When I reached the forest, I got caught up in my tracks again. In patches, the trees were still rusty. But many were now sparkling in the dusk.

I watched the women working at the leaves and branches, scraping with wire and steel wool, just as I’d said. Alpha hooted and whooped at the sight of me.

“You like it?” she called, her whole body coated in sweat. And the forest looked great, but I tell you, that girl looked even better. She strutted and shook on the scaffold, her body like a smokeless fire. Her skin slippery and gold.

A pirate with green hair said something to Alpha that made all the women bust out laughing, and they kept staring at me as I pretended to be busy, checking their work. My face burned up red as they watched me. And that just made them laugh even more.

Ahead of me, Jawbone dropped from the scaffold where she’d been working at Hina’s thigh.

“Hell of a job,” I told her as she came toward me.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “You, too.”

That night, I got all the rebar curved how I wanted and then welded it together just right. Way I did it, the hair was shorter than Hina wore it, but it’d work better that way, putting the focus more on her face.

I worked with Alpha beside me. She was good with the blowtorch, and the sparks shone in her eyes as the soot stained our skin. We welded till the sun was too high and then rolled back into the city, swelled by that good kind of tired when your body’s been worked to the bone.

“So you build a statue,” Alpha said, as I knelt to drink from a rusty pipe. “And then you never see it again.”

I splashed the dirty water on my face, the back of my neck. It was still early and the streets were empty.

“Me seeing them ain’t what’s important,” I said. “Just so long as somebody can.”

“And you make enough to keep drifting, one place to the next?”

“Better than robbing folk blind and hauling them off the forty.”

Alpha knelt beside me, cupped her hands under the pipe. “It’s called surviving, bud.”

“Gotta believe in more than that.”

She rubbed water over her arms, smeared the soot off her legs. “Like what?”

“Like what you leave behind.” I pointed back toward the forest. “The statues, they’re like stories. They keep things from getting forgot.”

“You believe what the Rastas say? That there’s still a place where real things grow?”

“I don’t know. They say it’s over the ocean. And I’ve seen the Surge.” I nearly felt bad for lying to her. For not telling her there were trees growing someplace. Trees people were fighting to find.

“So you like statues and stories,” Alpha said, making to stand. “What about old world songs?”

“Never had much in the way of music. Though I guess I never had many stories, either.”

“That’s what you get for just drifting.” She grinned. “Come on. You better stick with me.”

I scrambled up, and we started along a broken path. And as I followed behind her, I felt like I was being tugged toward something. Like how the needle on a compass points north.

In a far corner of the city, we reached a crooked stone building, and the dirty flag raised above it showed a falling yellow sun. Alpha banged at the door, then pushed it open, leading me inside.

“Captain?” she hollered into the silence. “You here?”

There was no answer. We were alone, out of the sunlight.

And we were surrounded by hundreds of books.

I stared around at the walls, the shelves full of pages and dust. All that paper. All those words.

A plastic desk sat in the middle of the room, and in the corner there was an old bathtub full of CDs. Piles of books had been stacked like towers across the floor. It was beautiful. Cluttered and sealed off from the world. My old man would have loved it.

“Where’d you get these?” I said, rushing to the shelves and running my hands along the soft covers, the cardboard spines.

“They were passed down to Jawbone,” Alpha said. “Along with the right to read ’em. I’m not even supposed to come in here. But she’s a good one, the Captain. Reads to us all the time.”

“Yeah?” I grabbed a book and started thumbing at the pages. “You heard Lewis and Clark?”

“Don’t think so.” Alpha stared at the book in my hands. “You can read?”

“My dad used to.”

“Where’s he at now?”

I stayed quiet. I felt sort of pissed for bringing it up at all. It was none of this girl’s business. And even if the books had blown me away, wasn’t this just a waste of my time?

“Said you were heading to Vega,” she said.

“I am.” I slammed the book back on the shelf. “Once I get the hell out of here.”

“Don’t worry, bud. I’ll help you finish it. Soon as the sun goes down.” She came over and straightened up the shelf beside me.

“You could let me run now. If you wanted. You could show me which way to go.”

“What’s the rush? You got a girl waiting?” She said it half like she was joking.

“Ain’t got no girl, damn it. It’s my old man. He’s in all kinds of trouble.”

“Then I tell you what, you finish the statue like the Captain wants, and I’ll drive you back to the forty. First chance we get.”

“You would?”

“Sure.” Alpha leaned against the shelves and studied me. “Most folk are just busy trying to keep alive. Seems like you’re different, bud.”

“Thought you were just about survival.”

“I thought you said there’s something more.”

It was like she wanted to believe it. Or she wanted to believe in me, maybe. I picked up a book and glared at the cover, my brain all jumbled and fried.

“I know how it feels,” Alpha said, her voice soft. “My mom raised me here and left me here and I used to wish for a whole lot different.”

“And now what?”

“I quit wishing, that’s all. There’s folk who think the pirates are gonna come back together. Bring down the Purple Hand. But that’s just dreaming. I had a baby sister, and I used to whisper her promises and they all ended up lies.”

Girl made my dizzy. First she’d shot me, then she’d healed me. And now she was going to tell me the things that lay heavy upon her?

“Hard to be alone already,” she said. “Ain’t it?”

I looked into her brown eyes like she might blink me inside them. And the room seemed to turn for a moment, as if the world was trying to spin me toward her.

“I ain’t alone,” I said, losing my balance and knocking over a stack of books on the floor. “Not as long as my old man’s alive.”

I was exhausted all of a sudden, and I sank to the ground.

“What’s he like?” Alpha said, sitting beside me.

“He’s smart. Real smart. And he can be funny as hell.”

I wanted to say more, but I remembered the night Pop got taken. I pictured myself shut inside the wagon as the dust storm raged, strangers creeping around outside. I’d been frightened. Too frightened. And I’d just stayed in the wagon, safe, waiting on Pop to come back.

I put my head in my hands.

“I gotta finish that statue,” I whispered.

“Then you’d better go get some rest.”

She was right. Outside the sun was too high and too hot, and I let Alpha guide me back to the shack. She left me alone, and I sprawled on the cot. But my mind worked too fast to quit.

I kept picturing myself in that room full of stories, surrounded by the beautiful books. And where was my old man? Trapped and alone somewhere. No books. No pretty girls to make eyes at. Did he even remember the future we’d mapped out together? The forest we were going to build of our own? I imagined us in a house with ragged tin walls, surrounded by cast-iron branches and leaves we’d change in the fall and the spring.

Usually spring comes before the killing. That’s what the old Rasta had said. And now those words just stuck to my brain.

Murderers, the old Rasta had told me.

Murderers, the lot of them.

I headed back to the forest before the sun even started to drop. Told myself I had to stay strong. Had to keep my head in the game. Had to finish that statue, get Sal, and then get us to Vega and find that damn GPS.