Sunrise

One afternoon, A

Alyssa came, opening the hatch from the attic to the platform and clomping up the stairs. The platform was not really big enough for three—we were packed on it shoulder to shoulder.

Alyssa flung her arms around me and gave me a huge, smacking kiss on the cheek.

“What . . . what’s that about?” I spluttered, trying to remove her arms without knocking either of us off the platform.

“I love them!” Alyssa was practically gushing enthusiasm. A

“Love what?” I asked.

“The earrings you left under my pillow.” She tossed her head so her earrings bobbed. I hadn’t noticed them before, but they were lovely—gold filigree hummingbirds with tiny ruby eyes.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“They’re even better than the square of chocolate you left for me last week. It was a little stale.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that either.”

“You don’t need to be coy,” she said. She pressed herself up against me, and I turned my head, dodging another kiss.

Alyssa left, and I turned back to A

She nodded, her lips pressed together, her face still flaming red.

When Darla and Uncle Paul returned to the farm after a day of studying wind turbines east of Warren, I met them outside. “I need to talk to you,” I told Darla as she dismounted Bikezilla II.

“I’m freaking freezing,” Darla said.

“It’ll just take a second.” I waited for Uncle Paul to get inside and then turned back to Darla. “Alyssa thinks I’ve been leaving her gifts.”

“Oh?”

“I haven’t.”

“Figured,” Darla said. “So who has?”

“I don’t know. But Alyssa was all huggy when she was trying to thank me. She didn’t believe it wasn’t me.”

Darla didn’t reply.

“You okay?”

“If I turn flenser, I’m eating Alyssa first,” Darla said. “She would be delicious,” I said.

“Hey! Don’t be coveting the meat of another woman.” “Yeah, but I don’t think you’d taste nearly as nice. Too tough and stringy.”

Darla glared at me. “Stringy?”

“It’s okay. I like my women tough.”

“Your women?” Darla’s glare had turned positively murderous.

“Woman, I mean, woman.”

Darla smiled and gave me a quick kiss.

“Seriously,” I said. “Are we okay?”

“Yes. I trust you, Alex. You’ve never given me any reason not to.”

I held the door for Darla, and we went inside.

After more than a month spent studying the wind turbines, Darla had a new list of electrical supplies she needed: eight-gauge wire, electric stoves, electric water heaters, and more. They were mostly things that could be scavenged from homes. We biked to Warren with two sacks of kale to try to trade.

Nobody would talk to us. Doors were slammed in our faces. Shotguns poked out windows as we approached. Oh, a few were friendly enough, like Nylce, but we already had taken everything we could use from her house. We asked Mayor Petty for permission to scavenge from abandoned houses in town, and he smiled sadistically as he said no.

We raided abandoned farmhouses instead. I spent the afternoons on my back in crawlspaces or craning my neck upward in basements to pull staples and liberate lengths of the heavy wire Darla needed for her project. We raided the ranger station in Apple River Canyon State Park, cutting the water heater free with a hacksaw and dragging it out to Bikezilla’s load bed.

The barn began to look like an appliance repair shop, with dozens of water heaters and stoves arranged in neat rows, some in pieces, some intact. A corner held an enormous stack of heavy-gauge wire in various lengths, each piece coiled neatly and labeled.

We used the truck to drag a huge metal tank originally used for storing pesticides from a nearby farm. We left it hitched to the back of the truck sitting outside the workshop Darla and Uncle Paul had built in the barn. Darla cut a hatch in the tank, and she and Uncle Paul started assembling a contraption inside. Darla swore it was a simple water-heating system, but the tangled mess of tubes and wire I saw in there looked as complicated to me as the guts of the space shuttle.

The GEEKs couldn’t help Darla much with the project. There was only room for one person inside the tank, and Uncle Paul hovered at the hatch, talking to her in a strange language full of volts, amps, ohms, and resistances. I worried about exposure to the pesticide residue in the tank, but when I raised the issue, Darla scoffed at me. “We’ll freeze to death a heck of a lot faster than those pesticides will kill me.” I figured she was right and dropped the issue, although I couldn’t get it out of my mind completely. I lay awake that night in bed for more than an hour. Darla claimed modern pesticides were remarkably safe. I was sure she was right, but what if that tank had stored something else? Something older?

When I finally did sleep, I dreamed that Darla had grown huge and stretched out like a cross between the Na’vi from Avatar and Mr. Bendy. She tried to kiss me, but her body bent double, folding over mine so that instead of kissing my lips, she was smooching my Achilles tendon, my head pressed to her stomach, which had somehow molded to fit my face so precisely that it was suffocating me.

I woke with a start. The bell—the one that signaled an attack—was ringing wildly.

Chapter 20

I pulled on my coat and boots, grabbed my go-bag— actually a full-size backpack with frame. I slung the pack over my shoulders and hit the door of the bedroom less than thirty seconds after I’d woken up. Darla was on my heels.

Who was on watch? I wondered as I ran into the hall. Max, I thought. The pull-down staircase to the attic was open, and Max was nowhere in sight. If we were supposed to run, then he should have been in the hall ready to go with us. I charged up the staircase, anxious to find out what was going on.

Max was on the lookout platform, but I didn’t need to ask him why he’d rung the bell. Flames were licking up the outside of the barn, illuminating everything with a flickering red glow. The greenhouses were burning too—wispy blue flames flitted across their skins, turning the irreplaceable plastic into pools of slag.

I started to ask what had happened, changed my mind, and asked a more important question. “Anyone out there?”

“I’m only half finished with my scan,” Max said in a soft voice. “But I haven’t seen anyone. Could the fire have started itself somehow?”

“I don’t see how. Keep looking.”

Darla crowded her way onto the platform. The fire on the barn leapt further up its walls, and a gust of wind carried a blast of heat and choking smoke across us. “My welder!” Darla vaulted off the platform, sliding down the steep, icy roof.

I grabbed for her but missed. “Are you crazy?” Darla was sliding toward the front of the house where the peak of a small porch roof came within five or six feet of the main roof’s gutter. If she missed the porch roof, she would fall more than twenty feet.

Uncle Paul poked his head out from the hatch.

“Get a fire brigade organized,” I told him, then turned to Max. “Stay here. Keep sca

Darla flew off the edge of the roof. If I tried to go through the hatch and down the stairs, it’d take forever— I’d have to push past Uncle Paul and whoever else was coming up.

I hurled myself off the platform, following Darla.

Chapter 21

I flew down the roof headlong, my outstretched gloves throwing stinging particles of snow and ice into my face. I dug my hands in, trying to slow my descent, but all too soon I had reached the edge of the roof. I tried to grab the gutter as I went over, but I was going too fast and couldn’t hold on. Someone was screaming—me, I realized, as my side slammed into the top of the porch roof. A sharp pain spiked through my hip and shoulder, but I didn’t hear anything snapping or crunching, which meant—I hoped—I hadn’t broken any bones.