“We found wild ones in Brooklyn,” said Yoon. “I think they escaped from a zoo. On patrol last year I found this one as a baby, and I’ve been raising him. He’s pretty tame.”

“Until Yoon tells him to rip somebody’s head off,” said McArthur. “Then everybody has nightmares for a few days.”

A man in a dark-green cloak stepped up to the doorway, a rifle in his hands and a pair of night-vision goggles pushed up across his forehead. “You sounded the all clear. What’s going on in here?”

“Commander Asher Woolf,” said Woolf, holding out his hand to shake. “We’re looking for Delarosa.”

The soldier looked over the group quickly, sizing them up. “You and you I recognize from the Grid,” he said, pointing at Woolf and Galen; then he looked at Marcus. “You look like Marcus Valencio.”

“I am,” said Marcus. He’d become a minor celebrity after helping Kira bring back the cure.

The soldier frowned at Vinci, though, and Marcus felt a pang of nervousness. Did they know what Vinci was? Did they suspect?

“You I don’t know,” said the soldier.

“I vouch for him,” said Woolf. “Now we need to get out of here.”

The man thought a moment longer, and finally nodded. “Let’s go.” Marcus and his companions grabbed their packs—little more than bedrolls at this point, with their food and ammo almost completely gone—and followed the White Rhinos into the trees. Though they called it a forest, it was really just an overgrown subdivision; derelict houses and weathered fences crumbling from thirteen years of disuse, with the neighborhood’s old trees and an explosion of new young ones growing up in the abandoned yards. Woolf had chosen their house because it sat on a small rise, giving a slightly better view of the path they’d expected Delarosa to take; that the White Rhinos had come right past them instead of sticking to the more obvious route was, Marcus thought in hindsight, a big part of why the group had been so hard to find. They knew the Partial army was looking for them, and they knew how not to be seen.

The rest of the group was farther out in the trees, arranged in attack formation around Marcus’s hiding place, safely concealed in cover. Delarosa herself was near the center of the group, near a low wagon. Marcus frowned at this, wondering what could possibly be so important—and so heavy—that they would risk the ruts and tire tracks of a wagon in order to haul it around. He didn’t get a chance to ask, for Delarosa recognized Woolf and nodded brusquely, cutting off all conversation with a single question.

“The Senate sent you?”

“We haven’t heard from them,” said Woolf. “We assume they’ve been taken.”