“Quiet night?” I asked cautiously. He gave me a one-shouldered shrug. The red light of a CB radio we’d harvested from one of the carriers’ trucks blinked on the step between his electric-taped boots. It was metal, and half the depth of a shoebox. Not as convenient as a handheld, but it was strong enough to connect to the interior.
At least, we thought it was strong enough. The red light was supposed to glow green when we had an incoming call, but had yet to do so.
My gaze lifted back to Billy. He’d been quiet since we’d been reunited in the safe house ruins. I knew he held out hope that Wallace, the one-time leader of the Knoxville resistance—and more important, his adopted father—was still alive, that he was among the survivors we tracked. But that was impossible. Wallace had burned to death in the Wayland Inn. We’d all seen it go down.
“There’s some canned stew left,” I offered. Hunger gnawed at my own stomach. Rations were running thin. He grimaced and kept picking the bark off that stick with his fingernails, as though it was the most fascinating thing in the world.
Billy could hack into the MM mainframe. A stick wasn’t all that interesting.
“Okay. Well. One of the guys found spaghetti noodles, did you—”
“Did I say I was hungry?”
Someone sleeping near the front door stirred. Billy lowered his chin back to his chest, hiding his defiant brown eyes under a greasy curtain of hair.
The silence between us strained. He’d lost a parent; I knew how that felt. But it wasn’t like we’d killed his father.
Not like we’d killed Harper.
A sudden chill crept over my skin, despite the balmy temperature.
“How long has Chase been gone?” I asked.
He shrugged again. Irritated, I stood, and made my way around the side of the house toward the beach, hoping Chase had gone in this direction. The grass was thinner to the right so I took that path, and winced when the climb up the dune sent a burning jolt up my shins. My legs had become their own war zone: purple and yellow bruises from the Chicago blast, blisters from my boots, and dime-sized welts on my ankles and heels from the gravel that had worked its way into my socks. But when I reached the top of the embankment, my pain was forgotten.
A burst of stars reflected off the black ocean, pure and bright as diamonds, with no competition from the lights of a city or base. The exact line where the water met the shore was hidden in the darkness, but its murmur was as constant as a heartbeat.
The vastness of it swallowed me. The cool, fresh air played with the ends of my hair, in the absentminded way my mother used to when we would talk. It was times like these I missed her most—the quiet spaces, when no one else was around. When I closed my eyes, it was almost like she was back.
“Still no tracks. Not since yesterday morning,” I said aloud, hoping she could hear me. I didn’t know if that was how things worked. All I knew was that I wished I could hear her answer back, just one more time. I twisted my heels in the sand. “No word from our people at the mini-mart. Chase thinks their radio is probably dead. It was on its last legs before we left.” I sighed. “No word from the team we sent to the interior, either.”
Each of us that was searching for the survivors took a shift carrying the radio, anxious to hear news from the other resistance posts. No one spoke the truth: that our team could have been captured. That the chances that anyone had made it out of the safe house were slim. That our friends, our families, were all gone.
“I don’t suppose you could tell us if anyone survived,” I said. “Guess that would be cheating.”
I opened my eyes and tilted my chin skyward in search of any sign of the bombs that had destroyed our sanctuary. But the stars were silent.
Before the War, I’d been so used to the noise I hadn’t even heard it. Cars, lights, the hum of the refrigerator. People. People everywhere—passing by in the street, talking on their phones, calling for their friends. When the Reformation Act decreed that the power be shut off for curfew, the nights got quiet. So quiet you could hear thieves breaking into houses two streets over, hear the sirens and the soldiers that came to arrest them. So quiet you could hear your heart pound and every creak in the floor as you hid under your bed hoping they didn’t come get you, too.
The silence didn’t scare me anymore. I welcomed it because it had strengthened me, made me more aware. But times like this I would have given anything to bring back the noise. To shout at the top of my lungs, I am still here, you haven’t beaten me! To tell everyone who could still sleep soundly because they were convinced the MM was at best our saving grace, and at worst a necessary evil, what had happened to me, and what they’d done to my mother.
A compression in the sand behind me pulled me from my thoughts. I spun toward the tree to my left, and strained my eyes into the darkness, gripping a fork in my pocket that I’d picked up in the street earlier.
“Who’s there?” I called after a moment.
A familiar shape emerged from under the canopy of dew-soaked leaves. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Relief rose within me, right along with the heat in my cheeks. I should have made sure no one was listening before launching into a one-sided conversation.
“Are you spying on me, Chase Jennings?” I planted my fists on my hips.
He chuckled. “Never.”
The sand shifted with each step that brought him closer, and for an instant the night behind Chase wavered, and he was back in the ruined remains of the safe house, digging through piles of broken wood and bent metal with his bare hands. Destroyed, just as the safe house had been destroyed, because his uncle was gone, because his last hope for our shelter was gone. But as quickly as it had come, the vision dissolved, leaving my throat swollen and my hairline damp.
I shook it off.
I couldn’t see him clearly until he was even on the embankment an arm’s length away. The black hair that grew so quickly was already fringing over his ears, and his jaw was scruffy from days of not shaving. He wore just a white T-shirt that seemed to glow in the moonlight and soot-stained jeans, torn through the knees, that frayed at his bare feet. His boots were tied together by their laces, and hung from one hand.
And just like that, I forgot the images that had clouded my mind. I forgot how I’d woken or what I’d dreamed. Something stirred inside of me, simmering with each moment his dark, glassy gaze held mine.
“Hi,” he said.
I smiled. “Hi.”
We hadn’t been alone much in the last three days, and when we had, Chase had been consumed by the search. He’d been a million miles away.
He didn’t feel so far away now.
I reached for his waistband, threaded a finger through the belt loop, and pulled him closer.
His shoes made a muted clunk as they dropped to the ground. His fingertips rose to my face and brushed along my cheekbones, his skin rough but his touch soft. They inched down the nape of my neck, down my spine, drawing me in as they came to rest around my waist.
I held my breath, aware of his hips against my stomach and the fluid way his shoulders rounded beneath my palms as he lowered his face to mine. I arched into the space between us so there was no longer him and I, but one. One form in the darkness. One breath, in and out.
His lips skimmed over my lips, side to side, as if memorizing their shape, innocent at first, but then something more, until the world beyond us dropped away. His eyes drifted closed and his embrace grew tighter and stronger, as if he could gather me inside of him.
My hands slid up the back of his shirt and traced the puckered skin from a scar on his lower back. He tensed in that way he did when he remembered things he didn’t want to.