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Katherine, losing Mary could cause problems if the next Arrival chose to work for Ajani instead of staying with them.
    He sat beside Mary, thinking about what came next, but not finding any answers—or signs of returning life. It wasn’t unheard of for the Arrivals to wake a few hours shy of midday or even at dawn, but it wasn’t typical. Jack knew that, but he hoped all the same. Hours passed in silence, and more than a few prayers passed his lips. He hadn’t realized he’d even remembered them that well until now.
    When morning came, Katherine’s cussing and Edgar’s calm words broke the silence, and Jack felt a moment of guilt for keeping Katherine out. His sister wanted to be there for him, and he knew she’d been close with Mary, but the cold truth was that he didn’t want his sister there watching him. He didn’t love Mary, had never known the sort of love Katherine and Edgar shared, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was capable of it. What he did know was that Mary had loved him, and right now he wanted to be worthy of that love.
    “If you come back, I’ll try to love you,” he promised.
    Mary didn’t stir.
    For several more hours, Jack alternated between praying and making promises to the dead woman in his bed, but by midday, she was still motionless.
    “I’m sorry,” he told her, and then he left his tent.
    Edgar looked up at him when he walked out. Beside him was Katherine. They both opened their mouths to speak, but Jack shook his head and said, “I’m going on patrol.”
    His sister reached out to him, wrapping her arms around him, but all he could say was “I’m sorry,” even though the words weren’t any more use to her than they had been to Mary. Yet another of the Arrivals was dead, and in the next few days, someone else would appear in the Wasteland to replace her, and Jack would once again try his best not to fail that person. And all the while he would try to convince him or her not to join Ajani—even though that was the only surefire way Jack knew of to keep the newest Arrival from permanent death. That was the ugly truth of it: if they worked for Ajani, they’d be truly free of death. Unfortunately, they’d also be indebted to the one person in the Wasteland whom Jack would willingly die or kill to destroy.

Chapter 5
    W hen Chloe opened her eyes, she was stretched flat on her back, staring up at an odd-looking sky. She wasn’t sure where she was, but she was sure that it was not Washington, D.C. Although she hadn’t seen the whole of the city in the few months she’d lived there, she could pretty much guarantee that there were no sand dunes or fields of what looked like cotton in the heart of the nation’s capital.
    All she could move was her head. From her neck down, her body was tingling. She tried to move her legs, to sit, but all that happened was a weird jerking, as if her body was trying but couldn’t complete the movements. She could feel the trickle of sweat rolling off her skin like small insects crawling all over her, but she couldn’t move to wipe it away.
    She tried to stave off panic by studying what she could see around her. To her right was a barren stretch of desert surrounded by a sturdy but peculiar-looking metal fence. A rutted road of dirt and sand cut between the desert and the field. The cotton plants had tufts of white on them, but they didn’t look nearly as prickly as real cotton plants.
    Above her, the sky looked . . . wrong. It was mostly blue like skies were supposed to be, but the sun was high above her as if it were midday even though sunset streaks of reds and purples were painted across the blue. She frowned as she looked to her left: there were two moons visible in the sky.
    The more she looked, the more she suspected that she had to be hallucinating—except it had been a long time since she’d even smoked a joint much less taken anything that would result in full-color hallucinations. She’d broken her sobriety last night, but that