We stare at the lake in silence. Thief doesn’t bother to take off her mask. I run through every curse our language offers in my head until I start to make up terms, and I don’t doubt that she does the same. Witch deteriorates at our backs, too disintegrated to make it to the lake, so his mutation devours him where he lies.

“Everything about today has been...unbelievably stupid.” I bury my face in my hands to rub my eyes and hide my laughter. Thief takes off her helmet and sets it down on the rocks, wincing when she stands, her arm still crooked. But she laughs with me as the last of the Variant disappears under the surface.

“Aha, what a mess.” She takes a deep breath. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, if you think about it though, we could let the town drink the water.”

“King, no.”

“Let Corruption spread, kill them all and sell them to be processed for self-infection.”

“No,” she laughs again.

“Why not? You said we’re broke.”

“We’re not that desperate.”

“It’d be fun.”

“Not for them.”

“Come on. You got a radio?”

She slips me an uncracked glass tablet, and when I summon the green lights they don’t waver or jump. I tell it some coordinates and wait for the sound waves to appear.

“Thief,” it says. “Did you find her?”

“It’s me, Drift,” I say.

Static answers for a moment. “Do you realize how much you’ve put me through?”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“King, I don’t even know where to begin. I thought you were dead.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Why haven’t you come home?”

“I’m about to. Listen, I need units here to evacuate the village. The lake’s been contaminated.”

“How?”

“Doesn’t matter. Get those people out of here and drain the water. Burn the town but don’t touch the bar, leave it intact.”

“Really?” Thief says.

“Really?” The radio chimes.

“Just do it,” I say. “Don’t take the tunnels, they’re too dangerous.”

Drift breathes a dramatic sigh into the receiver. “I’ll have a team ready in five.”

“Keep them safe. I’m leaving for a while, I’ve got something to take care of, but I’ll be home for a few hours to prepare.”

“Finally, you’re talking sense,” Thief says under her breath.

“Only a few hours,” I reiterate. “I’ve wasted enough time already.”

“Come see me when you get back, please, Drift says. It’s been years. I miss you so, so much.”

“I’ll think about it.” I shut off the hologram before she can say goodbye, and toss it back to Thief.

“How’s your head?” She catches the glass between her ripped leather gloves.

“It hurts but I’m fine. Your arm’s messed up.”

“Not too bad.” She tests her shoulder, which pops in and out of place as she rolls it around.

I grimace. “I wouldn’t call that fine. Do you have a bottle or container or something?”

“I have an extra canteen.”

“Are you attached to it?”

She cocks an eyebrow but decides not to ask. Seconds later she returns from her empty bike with an old leather canteen. I uncap it and dump out the hot water that still remains.

“What? Why’d you do that?” she asks. I don’t answer, too busy filling the canteen with the infected lake water. A clump of white and green sludge drifts between the rocks at the edge of the pond, against my wishes it sucks into the canteen. I turn my face away to cap the thing, careful not to get too much water on my fingers.

“What’s that for?” Thief says.

“Ah, gross.” I stumble over my shoelaces to make my way over to her, holding out the canteen so it doesn’t drip on my clothes. “I want Empress to take a look at it. Something about that Variant was...weird.”

She squints her eyes, a classic skeptical look personal to her. “Seemed normal to me.”

I click my tongue. “Whatever. Let’s get to work.”

We spend an hour cleaning up, putting bullets in the heads of hunters the Variant left behind, silencing the mutation left by the wax. The clean reservoir stinks with illness by the time we leave it, and when we ride away on stolen gasoline, Jawbone Hill settles as a graveyard behind our backs.

With all this time spent in the most brutal environments training with Eliott, I forgot how beautiful my homeland is. My thirty-day journey to Countess’ region in the swamps wasn’t any kinder than the desolate wastelands Eli and I called home for far too long. The Southern District gives me a sense of peace I didn’t know I needed.

Our region is rich in trade but not in credits, and the passing fields of crops spell out why. The road leads us through thick forests interrupted by rows of cotton, tobacco, corn, strawberries, and apple orchards. Dense trees hide oases teeming with priceless game, difficult to find in the other, more hardened districts. The other Tribes care little for credits and negotiate with bargains, so our people are never hungry as we trade our agricultural resources for things like fish from the Eastern tribes and larger game found in the plains of the North. My resources of power, however, like the coal mines of Monarch and Regent’s oil fields, Saint’s weapons and such, they require credits only. Cowards they are, asking for Martian currency to pay Titan to leave them alone; and they’re the reason why my precious agrarian district isn’t as wealthy as it should be. We’re coveted nonetheless, and I spend my days away from home defending it from all those who wish to claim it.

