“Nah, never.” I stirred the pot. “But I never stopped looking for any of you. And I found Dad.” I turned a bit to see how this landed on his face. I’d been saving that information for when I needed it, for when I thought it could do the most work of tearing him down. He pulled back a bit when others would have leaned in. He leaned so far back he had to put an arm behind him to hold him up.

“Oh. He’s…out here?”

I was cautious. How much of Mitch was in this question, and how much was Agent Dusome? No way to tell.

“Yup. Lost a leg, but he’s okay otherwise.”

“His leg? Seriously?” His eyes jumped around the clearing, landing everywhere but on me. His lip twitched. He put a hand over his mouth to cover the small movement.

“Yeah. It’s not like we’re out here playing tag or some shit. This is life and death. Things get messy. Things go missing.” I tried to stay calm, like I didn’t have any skin in the game anymore.

“Well, he’s lucky it was just a leg,” Mitch responded. “You have two of those suckers. Not like losing a heart or something.”

“Yeah, well, he had two sons, too, and look how that turned out.”

Mitch gathered his words carefully. His voice was shaky, and he paused in weird places. “Are we going to…I mean, is he…with the…target group?”

“No idea.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. I waited for him to offer a rebuke or question my newfound loyalty. When he didn’t, I decided to push it a bit. I handed him his tea and grabbed my backpack. I rummaged around in the front pocket, threw it on the ground, and sat on it.

“Mitch, do you remember the tree house?”

It took him a few seconds to answer. “What tree house? Like, the one we’re about the sleep in?”

I didn’t believe him. He knew. How could he forget the last time we were together? When we were both running in the same direction? When he’d been taken in and changed?

I balanced my elbow on my knee, straightened out my arm in his direction, and slowly opened my fist. Balanced on my palm was a small green army man, the kind that used to come in bags of a hundred, the kind that stood on small, usually uneven, plastic platforms. Mitch looked up from blowing on his tea to cool it down.

“W-what’s that?”

I didn’t answer right away, watching his face. But he had put space between us, more miles than this forest had. I took a deep breath and told him what was really our coming-to story: how we’d gotten here, how we’d become who we were.

“We had lost Mom, in the city and we kept walking, together. We ended up in someone’s backyard out in the suburbs. The houses were all empty then. The people had moved on or were made to move on. We looked through some of the places for food and supplies, and then we found a tree house. Remember that? I know you remember, because that’s where you broke your leg and got brought in.”