She softened, just a little. She’d known Beto her whole life. She’d grown distant from him—and a lot of the Lopezes—since her dad died, but they’d been close once. Beto was three years older, and he often got stuck with the job of babysitting her. She’d spent one terrifying night locked in a closet with him while their dads fought off Reapers. At the time, she’d felt safe with him, but he’d only been nine or ten years old. He must have been scared shitless.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

His eyebrows drew together, like this sentiment confused him.

“About your dad. And I think I punched you earlier. So, I’m sorry about that, too.”

“You did.” He paused. “I’m sorry I held a gun on you a few days ago.”

“It’s fine.” She glanced over at the Vals, and at Lennon, who was making conversation with a few of them. Maisie was momentarily distracted—and impressed—by how Lennon could so easily adapt to any situation. From headbutting to chatting with the women who’d kidnapped him in a snap.

She returned her attention to Beto. “What do you say we try to do this without getting everyone killed?”

LENNON

MAISIE HAD BEEN talking to Beto for a long time. Lennon kept glancing over at them, expecting they’d be done, but they were still talking quietly, heads bent together.

“Wait, so they just dropped you out of the plane?” Jessa, a younger Black teenager with long dreadlocks, was staring at him with a dumbfounded expression. She and Anna had apparently been elected as the Vals tasked with keeping an eye on him.

He nodded, returning his attention to them. “Yeah. Strapped a parachute on me and pushed me out.”

“Damn,” Anna said.

“But what if you’d panicked and didn’t open the parachute?” Jessa said. “Or if you’d, you know…done it wrong? Isn’t it hard to land?”

“I would have died, I guess. And yeah, it is hard to land. But I did all right.” He considered for a moment. “And by that I mean, I didn’t break anything. It wasn’t exactly graceful.”

Jessa laughed. “I would have liked to see that.”

“I’ve been wondering,” he said. “Why is this called ‘Val’s Territory’? When everything else is just east and west and north?”

“Because it used to just be those three,” Anna said. “When Val split off, she took the territory south of Northgate, but north of East and West Spencer. What was she going to call it? Mid-Spencer?”

“Doesn’t have a nice ring to it,” Jessa said.

Anna nodded. “Plus, I think that she just liked naming it after herself. Going against her brothers was a big deal. They were all about ‘traditional family values’ or whatever, which they took to mean that the men were in charge of everything.”

“That’s why she split off and made her own territory?” he asked.

“Yeah. I mean, family values are nice and all, but things started getting really grim for women, especially in the east. They were talking about only letting girls take cooking and homemaking classes at school. They didn’t let women have any positions of power, anywhere. They were using the virus and the Q as an excuse to take women back to the nineteenth century.”