name Meriwether and he can’t help but think, and not for the first time, this is Meriwether’s Dome, this is Meriwether’s city, this is Meriwether’s place, not mine. He stares up at the museum — Lewis’s museum — and thinks he sees a face in the window. As if his old friend has returned to mock him too. He tries to look closer but is quickly blinded by the sun cresting its roof. It spills its light like a splash of magma across the platform where he stands. The temperature spikes.

His discomfort hurries him along, reminds him of his task. With a shake of his wrist, he uncurls the whip. He will do his duty. By whipping the boy, he will whip them all. The sooner he is done with this, the sooner he can escape the heat, the sooner he can return to the Dome, the sooner he can bathe the dust and the blood from his skin, the sooner he can forget about this moment and focus on the next, the party.

The whip is heavy in his hand. Its tip looks like a frayed nerve ending. The boy twists his face to look at him, his face pinched with pain, and Thomas says, “Turn around please.”

A fly lands on the boy’s face, tasting the corner of his mouth, and he blows it off.

“I said turn around, boy.”

“My name’s Simon.”

“I don’t care what your name is. Turn around.”

But he won’t. The boy won’t break eye contact. Neither will the crowd. Nor will Slade. Everyone is watching. Everyone is waiting to see what he is capable of.

* * *

Ella watches until she can’t anymore. When the whip lashes Simon a first, a second, a third time, his body convulsing with every strike, she sinks below the window so she can’t see. But she can still hear, the whip cracking, the audience gasping, Simon crying, so she covers her ears and hears then only the blood roaring inside her.

She thought she knew what anger was. She thought she was angry when Lewis left her. She thought she was angry when Slade tore out her tooth. But that wasn’t anger. Anger is not yelling. True anger — the deadliest kind of anger — is the white-hot silence that defines her now.

She had someone — Simon was hers, and she his — and they took him away from her and now they will pay their debt in blood. Lewis charged her to maintain the museum. That made her an educator. She is going to exact her revenge through education.

The museum is empty but won’t be for long. A crowd gathers outside. They form a line at first, but the bodies soon mash together at the door. The day is heating up. Tower tops seem to glow. The blades of turbines spin with a cutting light. People fan their faces with hats. They suck on stones to water their mouths and they spit on their fingers and dampen their wrists, their necks, anything to cool them down.

It has been a long time since the museum rotated its displays. For the past few days, the sign draped above the entry advertised a new exhibit. Simon helped her hang it there. No one knows the subject. Maybe it’s war, the people say. Or maybe anatomy. Maybe electricity. They speculate, but really, they don’t care. They’re hungry for something new, a diversion they desperately need.

Simon remains chained to the nearby whipping post. On Slade’s orders. He will be a reminder to any who think to disobey. His body is crumpled, one cheek crushed against the post. The birds and the flies feast on his body, a seething black drapery. The crowd tries not to look, but the first sweet stirrings of rot offer a constant reminder. It makes them feel as angry as it does depressed, more eager than ever to escape into the museum that will deliver them to a more prosperous, hopeful time.

A man rattles the latch and finds it unlocked. Maybe it has been all along. He creaks open the door and calls out, “Hello?” but Ella is no longer there to hear him, already deep beneath the city and roaming its tunnels with a lantern held before her. His voice echoes back at him like a greeting and he shrugs and steps inside and the rest follow.

In the exhibit hall they find a banner that reads THE RISE AND FALL OF THOMAS LANCER. The room is otherwise empty except for two stages arranged at its center. The barrenness of the space — and the echo chamber of the rotunda — makes their whispers and their footsteps carry into a sound like an army on the march.

On the first stage, which previously housed the bones of a Tyrannosaurus, there is a twenty-gallon plastic barrel set upright. The top has been peeled off to reveal the cool, clear water inside. A ladle hangs beside it. Everyone who walks by dips the ladle and takes a sip and closes their eyes, as if taking communion.

Then they read the sign set on a stand. Harvested from the basement of the Dome. One of several thousand in storage. This afternoon Thomas Lancer is hosting a lavish party. There will be platters of food and bottles of liquor. And water tapped from barrels like this one. You were not invited.

On the other stage sits the Judas chair. Thick wooded, with leather straps. Armored with spikes that needle the back and seat and arms of it. Empty except for a note that reads in tidy script: Reserved for Thomas Lancer.

Everyone files through the room, some of them silent and awed, some of them already making the noise expected of a mob. There is a third display, though few see it. It hangs from the wall next to the exit. It is labeled The Uprising. Beneath today’s date reads a story, told in future tense, about the thousands of tired, disenchanted citizens who will take to the streets and who will storm the Dome and who will see Thomas Lancer seated in the throne he deserves before being hanged and dismembered and burned.

The people move through the museum at a slow walk, but they leave at a run.

Chapter 55

FOR A FEW LONG hours, Lewis and Colter are locked away in a windowless basement with mildew mucking the floor. There is no light except the gray sliver beneath the door at the top of the stairs. Lewis sits on the bottom step while Colter walks the perimeter of the room, running his hands along the walls, looking for some way out or something to aid them in escaping. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“What is there to do?” Lewis says. “We are here. We’re finally here. And now we need to understand why.”

“Why?” Colter says. “I didn’t come here for the why. I came for the where. I came for a place dripping with water and layered with black dirt. That’s why enough for me.”

“I came for those things too.”

“And I came for you. Don’t you forget that. I came for you and you better not let me down.”

“I won’t.” He glances at the door. He has traveled these many months and thousands of miles for it to open. Aran Burr waits somewhere on the other side. “Let’s hope he won’t either.”

Colter paces back and forth and slashes the air. After so many months of movement, he can’t sit still. “They put us in a cell.” There is a caged-animal quality to his voice, a desperate growl. “I’m not going to spend any more of my life in a cell.”

“Just wait. We’ve waited this long. What’s a few minutes more?” Lewis says, but Colter pushes past him, climbing the stairs, and at their top he swings his prosthetic against the steel door with a clang.

