Wild Things

by

Liz Boysha

Author’s Note

This book deals with “mature themes” including:

Climate Change and Mass Extinction

Police Brutality

LGBT+ and Sexuality

Poverty and Crime

Rape/Sexual Assault

Sex Trafficking

Occasional cursing

None of these were particularly new topics when I was a young adult, and I can’t imagine things have gotten any better in the meantime.

If this book is banned in Florida, my life goals will be complete.

For more information about the very real impending ecological disasters described in this fictional story, please read the appendix.

Prologue: A Man Called Wolf

Listen: Wolf had been drinking, and he was driving. That is unacceptable, he knows. There is no excuse. There might’ve been other substances involved, too, he doesn’t know if they’d yet worked their way out of his system, you know? He was driving away from a week-long bender at an old friend, a new stranger’s house; the constant stream of visitors in and out, each on different drugs and in different stages of desperation.

Well. He wasn’t in good shape.

Wolf wasn’t seeing much, because it was black as black and he was driving well away from that city, its Inner District lights just a ghost on the horizon behind him. His headlights were nothing but pinpricks swallowed up by the asphalt.

So even if he was drunk, or high, there probably wasn’t anything he could have done to stop that deer from leaping straight in front of his truck. All he sees, all he could possibly have seen is a flash of white as he hits it, then red as his face abruptly decelerates into the steering wheel.

His nose takes all the force.

Wolf fuzzes out a bit there, lost in the pain and blood and haze of intoxicants, but somehow, he pulls that truck to a stop after spinning a full 180, facing the wrong way down the highway, headlights pointed straight at that dead deer in the road. Even with his eyes fogged from pain, he can see it is dead. Its head was ripped nearly clean off.

Lucky, though, the truck is alright: bumper dented, windshield cracked, but the engine is still running.

Wolf feels obligated to drag the deer off the road, thinking about scavengers and the unlikely chances of another vehicle racing down the highway as they are trying to enjoy the meal. He steps out of the truck, leaving the door open with the lights and the ding ding alarm singing at him as he stumbles over.

When he approaches, he can see the deer’s abdomen rippling, like something is squirming inside, and his stomach churns along with it. Steeling himself, Wolf grabs its front legs and drags the corpse towards the shoulder of the road. It is heavier than he was expecting, and as he pulls, the deer’s head flops back, tongue sticking out, dragging along behind it by a strip of sinew. He does not notice that the convulsing within the deer grows stronger. He just pulls, again and again, and as soon as he gets to the side of the road something shoots out the other end.

That is when Wolf drops the deer and pukes, again and again, until he is stone cold sober, staring at a cloudy amniotic sac that had just been birthed onto the road by a dead deer.

He faints when he sees the hand, five perfect fingers pressed up against the translucent membrane. He lands pretty much face first, cutting his eyebrow on gravel. He is not out for long; before he is even aware, he is on his knees, tearing into the amniotic sac with his bare hands. Pulling out a fully formed human baby.

The amniotic fluid falls away from the newborn in a gush, and the cold air shocks it into a long, ear-shattering scream. The sound of it is mind-numbing, and Wolf sits frozen, staring at the shrieking thing before him, growing cold in the night air. He is in shock and bleeding from his face.

His eyes trail the umbilical cord, still attached to a meaty looking placenta hanging half out of the deer. He slips off his hoodie and wraps infant and placenta both in it, securing the package back to his truck where it is still warm. He keeps a knife in the center console, as well as a small first aid kit, both of which prove useful now. He uses the string from the hoodie to tie off the umbilical cord, which has ceased its weak pulsing. The tissue is slick and tougher than he expects, and the newborn’s screams leave him worried it can feel him cutting through it.

Sitting there, staring at what he now realizes is a newborn baby girl, her face all red and screaming under the dim overhead lights and the ding ding alarm still going off, this is the first time Wolf thinks, What the fuck?

It has been a long week.

The baby starts to quiet down, probably due to sheer exhaustion, as Wolf cleans it up and dries it off, then wraps it back up in the hoodie. She seems to like being wrapped up like that, he notices, snuggled up close like a cocoon. Wolf examines his own face in the tiny overhead mirror, his nose swollen and a cut above his eyebrow bleeding too much for its size, as head wounds tend to do. He staunches the nasal flow with gauze and roughly applies the sticky butterfly tape to close the gash on his head. All the while the newborn sits on his lap, silent now, staring up at his mangled face with swollen, unfocused grey eyes.

Urgent needs taken care of, Wolf now has time to think: What do you do? When you’re 17, injured, holding a baby what just came out of a dead deer, dead because of you, by the way? He could take the baby to Tia’s house, which is his house now, he supposes. Tia Elena, his mother’s sister, was just a couple weeks gone now. This explains Wolf’s past week, actually: the weight of all those months caring for her, watching her die, talking to doctors and lawyers and funeral directors. Wolf has not set foot in that house since watching her leave it in a body bag.

Problem is, that house is a good six hours away by highway, and the baby is here, grunting and snuffling around like it is hungry. Wolf looks out his windshield at the dead deer, oozing scarlet into gravel, and he wonders what the baby would have been eating if he hadn’t come along to kill it. Would she have nursed from the deer? Would the deer have laid there with it for weeks, months, years so it could grow so slow?

Wolf realizes he has to drive back to the town he has just left, where it is still late and past Off Hours, so he has to drive all the way through to the Inner District, where the streets are still lit and the occasional 24-hour store still open. He keeps the newborn buckled in the passenger seat next to him as he drives. He can hear his heart thumping in his chest the entire way, his nerves jangled and shot to hell.

Forgive him, Wolf does not know much about babies. He is seventeen years old, and the only diapers he has changed before were his Tia’s, those last couple weeks when it got really bad. He parks his truck in a dark corner of the pharmacy parking lot and leaves the newborn alone in the passenger seat as he browses through formula and diapers. There are too many options for both: liquids and powders and concentrates and pre-mixed; plain and sensitive and soy and hypoallergenic; bottles of all sorts of shapes and sizes. The diapers are easier once he realizes they are labelled: N for “Newborn.” Wolf even buys a set of tiny pajamas, also size N, grey fleece, dotted with tiny yellow ducklings.

Signs on the shelves warn customers about a formula shortage: “Limit: 2 per customer.” The cashier reminds Wolf of it too, even though he is only carrying two containers: newborn, ready-to-serve. Wolf winces under the harsh lighting, certain the cashier’s scowl has something to do with the state of his face. There is still dried blood in his scruffy beard, and there is nothing to be done about the swollen nose. As soon as he pulls out cash, however, the cashier breaks out into a grin.

“The wife threw a hair dryer at my head, when our oldest was a week old,” he chuckles. “Won’t ever forget to stop on the way home again.” Wolf nods and pays quickly, the cost of the formula an unpleasant shock, and hurries out of the store, across the parking lot.

Wolf’s truck is hardly soundproof, and he can hear screaming as he approaches, but as soon as he picks up the bundle it seems to calm down, if only just a little. He struggles to fill a bottle one-handed, to work the nipple into the toothless gaping mouth of the newborn. It takes coaxing, but soon she is happily sucking down the sticky formula. He had filled the bottle, assuming she would be hungry, but she drinks less than an ounce before her eyes start to blink closed in a satiated slumber. He will have to throw the rest out.

The baby stays asleep as he unwraps the hoodie, which is now covered in black, sticky poop in addition to the remaining deer gore. Wolf cleans it off as best as he can with wipes, then dresses her; the diaper and pajamas are both a little too big, despite the N-size. He wraps her up again - in a clean shirt, since all his clothes are in the back seat - and starts the drive home.  The baby sleeps quietly in the passenger seat the entire time, waking only once for feeding and changing, then she is right back asleep.

Wolf and the baby, whom he names Elena, live at his, Tia’s, house for two months, while he learns about burping and diaper rash and sleepless nights and cradle cap and poop (so much poop). Then he sells the house, his childhood home, and uses some of the cash to buy an electric camper van, as well as a car seat suitable for infants. They like to be on the road; the Van can always lull baby Elena to sleep.

Chapter 1:

Wolf tells Elena a lot of stories about her absent mother over the years, but the first time she believes him is when she is thirteen, and he tells her about the deer.

Part of it is his eyes, which Elena finds stunning and therefore spends an inordinate amount of time staring at: light brown with flecks of gold, like his namesake’s, and always darting around. Even when he is driving, he’ll risk glances off the road, over to the schoolwork or a watercolor Elena is hunched over in the passenger seat. They cross over her face, to the side mirror, the rearview mirror, back to the road. Always moving, always watching out.

But when he tells the deer story, his eyes never leave the road. Not even once.

Part of it is also because of something that had happened many years before; it is one of Elena’s earliest memories. They had stopped at a campground off a highway somewhere in Appalachia. Wolf was distracted by the septic pump, while an only recently mobile Elena examined the forest. She had learned to walk so late; her specific developmental delay left Wolf with a false sense of security, the erroneous belief she would not, could not wander off.

The forest was a beautiful and enticing place, trees shrouded in fog, into which she immediately wandered. She still vividly remembers the scent of mist and pine; the different birds, each singing their own tune; trees whispering in the wind; a cricket somewhere chirping. To Elena, it sounded like the forest was calling her name.

She kept walking, deeper and deeper into the woods, until she came upon a clearing, brightly lit compared to the shade of the forest. There she found a family of deer grazing: two does, two fawns, a stag with velvety antlers. They froze and so did Elena, staring at each other, time standing still. Then a sweet smell in the wind, and the tension broke, and the deer returned to grazing. The fawns were the same size as the girl, and they bounced and played for several minutes before, overcome by sudden exhaustion, she laid down with them in a warm beam of sunlight.

They were awoken by the sound of Wolf, calling, desperate, panicked. The deer fled, springing off on tight, thin legs; and Elena burst into tears, incomprehensibly lonely.

The deer tale is also the last story Wolf ever tells about Elena’s birth, further cementing her belief in it. Now that she is old enough to wander off at rest stops without causing a panic, she takes every opportunity to look for more deer, but has thus far been unsuccessful. They are nearly extinct, according to the news. Like most animals.

Elena’s initial delay in walking was largely a consequence of growing up in the Van; despite young Wolf’s best efforts, there is never enough room in a van for a toddler to sufficiently stretch their legs. The Van is a quaint little vehicle, with solar panels lining the roof and a two-burner electric mini-stove for cooking. There is a table and bench that folds into a bed if needed, which is never, because it is just the two of them. Wolf sleeps in a bunk over the front, and Elena takes a mattress in the back, partitioned off by a heavy velvet green curtain. It would make her room unbearably dark if not for the moth holes scattered throughout, letting in little stars of light from the main room. There is a closet of a bathroom with a sit-down shower that pumps sun-warmed recycled grey water into a weak overhead spray, and a chemical toilet that gets pumped out at campgrounds.

There are no windows in the back of the Van, just the windshield and two front door windows. The outside panels are solid white, designed for obscurity. From the outside, it looks like a regular transport vehicle.

Theirs is one of the few private vehicles left on the roads. Officially, Wolf is an independent agent, transportation class. He does private deliveries, special cargo, long-haul pet transport: the kinds of things the wealthy cannot trust with the Federated Postal Service. In reality, he is a smuggler, and for the longest time Elena was not allowed to ask what was hidden in various nooks and storage areas around the Van. Wolf does not know that she learned how to pick the locks he uses to secure them when she was nine.

It is nothing exciting like drugs or exotic seeds. Wolf deals in electronics: old cell phones with cracked screens and bloated lithium batteries; laptops missing their hard drives; children’s toys with tiny midi-speakers and LCD screens. They are taken illegally from landfills by junkrats who sell them to Wolf for cheap; then he illegally smuggles them to often-armed, always-unmarked warehouses in the cities, where they will be illegally refurbished for the black market. Those untraceable electronics are high demand goods for hackers and criminals.

And Wolf just carries them back and forth in his little Van.

Never mind, it keeps food on the table. He chooses to smuggle these goods, these harmless goods with little value, to keep Elena safe. She is an illegal child: unregistered, unlicensed, unschooled, except for the worksheets Wolf makes her fill out on her tablet while he drives.

Elena does not enjoy the worksheets; she really does not enjoy math. She does enjoy reading, sometimes, and she especially enjoys listening to Wolf’s audiobooks. They come on shiny plastic disks with such little storage that the books have to be broken up into five, six, sometimes over a dozen parts. Sometimes a disk is absent, and they miss entire chapters. With all the contraband he smuggles, Elena wonders why Wolf does not find something better than an ancient Discman for listening to books.

But mostly, Elena enjoys colors, blurring in the landscape as they speed past. She enjoys lines, like the hard white ones contrasting on the road; the colorful ones lighting the dashboard; the sleek curves of the synthetic microplush bucket seats they sit in for 6-8 hours a day. Shadows, darkening under Wolf’s eyes the morning before a rough mid-district drop-off; darkening the alleys, despite the Van’s headlights and the orange lights overhead; darkening the woods next to the highway, with darker shadows hiding within.

Wolf calls Elena a dreamer. He grew up in a world with animals, if not in abundance, then at least with diversity: not just deer but elk and moose and even bison; songbirds, each with their own charming music; butterflies in every color of the rainbow and even some beyond our own perception. The now roaming packs of wild dogs and coyote hybrids once ran alongside such ignoble predators as wolves, mountain lions, and bears. Rats and mice were joined by squirrels with fluffy tails, groundhogs, prairie dogs. Enormous herbivores, like rhinos and elephants, grew huge on nothing but grass and leaves.

“Nah,” he corrects Elena. “Rhinos were extinct by the time I was born.”

It’s not like they’re all gone, but whatever’s left just isn’t all that great. Cockroaches and blowflies; rats the size of your head; wild dogs and hybrids; kudzu and prickly thistle. The very same feral cats that hunted small birds and mammals to extinction. Elena has never even seen a reptile, or an amphibian.

She might be a dreamer, but she’s pretty sure the world she is growing up in is a nightmare.

. . .

Wolf can remember seeing an elephant at the zoo once, when he was just a little kid. He remembers cotton candy and the smell of sunscreen, and Tia lifting him up onto her shoulders so he could see past the crowds. The elephant was a great wrinkled grey thing, but alone in the zoo it looked so small. The keeper wielded a heavy iron hook and gave the elephant a whole watermelon. The elephant crushed it like a grape, watermelon exploding into fruit guts and juice gore. The zookeeper explained that elephants were extinct in the wild, and this was one of the last on the planet.

Wolf tried taking Elena to a zoo, once, when she was probably the same age, but she cried the entire time. She loved animals, had spent hours looking at pictures in an animal encyclopedia, pointing to each one and demanding to know what it was. Not just common name but Genus species, too. Wolf was useless at answering, distracted as he was by driving, so Elena was forced to teach herself how to read so she could decipher the names. Then she proceeded to memorize them all.

Wolf thought she would like to see animals in real life, but she couldn’t stand to see them caged up. There wasn’t a whole lot left, anyway – a box of monkeys, some bored looking hyenas, definitely no elephants. They left pretty quick, the $50 each ticket price gone down the drain, irking Wolf only a little.

One of the benefits of raising a kid on the road, Wolf has found, is the ability to visit things like libraries and parks and art museums; the wealth of the Inner Districts that are usually gatekept by the ability to afford the right zip code.

“We have no zip code,” he explains. “Ergo.”

The libraries are where Wolf gets his audiobooks in their dusty disused stacks of plastic cases. Sometimes they are even boxed up and tucked away in the basements, you just have to find them. Since he doesn’t have a library card for any city, let alone every city, he just trades them out, this for that. The librarians don’t have to know.

He especially likes listening to old science fiction, books from before even Tia’s time – when dreams of the future meant flying cars and space travel and new life in new civilizations. He found a box of paperbacks in the attic of her house one summer before his first (and only) year of high school. Real, physical books from the 20th century, musky and dusty. They were his abuelo’s, probably; he had been an English literature teacher, way back when. Wolf never got around to reading them, so he is always looking out for the titles, their familiar covers.

Prone to fighting and lacking any real interest or motivation, Wolf did poorly in school; he was classed as “barely literate” by his remedial English teacher. After Tia’s diagnosis he jumped at the opportunity to drop out and care for his dying aunt. Hers was the cancer afflicting an unfathomable percentage of the generation, caused by this or that virus; the one that resulted in a cold in most cases, but in others festered quietly in the lungs for years before metastasizing into a terminal cancer seemingly overnight. It was three years before a vaccine was developed.

Don’t think about the plague. Don’t think about the extinctions. Don’t think about the disappearing coastlines and the desert taking over the Midwest.

Just drive.

This is not a world Wolf would want to bring a child into, but he had little choice in the matter with regards to Elena. So, he tries to make it tolerable, driving her around the country to see the last vestiges of modern civilization, tucked safely away in the Inner Districts; and the last of the wilderness, mostly privately owned and expensive. He encourages her passions, her love for animals, her art, even her fits and mood swings.

He does not grade her worksheets.

When she is sixteen, Wolf attempts to teach Elena how to drive. It is not difficult with an electric Van; there are no sticks to manually shift, few other vehicles to contend with beyond the occasional long-haul truck that towers over them, rumbling like a monster on speed. Elena holds smoothly in the lane, foot perched over the pedals, speedometer pointing to a number at least five mph below the speed limit. Teaching someone how to drive is a lesson in patience, Wolf thinks, and also trust.

Then Elena screams, her foot slams on the brake; she swerves right, then left, over-correcting and Wolf is reminded painfully of the accident so many years ago when his head cracks against the passenger-side window. Then it is over, and no one is seriously harmed, but Elena is still sobbing in the driver’s seat, hands white against the steering wheel, incoherent.

“There... was...” she stutters. Wolf looks around desperately, the road empty for miles. “It was... It...” She is still sobbing, and Wolf leans over awkwardly, half hugging her, his other hand shifting the Van to park. Elena’s foot presses hard against the brake still. “In the road.”

A kitten, it turns out, a ball of asphalt-grey fluff splayed in the middle of the lane, too young to be alone; its eyes look like they only just opened in response to its near-death experience. The Van had travelled harmlessly over it, but the mother is half a smear on the road nearby, victim of some other vehicle. Elena cradles the kitten in the passenger seat, cooing as it mewls pathetically, and Wolf is once again reminded of That Day.

“They drove the hummingbirds extinct,” he reminds her.

“Not this one,” she purrs. She names it Adam, and their little Van gets a little more crowded. For the next few weeks, Elena dedicates herself to the tiny terror: waking through the night to feed him out of a little dropper, giggling as his tiny goblin ears wiggle in tune to the sucking; taking care each time to clean the sticky milk from his fur and rub him down with a warm, damp paper towel to stimulate bowel movements.

Adam grows quickly, from helpless round ball to scrawny, hyperactive kitten, overly fond of racing around the Van at three in the morning. The kitten’s rapid growth is reminiscent of baby Elena, who went from swallowed up by N-size clothing to nearly as tall as Wolf, already. His long fur makes Wolf sneeze.

Elena declines any further driving lessons. Although she does not mind living in the Van, she finds more and more she prefers the times when they have stopped, especially when they stop at a wilderness area. Elena truly enjoys walking, despite or maybe because of her initial delays as a car seat-bound toddler. She thinks that maybe she would be happy just walking around the country, as Wolf seems to enjoy driving it.

