His chest still hurt when he took a deep breath, and his arms were beginning to feel the stretching sting of having been worked too hard in an unfamiliar fashion, but he’d fixed something himself. “I’m all sorted out. Let’s get moving. We can start off … that way.” Still pressing his back against the wall, he indicated a direction to the right.

Houjin cleared his throat. “I might recommend the other direction.”

“Oh, might you?”

“Another fifty yards that way,” the Chinese boy clarified, “and there’s nothing on the other side of the wall but the Puget Sound.”

Grouchily, Rector argued, “Well, maybe the rotters are headed out to sea.”

“But the rats and raccoons aren’t coming in that way,” he pointed out. “Your first idea—that the animals are coming inside the same way the rotters are getting outside—was a better one. If I were you, I’d stick with that theory.”

“Yeah, it was a pretty good thought.” He worked one finger under the itchiest mask strap and rubbed, figuring he could get away with it since his nails were covered by soft leather. If he felt like being honest with himself, he might’ve admitted that he didn’t have good thoughts every minute of every day, so he ought to stick with the ones that made it through. But he didn’t feel like being honest.

In the minute or two he’d kept his mouth shut thinking about it, he’d begun to hear the soft swish and roll of waves off to his right. “Rector?” Zeke asked, in exactly the same tone you’d use to talk a dog into putting down a bone.

“All right, that’s fine. You two live here, like you keep telling me. We’ll go your way, and see what we can find.”

The fog pooled and collected like snow. It drifted and gusted against the vertically stacked stone and twisted in small eddies; it spiraled and spun in tiny tornadoes that tugged at the boys’ hair and tickled the spots where their clothes didn’t cover their skin. Rector, Houjin, and Zeke moved without speaking, except to double-check that they were all together. Sometimes the air was so thick that they couldn’t keep track of one another unless they held hands. When they seemed to be hiking through a rich cream soup, they would spit one another’s names between their teeth, calling back and forth with as little sound as possible.