“We’re not leaving them,” said Kira.

“Guilt won’t bring Afa back,” said Heron.

“And callousness won’t make the distance any shorter,” said Samm, folding the map. “Let’s keep walking.”

Kira had held a vain hope that the toxic wasteland would be better here, shielded in some way by the mountains or the skyscrapers or some foible in the weather patterns, but the city proved to be somehow more dangerous than the land they had already crossed. Acid runoff collected in potholes and dips in the road, forming caustic lakes where drainage grates were too clogged with garbage to let the slurry escape. Truck beds open to the weather had formed miniature salt pans, evaporating the poison particles out of the rainfall in an ongoing cycle until they were filled with crystalline masses that kicked up in the wind and burned the travelers’ eyes and throats; they wrapped their faces with spare clothing and peered cautiously through their eye slits, always on the watch for danger. Some of the chemicals that saturated the city were flammable, and fires smoldered here and there as they passed, sometimes reigniting in the heat, all the time feeding the poisons in the air with a never-ending stream of smoke and ash.

They stopped for the night in what looked like it used to be a luxury hotel; the rich green carpet in the lobby was bleached at the edges and covered with windblown dust. They led the horses through a wide double door and made camp in a former five-star restaurant, sealing the way behind them to keep out as much of the toxic wind as possible. Samm built the horses a corral from old hardwood tables, and they fed them from a massive store of canned apple pie filling they found in the kitchen. Kira ate canned tuna mixed with canned beef bouillon to hide the flavor; if she never saw another can of tuna again in her life, she’d count herself lucky. They didn’t bother setting watch, collapsing on the deep pile carpet without even untying their bedrolls.

Kira rose the next morning to find Heron already gone, presumably scouting ahead, if she hadn’t already abandoned them completely. They hadn’t talked much after the fight, and while Heron seemed resigned to go with them to Denver in the end, she had not been her usual self since.

Samm was searching boxes stacked along the wall next to the kitchen for anything they could take with them. “Most of the cans have gone bad,” he said, tossing Kira a bloated metal can of tomato paste. “Hotels are always crappy anyway—they use too much fresh food, and most of the canned stuff is bulk.”

Kira nodded to the five-gallon can of tomato sauce on the table beside him. “You don’t want to haul that thirty miles today?”