Keeping Adam and his razor-sharp claws safely tucked away in the Van, she wanders among the trees, straining to hear the song of the wild that she so clearly remembers. Increasingly, she finds the woods eerily silent. She has better luck finding animals in the cities: pigeons and sparrows squabble for scraps on the pavement, then scurry away at the CAW caw of a distant crow. Ducks occupy nearly every artificial water feature. Once, she swears she saw the orange glint of a fox, ducking down a back street behind some houses. It was probably just another cat.

The view outside the Van grows increasingly desolate.

. . .

Wolf spots the hitchhiker first; Elena has unfocused her eyes, allowing the brown and grey of the landscape before them blur into a dark void. There has been a wildfire recently, and the air is still tinged with smoke. At first Wolf is tense, but as they approach, he realizes it is tiny, just a child before them; no older than Elena. She has finally noticed the strange figure and is sitting up straight, straining to see, demanding Wolf pull over.

“No way,” “Not safe,” excuses tumble out of him before he can voice them. Somehow, the Van is slowing, pulling over. The hazard lights are flashing. “No!” Wolf shouts, but Elena is already out the door, racing towards the hitchhiker. He follows, barely faster than the girl, gets his body between them, just in case.

Just in case, what?

The kid is small and pale, wide blue eyes hidden behind thick glasses and curly hair that is light in both color and weight; it bounces around their skull as their head bobs.

Their face is utterly serious and their voice barely more than a whisper. “My name is Ozymandias,” they say. No kidding.

Chapter 2:

Ozymandias, who typically just goes by Oz, has a secret, one they have been living with for the entire twelve years, three months, and three days they have been on this Earth:

Oz lives with bees in their chest.

The bees live in their thoracic cavity, building comb with wax to fill the space between their lungs and heart. They fly in and out through a hole in their chest between the ribs, where the dry skin has folded inwards. They are not honey bees, but small, fuzzy, black things that Oz has yet to identify. The bees eat meat, mixing scavenged flesh with nectar in their stomachs and producing a sickly-sweet smelling paste that they feed to their larvae. They do not bother Oz; indeed, Oz has grown rather fond of them over the years.

Largely as a consequence of this secret, Oz has never met another person their age before now. They were raised in an isolated mountain cabin by their mother (who was gone more often than not) and grandmother, and indeed Oz has met very few people at all. The girl before them now is taller than them; her coppery skin is darker, her eyes a stormy grey, her hair short and black and straight. She is the opposite of Oz in nearly every visual way, but looks vaguely similar to their grandmother, who was part Inupiaq Native Alaskan. Like many tribal names, Inupiat simply means, “the people.”

Oz’s grandmother lived during a time when there was snow in the Arctic Circle. Not just the light dusting it gets now, or the freezing rain that coats everything in thin sheets of glass, but true, thick white flakes that never melted and blanketed the ground in stacked layers from September to May at least.

“Arctic comes from the Greek word ἄρκτος,” Oz explains, tracing the invisible Greek on the table, trying to ignore the queasiness in their stomach, the angry buzzing in their chest. They have never travelled inside a vehicle before – they sit on a bench at a folding melamine table, a lap belt drawn loosely across their thighs, which they do not think will protect them in the event of a crash. “It means ‘bear,’ so that the Arctic is bear-land, and the Antarctic is no-bear-land. But technically, the entire world is a no-bear-land, because bears went extinct.” Oz has a tendency to ramble.

Their grandmother remembers snow in the Arctic because she lived there, not exactly there but near enough that it still snowed every winter. She grew up in a town called Nome, at the tip of a peninsula that is now buried underwater. She lived far enough south that the endless Arctic winter nights weren’t; even on the solstice, nighttime was broken up by a few hours of thin, watery daylight. Or, if you were nocturnal, the endless summer days were broken up by a few hours of thin, watery darkness.

Nome was the endpoint of an annual dog-sled race called the Iditarod, which started in 1973, before even Oz’s grandmother was born, and ended when the permafrost melted one summer and never returned. Oz’s grandmother, Miss Pearl Marie, was the last champion dog racer.

The legend behind the Iditarod is: in 1925, the coldest winter in twenty years, there was an outbreak of diphtheria in Nome. The only treatment was an antitoxin serum, but the town had run out. Teams of dog sleds carried the serum across the state of Alaska, over 600 miles, in less than a week.

“The worst part is Balto is famous for it, even though he only ran the last 50 miles or so. Another dog named Togo ran over five times further, but no one’s ever heard of him.” Oz scoffs as though personally insulted by the lack of recognition for Togo.

Elena, who has heard of neither Balto nor Togo, remains silent, feeling odd sitting next to the strange child at the table instead of her usual spot in the passenger seat. From the front, Wolf, who has heard of Balto but not Togo, also elects not to share this information. He is still wary of this hitchhiker, who is definitely too young to hitchhike, and who is still vague on their destination.

“I just need a library,” they had declared upon boarding the Van, lugging a duffle bag nearly as big as they are. They seemed unaware of where they were currently, and reticent about where they had come from. They avoid eye contact and mumble quite a lot.

“Where is your gran now, kid?” Wolf calls back, glancing in the rearview mirror, which is really only there for show – there are no back windows to view. It is angled towards the table, which the hitchhiker is staring at intently as they tap rhythmically with their fingers. They have a loose silver bracelet draped on their wrist, dangling charms ringing as they tap.

“She died,” they reply, voice flat, “four days ago.” Now they are terse, interest in the conversation lost.

Oz’s grandmother had been old, and they both knew it was coming, ever since the day she collapsed, crumpled to the ground in the bathroom. When she awoke her face was half-frozen, her arm and leg weak and useless, and Oz had to half carry her to her bed, which she never left. On the last day, Oz held her hand, cold and bloodless under skin as grey and delicate as wood ash; listened as her voice faded, her clouded eyes slackened, her pulse fluttered weaker and weaker until it was gone. Then Oz was alone in the cabin, save for the bees; but no one can know about those.

Elena wants to touch their hand, to ease the constant tapping with perhaps some comfort, but they quickly withdraw, cringing away from the air of touch. Without the tapping, she notices a strange sound coming from the younger child, as though they are humming softly. “Do you have anyone else?” she asks.

“Po disappeared,” some months ago (5 months, 17 days). Doctor Elizabeth Opal Miller: climate scientist and environmental activist. Even Wolf has heard of her, if only by infamy - Opal Miller is public enemy number one in the eyes of the oil oligarchs. Her disappearance has not yet made it to the mainstream media.

Opal, Po, Dr. Miller, has played a variable and fleeting role in Oz’s upbringing; she was rarely home, work taking her across the country from one environmental disaster to the next. It is possible she has never gotten over the shock of giving birth to such an unwanted pregnancy, or of her baby becoming host to some species of scavenger bee. Most of Oz’s memories of her consist of goodbyes: hugs and kisses they resented; eternally packed luggage; Po driving away on her electric motorcycle, red hair like flames flying behind her helmet. She will be back again with yet another charm for Oz’s bracelet.

At their last goodbye, the bees swarmed all over her, biting and injecting her with their potent digestive enzymes that felt like acid under her skin. She intended only to be gone for a few weeks; a month at most. She definitely did not intend to miss Oz’s birthday.

Three months in, grandmother started dying. A sudden, rapid decline from: gardening, foraging, bird finding with Oz; canning fruits in the overheated kitchen; carving extinct owls out of pine by the fire stove; to: collapsed on the hardwood floor; pale, wheezing, slurring her words; her body sinking into itself. Grandmother, who had adopted a feisty and troubled teenage Po from foster care; who had encouraged her throughout her rebellion and occasional criminal behavior; who had built their cabin to keep Ozymandias safe from whomever might harm them; who kept the gardens growing and the chickens clucking.

This trauma, Wolf understands well: for two months, young Oz spoon-fed their grandmother broth; whisked away soiled blankets; listened to whispered wheezing. Too young, by far, to be alone now.

“Why a library, then?” Wolf asks. They are nearing a city, and he is uncomfortably close to having to make a decision about the child.

“Research,” Oz says. There is no internet connection on the mountain, and their prized possessions, a full set of encyclopedias and other reference books, most over a decade old, do not provide the information they are looking for.

“Maybe we could help?” It’s a lie: Wolf can barely read. Elena can help, if the question is about animals.

“Animals?” Oz is interested again. Kids – they always want what they can’t have. It turns out Oz has seen more birds than Elena, her face growing increasingly distraught as they list over a dozen species. A perk of living in the middle of nowhere, they suppose.

It doesn’t pass Wolf’s notice that Oz never answered the question about what they were researching.

Against Wolf’s better judgement, they end up leaving the hitchhiker at the public library as asked. Oz went straight to a line of computers in the back; Elena showed them the browser, the search bar, the keyboard.

Then: “Thank you. Bye.” They stare blankly at the computer screen, unmoving stone. They don’t even begin their search until Wolf and Elena have walked away.

Oz forces themselves to ignore the abundance of books stacked on the shelves towering around them; they are here to find certain facts, then they will go home.

The first search: “scavenger bees” is surprisingly fruitful, once they figure out how to scroll past ads for: Hot Single Ladies in your area, Tonic Cream for Arthritis, Energy Drinks with extra vitamins. Vulture bees fit the description exactly, though they lived in Central America and haven’t been seen in decades. Not in the Field Guide to North American Insects, then, which Oz had read early on, trying to identify their bees.

Next, to find the owner of the oil company that intends to build a pipeline straight through Oz’s forest. They know the company name from a letterhead, sent the old-fashioned way to their mailbox several miles from the cabin. It was on grandmother’s bedside table, the words “eminent domain” and “easement” both easily interpreted with the help of Oz’s reference books. A solution to this issue, however, is not so readily available, and knowing more about Armor Inc. does nothing to ease the tension in Oz’s chest.

Finally: email. Oz signs up through the first website in the search results, which happens to be the search provider. They know Po has one, finds it easily through her professional profile, but will she respond? Can she? Elena parted with her email address scrawled in fine spidery handwriting on a yellow sticky note, so Oz emails her, too. They type slowly, searching for each letter before pecking it with a single finger. Their chest buzzes – the bees are upset, first cooped up in the Van, now here in the library. Soon we will leave, they promise.

——————————————————————————————————————-

From: ozy1618003@gmail.com

To: miller_po@climatejustice.org

Subject: grandmother

Po, I hope this email reaches you. I need to tell you that grandmother has died. I think it was a stroke. It fit many of the symptoms from the Merck Manual.

Please come home.

——————————————————————————————————————-

From: ozy1618003@gmail.com

To: elena_d33r@gmail.com

Subject: birds

Elena, one of my favorite birds from the forest is called the mountain bluebird. Apparently they are extinct but grandmother and I have both seen a pair nesting not far from our cabin.

Do you like insects?

Sincerely,

Ozymandias

Chapter 3:

Raven stretches out in the grass on a hill just outside the library. The spring air is cool, but the sun is warm on her skin. Her magpie, Nirvana, is stalking a target. A fool! the bird chirrups in her head, gleeful. Smells weird. The comment gives Raven pause – do birds have a sense of smell? Then again, she can smell it, too - some sickly-sweet odor carried on the breeze.

Raven is blind; missing her right eye entirely, the other destroyed by the subsequent radiation and chemotherapy that nearly claimed her life when she was a toddler. She can see colors and light and shadows, but only in the daylight, and the dark glasses she wears block most of that out. The magpie, however, has exceptional vision; he relays the sights in bits and pieces with the typical attention deficit of a corvid. Yellow hair, Ka-kaw-ka. Child!

From the giggles, Raven knows the child is younger than her, and that they find the bird amusing; at some point, they even share some food, which prompts another round of Fool! Fool! from Nirvana. Raven stands and retreats, trotting down the hill away from the library. The distance severs her connection to the magpie, but she doesn’t need it: she can hear the target shout, “Hey!”, knows Nirvana has found something valuable, something worth chasing for. Raven deftly slips into an alley down the street. It smells of rot and ash, but she crouches behind a dumpster, waiting, listening.

Nirvana crows in delight as he flits down the street, curving into the alley at the last second. He drops something cold, metal in Raven’s lap – a bracelet? It goes straight to her leggings pocket. The footsteps of his pursuer are heavy, lopsided, as though they are lugging something very heavy.

Bag on left. Nirvana is perched on a low wall, crowing and preening, and the target doesn’t even notice Raven as they approach. When the footsteps are close enough the magpie takes off again, and Raven barrels into the distracted target, knocking them down before grabbing the duffel bag and running.

At first, is a disappointing haul: the heft of the duffel bag turns out to be several heavy, hardbacked reference books, like a collection of dictionaries. Clothing, food wrapped in waxed cloth like it was homemade. Then Raven finds a wad of cash tucked in a pair of socks: a consolation prize. She gives the food to Nirvana, then leaves the rest on the sidewalk. Maybe someone else could use the clothes; the books might make good fuel for a barrel fire. She follows Nirvana home, fingering the charms on the stolen bracelet as she tries to identify them: a bird, an insect, something with too many legs, a frog?

Home for Raven is a row house sandwiched between a dozen identical others in the Middle District, where lights out starts at 8:00 PM daily and extends a full 12 hours into the morning. Not just lights, but all electricity, the entire neighborhood blanketed in darkness; windows open in the heat of summer, wood fireplaces if you’re lucky for winter. Neither effort is enough to cut through the temperature extremes.

The thing that sets her home apart is the meticulously maintained solar panels on the roof, installed by her older sister Charlie, who needs the extra electricity for her questionably legal online activities. The lights provide little benefit to Raven, who doesn’t bother searching the walls for switches, nor to Charlie, whose room is always lit only by the screens of her monitors; but the power banks keep her servers running through the night, which is what matters.

The computers provide heat, too, a bonus not extended to the rest of the house. Raven shivers in the kitchen, hands rifling through the pantry for something to eat, landing on half a pack of biscuits and a jar of peanut butter. She throws a couple of bills into the grocery fund jar on the counter, keeping the rest of the stack for herself. Nirvana is perched next to it, pecking at a bruised and overripe apple that reeks of ethylene. Fifty, he purrs, pleased to remember the numbers.

Raven hesitates. “All of them?” she asks out loud, fanning the bills. The magpie squawks his affirmative. She thumbs through the bills quickly, counting under her breath – if they’re all fifties, she stole over $2000 from some kid. “Shit.” She tucks the bills into her hoodie pocket, darts up the stairs to her room before Charlie can wander down and ask about them. A hundred bucks is more than enough contribution for the day.

She opens the window, inviting in a smog-tainted evening breeze as well as a pair of cooing doves. They are a dull but loving pair, incapable of communicating in anything more than bursts of emotion and psychic color. Nirvana chitters at the irritating things, but Raven finds them peaceful; they keep nightmares away in exchange for a biscuit broken up into crumbs.

Raven lays down on her old, decaying spring mattress and puts in her earbuds. She presses the play button on her ancient mp3 player; the screen is cracked, but she has no need for it. She listens to all her music, most of it decades old, on random; the volume turned up high enough to drown out the noises of the dying city outside.

. . .

Oz, sheltered as they are, is quite unaware of the depths of their loss financially, but they acutely feel the pain of losing the other contents of the duffle bag – particularly the reference books: Mercks Manual, A Field Guide to Edible Flora, Roadmaps and Highways, Traveler’s Guide: USA. And the bracelet, which held nearly a dozen tiny silver charms, each shaped like a different animal; an annual gift from Po. It was not worth anything, but a magpie wouldn’t have been able to resist something so shiny. Though this is the first time they have seen a magpie, Oz is acutely aware of the trickster nature of the corvids near their cabin. They can forgive the bird who tricked them, but not the girl who took their things. Had the bird really lured them to their attacker?

The missing cash poses a different problem entirely: Oz had intended to purchase a cell phone, so they could continue to check their email outside of the library. They did not know how much one would cost, but it was certainly more than they have now. They have found a place to sit: a bench surrounded by carefully pruned deciduous trees and dry, yellowing grass cut too short. The vulture bees are content, for now; there are flowers nearby, a carcass of some animal they have never seen before. Oz is considering their next steps. Without cash, without their clothing or snacks, without even their reference books to guide them, they are lost. This adventure feels increasingly ill-advised; they have solved nothing, except, perhaps, the species of the bees living in their chest.

They have done a great deal of New Things in just a few days, and the weight of it all collapses in on them at once. With no next steps in mind, no way to check for a response from Po, or Elena, Oz starts sinking into themselves, numb to the darkening sky and the cold breeze promising a frigid spring night. They pull their legs up and fold their body in half, making it as small as possible. The vulture bees have returned from their foraging and cluster together inside their chest, vibrating to keep warm, while Oz sits on the bench, still like stone, and thinks.

. . .

Elena recognizes the duffle bag that has been abandoned on the street corner, although it is too generic to know for sure until she has looked inside. The zipper gapes open, as though it has been rifled through, but the only things inside are plain clothing and a stack of heavy, hardcovered books. Of course that strange hitchhiking teenager would travel with reference books, why not? But then, why would they abandon their things right here? Elena can’t tell if anything is missing; she worries Oz has been mugged, or scammed, or kidnapped.

She takes the duffle bag back to the Van, where Wolf is finishing a drop-off. “Why did we let the effin’ kid go?” Clearly sheltered, first time in a city, oh, anything could happen to a kid. They drive back to the library, but by now it is closed. Elena’s phone pings too late with an email: nothing but a comment about a bird, which was sent several hours ago already. She taps out a response.

——————————————————————————————————————-

To: ozy1618003@gmail.com

From: elena_d33r@gmail.com

Subject: re: birds

Huh? I found your duffle bag - are you okay? Where are you staying tonight?

——————————————————————————————————————-

Wolf finds a lot at a nearby park that is neatly hidden in shadows to park the Van overnight, promising Elena she can return to the library in the morning to attempt to find their hitchhiker. Unbeknownst to everyone involved, it is the same park where Oz still sits on their bench, unmoving through the night.

Chapter 4:

Elena finds Oz still as a statue the next morning, sitting legs crossed on a dewy metal bench. Their lips are tinged blue, their skin somehow even paler, so at first, she fears she is approaching a corpse. The bench they sit on is bathed in early morning sunlight, and their plain shirt is dotted with some sort of insect, dozens of little black bodies sitting still in the chill. When she goes to brush them off, Oz’s hand suddenly moves and grabs her wrist, startling her.

“Let them be,” they say, releasing her gently. They are breathing slowly, shallowly, but sitting in the sun, warm blood slowly returns the feeling to their fingers. Sitting outside like this, all night, was a Bad Idea, Oz knows, and they would be in trouble for it if they had done this at the cabin with grandmother. They push the thought away; they cannot afford to freeze up again. The vulture bees climb on their shirt to soak in the heat, using the morning sun to kickstart their hive activity. Elena must notice.

She does, shivering on the bench next to Oz, but she does not say anything about the strange insects that swarm over them. She would never guess the truth - she assumes they are flies, attracted to that peculiar smell; like something sweet just about to go bad. The hitchhiker probably just needs a shower. Then again, as she looks closer at the insects, she can see: four wings, linked together, rather than the single pair of wings carried by flies.

“They’re bees!” she exclaims. Oz looks down at their shirt, the fuzzy black things heating their wings in the sun. Bees are a rarity, especially in cities, except maybe sweat bees and the occasional honeybee that wandered away from its managed orchard. They are surprised Elena could recognize them so quickly.

