“So GenTech’s going to sell us apples now. And trees.”

“And everyone will buy them, too.” Zee shrugged. Then she saw the look on my face. “What? I don’t want it to be this way. It’s just the way it is.”

“Why should you care? You’re on the side that’s winning.”

“There were never any sides, Banyan. GenTech wasn’t even searching for Zion. They were just fooling everyone with stories while they built what they need.”

“Are there more trees on the island? Other things growing?”

Zee tugged the hood back onto my head, then pushed our hoods together, and I could feel her breath warm on my face as her lungs creaked and rattled.

“This is it,” she said. “The last stand.”

And this was it. One apple tree left, and they’d already gutted it. This was the GenTech Empire. This was where it got us. And I knew that the boat big enough was just big enough for all the bodies they needed. I knew this was cold blood killing on the most massive scale.

So my father hadn’t been taken. But how many had been? How many mothers and sisters and husbands and wives? Didn’t they all belong to someone? Didn’t they deserve some protection?

I pulled away from Zee, put my hand on a tree branch and held myself steady. I stared up in the branches and then closed my eyes.

I pictured that half-eaten man on the forty, trying to drive his dead family home. I saw the lost faces on the Harvester transport. The bodies burning in Vega, and Sal being thrown to the flames.

I remembered Jawbone splattered lifeless on a plastic console. Hina consumed by the ravenous swarm. I felt death’s fingers in the mud pit. And I felt the dead Rasta in my arms. Skin and bark, limp and knotted.

So much death.

So many hearts turned to stone and days that were stolen. The last things living and we were just ripping each other in pieces that could never again be put back whole.

It ends here, I swore to myself. It must end here. And I knew that Pop had been right to return, even if he thought it meant he had to leave me behind him. He’d been right to try and stop this hell he’d helped GenTech to start. Because being a builder can only get you so far, I reckon. Sometimes you got to be a fighter. Sometimes you got to fight.

“We have to get Crow out,” I said.

“Crow?” Zee’s voice pierced a hole in the air. “Crow’s here?”

“Yeah. You might not recognize him. But he’s here.”

“Are there others? People you know?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t tell her about Alpha, though the thought of her tripped me — the fear of losing that girl had worked its way too deep to ever work its way loose.

But Alpha had believed in me. And I took that faith and it helped grow me stronger, and I had to be stronger now than I ever had been. Because I knew what I was going to do. I had to finish what Pop started. And that meant I was going to need Alpha on the inside.

For the uprising.

Zee told me that before the Darkness, the white trees had grown all over the west and all across what was now the Rift. They were called Populus, back in the old world. Populus tremuloides. But they were also called Quaking Aspen, because back then there were enough trees around that people gave them two names apiece.

The apple tree, though, was of a kind rare even before the Darkness. It grew in mountains in far off places. Malus sieversii. A type of wild apple that had grown for a long time unaltered, before people knew how to mess with such things.

But here on Promise Island, here on this frozen lump of trash, the trees didn’t need naming. They were just all that was left. And that night, after Zee had made the agents retrieve Crow and get him conscious, I carried what was left of the watcher to see what was left of the trees.

It was not a clear night, and it seemed somehow colder for the lack of moon, the absence of stars. I had Crow wrapped in blankets, and I’d tugged the blankets over my shoulder, then tied them around my waist. I was starting to get my strength back and made it up the hill slow but without stopping. Top of the ridge and it was too dark to see the branches below.

“Hold on,” I said over my shoulder. “Not long now.”

What had been snow was now ice and I slipped and skidded down the slope until we were all the way to the bottom. At the edge of the forest, I unwound the blankets and set Crow down, holding him upright and pulling off his hood.

Our breath steamed in the darkness.

“Closer,” Crow mumbled, and I walked him nearer. “Lean me against it,” he said, and I balanced him so he could hold himself tall with the trees in his hands.

“You want to go in deeper?” I asked him.

“Not yet.”

I dug up some of the old leaves and showed them to him, but Crow just stayed staring at the bark between his fingers. It was so dark I could hardly tell, but I was pretty sure Crow was crying.

“I’m ready,” he said finally, and I lifted him and carried him before me as I made my way slowly through the forest.

At the center clearing, I took a break and we sat there, surrounded by the empty hole in the trees.

“Thank you for bringing me here, Banyan,” Crow said, and his voice had changed now so that it no longer sounded as if he was about to start laughing. More it sounded like he wasn’t ever going to laugh again.

“What do you think of them?” I asked.

“I think they’re Zion,” he said. “I think they’re worth living a life for. And I think if you hadn’t dragged me out of that wagon, then I wouldn’t be here now.”

“I think we can save them” was all I said.

“No. They don’t need us to save them.”

“Yeah they do. The trees need us. And the people need us even more. Else GenTech’s gonna kill a whole lot of people so they can own a whole lot of trees.”

“They been killing people and owning everything since the Darkness. Probably a long time before that, too. Nothing going to change.”

“There are more of us than them.”

“Us? Didn’t you say it’s your own mother that’s running this show?”

“She ain’t my mother. She ain’t nothing. We just have to bust the prisoners free. And we can take them.” I pointed at the trees. “Not these. New ones they’re building. We get our hands on those and we take the boat. Head down to the mainland.”

“The mainland? You mean the Rift.” Crow shook his head slowly. “I seen those lava fields from the south side.”

“We got taken up here, must be a way back down.”

“So we find a way through the lava and somehow get back there. What about the locusts? I always believed these trees would be different, but it’s just that they’re stuck out here, away from the swarms.”

“These new ones they’re making are different. GenTech’s got them built so the locusts can’t touch them, not for eating or nesting or nothing at all. Mixed up people and trees and scienced the hell out of them. That’s why they’ve been rounding up so many prisoners. So they can build these new trees and send a whole crop back for planting.”

“We may got the numbers,” Crow said, when he was done being silent. “But they got those prisoners doped up and sleeping.”

“Yeah. Dormancy’s what Zee called it. Some sort of preparation they do. They’re all right for about forty more hours. Then the splicing begins.”

“So what do you want to do?” Crow said, his eyes staring through the night like they were digging for something.

“I want to wake everyone up.”

Crow did laugh then. And his laugh sounded just the same as it used to. “Wake everyone up?”

“Just got to work the angles, that’s all. Like you said, I’m connected here. That woman. The Creator. I can get her wrapped around my finger, I play my cards out right.”