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She’d thought Cameron was being callous, rude, uncaring. Of course they had to help. They had supplies, and the family had none. How could Cameron argue? He’d watched their backpacks get carried off with his own eyes. He’d shot at the bandits himself. They weren’t being asked to take these people on their word, swallowing a story of high risk on the mountain trail.
They
’
d been there
.
 

The old saying was that the life you saved was your responsibility forever. Piper wasn’t willing to go that far, but she’d surely felt they could give the Nelsons twenty-four hours.

That simple act of mercy had cost them too much. Maybe everything.
 

All of their water.
 

All of their food.

All of their extra clothes.

And a bunch of gear that Cameron and his men had relied on to reach Vail in the first place. Right down to compasses, cooking gear, a pair of the night vision goggles they’d used when claiming the bunker, matches, a water purification kit …
everything
.
 

Cameron had wanted to leave the family to their own devices, and that had struck Piper as so,
so
wrong. But in the end, he’d been right. They’d woken in the middle of the night and stolen both backpacks, leaving them less than the Nelsons themselves would have had if they’d walked away as Cameron had wanted. They were left with what was in their pockets or on their bodies, including their guns.
 

Piper had been thinking about that last bit while saddling two of the barn’s horses and riding away from the rising sun. If one of the guns had been in the packs or laid to the side, would Mike and Rachel have left them sleeping? Or would they have covered their tracks further — and more permanently — just in case the two looted travelers decided to track their robbers and retrieve what they’d stolen?

Surely not. But if this morning had proved anything to Piper, it was that everything really had changed. Maybe there were towns out there where business had returned to normal in the absence of alien activity. But now you could be robbed by anyone. Piper didn’t want to find out if the same was true of being shot in the back.
 

It was all her fault.
 

She rode behind him for miles, doing her time in her moving dunce corner. He slowed as the sun climbed. Piper slowed to stay behind, embarrassed and ashamed. Finally, he stopped entirely, turning in his seat to face her for the first time since they’d set off that morning.
 

“Are you getting thirsty?”
 

At first, she didn’t answer. It sounded like mockery. They had no water. The nice family they’d saved from rape and death had stolen every drop.
 

“Are you?” he repeated.
 

Maybe it was a serious question. “Yes.”
 

“I hear something this way. Come on.”
 

Piper looked back through the trees, watching the highway vanish as they headed farther south. She didn’t want to ask Cameron what he had in mind, but after a while she heard it too: the muffled babble of a stream.
 

When they reached the small waterway, Cameron dismounted and looked around.
 

“What are you looking for?”
 

“A way to tie my horse.”
 

“You don’t think she’ll stick around?”
 

“I’d rather not leave it to chance.” He was still looking, slapping his hands on his thighs. His medium-length brown hair kept falling in his face. He didn’t look nearly as young as she’d first taken him to be, back when she’d thought him one of Morgan’s bad guys. He had to be midtwenties, maybe late twenties. How had he made himself seem barely eighteen? It had been something surprisingly convincing in his manner. She wanted to ask him if he’d ever taken acting classes but was still too gun shy about her mistake, and the question felt too familiar.
 

“Guess we should have brought some ropes.” Piper fished into the dusty canvas shopping bag she’d found in the barn and tied to her saddle, pulled out a blue and white rope with a clip on the end, and handed it to Cameron.
 

He met her eyes. A small smile turned up the corner of his mouth. And just like that, Piper realized it was over. She was forgiven. He took the rope, secured his horse, then held out his hand to help Piper dismount and secured her horse to the same tree as his with a second rope. Both animals were close enough to drink the water.

“What else you have in there?” He nodded toward the bag. They weren’t speaking when she’d loaded it.
 

“Some treats.”
 

“Anything that’s not for the horses?”
 

“I tried the water spigot, but it wasn’t working.”
 

“Probably had city water. I don’t know that I’d trust it anyway.” Cameron knelt beside the stream.
 

“You trust that?”
 

He smiled up at her. “It’s literally a mountain stream.”
 

“But … ” She gestured. “Dirt. Rocks. Moss and stuff.”
 

“The moss is on the bank. The water is moving too quickly to stagnate. You’ll get some dirt, I’m sure.” He scooped up a double handful. “But think about it. This is what Coors brags about using for their beer.” He took a sip.
 

“What if you get parasites?”
 

“Good enough for them.” Cameron nodded toward the drinking horses. “Besides, whatever’s in here,” he took another sip, “is better than dying of thirst.”
 

Piper knelt, dipped her cupped hands into the water, and lifted them to her lips. She drank. It was cool and fresh, different than the water she was used to. She was a nature girl now. Soon she’d be milking cows and drinking raw milk from the teat.
 

“I guess we’ll find out,” she said.
 

After they’d had their fill, Cameron stood and tipped his chin toward the west.
 

“I’ve been thinking.” He patted his horse’s side. “We have two great rides right here. Maybe we don’t need a car after all.”
 

“You want to ride the whole way?”
 

He nodded. “I didn’t want to say so earlier because it seemed depressing while we were on foot, but I’d thought that from the beginning. We had a car — ‘we’ meaning me, Dan, Vincent, and Terrence — on our way to your place, coming down from the Dakotas. Sometime after we diverted away from Moab and toward Vail, we started running into military blockades. Kind of like that one we saw yesterday morning but much bigger. At first, it was just one, and we turned around and retraced our steps. But then we hit another and detoured again. It became apparent pretty quickly that they had a method to their madness, and sure enough we started to pick up what sounded like military chatter on one of the open frequencies. They were using some sort of a code, and as good as we are, none of us are able to crack military codes, but to me it confirmed what we’d been seeing.”
 