“They don’t sting, but they bite,” they say, finally. “It will blister.” Though they are stingless bees, their bite and saliva are meant to partially digest meat; Oz has never experienced the blisters they cause, but they certainly look painful, and grandmother called it “excruciating.”

They are still slow in the morning chill. Elena lightly touches her finger against Oz’s shirt, careful not to brush their skin, letting one of the bees crawl onto her finger. This is the first time she’s seen any insect so close; she is enthralled by its pulsating abdomen, wagging antennae, prickly red hairs. After a moment it buzzes its wings and takes off.

“They are vulture bees,” Oz offers, but Elena doesn’t recognize the name and doesn’t pull out her phone to look it up. She watches Oz as they close their eyes, bathing in the warm red light filtered through their eyelids.

Po always referred to Oz’s bees as a capital-P Problem, brandishing it as a generic excuse any time Oz asked why they must stay at the cabin while she travels across the country. “We can’t have them finding out about your Problem,” she would hiss, ending the conversation. She believed They would take Oz; They referring to some vague, faceless conglomerate of government military scientists with a particular interest in little children with an infestation of bees in their chest. Unfortunately, she is not far off base.

Grandmother had always been more accepting of Oz and their bees, and not just because she had to, as any parental figure must accept and love and nurture their children or their children’s children, regardless of whatever issues they present with. Instead, grandmother celebrated it, elevating Oz’s bees to a spiritual level; animal transformations were a common theme in her childhood bedtime stories, and always a sign of someone special.

Whatever Oz’s particular affliction, it was a gift. The problem, lower-case p, comes from the Others, here referring to some vague, faceless conglomerate of regular citizens with limited spiritual context. “They just wouldn’t understand,” she would say, shaking her head. She said the same thing about Oz’s pronouns, their early decision to eschew gender entirely.

Once a year or so, Oz would ride on the back of Po’s electric bike to the closest town, where Oz saw the only doctor in their life: a kind old optometrist with white hairs growing out of his ears, who never examined their chest and never knew of the bees. He just asked Oz to read blurry letters on a chart and prescribed glasses that were never quite strong enough.

Afterwards, Po would treat them to some overly sweet treat like ice cream or soda and candy. Oz would grimace through the sensations, their teeth feeling gritty, but the bees adore sugar almost as much as they love fresh meat; Oz secretly spilled some or most of it in the grass for them. Then they would reluctantly trail along behind Po at the grocer, cringing under the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, as she picks up a few essential items; only what could fit in the two side bags on her bike.

Twice a year, Po would rent a truck to stock up on what grandmother and Oz couldn’t grow themselves: oats and flour, sugar, cooking oil, nuts and dried tropical fruits from thousands of miles away. They lived well, despite their isolation. Oz was no longer allowed to join her on these runs. Not since The Time when they were tiny, their emotions a chaotic storm. Then, they lacked the words to express that terrible anxiety in their chest, that overburden of sensory stimulation, and instead they just screamed and lost control of the bees in an explosive swarm.

No. Better for Oz to stay with grandmother in the cabin, better for Oz to keep the bees a secret weight in their chest.

Warmer now, looking towards Elena who is watching them, Oz wonders for the first time if this is true, this need for secrecy and shame. They have finally thawed enough to stand, and the bees have dispersed, so they trudge along behind Elena to the Van.

. . .

“Well, that was easy,” Wolf muses upon their arrival. What to do next, though, less so; he nearly lost the kid to the city once, he doesn’t want to let that happen again. He hands the duffle bag over to Oz. Except for the cash, they are pleased to see everything remains, the books unharmed. No, the food, too, was missing; suddenly they are ravenous, too hungry to object to the overly sweet pastries Elena has to offer.

“Uhm, so,” Wolf continues, “We’ve got to get going. I got a pickup scheduled tonight, five-hour drive, you know.” Does this hitchhiker, this stranger, this child want to come with them? Elena holds her breath; she wants to talk to them more, ask about their cabin and the birds.

Oz shrugs. “Do you have a cell phone?”

Half a dozen, as it turns out – don’t ask Wolf where he got them. Even Elena is surprised to see the secret stash of fully functional, untraceable technology; she thought he only dealt in trash. She helps Oz log in to their email, which is empty except for her response from last night. Nothing at all from Po. Oz shows her the website where they had gotten the email address; it was something Po had shown them years ago, on a laptop with a satellite connection. It was the only communication accessible to the cabin, and she always took it with her when she left.

Elena considers the website, the outdated portrait. “Give me a sec,” she says, knocking Adam out of the passenger seat so she can sit, lean back, put her feet on the dashboard without regard to Wolf’s objections. The young cat, upon seeing Oz, hisses at them, spits, then darts behind the velvet curtain at the back of the Van.

Still tapping her thumbs on her phone, Elena looks up, remarks, “That was weird.”

“Cats don’t like me,” they reply. Incongruous to their character, for sure; Oz has met a few cats in the past, all feral, all violently repelled by the bees and their acidic bites. They refrain from explaining this out loud.

“Aha!” Elena’s exclamation fills the ensuing silence: she has found several potential emails for Elizabeth Opal Miller, PhDs in Climate Studies & Ecology, including one from a university Oz has never heard of, does she teach? Then: an Xbook account for one “Liz Po,” who has a generic personality but undeniable flaming red hair.

Oz stares at the profile picture, the smile that even reaches Po’s eyes. So that’s what she looks like, they think.

They send an identical message to each email but are flummoxed by the Xbook account. Elena snatches the phone from them and creates an account using the name “Oz Phi” within minutes. She twists around in the passenger seat to snap a photo, a candid and pensive shot. In the picture, a single black bee sits on their shoulder.

Chapter 5:

Raven never wanted to be a thief, but life’s circumstances gave her little option. Charlie demands rent, but less than half, and it is a far superior alternative to her stepdad’s proposed method of recuperating the funds lost to her upbringing.

The official channels consider Raven unemployable: she’s too young, sure, a drop-out, but that doesn’t usually stop them, at least not when the potential underage employee is sighted. But she would be far too much a liability at the slaughterhouses, the factories, the recycling centers known to employ kids.

And with Nirvana, it’s just too easy; they’ve been working together for three years, the magpie delighted to pickpocket from suits in exchange for some food and a relatively warm, safe room at night. Raven has attempted this collaboration with other birds in the past, including her namesake, but Nirvana is cleverer than the rest. She suspects he was already a thief before they met.

Two thousand dollars, though, feels excessive to take from any one person, let alone a kid younger than herself. Not that she has any inclination to return it, but she knows someone who could benefit from at least some of it, and the windfall has left her feeling somewhat generous. She pulls out four of the bills, verifying the number on each with Nirvana. The rest she tucks into a slit in her mattress. She slips the bracelet on her wrist, but she suspects it is worthless, no precious metals.

Raven can hear Charlie snoring from her room as she creeps past. Her sister is always up late into the night, through early morning, time zones meaningless in the global web. She is generally mum about her online activities, as Raven is silent about how she spends her days. Questions, and the ensuing answers, whether she opts to reveal lies or the truth, just complicate things.

Raven’s Mid-District neighborhood is largely paved, and the sidewalks are decently maintained, at least until snow comes. She has little trouble navigating it without the assistance of a cane or seeing-eye-bird. She wears heavy boots, primarily to avoid frequently stubbing her toes or stepping on glass; especially in the Outer District, where sidewalks (when they exist) serve as dumping grounds for sharps and glass.

It is there she is headed now: the Outer District, where warehouses and factories are permitted to produce fumes all night long and the air is constantly tinged with smog that buns and tastes like battery acid; but Off-Hours for households extends for 14 hours or more overnight, and brownouts are common during the day. Raven knows the place well; she grew up here.

Here is where Raven’s friend still lives: Nat, screenname Hatch, is the child prodigy behind the global hacktivist group YakAttak, of which her sister also a member. But if Charlie knew that her idol Hatch was actually squirrely little Nat, whom she used to babysit, she would lose it. Scratch that; if anyone knew Hatch was a teenager named Nat, the entire world would lose it.

Raven can smell Nat’s house before she even turns down the street, the ammonia of cat piss almost indistinguishable from a nearby methamphetamine lab. Nat’s father: alcoholic, sufferer of chronic pain, hoarder, and cat collector, is probably the least disreputable person on the street. The horde of cats and the hoard of trash and junk scattered around keeps the burglars away, at least. Even the magpie Nirvana refuses to go inside the house that is overrun by the nearly feral predators, but he loves to taunt them outside, swooping down to nip at their tails, already out of reach before they even have a chance to extend their claws, Kek keK.

“Careful, I need you,” she calls out to him, searching with her fingers for the key in the empty flowerpot, as usual. She knows Nat’s house better than she knows her own childhood home, which is just down the street. It didn’t used to be so dank, or cluttered; there didn’t used to be so many cats. Most of them, now, are just strays that have wandered in, but the original, Ash, is probably still around here, somewhere.

Raven removes her heavy boots as soon as she enters, stepping softly in socked feet on the hardwood floors. There is no need to be quiet around Nat’s father, who is passed out on the couch in the front room; but it is important to avoid accidentally stepping on a cat’s tail – they absolutely do not enjoy that. The television is off; not only is there no sound, but no characteristic buzzing from the screen, so the power is still out, then.

Nat’s room is down the hallway, to the left; a bathroom in the middle; Lionel’s room on the right. The door is closed and completely silent when Raven opens it, because Nat oils the hinges. His is the cleanest room in the house, bar none; it is practically desolate, no more than a bed, a closet, and a side table. There’s little chance of Raven knocking into something here.

Nat is sprawled out on his bed; she can hear him snoring. Unless something dramatic has changed, his laptop is still open next to him, the battery having died sometime overnight. It must be hard, being an elite hacker, placed two grades above your age, so you’re swamped with homework, and you don’t even have power half the time because your dad doesn’t work and won’t move to a better neighborhood.

Nat goes to an elite private school on scholarship, nearly an hour away by bus in the Inner District. At school they call him Natalie and insist he wears the uniform, too-short skirt and all. But they can’t do anything about his short hair, because he is Black; nor his binder, which isn’t really any different from a bra, anyway.

Raven is glad to have dropped out of school when she did, but Nat has dreams of making the world a better place.

“Get up, I got something for you,” she says, kicking Nat’s leg, which is dangling over the edge of the bed. He groans, grabbing for his blanket, but when she tosses the bills on his chest, he sits up to examine them.

“You only owe me one-fifty,” he says, examining the bills skeptically. No one walks around with anything higher than a twenty, except maybe in the Inner District. Somewhere, a cat meows.

“I was feeling generous.” Raven flops over onto his bed, disturbing a cat or two, which dart out of the room. Nat has gotten up, is rummaging through his closet, probably getting dressed. “I got it from this weird kid at the library.”

She explains the strange target, Nirvana’s comment about their scent. There are no secrets between them; Nat knows about Raven’s connection to birds just as well as she knows about how he sleeps piled with cats to keep warm during the powerless winter nights. She dangles the bracelet in front of his face and describes the stolen duffle bag; not a normal thing to take to a library, except, she supposes, when it is filled with books.

“Do you think the kid stole the books?” she asks, suddenly excited. A book thief? Maybe they were rare publications, priceless editions. Maybe she should regret leaving them there on that street corner. Nat doesn’t answer, distracted by his laptop. The power has turned on; Raven can feel the charger heat up under her leg. In the continuing silence, she sits up, serious. “What’s wrong?”

Nat is reading the news, shrugs, not that she could possibly know. Slowly, he looks up at his friend. He can see himself in her dark glasses. “Kennedy Yates,” he says. The name isn’t familiar. “It’s my mom.”

Nat only knows this after gaining access to his sealed birth records a few weeks ago; his father signed an NDA, promising to never speak about the illegitimate child in exchange for monthly child support payments. It was just enough to pay for their house and put food in the cabinets; they have no fridge, for obvious reasons. With Kennedy Yates for a mom, though, he shouldn’t be here; he should be living in a mansion in the Inner Districts – she is the heiress of an oil fortune, CEO of a leading AI developer, multi-billionaire capitalist extraordinaire.

“In that case, I’ll take that extra fifty back,” Raven says. She’s only joking. Mostly.

The news is: billionaire Kennedy Yates has disappeared; she was last seen with infamous climate extremist Dr. Po Miller, who also has not been heard from. Nat scrolls through the feed, the forums, the encrypted chatrooms. No one knows where either of them could be.

Chapter 6:

As usual, Wolf arrives early to his destination: a tiny mountain town, nearly abandoned, with its own overfull landfill reeking of methane. He gave himself all day to complete a drive that should only take four or five hours, depending on weather, traffic, and the persistence of state patrols. Although he’s a registered courier, his paperwork isn’t always 100 percent, and Elena’s is non-existent; and now there’s Oz, who is sleeping peacefully sprawled out on the bench, bent awkwardly around the lap belt. Better to not get stopped, avoid an unnecessary search. Elena keeps darting looks back at their hitchhiker; she’s drawing them, sketching out the scene in charcoal.

They stop, as usual, at a rest area outside their destination, and, as usual, Elena is out the door before the Van is even turned off. “Would you believe, for the longest time she refused to learn how to walk?” Wolf chuckles at Oz, who is blearily rubbing their eyes, frizzy blond hair crumpled at the back.

Wolf had tried everything to convince young Elena to walk: driving only at night, while Elena was, ostensibly, asleep, so she could be free from the carseat during the sleepless days. Stopping at rest areas, campgrounds, renting hotel rooms, trial memberships at Mommy & Me gyms in the middle of some swanky Inner-City.

“She has your eyes,” white moms would croon, though the only commonality between them is that they are both dark. In fact, their eyes are probably their most different feature; Elena’s are grey to Wolf’s light brown, and the shape is entirely different.

Wolf once resorted to plopping the reluctant toddler in the middle of a campsite, trying to lure her over with real chocolate. He’d hoped that the gravel on her knees would discourage crawling. It was textures Elena hated: sand, grass, gravel, pavement. She would curl her chubby toddler legs away from the ground, climb up his arms to get away from it. She could feel a grain of sand in her shoe. Instead of walking, she just ambled over on hands and feet like an awkward fawn.

Oz is anxious to get outside, but they also have to pee. The Van’s bathroom is little more than a locker, and when they sit on the toilet, their knees almost come up to their chest. They brush their teeth, wash their face in the sink, and a few bees cluster around the tiny, screened window overhead. Adam hisses as they emerge, and they have to duck around to dodge his claws.

It is drizzling outside, rendering the solar panels on top of the Van fairly useless, so Wolf has to charge it from a plug. They have gained altitude, and the thinner air makes Oz’s head feel light. Elena sits perched at a picnic table nearby, staring intently into a dense wood. “Have you ever seen a deer?” she asks Oz as they approach.

“Not exactly,” they admit.

Elena sighs. “Not even in the middle of nowhere?”

“I have seen their prints.” Two pointed hooves per foot, curved slightly inward. If she ever finds her way to the cabin, Oz will show her a treasure: a pair of shed antlers, stunted and blunt, as though the stag had evolved specifically to avoid trophy hunters. Elena grins at this, and Oz wonders at how easily she can smile.

“Let’s explore,” she says, off the bench before they can answer. They walk in silence; occasionally, a distant bird chirps, and Elena attempts to whistle back, but she is not very good. Oz never figured out whistling, either. Eventually they find themselves in a field dotted with early-season dandelions. The rain has let up to just mist, and Oz’s blonde hair sticks up in every direction, collecting it like dew. They sit underneath a deciduous tree, pants soaking in the damp ground.

“There’s another one!” Elena exclaims, suddenly: a black bee, buzzing away from Oz towards the flowers. And another, and it is clear they are following her new friend. “What did you call them, vulture bees?”

Now is the time; the floodgates open, and Oz has no choice but to dump their entire history on Elena’s lap. The bees, how they’ve grown and thrived in their chest, how the thoughts of the hive feel so intuitively connected to their own. Elena sits quietly, listening; when Oz lifts their shirt to reveal a gaping gash, dry bone ribs above and below, she peers in, watches bees crawling in and out. Her finger traces over the long-healed wound, just barely not touching them.

When they have finished, Elena reveals her own strange connection to nature: Wolf’s story of her birth, her chance encounter and continuing quest to locate the herd. Though both stories sound absurd, there is no denying Oz’s bees; nor do they question Elena’s belief in her origin. It is absolutely something their grandmother would believe. Shared strange connections to nature revealed, Elena and Oz feel infinitely closer; they sit together in peaceful silence, Oz watching their bees, Elena sketching the woods around them with charcoal. The occasional bird chirps, which Oz identifies as a robin.

“They nest near the cabin,” they explain. “The eggs are blue.” Elena pictures sky blue, indigo, but it’s lighter, greener.

“So, like your eyes,” she says. Oz’s eyes are hard to appreciate, hidden behind thick glasses, and they are reluctant to make eye contact, preferring to look away, stare past Elena’s shoulder, fixate on the sky, anything but her own eyes. They are pale blue, almost silver; the color of ghosts. Po’s are also blue, but darker, competing with her red hair for attention in her profile pictures. Grandmother’s were grey, then cloudy white, then empty, yellowing, decaying.

“I guess. I’ve never really seen them.” They’ve never taken a picture, never looked in a mirror? No, they avoid it entirely. Elena can’t imagine such a life; her phone is filled with images of herself, which she often picks through critically, looking for every flaw. She is overweight; her hair is coarse and wiry; she picks at blemishes, leaving pitted scars on her skin. And Oz has no idea what color their eyes are.

When the sky starts to darken, they walk back through the woods together towards the Van. As they approach the rest area, Oz’s phone pings twice: two messages, and they are from Po.

Liz Po: Help ozy. VJPFASKYCRTOUGLDXNIEGBMWQZBH

Liz Po: find hatch

Chapter 7:

Nat is grateful for Raven’s company, and he is even more grateful for the repayment of her debt, plus the extra funds. The bus four days a week into the Inner District is expensive, and so are computer parts. Nat purchases them under the table, with cash, from a warehouse nearby. It is a sketchy place in a bad neighborhood, not that there are any good neighborhoods to compare it to, with illegal workers to fix and rebuild antique e-waste with scavenged parts.

The refurbished tablets and phones are resold to people who desire tech that isn’t hardwired to the government’s Big Brother network. People like Nat, aka Hatch: the anonymous hacker almost single-handedly responsible for billions of dollars in damages to Big Oil companies.

Hatch is probably the last person to have spoken to the missing climate activist Dr. Po. Breaking his usual strict rule of ‘no phone calls,’ voice artificially deepened, he told her nothing more than a string of letters; they couldn’t be written down, not digitally, not without incriminating Nat personally. The scientist’s high, dry voice repeated the string, confirmed, then ended the call.

That’s it. Nothing else. What Po Miller decides to do with the code is out of Nat’s hands; but kidnapping one of the most famous women in the country? It doesn’t sound like her, and he struggles to see how she could use it to advance their goal, which is: stop fossil fuels, generally.

So what if Kennedy Yates had benefited from oil wealth her entire life, she wasn’t now, right? She had pivoted to technology, machine learning, artificial intelligence with her company DataLess. She was even investing some of that money in renewable energy.

