“Getup, Shea,” cries Poppy. “We have to go.”
The wind intensifies. It buffets Shea in a steadychop, chop, chop, turning the saltwater tug of a breeze to a roar that shuts out all other sound. Her hair whips into her face. Her vision tunnels.
When her head hits the ground, she doesn’t feel anything at all.
Shea Parker’s missing poster is the same as all the others.
The girl in the photograph is small and unsmiling, her hair in braids. The image is old. A Polaroid her father snapped, the Christmas before he left. She stares at it for a long time before she flips it over, setting it face down on the table.
“I want to see my friends,” she says, for the fourth time in as many minutes.
Across from her sits a woman, her hair slicked back in a sleek red bun. She’s dressed in a suit, neat and crisp, her features angular.
“I’m sure you do, but I need you to answer the question first.”
They’re in an old classroom, complete with linoleum floors and yellow blinds, a chalkboard on one wall. Snow gathers on the windowsill. She can feel the cold press of it through the glass.
“I forgot the question,” she says.
The woman raises a brow. “Again?”
“I hit my head pretty hard.”
The woman’s smile stretches thin. Shea stares across the table. She waits. Her neck is bound in gauze. Every bone in her body aches. They’ve been sitting here for an hour. Maybe more.
The clock on the wall doesn’t work.
At first, the woman was chatty. Open. She told Shea how Oliver Keeling took out an entire transport somewhere north of the Flatwood. How they found the caravan going up in smoke, no tracks, no trace. No survivors.
She explained that they were somewhere along the northernmost terminus. The first watch, deep in the mountains of Maine, situated along the mouth of the Gravewood, dark as Tartarus. They’d been watching Shea for a while. Tracking her movements. Monitoring her—aware that she wasn’t just another missing girl from Little Hill.
After that, she’d been close-lipped.
“We can make our own inferences, of course,” she says. “But we’d rather you tell us your version of things directly.”
Shea bites her tongue. She says nothing.
With a sigh, the woman flips open the manila file in front of her. She spends some time shuffling through a short ream of papers before prying one loose. “This says here that you suffer from sensorineural hearing loss. A childhood illness, was it?”
“Scarlet fever,” says Shea.
“That’s a shame.”
“I manage just fine.”
“I’m sure you do. You’ve had to be clever, though, haven’t you? Our rangers say Keeling was getting you batteries from a shuttered shipping facility down in Nashua. It was a lucky find on his part. Most of them have been torched. Even still, he was pulling from a finite supply. I’m curious—what would you have done when he ran out?”
“That’s your question?” asks Shea. “A hypothetical?”
The woman lets the file fall shut. “We can get you batteries, if that’s what you need. We can get you in front of an audiologist. We can have you assessed by a surgeon. You want it? All you have to do is ask.”
“I’m waiting for the catch,” says Shea.
“Don’t play dumb. It’s a waste of both of our time. You already know what I want.”
“You want Lys,” guesses Shea. “Why?”
“He’s a threat that needs to be neutralized. His father played by the rules. He stayed within the agreed upon lines. But Oliver?” The woman sits back, hooking an elbow over the back of her chair. “People will die, Ms. Parker. Good people. Oliver Keeling is a contagion risk. He’s not in control of himself.”
