We skirt around the camp, going as deep into the forest as we can without losing sight of the camp. This gets tricky several times since the moonlight is so dim now, and the camp itself is mostly under canopy. I have to rely more heavily on Raffe’s night vision than I like.

Even knowing he can see, I can only go so fast without walking into a branch or losing my footing. It takes a long time to navigate the forest in the dark, and even longer to find my stash.

Just when I see the tree hiding our goods, I hear the distinctive click of a gun’s safety latch behind me.

My hands are up in the air before the guy can say, “Freeze.”

CHAPTER 18

“Just for interrupting my night, you’re getting latrine duty.” Obi is clearly not an early morning guy, and he doesn’t bother to hide that he’d much rather be sleeping than dealing with us.

“What do you want with us?” I ask. “I told you we didn’t kill those people.”

We’re right back where we started—Raffe and I sit tied to our chairs in what I’m starting to think of as our room.

“It’s now more about what we don’t want. We don’t want you telling others our numbers, our location, our arsenal. Now that you’ve seen our camp, we can’t let you go until we move.”

“How long will that be?”

“A while.” Obi shrugs noncommittally. “Won’t be too long.”

“We don’t have a while.”

“You’ll have as long as we say you have,” says Boden, the guard who caught us. Or at least that’s what the name on his uniform says. It could, of course, just be a uniform that he took from a dead soldier that already had that name on it. “You’ll do everything the resistance movement says. Because without it, we’d all be doomed to the hell those angelic motherfu—.”

“Enough, Jim,” says Obi. There’s enough weariness in his voice that I’m guessing that good ol’ Jim and maybe several of the other soldiers have repeated these exact same lines a million times over with the zeal of the newly converted.

“It’s true,” says Obi. “The resistance founders warned us this time would come, told us where to go to survive, galvanized us while the rest of the world was falling apart. We owe the resistance everything. It’s our greatest hope of surviving this massacre.”

“There’s more than just this camp?” I ask.

“It’s a network that’s all over the world in pockets. We’re just becoming aware of the others, trying to organize, trying to coordinate.”

“Great,” says Raffe. “Does this mean we have to stay until we forget we ever heard of this resistance movement?”

“That’s the one thing you should spread,” says Obi. “Knowing about the resistance brings hope and community. We can all use as much of that as possible.”

“Aren’t you worried that if word gets out, that the angels will just destroy it?” I ask.