“I wouldn’t do that.” Lewis backs away from the staircase and says more loudly than before, “Please don’t do that. They put us here because we attacked their men.”

Colter continues to pound the door and punctuates every clang with a word: “I’m — not — going — to — spend — any—”

The door swings open and knocks Colter against the wall. He loses his footing and stumbles down the stairs and falls to the floor, where a moment later he is muscled in place by the five men who come hammering down the steps.

They wrestle with Colter, who does his best to lash his arms, kick his feet, arch his back, bite. One of the men cries out with a gash to the temple, but they soon overpower Colter, knotting his wrists and ankles.

Then one of the men — breathing heavily — turns to Lewis. His arms appear oversize, thicker and longer than legs. Weeping sores fleck his face. “Your name is Lewis Meriwether?”

“Yes.”

“He’s been waiting for you.”

Aran Burr makes his home in the Flavel mansion, a Queen Anne with a hipped roof and a rounded wraparound porch and an ironwork veranda and a peaked three-story tower that looks down the hill and across a bay studded with fishing and crabbing boats. It is in impeccable condition, even its garden, hedged in by white roses so fat they bend their stems. Several men kneel in the garden, deadheading flowers, ripping out weeds. They have numbers and letters burned brightly along their forearms.

Burr is seated on a patio swing. A wind chime made of wishbones clinks in the breeze. His mouth hangs open as if he has been waiting to speak for a long time. He waves away Lewis’s escort with one hand, knotted with arthritis, and then smiles a yellow-toothed smile and says, “I knew you’d come.”

He wears a long white robe and he has long white hair, just as Lewis dreamed, but he otherwise looks different — terribly different. He is the oldest person Lewis has ever seen, his skin mottled and papery, his joints bent and bulging. His breath sounds like blowing sand. But it is his head that bothers Lewis most. It is twice the size it should be, most of it forehead, with veins worming through it and pulsing visibly beneath his skin. He appears not so much flesh as he does intelligence. “It’s nice here.”

“Is it?”

“I think you’ll like it.”

Despite the frailty of Burr’s appearance, Lewis feels weak before him. He does his best not to show it, steadying the tremble in his voice. “Where is Gawea?”

“She’s fine.”

“I said where is she?”

“She did what she was supposed to do and got what she wanted.”

“What did she want?”

“Never mind that. There are so many other things to discuss.”

“Like why I’m here.”

“Like why you’re here. So many questions. So much to talk about.” A black cane lies across his lap. He takes hold of it now and tocks the porch with its tip. Then he leans forward, rocking the swing and using its momentum to help him into a standing position. “Come.” He leans heavily on the cane when he struggles across the porch and knobs the front door. “I want to show you something.”

Lewis feels drawn to follow as if pulled by a wire. The wood interior gleams, freshly polished. They walk past hand-carved pillars and tiled fireplaces and ceilings busy with plaster medallions and crown molding. There are lamps in every room, with no evident wiring, but they flare when they enter and fade when they leave. The air seems to be humming.

Lewis hears the marbles long before he sees them. Maybe a hundred of them, white and colored and clear, with green and blue and red threads twisting through them, all rolling madly across the wooden floor of the room they enter. They rattle to a stop.

A boy sits in the middle of the floor with his legs folded under him. Maybe five years old. He has a cleft palate and one ear folded over like a shell. Lewis tries to recall everyone he has seen so far, every one of them marred by some deformity. The boy stares at them blankly.

“Go on, Mason.” Burr’s voice is like a rusted instrument blowing out notes. “Keep playing. Show us how you play.”

The boy drops his eyes to the floor and once again the marbles come to life, spinning around him, clacking together. Sometimes they join in streams of color, sometimes in shapes Lewis thinks he might recognize: a bird beatings its wings, a horse galloping through a meadow, a salmon crashing upstream to die.

“Good boy, good boy, good boy.” Burr brings his arthritic hands together in a pantomime of applause. He cannot turn his enormous head, so he turns his body to study Lewis. “You see? Do you understand?”

“He’s like me.”

“He’s like you. Yes, yes. He’s like Gawea. He’s like us.”

“The next.”

“The next people, yes. The next America.”

And then Lewis feels invaded, as if something many limbed has crawled into his head to prod at his brain. He hears Burr’s voice, but a stronger and younger version, the voice from his dreams. “This country has evolved. Through revolutionary wars and civil wars, wars against terrorism, wars for racial and feminist rights. And now, as a result of the last war, the war to end all wars, it has changed again. And we’re changing with it. Fins to limbs, freshwater to air breathing, lobe-finned swimmer to land-dwelling tetrapod. We are the next step.”

Chapter 56

LEWIS AND BURR sit in two leather chairs in a library walled by books. For the past hour, they have been talking, though Lewis is unsure how much of the conversation has been spoken aloud. His head throbs with the words and images runneling through it. He knows about the altar — the Hanford nuclear site — that feeds the river, that nurtures change, genesis.

He knows, too, about Burr’s father. He survived the flu, one of the few immune, but he endured a missile strike on Portland. He was on the Willamette River, out on his boat, his home, the only place he felt safe, anchored far from shore, when half the sky lit up with the trembling white of a gas flame edged blue and red where it battled the night. The concussion arrived seconds later, splitting trees like pencils, melting his skin and crisping his hair and hurling him twenty yards from the deck of his cruiser. He did not know up from down, deep in the swirl of black water, nor did he see what looked like electricity snapping and rippling across the surface — and then suddenly rolling back the way it came — because the blast burned away his vision. His eyes were thereafter sunken hollows, the lids stitched closed. But he could see. He could see things others could not. The radiation changed him, improved him.

“We’re both the products of powerful men,” Burr says. “My father was the beginning. He taught me and now I teach others.”

The mere mention of Lewis’s father makes him flinch. Would he be proud of Lewis, having traveled all this way? Or disgusted at the folly of it, putting his faith in a man he had never met, a man he had not made up his mind about, a man who simultaneously terrified and worried and awed him, a man who in many ways resembled his father.

