Nothing. Several miles of coastline, and nothing. Grace and Hunter trudged all along the coast, scrambling over rocks and cautiously navigating the still shifting landscape, but eventually they ended up back in the town, the sun long since set over the Pacific. They had reached the end of the fall zone, but didn't bother scaling the jumbled mountain of fallen rocks. There wasn't any point.

Grace hated to admit it to herself, but as she and Hunter sat by a fire, sheltered by one of the half-destroyed buildings, things seemed tense between the two of them. She was disappointed, of course, that they hadn't found what they were looking for, but Hunter seemed to be more than disappointed. She just couldn't read him at the moment.

"Look, I'm sorry we didn't find them," Grace prodded gently. "I really am."

"Yeah." Hunter stared at the flames, and Grace sensed he was pointedly not looking at her.

"Hunter, if there's something you want to say, just say it."

He kept quiet for a few more moments. "Well, of course they might be here, just, you know, buried under one of those giant piles of rocks." His voice was bitter, angry even.

"I suppose that's a possibility," Grace said, quietly.

"Or, they never came this way at all, and we just wasted several days coming out here."

"Hunter, this isn't a science," Grace said, struggling to keep her voice even but losing patience after the long day. "Sometimes you make guesses, and sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're wrong."

"But was this really what you thought was the most likely place for them to be?"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that you seemed really eager to not head to the central valley. You jumped onto the second story about where the train might be right away."

Grace stared at him, her mouth open to retort but then closing when no words came to mind.

Hunter finally turned to look at her. "You've been there, haven't you?"

"Yeah," Grace finally said, pushing down an intense feeling of dread as memories of her experiences came flooding back to her. "I have. And clearly you haven't."

"How the hell would you know?"

"How would I know?" It was Grace's turn to get angry. "Maybe because if you had been there, you wouldn't be looking at me right now like I personally murdered you sister."

Hunter flinched at her words, but kept his gaze steady. "So, did it affect your call to come here?" The question was straightforward enough, but Grace didn't have a simple answer.

"I don't know," she replied. "Really, I don't," she repeated as Hunter turned away and scoffed. "It does make sense for them to come this way, really, it does. It's suicide to go through the valley."

"But?"

"But if I didn't have those experiences, maybe, I don't know, maybe I would have seen the situation differently. Okay, I'm not a robot, Hunter. I'm not Liam fucking Neeson from the Taken movies. I'm doing the best I can, and if that's not good enough for you, you can fuck off. Good luck finding your sister."

Hunter looked slightly murderous, but silence fell between the two of them. Grace's entire body was tense, and she hated that Hunter might actually have a point.

"So what happened?"

"What?"

Hunter was staring at her again, but with more curiosity and concern than anger this time. "What happened? When you went to the valley?"

Grace shifted her weight and then hugged her knees to her chest, staring into the fire.

"Sorry. You don't have to tell me; I shouldn't have asked." And there was the old Hunter, concern rippling through his voice.

"No, no, you should know." Grace didn't change her position or look at him, but she knew that he deserved the truth.

As Grace wrestled with herself to talk, Hunter remained silent. Grace could see him examining her out of the corner of her eye.

"It was about two years ago," Grace began. "I was already at Seaside, and had done a couple of jobs, so I already knew what I was doing, or at least the basics of it.

"I was coming back from one. I don't remember what it was, though. But I stopped in Arden, and at the inn there, this was before I knew Desiree. At the inn some guy approached me, completely in distress, and asked if I was the person who could find things. Find anything."

Grace unwrapped her arms from around her legs and sat with them crisscrossed, her arms folded tightly across her chest. "Sound familiar?" she asked drily.

"Just a bit." Hunter sounded apprehensive, and Grace wouldn't have blamed him for feeling unnerved at the fact that the situation she had just described matched the way he initially approached her almost perfectly.

"So I talked to him, and he told me his mother had gone missing. Gone missing in the central valley. And he asked me to find her. And I said yes."

"I thought you didn't look for people."

"And this is the reason I don't," Grace sighed. "I had heard the rumors, about some sort of fascist government emerging in the valley, but I didn't take them seriously, at least not seriously enough. I got all the information I could the from the guy about his mom and left the next day.

"The only problem was, there wasn't ever any mom. Well," Grace corrected herself, "I mean he must have had a mom, but he didn't intend for me to find her."

"What do you mean?"

"He told me that his mom had lived in the central valley before the bombs," Grace explained, "so I started by heading to approximately where she lived, you know, start at the beginning and figure out where she might have gone from there. But I didn't find his mom there."

