After a moment of stunned silence, Marcus twisted the tuning knob, searching for the next frequency up. The message was playing there, just like she’d said it would, and Marcus listened to it again with disbelieving ears. He followed it up the dial four more times, as if he was certain it was all a dream, that it wasn’t actually real, but every time it was the same: They wanted Kira. They would kill innocent people to find her. They would stop at nothing.

That night he paced the floor of his makeshift hideout, thinking about the message. That was what this whole invasion was about, from the beginning; they wanted Kira, and they’d do anything to get her. Why was she so important? Why did they need her so badly?

Why hadn’t Kira contacted him?

He had no solar panels for his radio, as those had all been commandeered by the Senate and the Grid in the earliest days after the Break, but he had a hand crank, and he worked it furiously to keep the radio active. His days began to blur together, walking all day in search of Ariel, and cranking all night in the hope that Kira would contact him. When he reached Islip he found an unassuming home to hide in, and connected the radio to an exercise bike; as he pedaled he listened to the hiss of radio static buzzing softly through the house. In his crazier moments he thought about going to Manhattan himself to find her, imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios: She’d been captured by Partials, or eaten by lions, or simply trapped by a collapsing building. It was stupid to travel alone, and he’d been stupid to let her. But stopping Kira was something he’d never been able to do.

The radio buzzed, the wheels squeaked. When the sun began to set, he took a break for water and an apple, grown in a heavy tree in the backyard, and then went straight back to his pedaling. Nighttime, he knew, was the most likely time for a call, when it became unsafe to travel and Kira settled down for the night. He pedaled until after midnight—until his legs burned and his feet throbbed and his hands felt blistered against the handlebars. He crawled to his bed, the radio still crackling in his ears, and fell asleep.