Emmy waited until Mendez bent over the jeep's back seat with a crate of cans, and Riley crouched by the rear tire checking the strap. She had one shot. The camp where the light took everyone was less than a mile back through the ruined town, and every hour she stood here loading someone else's supplies was another hour her friends went colder in the ground or wherever the Vael had put them. She was twelve. Her hair was black and blue and stuck to her neck with sweat. Her shorts were stiff with dirt. She had been sleeping in ditches for days, alone, because she believed some of them had to have made it, and no one else was going to go look. She slid behind the fuel drum and ran. Mendez shouted her name before she cleared the first collapsed wall. She heard the jeep cough to life, tires grinding grit. Emmy dropped low and cut sideways through a gutted storefront. Riley's voice came sharp over the engine, calling for her to stop, saying it wasn't safe. Emmy kept moving. She knew the shape of these streets better than they did. She squeezed through a gap between two leaning slabs and held her breath while the jeep rolled past the mouth of the alley, slow, searching. Mendez's face was tight above the wheel. Riley scanned the rooftops with her gun braced against her shoulder. Emmy pressed flat against the concrete until the engine faded. She hated the way her chest hurt. Mendez had been kind to her. Riley had given her half a protein bar last night without making a thing of it. But they wouldn't take her back to camp. They'd said so. She ran the rest of the way with her shoes slapping loose grit. She climbed a rise she remembered and came down the other side, and there it was. The fire pit was cold. Stones still ringed it in a neat circle. Sleeping bags lay open around the ash, green and red and yellow, exactly where people had crawled out of them. A mug sat tipped on its side. No bodies. No blood. No packs taken. Everything left the way it was the second before the light came. Emmy stood at the edge of the ring and could not make herself step in. "Hello?" Her voice cracked. She tried again, louder. "It's me. It's Emmy. If anyone's here, come out." Wind moved a corner of the nearest sleeping bag. That was all. She walked to the fire pit and put her hand flat on a stone. Cold. She called again, turning a full circle. She called every name she could think of. She called until her throat scraped. No one answered. No one was here. No one had been here for a long time. Emmy sat down in the sand beside the dead fire and understood that wherever her people had gone, they had not come back, and the trail she had crossed the whole town for did not start here.

Emmy stayed in the sand until her legs stopped shaking. No one was coming. If she wanted to know where her friends went, she had to find it herself. She got up and started walking the ring of the camp, slow, looking at everything. She checked the sleeping bags first. Hers was the yellow one, still wadded the way she'd kicked out of it. The green one next to it was her bunkmate's. Empty. She crouched and pressed her hand into the fabric like something might answer. Nothing did. She moved on. The fire pit told her nothing. The mug tipped on its side had a dry brown ring at the bottom. A flashlight lay in the dirt with its lens cracked. A single shoe, not hers, sat upright near the tree line as if someone had stepped out of it. No blood. No drag marks. No packs missing. Whoever took them hadn't bothered to take anything else. She made herself remember. She had been asleep. Then the light. The bright quiet that pressed on her ears like water. She had opened her eyes and seen it pour through the gap in the back stone wall, the wide break between the two crumbling halves where the desert trees leaned in. The Vael came through that gap. Purple. Fast. Their tails moving wrong. She had grabbed the girl next to her and pulled her flat. When Emmy looked up, the girl was gone, and so was everyone else. She walked to the wall now. The gap was still there, stone piled on either side, thin trees clawing over the top. She put her hand on the warm rock. This was where they came in. So the ones who ran, ran the other way. Away from the wall. Out the south side of the camp, past the fire pit, toward the low open ground. She turned to check it and froze. On the flat stone at the base of the gap, a single track pressed into the dust. Three narrow toes. A drag line behind it from a tail. Fresh enough that the wind hadn't smoothed it. Emmy stepped back slowly. The camp was not as empty as she'd thought. One of them had come back, or was still close. She scanned the trees at the top of the wall. Nothing moved. But she could feel her own heat on her skin and remembered what Mendez had said once, quiet, when he thought she wasn't listening — that the purple ones tracked by warmth. She wiped her palms on her shorts. She had her answer. If anyone from her camp had made it, they went south. She would go south too. And she would go now, before whatever left that track in the dust came back to finish the count. She cut around the fire pit and started walking, fast, away from the wall.