On the main floor they found Joe Burns, Jay Arvidson, and someone else whose name Rector barely heard and didn’t remember. Like a great broom, the two boys patrolled the Vaults and swept everyone they found upstairs.

When the place had been scoured to Zeke’s satisfaction, he and Rector went down to the main-level storage room and switched out the filters on their masks. “Time to visit Fort Decatur,” Zeke said, screwing a clean carbon disk into place and twisting hard to make sure it was secured.

Rector nodded agreeably and fiddled more slowly with his own filters. This wasn’t old hat to him yet, and he was still getting the hang of making sure every seal was fixed as though his life depended on it. Because his life did depend on it, and that thought made him twitchy. His whole life, hanging upon a small black filter that could clog or fail at any time … but probably wouldn’t, if he set it up just right.

No pressure.

“Hey Zeke, I’ve been wondering,” he said as they made for the exit. “Why’s it called Maynard’s? Is that after your grandpa?”

“Sure is,” he answered proudly. “Miss Mercy says the Doornails treat him like he was their patron saint. But I only know what a patron saint is because of you and the orphan home.”

It wasn’t a bad comparison. “Yeah, that’s right.”

He thought about the small cards the nuns passed out, each one with the image of a saint and a short biography on the back. Maynard’s would depict him in his hat, with his badge, buckle, and rifle. He’d be wearing a halo of gold-colored gas, and all the poor sinners would venerate him on bended knee with eyes averted out of respect. Maynard Wilkes: lawman and folk hero. A man who obeyed the spirit of the law if not the letter. He braved the Blight without a mask, back in the days before anybody knew what it was, or how it worked—only that it killed. He fought his own officers, his fellow lawmen, and the remaining civil authorities one and all … and he ran to the city jail to set the prisoners free. Gave ’em a fighting chance. And his famous last words, according to people who professed to be in the know, were, “None of those men were condemned. It’d be murder to let ’em die.”

It was a great story, and at least some of it was true.

If there was one thing Rector had learned in Sunday school, it was that people liked stories. People needed stories, same as they needed heroes. Dead heroes were the best kind, really. You couldn’t argue with them, and mostly, you only remembered the best things they’d ever done—while forgetting about the worst.