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I stared at her in total surprise. Kimmy obviously felt the same, but she brushed past it quickly, giving her a sweet look that even I felt. “Thanks, Ash.”

She took Asha’s hand and they went to the centre of the crowd where Claire was, the three of them dancing together to a bouncy jig.

I tapped my foot to the music, watching them dance and laugh together.

It was a nice image. I liked seeing Kimmy happy; she’d been a bit mopey lately with Asha gone so much.

A large group passed in front of me to join the dancing crowd, and as they meshed with the others, I lost sight of my family.

A minute later, Claire and Kimmy were still there, but Asha was gone.

They didn’t seem to have noticed because the crowd now took up most of the street.

I looked around, trying to spot her, but it was hard to see past the mass of bodies.

After a minute or two, I weaved towards Kimmy to tap her on the shoulder.

“Where’s Asha?” I said loudly.

Alarm flashed across her face. “I don’t know.”

At that exact moment, she was violently bumped by a guy obviously having too much fun, since he reeked of booze. I steered her out of his way, annoyed.

“Stay with Claire.” I squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll look for her.”

She nodded, frowning. Claire looked to me, concerned, but I gave her a look that said later, and she nodded. It was easier for me, being at least twice their size, to push my way through the crowd towards the opposite side of the street. When I got there, though, I still didn’t see Asha anywhere .

I marched down the street. Vendors shouted out their wares as I passed, but still no Asha. The festival only stretched to the end of the Post’s main strip. Beyond that area, there were only a few people outside, all residents. I frowned.

Where the hell could she have gone? Maybe she’d slipped out the opposite side of the crowd and gone back towards the stables? I didn’t know why she’d do that, but she definitely wasn’t here.

As I started to go back, there was movement at the corner of my eye.

I turned to see Zach Jameson, of all people, walking quickly from a nearby alley—almost running.

Just seeing the guy again after what he’d done made my blood boil, but curiosity got the better of me.

I ducked behind one of the nearby buildings to watch him.

He headed toward the woods, in a real hurry for a guy on his own. My instincts told me to follow him. I’d stay out of sight, and if it turned out to be nothing, no harm done. Otherwise…it was my job to investigate suspicious shit, and this fit the bill.

I resolved to pass the search for Asha onto Kimmy, then track Zach. But just as I was about to leave, a beautiful figure greeted him at the treeline. I could barely make out the woman from this distance, but she had long black hair and flawless brown skin.

Asha.

She grabbed Zach’s hand in an annoyed sort of way—a move that made me frown—and they disappeared into the trees together.

My gut screamed that something was wrong. Why would Asha be talking to this fucking creep? Holding his hand? Going into the woods with him alone?

I gave them a head start to make sure they wouldn’t see me, then followed out of the Post and into the forest. Moving silently, I took my rifle into my arms and followed their voices, though I couldn’t make out what they said.

They walked for a good ten minutes before stopping in a small clearing beside a big hollow tree. The brush was thick here, with long grass that gave me a good hiding spot to listen without being found. I crouched in the grass and listened hard.

“…utterly fucking botched this,” Asha was saying furiously. “You had one fucking job, Zach. And you couldn’t even do that right!”

“It was your stupid idea in the first place. I told you that your little stunts wouldn’t be enough to scare that bitch off. She’ll never hop off Madigan’s dick long enough to leave. I don’t know why you care so much; we don’t need her.”

My breath caught.

“C’mon, sugar,” he said in a way that made me want to barf. “You already said that sweet compound of yours will trade us for what we already got. Even a Wastelander like me can live the high life.”

Asha laughed bitterly, chilling my blood.

“If you can manage not to fuck that up, too. No second thoughts, no mistakes. If you do this, everyone you know is dead. They will go to the Valley, and they will take everything, kill everyone. You get what that means? Because I do. I lost everyone, and if you’re not prepared to face that, I’m gonna leave you here. ”

I tracked their movements, listening carefully to figure out their positions.

Zach scoffed. “The fuck do I care about who’s left there? I just wish I was there to see them kill McNeil and Madigan.”

I’d heard enough.

In one quick motion, I stood, aimed, and fired. Zach Jameson’s head snapped back, spraying blood on the grass, a bullet through his brain. Asha screamed and jumped back, but she didn’t have time to recover. I walked towards her, rifle trained on her, and she gave me a look of genuine fear. Good.

“Drop your gun,” I said, nodding towards Zach bleeding out on the ground. “Now explain to me why I shouldn’t do the same to you.”

Asha backed up a step, but I came closer, until the barrel of my rifle was inches from her chest. She reluctantly unclipped her pistol and tossed it on the grass.

“He threatened me,” she said in her best impression of damsel-in-distress, only she wasn’t a very good actress anymore. Not with a gun in her face. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Cut the bullshit,” I said. “Explain. Or I’ll kill you, too.”

“You wouldn’t,” Asha replied, in an entirely different voice—full of the venom I was used to from her. “Claire and Kimmy would hate you.”

“If they’d heard what I just did? Doubtful. But sure, test me.”

She stared at me, and whatever she saw in my face obviously convinced her, because she sighed like she was resigned. Somehow, that only pissed me off more .

“Was selling us out your plan all along?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Lying to Claire? Playing with my sister’s heart? That all part of it?”

Asha huffed. “No. I didn’t believe Claire when she told me about the Valley. I assumed you were lying to her—dangling a carrot. She’s always been such a doe-eyed innocent that I knew she’d fall for that kind of thing from the first guy to sweet-talk her a little.”

“Do they know about the Valley?” I gritted out, giving her a sharp jab with the rifle. “The people you were going to sell us to.”

“They never responded to my radio calls,” Asha replied bitterly, and I relaxed a little.

“Radio calls?”

