"Because this time, I'm not walking away." His voice is steady despite the six rifles pointed at his chest. Despite the fact that he knows I have every reason to kill him. "I can't undo what I did. Can't bring back the people who died because I made the wrong call. But I can help you survive what's coming. If you'll let me."
"Why should I let you do anything except bleed out in my yard?"
"Because I'm right about the girl, and you'll need my help to survive what's coming. And because killing me won't bring back the people you lost."
I stare at him in the moonlight. This man carries that choice like I carry mine. Who looks at me like he sees past the walls and the rifle and the leader who makes hard choices, straight through to the woman who still hears screaming.
I don't want him to see that. I don't want to see the same thing reflected in his eyes.
"Put him in the holding cell," I tell Harry, not taking my eyes off the stranger. "Double guard. No one talks to him until I say."
"And then?"
I look at the stranger one more time. See the guilt carved into every line of his face. The exhaustion that matches mine. The way he's standing there like he expects to die but came anyway.
I recognize it, because I see the same thing in my mirror every morning.
"Then we find out if he's telling the truth." I lower my rifle slowly. "And I decide whether saving my settlement is worth working with the man who left us to die."
As Harry hauls him away, the stranger looks back once. Our eyes meet across the compound, and I feel a jolt of connection.
I turn away before he can see that it affects me.
Before I can admit that it already has.
two
Dutch
Iknewthiswouldgo badly. Didn't expect it to go quite this badly.
The cell they put me in is clean and secure, with a good lock, solid walls, small window that's too high to reach.
I'd be impressed if I wasn't so busy replaying the look on Avery's face when I told her the truth. The way her eyes went from suspicious to devastated to murderous in the space of three seconds.
She should have killed me. Part of me wanted her to.
Three years I've carried that distress call. Three years of wondering who lived, who died, what happened to the settlement I abandoned. I told myself I made the tactical choice—Clearwater sounded overrun, the other settlement had confirmed children, the math favored saving the larger number.
The math was wrong. The math is always wrong when you're trying to justify leaving people to die.
Through the window, I hear the settlement waking up. Voices. Movement. The clang of morning routines. They're organized here. Disciplined. They survived because of the woman I heard screaming on the radio that night.
She survived. She rebuilt. She made something worth saving.
And now I'm trying to save it again.
I run through what I know about Old Hawk's pattern while I wait. Dawn attacks, multiple entry points, leadership targeting. He's done it successfully four times now—the settlements he hits either die or scatter, leaving behind supplies and sometimes survivors to track and enslave. The daughters make it work. Teenage girls trained to observe and report, used as advance scouts because no one suspects children.
It's brilliant, in the most disgusting way possible.
Jenna is the oldest. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. She's been doing this long enough that the empty look in her eyes look is permanent, but I've seen the way she flinches when her father raises his voice. She's not evil. She's trapped.
Like the five people Avery locked outside her gates. Trapped between impossible choices while someone else decided their fate.
The lock clicks open. Two guards, then Avery herself.
She looks different in daylight and that difference hits me like a punch to the gut.
