“Are you sure?” I look at him skeptically.
He eases me down. My knees aren’t ready, but his arm stays around my waist until they are.
“I’m sure. Come to bed.”
He picks me up because the bed is apparently too far away to let go. I press my face into his neck. He smells like me.
I press my palm to the crescent mark over his heart. He pulls me closer.
Chapter
Four
The city falls behind us.
Strip malls thin out first, then the overpasses, then Atlanta’s glow against the clouds. Kyle turns north onto the two-lane highway. Trees pressing close to the shoulder. A sky with actual stars.
I have Julian’s report open across my knee. I’ve read it three times. Each pass turns up something else.
Konstantin didn’t cause a crisis. He built one. Contamination seeded into three distribution points over a period of months. The decay designed to get worse. The lords in his target territories running out of options on a schedule he designed. Then he positioned himself as the solution. The farms weren’t his response to the contamination. The contamination was his recruitment strategy for the farms.
Erik’s map confirmed it last night.
I close the folder.
Celeste is watching the trees through her window. She hasn’t spoken since we passed the city limits.
This morning I went dormant with her palm on my chest. Tonight she was in her field clothes before I surfaced.
“He’s not trying to win a war,” I say.
She turns from the window.
“He’s trying to own the supply chain. Every lord who accepts his sustainable source becomes dependent on him. Not allied. Dependent. He controls what they drink and how much.” I set the folder on the seat. “I’m not sure that we’re his target. We’re a variable he needed to keep occupied while he built the infrastructure.”
She looks at the folder. Then at my face.
“So when we take down the hubs,” she says, “he just rebuilds.”
“Unless we take the farms simultaneously.”
“We don’t know where the farms are yet.”
“No.”
A beat of silence. The trees press closer to the road.
“We will,” she says. She says it like it’s already on the calendar.
I look at her profile against the dark window.
Kyle slows for a turn. The road ahead is unpaved. Gravel, then dirt, then the canopy of trees closes in entirely, and the headlights are doing serious work.
A wolf steps out of the tree line.
Enormous, gray-brown eyes catching the headlights and throwing them back gold. It stands in the road for two full seconds, looking at the car with attention that has nothing domestic in it. Then it turns and moves back into the undergrowth.
Kyle stops.
