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a bright, summer afternoon. “You have little choice. This is the only reason you are alive.”
    Dylan stepped back again, the realization that all the running in the world was not going to do her any good filling her chest with that tightness that comes with intense anger. She didn’t know what to do, but she needed to get out of there. So she did the only thing she could. She screamed. She screamed as loud and hard as she could, her throat aching almost immediately. Lily pressed her hands against her ears and stepped back, her movements ironically finding success in this dreamscape. And then the room dissolved and Dylan found herself back on the hard ground of a tiny oasis in the middle of the desert.
    She sat up, gulping in air as her throat continued to ache from the effort of her screams. Wyatt was immediately beside her. His touch on her shoulders, her upper arms, made the pain disappear without an ounce of effort. His eyes searched hers in the lingering darkness of the predawn hour. He didn’t ask. He simply let her bury her face against his chest and hide there until the sickening, slimy feeling the dream had left in her mouth disappeared like her pain.

Chapter 8
     
    “The bald eagle was the symbol of the country that once existed here,” Carver said. “And the yellow rose was the official flower of the state we’re in.”
    “How do you know where we are?” Dylan asked.
    Carver glanced over his shoulder at her. “The ruins. Most of them still have their city signs, and the libraries have encyclopedias and maps.”
    “What are those?”
    Carver shrugged. “Books that tell about places and show what they look like.”
    “What’s a state?” Ellie asked.
    “Sections of a country,” Carver said.
    “And a country?”
    Bobby had moved up alongside Carver, slowing down from the quick pace that had kept him at Wyatt’s side most of the day. Sam had been lagging behind, watching their backs, but had caught up to join the discussion.
    “That’s the whole mass of land we’re on, right?” Bobby said.
    “It’s a group of people who all live under the same rulers,” Carver said. “This one was called the United States of America, and it included fifty individual states.”
    “That’s pretty big, isn’t it?” Dylan asked.
    “Much bigger than a single city like we have now,” Bobby agreed.
    “No wonder the war started,” Ellie said. “Who could govern that many people and keep them under control?”
    “They must have been somewhat successful,” Carver said. “This country existed for more than three hundred years.”
    Everyone seemed reasonably impressed with that because no one said anything for a long few minutes. Sam was the one to finally speak.
    “How long ago was the war?” he asked.
    Carver shrugged. “They stopped writing books when the war started.”
    “What makes you think the war has ended?” Wyatt suddenly asked.
    They all looked at him. He was still walking with his body pointed forward, his step just as quick and determined as it had been since they separated from the others. But there was a certain slump to his shoulders that indicated, to Dylan at least, that he had been paying attention to everything they had been discussing.
    “When did it start?” Sam called out to him.
    Wyatt didn’t answer.
    “I heard someone say once that it wasn’t more than forty years ago,” Bobby said.
    “I know someone who swore he was a kid when it started,” Carver added. “So it couldn’t have been more than, maybe, thirty years ago.”
    Dylan and Sam exchanged glances. “We were taught that it began more than two hundred years ago,” Sam said. Dylan nodded and saw out of the corner of her eye that Ellie was doing the same.
    “Genero is just a factory of lies,” Wyatt said.
    Dylan wanted to argue, but after everything she had begun to learn about herself, she knew it would be a lie to do so. Genero was not what she thought it was. It wasn’t the happy city that was built out of