But can you blame them?

We pass rolling hills of forests made lush by the frequent rain, the smell of soil and petrichor forever in the air. Beyond the mountains lie fields of craters left from the war all those years ago, ghosts of a nuclear past. Every district carries them and every district wears them differently. They scatter the desert as empty crevasses, fill the coal regions as blackened voids, and span the Wastes as traps for travelers, homes to the Beasts. But here they teem with life, transformed into clear ponds enriched by the rain, foliage bursting thanks to the abundance of oxygen. A magnificent landscape left by our forefathers, the craters that once represented death and destruction now bring healing, power, resilience, life and evolution. I strive to see myself in them.

The foothills give way to the crater fields as we pursue the sunrise over the horizon. Thief let me drive due to injuries that have already healed, so I know she used it as an excuse to get some rest. She wraps her arms around my waist and falls asleep between my shoulder blades, unbothered by the engine and the winding path we have to take. Her silence is welcome though, the landscape provides all the company I need.

Yes, the landscape, with the dense forests bordering grassy plains, wetlands surrounding craters and ponds, wildlife running among them. With our villages miles and miles apart our district seems untouched, undisturbed. So when dense smoke hides the distant trees, I slam the bike to a stop.

Thief snaps awake and shouts over the engine. “What’s going on?”

“You see that?”

Smoke hovers over the tops of the trees, the scent unpleasant to no end. Rotten, putrid, and familiar.

“Someone’s just burning something,” she says. “It’s fine, King.”

“No, that’s not right. There isn’t a settlement over there.”

“Then it’s probably just people hunting Corrupted in the woods.”

“Corrupted don’t smell like that when you burn them.” I push my riding goggles through my powerful wave of hair, rubbing the indentations above my cheeks and brows. “I’m going to go check it out.”

“We don’t have--King, you told Drift that you don’t even have time to talk to her, and now you’re taking a detour?”

“That’s because I didn’t want to talk to her.”

“She’s your wife!”

I put my goggles back over my eyes and shrug.

“You need to go see her. She’s still loyal to you,” Thief persists. “Your absence hurt all of us, but to her it was devastating. You owe her an apology at the fucking least.”

“We’ll see about that.”

I rev the engine to interrupt whatever argument she has prepared for me, then barrel to the forest bordering the Crater Fields.

The ponds along the roadside turn to smears of green splotches and red clay. I push the bike to seventy, ninety, a hundred, one-twenty, until the needle on the speedometer has no more space. Dense smoke hides the greenery more and more when we reach the forest’s edge, where tree limbs heavy with vines sink over the narrow gravel path. But the foliage doesn’t last. Pine trees give way to a clearing of tall fescue and heaping mounds of kudzu, but the grass and vines turn black as we make our way through it all. Among them settle ashen tents, scorched tobacco barns, and scattered remains.

Thief doesn’t protest. She ditches the bike before I shut it off, quick to find her gun and load it with the last of her charges. I grab my bloodied pipe and lead her to the center of the camp.

“Oh my god,” Thief says.

I don’t care to chime in; the forest speaks for me instead. And it should bother me, everything about it should make my heart ache, but I only stare and clutch my weapons a little tighter.

Mangled bodies twist in unnatural shapes by shredded tents and burning supplies. Deep gashes spread over their stomachs, insides torn from devoured midsections. Light bullets decorate their foreheads, quieting their own Corruption. The stench is unbearable; I pull the top of my shirt over my nose just to keep my breakfast from coming back up.

“King,” Thief says. She crouches beside one of them, the body small and female, and puts a cloth over the head so I don’t have to see. Her tone is solemn when she speaks. “Look.”

Ash makes its way through the holes in my boots when I wade through the debris to where she sits. She takes off her leather glove and points to the hand of the corpse, which lies on blackened leaves, fingernails torn and stained with blood. A small red circle sits at the bottom of its thumb, a tattoo I know too well, since Thief and I wear the same on our own hands. It’s a brand that the lost children wear, the ones like us who have no families, our homelands destroyed by either Corruption or Titan long before we can remember. Nomadic and clandestine, we traveled the Wastes until we learned how to conquer this hostile world and take it for ourselves. Groups of children like us still wander in clans of their own, unbound to the Tribes or to the Elite, wild as the Wastes themselves. Thief and I have spent our entire lives seeking them out; not just to give them a home, but because they make excellent warriors.