Their conversation is interrupted by a woman appearing in the doorway. She is primitively dressed in a rough brown dress, which seems at odds with the porcelain cups she carries on a silver tray. This she sets on a short table between the two chairs, and when she does, her sleeve pulls back to reveal the scarred numbers beneath.

“Thank you,” Lewis says, and Burr says, “You don’t need to say thank you.”

The cups steam with black coffee roasted from chicory nuts.

“Why not?”

Burr gives a croaking laugh. “Because she’s a slave.”

The woman bows and leaves them. Lewis sips from his cup and cringes at the bitterness.

Burr holds his with two trembling hands. “Not to your liking?”

“No. It isn’t.” Lewis sets his cup on its tray, giving up on it. “Gawea had those same markings on her.”

“She did.” His enormous head shivers more than nods. “She does. I can tell that this bothers you, but if you look back, way back, on the long hoof-marked trail of human history, slaves are the standard of empire. Rome. Egypt. The Macedonians and Ottomans. The Chinese dynasties. These United States. That’s how you build something big. You have to abuse some to benefit many. In this case, it’s not just about power; it’s about survival. We’re on the brink. This could be the end. The world will keep spinning without us if we don’t stake our claim. I’m the person who is making this happen. You’re capable of helping me. Help me.” His voice grows kind and weary. “Look at me, Lewis. I won’t be around much longer. I need you.”

The old Lewis might have believed him. The old Lewis, who held others in disdain, who clapped himself away in his office, who studied the world with a cold remove. But that man is gone, shed like a dark chrysalis, and the new Lewis has traveled to the horizon’s rainbow edge, where he has discovered — no better word for it — a magic in himself and others.

His mind turns to Colter then, his demand that Lewis not disappoint him. As a delaying tactic, to get his head in the right place, he nods at the bookshelves and asks, “May I?”

Lewis is a scholar, after all. He is a man who reads in order to figure out how to behave. He rises and walks the length of the shelves and pulls down a book at random and cracks it open and breathes deeply. Parchment, leather, mold. He has missed this, the company of books. And they give him a confidence he lacks when fumbling around on his own. He remembers his own journal. He remembers that he is writing his own book, that he is authoring his own story, not this man and not anyone else.

“They’re so comforting,” Burr says.

“They are.”

“Because they feel so fateful. In them people do things for a reason. They are following a predetermined pattern, often one established long ago by another writer, or another hundred writers, or another thousand writers, so that every story might seem unique and particular but is actually recurring, in conversation with others. That’s how history works too. That’s how life works. We’re all characters caught in a cycle of ruin and renewal.”

“That’s a way of looking at it.”

“There’s no way of looking at it. It’s true. We’re at the beginning of a time of renewal. And you — you are one of my fateful characters.”

“Hmm.” Lewis closes the book and fits it back on the shelf.

“Have you read many novels?” Burr says. “I’ve always liked novels best. The hero comes from humble or disadvantaged circumstances. He suffers a loss or injury that presses him into a fight or quest.” His coffee steams. “He gets help. From a friend. They push their way through a dark time. They triumph. Everything makes sense. Everything turns out for the best.” He slurps loudly. “I can be that friend.”

Lewis stares at him a long moment and says, “I tend to prefer nonfiction.”

“Of course you do.” Except for his head, Burr is so much smaller than expected. Bird boned. As if a hug could crush his ribs. Just looking at him, Lewis doesn’t understand his power, his seeming command of this place. “You can read whatever you wish. The library is yours. Consider this home.”

Lewis feels the words pulled from his mouth. “I would like that.” He brings a hand to his mouth, too late to stop himself.

“You would. Yes, you would. To study under me. To call me your teacher.”

Lewis feels something like fingers inside his mouth, his throat, making him gag, making him say, “Yes.” He snaps his jaw twice, biting away the word, the sensation. “No. No, I would not. I consider myself a man of science, but what you’re doing here seems to go against God.”

“What God?” Burr croaks out a laugh. “If there was a God, he made cats that play with birds before eating them. Just the same as he made stillborn babies and rapist fathers and brain tumors and viruses that make you cough your lungs inside out. There’s no right and no wrong in any of that. Only the survival that comes with strength and a little bit of luck. We’re God, Lewis. You and I. We’re the gods of this time.”

Again the fingers in his mouth, pinching his tongue, clawing his throat, drawing something submissive from him. But he fights back with a word, “No.”

The lights blaze. Burr seems suddenly to grow larger. Lewis swears he stands, even as he plainly remains seated. “I hoped you wouldn’t say that, but I expected you might need some convincing.”

Footsteps clomp down the hallway. Two figures appear in the doorway. One of them is the man who escorted him here — the one with the arms too big for his body — and the other is a woman with her hands secured and a burlap sack over her head. She struggles against the man’s grip and tries to stomp on one of his feet. He brings a fist to her stomach to quiet her. With a moan she bends in half and he rips off the sack to reveal a fiery tangle of hair. Her face is bruised, but Lewis recognizes her all the same.

“Clark!” He tries to move toward her but something invisible grips him, anchors him in place.

“She arrived two days ago by train. I’ve been very happy to make her acquaintance.”

Lewis’s face twists in several directions. He can’t decide how he feels. First an ebullient giddiness. Then a lingering fury. This mellows when he realizes why she is here, how Burr hopes to use her against him. Lewis feels more and more like a marionette tugged by strings, dragged thousands of miles and now asked to dance, shaken when not compliant.

“You see, don’t you?” Burr says gleefully. “You understand? You’ll maybe listen a little better now?”

Lewis thinks about lying, about saying she means nothing to him, but he feels as if an eye is rolling through the corridors of his mind and he must dim the lights and close the doors on it. He removes from his mind any thoughts of Clark. In defense, he focuses all his attention instead on the grain of the wood in the floor, how much it looks like the whorl of a fingerprint. For the moment that is all he knows.

“I understand,” Lewis says and he feels the eye retreat, releasing him. He realizes only then that he is crumpled on the floor, like a boneless pile of clothes.

