She had made me taller.
I kept coming back to the look on my face. I almost didn’t recognize myself. She caught me just as I was waking up, before my worries about Dad and the town had flooded in. I had, not a smile exactly — it was harder to place than that — but more a look of stillness, of thoughtfulness. Of peace. On my face was the look of someone who was exactly where he wanted to be with no thought of the future or the past. Nothing but that moment.
Jenny said that drawing quieted something inside her. I said I had nothing like that, but was I wrong? Wasn’t that what being with her did for me?
I thought back to that night out by the snowy highway, wondering if the answer was to walk away and disappear. If being alone might spare us the pain of feeling anything like Dad felt the day Mom’s hand slipped from his in the shadow of that amusement park. Maybe if we never built anything, then nothing could ever collapse.
We have to be more than the world would make us.
Mom’s words were like a warm breath blowing past my cheek.
The sketch pad fell out of my hands, and I drifted from the room and down the hallway, following the dim morning light toward the exit. I could just barely see Jenny standing outside.
The unbroken snow was dazzling, clean and white. She didn’t turn as I stepped through the door and came up beside her. The back of my hand grazed hers. Her fingers fell and intertwined with mine, locking together. I felt a deep sigh in my chest as something settled into place.
“I’m so sorry about your dad,” she said.
A chill spread over me again, but I pulled Jenny close. My heart thumped hard in my chest.
“They destroyed their world,” Jenny said, looking out over the vast plain of snow. “But this one is ours.”
“We should leave,” I said. “Today.”
We said nothing more for a while. I wished Dad could be there with us. Wished he could leave and come find whatever it was we would find. I wondered if there would always be this empty, aching place inside me where he used to be.
Jenny nudged me with her shoulder. “Come on, then. We’ve got some packing to do.”
She reached for the door, but before we could go in, there was a crunch of snow to our right. Tree branches shook. We jumped back into the doorway and out of sight.
“Probably just a deer,” I whispered, but then we saw two figures slide behind the curtain of trees. Once they passed, Jenny motioned me forward. I took her wrist, but she turned back and held up one finger.
Just a second, she mouthed.
I followed as Jenny moved to the corner and we both dropped down low to peer around to the back of the building. Two men emerged from the woods. I could tell immediately that they weren’t Will or Caleb or anyone we knew from Settler’s Landing. They moved in precise glides, short automatic rifles held ahead of them, communicating with crisp hand signals. They were both wearing some kind of black uniform, their shoulders and waists crisscrossed with pouches of equipment. They looked ex-military to me.
What are they doing here?
The two men circled the building, then disappeared around the other side. Jenny looked at me. I nodded. We moved along the back wall until we saw them climbing the hill toward the highway and Settler’s Landing.
“Scouts,” I whispered.
“For who? Fort Leonard doesn’t have any military.”
A buzz of nerves started to rise in my chest. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll pack up. Go. Like you said, this isn’t our—”
Before I could finish, Jenny leapt up from her crouch and ran for the highway.
“Jenny!” I hissed, then scrambled to my feet and went after her.
The scouts were a ways ahead of us by the time we made it to the woods, but we could follow their tracks easily enough. We didn’t catch sight of them again until we came out of the trees above Settler’s Landing’s gates. The men swept down the hill toward them, but instead of passing through, they veered sharply north and into the forest across from us.
“We should see how many of them there are. Maybe they’re camped nearby.”
“Jenny—”
“If it was just Fort Leonard against Settler’s Landing, I’d leave it, but if they’ve brought in help, we need to tell Marcus and Violet it’s not going to be a fair fight. Right?”
I hated the idea but had to admit she was right. I agreed, and we trailed the two scouts from as far back as we could. They followed pretty much the same path Jenny and I had the other night. I thought they were making straight for the Henrys’ house, but before they reached it they cut around it and went farther east, disappearing into thick trees.
When their footprints finally petered out, we dropped down onto the snowy ground and crawled up to a fallen tree that lay at the edge of some brush. Voices came from the other side, a mix of languages and accents. We glanced at each other, then peeked over the edge of the tree.
Less than a hundred feet from where we lay was a camp made up of black tents arranged in precise rows. Twenty of them, at least. Men like the two scouts we’d seen milled around, bristling with as many weapons and as much ammunition as they could carry. A fire burned at the center of the camp, and behind it sat a central tent that was flanked by three large dark shapes that sat just outside of the firelight.
Jenny looked at me, but I shrugged, unable to tell what they were. The forest curved around the north edge of the camp, so Jenny and I pulled back from our hiding place and crawled until the three dark shapes became all too clear.
The one closest to us was a flatbed truck. On its back there was an immense metal canister with a hose running from one side of it. A fuel truck, I guessed, meant to service what sat next to it — two hulking black jeeps, their sides and fronts plated with armor and an open back where heavy machine guns were mounted on rotating tripods.
It was like looking at two prehistoric monsters. Both of us stared in awe, speechless at what was looming over Settler’s Landing as it quietly slept just a few miles away.
“How could Fort Leonard afford mercenaries?” I whispered. “Aren’t they smaller than Settler’s Landing?”
Before Jenny could answer, there was a commotion in the camp as the black flap of one of the central tents opened. Two figures walked out and everything inside of me froze.
No. It can’t be.
The black man’s dreadlocks were longer than the last time I’d seen him, and so was his beard. The white man with the scar seemed, if anything, bigger. There was no doubt who they were though. Their faces were seared into my memory.
Not mercenaries.
Slavers.
The air rushed out of me as I realized exactly what Fort Leonard would have offered them in exchange for ending the war once and for all. They offered them Marcus and Violet and Jackson. They offered them Tuttle and Martin and Derrick and Wendy. They offered them everyone and everything in Settler’s Landing.
“Stephen?” Jenny whispered.
She grabbed my arm and pulled me deeper into the forest, away from the camp. Once we couldn’t hear them anymore, we eased down the back side of a slope, pressing our backs into the snow.
“We’ll tell Marcus,” Jenny said. “Warn them. Maybe if they know what’s coming—”
I almost laughed. The thought that they had a chance against these people, that they could even risk that, was ridiculous.
“They’ll have to go,” I said. “All of them. Take what they can and leave.”