“Don’t get too comfortable,” Simon said to Piper, when he found the three of us surveying the camp. Zoe snorted, looking out over the island of mud and reeds with its few straggling trees. “I’m sending you and Zoe to watch the town from the south,” Simon went on. “I’ve already sent Violet and two of her scouts to watch the northern perimeter. I want troop numbers, and whatever details you can get about the Council’s defenses. Patrol procedures and routes, and anything else you can gather.”
“Cass is coming with us,” said Piper.
“It’s not a holiday,” said Simon. “I’m sending you and Zoe because you’re the best for the task. Cass is safer in the camp.”
“She goes where I go,” said Piper.
I registered Zoe’s eye roll.
“I know New Hobart,” I said. “I’ve traveled the plains and the forest more recently than any of you.”
“The forest?” said Zoe. “You mean what’s left of it, since you and Kip burned it down.”
I ignored her. “You know I’m better than anyone at finding places, sensing things. I’m going with them.”
Simon looked from me to Piper, and back again. “Fine,” he said. “But watch her.” He turned away. It wasn’t clear whether he was telling them to protect me, or to spy on me.
Either way I was grateful to be leaving. The hostility of the troops had been slightly blunted, less out of trust than familiarity, and the daily exchanges that were unavoidable when camping and traveling together. They spoke to me civilly enough when they needed to ask me to pass a water flask, or to pick the safest route through a patch of swamp. But most of the time they avoided me, and their stares followed me around the camp. I suspected that Simon had noticed it, too, and figured that it would improve morale for the three of us to be away from the camp.
We left Sally and Xander with the troops in the swamp. I would never admit it to the others, but I was as relieved to be away from Xander as I was to be away from the quiet hostility of the troops. Since Xander’s words about The Rosalind’s return, he’d hardly spoken. But each time his hands twitched, or he spat out half words, I became more aware of the restlessness of my own hands, and of the visions of flame that jostled one another in my crowded mind.
It took hours to negotiate the marshland before Piper, Zoe, and I could draw close to New Hobart. When the marshes receded, we were in the forest—or what remained of it. It had been late summer when Kip and I set the place alight; now it was a wasteland of scorched stumps, whittled by flame. The smaller trees were gone altogether and only the trunks of the larger trees were left. I touched one and my hand came away black.
Before the fire, we might have needed a lamp to make our way at night, but in the ruins that Kip and I had made, the moon lit the way through the spindles of tree trunks, their sharpened tips accusing the sky.
Had the whole world looked like this, after the blast? Worse, probably—no trunks would have remained, however charred. Was there a forest—anywhere—that had been spared the flames of the blast? The world had been swept of its growing and living things. I thought of the total bleakness of the deadlands, where nothing grew, even after centuries, and I wondered whether Elsewhere would be any different.
Closer to New Hobart, there were sections of forest that had not burned. Here, with the lights of the town visible just a few miles to the north, we made camp for the night. Piper took the first shift, but I looked toward the town too as I lay down to sleep. It was strange to lie there, seeing the lights on the hill and knowing that Elsa, Nina, and the children were so close. After what I’d foreseen, I couldn’t think of them without feeling my heart leap like a startled toad in my chest. Every night, now, in my dreams, Elsa floated in a tank, her mouth slack around the tube that penetrated it. I dreamed, too, of the children crammed together in a larger tank, a tangle of bodies. I could make out some of their faces: Alex, who used to laugh himself breathless when Kip tickled his stomach. Louisa, who followed me everywhere, and who had once