“That tower is probably an airport,” said Kira, pointing to a tall concrete pillar near the shores of the lake. “They’ll have an old car rental place, and that’s bound to have some kind of local road map.” The others agreed, and they climbed back down to their horses. The roads to the airport were mostly dry, but the few patches of flooding still proved problematic. Some of the streets were full of shallow standing water, others were merely muddy, but here and there a street had become a moving stream or a rushing river. Manhole covers bubbled with encroaching lake water, pavement buckled from leaking water mains, and sometimes entire streets had caved in and washed away, thanks to overloaded sewer pipes far below. The smell was overpowering, but it smelled like lake, not sewer. Humanity had been gone so long it didn’t even smell bad anymore. It took them all day to reach the airport, and they camped for the night in a ground-floor office. The horses they tethered to a rusting X-ray machine. As Kira had suspected, the rental car center had a number of local maps, and they pored over them by the light of Heron’s flashlight, planning their route for the following day.

“The data center is here,” said Samm, pointing to a spot near the coast, smack in the middle of the thickest part of downtown. “With the lake right there, and canals on every side, I think we’ll be lucky if we don’t end up swimming there. And we’ll have to hope the water’s not poisonous this close to the toxic wasteland.”

“The horses will never make it,” said Kira.

Heron looked at the scale in the corner of the page, trying to calculate distance. “That’s a long walk without them. It looks like we can take Highway 90 almost the whole way there; if it’s elevated, like some of these have been, we shouldn’t have any problems with the flooding until the last few blocks.”

“And then what?” asked Kira. “Leave the horses tied up to the freeway? If Chicago’s anything like Manhattan, they’ll be eaten by lions in the first few hours. Or those freaky talking dogs.”

Samm almost smiled. “You’re still hung up on those, aren’t you?”

“I don’t understand how the rest of you aren’t,” said Kira.

“If we leave them free enough to escape from predators, they won’t be there when we get back,” said Heron. “If you want horses at all, we have to take the risk.”

“How far is it?” asked Kira, looking closer at the map. “We could leave them here, or upstairs maybe—if they’re penned in, they’re not in as much danger, and we know we could find them again.”