Afa was asleep most of the day now, with or without the sedatives they gave him, and Kira grew more worried than ever. His broken leg was refusing to heal, as if all his body’s strength was routed to some other purpose. In a town called Benkelman she used most of their water to wash him, head to toe, cleaning his hair and his leg wound and the sores from the acid and shooting him full of antibiotics; she didn’t know if it would do any good, for the surface wounds, at least, seemed uninfected, but she didn’t know what else to do. In the East Meadow hospital she would have had more options, but in a crumbling farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing to do but hope. She wrapped him tightly and covered him with blankets, and the next day they tied him back in his saddle and headed west again, leaving the road—it tried to cross the river, but the bridge was gone—and striking out across the fields themselves. They passed a town called Parks, and a bigger town called Wray, and soon the river petered out to nothing and the fields stretched out to nothing on every side, as if the world had run out of terrain altogether and there was nothing left but land and sky, a lost limbo of never-changing nothing.

Afa died days later, the travelers still lost in the pale yellow wasteland.

They buried him in dirt that smelled like broken batteries, and crouched in a fiberglass shed while the acid rain poured down to dissolve his flesh and bleach his bones.

“What the hell are we doing?” asked Heron. Samm looked up at her; Kira, too tired to move, lay in the corner with her eyes closed.

“We’re saving people,” said Samm.

“Who are we saving?” asked Heron. Kira looked up, her head loose on her neck, her movements shaky and uncoordinated from weeks of malnutrition, exhaustion, and fear. “Have we saved anybody? We’ve killed somebody. We killed two horses. Afa lived for twelve years on his own, completely alone, in the one of the most dangerous parts of the world, and now he’s dead.” She spit onto the ground and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Let’s face it: we’ve failed.”

Samm peered in the dark at his careworn map, nearly falling apart at the creases. Poison rain drummed down on the fiberglass over their heads. “We’re in Colorado now,” he said. “We have been for a few days. I’m not a hundred percent certain of where in Colorado, but based on how fast we were traveling before, I’m pretty sure we’re . . . here.” He pointed at a spot on the map, far from any roads or cities.

“Yay,” said Heron, not even looking. “I’ve always wanted to be here.”