Kira and Heron were both burned by the acid, though the blisters had healed into angry welts after a few days. Samm was much worse off, and spent three days near blind before his Partial accelerated regeneration was able to fight off the poisons and rebuild the damage to his corneas. Afa, the only human in the group, had it worst of all: He’d survived the harrowing fifteen minutes tied to the back of the kicking, thrashing horses, but in the process his back and arms and legs had been horribly burned by the acid, and his eyes, burned even worse than Samm’s, showed no sign of having healed. Kira stopped in every city they passed to scrounge for ointments and painkillers, but most of the time they kept him doped and tied to the back of Oddjob, trying to make the travel as easy as possible for all of them. They didn’t know what they’d find at the ParaGen complex in Denver, but Kira hoped it would have, at the very least, adequate shelter and a clinic they could scavenge for supplies. Afa deserved better than they could give him on the move.

Highway 34 took them through the state of Iowa, a vast, flat checkerboard of farmland that was now marked only by bleached-white fences and sickly yellow trees. The poison wind blew steadily from the south, broken by the occasional acid rainstorm or, even more terrifying, vast black dust storms that swept across the land like swarms of locusts, blotting out the sun and scouring the last desperate leaves from those few bushes strong enough to draw strength from the toxic earth. Kira had tried at first to use their water purifier on the oily yellow streams that flowed here and there across the land, but they gave up when the purifier itself started to break down under the caustic onslaught. Instead they searched every grocery store and shopping center they passed for bottled water, loading as much as they could on their own backs and using Bobo, the last remaining horse aside from Oddjob, as a pack animal to carry their few remaining supplies. Clean feed for the horses was even harder to come by, and as the journey wore on Kira was forced to spend more and more of their rest stops swatting their mouths away from the poisoned grasses sticking up through the dust. Their good traveling clothes were left in a smoking heap on that first farmhouse’s floor, and they were dressed now in the farmers’ family’s clothes. They were too big, but Kira joked that at least now they were properly dressed for the Midwest country they traveled through. It was the kind of joke she thought Marcus would have made.

When the Missouri River appeared before them, cutting a deep, treacherous border between Iowa and Nebraska, Heron growled, “If I never see another river again, it will be too soon.”