The travelers had distributed their gear between the horses, Kira leading Bobo while Samm led Oddjob; the mare seemed morose without Afa strapped onto her back, and Kira wondered if even the animals’ diet of canned vegetables and instant oatmeal—the only clean food they could find in the toxic wasteland—was starting to take its toll. If they’d lost Afa back in Chicago, or sent him back on his own, they could have loosed the horses and spared them the horrors of the journey completely, but to loose them in the middle of the poison plains would have been the height of cruelty, and Kira wouldn’t hear of it. They had lost Afa, but she would save his horse if it meant her own life.

Except I know that isn’t true, she thought. If it really comes down to it, I’ll save myself. It made her feel guilty and nauseous to think of it, and she did her best to think of something else.

The city they passed through was, if anything, bigger than Chicago. The suburb of Bennett stretched west into the suburb of Nieveen, then Lawrence, then Watkins and Watkins Farm, and on and on in an endless sea of housing developments and shopping malls and parking lots. Lonely wind rustled through the piles of brittle leaves and broken glass that clustered in the gutters and collected against the walls of crumbling buildings. Heron ranged far ahead, scouting their path more out of habit than necessity, doubling back at regular intervals to report that they were coming up on first one airport, then another, then a golf course. There was nothing meaningful to report; nothing to see but the bleached bones and rusted metal frames of the millions of people and buildings destroyed in the Break. Samm found another road map in a broken-down gas station, folding it out on the hood of an empty car. The roads coiled together on the page like a cluster of nerves.

“According to Afa’s records,” said Kira, “the ParaGen complex was here, tucked up against the mountains.” She pointed to the western edge of the city, in an area called Arvada. She read the name off the map. “Rocky Flats Memorial Preserve. Why would they build an industrial facility on a preserve?”

Samm pinpointed their current location and measured out the distance. “That’s forty miles away. How big is this city?”

“Forty miles across,” said Heron. “We’re walking from one end to the other. It’s at least twice that north to south, so be grateful we came the way we did.”

Kira looked at the sky, estimating the position of the sun. “It’s already . . . three in the afternoon? Three thirty? We’re not making it forty miles by nightfall.”

“Not even tomorrow by nightfall if the horses don’t perk up,” said Heron. “I tell you, we need to just leave them and move on.”