“He’s no dummy.” But he sat up, rubbed at his itching eyes, and yawned.

“He’s pretending he’s got work to do. He’s sticking close to the fort and pretending like he can’t leave. But the captain’s not even over there—he’s off someplace with my mother. I bet.”

“That must be strange.”

“Yeah, but what am I going to say about it? He’s all right, and even if he wasn’t, he could toss me over the wall with his pinky finger.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Rector reached for his boots—or whoever’s boots they were—and stuffed his feet inside them.

“Come on, hurry up.”

“Don’t rush me. I’m working on it.”

He almost knew the way to the outer blocks by now. He realized this at the same time he realized that he still wasn’t sure how to get back to the Station, so perhaps he’d made some kind of decision without noticing it.

Not worth wondering yet, not quite so soon.

The day was quiet after the night’s cacophony of violence and light. It was an odd thing, and it felt like distance, but it wasn’t, was it? The wall had a hole just a few blocks north; the city had a leak and terribly ill animals and dying people; and the tower was gone—blown to a million bricks by Huey’s handiwork on the clock-bomb.

Neither Zeke nor Rector brought this up, even when they hiked through the fog-shrouded streets and sometimes kicked a gun, or noticed a nearly new gas mask lying beside a body.

Not all of the bodies became rotters. Most of them, yes. But nothing on earth is any use without its head. Few things are any use when they’re cut or blown or chewed in half. Whatever the cause, no rotters reached out with rickety, grasping fingers as they slogged up the hills and between the narrow blocks of the time-blasted city. So instead of talking about it, the two boys only considered it as they walked side by side. They were careful to stick to the walls for shelter and cover, and they guided each other away from any debris that made them wonder, even in the slightest.

The prison itself was as they’d left it, quiet and squat. Missing its front door and still as clogged with Blight as ever, it was the very picture of someplace unloved and unused, and almost certainly forgotten.

Inside, Seattle’s second city jail felt like the tomb it’d almost become seventeen years ago and change. Not a sound. Not a motion. Not a breath to stir the dusty beams of light that cut inside halfheartedly and none too efficiently. Not until Rector and Zeke came inside. Their filters gusted as they exhaled, and sparkling motes of yellow-brown dust eddied in the puddles of ill-formed illumination.

But then, listening and walking with exaggerated care, they heard the faint, rhythmic sounds of something large drawing steady breaths and pushing them out again. The barest hint of a filter’s hiss underscored the sound, and then the slow, sad scrape of some fur-covered body part sliding along the floor.