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you think Rayford is still standing?”
    My heart stops. “It’s not?”
    “Nothing is.” He shrugs. “Why should it be any different?”
    “It’s the government,” I say and he snorts. “We needed somewhere to go. We were in a school … holed up in a high school. It got bad. We didn’t know what else to do.”
    “You and the girl?”
    “My group—”
    “Group?” His voice is sharp. “You’re with a group? They looking for you?”
    “No. We lost them and then it was just me and … me and her.” I stare at my hands. My hands, holding food. I make myself say her name. “Sloane.”
    “How many people you lost?” he asks after a second.
    God. Numbers heavy in my mind will be even heavier off my tongue. I don’t know what’s worse, holding their names, or turning them into a body count.
    “Seven.”
    He whistles, impressed.
    “Is this your place?” I ask. “You stay out here?”
    “It’s a stop along the way.”
    “Where you headed?”
    “Nowhere you’ve earned,” he says, like we got to the part where I asked him to take me with him and my face heats up because I might’ve been working my way to it. “This isn’t a time for strangers. I’m sure you know that.”
    “My name is Rhys Moreno,” I say. “I’m seventeen. I lost my mom and dad.”
    He doesn’t offer me anything for it.

 
    “Wake up.”
    The cut of his voice has my body upright before I even really know what’s going on. The fire is out and smoldering. The sun is slowly climbing its way up the white sky. It’s a testament to how exhausted I was that I didn’t hear him moving around, didn’t hear him put the fire out. If he hadn’t been here, I could’ve been killed, slept through my own devouring. I rub my eyes, forgetting about the busted one. That fucking hurts. I suck a breath in through my teeth. My clothes feel scratchy and gross, like they dried to my skin. I’m sure they did.
    “What?” I ask.
    “Can you stand?”
    I untangle myself from the bag, and that takes some doing. I loosen the cords, unzip the zipper, wriggle out, and get my feet under me. By the time I’m upright, I’m sweaty and my head is pounding. I lean against the nearest tree for support, but at least I’m standing. The man eyes me. In the light, his face looks worse. Dirtier and weatherworn.
    “That was pathetic,” he says.
    “Well, I guess that’s my problem.”
    “I guess it is.”
    I take in the patch of land he’s carved out for himself. The drowned fire and the tent, which is on the small side and a shade of green that matches our surroundings. There’s someone in that tent. Listening for infected, your senses get a little sharper. Never sharp enough, though. I’m about to ask who it is, when he asks me what I’m thinking about.
    I’m thinking I don’t ask for a lot. It wouldn’t have been that hard for Sloane to end up on the same muddy patch of bank I did. For us both to be here right now.
    But I’m thinking that even if she didn’t—she doesn’t have to be dead.
    “I gotta look for the girl I lost,” I say.
    He raises his eyebrow. “Think she made it?”
    “I don’t know but I have to try to find her,” I say. I reach into my waistband and realize—shit. “Was there a gun on me? Did you take it? I had a gun …”
    “No gun on you.”
    “Fuck.” I bury my face in my hands and after I’ve absorbed this latest loss, I cast around until I find a … stick. I pick it up. It’s got a little heft to it. Maybe. I feel the man’s eyes on me and I must look too pathetic for the man to even say so this time. “Which—which way’s where I came from?”
    He looks me up and down. “You’re serious.”
    “She’s the last thing I got left.”
    He studies me a long time, his arms crossed. Finally, he shakes his head like I’m an idiot. “You follow the river south, she might be that way. In a few days—and that’s if you run into no trouble—you’ll get to Riverside. You know the way to Rayford from