Grace took a deep breath and ran her thumb across her tattoo, almost subconsciously. "Instead, there was practically an army waiting for me."

"An army?"

Grace finally turned to look at Hunter. The light from the fire flickered in his eyes as he looked at her, his face scrunched up as he listened to her.

"It was a trap," she said. "Send people from Arden or the surrounding towns there. They got me by giving me a job, but they probably had all sorts of methods of getting people to go there. Telling them there was electricity or cell service or some type of transport out of California. Hell, maybe even telling them their favorite food was there." Grace shrugged. "All I know was that one minute I was looking for a missing mother, and the next I was thrown into the back of a truck with three other people, bars all around us."

Looking for an excuse to take a break from talking, Grace opened her pack and pulled out her bag of, now slightly stale, Oreos. She broke one in half and offered a piece to Hunter before taking a bite out of her own.

"They kept us there for three weeks." Grace hated that her voice shook, but she swallowed down a lump in her throat. "Not a lot of food, not a lot of water. No place to go to the bathroom. And someone new came at least every three, four days. Sometimes more than that. By the end we were all on top of each other."

"What did they want your for?"

"Slave labor." Grace let out a mirthless laugh. "The entire state was founded by terrorists, not farmers and economists. They had all the protection they needed, but none of it would matter if they didn't have a way to sustain themselves. So they turned to forcing people to grow food for them.

"But, we, the whole group and I, we got lucky. Finally, probably after a month of luring people into the trap, they moved us. They had some sort of supply of gas for the trucks, I think they still do, so they could just move the truck and keep us locked up in the back. And then, I don't know, sell us off or something."

Grace took another bite of her cookie. "But, like I said, we got lucky. We were halfway across the valley when the truck stopped."

"Ran out of gas?"

Grace shrugged. "No idea, honestly. Maybe, and I can't imagine it would have been easy to fill up the tank. But it could have been any sort of car trouble. The point is, it stopped.

"There were three vehicles in total. We were in the middle, and security in front and behind. The car in front of us had driven ahead a bit, so they didn't even notice we stopped. But behind us did. They stopped too and talked to our driver and then drove off. Maybe to get something to fix the car, I don't know. But then it was just us and the driver, stuck in the middle of the central valley.

"There were about 15 of us at that point, and only one of him. He turned his back on us, just for a few seconds, and this one guy, I never even knew his name, just kicked him in the back of his head, knocked him out. Someone else managed to catch him before he hit the ground, and we got the keys off of his belt. Within a few minutes, we were free."

"So you got out?" Hunter questioned. "How did you get out of the valley?"

"A lot more luck," Grace admitted. "We all went in our separate directions; it would have been too noticeable if we traveled together. So there I was, weak, alone, and completely lost, but I just ran west. Eventually, I found a place to hide, slept till it got dark, and then travelled at night. And eventually I got out, but I doubt everyone who was a prisoner with me was as lucky. Even I had a few close calls. They really pulled out all the stops to find us."

"So not only did you never go back there," Hunter said, nodding in understanding, "but you also swore not to find people?"

"Nail on the head."

Grace was relieved to finally be done talking, but she waited apprehensively for Hunter's reaction.

"I'm sorry I reacted the way I did."

He apologized. How very like him.

"I shouldn't have accused you of using poor judgement."

Grace shrugged. "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. But, the way I see it, it doesn't matter now."

"No?"

"What's done is done. And, at the very least, we know what's here. But right now, you have two choices, Hunter DiAngelo."

"Which are?"

Grace took a deep breath, hardly believing that she was going to say what she was about to say. "If you really think that they came this way and the entire train is sitting under a giant mountain of rock, then we pack things up. Go home. Try to find a way to live with things. But if you don't," Grace swallowed hard, "if you don't," she repeated, "then we go to the central valley. And we see what we can find."

"You would do that?" he asked incredulously.

"I told you I would help you find her, and I stand by that."

"But how am I supposed to know what to do?" Hunter asked, his voice raising slightly. "I know nothing about finding people."

"No, you don't," Grace agreed. "But she's your sister, not mine. The choice has to be yours. And I'll respect it."

"I, I honestly don't think they were all crushed to death in these rock slides," Hunter admitted after a moment.

"Then your decision is obvious," Grace said softly. She suspected that's what he would do, but a strong pang of fear still stabbed her in the gut when he said the words.

"You don't have to come."

"Yes, I do," Grace said. She laid down the ground. "You should get some rest. You're going to need it."