Peter, watching from five meters away, felt a prickling sensation along his skin. Something clenched inside him. All eyes. “Hightop-”

The panel flew open, sending Caleb tumbling backward. A figure unfolded from inside the tube.

Jude.

Everyone reached for a weapon. Jude stumbled toward them, lifting a pistol. Half his face had been blasted away, revealing a broad smear of exposed meat and glistening bone; one of his eyes was gone, a dark hole. He seemed, in that elongated moment, a being of pure impossibility, half dead and half alive.

“You fucking people!” Jude snarled.

He fired just as Caleb, reaching for the pistol, stepped in front of him. The bullet caught the boy in the chest, spinning him around. In the same instant, Peter and Hollis found the triggers of their weapons, lighting up Jude’s body in a crazy dance.

They emptied both their guns before he toppled.

Caleb was lying face-up on the dirt, one hand clutched at the place where the bullet had entered. His chest rose and fell in shallow jerks. Alicia threw herself onto the ground beside him.

“Caleb!”

Blood was running through the boy’s fingers. His eyes, pointed at the empty sky, were very moist. “Oh shit,” he said, blinking.

“Sara, do something!”

Death had begun to ease across the boy’s face. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.” Then something seemed to catch in his chest and he was still.

Sara was crying, everyone was crying. She got on the ground beside Alicia and touched her elbow. “He’s dead, Lish.”

Alicia shrugged her violently away. “Don’t say that!” She pulled the boy’s limp form to her chest. “Caleb, you listen to me! You open your eyes! You open your eyes right now!”

Peter crouched beside her.

“I promised him,” Alicia pleaded, hugging Caleb close. “I promised him.”

“I know you did.” It was all he could think to say. “We all know it. It’s all right. Let go now.”

Peter gently freed the body from her arms. Caleb’s eyes were closed, his body motionless where it lay in the dust. He was still wearing the yellow sneakers-one of the laces had come untied-but the boy he was, was nowhere. Caleb was gone. For a long moment, nobody said anything. The only sounds were the birds and the wind in the tips of the grass and Alicia’s damp, half-choked breathing.

Then, in a sudden burst, Alicia shot to her feet, snatched Jude’s pistol from the ground, and strode to where Olson was sitting on the dirt. A furious look was in her eyes. The gun was huge, a long-barreled revolver. As Olson looked up, squinting at the dark form looming over him, she reared back and struck him across the face with the butt of the gun, knocking him flat to the ground, cocked the hammer with her thumb, and aimed the barrel at his head.

“Goddamn you!”

“Lish-” Peter stepped toward her, his hands raised. “He didn’t kill Caleb. Put the gun down.”

“We saw Jude die! We all saw it!”

A trickle of blood was running from Olson’s nose. He made no motion to defend himself or move away. “He was familiar.”

“Familiar? What does that mean? I’m sick of your double-talk. Speak English, goddamnit!”

Olson swallowed, licking the blood from his lips. “It means… you can be one of them without being one of them.”

Alicia’s knuckles were white where she clutched the butt of the revolver. Peter knew she was going to fire. There seemed no stopping this; it was simply what was going to happen.

“Go ahead and shoot if you want.” Olson’s face was impassive; his life meant nothing to him. “It doesn’t matter. Babcock will come. You’ll see.”

The barrel had begun to waver, driven by the current of Alicia’s rage. “Caleb mattered! He was worth more than your whole fucking Haven! He never had anyone! I stood for him! I stood for him!”

Alicia howled, a deep animal sound of pain, and then she pulled the trigger-but no shot came. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. “Fuck!” She squeezed again and again; the gun was empty. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Then she turned to Peter, the useless pistol dropping from her hand, leaned into his chest, and sobbed.

In the morning, Olson was gone. Tracks led away into the culvert; Peter didn’t have to look to know which way he was headed.

“Should we go look for him?” Sara asked.

They were standing by the empty train, assembling the last of their gear.

Peter shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any point.”

They gathered around the place where they had buried Caleb, in the shade of a cottonwood. They’d marked the spot with a scrap of metal Michael had popped from the hull and etched with the tip of a screwdriver, then affixed to the trunk of the tree with sheet-metal screws.

CALEB JONES

HIGHTOP

ONE OF US

Everyone was there except Amy, who was standing apart, in the tall grass. Beside Peter were Maus and Theo. Mausami was leaning on a crutch Michael had fashioned from a length of pipe; Sara had examined her wound and said she could travel, as long as they didn’t push it. Theo had slept straight through the night, awakening at dawn, and now seemed if not better, then at least on the mend. Yet, standing beside him, Peter could feel something missing in his brother; something had changed, or broken, or been taken away. Something had been stolen from him, in that cell. In the dream. With Babcock.

But it was Alicia who worried him most of all. She was standing at the foot of the grave with Michael, a shotgun cradled across her chest, her face still swollen from crying. For a long time, the rest of the day and all that night, she had said almost nothing. Anyone else might have supposed she was simply grieving for Caleb, but Peter knew differently. She had loved the boy, and that was a part of it. They all had, and Caleb’s absence felt not just strange but wrong, as if a piece of them had been cut away. But what Peter saw now, as he looked into Alicia’s eyes, was a deeper kind of pain. It was not her fault that Caleb was dead, and Peter had told her so. Still, she believed she had failed him. Killing Olson would not have solved anything, though Peter couldn’t help but think it might have helped. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t tried harder-tried at all, really-to take Jude’s gun away from her.

Peter realized he was waiting out of habit for his brother to speak, to issue the command that would set the day in motion. When he didn’t, Peter hitched up his pack and spoke.

“Well,” he said, his throat thick, “we should probably get going. Use the daylight.”

“Forty million smokes out there,” Michael said glumly. “What chance do we have on foot?”

Amy stepped into the circle then.

“He’s wrong,” she said.

For a moment no one spoke. None of them seemed to know where to look-at Amy, at one another-a flurry of startled and amazed glances passing around the circle.

“She can talk?” Alicia said.

Peter stepped gingerly toward her. Amy’s face seemed different to him, now that he had heard her voice. It was as if she were suddenly present, fully among them.

“What did you say?”

“Michael is wrong,” the girl stated. Her voice was neither a woman’s nor a child’s but something in between. She spoke flatly, without intonation, as if she were reading the words from a book. “There aren’t forty million.”

Peter wanted to laugh or cry, he didn’t know which. After everything, for her to speak now!

“Amy, why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I am sorry. I think I had forgotten how.” She was frowning inwardly, as if puzzling over this thought. “But now I have remembered.”

Everyone fell silent again, gaping at her in astonishment.

“So, if there aren’t forty million,” Michael ventured, “how many are there?”

She lifted her eyes to them all.

“Twelve,” said Amy.