I awoke to the smell of charred hair and begged my temporal lobe to take me back to dreamland.

Mason had gone hunting early, and he'd managed to catch something edible, much to my surprise. The small, unidentifiable mammal now burned above the fire. It was charcoal black, and I had to wonder if Mason had dropped it in the embers by accident, or if the patriarchy had failed him in the cooking department. I lacked the energy to ask.

"What is that?" asked Fudge, fanning the air in front of his nose.

Mason jabbed the meat with a stick. "Your breakfast. What else?"

Fudge glanced at me, dubious, and I grinned. Maybe it was too soon to tell, but I thought that maybe—just maybe—I might have made a new friend. And I wasn't quite sure what to think about that.

In the desaturated world of early morning, the surrounding trees stood like stoic guardians in the haze, warding off the unknown. I frowned at the empty spaces between the pines, wondering if the evil creatures had already moved for Holly.

How many miles did we have on them? Could they be just outside the glade, waiting to strike us down?

Mason shoved a piece of meat in my face, cutting off my anxious spiral, and after watching the others eat their portions, I took a small, cautious bite.

The gamey mammal tasted like coal and rust, but my stomach didn't protest. Hunger made anything appetizing.

"Exactly how big of a hike do we have ahead of us, Will?" I asked a few minutes later, mourning how quickly the food had disappeared.

"We've halved our traveling time by cutting through the Range. Reaching the Command by road would have taken close to a week," he said. "But if we keep east, we should get to Holly in about three days. Give or take."

He had dark circles under his eyes, and I wondered if he'd slept at all. Really, none of us appeared to have gotten a sufficient amount of rest, and I feared the concepts of deep sleep and clean sheets were far behind us.

The spirit-demon hybrid seemed to be the only one undeterred by the lack of sleep. She materialized in front of the camp, waving her leafy arms, urging us to get going.

Her bossiness really pissed me off, and I was about to tell her as much when I realized how high the flames stretched in front of me, how hot they'd grown in the past ten minutes. My gaze dropped to the fire pit, and my anger increased tenfold.

"Mason," I said dangerously. "Where did you get that paper for the fire?"

He nodded toward my pack, where my books lay, gutted and shredded upon the dirt.

One could say I flipped.

I flew at him, but Will caught me around the waist and twirled me back around before I could do to Mason what he did to my books.

Mason stepped back, appalled by my aggression. "Woah, they're books. They were just going to weigh you down. I made good use of them."

I shook off Will's hands, watching the pages shrivel in orange and dissolve in ashes.

They weren't just books. Not to me.

These gems were classics that survived the wars. Stories of Greek heroes, tales of murder on the streets of Russia. They were memories, veins of history. Ties to Belgate and the library and our nation's origins.

With the slip of my glove, I could examine the Ancients holding the very same copies in their hands, their eyes darting from margin to margin. I could see their strange clothes and hair and spectacles. The way they laughed, cried, or scrunched their noses at the content. I'd been overwhelmed by strange colors and architecture—and on occasion, vast blue skies overhead.

I'd spend days trying to place them on my broken timeline. Thinking. Questioning. Theorizing.

The books had become my lens to the world before the Crash, and I'd clung to them in hopes of discovering that life hadn't always been this way. That there had been more to society than war and marriage. That there'd been more.

And Mason had reduced them to combustion material.

I shot him a scathing look and stuffed the violated novels back in my bag. "We need to put out the fire. The smoke will give us away."

Will shoved past Mason to bury the flames, and Fudge crouched to help me salvage what pages I could. I thanked him quietly and turned away to finish packing, forcing back the frustrated tears that threatened to fill my eyes.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

You cry, and you lose all clout.

You cry, and Mason wins.

And that can never, ever happen.

A cool hand fell on my shoulder, and I glared up at the demon-spirit in wary silence. She didn't have a face, but somehow, she conveyed her sympathy.

I didn't like it.

"Don't you have a name?" Fudge asked her, voice high-pitched and gentle, as if he were speaking to a child. "Can't we call you something?"

The demon angled her head, but I wasn't sure if it was a sign of confusion or deliberation.

"Don't bother, Fudge." I slid out from under her ghostly touch. "You'll get attached."

I didn't want his heart to break after the spirit's inevitable perfidy.

"She doesn't seem to know what we're talking about," he went on, deaf to my griping. "If she's going to follow us all the way to Holly, we might as well give her a name."

"Pest?" I muttered.  

Fudge looked at the spirit peculiarly. "How about...Sticks?"

"Isn't that a bit frank?"

"No, not Sticks, Mason. Styx. Like the river in Greek mythology. The boundary separating the Underworld from Earth."

It seemed appropriate. As appropriate as naming any spirit humanoid could be.

"Awesome," I muttered, slinging my pack over my shoulder. Rising to my feet, I faced the demon. "Cross us and you'll regret it, Styx."

She offered a sarcastic salute, and I knew she would have flashed me a snarky grin had she a face.

After hiking through the morning, we came to the edge of a quiet meadow. Three enormous slabs of stone rose from the field, like some kind of giant, unoccupied exhibit.

Will had abruptly scaled a tree to find out just how lost we were, and the rest of us had planted our butts on the ground at the first opportunity, passing my waterskin around.

I didn't know how Will would be able to determine our location from the middle of nowhere. Maybe he could somehow see the road from up there. Maybe he had a compass built inside his brain, like a robot. Or maybe he'd navigated the Range with his father before moving to Belgate.

It was only speculation though; he refused to answer my questions.

I left to scavenge for some food, deciding that with my background in agriculture and my secondhand knowledge in herbology, I had the best chance of finding something edible. Or at the very least, I could determine what we shouldn't eat.