He reaches into his pocket — his habit from long ago, when he would seek comfort in his snuffbox — and finds not a silver tin but a wooden case. The coffin-shaped one containing the vial. He transferred it there when they left their bags in the cove. He didn’t want to leave it behind, thinking it too valuable and dangerous. How easy it would be to snap its top, shake its contents into the coffee cup beside him. He wonders how much time would pass before Burr began coughing, before his fever spiked. He wonders how long it would take for the infection to work its way through all of Astoria. A viral infection that would wipe away the human infection.

It is then that a thunderclap sounds, though only a few clouds spatter the sky. They all hunker down. A crack runs through the window. A book falls from the shelf. Outside, down the hill, a bloom of fire, a plume of smoke. The aftermath of a bomb. A concrete building crumbles in half, opening its dark, gaping center. The noise of the explosion lengthens as it orbits the town.

Burr has risen from his chair and stands by the window. Lewis can sense his anger, but it is momentarily directed elsewhere. “It’s those goddamned women again,” he says.

Now. Now would be the time. To crack the container, to twist open the vial, to dose his coffee.

Then he hears a crying. The boy stands in the doorway. The boy with the cleft palate and the marbles. His cheeks are wet with tears. He runs to Burr and clings to his leg and the old man pats him and says, “There, there. Nothing to be afraid of. Just some bugs that need to be squashed.”

Boys. Girls. Men and women. The innocent and the terrible alike. If he shook out the specimen and infected Burr, this is what Lewis would be destroying. Then he would indeed be playing God. He will have to find another way.

Outside, with every passing second, the smoke blackens and thickens. Then comes a second explosion, farther away than the first, that jangles the cups on their saucers.

The wrinkles in Burr’s face seem to multiply when he turns from the window. “I’m needed elsewhere. Which will give you some time to think about this,” he says, with a voice with a lot of teeth in it. “Adapt. Or face extinction.”

Chapter 57

IT WAS NEVER going to be easy. Gawea knew that. But she thought the trouble would come from hunger and thirst, storms that spit snow, sunlight that scorched, insects that stung and animals that clawed. She thought her flesh would be vulnerable, not her heart.

When they paddled the Columbia, when they followed the final artery of water that would lead them to Astoria, she hoped that she would return in more ways than one — to her home and to her original frame of mind, indifferent to her cargo. She didn’t want to care about Lewis anymore. It was too hard.

The current pulled them and their paddles pulled them and Burr pulled them, and at one point she almost yelled at them to stop, turn back, but by then it was too late. The lights of Astoria glowed in the distance. She could call a snake up from its burrow or a bird down from a branch, but she could not control the guilt and the doubt twisting inside her, and on the beach she decided she could not face Lewis any longer. Before she stole off into the night, she told herself that he would be fine. If he gave in and did as he was told, if he became the old man’s instrument, he would be rewarded. She would not consider the alternative.

Burr made her a promise. If she delivered Lewis to Astoria, he would give her what she has pined for all these years. Family. Her mother. This, she thought, was what she wanted. This would give her the sense of wholeness that has escaped her all her life.

When dawn comes, when she presents herself to Burr, he pets her hair and thanks her and feeds her and questions her and makes good on his promise and directs her up the bald-sculpted hill where clouds pattern the grass with fast-moving shadows. Here the Astoria column rises, with pioneers and trappers painted in a swirling mural along its length, memorializing all those who braved the way west in the hope of a better life.

Its long shadow points to a gazebo. In it she finds her mother waiting on a bench. She forgets all about Lewis then. Her feet whisper in the grass when she approaches and stands a little off to the side until her mother turns to look at her. The last time Gawea saw her, seven years ago, she clutched a baby to her breast and contorted her face in fear when a storm of wasps came pouring in the window. She looks calm now — sad but calm — acknowledging Gawea and then returning her gaze to the ocean. The salt wind blows and knocks her hair — streaked gray — around her head like tentacles. “I never thought I’d see the ocean,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Gawea takes a step closer. “Do you remember me?”

Her mother blinks hard, as if something bothers her eye. “I remember.”

Gawea takes another step closer and another still. “They told you why you’re here? They’ve treated you well? You look well.”

She does. She is deeply tanned and furrowed with wrinkles — and her hands are so callused they appear hooved — but she is freshly bathed, wearing a pine-green dress that matches her eyes. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she takes a deep breath and asks Gawea in a calm, cool voice, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

It takes her a minute to find any words, and when she does, they’re the obvious ones. “Because I want to be with you. I want us to be a family.”

“I’m sorry, but I have another family now.”

“You were a slave. Now you’re free. I made that happen.”

“They stole me away once. Now they’ve stolen me away again. If I’m free, then let me go back. I have children. I have a home.”

“I’m your child too.”

“Maybe.” Her mother’s eyes, her green eyes, regard her, so different from Gawea’s. She is different. They are different. “But that was a long time ago. And I was another woman. I just want to forget all that. Don’t you understand that it’s easier to forget? It’s harder to remember.” She reaches out a hand for Gawea to take. Its fingernails short, its calluses rough. “You must have people who care for you. Go to them.”

Her mother was different, but Lewis was like her. Gawea was like him. All this time she kept yearning for her mother, when he was more family to her, a brother beyond blood, fused by their abilities. She needed him, and right now — maybe more than ever — he needed her.

* * *

The knob and then the deadbolt lock behind Lewis and Clark, but the footsteps do not retreat. The man waits outside, guarding them, his feet shadowing the light under the door.

This is the tower of the Flavel house, an octagonal sitting room with cushioned benches. At its center, a narrow metal staircase spirals upward into another windowed peak, four stories high. Lewis goes to one of the benches and looks out across the bay, all that open space rolling off to the horizon. No fences, no walls. No fear.

Because these people are the ones to fear. He understands that now.

“I’m sorry,” Clark says behind him.

“Are you?”

