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tightly sealed laboratory door and walked out. She found the village
empty, its streets polka-dotted with yellow crusty stains, like vomit baked into the ground. She did not stop to genuflect or to mourn, nor did she even step around the crusty puddles. She walked
right through them, the soles of her feet stepping on the sticky, slightly crunchy texture of what was once teeth and eyes and skin and bones.
    She was crossing the bridge when she stopped. The train tracks would indubitably be the straightest path to Gene’s destination, but they were also the riskiest. The mountain foliage
would initially offer her partial reprieve from the sun, but once the terrain leveled out and the tracks fell across the spare barren desert of the Vast she’d be fully, and fatally,
exposed.
    No, she would use a different route. For she’d already figured out the train’s destination. It had to be the Ruler’s Palace. Rumor had long circulated of a secret stash of
hepers kept in underground pens, a rumor now corroborated by what she’d read in the laboratory. She would head to the Palace via a circuitous but safer route: return to the caves beneath the
mountain, then backtrack along the Nede River the way she’d come. Several of the sun-proofed dome boats were docked at various points along the river with mechanical issues, and if she timed
it right she could run at night and find shelter in these boats during the daytime. And in so doing, skipping like a rock across the surface of a river, she would make it back to the metropolis.
And from there, to the Palace.
    To Gene.
    Wherever he was, she would journey there. No matter how far, how many miles and suns and days stood in her way, she would find him. And if she could not go to him, she would somehow lure him
to her. For she had something to tell him: a truth that was both a curse and a miracle, the truth of the crimson moons.

Ten
    F EAR SPILLS OUT of each enclave, collectively clotting the catacomb corridors. Matthew told us somebody is always taken after the sirens, and
I can feel the hundreds of bodies on edge. A terrified pause, as if everyone is holding their breath in their hot and dark enclaves. How long before one of us is taken? Minutes? Hours?
    Time passes unseen, unfelt, unknown. It feels like hours, but it might be mere minutes. It might be whole days.
    A light suddenly shines. From across the corridor. It is bright, spilling into, then fracturing my blackened space.
    It is coming from Sissy’s enclave. From
only
her enclave.
    Too bright. I see only a firestorm of brilliant white light, a dark shape swimming in it. Sissy, trapped within. She swings around, her arms cutting through the shafts of light.
    Her enclave starts to vibrate ever so minutely. Now my eyes are adjusting to the brightness. Her limbs, pressed against the walls, are racked with fear and tension. Panic ripples across her
face. On her back, she spins around, then pistons her legs out, pounding her feet against the glass, slamming it harder and harder. But she makes not a dent, not a crack, not even a sound.
    She shouts, but her muffled voice is swallowed up by harsh, metallic clanks. And then her enclave starts to shift and move. She slides over to the glass wall, her hands splayed against it, eyes
swinging wildly, trying to see.
    She’s trying to locate me, needing to see me. Our eyes meet for just a second.
    And then the wall behind her opens up, and her whole enclave starts to retract into the wall. Into the dark void behind.
    I scream out her name. Throw myself against the glass. I won’t let her go. I can’t let her go. I’m done with desertion. I will never do to another what I did to Ashley June. As
long as there is breath left in me, I will never abandon Sissy. Ever.
    She starts hitting the glass over and over, but the impact is silent and useless. She is pulled farther into the darkness behind the wall, getting smaller and smaller, until she is recessed so
far back, I can see