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Darkness was closing around Sister Sun’s thoughts, but as the red and yellow and blue and green balloons bobbed and danced across the hot sands, she thought a single word and her lips formed it silently.

“Beautiful.”

Then the darkness wrapped her in its arms and she fell forward.

CHAPTER 66

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Benny. “What kind of monsters did they make here? Or is that a naive question?”

The ranger didn’t answer.

Benny snorted in disgust. “More and more often I get the feeling that growing up after civilization ended is a better deal.”

“More and more often I agree with you, kid.” Joe nodded toward the dead man. “That’s why I resigned today. I reached my limit of shame and guilt for being a part of the old system.”

“Did you know about the Reaper Plague?” asked Nix.

“Nah, that’s not what I mean. Like I told you, I was the guy who tried to stop this sort of thing. I loved my country, and I guess I still do, though I kind of feel the way a kid might feel when they discover that not only are their parents not perfect heroes, but they’re deeply flawed.”

“Was the whole country like that?” asked Benny.

“No — not even close. For the most part it was pretty great. But there never was a country, no matter how noble or well-intentioned, that wasn’t infected by a greedy and power-hungry few. It’s no different from those parasites infecting the zoms. We can’t really blame the afflicted person any more than we can blame the entire country, but we can sure as hell despise those parasites.”

Lilah stood closest to the dead man. “Who was he?”

“According to the paperwork we found, he was the deputy director of this facility in charge of operations. He kept this place running, before, during, and after First Night. He’s been keeping those old secrets all this time This place is way off the grid…. I’ll bet there are all sorts of things here that shouldn’t be anywhere.”

“Well, isn’t that comforting?” said Nix sourly.

They went back to the hallway. The corridor they’d been following ended at a blank wall, but on the far side of the blasted entrance was a much longer hallway that stretched off into shadows. Some residual smoke hung in the air, shifting like ghosts in the breeze. It obscured the hallway like fog in an alley on a humid night.

“I lead,” said Joe, “you follow. Lilah, you watch our backs.”

A month ago — or perhaps a few hours ago — Benny knew that he might resent Lilah being picked out for the more important job; but his mind was running in a different gear now and he knew it. Lilah was the better fighter, and she was far more experienced with being alert and moving with caution. Of course she was the better choice. He also knew that if Riot were here, she would have made a good alternate choice.

There was a certain comfort in accepting these things. It touched on an old lesson Tom had given him, about seeing things as they are without being filtered through anticipation, expectation, or assumption. There was something liberating in seeing things with that clarity.

I’m not who I was, thought Benny as he fell into step behind Nix. This is who I am. I’m not Tom and I’m not little Benny anymore.

I’m me.

Despite everything Benny smiled to himself.

He wanted to tell Nix about this. He knew she would understand, and thinking that made something else click into place in his mind. He and Nix had fought a lot since leaving Mountainside; their relationship had eroded to more of a friendship than romantic love. He thought he understood why. The two people who’d fallen in love were naive and innocent kids back in a secluded town hidden behind a fence. Those kids didn’t exist anymore. For Benny the separation from naive child to aware teen had started the first time Tom took him out into the Ruin and he saw the realities and brutality of the world outside. The real world in no way resembled the version he’d constructed in his head. Even the things like combat and adventure were different beyond the gates. They weren’t fun, they weren’t part of a game. People got hurt and they died and there wasn’t always a happy ending and you couldn’t just clear the pieces off the game board and start again. For Benny, it began with that, but the process of change included fighting for his life, killing to save his life and the lives of others, seeing people die, seeing Tom die, and then leaving the place where Tom was buried and traveling farther out into the Ruin, past all known places and all chance of safety. Out here, where every day was a hardship and every choice was a hard one, something had happened to the old Benny. It wasn’t that he died, but the child in him stepped back and something else emerged. Not an adult — but an older teenager who was in charge of his own life.

A similar process must have been going on in Nix. She wasn’t the funny, happy, easygoing girl Benny had first fallen in love with. Life since then hadn’t given her many reasons to laugh, and happiness was hard to maintain under the brutal sun of a wasteland. And who was easygoing out here in the Ruin? Joe pretended to be, but Benny knew now that the old ranger was playing a role. In truth, he was a heartbroken man who’d spent his entire life trying to save the world while constantly being disappointed in some of the people he should have been able to trust. His banter and jokes were probably the only props that kept him on his feet.

Nix must have felt his thoughts, as she so often did. She turned and looked at him. Benny gave her a small nod and a brief but genuine smile. Nix’s brow furrowed for just a moment, and then he could see the exact moment when she understood that he understood. She was already there.

That was when Benny saw something in Nix’s eyes that he hadn’t seen since before her mother died.

Joy.

Only a spark of it. But proof that her fire hadn’t gone out any more than his had.

It made him want to laugh out loud, to shout, to hug her.

But Nix turned around and followed the ranger and his dog. He followed her through smoke and shadows in a place of mystery and death, but Benny Imura was truly happy and content for the first time in his life.

Yeah, he thought, this is who I am.

CHAPTER 67

They moved through the building. There were storerooms filled with scientific equipment, offices whose only occupants were spiders in dusty old webs, and some rooms in which they found dead bodies. A few had been left to rot, but most were wrapped neatly in plastic. Once they were past the damaged entrance, they found that the electricity was still working. They passed through a generator room where a big unit encased in metal hummed with patient diligence.

They entered a room marked MESS HALL. It was big, with two other doors leading out; one that bore the sign STAFF QUARTERS, and the other that led to the kitchens. The kitchen doors were propped open, but the room beyond was in total darkness. The whole mess hall was lit by only two functioning overhead lights. All the tables had been pushed back to make room for stacks upon stacks of plastic boxes. Five boxes to a stack, five stacks to a row. They stretched from just inside the door almost to the far wall. Beside the containers were waist-high heaps of large clear-plastic bags. Each bag was in turn filled with smaller bags crammed with clear capsules filled with a bright red powder. Benny guessed that there were at least a thousand of these big bags, and countless hundreds of thousands of the capsules.