My district is a sanctuary for them, it always has been. Any clans of Ghosts found here are the ones searching for me. So when Thief holds her red brand up to theirs, my heart does sink.

“They’re Ghosts.” I shudder at the mention of their name. Our name, what we used to be, before tricking a Warlord meant becoming one, before power was more important than identity or survival.

She nods.

“I don’t like the way this looks,” I say. “This doesn’t look like it was random.”

“I don’t--I mean--I don’t think this could have been planned.” Her voice shakes a little, as if she’s trying too hard to hide how much all of this bothers her. “There’s not much that we can do.”

“No. The bodies are burned, see? And they have bullets in their heads. Light bullets. Someone took care of them so they wouldn’t mutate.”

She lifts the cloth from the face of the dead girl, squeezes her eyes shut and lets it go. “Maybe someone came through.”

“If they were Ancients they would have buried them, they wouldn’t have shot them in the head and left.”

“And it’s against the Legion’s code to kill Ghosts,” she finishes for me. “I don’t know, King. It was probably just a Beast, maybe a survivor finished the rest, I mean, we never followed traditions back then.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I look through the forest for signs of an escape, for a pathway of fallen trees and lingering bits of Corrupted flesh. Our surroundings are untouched aside from the clearing. Thief does the same but if she notices, she doesn’t mention it.

“Let’s bury them and leave them alone,” she says.

I shift my feet through the ash, contemplating the bodies, how some twist as if asphyxiated despite the burns and animalistic wounds. This isn’t the first time we’ve come across a graveyard, Thief and I have been desensitized for some time. This is different though. This is wrong.

“Yes, we’ll put them to rest,” I say after some time. “But I want this area monitored.”

“Agreed. I’ll send scouts as soon as I get home”

We dig graves using shovels found in the wreckage. Twenty-seven mounds of fresh dirt replace the camp when we finish, and the sun hangs low in the sky. Hunger pains gnaw at my stomach despite the nauseating smell of the camp. Thief wavers when she stands from her last grave, both of us exhausted.

She stops at the mound of dirt that used to be the girl with the red tattoo. There she draws sun rays with her fingertips through the ash and the dirt, and she places it over the head of the grave like a halo. When she stands she smears soil over her eyes as she wipes away her tears, then dusts herself off and joins me at the edge of the camp, where I stare at the rubble of a fabric tent.

“We should go,” she says.

I shake my head, focused on the tent. “Give me your gun.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

She digs out her last two light charges and her pistol. I load the chamber and cock the hammer, then hold out my hand as a silent warning for her to stay still.

The tent twitches. Something snakes underneath the ripped tarp and broken wooden supports. My heart leaps to my throat; with eyes wide, I charge the gun and aim it at the ground.

“It’s probably a squirrel--” Thief says.

I pull the tent aside, put my finger on the trigger. The gun never fires though; I disengage the charge and put it down, entranced.

“What is that?” Thief asks.

“I don’t--I don’t know.”

A hole burrows deep into the Earth, and from it spills countless thick wires, the cables stretching far below the surface until darkness swallows them up. Each one dips into the topsoil like tree roots, disappearing under the layer of ash. They twitch ever so slightly, quivering with a light hum, like snakes stuck inside the ground.

“Why would someone run cables like this,” I say. “There’s no electricity out here.”

“Could be one of Saint’s experiments,” Thief suggests. “Or Empress’.”

“Empress doesn’t come out here. Saint...maybe. I’ll ask--” A snap in the woods interrupts me. Thief doesn’t hesitate. We both hear their heartbeat at the same time, smell their breath and sweat from meters away, feel the vibrations of their lurching footsteps through the dirt. Thief jogs into the woods, disappearing inside the thick walls of kudzu. I meander in her trail, too tired and dehydrated to run after her, so I blame it on an excess of caution.

“Hey, get over here!” she shouts. “Bring the med kit!”

“Coming.” But her instructions matter little to me. I grab my pipe and follow the imprints she left in the grass, ducking around patches of poison ivy and green stickers.

Thief crouches before a ragged small girl, about fifteen and covered in blood. Her tangled hair catches on the bark of the pine tree she leans upon, and she holds her hands around a wound in her stomach, gasping for air. No yellow boils climb her shoulders, nothing shifts beneath her pale skin, and she stares at Thief with desperate blue eyes.