He has come here looking for an answer. But it is not the answer he is looking for. The present is constructed from the past. The future is predicted by the past. Virgins are hurled into volcanoes. Children are stabbed on altars. Women are burned at the stake. Natives are gifted with blankets smeared with smallpox. Africans are hunted down and chained and stuffed into the bellies of ships. Jews are marched into gas chambers, their bodies wheelbarrowed to furnaces that pump black clouds from tall chimneys. A bomb whistles from the sky and flattens a city. Planes become weapons and rip down buildings. Serbs are killed. Tutsis are killed. Hmong are killed. Homosexuals are killed. Muslims are killed. Christians are killed. The wheel of time turns. People kill people. People enslave people.

Burr is wrong. The world is not evolving. The world stays the same. The circumstances change but not the matter. The world has not destroyed itself. The world has always been destroying itself, a perpetual apocalypse. What hope is there?

He feels suddenly overcome. He has traveled all this way for this. He tests the window, toying with the idea of throwing himself out it, but finds it nailed shut.

Clark says, “Back at the Sanctuary, when we were ranging the Dead Lands, we sometimes came across animals. Sand wolves. Bears. Javelinas. Spiders. We were trained to never run. Never run. If you run, you give up your power. You face whatever it is that’s dangerous. You face it, and if you need to, you fight it.” Her voice chokes and she goes quiet a minute. “I forgot that. I ran away from what scared me. But I’m ready to face it now. I’m ready to fight by you again.”

She appears beside him. He does not look at her directly, but sidelong, and still he sees her battered face. If she is anything, she is a fighter. She’s not going to give up, not on living and not on muscling him over to her side again. “I said I’m sorry and I mean it, Lewis. I’m sorry for everything.”

“What happened to the others?”

She tells him. About the hundreds of men who charged out of the fog, who swarmed the mall and overcame their defenses, who beat them and interrogated them and crushed them onto a train. The doctor — here she clears her throat and says, “Minda”—Minda did not make it, a blow to the temple cracking her skull and making her brain swell so that she cried out visions the rest of them could not see before falling into a deep sleep she never woke from.

“I think she might have loved you, you know,” Lewis says.

“I know.”

Clark reaches for Lewis and at first he flinches from her. Her hand pauses in the air between them and then continues and she runs her fingers across his scalp, his hair now as white and stiff as a horsehair brush. “What happened to you?” she says.

“You. You happened.”

She smiles with her whole face, everything bending into an expression of warmth. “Did you ever think you’d see me again?”

“I hoped I would.”

“What’s going on in that head of yours?”

When he thinks about the Clark he grew up with and the Clark who stands beside him now, he might as well be staring at a mirror with a crack running through it. He sees a similar division in himself. While the Sanctuary brutalized them, the journey has humanized them. He is not the same man; she is not the same woman. To blame her for what she did would be to blame a hard-faced stranger. He would have never been capable of such a gesture before, but he takes her hand now and their fingers knit together.

Lewis blows out a sigh, and, like an echo, another explosion concusses the air.

More and more people appear in the streets. They appear frenzied, lost. They run one way, pause, and then run the next, like ants rushing out of a kicked hill. The sky is dirty with smoke. Maybe they are afraid. Maybe they should be afraid. Maybe they need a wall of their own.

“Somebody is fighting back,” he says.

Clark sees him, knows the potential inside him more clearly than Burr ever could. “So are we going to join them or fucking what?”

He feels a small flash of hope once more. “I thought I came here to join something. Now I understand it’s to stop something.”

“That’s the spirit.”

He leans against the window, pressing his cheek against the cold glass, fogging it with his breath, trying to see where the latest explosion has come from.

That is when the first gull swings by, a flash of white that startles Lewis back a step. It is followed by another, this one tapping at the glass, chipping it with its beak.

He looks up and sees a flock swarming the sky, so many of them that they make the yard swim with shadows. He sees, then, in the center of the lawn, Gawea staring up at him. The gulls scream and her black eyes shine and she raises a hand to him in greeting or apology. He returns the gesture, his hand flat on the glass.

Behind them, in the hallway, there are voices. Lewis cannot hear the words but recognizes them as pitched high with anger. This is followed by the thunder of a body rolling down the stairs. A second of silence passes. The knob turns and catches and shakes.

There is a bang and the door strains against its hinges. Then another that rains splinters. Then another — and the door crashes inward and Colter steps through the storm of dust and motes of plaster. He waves them forward with his prosthetic. “Come on already. Didn’t you hear me knocking?”

Chapter 58

THE STREETS ARE buzzing with people, but they are distracted by the explosions and give the four of them no more than a passing glance. Some wear necklaces linked with shells. Some have colored scars and pearls jeweling their noses and ears, forked beards or strange braids stiffened by egg whites. Lewis sees one man with no legs dragging himself along on a wheeled sled. Another with what appears to be a fleshy tail hanging out the back of his pants. So many have physical deformities of one kind or another, and so many more are brightened by sores and lumped with tumors.

Only one man calls out for them to stop. He reaches for the pistol at his belt. But his attention soon turns skyward, where he sees the birds, a white cloud of gulls, all screeching at once. Gawea sends them rushing down. Their white wings make the air appear stormed with windblown paper. Lewis throws up his hands, but none molest him. They concentrate on the man with the pistol, who vanishes into a cyclone of beaks and wings and webbed claws and eyes as black as those of the girl who commands them.

The gulls depart as suddenly as they arrive. They leave behind a damp, musty smell and hundreds of feathers pinwheeling the air and the body of a man with hollowed eyes and bones glimpsed through the many holes in his skin.

They hurry on, down gravel roads, past rows of houses, until they push into the moss-furred woods and then find the bay beyond. Lewis feels suddenly uncollared as he escapes the town, able to breathe better with every step he takes, distancing himself. With the dangerous attraction of Burr so close, he cannot help but think about the black hole at the heart of every galaxy, and how the biggest grow out of elliptical galaxies, where black holes merge and become one, forming antimatter more powerful and dangerous than any other force in existence. He cannot allow himself to be taken again.

They splash along the beach until the cliffs fall away, replaced by sand dunes that roll into a hillside choked with rubber-leaved salal and bony manzanita. They find a cedar with a kink of roots hanging over a shallow gully and they settle beneath it to rest.

Lewis looks to Gawea and says, “You came back for me.”