Raven scoffs; even Nat knows that isn’t exactly true. No one accumulates billions of dollars in wealth without stepping on a lot of faces in the process, and the energy required just to run one of DataLess’s AI learning models is astronomical. The renewable investments are to reduce the cost of running their massive server farms, which are also draining and polluting water sources all over the country.

“I get it, my genes suck,” Nat concedes. As far as he can tell, Kennedy Yates had carried Nat to term under the assumption that he was the legitimate child of her actor/musician husband; when Nat came out the wrong color, he was offered to the real father, Lionel the pool boy. A quiet transaction, swept under the rug; Kennedy claimed a stillbirth right around the time Nat was born and never spoke of it again. She’s rich enough that the meager child support could be considered an accounting error.

It is the next day, and Raven has dragged Nat outside, for a change. He holds his arm out automatically to guide her through the tangled streets, even though she doesn’t need it anymore. They have been friends since grade school, Raven’s empty eye socket and Nat’s absurd intelligence a unifying force, of sorts. Outcasts always find themselves together, but these two were particularly fast friends. They met when Nat was in Kindergarten, and Raven in second grade; by the next year, they were both in the same third grade class.

Soon: summers together, under the watchful eye of Charlie, a decade older. Raven’s dad’s death to that cancer, the one afflicting everyone in that generation. The subsequent introduction of a Step Dad, with lecherous grins and groping fingers; the escape to her sister’s and dropping out of school.

Also: Nat’s rejection of his assigned gender; arguments with his father over baggy clothes, haircuts, pronouns; Lionel’s eventual acceptance, the first time he said “son.” As well as: Nat’s father’s decay, from: healthy, strong, active; to: pained, couch bound, apathetic.

And so, so many cats.

It was only Nat and Ash in the beginning, a solid (in both color and density) grey cat with pumpkin orange eyes that curled up with him as a baby in the crib; how did the house become overrun, again? Perhaps if they didn’t spend so much of his monthly payments on cat food and litter, which only Nat can be bothered to change out, they would be able to move to a row house in the Middle District, that much closer to his school.

What little Nat actually earns from his online activities goes straight to a college savings account. Hatch works mostly to effect change; the meager income is just a bonus. He has values, unlike Raven.

“I can’t believe you stole from a kid,” he scolds. He’s partly talking to Raven, but mostly to Nirvana, the cheeky magpie who is also fond of stealing from him and has a personal vendetta against Ash.

“I can’t believe how dumb that kid was,” she retorts. “Who walks around with over two grand in a duffle bag?” She’s fiddling with the stolen bracelet, feeling for each charm individually. There are eleven of them.

It is the unique CAW CAW of a crow that keys Raven in to where they are; she hasn’t been paying attention to their turns and weavings, allowing herself to get lost in Nat’s musings. But there’s only one place in the city that has crows. “Are you taking me to the warehouses?” she accuses; then, to Nirvana, “Don’t you dare.” The magpie dislikes crows, and crows hate him; he is too human, he doesn’t make sense to them. The warehouses, though, are an arena of truce amongst the various surviving corvids; they offer too generous a treasure of wasted food and shiny bits to risk losing it all to war.

“This is just our first stop,” Nat responds. “I happen to know there’s a drop-off going on this morning.” He glances at his watch, the old-fashioned type with arms and a tick tick Raven can always hear, even when he’s not around. He doesn’t trust modern technology, and for good reason. “They’ll be wrapping up soon.”

Raven groans. She has little interest in technology; trying to squint at a screen with her one good eye is just asking for a migraine. She has an ancient MP3 player for tunes and the occasional audiobook; anything more would be wasted on her.

She doesn’t get a chance to ask what the next steps might be; they turn the corner and Nat stops quick, as if he’d run into a wall. “Shit,” he mutters. It’s a cop; Raven can tell by the way Nat tenses and by jangling of a tool belt, complete with: stun gun, handgun, baton, mace, taser, hand cuffs in metal and plastic.

“Stop right there,” the cop barks. “Put your hands where I can see them.”

Nat complies immediately, holding his hands firmly in front of him; his dad gave him the Talk, again, when he finally came to accept that he was trans. “They hate us for the color of our skin,” Lionel had said gravely, “They’ll hate you doubly for being a Black man. Shit. Triply if they find out you’re trans.” Do what they ask, don’t give them an excuse to shoot.

Maybe you’ll survive.

A door slams, another cop emerging from an unmarked vehicle. “You match the description of a suspect wanted for violent crime,” she says. “You have the right to remain silent.” She yanks Nat’s arm down while reciting the rest of his Miranda rights.

He can only hope Raven is wise enough to play along, too; she is not known for her compliance. Although she claims she dropped out, her removal from school likely had more to do with the boy whose balls Raven held in an excruciating vise grip while he begged for mercy, after grabbing her ass in the hallway. When she decided he had suffered enough, she sucker-punched him in the nose. It was still crooked the next year, but by that point Raven was gone to live with her sister and Nat had transferred to his all-girl’s private school.

Without school to worry about, Raven has channeled her disobedience towards protests and activism; she has adequate experience dealing with cops. She does hold her hands up as directed; she cannot see the gun pointed at her friend, but assumes it is, since she has the benefit of pale skin.

Nirvana, on the other hand, is agitated, hyped by the nearby crows, the excitement of the cops, everyone’s hearts racing. Don’t do anything, she pleads silently. He flits around the nearby buildings, screeching up a storm, getting all the other birds in the area going too. The entire neighborhood is a cacophony; it muddies her thoughts, makes her heart race, her breathing quicken. No, not now, she thinks; she does not need a panic attack right now. She tries to hold still, trembling internally.

Then, and outright lie: “He’s going for your belt!”

“No!” Raven knows it’s not true, but what kind of witness is she? Nat has ended up flat on the ground, face pressed into the asphalt, the cop’s knee digging into his back.

Maybe he won’t.

Chapter 8:

Wolf’s smuggling operation takes them to exactly the same city they came from, a fact which prompts a rare giggle from Oz. It is a strange, melodic sound coming from such a serious face. Elena just rolls her eyes, accustomed to the cyclic drudgery of their expeditions.

It is a different warehouse, at least, in a different part of town. Oz is not quite sure how Elena knows this; to them, the buildings look pretty much the same: towering grey blocks (or blue, or beige), straggly trees with waxy looking leaves, asphalt and pavement and short mowed lawns. There is a bread factory nearby, the smell of yeast overwhelming in the air. According to Elena, it borders a grocery warehouse, and the dumpsters are absolutely swarming with enormous black birds.

“A group of crows is called a murder,” she explains, dragging Oz along; they knew this already, but refrains from delving into it. They have been quiet since their revelation yesterday, or since the message from their mom; neither Wolf nor Elena had any suggestions for what the cryptic sequence might mean. After the pick-up at the dump, Oz stretched out on the folded-out bed and pretended to sleep, and during breakfast this morning, they just stared resolutely at their tapping fingers, phone blank screened in front of them. Elena already misses Oz’s tirades about various extinct animals; how, when they’re excited about a topic, their voice gets louder, but no less flat. She also feels a tang of bitter jealousy for Oz and their bees; they are never really alone.

The murder is in a state of frenzy as they approach, and as Oz squints into the void of black feathers, they think they understand why: fleeting flashes of white from a magpie that has infiltrated their feeding grounds.

Then there is a shout, and Elena is already pushing Oz behind her; she has her phone out, recording, before they even recognize what is happening. She has been here before, the same scene in cities around the country. Someone is getting arrested across the street; one cop has his gun pointed at his head, the other pulling his arms down to cuff. Another person in all black is backing away, arms raised. Is that...?

The crows are screaming, flying chaotically over the street, egged on by the cackling magpie. Oz can feel their chest buzzing, the bees humming in tune to the anxiety in the air. They watch uncomprehendingly as the arresting cop suddenly twists the man’s arm around, forcing him onto the ground, pinning him with her knee.

“Hey,” Elena shouts suddenly. She is still holding up her phone, red recording light blinking. “Did you forget to turn your body cams on?” She keeps stepping closer, on the road now, but Oz just wants to flee. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.” The cop on the left lowers his gun, shouts an expletive and instructions to leave. Oz’s chest hurts; the bees are so angry.

The other cop has relaxed her stance on Nat, and he can breathe; I’m okay, he thinks; his shoulders ache, his nose is bleeding, but he’s okay. The cop roughly finishes incapacitating him with tight plastic zip ties and drags him to his feet. The other approaches, shifty eyed.

“We got a ‘be on the lookout’ for someone matching your description, wanted for a violent crime,” he spits, looking Nat up and down, watching the blood drip uncontrolled out of his nose.

“And what description is that, Black?” This comes from the girl in the street, who is holding up a cell phone, approaching with surefooted steps. She looks roughly the same age as Raven; someone else cowers behind her, shaking visibly.

“What is it I’m accused of doing?” Nat manages through the pain in his nose.

“A woman was raped at gunpoint in her house, two blocks from here.” This from the woman cop, voice dripping in disdain.

Raven finally finds her voice. “That’s not possible,” she says, almost laughing.

Nat starts. Don’t...

“He’s been with me all night,” she concludes.

An alibi, and there’s the fact that Nat is only 13. His school ID, when they finally let him retrieve it, still has his birth name on it. The cops are clearly flustered, and the sudden appearance of some nasty looking biting bugs finalizes their decision to release Nat and get out. After cutting his wrists free, they race back to the car, swatting and yelping at each acidic bite. Tires squeal as they drive off, leaving the four children alone to deal with the bugs and the deafening murder of crows.

. . .

Once the danger is gone and Oz has a chance to think for a second, they know for a fact they recognize one of the strangers. The bracelet she is wearing confirms it. Losing all of the precocious maturity they’ve displayed so far, Oz grabs at the traumatized girl’s wrist and pulls the bracelet. “Give it to me,” they yell, “It’s mine, give it to me now!”

Raven reacts as she has trained herself to react, swiftly knocking them in the chest with her fist. They stagger backward, landing on asphalt, and Nat lays a hand on her arm; this kid is even smaller than he is. Nirvana is flying overhead cawing in delight. Fool, fool! and Raven recognizes this is, indeed, the rightful owner of her bracelet. She moves to take it off, but before she can undo the clasp she feels dozens of prickling bugs landing on her arms. She tries to brush them off, shake them away, but they are swarming all over her and even Nat has backed off, abandoning her. One of them bites; an instant, searing pain screams up her arm. Nirvana’s screeching changes, growing frantic; Bees! Bees!

Then: “Enough!” Elena shouts; she is on her knees, rocking Oz in her arms, trying to get them to calm down. “Watch the birds,” she whispers in their ear, and it does help. The crows are settling down to resume their meals, tolerating the magpie, if only just; and Oz’s eyes track their movements, and their racing heart slows, and their breathing eases. They rub their chest where a bruise is forming.

Nat is holding his nose to staunch the blood; Raven scratches at her arm where the insects bit her. The bees have eased off, disappearing to wherever they came from. Elena helps Oz to their feet, finally gets a decent look at the two strangers. They’re both roughly her age; the girl wears dark clothes, dark sunglasses, dark hair pulled back into a long braid. The boy’s nose is swollen, black rings developing under his eyes. He’s younger than she thought, she realizes; probably closer to Oz’s age than her own. For a moment, Elena feels ashamed; this is probably the excuse the cops were looking to use for harassing him in the first place.

A magpie perches on the girl’s shoulder, and she wordlessly hands it the bracelet. It takes off, dropping the treasure at Oz’s feet as it flies away. They duck to pick it up and remain crouched there, holding the bracelet to their lips, rubbing the smooth metal back and forth.

Elena breaks the tension. “You might as well come with me,” she tells the injured party. “We can fix you up.”

. . .

Wolf, who was only seventeen years old when he became an accidental father to Elena, is barely in his thirties when he arrives to his Van and finds a sudden crowd young teens clustered around its tiny plastic table, each looking worse for the wear. They all freeze when he enters, caught in the act; of what, Wolf doesn’t know.

A bird caws at him from a cabinet to his left, breaking the surreal silence.

“Elena...” Wolf mutters. Nothing else.

She introduces them: you know Oz, this is Raven, this is Nat. Raven wears sunglasses, even in the dim Van, and Nat is holding a bag of ice to his maybe broken nose. The bird is named Nirvana, like that oldies band.

Wolf sighs. It is lunchtime. “Are you guys hungry?”

Of course.

Several pizzas later, the atmosphere has lightened, but the conversation remains shallow, awkward, and Wolf decides it’s best if he ducks out. Kids are always taciturn around strange adults; even though these are some strange kids. Elena has gone from having no friends, to having three; she looks so happy there at the table next to people her own age.

. . .

Oz is the first to ask about Nirvana; where did Raven get him, how did she train him. He was the last surviving nestling in an abandoned nest; presumably his parents had perished somewhere distant. They just get each other, you know.

Elena thinks she knows; maybe she understands more than the others. Oz is rubbing their chest through their shirt; Raven and the bird move so harmonically it is as though they can read each other’s thoughts. Nat has discovered Adam and is cradling the young cat in his lap, who is purring despite his proximity to Oz and their nasty little bees.

Speaking of which – one is buzzing around now, bumping into the bare LED bulb overhead.

“They’re bees,” Elena explains to no one, to everyone.

Raven’s nose wrinkles. “They hurt,” she says, holding out her arm to reveal tiny, swollen blisters, each almost perfectly circular.

“Sorry,” Oz mutters. They’re hunched on a folding chair brought up to the table, fidgeting with the charm bracelet. Raven can hear them clink against each other. She sighs, takes off her sunglasses to rub her face.

Oz stares: Raven had explained she was blind, but it was something else to see the empty eye socket, the other eye scarred and cloudy. Elena nudges them as she gets up, whispers chidingly, “Don’t stare!” as she ducks into the tiny closet bathroom. She returns with a first aid kit and sits next to Raven, begins dabbing insect ointment on each swollen bite.

Nirvana flutters over and lands on the table, prompting another hiss from Adam, secure in Nat’s lap. He starts pecking at a pizza crust, resolutely ignoring the cat.

“You have a special connection to him,” Elena remarks, voice low. Raven shrugs.

“She talks to him,” Nat says, mouth full. Raven kicks him under the table.

“Does he talk back?” Elena asks.

Raven hesitates. The insect ointment soothes the sting, and the girl’s fingers feel good on her arm. “Sort of,” she admits. Choppy, bits and pieces; she’d had to teach him the words for most nouns, but he picked it up quick, even developing a personality and his own words for things he couldn’t identify. Easier to communicate in pictures, once you figure out what they mean.

“Anyway, Nat, you talk to cats,” she accuses, directing the attention away from herself.

Nat nuzzles Adam with his chin, denying nothing.

Suddenly, Oz reveals, “The bees live in my chest.” Having confessed to Elena for the first time, they find the second time almost laughably easy; though perhaps it is just this group, these particular people, who make them feel so comfortable. They lift their shirt to display the hole, a few vulture bees poking their heads out, antennae wiggling.

“Dang,” Nat says. “Does it hurt?”

Elena wonders why she never asked that before.

“Nah,” they say, “I’ve had them since I was a baby.” Not as a newborn, but a few weeks old, the first bees showed up; Oz’s grandmother had noticed them crawling around their little bassinet, dotting their little baby pajamas. She tried to brush them away, swat them, squish them, ignoring their nasty little bites. Then the hole appeared in Oz’s chest, growing larger overnight so it gaped between two spindly infant ribs. The bees sealed the flesh with their wax, filled the cavity with waxen cups to nurture new larva, new bees.

Oz’s grandmother has often described the terror in great detail.

I was born from a deer, Elena thinks; but what does it matter, they’re probably extinct now. Of her new friends, only she is alone. Instead, she says, “You’ll never guess who this kid’s mom is,” pushing against Oz’s shoulder. They bite their lip, suddenly unsure about sharing this particular bit of information, but it’s too late to object. “Dr. Po Miller!” she says. “You know, the climate activist?”

Oh, they know. Nat especially knows, but he definitely did not know that Dr. Po had a kid, or that she’d effectively abandoned them in the woods with their grandmother while she was off trying to save the world or whatever.

“Shit,” he says. “We need to talk.”

By the time Wolf arrives back at the Van, the sun sinking in the western sky, the fast friends have come up with a plan. Nat is to work on the code, but first he needed to get his custom-built sat-laptop from his house. They’d pick him up from there.

“You mean, I will,” Wolf interjects, “I’m driving.” He’s not sure what Elena has gotten herself into, what she’s about to drag him into, and he’s not sure he wants to know.

“Then we need to get to Oz’s cabin,” Elena continues.

Wolf hesitates, thinking of his schedule. He realizes there is nothing urgent in his business; if he misses a pick-up, someone else takes it. He chose e-waste for its complete lack of glorification or governmental concern. It’s not even a felony to handle illegal technology; just to cross it over state borders.

“Why, where is it?” he asks.

That’s a good question.

Chapter 9:

Oz had walked a long time before they reached the desolate highway on which Wolf picked them up, and a longer time still down that road. 16 hours, 31 minutes, and 56 seconds, counting the time spent resting their aching feet, examining an interesting rock formation, climbing a tree, heavy with fruit.

They walked through their own familiar woods, then ones less so; they remember turning away from the small town where they might be recognized, but not the name of that small town now. Their internal map is fogged up from all the new things Oz has done and seen. They walked past two large swaths of forest that were burnt to charcoal; the second of which was where Wolf had picked them up.

“That narrows it down,” Wolf says; but not really, he doesn’t. He has a map spread out on the table, the old-fashioned paper kind. He’s marked out roughly where they picked up Oz, and Elena is scrolling through a map of recent wildfires on her phone, matching them up. Once the spots are marked, Oz is shockingly quick at identifying the cabin’s location, muttering left, right, or straight at each crossing they encounter. It is, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere, an unmarked dotted line representing the gravel road disappearing into a swath of forest green.

“And, why are we going there, now?” Wolf asks.

Nat thinks Oz might be in danger; his initial assumption that Dr. Po had done something to Kennedy Yates immediately reframed after reading the message asking for help.

“So you want to take them to their home, where their grandmother died, because you think it will be safer?” he asks.

“Pretty much.” Also: so Nat can dig through Po’s room, see if he can find any clue to decoding the message. Also: everyone wants to see Oz’s cabin in the woods. Wolf agrees, it sounds nice.

Wolf follows Raven’s instructions to Nat’s home; she is used to walking, not driving, and her disorientation is clear. Before he turns onto the last road, however, he stops: red and blue flashing lights, yellow police tape. Nirvana confirms it is Nat’s house swarming with cops, but neither him nor his father are there. “Go find them then!” she demands out loud, and the bird dashes away, clacking.

“No ambulances,” Wolf assures as he u-turns away, but it doesn’t make Raven or the rest of them feel any better.

Next stop, Raven’s house, where Charlie has more information. “Your little friend got arrested,” she announces, almost gleefully, “His dad is piiiiissed.” Charlie has never been overly fond of Nat; Raven always figured she felt threatened by the computer prodigy. She doesn’t know what a kindness he’s extended as Hatch by including her in YakAttak; how much of her success was due to Nat’s failure to take what he deserves.

I’ve got to remind Nat what’s your username next time I see him, Raven scowls. It is clear from Lionel’s voicemail that he assumes she ditched Nat during a crime she had initiated.

She packs some clothing and the remaining cash she had taken from Oz the other day. She sprinkles bird seed on her windowsill and says goodbye to the doves before closing the window. She drops $200 in the grocery jar before leaving, not bothering to say bye to her sister.

