Page 77

“A few days later, the Wards were arrested, and the Delegation took Grace from them.”

Alexander was quiet for the whole story, just sitting there next to her.

“You didn’t know,” he says, his voice creaking.

She replies, “I knew enough.”

She’s never been to church—there were no DesCoin rewards or penalties for religious practice, the Delegation said, and there’s no church in the Aperture—but she imagines this is what it feels like. Seated, wishing you were someone else. Wishing you could walk backward through time.

He puts an arm around her, and she pushes him away and gets to her feet.

“I knew enough,” she repeats, firm this time. “Come on. I owe her the truth.”

They see the smoke from the house’s chimney before they see the house itself. It stretches toward the sky in a single gray column, the mountain veiled in mist behind it.

The tire tracks come next. They’re deep grooves, curving around a path that Sonya didn’t recognize as a path until she saw them. Plants have sprung up in the depressions, suggesting that whoever drove here hasn’t done so in a long time.

Then—the dark shape of a building through the trees. Their pace slows as they approach it. It’s a cabin, though that word is too small for its size. Its front door is painted blue. There’s a garden in front that reminds her, with a twinge of pain, of the seedlings growing in the greenhouse on Building 4’s roof. It’s caged in chicken wire, presumably to keep wild animals from eating the leaves.

Alexander stops her when they’re still far enough away from the house not to be overheard.

“What if they attack us, whoever they are?” he says.

She looks up at him.

“Have you really come all this way without thinking about how the people holding Grace Ward might be dangerous?” she says.

“Well,” he says. “Yes, actually.”

She smiles, and takes off the backpack. Zipped into the side pocket is the knife she took from Alexander’s kitchen. The knife she killed the man with. It’s clean now, washed in a stream. About the length of her palm, with a plastic handle. She turns it so the blade is up against her arm, hidden by her sleeve, and touches Alexander’s arm.

“I look harmless, so I’ll go in alone,” she says. “I’ll signal you when it’s safe.”

She moves toward the house, ignoring his hissed objections. He won’t risk her safety by coming after her now. She’s in the open, in view of the blue door. She limps a little, playing up the soreness in her legs to appear even less threatening. She’s a few feet from the bottom of the steps when the blue door opens and a woman steps out. She’s holding something familiar.

A gun, she thinks, held up to the woman’s eye, her hands wrapped around the body of it. Bigger than the one the man from the Army brought to kill Sonya and Alexander, with a long wooden handle. For a moment it’s all Sonya can see, and then the woman herself—tall and gray-haired, wearing a sweater the color of oatmeal and a pair of blue jeans. There’s a pencil tucked behind her ear.

“Who the hell are you?” the woman says to her. Her voice is like ice water.

“I just need some help,” Sonya says. “I don’t mean any harm.”

“That why you’re holding a knife?”

The woman nods to Sonya’s right hand. Sonya reaches out to the side and lets the knife slip from her grasp. It tumbles into the leaves at her feet. She turns her hands so her palms are facing the woman.

“Just didn’t want to be caught in a bad situation,” Sonya says.

“Guess that plan backfired, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Don’t think you really answered my ‘who are you’ question,” the woman says. “Though I guess the Insight kind of narrows down the options.”

Sonya knows what guns do—that they shorten the distance between people. She can’t turn and run now. The Insight’s bright halo feels strange here, nestled in all these trees. Only moonlight shines like this, out here.

The woman lowers the gun a few inches. Her eyes are dark and creased at the corners. Her mouth is drawn and puckered. There’s something familiar about her.

“You come from the Aperture,” the woman says.