“All this time you’ve been following me. I decided it was time to follow you.”

“We need to find who set off those explosions. Can you help?”

She nods and looks to the sky, where the cloud of gulls spins. At that instant they break apart and spread in every direction.

* * *

The sewage-treatment facility is north of Astoria, on a peninsula that reaches like a mandible across the mouth of the Columbia. There are massive open-air cauldrons, walled in by concrete, with metal walkways reaching across them. This is where they find the sisters, who dip long poles with screened scoops into the sludge beneath them and splat it into one of many five-gallon buckets they have lined up on the walkway. Their rifles are strapped across their broad backs, and when Lewis calls out to them, they drop the poles and quickly arm themselves.

“I’m a friend,” he says.

They do not ask him what he wants, but they do not fire either, when he approaches them with his hands up. The rest of his party remains below. The seagulls whirl overhead and dapple him with shadows.

At the museum, in his office, there was a section of his desk worn smooth and discolored from where he always rested his arm. It was the best kind of polish, shabbied over time, earned. That is what their faces remind him of. The women resemble each other, broad figures, short graying haircuts that look like tweed caps set on their heads. They both wear denim pants, canvas coats. If he didn’t have a rifle pointed at his chest, he might notice more about them, but for now, one is in front, the other in back, and that is what distinguishes them.

“What do you think?” one says.

“Don’t know,” the other says.

“I don’t think he’s one of them.”

“You one of them?”

“No,” Lewis says.

“What about the rest of them. The ones down below?”

“They’re good.”

“They’re good, huh?” The women look at each other. Some sort of unspoken communication seems to pass between them. “I don’t know.”

“Weird,” the other one says. “There’s something weird about you.”

Lewis lowers his hands and they tense their rifles. “We want to help you,” he says.

“Help us?”

“You mean you want to harvest some algae?”

He can’t tell if they’re joking. Everything they say comes across as a gruff bark. “You set off the explosions earlier today?”

“You bet we did.”

“We blew the shit out of them.”

“Well,” Lewis says. “We want to help. We want to join your army.”

The women laugh together, a single mean ha. “Army.”

“No army. Just us.” One of them shoulders her rifle and picks up her pole and returns to skimming the pond, glopping the buckets full.

Lewis says, “There’s no one else.” His words sound defeated, accusatory. He doesn’t know what he imagined, but not this, two women stirring a sewer. He cannot think of anything more to say. He is all out of words. But the second woman, with her rifle now propped on her hip, is staring at him expectantly.

“Why are you harvesting algae?” he says.

“For fuel.”

He looks around as though searching for an explanation.

“For our truck.” She motions with the rifle. “It’s parked right over there.”

“You have a truck?”

“Yeah, it’s right over there,” says the other sister, hoisting up a dripping scoop of sludge.

Chapter 59

HIS GUESTS HAVE already arrived, but Thomas remains in the bath. He will make his entrance soon. His costume is a cloak made from the scales of a massive snake speared outside the wall and presented to him by the rangers as a gift. He didn’t care for its rubbery meat, but the treated skin shimmers like jeweled chain mail.

For now, though, he splashes in the tub. There is nothing so pleasing as a hot bath. He immerses his head in the water and the sounds of the world muffle to a dribble and plop. The dust soaks from his skin, his every pore opens and eases the stress from him. He takes the water into his mouth, tasting the soap, tasting himself, and spurts it back out. He likes to pretend sometimes he is an infant, floating in his mother’s belly, not a care in the world, every need served by the larger body hosting him.

He wants his body like an infant’s too, so he asks to be shaved.

Vincent runs the razor along his cheeks, his chest, his belly, his groin. “Make me completely naked,” he says.

The windows are shuttered, blinding the sun and softening the noise outside the Dome. People have been gathering outside his gates the last hour. Their chants storm the air. Their feet stomp and shake the ground. They rattle the fence with their hands. A few, he knows, have climbed over it, only to be struck down by deputies, hacked by machetes.

He chanced a look outside earlier. His grounds are a black cluster of deputies — and the gates beyond a seething throng of people. The sun was high enough then to burn every shadow from the city except the blackness held in their open mouths.

The razor scrapes the top of his thigh. The soap and hair ooze from it when Vincent splashes a handful of water. “Can’t you just kill them?”

Thomas has his arms draped over the lip of the tub, his head pillowed by the rim. The rest of his body floats, suspended by Vincent’s grip. “Who? Who is them? Everyone is them. We can’t kill everyone.” He stares at the ceiling, where steam swirls, as though an atmosphere is forming, as though this room is a world of its own.

The door knocks open and Slade barges through it and Vincent slips his razor and draws a red line across Thomas’s lower belly. “What?” Thomas says at a shriek. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”

Slade pulls a towel off a hook and stands at the foot of the tub with it bunched in one hand. “Get out.”

“I’m not done.”

Slade goes to the windows and rips open the shutters and the sunlight shocks the room. The noise outside — the screaming, the chanting — grows fiercer.

Thomas rises from the tub, not yet shaved entirely, one of his legs hairy, the other pink and clean. He pats himself down with the towel and presses it hard against the razor slash, and the blood petals through the threading of the towel.

“Party’s over,” Slade says. “The gates have been breached.”

The guests are racing up the stairs as they race down. One has jewels encrusting her eyebrows. Another wears a dress of white feathers. Another is painted with swirling gold designs, maybe costumed as a sandstorm. They flail their arms and trip their feet, scurrying past, leaving behind tables stacked high with desserts, a stage empty except for its instruments. Broken glass and broken plates glitter the floor. Thomas wears only a robe, no shoes, and he bloodies his feet on a glass shard and cries out and sits down to nurse it, only to be snatched up by Slade and shoved down a hallway. “Hurry up, you fool.”

The air shakes with footsteps and screams. Thomas gets a glimpse of the rotunda, a mess of deputies bullied back by the tide of people surging forward, not pausing at the machetes that come down on them. They swing bricks and boards and pipes and fists, whatever they might make into a weapon. A glimpse is all he gets. Slade jostles him through a door, the door to the basement, instructing him to escape through the sewer.