Wolf ends up parking for the night at a rest area just outside the city, past the warehouses and their endless plumes of smoke. The atmosphere in the Van is tense and grim as they settle down to sleep.

Raven feels responsible for Nat’s arrest; she never should have let him walk home alone, but she wanted to stay in the Van. She wanted to talk to Elena more, to be honest; or rather, she wanted to listen more to Elena’s husky voice, talking about... Whatever, anything, Raven doesn’t care. Her arms itch, and she wishes she had asked for more of that ointment before everyone went to bed.

She had reluctantly declined to share the mattress in the back of the Van, what Elena had called her ‘room.’ Instead, she stretches out in a sleeping bag in the narrow walkway; the hard floor is comforting, in a familiar sort of way, and the Van is a lot warmer than the streets she’s slept on before. Raven’s earbuds pipe soft music into her clattered thoughts; she pretends this is a reasonable alternative to sleep.

Oz can’t get the images of Nat’s brutal almost-arrest this morning out of their head; can’t stop themselves from catastrophizing about what might have happened during the second encounter. They feel so utterly lost; the city is a very different place from the woods, and far more dangerous than they could have believed. They are beginning to understand the privilege of the life they’ve held: a financially stable mother, a loving grandmother, a cabin and vegetable garden and fresh air. The sky outside is an orange-brown color Oz has never seen before. It reminds them of vomit.

Elena is worried for Nat, of course, but a small part of her is the happiest she has ever felt in her life. She has friends: people her own age who understand the world in the same way she does. Their strange connections to nature affirm her belief in her own unique origin. If someone can live with bees in their chest; if someone can talk to birds and teach them to be their eyes; then who’s to say a girl can’t be birthed by a dead deer in the middle of the road it died in? She looks out past the curtain at Oz, on the fold-out, then Raven. Awake, she always looks tense, always focused and concentrating, but asleep, her face relaxed, Elena thinks she looks beautiful.

. . .

All their worries are for naught: before they have even finished eating breakfast the next morning, Nirvana starts screeching from outside, and Raven immediately races out of the Van and straight into Nat’s arms. He seems unharmed; oh, how she hopes he is unharmed. She drags him back into the Van, sits him down in front of a plate of pancakes.

“With real maple syrup,” Wolf emphasizes, “from Vermont.”

Finally, Raven can’t hold it in anymore. “Why didn’t you call us?” she demands, hitting him not so lightly on the shoulder.

“They took all my tech,” Nat responds, mouth full. “Everything. It was a nightmare.” He was picked up on the way home by the same cops who tagged him this morning. They ran his name, decided he was wanted for dealing in illegal electronics; he’d been seen around that warehouse before. He spent the night in a real jail cell while his dad dealt with the raid of their house, junk and cats and all.

Lionel had to pay bail, pick Nat up from the station with a thousand bucks; the stolen money burns a hole in Raven’s pocket. “Dad spent the entire drive home yelling at me. House was a disaster: all those stacks knocked over, cats panicking.” He shudders. It was good to get out quick.

Technically, Nat shouldn’t be here at all; technically, he’s on house arrest, and it would be a violation of his bail conditions to touch a computer.

“Bullshit,” Wolf spits, not at Nat but at the situation. He’s just a kid; it’s just a misdemeanor. Wolf has dedicated the last decade or more to making sure he toed the lines, keeping Elena far out of reach of any real danger.

Nat chuckles, “Wait, that’s illegal.” It’s an old meme from before even Wolf’s time. The kids all laugh; everyone knows the world doesn’t work like that.

“How are you here then?” Raven asks. The thought of Nat getting in even more trouble concerns her.

“I put the GPS tracker on a cat.” Tyler, one of his favorites, a product of one of Ash’s early litters from before Nat insisted on getting all the tomcats neutered. He’s a strictly indoor cat, repulsed by the touch of grass and pavement, and spends most of his time curled up on Nat’s bed anyway.

“Clever,” Wolf admits, “but you are almost certainly going to get caught.” Nat shrugs in response. What can he say? His nose still hurts and one of the cops got a pot shot to his gut the second time around. He’s going to be expelled, he’s going to be required to pay fines he can’t afford, and he doesn’t want to think about the spiraling downfall from here.

All because a couple of cops decided he looked like someone else.

Chapter 10:

The cabin is larger than anyone expects, and newer looking; it is just well-maintained, Oz knows, the gleaming logs oiled with some foul-smelling goop only a few years ago. Oz has never known a life outside of this cabin. They were born in it, grandmother playing midwife to Po, whose distrust of industrialized medicine extended well beyond fear of discovery of Oz’s Problem.

Grandmother grew up in one of a dozen identical singlewide homes, paint color the only distinguishing feature. They were elevated on stilts against flooding and snow; flooding after ice break up, when ice was still a thing, was just a regular part of life, especially as ocean levels rose alongside the temperatures.

The last real snow grandmother saw was the year she won the Iditarod; there was enough on the ground for the sleigh tracks, but the temperatures were overly warm even overnight. She was used to sleeping in the tent piled up with the dogs, but during this race she didn’t even bother setting it up. They all lay together in the snow under the aurora, breathing in the last of the arctic air.

She used the money she won to flee the now life-threatening tidal floods; she had to leave behind those precious dogs, a fact which she often lamented. She went south to Arizona, from one disaster to the next. The megadrought and extreme temperatures now make the state uninhabitable (you can only drive through it at night, Wolf knows; he’s made the trip through the Great Desert twice: to the west coast, and back. Never again).

Arizona is where grandmother met Po, who was Elizabeth then; Opal, Po, was a gift during the adoption, something she could share with Miss Pearl Marie. Grandmother was never married; she was adamantly against the idea her entire life (a sentiment which Wolf understands well).

Grandmother built this cabin after Po left for university; her subsequent accidental pregnancy, father unknown, did nothing to impede her education, as she was able to leave baby Oz behind with grandmother within weeks of giving birth between terms.

Grandmother raised Oz: she taught them how to read; how to do count and add; how to speak; how to calm their terrible fits and anxiety; how to recognize edible and poisonous plants; how to fish in the creek nearby; how to cook; how to can and preserve fruits and vegetables; how to grow them in the garden out back. For just over twelve years, grandmother dedicated her life to teaching Oz how to survive in a world that has given up on them.

The things she missed: finances, butchering (Oz was always too squeamish), how to rescue your mother who has disappeared.

Grandmother is buried out back, beneath an enormous oak tree. Wolf considers the size of the mounded soil, the skinny child in front of it. He doesn’t want to consider how tiny, wiry Oz had to drag their grandmother’s corpse out here alone, dig a hole big enough that wild animals, if there even are any, wouldn’t dig it up. He doesn’t want to be impressed by the resilience of a kid through trauma they should never have had to deal with alone.

Wolf especially doesn’t understand how Dr. Po Miller could have just left an infant behind in such an isolated place; he would never have considered leaving Elena behind, especially after her peculiar origin, that traumatizing post-mortem birth from a deer.

That’s not even true, exactly; he had driven past a fire station once, early on, eyeing the 24-hour safe drop-off zone. Like a little post box to drop a baby in; ostensibly it would sound an alarm and your infant would be in safe hands within 15 minutes. Elena was screaming, colicky; Wolf hadn’t yet figured out how important it was to burp her properly. The formula shortage was weighing on him and he wasn’t even sure if he could even afford to continue feeding her. But he did, and that’s what matters, he thinks; that is the difference.

Oz gives a tour of the inside: kitchen with an electric stove, and an antique wood stove in the adjacent living room; three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs; modern electricity and plumbing throughout, powered by solar panels on the roof and a wind generator of Oz’s own design. They breeze past a door to the cellar, hidden in the wood paneling, but do not open it; and the visitors quickly forget about it.

Nat and Raven take unabashedly to searching through Po’s barren room with the help of Nirvana, great lover of shiny things. Nat has assembled a Frankenstein’s monster of a machine from miscellaneous bits scattered through Wolf’s Van to aid his research; it’s slow, but it gets satellite internet, even out here. He wonders why he never just bought the e-waste from Wolf directly; sometimes, the economy just doesn’t make sense.

Elena is enthralled by Oz’s collection of found objects; like a crow, they have collected anything and everything that caught their attention, and they have placed each object on shelves lining the walls of their room. Feathers and rocks, strange shells, glass and nails, leaves and flowers pressed between books; but most importantly, the precious deer antlers, which she strokes gently with her fingers, feeling the crackling texture, dreaming of their wearer. Also: bones, dozens of them, most of which she cannot identify. Bugs, pinned and dried to preserve their delicate legs and wings. Fur and teeth and strips of bark. Elena wants to hug Oz; she wants to go back in time and grow up with them, find these things for herself.

The walls in the room downstairs are also lined with shelves, these ones stacked with books; actual, paper books, smelling musty and wonderful. There is an entire section dedicated to banned books. Oz replaces the volumes they had taken with them on their journey.

“This room is a fire hazard,” Wolf remarks. He likes listening to books, not so fond of reading them. It’s true, a single spark from the wood stove would light the place up; that’s why they are always very careful, indeed.

Unsuccessful in finding anything useful in Po’s room, Nat proceeds to dig through grandmother’s; this one is much more lived in, filled with trinkets and memories and smelling like essential oils. Raven, instead, proceeds across the hall to Oz’s room, where Elena is sitting cross-legged on the floor, still examining their collection. She doesn’t say anything, just sits where she thinks is next to the other girl, and a second later, she is startled by the light tickle of a feather on her hands.

“This one is a turkey feather,” Elena says, handing it over. Raven feels its stiff, plasticky shaft, the fan of interconnected hairs. “It is striped, brown and white, and big, that’s how I can tell.”

She removes the turkey feather and replaces it with another, smaller one. “This is a chicken feather,” she says, laughing. “I saw the chickens outside, in the coop.” They must be hungry, since Oz has been away for a few days now.

A third feather belongs to a bluebird, which Elena says is the color of the sky. Raven tilts her head back, towards the open window; she can see that, at least. “The mountain bluebird is supposed to be extinct,” Elena explains. “If they still live here, imagine what else might, too.” Like deer, she thinks.

Elena next shares a stone, cool to the touch and perfectly round, and as she moves to take it back, their hands brush, an electric shock; Raven quickly moves to grab it, gently, just to hold her hand a bit longer. They sit together like that in silence; Raven can feel the other girl’s pulse fluttering gently in her inner wrist.

“Can I tell you something?” Raven asks, surprising herself. “I really like the sound of your voice.”

“Oh,” Elena giggles, sending another thrill through her chest, “I don’t know what you say.”

“You could probably say anything and I’d be happy,” Raven responds, smiling.

Then: “Got it!” Nat is yelling from the other bedroom. As they enter, Raven feels a chill; is this where Oz’s grandmother died? Nat is kneeling next to a safe, which he easily cracked (Oz’s birth year). Inside, he has found a USB drive.

. . .

Nat is not a fool; he’s not about to stick some random USB stick in his own tech; anyway, all of that got confiscated by the police. The Frankenstein laptop is also out, since he doesn’t want to use a device that can connect to the internet. In the end, he slaps together yet another computer just to read it, bringing it down to the kitchen table the next morning. Elena remarks on his accomplishment pointedly to Wolf. “Look at all he can do with the junk you just smuggle.”

Many of the files are personal: Last Will and Testament for both Elizabeth Opal Miller and Miss Pearl Marie; copies of birth certificates, diplomas, resumes; a handful of photos of baby Oz, most of them pre-bees. Then, nested within the other folders, he finds a folder titled “Hatch,” password protected.

Nat tries the string Po sent to Oz’s Xbook account. Locked. He thinks about it further: in the last communication with Dr. Po, the phone call, he recited a string of characters to her. It was an encoded IPv6 address, the key she needed to complete... whatever her mission was. He had used a simple, randomly generated substitution cipher; Dr. Po had given him the key. He reverses the cipher and tries the new code.

Unlocked.

“This is super basic stuff,” he explains to a stunned audience, minus Raven; she has witnessed Nat in action, finds it rather dull, and has opted to disappear outside with Nirvana. “Dr. Po didn’t really like computers.

Inside the folder are two files: a .txt containing two strings, which Nat recognizes as GPS coordinates; and a .png of a map, overlaid with rough sketches. “Any ideas?” he asks, turning the screen around for the others to see.

The map is local: the cabin is sketched in, its private land bordering a rare government protected wilderness area to the north. Wolf recognizes the highway he drove to get here, though the smaller roads are unmarked. Near the top of the map, a grey box with diagonal lines covers a swath of protected wilderness; a thick, solid line extends almost straight down, cutting right next to where the cabin has been marked, continuing past the southern edge of the map.

“It’s a pipeline,” Oz chimes in. They still have the letter, addressed to Miss Pearl Marie; the words “eminent domain” highlighted in their mind. “The rectangle there must be a natural gas field.”

Armor Inc.: planning to use a bit of their grandmother’s land and a whole lot of one of the last vestiges of wilderness in order to extract and transport and, eventually, burn more fossil fuels. As if the climate hasn’t already changed enough. It is the same company that made Kennedy Yates a billionaire, before she supposedly divested.

Nat uses his Frankenstein laptop to check the coordinates. They point to nowhere on the other side of the mountains; approximately 150 miles southeast of the emerging gas field, according to the other map. The satellite image view shows no signs of development, even roads, in either area, but they are a couple years out of date.

Elena slips out of the cabin as Nat and Oz pour over the maps and mysterious coordinates. The hard wooden porch boards creak beneath her feet as she descends the stairs, and she briefly closes her eyes to try to imagine Raven, blindly feeling her way down. Then she nearly misses a step, clutching the handrail to keep from falling the rest of the way. Eyes open, then.

Raven is sitting outside in the sun, face turned up to the sky; this seems to be a common theme in the group, Elena muses; she, too, enjoys sunbathing and Nat must, too, since he was raised by cats. She thinks of a picture of lemurs sunning themselves from one of her animal encyclopedias; a collection of lost things would perhaps be a better name for the volumes. Most of them are extinct now.

Elena crosses the yard loudly, stomping and shuffling through the grass. Raven probably would have heard her approach regardless; had she not been listening to music loud enough that Elena could hear it from halfway across the yard. Otherwise, it is deathly quiet out here; even the wind is holding its breath. Nirvana soars overhead in wide, lazy circles. Raven pulls out her earbuds as Elena sits down, the tinny music coming from the speakers stopping abruptly with the press of a button.

The sudden silence is jarring.

“We learned about the Anthropocene extinction in grade school,” Raven confesses after a moment, “I always kind of thought, or maybe hoped, that it was a lie. That all the animals were just out here, somewhere, hiding.”

At first, it was just the big mammals hunted to extinction: rhinos, elephants, moose, dolphins. Elena’s books called them the “charismatic megafauna”: charming, often fuzzy mammals that were easily anthropomorphized. Then the insects collapsed, their numbers plummeting over just a few decades. Amphibians fell simultaneously, thanks to climate change induced fungal diseases; without prey, reptiles starved to death soon after. Half of the birds vanished almost overnight, while smaller mammals succumbed to competition from invasive species. The boiling oceans took care of the rest. The survivors so far are the creatures that had already adapted to living alongside humans.

“Like Nirvana,” Raven suggests. A black-billed magpie, Pica hudsonia; Elena had looked it up. Something about this sweet gesture, this more than passing interest in her bird, warms Raven. She is accustomed to skepticism, even scorn, regarding her obsession with birds; from everyone but Nat, who knows better. They sit together in comfortable silence, feeling the sun’s warm rays, breathing in the mountain air; which for Raven must be the freshest she has ever felt.

Then, from the hills behind the cabin: a song. Peu, chirrup, peu peu peu. Peu, chirrup, peu peu peu.

Elena’s heart is racing; Raven’s, too. They each hold their breath, listening as the song fades into the distant hills.

“Did you recognize it?” Elena asks. Raven shakes her head. Nirvana lands in a nearby tree, begins squawking, filling the air with his own chatter. “Do you want to go find it?” Her voice is eager, excited.

Yes, of course Raven wants to go find it, to learn the song of a brand new bird she has never heard before, but the air is cooling, the sun is setting, and just inside the strange cabin in the woods she’s found herself at, her best friend, still bruised from getting attacked by cops twice in one day, is busy digging through the mystery of a stranger’s missing mom; a stranger with a hole in their chest, bees living inside.

To be clear: disappearing in the woods with Elena sounds to Raven like the absolute most perfect thing to do; just not right now. “Tomorrow?” she asks. “It sounds like it will be a hike. We’ll want to be prepared.”

Elena grasps her hand. “Tomorrow.”

Chapter 11:

The next day, Nat squints in the morning sun, bleary-eyed from spending the night staring at the tiny screen on his Frankenstein laptop, researching everything he can find about Armor, Kennedy Yates, extraction permits and land use acts. Today he is taking Elena’s usual place in the passenger seat of the Van; Wolf knows of a landfill a couple hours away, some friendly junkrats with plenty of scavenged e-waste for sale on the side. Nat has only a rough idea of what he is looking for, from the vague plan formed between him and Oz overnight. They plan on rescuing Dr. Po. Somehow.

They haven’t officially determined where she might be, but a look through the county’s GIS records reveals the land around the coordinates hidden in Po’s USB drive is owned by DataLess. Nat is still trying to access whatever permits have been filed for development, but he suspects they are building a data center there. By extrapolating from the line extending from the gas field on the map, Oz has discovered it points almost directly to the GPS coordinates.

Nat sleeps for most of the trip, his head resting against the window, Adam purring, warm on his lap.

. . .

Oz opts to stay at the cabin while Elena and Raven go searching for birds; their brief time away from their home caused so much anxiety they feel almost physically ill upon returning. They warn the girls against getting lost: “There’s a creek just through the trees to the east,” they instruct, “Follow it. Upstream to the woods, downstream back. Don’t leave the creek.”

They insist Raven wear a coat, borrowed from the dead grandmother, and provide bottles of water and snacks: the same handmade oatcakes Raven found in the stolen duffle bag. She feels persistently uneasy around the younger kid and their bees. Aside from demanding the bracelet back, their relief at the books unharmed, Oz has not mentioned the theft, nor the missing cash. They are quite clearly naïve about money in general, having procured yet another lump of cash from who knows where, offering it to Nat to buy “whatever you need.” It was probably enough to pay off his bail, if not for the fact that he was skipping out on it, in addition to replacing all of his confiscated electronics.

There is a breeze until they reach the tree line, then the sky is swallowed in shadows. Raven gently grasps Elena’s forearm, a touch that secretly thrills her, and allows the other girl to guide her through the dense trees, avoiding tangled undergrowth. It clears up somewhat, turning into tall grass as they approach the creek Oz described; a tight trail through the grassy floodplain suggests where they have trekked through these woods countless times before. It is too narrow to walk side-by-side, so Elena holds her hand out behind her to guide Raven along; with Nirvana overhead, she doesn’t need it, but she’s not about to let go.

At first the babbling of the creek is the only thing Raven can hear, and she strains to listen for signs of wildlife beyond it. It feels nice, she admits to herself, to rely on someone else for a change; to feel safe around someone besides just Nat. In school, and in life, she has always been expected to overcome her obvious disability; many of her teachers tried to suggest she merely needed to unlock the secret powers of her other senses, like perhaps a better sense of smell would allow her to learn how to read text. While it is true that her hearing is better than most people’s, Raven believes that is mostly because she is more focused on listening, undistracted by the visual world. She has no secret echolocation powers, no sixth sense for magnetic fields or vibrations.

