I follow her through the door and into the belly of the tanker, where it smells of metal and rust and falseness. The air is stale. I can’t hear the wind.

It’s worse than our cellar during storms.

We climb down a series of ladders and snake through halls where I have to duck at each doorway to keep from hitting my head. The girl takes me to a small room where beds jut from the wall. They remind me of our mats back home, but, they’re suspended by metal brackets.

“We don’t have water to spare,” the girl says to me.

“I didn’t think you would.”

I’ve been careful on the way in. My waterskin is still half full and will last me until I return home.

The girl sets a candle on the floor, and the walls seem to come to life beneath the flame, glinting and flashing. It’s unnatural. Asher once said that the tanker felt like freedom, that he felt safe during his visit, but I just feel trapped.

“Do you like living here?” I ask the girl.

She shrugs. “It is all I know. But traders bring word of raids in the wastes, of men taking all they want, from goods to homes to women, and I know I’d rather be here. The Ark is impenetrable. We are above the lawless land. Protected. Zuly watches over us.”

I sit on the lower of the two mats, my head nearly knocking the bed above, and try to keep my knees from bouncing.

“I will find you when there is news,” the girl says.

I sleep, my exhausted body succumbing to dreams, and when I wake, it’s to my shoulder being jostled. “Come.” The girl motions toward the hall.

When we emerge onto the deck, the aurora still dances low on the northern horizon, a sickly green mist that is so bright it disguises the true time of day. The girl says it’s nearly dawn, sunrise just moments off. Zuly has been with Indie all night.

We pass the dust-covered linens the pack was stringing up when I arrived. A few pack-members are awake already, pulling the sheets down and shaking them out while others right a section of the canopy that collapsed in the wind. Chickens scatter, startled by the snapping fabric. A goat bleats from somewhere out of view.

The girl stops suddenly and points. Zuly is standing at the nose of the tanker, a baby in her arms. I rush forward. The baby has dark hair and paper-thin eyelids, and is far smaller than Brooke’s girl was when she joined our pack. “She ate earlier and is sleeping now,” Zuly says.

A sigh of relief escapes me. “Is Indie sleeping too? I want to see her.”

Zuly frowns. “You misunderstand. The baby was fed goat’s milk. Your sister died during the labor.”

“What?”