didn’t move, or cry out. But after a few yards, he began to slump forward. When he was prone, face pressed to his horse’s mane, I saw the glint of the blade in the back of his neck. Then, with a terrible slowness, he slid to one side. When he finally toppled from the saddle, one foot was stuck in his stirrup, so that when the horse panicked and sped away, the man was dragged along. The hoof falls were joined by an extra beat, the soldier’s skull bouncing on the iced road.
That surreal chase seemed to last forever: the horse frantic, bucking and shying, and us gaining on him only slowly. The soldier upside down, his head dragging, bouncing and for several seconds, even tangling between the horse’s back legs. When we finally drew even, the horse was crazy-eyed, its dark coat striped with sweat. Piper grabbed the reins, and the horse recoiled as if trying to shake its head free of its own neck. Its hoofs clattered on the ice as it danced on the spot.
There had been a time when I would have screamed at Piper, and asked why the soldier and his twin had needed to die. Now I said nothing. If we were captured, the Ark and Elsewhere would slip further from the grasp of the resistance. Zach and the General would win, and the tanks would be fed.
Piper jumped down and freed the soldier’s body from the stirrup. I dismounted and looped all three reins together, pinioning them with a heavy rock. We dragged the body from the road to the cover of the shallow ditch; I knelt with Piper there, helping to scoop snow over the stiffening corpse. The blood was black where it pooled beneath the man’s neck, and pink at the edges of the spreading stain.
I felt more than ever the truth of what Zach had said on the road outside New Hobart. I was poison. He was right. Even to glimpse me now, a hooded figure in the snow, meant death. My journeys in the last few months had left a map of bones laid across the land.
If I was a prophet, I foretold only death, and I fulfilled my own prophecies. Ever since the silo, I’d been struggling to recognize the Kip I knew in the person the Confessor had described. Now, for the first time, I wondered if he would recognize me.
Piper held out his hand, appraising the snow that still fell on it.
“It’ll cover the tracks, at least. It should buy us some time—more time than if he’d raised the alarm tonight. They won’t find the body before daylight, even if they realize he’s missing by then. But we have to leave the road, now.”
We led the dead man’s horse with us when we left. He was still skittish and nervy, jerking at his reins, and Piper and I were both exhausted. By midnight we reached the forest, and there we tethered the horses and Piper took the first watch as I slept for a few hours. I woke to a vision of the blast, and couldn’t reconcile the extremes—my body shaking with cold and my mind shimmering with flames.
Piper was watching me, but in the slightly distracted way that I’d grown used to in these last few days, since Zoe had left. He seemed a long way away—always scanning the distance beyond the horizon of my face.
He’d never accused me of driving Zoe away. He didn’t need to. I saw myself through her eyes, now. I was both in my body and aware of it. Aware of how I shook when a vision came. How when I dreamed of the tanks, I woke with my mouth wide, greedy for air, as if I’d just surfaced from the tank’s cloying liquid. I heard, as if for the first time, the noises I made when I had a vision of the blast. The strangled screams that never expected to be heard, because there was nobody left to hear, and no world left to hear in.
“Where do you think Zoe’s gone?” I said to him.
“There’s a place out east, where she used to think of building somewhere for her and Lucia. It’s harsh country, right on the edge of the deadlands, but it’s a long way away from all of this.” He didn’t have to explain what he meant.
Once, I would have argued with him, said that I didn’t think Zoe would give up on the resistance. But after