“The thing with the birds is something different entirely,” she justifies to Elena.

As a kid, she never had much to do; her early cancer treatment left her scarred and delayed, so she was ignored or loathed or pitied by the other kids, and she spent a lot of time sitting outside listening to the ever-dwindling bird populations.

Her first bird was a robin she named Batman. As she learned his songs, invested herself deeper in his life, she realized she was able to understand more and more, as though the bird’s thoughts were being sent to her telepathically: flashes of emotion, then sounds, then brief images. She saw herself for the first time, as the bird saw her.

“What happened to Batman?” Elena asks, thoroughly amused by the name.

“I think he got eaten by a cat,” Raven replies. It is the same fate suffered by Nirvana’s nestmates when he was a fledgling.

“For what it’s worth,” Elena says, “I would never let Adam out.” Although he is small now, the Van not too confining, she worries about how he will feel when he has outgrown it.

They stop for a break, sitting back-to-back on a large, flat stone, covered in soft moss, at the edge of the creek as they eat the surprisingly delicious oatcakes provided by Oz. An outcropping next to the rock has resulted in a stagnant pool of brownish water; Elena can see miniscule mosquito larvae dotting the surface. More survivors: bloodsuckers and disease vectors. As she watches, a tiny minnow darts to the surface and snatches one of the larvae, leaving behind a ripple of concentric circles.

Elena is about to say something, describe it to Raven, when: “Shhh,” the other girl is silent, still. They listen.

Peu, chirrup, peu peu. Peu, chirrup. Peu peu.

The sound is much closer than they heard last night; Elena looks around, but there is no movement in the surrounding trees.

Peu, chirrup. Peu, chirrup. Peu peu. Chirrup.

Raven is on her feet, holding out her hand for Elena; now she is leading, zeroing in on the source of the singing, somewhere away from the creek and into the surrounding woods.

Peu, chirrup. Peu peu.

A couple hundred feet deeper into the forest she stops abruptly; Elena looks up to see a flash of blue flitting through a pine tree. Oz was right: a mountain bluebird, here and not at all extinct. The sky-blue male is joined by a plain, greyish female. There must be a nest nearby.

Raven is swaying on her feet, her head and body rocking as she listens to this sweet, tender new song between birds. Even Nirvana is silent, refraining from his usual trickster urge to harass other birds, perhaps out of respect for his human friend.

As though the bluebirds were gatekeepers who found the girls worthy, their chirping brings out a chorus of a dozen or more other birds; Raven can pick out at least three different songs.

“Bluebirds,” Elena whispers, barely heard over the singing, “sparrows, juncos, chickadees.” All such tiny birds for such loud, cheery vocalizations. Not long ago, they were some of the most common birds in the state, but she’s never seen them before; Raven has never heard these songs before. This reality taints the joyful atmosphere with hints of grief and sorrow.

Elena, never without a sketchbook on hand, sits down to sketch the scene: Raven, surrounded by the forest, entranced by the scatterings of plain birds with songs like music. If she had watercolors, she would highlight the azure flashes of mountain bluebird, but the others, feathered in browns and greys, blend into the background. It is their voice, not their sight, that gives them meaning to Raven. Elena has no way of capturing that on paper, she realizes with regret. No way to share her drawing or any of her artwork with her new friend.

She puts the sketchbook away and closes her eyes, laying back on the hard ground to listen to the birds and try to understand them as Raven can. At first, the chirps and tweets all blend together into one voice, but eventually, Elena finds she can start to distinguish them.

Peu, peu. Chirrup. Peu peu peu. This is the song she heard yesterday: the trill of the bluebirds.

Thrrrip. Chipchipchip chipchip. Thrrrip. The juncos, so quiet she can barely hear them.

Fee bee. Fee bee. Chicka dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. The chickadees, named for their unique chirps.

She feels Raven, who must have broken out of her trance, stretching out on the ground beside her, but Elena keeps her eyes closed. Their hands brush, then clasp; before she can lose her nerve, she brings Raven’s fingers up, softly kisses them. The other girl’s fingers spread out, gently touching Elena’s face: her nose, her eyelids, her lips.

Then: a discordant screeching, and the hand withdraws; Elena’s eyes fly open, to see Raven already sitting up, head cocked, listening. The new birds have gone; the screeching comes from Nirvana, who has found himself the target of some predator.

Cat, cat; even Elena thinks she can understand the magpie, but as she squints into the pine tree, she can see it is not a cat at all, but some sort of long, weasel-looking thing. She can’t identify it, only recalling the family, Mustelid; but when the creature pauses to hiss at the retreating magpie, she commits the sight to memory: its pointed face and rounded ears, reddish brown fur, and slinky body. She will look it up when she can.

Nirvana has safely perched on Raven’s shoulder, and he is scolding her for something; taking him out here to this dangerous place, perhaps, Elena thinks. For a city bird, the woods would seem like a playground, until they met a predator. For a forest bird, though, the city would be a terrifying place from the start: concrete jungle, black asphalt with its waves of heat rippling through the air in the summer, factories and cars and people.

The girls walk back to the cabin through the woods, ignoring Oz’s advice to stick to the creek so they can walk side by side, hand in hand. Raven pays little attention to the forests as they walk; Elena is describing her dream of seeing deer, her assured belief that they are not extinct; Raven is quiet, too busy falling in love with her voice.

Nirvana does not let them get lost.

Chapter 12:

The entire two-hour drive slips past quickly in his sleep and Nat is disoriented when he feels the car decelerate, stop; out the passenger side window, he can see an apparently endless plain of junk cars, rusting in brown patches of grass. From his left, Wolf: “We’re here.”

Wolf is used to picking up boxes of e-waste for others: special order parts, miscellaneous waste, unsorted pay-by-the-pound. Junkrats, the people who dig through landfills for electronic treasure, tend to be the large, silent type, and this particular man is no exception. His face is smothered in a bushy, greying beard, his flannel sleeves rolled up to show off thick, freckled arms, and he is taller than Wolf by about a foot and at least twice as wide.

So he is particularly surprised when Nat easily launches into a technical conversation with the man; they chat, ignoring Wolf as he follows them into one of many sheds dotting the landscape. Inside, the walls are lined with shelves of labelled boxes: power cables, processors, RAM, keyboards, mice, batteries. Details confirmed, the junkrat, Owen, silently pulls boxes one by one from a shelf, selecting parts seemingly at random; but Nat examines each and nods, satisfied. In the end, they settle on a price, but then the boy hesitates.

“Do you happen to have any old tech from DataLess?” For the first time, Owen breaks into a smile, revealing crooked, yellowing teeth. He does, indeed, an entire separate shed full.

“DataLess is one of the greatest contributors to the e-waste stream,” Owen explains as Nat’s eyes wander over the selection. Entire racks from decommissioned server farms, surplus computers, laptops, routers, scanners, printers. This is exactly what he needs. Depending on how securely one of these hard drives is wiped, if at all, it might contain all the information he needs to get to Dr. Po.

They settle on a price, Nat carefully concealing his bag as he counts out each bill, Wolf considering where that money might have come from. He has a brief moment of doubt; the boy had been arrested, after all, and he had the bruises to show it. The doubt vanishes, however, when they return to the Van, and Adam the cat immediately curls up in Nat’s lap again. His eyes soften, and he nuzzles the cat’s fur, and it is not the look of a nefarious kid.

“He likes you,” Wolf comments, cringing at himself. Small talk with adults was always something he hated as a kid.

Nat surprises him, though, by responding, “I was raised by cats.” He was, effectively; cats kept him warm when his dad forgot to pay the electricity bill; they purr and massage their paws into his leg when he is sad; they bring him mice every morning, which he subtly discards in the garbage bin outside.

His oldest cat, Ash, was around since the beginning; somewhere in that cluttered wreck of a house, there exists a photograph of newborn Nat and a fat grey cat, curled up together in his crib. Baby Nat played with cats and kittens instead of blocks and stuffed animals; he even remembers resorting to eating cat food, early on, after going on one or more days with his father forgetting to feed him.

He's not sure when, exactly, he became aware that the state of his house, his dad’s neglect, was a problem. It was probably the way Raven’s nose wrinkled every time she entered it; no matter how hard she tried to hide it, Nat always noticed. Then he noticed how the hallway narrowed with the stacks of boxes and newspapers and magazines piled up, first on one side, then the other, the rooms shrinking under the weight of all of Lionel’s stuff. He noticed how, unless he spent an hour each day after school cleaning out cat boxes, they never got touched. Noticed how, no matter how much his dad loved the cats (or him), he could never seem to bring himself to do anything for them (or him).

“It could be worse,” Nat reasons; Raven’s stepdad had tried to insist she pay for rent and the medical bills, which were astronomical, from when she was toddler and went through treatment for retinoblastoma. The way he had suggested she earn the money, by sleeping with his workmates, is what drove her out of the house down the street and into her older sister’s place in the Middle District.

Speaking of Charlie, Nat needs something from her; he quickly types out a message through their encrypted emails on the Frankenstein laptop. He is rather excited to get to work building something powerful enough to hack into the world’s largest machine learning corporation’s network.

Wolf, stunned by the revelations from the kid and the ease at which they were forthcoming, spends the rest of the drive in quiet contemplation. He wonders how he got into this situation; Elena, of course, who would befriend a rock if given enough time, but still, what brought her into his life? A pregnant deer, carrying a human baby; however the hell that got there. Maybe, he thinks, they are the same strange circumstances that brought Nat his cats, Raven her birds, Oz their bees. Maybe it is nature’s way of trying to form a connection with her lost human children.

When they return to the cabin, the girls are gone; they have gone on a hike in the woods. Wolf worries they could be lost in the woods, but Nat assures him the magpie, Nirvana, would never let that happen. Then he darts upstairs, carrying an armload of computer parts; another waits in the van.

Wolf is wondering what he ought to do next – food, he supposes, since he is responsible for not one but four teenagers now. Before he can get to the kitchen, however, there is shouting from upstairs.

“Wolf! Help!”

. . .

At first, Nat is concerned Oz has died; curled up on their side, eyes closed, their face deathly pale. Then they open their eyes, stare at him unfocused, blink closed again. Nat places his hand on Oz’s forehead – it is so hot, it nearly hurts to touch.

“Wolf! Help!” he calls out into the hallway; he hears footsteps, pounding up the stairs two at a time.

Wolf feels Oz’s forehead, first with the back of his hand, then the palm; he feels for the child’s pulse, which is fast but strong. When he pulls the blanket back, Oz stirs, groaning, shivering. Black bees scurry around the light sheets, and Wolf recoils; although Elena had explained the apparent symbiosis, seeing it in person makes his stomach clench. He replaces the blanket, tucking it gently around the shivering teenager.

“They have a fever,” Wolf explains to Nat, who is hovering at the other end of the room, face filled with concern. He considers what he knows about Oz: born in the cabin, completely sheltered, scarce visits to an eye doctor only. He doubts they were vaccinated against any of the common childhood diseases like chicken pox, covid, flu, RSV. Growing up here, isolated from everyone, they wouldn’t have been at risk; but back in the city, they could have been exposed to anything.

Wolf sends Nat downstairs to make tea and wanders through the hallway until he finds a bathroom. The medicine cabinet, thankfully, is not completely barren and even contains a bottle of children’s liquid ibuprofen; so, Dr. Miller and her mother didn’t shun modern medicine entirely. He soaks a washcloth with cool water from the sink, takes it and the ibuprofen back to the bedroom.

Oz stirs when he places the cloth on their head, and Wolf makes them sit up to sip at the grape flavored syrup. “You’re going to be okay,” Wolf says, as the kid slumps back down onto their pillow, already almost asleep again.

Nat is watching the electric kettle on its path to boiling when the girls enter the cabin, Nirvana screeching through the room around them, looking for something to eat. Elena immediately clocks his grim face. “Is something wrong?” she asks. She can’t look at Nat as he explains, or Raven with her severe expression; her eyes wander around the room instead. The kitchen window is framed with drying flowers and herbs, dozens of bundles in all colors of the rainbow; Elena recognizes none of them. She wonders if any of them could cure what is wrong with Oz now.

. . .

It started as a tickle in the back of Oz’s throat the previous night; by morning, it had progressed, scratchy and hoarse. By lunchtime, it felt like they had swallowed glass; shivering with fever, head pounding, they retreated to their room and slept.

They dream of the city, a dark concrete jungle inhabited by an enormous monster that coughs smoke into the sky and chases Oz through the streets, trying to run them down. The smog is choking, and it burns their throat as they run. The buildings towering overhead are all identical, blank windows like voids behind the façade.

They wake, briefly, sometime in the afternoon; a vague face floats in front of them, someone who does not belong in this cabin. Not Po, not grandmother, but Oz’s arms are too weak, their legs paralyzed, and they sink back into that feverish city dream.

“Oz,” someone says, another stranger. They groan; head pounding, shivering in the cold, Oz tries to roll away. The stranger makes them sit up, sip some potent cocktail that sticks to their teeth and feels like acid in their throat; then blissful unconsciousness again.

In the dream city, Oz looks down at their chest to find it whole, unbroken, skin stretched smooth over hidden ribs. They press their fingers against their flesh, which is still, unbuzzing. Then the monster roars behind them, and they start running again.

. . .

Elena sits in Oz’s room, watching over them as they sleep fitfully through the night, simultaneously burning and freezing from fever. She doesn’t remember ever being this sick, but Wolf informs her she had the flu once, as an infant. Her tiny coughs, mucus-clogged and rattling breaths had kept him up for nearly 3 days straight. He had rented a hotel room, just so he could turn the shower on high and fill the bathroom with steam to help ease the baby’s congestion.

This revelation does little to ease Elena’s concern as she watches Oz suffering through the night.

. . .

Eventually Oz grows weary of racing through the endless identical streets in this infinite city; at some point they stumble, their legs give out, and they crash into the hard, abrasive asphalt, skin scraping off their knees and elbows. This is the end, Oz thinks, the monster roaring down the street after them, trailing black smoke.

But that’s not necessarily true, is it? Because these monsters do have a weakness, their flimsy rubber tires that are always degrading, turning into microplastics in the roads, the waterways, the sky. Rubber vs metal spikes, the tires explode, the monster loses control, crashes in an explosion of noise into a nearby building.

Then Oz is completely alone. No bees in their chest, no birds in the sky, no people or their monsters. The city is a desolate wasteland, crumbling concrete and rusting metal beams. They feel as hollow and empty as their surroundings. Without the monster to chase them they trudge slowly through the empty streets, looking for someone, something, anything to suggest they are not the only living thing left in the city.

. . .

By twilight Oz’s fitful, trembling sleep has eased into a deep slumber, and Wolf makes Elena go to bed. She stumbles through the house, looking for her friends; Nat is working intently on his computers, Raven has disappeared again entirely. There is a fire burning in the fireplace, chasing off the chilly spring night, and Elena curls up on the couch nearby, asleep before she even realizes it.

. . .

In their dream, Oz is still walking through the endless, empty city; time stretches infinitely around them. Then: a bee, tiny and black with red fuzzy hairs, buzzes past. Oz races to catch up to it, but it is always just out of reach. There is something particularly tragic about a social bee trapped alone like this; without her hive, a worker bee has no purpose, nothing to protect or feed or support.

They stop, rather abruptly, at the edge of the city, their arms wheeling cartoonishly at the edge of the chasm that seems to have just opened in front of them. The vulture bee flies on, disappearing into the void, leaving Oz alone again. They look all around them: in front, a void; behind, an infinite city.

They jump off the cliff, into the unknown.

Chapter 13:

Nat watches the video again and again; it is a 47 second clip, viewed on Xvid over one and a half million times already.

“Dr. Po’s Sudden Reversal”: in the video, Dr. Po stands in a forest, red hair a vibrant contrast to the green background. She explains that nothing lives here anymore; the woods are abandoned, home to nothing but dying trees.

But, Dr. Po explains, suddenly brighter: there is hope. In addition to building the pipeline, which will alone create hundreds of jobs, Armor Inc. is investing in the ecological restoration of the surrounding woods. An Armor-funded Conservation Corp will reintroduce several species of animals, clean up the waterways, and maintain the land for as long as the pipeline is running.

“Because Armor cares,” she says, the camera zooming in on her face, crystal-clear sapphire eyes.

“It’s not her,” Oz hisses, voice still hoarse. It was probably strep, Wolf concluded, peering into their throat after they finally woke up from that horrific fever dream the night before. Group A streptococcus, according to Oz’s Merck Manual, likely antibiotic resistant; luckily, it’s rarely fatal, just unpleasant. Particularly if your immune system has almost no experience dealing with other human beings.

Oz is recovering, albeit slower than they would like; the bees, previously made sluggish by Oz’s illness, buzz around as though they had never been affected. Oz sits on their bed, still, occasionally sipping on tea or soup, which feel less like glass and more like sandpaper. Meanwhile Nat has parked himself at their desk, surrounded by bits of technology.

Nat is pretty sure it’s fake, too; it’s definitely not the Dr. Po he knew online, who was always unwavering in her convictions. Rule one of averting continued climate disaster: there is no excuse for new fossil fuel development. Rule two: fossil fuel executives are responsible for millions of lives lost already, and billions to come; and that’s just the human lives. A brand-new gas field and pipeline in exchange for a few square miles of habitat restoration in a supposed dead-zone, which it is not, by the way, is not something Dr. Po would ever endorse.

Though she has never met Dr. Miller before, Elena can tell there is something odd about the video as well; she can’t quite place it, but something about her smile, the glint in her eyes, seems almost inhuman.

“Her voice is definitely wrong,” Raven agrees. She has been making herself scarce, these past couple days, seeming to avoid even Elena. They have not spoken since their hike in the woods. Raven was gone even after Elena woke up from her late night yesterday, then at some point trudged into bed without greeting anyone. She is sharing grandmother’s old room with Nat, who seems to not need sleep at all; she tries not to think about the last occupant of the bed in that room.

Nat watches the video again, and again, and again. They are absolutely right: the video is wrong. Of course, DataLess is one of the top AI companies, and it stands to benefit the most from this arrangement; the pipeline will directly fuel their newest data center. Have they deepfaked Dr. Po’s image for propaganda? If so, where does that mean she is?

“Not a forest,” Oz points out. “The trees are all the same.” Nat squints at the screen; it’s true, the trees in the background look like a single tree copied and pasted over and over again. It’s amazing, the quality of propaganda that people can be made to believe.

The other mystery, the missing Kennedy Yates, has been resolved by various public appearances the same day the video was published, including an interview at a late-night talk show the previous night. She claims to have been at a deep meditation retreat: “It’s so nice to get disconnected, once in a while,” she’d said of it. When asked if she had seen Dr. Miller’s video of support, she recited, “Dr. Miller has been working with us to develop a solution to the global energy and supply chain failures that is both economic and ecologically friendly.

“We appreciate her full support and cooperation in this matter.”

Her eyes, which Nat recognizes as his own, are predatory, glinting like an extinct bear’s with a fresh catch. “Dr. Po would never cooperate with you,” he says out loud.

