I waited for gunshots as we ran to Maggie’s van, crouched to minimize our visible profiles, with guns in our hands and ready to fire. They never came. Security was still inside, searching for Kelly’s phantom guests. No one had checked the logs showing the evacuation tunnels, possibly because they hadn’t compared notes with Portland, possibly because they didn’t think we’d get that far. My heart hammered against my ribs, George making soothing, incoherent noises at the back of my head to try and keep me calm. It did, barely. I didn’t really start breathing until we were safe inside the van with the doors closed against the outside. Then I was slamming the key into the ignition, and we were racing away into the brittle golden light of morning, leaving the CDC—and Kelly Connolly, who was naive, but never bad—behind.

We’ve left too many people behind. And somehow, the running never seems to end.

The sweetest summer gift of all

Is knowing spring gives way to fall

And when the winds of winter call,

We’ll answer as we must.

Persephone chose to descend

Into the night that has no end,

In Hades’ hands she goes to spend

Her nights amidst the dust.

For Hades holds his loved ones dear,

Away from life, away from fear,

And so when death is drawing near,

In Hades’ hands we trust.

—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Grace Garcia, June 23, 2041

Twenty-one

I kept my foot slammed down on the gas as we blazed along a frontage road, taking one of the morobscure ways out of town. Mahir rode in the passenger seat with a smartphone in his hand, entering alterations to our route every few minutes as he received updates from the GPS satellites. Every change had to be registered with the Highway Commission, but our credentials were in order, and unless there was a stop order out on our vehicle, registering our route was less dangerous than dealing with the smackdown if we got caught crossing state lines without the proper paperwork in place.

Our weird little hopscotch of twists and turns wasn’t the fastest way to get where we were going, even if I don’t think we ever dropped under eighty miles per hour, but it was definitely the most confusing. I wouldn’t have been able to track us—not without an actual tracking device planted somewhere on the van, and if the CDC was that deep into our shit, we were already dead. Hacking the highway registry wouldn’t give them any of the vehicles known to be registered to our site or its employees, and I seriously doubted they had a full catalog of vehicles registered to Garcia Pharmaceuticals.