When we near Sam’s Throne, and the light around us turns a burnt orange, a familiar nervousness settles in my stomach. That bottomless pit of not knowing what we’ll find on the other side. Or perhaps the gnawing is hunger too. The traps didn’t produce anything yesterday or the day before, and we’ve all but run out of our own supplies. Every successful trip into town gives us enough food for a day or two at most.

I nudge Grace carefully. “What do we need?”

Nia helped her to learn my signs. Enough to get by.

She frowns. “Food. Information. An updated map. Food.”

I pat the pocket with my copy of the map and the pencils I brought. Since Grace asked me to draw a map, we’ve been updating it with notes about abandoned houses, plague crosses, and more. It helps us figure out which houses to avoid and which houses to enter. None of us want to accidentally break into a house where someone inside is ill. Especially now that we may have managed to keep the plague out of Hope.

“I don’t know why some of us fell ill and others didn’t. Maybe there’s a good reason for it, but I don’t want to gamble that it was anything other than luck,” Grace says.

I can’t—I don’t want to imagine any of us carrying the plague back to Hope.

“I also don’t know how we’ll get information,” Grace admits, “but I’d like to know what’s going on in the rest of the world.”

“How?”

“One of the oldest houses, maybe? The ones we know have been emptied? We can try to see if any of their computers will work. They usually have better food stocks anyway.”

In many of the newer houses, hunger has taken hold too. Or other thieves have.

I pull a face, and she raises her hands. “I know it’s not ideal, but I don’t know what the best alternative is. We can’t very well walk up to people to ask them what’s going on.”

I raise my hands to sign then think better of it and pull the map out of my pocket. I point at the store and the area around it. It has a post office somewhere in the vicinity, probably a town hall too. Central gathering points. We can’t be the only ones angling for information.

Even the school or the church, from a safe distance. If we—

Grace shakes her head. “No, too dangerous. I don’t know if I can talk us out of another confrontation with Store Guy. Or anyone else for that matter.”

I nod. “I understand.”

I don’t agree, but I understand. And Grace won’t be able to see the nuances in my signs. The hesitation that must show on my face.

“We’ll start with food and go from there. Once we have a good house, I’ll do the runs, and you map the street, okay?”

I nod again. With the map still in my hands, we cross into town, and I immediately begin to mark the changes. The houses with new plague crosses, the houses with shattered windows, the houses where light is still burning. Grace and I stick close to each other, trying to not attract attention as two girls wandering a mostly deserted ghost town. She continuously scans the streets too.