“Then, is the area safe for us?” Lark figured there’d be things to fight. She wasn’t counting on the environment being one of them.
“That’s why we brought the gear,” Wes answered, tapping his badge. “Let me know if yours starts to glow.”
That wasn’t encouraging.
“OK, we’ve got kilometers to go.” Luke pulled a small tablet device from a waterproof pouch on his belt. Lark was fascinated by it, wondering how itworked and what it did. She’d seen pictures of them, but not a real one up close. “Sixty of them, to be exact. Due north.” He powered off the screen and returned it to its holder.
“How do you know?” Lark asked. “Did your tablet tell you?”
“Its GPS tracker did.”
Wes tromped beside her to explain. “It runs on a battery. Back at headquarters, we can charge the battery with a small, bicycle-powered generator. Gives Diego an excuse to exercise.”
“Excuse?” Diego’s eyes popped. He flexed his biceps in front of Wes. “I could bench press you.” Wes rolled his eyes.
Luke picked up the story. “When everything was going down forty-five years ago, some of the first targets were global satellites—enemies wanting to disrupt each other’s communications. One crashed near where my grandparents lived. Anyway, a company based in Virginia that built and launched them had just finished one when radar indicated a missile was coming right at them. Ten minutes. They weren’t going to get a safe distance away, but they had a shelter—hoped it would work. They fired up the rockets and shot that satellite into orbit just before the facility was leveled. Now it’s the only one. There’s an eight-hour window when we can access it, get information. We know exactly where to go.”
Lark was fascinated, but her focus was on retrieving the medical supplies. “Excellent! Lead the way.” She adjusted the pigeon cage’s strap, the two remaining birds cooing within, and they filed toward the path leading up the easier side of the cliff.
Lark glanced down as she side-stepped the massive, mutated bear. It must have been tainted as a cub to grow so huge. The glowing splotches, oozing lesions, and mangy bald spots stirred pity in her. It wasn’t the bear’s fault it was what it was. Still, pity didn’t negate the fact that they’d had to kill it.
Behind her, the river raged; ahead lay an uncertain path. Lark fell in line, marched on, the smell of blood and death still lingering in her nose, a foretaste of things to come.
Chapter sixteen
The Wild Unmade
The rain stopped. Wisps of clouds snaked around the sides of rounded gray-green mountains, clinging like pale fingers. Lark thought the region was quite lovely, though some sights were indeed foreign. As they approached the ribbon of red she’d spied earlier, she gawked at towering mushrooms, their caps blotched and swollen, some as tall as a man.
“Is that normal?” she asked, gesturing toward a clump of three spotted ones taller than her knees.
“I’ve seen some on the south side of Old Atlanta,” Luke answered. “Not sure if they’re dangerous, but I wouldn’t touch them just in case.”
“I wonder what this forest was like before, you know?” Lark asked, gazing about. The hammer of a woodpecker. Birdsong. Then a distant crash—something heavy hitting the forest floor. She scanned, saw nothing. Yet a sensation clung to her as oppressively as her wet clothing. Too many eyes in the dark.
“These mountains are very old,” Skye answered with the authority of a scholar. “They were here long before the first humans and might likely outlive the last. If our disregard for the planet scarred them, they will surely heal with time. Nature adapts. It will find a way.”
Resilience,Lark considered,like our kingdom motto.
Glancing up, she halted, staring in morbid curiosity. Before them, on the side of the crumbling paved road, stood a twisted, gnarled tree with three distinct kinds of bark. Her eyes followed it up to witness boughs bearing red mapleleaves, green oak leaves, and clumps of dangling pine needles. It appeared as if some giant hand had twisted three species together and jammed them back into the soil.
“A chimera tree is what they call them,” Wes said. “The part lion, part goat, part serpent creature might be a myth, but these curiosities are quite real. You only see them along the scars—radioactive paths, old blast zones. Bad places. Who knows what we’ll come across in the red forest?”
As they passed from green to shades Lark had only seen in fall, she asked, “Why are they red?”
Skye answered her. “As near as we can tell, radioactivity killed the chlorophyll in the pine needles, leaving them this burnt, orange-brown color. After forty-five years, somehow, they’re still alive—barely, I reckon.”
A foot-long, two-headed lizard scurried across the road ahead of them—one head focused forward, the other eyeing her crew warily.
Wes and Diego exchanged jokes about which of them it was ogling with lusty thoughts. Luke and Skye discussed what to do when they reached the target, and Harlan marched along quietly, keeping his thoughts to himself. Water sloshed in the bottom of Lark’s boots, rubbing uncomfortably against the thin spots in the heels of her socks. At least her shirt was beginning to dry.
An hour had passed when Diego exclaimed, “My badge—it’s glowing!”
“Mine too,” Lark said. Her pulse raced at the implication, and she turned to the captain for instruction.
“It’s no cause for alarm,” he replied calmly. “Lieutenant Navarro?”
Skye slid the pack from her back and unzipped a compartment. “We all have respirators.” She quickly passed them out. “Wes, what’s your count?”
