“Well, it looks better.” Theo rubbed his stubbled chin. His eyes, Peter saw, were hollowed with exhaustion. “The swelling’s down. Think you can ride?”

“I’d crawl if I had to, to get out of here.”

They set out after breakfast the next morning. Arlo had agreed to stay behind with Rey and Finn until the next relief party arrived. Caleb said he wanted to stay too, but Theo convinced him otherwise—with Arlo there, and as long as they stayed inside the fence, a fourth was unnecessary. And Caleb had been through more than enough.

The other question was the guns. Theo wanted to leave them where they were; Alicia argued that it made no sense to leave them all behind. They still didn’t know what had happened to Zander or why the smokes hadn’t killed Caleb when they’d had the chance. In the end, they reached a compromise. The party would ride back armed but hide their guns outside the Wall for safekeeping. The rest would stay under the stairs.

“I doubt I’ll need ’em,” Arlo said, as the group was mounting up. “Any smokes show up, I can just talk them to death.” Though it was also true that he was wearing a rifle over his shoulder. Alicia had shown him how to load and clean it and let him fire off a few rounds in the yard for practice. “Holy damn!” he’d yelled in his big voice, and squeezed off another round, knocking the target can clean off its post. “Is that ever something!” Theo was right, Peter thought; once you had a gun, it was a hard thing to let go of.

“I mean what I say, Arlo,” Theo warned. The horses, after so many days without exercise, were antsy to go, shifting beneath them, tamping down the dust. “Something’s not right. Stay inside the fence. Lock it down each night before you see the first shadow. Agreed?”

“No worries, cuz.” Grinning through his beard, Arlo looked at Finn and Rey, whose faces, Peter thought, did nothing to conceal their feeling of doom. Stuck in the station with Arlo and his stories; probably he’d just break down and sing for them, guitar or no guitar. Hanging from Arlo’s neck was the key they’d taken from Zander’s body. Theo had the other one.

“Oh, come on, guys,” Arlo called to the wrenches, and clapped his hands. “Buck up. It’ll be like a party.” But as he stepped to Theo’s horse, his expression sobered abruptly. “Put this in your pouch,” Arlo said quietly, slipping him a folded sheet of paper. “For Leigh and the baby, if anything happens.”

Theo tucked the paper away without looking at it. “Ten days. Stay inside.”

“Ten days, cuz.”

They rode out into the valley. Without a cart to pull, they cut across the fields toward Banning, bypassing the Eastern Road to shave a few kilometers off the route. No one was talking; they were saving their energies for the long ride ahead.