I glared over my shoulder when Styx decided to tag along.  I had a feeling she wanted to befriend me in order to properly assimilate herself into our group. Earn my trust first and hope the rest would follow suit. But her supernatural brethren had just destroyed my city and slaughtered my peers. If she wanted my trust, she'd have to work a whole lot harder than that.

We ventured through the trees, and I had to shake off the weirdest vibe I was getting from the place. Maybe it was the open space—we weren't concealed enough, it was daylight, those things were somewhere out there, coming after us. But the weight in my gut told me it was something else.

Something worse.

After a quick search, I found myself a meaty blackberry bush. Nova had always brought me wild blackberries when she returned from the Interior, so I was relieved to find a plant I was familiar with. I wasn't foolish enough to try the other berries and risk poisoning the whole group.

Not without Mason sampling them first.

Styx helped me fill my pack to the brim, and we made it back to the others just as Will climbed down the tree. He had a very somber look on his face—naturally—and I started to seriously consider the robot hypothesis. I'd read about thembefore in Belgate's limited science fiction collection. Unemotional, inability to socialize, no grasp of human kindness whatsoever.

It was totally plausible.

I offered him some berries, but he just looked at me and sat down.

"You know, you could always say, 'no thanks' like a normal person," I said. "Even Mason knows his manners."

My attempt was met with a tired shrug. "No thanks."

I bit my lip to keep the insults inside. After everything we'd been through so far, I thought he'd warm up to me a little more. I'd figured his frozen corners would thaw by now, that the cold exterior would melt to reveal a more approachable traveling companion, but maybe I just needed to light the burner myself.

I sat down beside him, staring out at the meadow and the strange stone formations towering before us. "What are they?" I asked quietly, so as not to engage Mason and his pretentious answers.

"Ruins." Will looked out at the crumbling walls with something like sorrow in his eyes.

"Ruins of what?"

"An outpost? A church? Something the Ancients left behind."

"You think it was destroyed in the Crash?" I asked.

"Could have been. Or it was abandoned and left to the mercy of the elements."

That was intriguing, but I had a feeling if I asked any more questions he might strangle me. I had to approach him slowly, carefully, like a buck. Any second he could dart away—or maul me with his hooves.

Fudge bumped my knee, raising his brow at the tentative robin a few feet away from us. The bird hopped forward, eyeing the berries in his hand, gauging the threat. Fudge tossed it a seed, and it scrambled away, fearing an aerial attack.

Laughing, Fudge cupped his hands over his mouth and whistled a series of chirps. Enthralled, the bird jumped forward again.

I gasped. The sound was identical to the robin's own warbling. "Who taught you that?"

The boy lifted a shoulder. "I taught myself, actually. I only know a few calls. But I practiced them over and over again until I got them just right."

I blinked at him, suddenly reminded of my mother and our time on the ranch. When I was a child, she'd pretend to speak to the birds to amuse me. She'd whistle back and forth with her hands on her hips, laughing at their replies, exchanging gossip with the wildlife. Sometimes I wondered if it had been an act at all.

"That's what you do in your free time? Practice whistling?" Mason scoffed. "No wonder you flunked out of the Tournament."

"Are you kidding, Mason? I took one look at those cannon balls and tossed the towel in. My bones are too thin for that." He smirked. "And in case you forgot, we both flunked out."

Fudge returned to conversing with the bird, undeterred by Mason's insolence.  Almost like it wasn't insolence at all, but rather some weird display of affection.

I glanced at Will in amusement, hoping to find him on the same wavelength, but he was just staring off into the distance. His brow furrowed, his mouth set in a grim line.

Typical.

Sighing, I feasted on the blackberries in silence, watching Fudge develop rapport with his new little friend. He was so natural at it—being open, building trust. There were times I wished I emanated such agreeableness and honesty. That forming bonds with my peers was easier and safer and even advantageous. But my curse made that impossible.

I couldn't be open and transparent. I couldn't be close to anyone.

"What's that sound?" asked Mason, regarding the meadow with distaste.

Tense, I listened for signs of danger, but there was only a light crackling in the air. Familiar crackling.

"Are those rattlesnakes?"  

I rolled my eyes. "They're just grasshoppers. Relax, Mansion Boy. They're friendly."

They're singing, my mother would have said. Singing for company.

Fudge threw another berry, and the seed disappeared into the meadow's hedge. We both chuckled as the robin quickly hobbled after it like its life depended on it.

"Where are the others?" Will murmured.

I glanced at him, unsure if he'd intended to speak out loud. "The other what?"

His dark eyes searched the pines, the skies, and an unpleasant chill caressed my spine at the wary expression on his face. "...Birds?"

Before I could respond, the robin shrieked from the depths of the grass, flapping its wings chaotically and staggering backward into the dirt. To my horror, a giant insect crawled up the side of the robin's head, weighing the poor animal down. Then it scuttled around the bird's eyeball and forcefully wedged itself inside the socket.

In mere seconds, the bird fell over, twitching as the grasshopper digested its brain.

It took a while for my mind to register what I'd seen, and even longer to come to terms with it.

"Did that just...happen?" Fudge rasped.

I stared at the dead creature for a beat, and then I slowly rose to my feet and approached the barren meadow. Dread brewed in my gut, mating with my anxiety, and as I peered out over the dying grass, my whole body went rigid.

Thousands of bones littered the field—a graveyard of rodent skulls and bird skeletons, unidentifiable carcasses rotting among the weeds. Their flesh and tissue were long gone, ribs licked clean and meatless.  And there, nesting within the remains of the hapless, were hundreds of squirming, thrumming locusts.

We'd awakened a plague.

The ground began to vibrate, rumbling like the growl of a famished stomach. The grass rustled wildly—a dam about to break—and I turned to Will to convey a single, urgent thought.

Run.