Marcus frowned, thinking of the elaborate hothouse in Xochi’s backyard. “She rebuilt that thing herself?”

“You’re thinking of the new one,” said Ariel. “This was at the old house: I smashed it to bits with a crowbar: every piece of glass, every pot, every planter box, every dropper I could find, though I know it wasn’t all of them. Nandita practically exploded when she came home, which I would have loved to see. I ran away to an empty house on the other side of town, and made it almost a month before they found me. I expected Nandita to . . . well, I don’t know what I expected her to do, but I didn’t think she was going to bring me back in. She’d had time to calm down, I guess. She was still as mad as hell, but she brought me back.”

“Because she loved you,” said Marcus, hopefully.

“Because she needed me for whatever insane experiment she was running,” said Ariel. “She couldn’t just start over with somebody new.” She sighed and rapped her knuckles on the wooden steps. “That was winter, and in spring we moved to the new place—she claimed it was water damage, but of course she just needed a new hothouse to grow her herbs. I ran away a few more times, but ‘children are our most precious resource,’ and all that, so they kept bringing me back. The instant it was legal for me to leave, I left, and I’ve never gone back.”

“Maybe the experiments had something to do with RM,” said Marcus. “You lived there until, what, sixteen?”

“Yeah.”

“So she tracked everything, every physical change, up through and including puberty.”

“I assume so.”

“I’m just thinking,” said Marcus. “Madison has the only live baby on the island. Obviously, it’s thanks to Kira finding the cure, but what if it were more than that? It’s at least something of a coincidence. Do you think it might have been something Nandita did? A heightened immune system, or a stronger fetal . . . I don’t know, I’m grasping at straws here. But maybe it was about reproduction.”

“I don’t know,” said Ariel. “I’ve spent years trying not to think about it.”

“And now Nandita’s gone,” said Marcus. “Completely disappeared, right off the face of the planet. And you know what that means.”

Ariel looked up at him. “What?”

“It means she’s not guarding her house,” said Marcus. “And maybe she left some of those notes behind.”

Ariel narrowed her eyes. “That’s in East Meadow—that’s under Partial control.”

Marcus nodded, a hint of his old scheming grin creeping onto his face. “That’s where they’re throwing everyone they catch. Which is going to make it awfully easy for us to get there.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“I can’t lose this backpack,” said Afa. “I’m the last human being on the planet.”