“I’ve planned for that,” said Kira, gesturing at some of the boxes. “Afa insisted we bring some of his larger archives, but I told him we might not have room. Remove all that stuff and it’s really not too bad.”

“We need another horse,” said Afa, though he was shying away from the four in front of him. “We need a packhorse, like a . . . shipping horse. A baggage carrier for all my boxes.”

“We’ll have to leave the boxes behind,” said Samm, swinging down from his saddle. He picked through the other supplies, nodding his head in approval. “Food, water, ammunition—what’s this?”

“That’s a radio,” said Kira. “I want to make sure we have some way of communicating, if it comes to it.”

“It’s too small,” said Heron. “We won’t be able to talk to anyone with a thing like that.”

“Afa’s set up repeaters all over this place,” said Kira. “That’s what the building was in Asharoken, and the one by where we met Samm.”

“Captured Samm,” said Heron, the barest hint of a smile in the corner of her lips.

“Wait,” said Samm. “All those rigged buildings, all the explosions, those were radio repeaters?”

“I set them up,” said Afa, reorganizing the piles of equipment. “I didn’t want anyone to find them.”

Samm was stone-faced. “You killed people over radio repeaters?”

“And record depots,” said Kira. “Most of them were also temporary safe houses.”

“That doesn’t make it any better,” said Samm.

“You knew he was a paranoid lunatic yesterday,” said Heron. “How does this change anything?”

“Because it’s wrong,” said Samm.

“And it wasn’t wrong yesterday?”

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve lost friends to those bombs as well.”

“Not those bombs, his bombs.”

“And I’m not happy about it either,” Kira insisted. “He was overzealous and he killed some innocent people, but you know what? Which side hasn’t in this idiotic war?”

“He’s not a side,” said Samm, “he’s a wild card.”

“A wild card that we need,” said Heron. “We agreed to this yesterday, we’re following through with it today. He’s unarmed—just don’t let him plant a bomb anywhere and you’re perfectly safe.”

Samm glowered but didn’t object, and he and Kira began loading equipment onto the horses.

“We’ll need to set up another repeater in the Appalachians,” said Afa, carefully placing the radio in his own saddlebag. “We don’t have anything set up that can get a reliable signal over a mountain.”

“Are you going to rig that one to explode as well?” asked Samm.

“How did you know I brought explosives?” he asked, his brow furrowed. “Kira said I couldn’t bring explosives—”