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s a compound a few hundred kilometres from here. The Delta. I tried calling them. I intended to trade the information about the Valley to them in exchange for residency.”

I frowned. “Why would they care?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know that there’s nobody else in the Wasteland like you guys. Sure, you live like a bunch of hick farmers, but you think they want you to have electricity? Technology? That’s not the kind of thing Wastelanders can be trusted with. So, they’d take it.”

She gave a grim smile. “Also, I think they’d have been very interested to know that the PNCs you have were acquired less than honourably, from another compound. I’d say they’d see them as stolen property, and not something Wastelanders should have.”

“But they were from another compound,” I said, carefully controlling my voice, “so why would it matter?”

Asha gave me that familiar look that said she thought I was dumb as a box of rocks.

“They’re connected,” she said slowly, as if speaking to a very stupid child. “All the compounds are. They’re all owned by the same people.”

I stared at her. “Which is…who?”

She shrugged. “Nobody really knows except at the highest levels. Very hush-hush.”

“Why wouldn’t Claire have told me?” I said, half to myself.

“She doesn’t know,” Asha replied. “Few do. My mother was an ambassador to the other compounds, though she kept her work secret. I only learned about it when I went back to the Cave. When I visited my childhood home, there was plenty there. It made sense in retrospect; she told me shortly before the attack that she feared something bad was happening…and she was right.”

“The Order,” I said, and she nodded before I remembered the detail that had bothered me. “You said you used a radio. How…?”

She just stared at me. And reality hit me like a bucket of cold water.

“You attacked Danny that night and took his radio.”

“Zach did,” Asha replied. “I told him we needed a working radio, and he knew where to get one.”

“You couldn’t call from inside the Valley, though. The reception to the outside is shit.”

Asha shrugged again. “Why do you think I’ve spent so much time on scav missions? The Post was the only place I could get a decent signal. Anywhere north of that is too remote.”

I thought about what Zach had said. “He did all that just to live in that stupid compound with you?”

To my surprise, Asha laughed with real humour.

“You met the guy, right?” she said, nodding towards his corpse a few feet away.

“He was an arrogant piece of shit looking to get his dick wet, just like every Wastelander I ever met. Manipulating him was too fucking easy. He believed everything I told him after a few blowjobs. Thought we’d run away to the compound together, that I was as in love with him as he was with himself. Fucking idiot.”

She spat in the direction of his body, and I winced. Fuck her for making me feel kind of sorry for that scumbag, even for half a second.

“If you hadn’t killed him, I would’ve,” she continued.

My stomach was in knots. This woman had lived in my house. She’d dated my sister. Met everyone I cared about. I may not have liked her, but I never thought that she’d be this…cold. Calculated. Brutal.

Asha shrugged, oblivious to my disgust. “I wanted Claire to come with me. I thought if she saw the truth—that the Valley was no better than anywhere else in the Wasteland—she’d come around. But you brainwashed her.”

I would’ve laughed at the irony there, but I was busy coming to another horrible realization. The woodshed burning down. The bloody message on the classroom wall.

“Fucking hell,” I muttered, mopping my face with my hand. “You terrorized her? For months? And all so you could go back to living in a fantasy world?”

Asha huffed. “I wouldn’t expect a Wastelander to grasp what it’s like to go from being chosen to live the elevated life we had in the Cave…to this. Before I lived in the Wasteland, I was skeptical. After, I knew they’d told us that the ‘people’ who lived out here were lesser because it was true.”

“Even Kimmy?” I asked. “Because she welcomed you when nobody else would’ve.”

Asha bowed her head, surprising me. “Kimmy’s…different.”

“But not enough to not completely fuck her over, I guess,” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice.

“In the Wasteland, sacrifices have to be made,” Asha replied coldly. “Don’t condescend to me about morality when you’d do exactly the same to save your precious Valley if it came down to it.”

“Not gonna dignify that with all the ways you’re wrong.”

I didn’t know what to do now. I knew what I should do: kill her the same way I had Zach.

Leaving her alive was too much of a risk.

But she’d wormed her way into the hearts of my sister and my fiancée, and I wondered if they’d ever forgive me.

I could tell them that she was a massive traitor that’d been plotting against us for months, but hearing it second-hand left room for doubt.

I made up my mind. “You’re coming back with me. You’re going to tell your story to the council. I’ll let them decide what to do with you.”

I didn’t say that they’d put her in front of a firing squad, but she seemed to know, because she tensed and shot me a look of pure hatred.

“Move,” I said, nudging her with the barrel of my rifle. “Back toward The Post.”

Asha gritted her teeth and started walking. We’d only been walking for a couple minutes, though, when I stopped again.

A column of thick, black smoke rose above the trees, back the way I came. That was when the screams started, followed by the sound of an amplified man’s voice. I couldn’t make out words, but my blood ran cold.

“What the hell did you do?” I demanded.

“Nothing!” she replied, her tone fearful. “Except…I only ever got one reply to my radio calls. But it wasn’t the Delta.”

“Christ,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. “And what, you just invited the Order? Have you lost your goddam mind? ”

“No!” she cried. It was the first time I’d heard Asha sound genuinely rattled. “I didn’t tell them anything. I didn’t think…I didn’t know they could track the signal.”

“Idiot,” I answered sharply. “Get on the ground.”

She whipped around, slashing upward with a tiny blade. I leapt back and avoided the worst of it but gasped at the slice of pain across my chest. Asha started running. Fuck.

Panting, I turned and shot from the hip. She’d made it to a sea of tall grass nearby, but she jerked as the bullet blew through her shoulder. She collapsed.

I automatically touched the thin cut across my chest. I was bleeding, but not badly. Claire , my thoughts screamed at me. I had to find her before they did.

I sprinted towards the smoke.