“Better to be safe,” she decided at last, and plotted a course that curved west, around the edge of the city, and approached the lake through the smaller, suburban area called New Fairfield. She would be staying off the roads almost the whole way, and she worked out enough of the details to guide herself by compass instead, landmark to landmark, starting with the western edge of a place called Bennett’s Pond. The forest was thicker there, with steeper hills than she’d passed through before, and she found herself tiring more quickly in the rougher terrain. She crossed I-84 around ten in the morning, a wooded stretch of road well west of the city, and then tramped across a narrow stream and through another thick, old-growth forest. By noon she had reached another wide pond, ringed by a series of golf courses long ago gone to seed. The western edge of the water was a low marsh filled with empty nests. Cold or not, the need to migrate south was too ingrained in the birds’ tiny minds, and the wetland was still and quiet. She saw a cluster of small, gleaming curves, surprised to find a clutch of eggs, but when she drew closer they were simply golf balls, yellowed and cracking in the sun.

She kept heading north through the forest, skirting the invisible line between the states, until a cluster of homes signaled it was time to curve eastward again. More and more houses appeared as she drew closer to New Fairfield, the buildings fading and forlorn in the midst of the trees. Kira imagined them not as houses but as spirits of the houses that used to be here, persisting stubbornly, ethereally, long after the structures themselves had disappeared. She skirted the edge of Corner Pond, crossed a narrow road, and turned almost straight east. Her undeveloped forest was running out quickly.

And then she saw a bright white mark in the trunk of a tree; a recent carving, maybe three days old at the most. The roman numeral four. IV.

The Ivies.

It made so much sense, and so abruptly, that she marveled she hadn’t thought of it before: the Ivies hadn’t named themselves for the plant, but for their old military designation. IV. The fourth division or regiment or some such segment of the Partial army. They were real, and they were here; this was either a border sign or a trail marker, and she couldn’t help but wonder if they used this same forested corridor to avoid the developed areas on either side. It was possible, maybe even likely, but why? What did a defensive army have to fear from the homes and open streets of a long-abandoned suburb?