“What?”
 

“Cordoning off. Maybe even quarantining, though I doubt it’s that. Likely just making a bigger effort to control the roads.”
 

“Control or block?” Piper asked.
 

“We were carrying a bunch of weapons and didn’t want to find out. Besides, there was no real guarantee that any of them were military. Another thing we’d heard a lot about and run into a time or two were … how to put it? ‘Land grabs,’ I guess. The real estate version of looting. Vincent and Terrence are good with maps and hiding. Dan and I are good at following directions — ”

“So you aren’t in charge? I thought you were the leader.”

“It’s complicated,” said Cameron, moving on. “We never got stopped, but we saw a lot of people in Jeeps and pickups with a lot more guns than we had, on patrol. Fewer pro blockades. One guy had strung up razor wire. Regardless, between the military and … ‘people staking their claims,’ I suppose … we started to realize the roads were no longer a smart place to be. But we were close enough by then, so we ditched the car and walked the rest of the way.”

“I thought we’d be driving. ‘In Moab by nightfall’ and all that.”
 

“It was a possibility. But not one I ever really liked. Best-case scenario might have been motorcycles because they can get around most of the roadblocks, so if they’re unmanned it’s easy. Problem is, once you get past one barrier, you might have just gone
into
something. Like into someone’s land, in the middle of a circle of roadblocks. So really, if we’re wishing, I’d say ATVs would have topped my Christmas list for this trip. So we could cut through the brush.”
 

“ATVs,” Piper echoed.
 

“Or even snowmobiles, which will run on dirt in a pinch if you don’t mind destroying the works with sticks and stuff. I’ll bet a lot of these places up in the mountains have snowmobiles.” He looked around, but there were no houses to be seen, then patted the horse again. “But even ATVs and snowmobiles don’t have a horse’s advantage.”
 

“They’re quiet.”
 

“They’re also good on uneven terrain and don’t require gas.” Cameron patted the horse’s neck then looked toward its rump. “Though they do tend to
emit
gas.”
 

He untied his line then mounted the horse and coiled the rope around the saddle horn. Piper, following his lead, did the same.
 

She looked west then turned to ask what was on his mind. Cameron answered as if he’d known the question was coming.
 

“I’d guess it’ll take us a week.”

“A week.”

He nodded. “Best get started.” He nudged the animal’s side, and the horse started walking.

Piper’s mind drifted with the animal’s motion. She kept thinking of Lila, Trevor, Raj, and Heather. She’d left them alone with Cameron’s men. Even if everything went perfectly, a there-and-back trip would take half a month. That assumed they didn’t run into delays or problems, and it didn’t account for the time they spent at the lab Cameron kept mentioning but hadn’t yet fully described. She might be gone a month, and she’d led them to believe it would only be days.

Maybe that was fine. Maybe that made it easier to go — and really, she did need to. The men would know it wouldn’t be a few days. Cameron’s explanation sounded thought out, and he’d spent a lot of time talking to Vincent and Terrence before they’d left, poring over maps that were now in the possession of the Nelsons. So they’d know. Maybe they’d already broken the news, telling the others not to expect their return for a lot longer than anticipated.
 

Cameron still had the radio. She might even be able to tell them herself, if they could manage to secure a signal and squeeze a few words into the crowded common frequencies.
 

Still, Piper couldn’t help but wonder if it mattered. In that missing month, Trevor would do fine, judging by the cold shoulder he’d been giving her for forever. Lila would cross into her second trimester. Maybe she’d be showing when Piper returned. She’d like that. It would let her pretend she’d have some sort of a role in the family, even though Meyer’s absence made that connection more tenuous than it already was.
 

Cameron stopped his horse. Piper, after a minute, stopped hers.
 

“Do you hear something?” she said, thinking of the tales he’d told of land grabs and controlled territories. She waited, listening for the crack of a stepped-on twig.
 

“No,” he said. “But I
see
something.”
 

He pointed.
 

And she saw.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lila was sitting in the control room, flipping between views, pinching in and out to magnify one unhelpful scene after another. After the banging had stopped and her mother finally exhausted herself yelling at Vincent, banging on his muscled chest before stomping off to bed, the whole bunker settled into quiet. Now it was dark.
 

“See anything?”
 

Lila turned. Raj was behind her, holding his telephone watch in one hand.

“Almost. I found a shot from the kitchen where you could see out the window and there was … something. But it got dark, and nobody seems to be down there with lanterns.” Lila nodded at his watch. “Any luck on your end?”
 

Raj shrugged and re-strapped the watch to his wrist. “Thing is useless. Maybe I should just get used to the fact that I’m here with you forever.”
 

Lila noticed two things Raj didn’t mention. The first was that for all Raj’s certainty that the watch was useless and that he’d never be able to use it to reach his family, he still put it back on. The second was that “I’m here with you forever” sounded resigned rather than cheery. Perhaps the alien invasion had plucked the bloom from their rose.
 

“You want to sit down?” she said.
 

“I was thinking I’d go to bed.”