“And then what?” Thomas hates the way his voice sounds, like one more broken glass.

“Then you live.”

With that Slade slams the door and leaves him in a darkness broken only by the lantern dangling from a nearby hook. He carries its glow down the stairs, limping with every step, his cut heel leaving behind bursts of blood.

He enters an open room full of coffins, the graves of the ruling class. He stumbles on his sore heel and rams into one and knocks it over and the lid opens and spills out a body with dust puffing from its open mouth. The body of Mayor Meriwether, his predecessor, Lewis’s father. His yellowed teeth seem to be grinning at Thomas. “No,” Thomas says and hurries away and knocks over three more coffins before he makes it through the doorway opposite him.

He enters the storage room stacked high with water barrels. The flame of his lantern partners the feeling inside him, a flaring of light in the face of impossible darkness. His hair remains wet from his bath and deep beneath the Dome he actually feels chilled.

He searches the room until he finds what he is looking for, the square black grate cut into the floor. He kneels and yanks at it. Then yanks again. And again. It barely moves, rattling in place. At first he believes it rusted shut. Then he spies the chain wrapped around its grating. He yanks and yanks and then a shiver runs through him and he says, “No, no, no.”

He can hear thumping above, feet pounding the floor, fists pounding doors. It is only a matter of time before they find him. He stands and feels the sharpness in his heel at the same time that he feels a sharpness at his back.

He spins around. He does not realize how deeply he has been stabbed until he sees the knife, a black blade, bloodied all the way to its hilt. His wife holds it in her hand, and as he turns to face her, she plunges it once more into his chest.

He hardly recognizes her. Her white hair is hidden beneath a wrap. Instead of a silk dress she wears denim pants, a brown shirt made of some coarse fabric. She looks ready for the streets. He almost says something to mock her, but blood gurgles from his mouth in the place of words.

He lurches toward her and she shoves him back and he wilts against a stack of barrels. One of them tips and falls with him to the floor. Its top cracks open. The water glugs from it, spilling across the floor, splashing his face. It feels good. It feels cleansing. He closes his eyes. He listens to his heartbeat, so fast at first like the footsteps drumming all through the Dome, and then slower, and then silent.

Chapter 60

BURR HAS A good view from the Flavel house. Way up high on a hill, he can see so much of his city and the bay beyond. He stands at an open window in the library. Lewis has escaped him but not for long. He can feel him out there, not far away. He will find him. He will seduce him and humble him and teach him. Once taught, he will be made into something wonderful, a great tool. He, like everyone else, will become an extension of Burr, a million-limbed monster.

This will of course take time. Burr must be gentler — must not present everything in such a forceful rush. He was just so excited, and when Lewis resisted him, Burr could not help but reduce him to a mewling ball. He has dreamed a thousand times what they might accomplish together, so that the future feels like the present, their relationship already under way. It is difficult, courting a person you believe belongs to you. Burr must be patient, must keep in mind his need for Lewis. He has, after all, no sons or daughters. He has tried to cultivate some unnaturally, exposing pregnant slaves to high doses of radiation, hoping for something radiant, not flippered or cleft lipped or turned inside out, but gifted, special, someone who can carry on, inherit what he has built so far. That is immortality. And though he has his students — Gawea among them — none have the same potential as Lewis. He is the next.

Everything will be all right. He is certain of this, even with the smoke rising from the bombed sections of his city. They will rebuild, as they have rebuilt before, and they will exterminate those who threaten them, and they will continue to manufacture, to claim, to grow.

There was a time, when he was out on a jetty, the seals and sea lions sunbathing on the rocks or bobbing in the water all around him, when a shark surfaced. Its fin cut the waves. Its eyes rolled over white. It showed its fleshy gums, a smile of a thousand teeth, and then bit down, tearing into a seal, biting again, drawing it deeper inside its mouth. Bubbles frothed white and red when the shark descended. For minutes afterward, Burr shook with fright and awe. There were certain things in the world that could do that to you. You crossed paths with them, even if only for a moment, and they infected you, made your body shake with dark energy.

Objects could have that same power. A nail from the cross. The throne of Charlemagne. The diary of a young Jewish girl. The looped video of the Twin Towers collapsing, replaced by ashen pillars. That is the purpose of a museum — a power plant full of receptacles that can enhance people even glancingly. Lewis has that same power, and Burr has felt it out there for a long time, floating in the dark sea of the world, and it has been borne to him by current, and he would have it, and when he did, others would tremble as he once did, mesmerized by the red wake of the shark. He commands the Northwest now, the country soon. But he is not merely interested in power; he is interested in the larger permanence of humanity. Sometimes a single person comes along and changes history. It is a position that requires more than grand intelligence, but detachment and ruthlessness, the utilitarian ability to hurt others as a way of helping others. He is that person. Lewis will be that person. And their names will become so important that they will never expire so long as humans retain their foothold on the world.

Burr smiles, but his attention is distracted by a bird. He sees it circling above the house and then dropping to his open window, a flash in the air before him. A tiny owl. Its wings creak and its beak twitters. On instinct he holds out his hands to accept it and it lands heavily in the cup of them. Its feathers are cold to the touch, made of metal.

It is then he smells the smoke. It is then he sees the spitting fuse trailing it like a kite’s string. Before he can drop it or hurl it aside, the black powder encased in its hollow breast ignites and transforms the library into a white oblivion.

Chapter 61

SLADE UNBELTS his machete and swings his way through the throng of rioters, severing a hand, splitting a face, opening up a throat to a geyser of blood, and though he is outnumbered many times over, everyone flinches away from him. In that way, he still owns them, so long as he does not reveal the fear taking wing inside him.

He crashes out of the Dome and through its fallen gates into sunlight so bright he throws up an arm to shade his eyes. For a full minute he runs at a dead sprint, not going anywhere, aiming himself away from the crowds. He trips twice and skins his knees badly but refuses to cry out. Then, in alley empty of anything but shadows, he chokes for breath and orients himself.

