“They’ve never come back if they have,” said Calix. “We’ve gone far enough to know that the toxic wastes don’t go very far west. The mountains stop the wind, keeping most of the bad stuff out here on the plains, but even without the acid storms, the mountains are pretty dangerous. You’ve got to cross some pretty high passes to get over them, and a lot of the roads have washed away.”

“The best bet would be an excursion up north,” said Phan, “through Wyoming and around the tip of the range, but Vale won’t approve it. It’s as empty up there, and there’s no good place to hide from the storms. He has to make rules like this, since people like Calix are dumb enough to try it.”

“Shut up,” said Calix, throwing a wadded sock in Phan’s face.

“Do you always have to do what Vale says?” asked Kira. “I thought Laura was the mayor.”

“I didn’t become a hunter by ignoring good advice,” said Phan. “Vale, Laura, the other adults, they’re all just trying to keep us alive.”

Samm popped a thick slice of pepper in his mouth, apparently unfazed by the heat. “You’re a hunter, too?”

“I taught him everything he knows,” said Calix.

“And then I improved on it,” said Phan with a grin. He nodded toward Samm. “How about you?”

“We don’t really have hunters,” said Samm, “at least not as a caste. I’m a soldier.”

Calix frowned. “Is it really that bad? With the Partials, I mean—do they attack you so often you need full-time soldiers?”

“We have to maintain some sort of defensive force,” said Kira, jumping in, “but most of us are other things—farmers and medics and stuff like that. We don’t have the cure, like you do, so a pretty big chunk of everything we do is dedicated to finding one.”

“How are you alive if you don’t have the cure?” asked Phan.

“Same as you,” said Kira, “we’re just immune. It’s the newborns who need the cure.”

“You’re just automatically immune?” asked Calix. “Just like that?”

Kira frowned. “You’re not?”

“Everyone in the Preserve was inoculated twelve years ago,” said Calix, “right after the Break. We’ve never heard of a . . . natural immunity. I though RM just killed everybody.”

It still boggled Kira’s mind that the people here had had a cure for so long—not that there’d been any way to get it from them, but just knowing that it was out there, that all the infants she’d watched die could have been saved, nearly broke her heart all over again.

“If people are naturally immune, there could be survivors everywhere,” said Phan. “We could bring people in from all over the continent—all over the world.”