“But why?” asked Gorman. “After everything that’s happened, after everything you’ve told us about the humans and the world and all the million things wrong with it . . . Why?”

Samm was still looking at Heron when he answered. “If you want to survive in this world, you need to stop asking why people work together, and just start working together.”

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kira crouched in the shade, surveying the destruction before her. She guessed the ashes were at least a month old, maybe more. Animals—maybe foxes, probably cats, and by the looks of it at least one wild pig—had already ravaged the site, dragging clothes and backpacks through the dirt, scattering the remnants of old, weathered equipment. Picking clean the bones.

Kira picked up a scrap of an old armored vest and turned it over in her hands before dropping it with a thump back into the dust. Dr. Morgan’s records of the smaller factions were accurate, but apparently out of date; she had sent a patrol out in this direction, but there was no report of this battle. The corpses might be Morgan’s soldiers, rival soldiers, or a mix of both. Kira wondered if there were newer, more complete records hidden in a drive somewhere, encrypted and secret, or if Morgan had simply stopped bothering to complete them. They were both equally possible, but Kira’s gut told her the latter was more likely. Morgan was obsessed, pursuing the cure for expiration with fanatical zeal. Everything else was being left by the wayside, including the people Morgan was trying to save. This forgotten battleground might very well be the last attack she’d ordered. Kira prayed that it was.

A small breeze lifted the ashes from an old grenade blast. Kira sat on a fallen log, staying under the trees and keeping her back to the water, where attack was less likely, and pulled out her map. She was in a thick beech forest on the shores of the North Stamford reservoir—about ten or twelve miles from Morgan’s headquarters in Greenwich—where Morgan’s scouts had marked the location of a possible recon camp for a faction of Partials called the Ivies. Obviously the recon camp was gone, but what about the rest of the Ivies? Kira hadn’t been able to find clear data on each faction’s beliefs or alignments, but the file on speculation listed the Ivies as “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That marked them as potential allies for Kira, and their suspected territory was relatively close.