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“There was another zero. I saw it.”
    “Yes,” Kelley said. She never bothered to lie anymore. That was a thing the living did. If she didn’t want to admit something, she simply remained silent.
    “A thinker?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you talk to it?”
    Kelley chose silence.
    “Goddamn it, Kelley, I need to know.”
    No response.
    Danny found her hand on the butt of her sidearm. Kelley’s silences had become deeper, lately. It was hard to explain. Somehow she seemed to be retreating inside herself. Without her personality to hang on to, Kelley was just another sentient corpse; the thing Danny feared the most was an ambush by her own sister, if that glimmer of her old self ever went away completely. The factor that kept Kelley in touch with her past humanity might be Danny’s determination to keep her that way. If Danny broke that compact, there would be consequences.
    Danny let her hand fall into her pocket and retrieved the keys to the interceptor.
    “The subject is not closed. But we need to get out of here. There’s a shitload of motorcycles coming.”
    Danny drove back by a more direct route than the one they’d taken out. Kelley had removed the bandages that bound up her head—once there was blood on them, she was in danger of getting moldy underneath. Danny would rewrap her before they came into view of the Tribe’s encampment.
    She glanced over at her sister after a period of prolonged silence—the kind of silence that made Danny feel alone. The features of Kelley’s face were recognizable, but discolored, sagging. The skin had tightened across the high bones—brow and cheeks—and lost its shape around mouth and neck. Kelley looked almost as if she had aged fifty years. Or, if Danny was honest, as if she’d died and begun to rot.
    “So who was it?”
    “One of my kind,” Kelley replied. “But they’re boring. They don’t have any feelings.”
    “You understand that I consider that consorting with the enemy, right? Did you talk about the Tribe? Our defenses? Our route?”
    “He wanted me to join his group. They’ve been hunting along the roads to the north.”
    “Did you talk about the Tribe?”
    “No, Danny. We didn’t. He already knew.”
    Kelley took a long breath that would have signified emphasis for a living person. But she was merely out of air for speaking. Danny found herself gnawing at the knotted skin over her fingerless knuckles. The instant she realized she was doing it, she took her hand away from her face—no good setting an example that way. He already knew? What the hell did that mean? How did he know? She wanted to ask but knew Kelley wouldn’t respond to such questions. She didn’t when she was alive.
    “Okay,” Danny began, speaking carefully, “he already knew about the Tribe. Probably rumors and stuff. So he just wanted you to join his group and kill the living for food.”
    “He also wanted to know how many kids we had,” Kelley said. “Like, if we had too many.”
    “How many is ‘too many’ children?”
    “I don’t know. I said no.”
    “Okay,” Danny said, as if she understood. “What else?”
    “What else did we talk about?”
    “Yeah.”
    “None of your business.”
    •   •   •
    When Danny returned to the Tribe, Kelley’s bandages refreshed, she moved into action without delay. She reported on the motorcycle gang and ordered everyone to saddle up immediately.
    The Reapers, if that’s who they were, hadn’t followed her, as far as Danny could tell; at least, she hadn’t heard any engine sounds when she stopped on the road to wrap up Kelley.
    There were no surprises as far as the truck stop the scouts had found, but twenty kilometers after that, the landscape was writhing with the undead. Beyond the infested area, it was supposed to be completely zero-free for a day’s drive or more. That was good enough for the Tribe. Theyweren’t going to a specific destination. It didn’t work that way. But the project of going eastward, the