The wall cuts into the too-blue sky. Smoke ribbons from burned buildings. A dog pants in the shade of an alley. A jingle cart rolls by. Otherwise the city seems empty. But he can hear a distant roar, the noise many angry voices take on when in chorus.

The man pulling the jingle cart wears a floppy brown hat that looks like it has been torn in half and sewn back together again. He pauses and calls to Slade, “Candies, medicines!” and then he sees the blood-painted machete and lets go of the cart and it rolls a yard before going still.

Slade tracks his way through a city that no longer belongs to him. A low-hanging awning tears his hat from his head. His knees feel wasp stung. He tries not to think about what will happen next, tries to focus only on returning to the place he feels safest.

He finds the police station empty, even the cells beneath. A desk overturned. A door ripped from its hinges. The occasional body slumped in a corner or sprawled on the floor with a knee bent strangely. When he calls out, his voice swirls down the hallways like water down a drain. The noise continues to rage outside, and he hurries to the dark nook in the basement he calls home.

He latches shut the door and leans his forehead against it and feels some sense of peace cooling him. He has separated himself, shuttered away the sun and the noise, in what feels an impenetrable nest. He rattles the dangling chains and makes music of them. He walks among his mannequins, his favorites, reassured by their company. Here he remains powerful. He strokes an arm, grazes a cheek, before finding his bed.

He sits at its edge, crushing the mattress with his weight. The metal frame protests and his sigh sounds similar — when it rises into a shriek. Because of the pain at his ankles. First one, then the other. A sharp slice followed by a hot flood of blood.

He tries to stand but cannot. His legs won’t work. He tumbles to the floor and barely throws out his hands in time to catch himself. He crabs his way forward, escaping whatever has injured him. He twists around to see her sliding from beneath the bed and then standing still among his mannequins, shoulder to shoulder with her own.

She is here. She is his at last. His Ella. His fierce, beautiful girl.

She tosses aside the scalpel, one of his own tools, used to slash and sever his tendons.

He smiles — he cannot help himself — but she does not smile back. Her face is grim when she hefts the baseball bat, testing its weight, knotting her fingers around the grip. “Remember what you taught me about terror?” she says. “You were wrong. Love wins.”

Chapter 62

WHEN THE SISTERS show Lewis their stores of black powder, he knows what to do. He kisses his owl before sending it to the skies one last time.

So many minutes later, he feels something shift. Like a lantern extinguished or a vise released in his mind. And he senses it is done. Burr is dead. He wonders how many others suddenly feel the same, how strong and wide the grip of this one man. Lewis understands that once the queen bee of a hive dies, there is another to take her place, but for now he has done what he can. He has bet on humanity.

This is why he walks to a cliff overlooking the place where the river meets the ocean. He watches the currents mash together, a foamy roiling. Waves boom and turn over endlessly. The wind bites him with sand and dampens him with salt spray. He reaches into his pocket and removes the coffin-shaped box and opens it and fingers out the vial and grips it in his palm. He cannot help but hesitate, debate whether he should open it up, snort its contents, make himself into a human missile and take out the rest of the human population. Destroy what destroys.

Isn’t the world better off without people? There is a balance — trees make a mess that fire cleans; rain extinguishes fire and swells green shoots from the ground; a deer eats the grass, then dies and rots into the dirt from which trees grow to make a mess — a balance that everything but man and virus acknowledge.

Then he hears some laughter in the distance, Clark delighting in something small, maybe a joke told or a grasshopper caught in her hair or the sun slanting through the clouds. That is all the convincing he needs. A hard woman giving herself up to joy. For a long time Lewis has felt overwhelmed by immensity — the measurable immensity of time and distance, as he rode and hiked and paddled so many thousands of miles over hundreds of days, and the incalculable immensity that can exist between people who betray or grieve or hate each other. And when he considers all the places he has traveled and dangers surmounted and people encountered and words written over the past few months, he feels overcome, vertiginous, swept away. It is the laughter that brings him back, makes him feel anchored. He is connected to Gawea, just as he is connected to Clark, a kind of family, the beginning of the community and renewal he imagined he might find here all along. There is hope after all. Life might be a catastrophe, but it is a beautiful catastrophe.

He cocks his arm and pitches the vial out. Once exposed to the air, the virus should expire within minutes. Far below, it bursts on some rocks, a glassy dust that sparkles. The river dimples and swallows its remains, one more pollutant.

“What was that?” A voice behind him, Clark’s.

“The end of the world.”

They walk back together. The sun hangs over the ocean and the moon hangs over the coastal mountains, as if in an uneasy truce. In the cracked parking lot of the sewage-treatment facility, the sisters stand beside their idling truck, the doors of it open. They heft something from the rear cab, what turns out to be a shortwave radio, and plunk it on the front seat and plug it into the cigarette lighter. It sparks out a puff of smoke they wave away.

One of them settles into the seat beside the radio and aims the antenna at the sky and fiddles with the frequency and begins a transmission. “Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Over.”

The other leans one arm against the open door, turning when she notices Lewis leaning in to watch them.

“Moon’s out,” she says. “She’s trying for a moon bounce.”

“Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? I repeat, is anyone there? Over.”

Lewis has been awake for two days. He feels too numb and exhausted to talk, to process what he sees. He can manage a small question, “Which one of you is Olivia?”

She stabs her chest with a thumb. “That’s me.”

“I’m sorry. I should have asked you that before.”

She shrugs.

“It’s a pretty name.”

Sam speaks into the radio again, waits, hears no response except the pop and buzz of static.

The wind rises and Lewis wavers where he stands. “I don’t understand. Who is she speaking to?”

“Boss.”

“Who — who do you work for?”

“The government. We work for the government.” She says this as though she is talking about what they should expect for weather or what they might cook for dinner.

“What?” Lewis gives a short laugh. “What government?”

“The American government.”

He looks at her a moment to see if she is joking. The flat expression on her face tells him she is not.

“You never asked,” she says and uncrosses her arms and peels back one of her sleeves to reveal on her biceps a tattoo — an American flag inked in black.