I know she’s right but I can’t help myself. The sensations inside of me are too great. They all vie for my attention, mixing around in my stomach and making me nauseous. My exhausted body is telling me to rest and recuperate, but my frantic mind is racing through a million thoughts. I’m filled with excitement, but at the same time I’m nervous. I haven’t forgotten the sound of my dad’s hand as he slapped my mom’s cheek the night he left us, voluntarily, to join a war that went on to obliterate everything. Is he even still the same man I remember?

Just then, the truck jolts to a halt.

“We’re here,” the soldier says.

She stands and starts unlatching the flap at the back of the truck. I’m suddenly overcome with fear. What if my dad isn’t the person I want him to be? What if he’s been traumatized by the last four and a half years? He said he would always love me no matter what, but that was before the slaverunners and the arenas and the crazies. That was before the nuclear bombs and the fighter jets.

“Are you having trouble standing?” the soldier asks.

I am, but not in the way she thinks. She thinks I’ve been weakened by my ordeal out in the desert. In reality, my legs seem to have turned to jelly beneath me. My whole body trembles as she helps me to my feet, guiding me by my elbow down onto a step, then down again onto the ground.

I’m standing on paving slabs with moss growing up between them. I can smell grass and vegetation, and hear the sound of running water in the distance. The air is cool, not like the painful, sweltering heat of the Texan desert I’ve just come from.

I feel the soldier put gentle pressure on my shoulder, and I can feel that she’s urging me on. Another truck has pulled up beside me, and Bree is being led down to the ground, trembling in much the same way as me. When she sees me, her eyes brim with tears. I know Dad always told me not to cry, but the sight of her alive makes me well up. I can still hear her screams in my head as she begged me not to give up back in the desert, to keep moving. I couldn’t do it for her. I’m only here by a miracle. But if she holds any resentment toward me because of it, she doesn’t show it. She rushes over and throws herself into my arms. She’s been patched up well by the soldier she rode with, and is no longer as feeble as she was back in the desert.

“Did they tell you?” she says through her sobs. “Dad is alive.”

“They told me,” I gasp, stroking her hair beneath my fingers.