She examined her map, scavenged from a high school library on her way out of Greenwich. She had transferred Morgan’s records to a data screen, purely in the interest of speed, but the battery wouldn’t last more than a few days, and as soon as she was out of Morgan’s reach, she’d sat down and painstakingly copied as much of the info as she could into a musty paper notebook. The map, too, she had heavily marked with pencil, denoting all the possible faction camps and her most likely routes to travel between them. Some were weeks away, either north along the Hudson or east through Connecticut and Rhode Island. One group had allegedly traveled all the way to Boston, fleeing the faction war almost completely. The Ivies, if Morgan’s scouts were correct, had retreated to the wilderness in between, making their home by a place called Candlewood Lake. Maybe twenty miles away, as the crow flies. Kira checked her supplies—a bedroll, a poncho, a handgun, a compass, and a knife. A bag of apples. Only what she could glean from the hospital without arousing suspicion. She’d look for more on the road.

She filled her canteen in the reservoir. Time to go.

The first leg of her journey ignored the highway and cut across the countryside, through a wooded stretch of land that the map said was more empty forest, but that turned out to be broken asphalt roads that wound through a loose collection of massive homes, each with its own fetid swimming pool, and most with their own tennis court. Kira kept to the trees when possible, just in case someone was following her, but when she reached the town of New Canaan, she turned north on Route 123 and made much better time. It was late enough in the year that most of the leaves had changed color, and foliage seemed to burn with bright yellows and oranges. Most of the leaves would fall soon, a callback to the old days when the winters were fierce and heavy, but the beeches kept theirs well into the spring. Kira wondered if they’d always been that way or if it was a new development, nature’s way of adapting to the new, winterless world the humans had created.

She passed a golf course, the long, open greens overgrown by saplings. It always felt like such a waste when she saw that—old golf courses were some of the easiest fields to clear for farming. A good sign, she decided, that the Ivies were nowhere near.