A very rare color indeed.

“Pl-please.” Spit and blood ooze between her teeth as she leans into Thief, thick tears tracing lines through the dirt on her cheeks. “Pl-please. I-I...I’m s-so s-sick.”

“I know, darling.” Thief tears away the fabric of her combat suit and wads it into a ball, then presses it to the girl’s wound. “It’s okay, love. It’s alright, just breathe. Breathe and look at me, no matter what you do, don’t fall asleep. King, where’s that med kit.”

I stay where I am, rooted to the dirt, watching the way the girl curls around a wound that won’t close. Curious, she wears no burns like the others, no tattoos, no markings typical of the other Ghosts. And her features are far too fair.

“I-I’m hurting bad.” She barely chokes out the words around her sobs. “I’m s-sorry but I’m—I’m just s-so sorry.”

Thief collapses her shoulders and wrings her brows together, as if trying to hold back her own tears. She pulls the girl’s hair away from her face, where the end gets stuck in her cracked lips. “Sorry for what?”

“I’m h-hurt,” the girl replies. “A-and they’re gone.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she says. “I’m going take you to my home where we’re going to take really good care of you. Alright? You just have to hang on a little longer. Just a little.” She presses the wad of cloth into the wound a little further to stop the bleeding. The girl squeezes her eyes shut and leans her head against the bark, mouth open in a silent scream.

“King, why are you just standing there?” She glares at me.

“Because you’re a fool,” I say.

“What?” Vitriol darkens the silver in her eye. She glances down at the girl again, and her face softens as she watches her writhe. “King, help me!”

“No.” I ready her gun instead. “Let it go so I can put it out of its misery.”

“It?”

“Take a closer look,” I say as I click the light cartridge back into place. “That thing’s not real.”

“She’s a child!”

“She was,” I say. “Look again.”

Thief swallows. She reaches her hand to the back of the girl’s neck, who doesn’t fight, who keeps her mouth to the sky, since she believes the air will save her fabricated lungs. Whatever Thief finds under her hair, it defeats her. She lowers her hand and lets the girl go.

“You’re a liar,” Thief tells the girl. “You’re a spy.”

“I-I’m not,” the girl whines. “Please, please take me home. Please, please take me home.

“She isn’t.” I say absent mindedly, busy bringing the gun to full charge. “She’s still assimilated, but In her mind, she’s telling the truth.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Thief asks.

“It means Titan has gotten cruel.” I shoot the girl through her leg. Light explodes from the barrel and slices up her quadricep, piercing the dirt underneath her. She shrieks until the birds flee, until the squirrels and rabbits run from their holes and dash into the denser parts of the forest. The sound puts a fire in my chest like no other. My vision turns bright red. With teeth clenched, I storm to the girl and grab her by the front of her torn clothes, then lift her off the ground and hold her to the tree.

Why? Because it’s all a fucking act.

“You did this, didn’t you, huh?”

She hangs her head over her collar bones, spewing blood from her lips. “I-I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.”

Thief watches beside me, chest rising and falling as she struggles not to hold me back. We’ve played the Minister’s games long enough to know what’s real and what isn’t, still, the act is convincing. But Thief knows better than I do, if you help a ragged girl with wires in her neck, you’re a dead woman.

“Titan, let the girl go,” I command. “Tell me what did this. Was it you?”

“No, no it wasn’t me,” the girl cries. “It wasn’t.”

“Then who?”

She lifts a bloody hand to my face just to have something to hold onto, perhaps a feeble attempt at an attack or to push me away. Instead she smears more blood across my cheek.

“The wires,” she says, her voice faint. “The wires under the Earth.”

“Wires, what wires?”

“It-It was…Mal—”

“Mal? Who’s Mal?”

She hangs her head low, the blue irises dimming to gray, and stares at me beneath her brow.

“No,” I say. “No, stay awake!” I shake her against the tree. “Who attacked this camp, Titan?”

She points her finger at me, trembling, spitting on herself. In her final moment she drags a bloody trail of fingerprints across my face.

“Number Seven.”

Her limbs drop. Her head meets my shoulder as if struggling to find an embrace. When I set her down she sprawls across the tree roots with her blue eyes still open, and when I put a bullet in her head, I wonder if maybe she didn’t belong to Titan after all.