They passed through the Appalachians on a wide highway marked with a number 80, run-down and crumbling in places, but mostly unbroken. They made better time across the river, leaving the dog pack and, they hoped, any other potential observers far behind them. With less fear of attack they could travel more openly, but the open stretches of farmland only accentuated what Kira understood was a growing agoraphobia in Afa, and he tried to stop at almost every town they passed through, holing up in a bookstore or library and obsessively sorting the titles. Much of the area was covered with long, low hills, and he did better when they could travel between them, comfortably hemmed in by reassuring masses that, while not buildings, at least limited his sight line. Kira hoped that this kind of terrain would continue all the way to Chicago, but as they moved west, the land got flatter and flatter. When they crossed the Allegheny River and the midwestern plains stretched out before them, Afa’s mutterings grew more sporadic and disorganized. By the time they crossed the border from Pennsylvania to Ohio, Kira realized he wasn’t just talking but arguing, mumbling furiously at a choir of voices in his head.

Afa’s lone saving grace in the Midwest were the cities, which were bigger here and more frequent; Heron, on the other hand, grew more cautious in each, always wary of an attack by some unseen force. They stayed on Interstate 80 as much as possible, passing through Youngstown and following it north to a place called Cleveland. Both were eerie, empty cities, lacking the kudzu that gave such a junglelike quality to Kira’s home on the East Coast. New York was still and silent, but the vegetation at least gave it a feeling of life. Here the cities were dead, bare and crumbling, eroded by wind and weather, fading monuments in a vast and featureless plain. It made Kira lonely just to look at them, and she was as happy as Heron to leave them behind. Their road took them along the southern edge of a rolling gray sea, which Samm insisted was just a lake; even seeing it on the map, Kira found it hard to believe that it wasn’t another part of the ocean she’d left behind. She’d never liked that ocean before, feeling small and exposed on its shores, but now she ached for it. She ached for her friends—for Marcus. Bobo nickered and shook his mane, and she patted him gratefully on the neck. How the old world ever got by without horses, she couldn’t understand. You couldn’t pet a car.