Further interview questions about her secretive retreat reveal: it was in a desert, hence her glowing tan; yes, she feels much better, so much more relaxed; it is an extremely expensive and exclusive retreat. “They’ll invite you when you need it most,” she laughs.

“A desert retreat?” Oz wonders. Nat looks it up on Xmaps and confirms: the GPS coordinates are a desert location, albeit only recently. Desertification has converted a lot of the plains over the past few decades, as the uninhabitable Great Southwest Desert extends its deadly range. The New Desert would have to be at least somewhat inhabitable if DataLess plans on building a server farm there; there is even a small town nearby. If Dr. Po is being held somewhere, there’s a good chance it’s the same place Kennedy Yates was ostensibly vacationing.

Oz has spread out Wolf’s maps for the state on their floor. They have marked, to scale, the planned gas fracking field and sketched out pipeline, as well as the location of the GPS coordinates. The pipeline initially seems to follow the creek, which will eventually curve off to the west, away from the final coordinates. Oz traces the existing roadways and rail lines, creeks and rivers, landing on a relatively direct path along a river as they approach the data center. This water would be beneficial for keeping the massive servers cool during their intensive calculations, as well as being a necessary supply for the inevitable power plant. But it is also a feeder into the Colorado River, the largest river in the west, which has nearly dried up from the never-ending drought. It will take significant rerouting and damming for DataLess to keep their data center long-term.

Likely, Oz’s creek will suffer the same fate, sacrificed for gas extraction; their land and the protected forest to the north, and countless other habitats further along, will be decimated to make room for construction equipment. Whatever life remains, including the nearly extinct bluebirds, will either flee or perish.

That is the way of things, now. Unless they can stop it.

Elena is listening but not really paying attention to her friends’ discussion. Her mind is wandering, her fingers itching to go outside; she has been in this cabin for too long. She startles when Raven taps on her shoulder; she had not even noticed the other girl approaching.

“I have something to show you,” Raven whispers; together, they duck out of the room and down the stairs, passing by Wolf, who is snoring on the couch. He was displeased by Elena’s decision to go for a hike alone, before.

“I wasn’t alone,” Elena insisted.

“You might as well have been,” Wolf yelled, “she’s blind. What would she have possibly done if you’d gotten lost?” Elena didn’t bother bringing up Nirvana, too upset by the implication that Raven was somehow less of a person. She hoped Raven had not heard her father’s words, thought maybe that was the cause of her recent absences.

They walk through the forest in silence, Raven striding so quickly and sure-footed through the trees that Elena struggles to catch up. Nirvana is soaring above, curiously quiet.

After nearly an hour, the other girl slows, and Elena, panting, almost crashes into her. “Shhh,” Raven chides, catching her from falling; the touch is electric. She doesn’t let go, but guides Elena by the hand through a thick wall of brush that scratches her arms.

Then: Elena gasps, breathing in and holding it, even willing her heart to stop in case it scares away the sight in front of them. It is a pair of deer, a doe and her young fawn, so small it still wobbles on spindly legs. She bites her lip as the doe freezes, stares her down; she’s aware of Raven’s hand on her back. “It’s okay,” she whispers, and it’s true: the mother doe has finished assessing the potential for danger and gone back to grazing.

The fawn dozing, birds chirping, the warm sun, the sweet smell of grass and pine, the joyful new life in front of her; Elena can almost picture a time, decades ago or more, that this was the norm.

“How did you find them?” she whispers, knowing the answer before she asks. As always, Nirvana is perched nearby, preening his long blue-black feathers. Raven describes combing through the woods yesterday with the magpie; there was chatter amongst the birds about a new life, an early spring fawn. Even for the birds it was a cause for celebration, and their gossip spread easily.

“You were asleep when I left,” she explains. She decided it would be better to let Elena rest, surprise her today.

Elena feels speechless, forces herself to turn away from the deer and pulls Raven into a tight hug. The other girl tenses, only for a moment, then relaxes and returns the embrace.

Elena is glad she had her portable watercolor set tucked in her pocket: a small tray of paints and a pad of paper, three half-length brushes. She sits to paint, Raven laying in the dirt and pine needles next to her, and at first the silence feels peaceful. After a while, though, Elena turns to her and asks, “Do you want to know what I am doing?”

Surprised, Raven answers, “Uhm. Sure.” She has learned to appreciate long, contemplative silences with her friends, mostly Nat; people tend to underestimate the significance of shared visual experiences, visual methods of communication.

“I’m starting by painting the trees,” Elena explains, “They’re spiky, so I’m using this brush with drier paint.” She gently tickles Raven’s arm with a stiff brush, demonstrating the technique, then quickly retreats, feeling awkward. But Raven looks relaxed, so she continues. “I’m using green and yellow-green for the main colors, and purple for the shadows.”

“Purple?” Raven grins.

“I know it sounds weird, but shadows aren’t really black,” Elena explains. “They’re not really grey, either, or even a darker shade of the same color. The light bounces around and our eyes fill it in weirdly too.” She continues painting, and Raven listens to the sound of the brush on paper.

Then: “I’ll use this brush to base the deer in brown.” She draws the narrow brush smoothly down Raven’s arm, sparking chills down her spine.

This proceeds for nearly an hour: Elena describing the scene before them, the colors, the technique she uses to capture it on paper. Her voice lulls Raven into a serene trance; eventually even the doe crouches down on the ground next to her fawn to rest.

It is jarring when Elena suddenly announces she has finished; she places the watercolors and paper on the ground next to her, then leans back on her hands. Her back is stiff after sitting hunched over for so long.

Raven sits up and pivots so they are facing each other, knees barely touching. “Excellent,” she says, “what do you want to do next.”

Elena hesitates. “Well,” she says, reluctantly.

“Hmm?” When Raven cocks her head, she so resembles the magpie Nirvana it makes Elena giggle, easing the tension in her chest.

“I would really like to kiss you,” she finishes. There is a pause, and Elena almost regrets her confession.

Then: Raven is reaching forward, searching for Elena’s face; she places a hand on each side, thumbs finding her lips. She leans forward and gently kisses Elena; her lips are so soft and full and she smells like mint. Raven’s lips part slightly as she adds more pressure, and heat rushes to Elena’s face; this is her first kiss, and she had not fully considered the logistics. She is suddenly very aware of her hands, flopped useless on the ground.

Sensing the uncertainty, Raven pulls back, one hand lingering on Elena’s face to trace her dimpled smile with her thumb. “Are they watching us?” she asks.

Elena looks past Raven’s shoulder; both deer are, indeed, watching the two of them with large brown eyes. She laughs and Raven loves the sound. She stands and holds out her hand to help Elena to her feet; she surprises Raven, drawing closer and pressing a firm, more certain kiss on her lips.

They walk back through the woods to the cabin together again, holding hands as usual.

Chapter 14:

The second video comes out on Xvid the following day. It is 3 minutes and 58 seconds long, titled: “How I Fell for the Climate Change Scam.”

In the video, Dr. Miller displays graphs with altered scales, describing how weather patterns have always been subject to natural fluctuations. She walks the viewer through a “natural oasis” discovered near the new regenerative server farms built by DataLess; it is a near perfectly round circle of green contrasting the surrounding brown wasteland.

“DataLess is dedicated to preserving this natural oasis, which is proof that life will always persevere.”

Oz was feeling better, finally, but this video makes their stomach ache. They are not terribly close to Po, but they know one thing: she is dedicated to fighting against this exact sort of greenwashing. During her brief visits to the cabin, she would rant about some initiative or another designed only to continue the expansion of environmentally devastating practices.

“Plant some trees, off-set an entire coal plant!” she would bark, waving her hands around to emphasize the absurdity of the argument.

This, too, is evidence that the facsimile in front of them is fake: Po is lively, passionate, emotional. The stoic robot praising DataLess on Xvid cannot possibly be her.

The teens have gathered in Oz’s room; after watching the video, Nat has an announcement. “We have made a breakthrough,” he declares, “and by we, I mean myself and your sister Charlie, so you can stop saying terrible things about her.” This last part is directed towards Raven.

“I will when she stops dissing you,” Raven retorts.

“She doesn’t even know who I am.”

“That’s the point.” Charlie can be as nice a suck-up to Hatch as she wants; she bullied him as a babysitter, misgendering and deadnaming him even after his appearance made the transition obvious.

“Anyway,” Nat continues; he does not have time for this. He holds up one of his new laptops, barcoded with DataLess’ logos. “With the brilliant help of one PinkBunnyHat, aka Charlie, we have almost complete access to the warehouse they’re building.”

He’s not kidding: building blueprints, design schematics, network data, emails. Charlie managed to socially engineer her way through to some IT intern, who assisted her in getting a “wrongfully terminated” employee reconnected to the system. Asset number: the computer on Nat’s lap right now.

It is clear that development is far more progressed than they had thought; whatever the outcome of the building permits, environmental impact statements, and court of public opinion, DataLess is already well on their way to having their fully functional server farm completed. All it needs now is power generation, specifically: the ability to move natural gas from point A (north of Oz’s cabin) to point B (some point in the desert) to burn for electricity.

“We need to go down there,” Oz decides. “Would Wolf be able to drive us?”

Elena is not certain, now; Wolf has been distant, distracted. He is downstairs now, pacing through the kitchen, muttering to himself. He has noticed Elena’s growing closeness to Raven, the way they are always together, barely touching. He is not ready for her to grow up and try out relationships; he has no life experience to offer should it inevitably cause tears, since he never bothered dating, even before a baby landed in his lap. Her attraction to the other girl feels foreign to him.

Wolf is also feeling the increasing pressure of responsibility for the teens in the room above him. He has, effectively, kidnapped at least two of them, and he is aiding in the delinquency of a minor on bail. And from the snippets of conversation they have involved him in, and what little more he has overheard, they are planning on causing more trouble.

He can only hope they don’t plan on dragging him into it; but of course, Wolf has become the adult in their life, even if he doesn’t feel it. He especially feels an obligation towards Oz, at least to help them find their mother. It’s not like he can just leave the kid here, alone in the cabin, like she did.

His hopes are dashed when the four of clump down the stairs to the kitchen, sitting around the table in unison and staring at him. Each face is so grim and serious that Wolf has to suppress a laugh. “You’re children,” he wants to remind them, “Go play outside.” It doesn’t escape his notice that Elena and Raven are holding hands under the table as the other two do most of the talking.

Wolf is sitting at the same table, head heavy in his hands by the time Oz and Nat have gone over their “plan,” quotes added mentally because it really is more of a vague sketch of an idea than an actual plan. Oz is convinced that Dr. Po Miller is being held hostage at a random server farm in the New Desert to the southeast. Some nefarious corporations are using her image to improve their public image. Supposedly, Nat has hacked into their network; Wolf groans again as he describes the process. He refrains from banging his head on the table; it looks to be solid oak, much harder than the lightweight plastic piece in the Van. They want him to drive them to this place in the middle of nowhere desert.

“What exactly do you expect to happen if you get there?” Wolf imagines them walking up to a security guard, demanding to see Dr. Miller, the guard laughing them off. Or worse, calling back-up, involving police, putting Nat at even more risk. “There’s no way they’re going to let a bunch of kids into the place.”

“Bet,” Nat responds; another ancient meme. With Charlie’s help, he is working to secure a visit and tour of the new facilities for an enterprising group of prodigiously intelligent teenagers; winners of a unique coding contest that never existed. As of this morning, however, the website sure did, proudly announcing the names of the four winners; pseudonyms, of course, because Oz’s name would certainly tip off Kennedy Yates, and Nat is now a fugitive. The woman Charlie had spoken to hadn’t been aware of such a contest or prize, but “We are sure excited to get to meet them!”

“And when is this supposed tour taking place?” Wolf asks.

The kids look at each other. “Tomorrow,” they say in unison. Of course.

. . .

The eastern half of the state was once a lush prairie grassland; scorching temperatures, drought, and nitrogen burn turned it into a great desert that is threatening to overwhelm the entire Midwest. Eventually it might even connect to the deadland in the southwest, making it potentially inhospitable in the near future; but people already live here, which means they are always looking for work.

This also means land there is super cheap; plenty of room for a server warehouse or a dozen. With their own power supply, sourced by their own gas fields in the north, Kennedy Yates’ company DataLess stands to profit enormously off this middle of nowhere supercomputer -slash- data mining operation.

And the test of her new deepfake video AI has worked flawlessly; there was that little hitch with the trees, but her team was excellent at deleting the comments of the few who had noticed. For their second attempt, she learned that filming the location on-site made for a much more realistic overall look, and stocks for DataLess have already gone up.

The only question now is what to do with the subject when this is all over. Dr. Miller is being held – no, kept is a better word – in relatively comfortable quarters on site.  It has a mattress, at least. The warehouse is huge; you never know what’s hiding behind the locked storage doors.

Kennedy’s desk phone rings, interrupting her thoughts. “Yes,” she answers sharply. It’s her secretary – it is always her secretary. Anyone who wants to get a hold of her has to get patched through.

“Hi Mrs. Yates!” The secretary’s southern drawl always makes Kennedy cringe. “I just wanted to remind you about that tour you promised to give those kids this afternoon. Is there anything you need me to prepare?”

Kennedy clicks through her calendar, irritated. “What tour, what are you talking about?” Her schedule looked open this afternoon, and she’d been looking forward to ducking out of this hell hole early. The desert land may be cheap, but it is hot, and she does not like being here longer than she must. Local quarters are for the lower staff; IT specialists and janitors, or whatever. For now, Kennedy has been shuffling back and forth between here and the nearest city, staying at a decent hotel with room service downtown. For a more permanent solution, however, she has had her eye on a particular cabin, somewhere up north in the cooler mountains, insulated from the more damaging effects of climate change.

“You know,” the secretary’s voice drones on, “the contest winners?”

Ugh, Kennedy thinks as her secretary continues drawling on about some contest for young geniuses that, apparently, she’d been signed up for as the first-place prize.

Well, and DataLess, she supposes. What are they even supposed to tour, server racks? “Fine, fine,” Kennedy says, waving her hand although the secretary cannot see it. “Let me know when they’ve arrived.” She rings security to let them know to put certain areas under extra surveillance; don’t want pesky kids getting into places they don’t belong.

It really would be nice if her secretary had let her know about this contest ahead of time – maybe she would have been able to judge it. Kids are always willing to work for cheap if you pretend their stuff is groundbreaking. One recently hired underaged “intern” is paid entirely in pizza coupons; the girl’s family is so poor, her orientation was the first time she’d ever eaten the nasty, greasy stuff.

. . .

There is an awkward tension among the group during the drive south, though only Elena knows why. She has once again opted to sit in the back with Raven instead of the passenger seat; Nat sits there instead, chatting obliviously with a taciturn Wolf.

Elena and Raven had gotten back from their elicit hike yesterday unnoticed, but that night, after everyone else had gone to sleep - even Nat, slumped over in the computer chair, his head resting at an angle on Oz’s bed - Raven had slipped quietly into Elena’s room. Her lights were already out; Elena reached over to click on the bedside lamp, but realized it was unnecessary as Raven deftly made her way across the room to sit next to her on the bed. She was not wearing sunglasses, for a change, and Elena loved being able to see her whole face.

“I’m obsessed,” Raven confessed, “I can’t stop thinking about this morning.” Then she had reached over and kissed Elena again, and it was wonderful. She was more prepared this time, returning the pressure; she ran her hands along Raven’s hair, which was black, of course, what would her parents have named her if it hadn’t been? Why was she even thinking about this? She followed the braid to the middle of Raven’s back where it ends, then let her hands fall to her hips.

That was as far as it went; when Raven’s lips parted, and her tongue darted into Elena’s mouth, it felt so strange that she immediately pulled back, giggling with embarrassment.

Raven smirked. “You haven’t done this much, have you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Elena admitted.

“That’s okay, we can take it slow.” Raven kissed Elena once more, then ducked out of the room, to sleep once again in the grandmother’s haunted bed.

It was this transgression Wolf had witnessed: the leaving, not the entering. Why he chose to sit with the information overnight, instead of confronting Elena at the time, is beyond her; but stewing with it made him more irritable than usual. He stormed into Elena’s room as she was preparing to leave.

“What was she doing in here last night?” he’d demanded.

Elena’s face had warmed; she was blushing hard. “Nothing,” she said, “Nothing happened.”

Wolf had flinched; what did Elena know about what could have happened? But even as he thought it, he had known it wasn’t exactly true. He’d given Elena an abbreviated sex talk after she’d gotten her period; he’d put off that talk too late, so when she started bleeding she thought she was dying. He’d decided to combine the all the difficult talks into one; his asexuality made it impossible to offer anything more than just the facts. Life advice, emotional consequences, whatever; she had a phone, and social media, and streaming, and she probably knew more about all that than he did.

“You can’t just sleep around with someone you’ve just met,” Wolf had said, “You’re too young. You’re not ready.” The words were poison and he’d known it. They didn’t even sound like his own; maybe they had come from a book he listened to once, where they would have been uttered by an antagonist. He’d apologized to Elena before they left, adding, “I just don’t want to see you get hurt. I want you to be safe.” It did not ease the tension between them.

The drive takes them over a mountain pass that still shows a trace of snow; past the city where they all met, where Nat ducks his head beneath the window, which probably looks more suspicious than anything; past multiple burn scars and an enormous stretch of retired agricultural wasteland. It is more of the world than Nat has ever seen, and it is sobering. He thinks they are lucky, in the windowless back of the Van, where they can pretend the world still looks alive; even out here.

Chapter 15:

Kennedy Yates is waiting in her office for the children to finish their main tour. She has instructed some intern named Matt to guide them through the general office area, give them some ice cream from the company freezer, talk about... whatever it is child prodigies talk about. Alleged prodigies – no one has bothered filling her in on what these supposed projects were, or even who held the competition in the first place.

Honestly, she can’t trust anyone to keep track of things around here.

The tour will end in Kennedy’s office, where she will give a little speech of congratulations. She has decided to give them a preview of DataLess’ increasingly effective deepfake video technology. It is currently scanning security videos of the group to capture each of them from every angle; by the time they’ve gotten here, Kennedy will be able to show them complete, insanely detailed avatars of each kid, running around some video game level.

Kids love video games, right?

. . .

They arrive at the main entrance to a bit of confusion; aside from the chaperone, who was apparently only a hired courier, none of the children had thought to bring any identification.

“No school IDs, nothin’?” the bored security guard asks, eyeing the oddball group in front of her with suspicion.

Thankfully, Matt the Intern arrives in time to assuage the guard, enthusiastically inviting the children through the security scanners. Holding out a tray, he explains, “Gotta leave your phones here, guys,” winking, “Security concern.”

Only two of the kids have phones to relinquish, and Matt narrows his eyes in mock disbelief at the others. “Are you sure you’re not hiding anything in those pockets?” he asks, jovially. “Aren’t you kids supposed to be glued to the things?”

The smallest kid, whose name tag is scrawled “Mandy (they/them)”, just shrugs; the other one, “Charlie (she/her)” doesn’t even look at him, and it takes Matt a second to realize she must be blind behind those ridiculously dark sunglasses. She is clutching the arm of the one named “Nathan (he/him)”, who mutters descriptions at her under his breath. The last contest winner, “Naya (she/her)”, already looks bored as she gazes around the security room; but not nearly as bored as the chaperone, whose nametag only reads “Wolf.”

