When they landed, the wolf leaped off, began to explore. The great owl swooped toward the trees.
“Did you see how the road winds and winds down? Switchbacking. From here, a sentry would see anyone advancing.” Fallon hopped off. “That building, an old church?” She gestured to the faded brick structure with its tall steeple, dingy gray from weather and neglect. “The highest point, and a perfect sentry post.”
“And a lot of the road’s eroded away in the low-lying areas.” As Fallon did, Tonia looked at the land for defense, offense. “Add a barricade. Access and cover for an advancing force through the woods, but that could be tightened up.”
“And the fields are wide open. You couldn’t cross without being seen.” Plant wheat, grains, Fallon thought, build a mill on the river.
She climbed up to the church. The doors, like the steeple, had been white once. Someone, long ago, had written DOOM over them. Now the despairing red paint faded into the gray.
Hinges protested with rusty shrieks when she opened the doors.
More gray, she thought. The air, the walls, the windows. Someone had tried without much success to set fire to the pews, so a few stood crackled and charred.
Above the altar hung desiccated remains.
“Not Raiders.” Tonia’s voice echoed in the musky air. “Not enough damage for Raiders.”
“No, not Raiders. He’s been there a very long time.”
She moved closer, opened herself.
“A nightmare, God’s punishment, some thought. But whose god? It took all, every soul, through the sickness or the madness that came with it. Crows circling, smoke rising. Oh, the screams, the terrible laughter that no prayer could overcome. Even here in this place of worship, Doom crept and clawed. Too many to bury, and the stench of burning flesh rises with the smoke, rises to the crows as they call me. It calls me, it promises, it lies. There is no salvation. Only death.”
“Don’t.” Tonia touched a hand to Fallon’s arm to bring her back. “Don’t look anymore. It doesn’t help.”
“He was one of us, and the power that woke inside him terrified him. What pulled at him terrified him because he wanted to answer. He tried to burn the church. Fire’s the first skill to come for most, but he was afraid, and he was the last, the only one who survived. He hanged himself in fear and despair.”
“We’ll take him down. We’ll bury him.”
“Yeah. There’s no one here, and hasn’t been since he did this. Maybe whatever he did, or tried to do before he took his own life, kept the dark away.”
Tonia raised a hand, pushed power at a window so the sun struggled through. “We’ll bring back the light.”
They buried him in the stony ground behind the church, and when it was done, walked down to the river.
“I’m glad you came,” Fallon said.
“I’ve got your back. Not just because of what you are, or because we share a bloodline. Because we’re friends.”
“You and Hannah are the first friends—girls—I’ve had. I used to wish for a sister, kept getting brothers.” She found she could smile again. “There were some girls on other farms, or in the village, but…”
“Your parents had to be careful.”
“That, yes, that, and I never made a real connection with the other girls. Too used to boys, I guess.”
She watched a dragonfly, iridescent in the sun, swoop over the river’s surface, sending out ripples. From somewhere in the trees, a woodpecker hammered madly.
The sound echoed forever in the empty.
“Then I went with Mallick. Mick was the first real friend—outside my family. Looking back, I don’t know what I’d have done without him. Always outnumbered by boys.”
“Duncan likes to bitch about being outnumbered by girls. And we did—and do—enjoy tormenting him. You know you can count on me, right? Not just in battle.”
“I do. You and Hannah. Kick Balls Hannah.”
As she shoved her hat back, Tonia laughed. “She is so digging on that status right now. How about the three of us score a bottle of wine tonight, stake out a place without boys around, and hang out?”
Fallon bent down, plucked a tiny flower, yellow as butter, from the weedy verge. Dragonflies, woodpeckers, wildflowers, she thought. There was life and beauty even in the empty.
“Oh yeah. Let’s do that.”
They took the time to scout more of the town, to add to Fallon’s maps before heading north and east.
She skirted D.C., the smoke, the circling crows.
The time was coming, she thought, when she would meet the forces there, all of them. They’d