Fuck. I hate it, but we’re still here on a mission. We still need the food. We need a ration card, and there’s only one thing left to do. I know what I have to do.

“Can you watch them too?” I ask.

Riley nods. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back soon.”

She frowns. “Grace…”

“I’m going to try a thing, but I have to do it alone.” I rub my eyes. Riley would hate it if she knew, and for all the right reasons too.

“Promise me you’ll be careful? We may not agree on much,” she says with a rueful smile, “but Hope needs you.”

I can’t promise that. “I’ll do my best.”

She stares at me like she’s trying to read my mind. I don’t look away from it. I don’t wince.

Eventually, she shakes her head. “Fine. Do what needs to be done.” With that, she turns and darts out of her hiding place, toward the girls. I give it a moment to make sure no one sees her or attempts to stop her, and then I turn away.

I take my copy of our carefully constructed map out of my pocket and backtrack our route into town. When I leave the main square behind me, the crowd’s voices dissipate too. The only thing I hear is the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears, the echo of the gunshot, and the yowling of an angry cat a few blocks down. My legs feel like lead, and my head is spinning. Every time we try to find help, someone shoots at us.

I can’t get Casey’s words out of my mind. We are the only ones who can save ourselves.

I find my way back to the church, with all its small remembrances, and from there I turn toward one of my familiar routes. I know all the houses by heart here. The ones we’ve cleared out, the ones on our list as maybes. The ones that have been cleared out by officials, though those are few and far between.

And the ones with new slashes on their doors. Markings that weren’t there two days ago. On “my” block are three new houses. I pass them by twice before I make my decision. Not the bright, two-story house with the two pink bicycles lying on top of each other outside the garage, where a young girl stares out of the window but doesn’t see me pass by. Not the single-story bungalow with all the curtains drawn and an angry slash on the door.

I stop in front of a house with a chaotic lawn and meticulously landscaped plants outside the door. The plague slash across the door is shimmering.

We never found ration cards in any of the other houses. We didn’t know to look for them, of course. But if what the letter says is right, they’ve handed out rations before, so the cards would only be in new houses.

Plague houses.

Here.

We can’t wait another couple of weeks.