Kira camped for the night in a fire station; the giant bay doors were open and the trucks gone, making Kira wonder if the firefighters had succumbed to RM while out on a call. The disease didn’t normally kill that fast, but if they were already infected and working while sick . . . She hadn’t seen an infected adult in thirteen years, but she knew the disease was painful, and she couldn’t imagine the strength it would take to keep going in those final stages. She had to admire anyone who’d try to fight fires while dying of the plague. She rolled out her blanket in the barn-like cavern of the open station, protected from rain but smelling the cool night air, and fell asleep to dreams of fire and death. In the morning she felt like she hadn’t slept at all. She repacked her bedroll and started walking again.

She followed Route 123 north until it ended, then traveled east on something called the Old Post Road. Her route seemed to weave back and forth between New York and Connecticut, and she couldn’t help but wonder how those ancient divisions had been decided, and what they meant for the people who’d lived there. There were no gates or walls, no clear delineations of where one state ended and another began. She didn’t even know what that division meant. It had been so obvious to the adults, and so meaningless to the post-Break children, that they’d never bothered to teach it in school.

However the state relationship had worked, it was over now, the houses empty, the cars rusted and falling apart, the roads buckling and breaking as new plants and trees encroached relentlessly back into their ancient territory. Birds roosted in the upper windows of sagging houses, while deer and other animals stepped lightly through the overgrown lawns, nibbling the new young leaves that grew up between the ruins. In another hundred years, Kira thought, these houses would crumble and fall completely, and the forest would swallow them up, and the deer and the boars and the wolves would forget that there had ever been anyone here at all.

The thought of wolves made her worry about Watchdogs—the bizarre talking hounds that ParaGen had made as scouts and companions for the Partial soldiers. There were none on Long Island, but she had been attacked by a feral pack of them on her trip to Chicago with Samm. He had assured her that they weren’t fully intelligent, at least not to a human level, but Kira couldn’t decide if that knowledge made her more or less nervous; more or less disturbed. She had no idea how widespread they were, but prayed she wouldn’t encounter any on her trip to Candlewood Lake.