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.

By afternoon the road bent into a town that pretended to be older than it was. Emmy knew the trick. Her dad had taken her to a place like this when she was little, with painted saloons and hitching posts and a candy store that sold rock sugar. This one had been chewed up. Windows blown. Porches sagging. A hotel sign leaned over the street on one hinge. She kept to the shade under the boardwalks and walked with her back close to the wood. She stopped when she heard the clicking. It came from around the next building, low and steady, the sound their tails made on hard ground. She dropped to her knees behind a broken brick wall and looked through a gap. Across the dust street sat an old ice cream shop with a painted cone sign mounted on a rock out front. The word Scoops was still readable. The windows on the shop were smashed out. On the flat roof above the balcony, two people crouched behind the sign. One was a bald man in a black vest, tattoos down both arms. He held something that looked like a small satellite dish, blue lights running along its rim. The other was a woman in a red bandana, and Emmy's breath caught. Bethany. From the camp. Alive. Emmy pressed her hand flat to the brick to stop it shaking. Bethany had braided her hair one night by the fire. Bethany had made it out. Below the roof, six Vael stood in the street. Purple. Tails twitching. Close enough to climb the porch posts in one jump. But they weren't climbing. They stood in a loose ring around the shop, heads tilting, antennas bending toward the roof like they couldn't quite find it. One took a step forward, then back, confused. Emmy stared at the device in the man's hands. The blue lights pulsed slow. Every time they pulsed, the nearest Vael flinched. It was hiding them. Not their bodies, but their heat, or whatever the Vael used to see. She had to reach that roof. If she ran the open street the Vael would have her before she made the porch. She looked along the brick wall. It ran almost to the side of the shop. If she crawled it, she could get to the alley and climb the back. She moved. Elbows, knees, low as the bricks. Halfway along, her shoe scraped a loose piece and it clicked against stone. One Vael's head snapped toward the sound. Emmy froze. The blue lights on the roof pulsed harder. The Vael shuddered and turned back to the shop, drawn to the stronger signal. Emmy let out her breath and kept crawling. She reached the alley. She was going to get to Bethany. She was going to find out what happened to the rest.

Emmy crouched in the alley behind the ice cream shop and looked up. The roof was too high to reach from here without noise. The porch posts creaked when the wind touched them. If she climbed, the Vael would hear. If she waited, Bethany and the bald man with the blue device would run out of luck. The device could hide their heat, but it couldn't hide forever. She had to move the Vael away from the shop. She looked back down the alley. Across a stretch of open dust sat a collapsed building, a pile of split beams and warped planks leaning on itself. Dry as bone. She checked her pocket. The plastic lighter she had taken from the camp was still there. She had almost thrown it out twice. She crawled the long way, keeping low behind a broken wall. The Vael stayed grouped around the shop, tails clicking, heads tilting at the roof. None turned. She reached the wood pile and pressed herself against the back of it, out of their line of sight. Her hands shook. She thumbed the lighter. Once. Twice. It caught. She held the flame under a curl of dry plank until the wood took. The fire ran up fast, faster than she expected. Smoke climbed. She scrambled back along the wall before the flames showed above the pile. The first Vael in the street snapped its head around. Its antenna bent toward the smoke. It chittered, sharp, and the other five turned as one. Then they ran. Not toward her, toward the fire, tails whipping the dust behind them. All six. Emmy waited until the last purple back disappeared behind the ruined building. She stepped into the open and waved her arms above her head, small and quick, at the roof. Bethany saw her first. Her mouth opened. She grabbed the bald man's shoulder and pointed. He looked down, saw Emmy, and gave one hard nod. They came off the roof by a back ladder Emmy hadn't seen from the street. Bethany dropped the last four feet and ran straight to her. She caught Emmy in both arms and held her hard against the red bandana. "You're alive," Bethany said. "Baby, you're alive." The bald man kept the blue device in front of him. "Julius," he said, not looking at her. "We go now. That fire buys us minutes, not more." Emmy pulled back from Bethany. "The others. From camp." "Later," Julius said. "Move." They ran together down the alley, away from the smoke and the clicking, out past the last leaning porch and into the open scrub beyond the town. Emmy looked back once. Black smoke climbed above the roofs. No Vael followed. She had Bethany. She had someone who had been there. Whatever Bethany knew, Emmy was going to hear it as soon as they stopped running.

They ran until the town was a smear behind them and the scrub opened into low dune country. Julius kept the blue device tucked against his chest. Bethany held Emmy's hand so tight it hurt. Emmy did not let go. "Slow," Julius said. "Walk now. Running spikes your heat." He dialed something on the device. The blue light dimmed. "Cache is close. We move to it, we sit, we plan." Emmy studied him. She had only known his name for an hour. He was big through the shoulders, bald, tattoos crawling down both arms. He kept scanning the ridge while he talked. He had not looked her in the eye once. That was fine. He had kept Bethany alive. "Emmy," Bethany said. Her voice cracked. "This is Julius. He found me the day after. I was under a car and he pulled me out." "The camp," Emmy said. "Bethany. The camp." Bethany's mouth worked before the words came. "They came in through the wall. The light, and then the quiet. I saw them take Marcy. I saw them take the twins. Most of them, baby. Most of them didn't run fast enough. I ran. I hid in a drain until morning." Emmy kept walking. She had known. Hearing it was different. "Thomas," she said. "My dad. He got out. He's at a place with walls. Real walls. People with guns." Bethany stopped. "He's alive?" "He's alive." Bethany pressed a hand over her mouth and kept walking. Julius led them off the track toward a broken building sunk in rubble. Half a wall stood. The rest was a pile of stone and brick baked pale by the sun. He crouched at the base of the standing wall and pulled loose stones aside until a green ammo can showed. "Two rifles," he said, lifting them out. "Ammunition. Water. Ration bars. A second panel like this one, half charge." He handed a bottle to Emmy first. She drank. It was warm and it was the best thing she had tasted in a week. "Where were you going?" she asked. "Before them." Julius sat back on his heels. "North. Mountains. I heard a man up there can't be seen by the Vael at all. Not masked. Shielded. If it's true, we find him, we learn how." He looked at Bethany. "That was the plan. Then the six cornered us on the roof." "He's real?" Emmy asked. "Rumor is real. Man, I don't know yet." Emmy set the bottle down. Thomas was behind walls. Her camp was gone, most of it. But a man in the mountains could not be seen. If that was true, he could go anywhere. He could go where the Vael kept the ones they took. "I'm coming with you," she said. Julius finally looked at her. He nodded once, the same hard nod he had given from the roof. "Then we move at dusk," he said.