“I’m just a hired courier,” Wolf explains, “they paid me to drive these kids. Didn’t tell me I was gonna babysit them.”

You and me both, Matt thinks; he directs Wolf to the break room upstairs, where he can help himself to the coffee and donuts. Then he turns to the kids.

“Well, let me be the first to say, congratulations, contest winners!” Matt cheers. They all stare; “Naya” manages a tight smile. “As we begin this tour, who wants to be the first to tell me about their winning project?”

“Nathan” abandons his charge to walk with Matt, talking animatedly about his project, something to do with rebuilding computers from e-waste, but isn’t that illegal? Matt is not really paying attention, busy swiveling his head around to make sure the kids are on track; the blind one has latched onto the other girl, so that’s good, she won’t be getting lost. Matt has to wonder about whose grand idea it was to award these kids with a tour of what is probably the least interesting place to work. Probably Mrs. Yates; she is always looking for an excuse for positive press.

The other day, he and another intern had been made to walk a 3D video camera through the artificial oasis outside, where the water coolant is piped out. It is a dank, vaguely metallic smelling place, with algae growing in the silty mud and the occasional spritz of grass. His coworker had wondered at how toxic the water probably was, after running through the machines and their heavy metals. Mrs. Yates was going to use the oasis as proof of DataLess’ positive ecological impact. Whatever that means.

Matt scans his badge to open the door to the main server closet, which is actually the bulk of the warehouse; an enormous, refrigerated space with rows and rows of server racks, blue and green lights blinking. They pile into the vestibule; a secondary cage made of steel bars encircles the servers for added security. He does not have a key for the cage, so this is as far as he can take them. Matt turns around to face the kids. The little one is already shivering, their pale skin and hair glowing under the ambient blue LEDs.

Make it quick, then, he thinks. “So,” he declares out loud, “This is where all the magic happens.” He spreads his arms wide, as if embracing the softly buzzing server racks. Thinking about it, the buzzing seems a little louder in one of the servers; he’ll have to let a technician know a hard drive is spinning out.

“Only a fraction of the servers are on right now,” Matt explains, “since they are running on limited power, but eventually the entire 200 by 250 foot square space will be filled with what is, effectively, one giant supercomputer.” Generators and solar panels keep the current DataLess server farm going, at least until pipeline finalized and the plant started. “It doesn’t look like much, but this is the mainframe for DataLess’ AI. It’s where the machine-learning happens,” he finishes, triumphantly. That went well.

Nat rolls his eyes; a massive oversimplification, he thinks, but does not say, because he has managed to convince this intern that he and his friends are just a group of harmless kids. Matt has visibly relaxed his guard as they walked through the hall, distracted by Nat’s chatter as Oz and Elena pay more than usual attention to the layout of the building. Wolf, ideally, is also investigating, having been left unattended in the break room.

He's not there when they return, but Matt does not seem to notice; he is digging through a large freezer. “Who wants ice cream?” he asks, turning around with four anonymous, white plastic-wrapped ice cream cones. “Normally, we reserve these for ice cream Fridays,” he winks, passing out the cones.

The kids meander around the breakroom as they eat their frozen treats, and Matt is glad for the rarely used ping-pong table and arcade machine furnishing the room. They still have half an hour to kill before he is supposed to take them to Mrs. Yates’ office. Two of them start up a half-hearted game of ping-pong, but neither of them is very good; it is clear that “Mandy” has never seen a ping pong paddle before in their life. Matt watches, distracted by the possibility of something breaking, and is surprised when “Charlie” appears at his side. Where did she come from?

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she announces, staring blindly somewhere past Matt’s shoulder.

“Oh, uhm,” he says, hesitating. Should they all take a bathroom break, or aren’t they a bit old for that?

“I can take her,” “Naya” skips up, taking the other girl’s hand.

“Perfect,” Matt sighs, relieved, “Down the hall, first right, take the hallway a bit and it will be on your left.”

Elena leads Raven down the hallway; when they turn down another hall, she spins around to kiss the other girl. Thrilled, Raven presses in closer, returning the kiss; it has been difficult to keep their hands off each other. Too soon, Raven hears something, and reluctantly pulls away.

“Footsteps,” she mutters, “someone’s coming.” They turn to start down the hallway just a Wolf appears at the other end. They meet in the middle in front of the doors to two restrooms.

“Where are you two going?” Wolf asks, voice low.

“Bathroom.” Elena is trying to sound casual, like her lips aren’t still tender from making out with Raven. “Where have you been?” she retorts.

“Bathroom,” Wolf responds, walking right past it. He has been exploring the 2nd floor of the building while the kids got the tour of the server farm downstairs; now he heads to entrance, to talk with the security guard.

There is a narrow window in the bathroom, and when Elena opens it she is greeted by Nirvana the magpie, perched on a ledge just outside. He squawks at Raven behind her, then picks up and drops the package he has been carrying.

“Thanks friend,” Elena says as she takes the package, prompting a smile from Raven. She enters one of the stalls and climbs onto the toilet to access the drop-ceiling tile and tucks the package into the empty space above. It is some odd piece of technology Nat produced with a single on/off switch (switched to on, she double-checked) and a short antenna sticking out of it. Most of the board components are concealed behind crossed layers of electrical tape.

Elena drops back down and exits the stall; she watches Raven, scratching that magpie’s neck feathers and murmuring before sending him back outside and gently closing the window, leaving it slightly cracked for Oz’s bees. Hopefully no one passes through and notices the discrepancy. Then they make their way back to the break room, where everyone is waiting to complete the tour.

. . .

The group standing in front of Kennedy Yates is what her grandfather would call an “after-school special mix”: two white (one disabled), one brown, one black. It is the last one who most draws Kennedy’s attention; he reminds her of someone, but not anyone she wants to remember. She shakes her head. His nametag reads “Nathan”, and though he was talkative and animated on the security feeds, now, in her office, his is an almost sulking silence.

“Well, who would like a chance to see what DataLess is capable of?” she asks. Her voice holds a high, false cheer; she is not accustomed to speaking with children.

No response.

Undeterred, she announces, “Ta-da!” while swiveling the monitor around to reveal four high-resolution avatars, idling in an empty map. They are nearly exact replicas of the kids standing in front of her; right down to the slouching postures and impossible to reach expectations.

Three of them lean over to peer closer at the screen; the fourth, whose nametag labels her as “Charlie”, doesn’t even appear to notice the display.

“She can’t see,” “Nathan” explains, glancing up from the screen to meet Kennedy’s eyes. They are an identical color to her own, she realizes with a start: a honey brown, probably lighter in the sun.

The one labelled “Mandy” wonders, “When did you scan us?” Brilliant; an opening.

“Never, and always! DataLess’ machine-learning algorithm modelled each of you after viewing the security footage of you all taking the tour. There are cameras everywhere in the building, so it was able to get all sorts of data on you.”

“Everywhere we went?” the one labelled “Naya” asks.

Kennedy laughs, “Well, everywhere except the bathroom.” Was that a sigh of relief? Yes, she thinks, I saw your little tryst in the hallway, girls.

“So, you can make models of people, just from videos of them?” Another question from “Mandy”; Kennedy starts to think their blank face might be an expression of displeasure, rather than impressed.

What a remarkably stoic character, she thinks. Then: “I don’t make them,” she explains, “The machine-learning algorithm models them based on the data available.”

“Could you do it to anyone?”

“I suppose, if it had enough video footage to analyze.” Kennedy is starting to feel like this is an interrogation. How ridiculous, she chides herself; of course this kid is no threat. They’re just curious, as children are – they had all won an award for it, after all.

She is relieved when it is time to send them off with a final congratulations, as well as armloads of DataLess swag: mostly plastic junk and hats that they get by the pallet-load from China. She walks down to the security bay to see them out herself. From the view screen at the security desk, she watches them pile into an unmarked white van and drive away.

Finally, Kennedy can relax; she’ll have to have words with her secretary about inviting children into the warehouse. She has enough guest to worry about already. Some sort of insect, a fly, she thinks, buzzes around the room.

“Ugh,” she says, swatting it away. Then, to the security guard: “Make sure this place is spotless. I do not want an infestation in here.”

Chapter 16:

Wolf drives the kids to what passes for a town closest to the warehouse; it primarily consists of trailer homes, placed here just to house DataLess employees. He finds a grocery store to park at, then twists in his chair to face the kids.

“Alright,” he asks, “what do we have?”

They have: a device Nat calls a Pomegranate, placed and ready for him to hack into the internal security system.

A hundred or more bees, currently crawling and buzzing around the warehouse. The server farm was too cold for them, but Oz is confident that they will find their way into every other room in the warehouse, eventually.

An accounting of the outside of the building and campus, courtesy of Nirvana. Most importantly: the location of each fire escape in the building.

A detailed map of the upstairs office space, courtesy of Wolf, to compare to the blueprints.

It doesn’t seem like much, but this is where they discover their first anomaly: while the second floor of the warehouse stretches across the entire footprint of the building, the server farm only encompasses about 2/3 its length on the bottom floor, if Matt’s dimensional description is to be believed. The blueprints, on the other hand, indicate the bottom floor as an entirely open space; the second-floor circles around the outside, with a balcony overlooking the central area. They filled in the central upper floor with office space, isolating it from the rest of the warehouse, and cut out a good 50 feet of server space from the bottom floor.

“They’ve got to be using that space for something,” Oz insists. They recall the layout of warehouse; even accounting for the narrow, awkward hallway after the security station at the front, which contained nothing but the heavily secured door to the servers and a staircase to the second floor, there has to be space beyond the end of the cage. Their bees wouldn’t be able to get through the massive, frigid server farm, but surely the ductwork extends throughout; especially if there are offices above the unknown space.

As an added bonus, the company provided them with enough random stuff labelled with their logo that Elena is confident she will be able to reproduce it and the standard uniform, should they need to disguise themselves as employees.

“Only if it comes to that,” she assures quickly, looking over to Wolf. He sighs, rolls his eyes, and exits the Van, strolling towards the grocery store.

With a final few taps on his computer, Nat announces, “Done. And I’m beat.” Elena directs him to her mattress in the back of the Van, where he almost immediately starts softly snoring. No one can blame him for that; he has spent more recent nights awake than not. Adam curls up on his chest, and, soon after, Raven joins them, her head resting on her oldest friend’s shoulder. The comfortable familiarity sparks a brief flare of jealousy in Elena’s stomach.

It suddenly feels too warm, crowded in the once cozy Van. Elena looks towards Oz. “Shall we go outside?” she asks, and they respond with a nod.

It is unbelievably hot outside; the sun is burning Oz’s skin, like they have just opened the wood stove to a full-on bonfire. The solar panels on top of the Van must be working overtime to power whatever air conditioning keeps the interior cool. Oz follows Elena to the edge of the parking lot, bordered by skinny, dying trees. The temperature is not much better in the shade; the air is still, heat waves distorting it over the asphalt.

“They replace them every few years,” Elena explains, noticing Oz eye the trees wearily. She has seen it happen, knows that the health of the trees is rarely a concern for whomever is responsible for them. Once one permanently loses enough leaves, it is simply dug up, a new one planted in its place.

Elena is trying to help Oz understand their bees better; she was inspired by Raven and Nirvana, who can share thoughts even without the necessary symbiosis shared by Oz and their bees. She knows the bees are sensitive to Oz’s emotions, and suspects the relationship also holds true in the reverse; bee pheromones are commonly used to control behavior in the hive. She sits with them as they meditate, encouraging them to listen to the bees, yet she feels like a fraud; she has no close connections to any animals. Raven should be the one doing this, she thinks.

Oz breathes through their nose, trying to clear their mind and listen to the buzzing coming from within. They think about flowers and corpses, feasts for the young; they think about building with wax and working with sisters to protect the hive.

“Bees communicate in dance,” Elena recalls from one of her books, “As well as the pheromones and vocalizations.”

“You want me to dance for them?” Oz muses.

“No,” she responds, feeling absurd. “Just, maybe, try to feel for it?”

As ridiculous as she feels giving the advice, it works for Oz; as they relax, tune in to the vibrations in their chest wall, let the noise and buzz flow through them, they sense something there. A wisp of feeling, or emotion; it is unpleasant.

“They are not happy,” Oz says suddenly, opening their eyes. “There are not enough flowers here.” This is true; the New Desert does not support a lot of floral activity. A few container plants, a windowsill planter, flowers artificially selected to bloom for longer periods, producing less nectar and pollen. They will wither out when water restrictions prevent them from getting watered daily.

“That’s great!” Elena remarks. “I mean, not that they’re unhappy,” she retracts, “but you understood them!”

It really is; Oz immediately feels more at ease with their bees. They have always associated the buzzing with anxiety, since it is at its most intense when the bees are stressed, which is when they are stressed. As they pay attention, though, they begin to notice differences in the frequency, volume, richness of the collective buzz; they begin to hum along, a low, trembling pitch.

Now, they hope, the ones left at DataLess will return, and Oz will be able to interpret the information they bring. There is no guarantee, however, that they will find them back here in the town, miles away from where they were left.

Elena loves watching Oz’s bees; they crawl out from the neck of their shirt and sit for a moment on their shoulder, getting their bearings, before taking off with a buzz. Soon they return, bits of pollen stuck to their hind legs, black bodies glittering red under the sun from their tiny fuzzy hairs.

She can understand why Po would want to keep Oz isolated in the cabin, safe from the real world. They are a strange sight: small, even for their age; skin so pale it glows; curly hair frizzed out in a golden halo around their head; ice blue eyes squinting behind thick glasses; eyebrows so thin and light they are almost invisible. She has painted them twice, already, and will do so again; there is something about them, or their bees, that she has yet to properly capture. Their odd appearance distracts, temporarily, from the constant presence of bees hovering around them; but it would not take long for anyone to notice them crawling all over the kid.

They are also, clearly, a misfit: robotic tone, encyclopedic memory, how they do not make eye contact or needless conversation, except when they are interested in the topic; then they can go on and on, forever.

Finally, as the desert heat grows unbearable for Oz or Elena, Wolf emerges from the grocer, arms loaded with the sort of food teenagers like. Elena and Oz race to help him, clambering into the shrinking Van and loudly unbagging everything. Wolf is breaking his usual rule, allowing an absurd amount of backup power to run the rarely used microwave; the whirring and beeping also makes a fair bit of noise. To top it off, Elena puts on one of Wolf’s audiobooks, and a narrator’s Scottish drone fills the Van.

Nat snores on, but Raven eventually climbs over to sit at the small table. She swiftly, subtly kisses Elena’s ear before resting her head on her shoulder. The gesture sends warmth flaring through her chest.

The temperatures rapidly drop with the setting of the sun, but inside the warehouse, Oz’s vulture bees are still hard at work investigating the maze of hallways and ductwork throughout the building. They crawl under doors and behind cabinets and through vents. One such vent, near the back of the building, splits off into three narrower tubes; each goes down to a small, identical room. Only one of these rooms is occupied, but the bee who discovers this room recognizes its occupant: she smells vaguely of Oz.

The bee flies once around the room, then back through the vent to find the others; tells them where to find the mother. In the morning, they will return to their hive and inform Oz of their discovery.

Chapter 17:

“They have her, I knew it!” Everyone was sleeping before Oz bursts into the Van, letting in a blast of sunlight. Wolf sits up, bashing his head on the roof of the Van; the first time he’s done this since Elena was a toddler with night terrors. He looks down from the overhead bed and examines Oz, wild-eyed and wild-haired, bees orbiting their head. Everyone but Raven is rubbing their eyes in the sudden light.

Oz has already continued speaking. The scouting vulture bees returned, confirming not only the expected: that there are secret storage rooms in the back of the server farm; but also an unexpected revelation: that Po is in one of those rooms, alive.

Po was shocked upon waking to see the small cluster of insects dangling from her ceiling, but when one of them approached, buzzing, she recognized it immediately as one of Oz’s bees. It landed on her mattress, which lay bare on the floor. She placed her finger next to it, and it crawled on; she peered at its face, reddish eyes and hairs, antennae tapping against her skin. Then it took off, landing on the vent in the ceiling and crawling through. The rest of the bees quickly followed.

“I saw her,” Oz insists. This is a stretch; it was more the essence of a smell. But the bees recognized her as Po, and so does Oz.

Wolf suggests calling the police; the kids don’t bother justifying that with a response. With a sigh, he decides it’s best he go get donuts and coffee; they’re going to need the caffeine. Also, he needs to take a leak, and someone, Raven, is already showering in the tiny closet bathroom. Sharing one bathroom with four teens is a mistake.

Nat is tapping at his laptop, digging through everything his Pomegranate has granted him access to: security tapes, emails, personnel files, access codes. Anything that passes through the DataLess warehouse’s internal Wi-Fi, passes through his Pomegranate. It’s a pretty neat device.

“There are no cameras in the back rooms,” he asserts, “but near the back of the warehouse there’s a camera on three unmarked doors.”

It looks like one of them is latched, with a regular old-fashioned padlock. “I might be able to pick that,” Elena says.

Nat glances up, impressed. “You’ll have to teach me,” he remarks. Raven also knows how to lock-pick; as they speak, she emerges from the tiny bathroom, toweling off her long, unbraided hair. Elena’s eyes light up when she sees her, which makes Nat secretly smile.

“How do we get back there, though? We’d still have to get through the cage and get into the building in the first place.” Oz is fretting, rubbing their chest. “They already know us. She has those models.”

Nat nods, warily; the existence of the models, and all that security footage, has been weighing on his mind.

. . .

Nat’s concern is not unwarranted; although it takes Kennedy Yates until the next day, she eventually does get the idea to use DataLess to cross-reference the models with public data.

The model for the kid named “Nathan” almost immediately pops up with a match: a school ID photo for a juvenile named “Natalie” who was arrested a week ago. The picture could easily have been Nathan’s twin; probably is, Kennedy realizes, thinking about the type of person who would name their twins “Nathan” and “Natalie”.

The next match arrives for the model of “Naya” – an Xbook profile for someone named Elena. Naya must be nickname, because the pictures are clearly of the girl who was in Kennedy’s office yesterday. From the profile, she seems like an utterly unremarkable teenager, and Kennedy wonders how the girl managed to win a contest award that involved DataLess.

Finally, a match for the kid named “Mandy” – another Xbook profile, for someone named Ozy Phi. Other than the profile picture, which is also clearly one of the kids from yesterday, the profile is completely empty.

The model for “Charlie” yielded no results.

So, one of the kids who visited DataLess yesterday might be related to a criminal. Kennedy sighs; the knowledge she has gained is not nearly as revelatory as she had hoped.

. . .

Wolf, on the other hand, accidentally learns something rather important during his quest for donuts and caffeine: the person in front of him, who is suffering from a massive hangover, has very loudly decided against going into work today. “Just can’t today, man, just can’t do it today,” the person finally mutters to the cashier, grabbing his coffee and trudging over to the nearest table. His badge, loosely clipped to his back pocket, identifies him as an employee of DataLess.

Wolf kind of hates himself for noticing this; he hates himself a little more for scurrying out of the shop to tell Raven and her thieving little magpie about it.

In the end, she doesn’t even need the bird; Raven just snatches the man’s badge as she collides headfirst into him on the sidewalk. In his embarrassment over running into a little blind girl, he doesn’t even notice the sleight of hand. He does notice that her hair was peculiarly damp; it leaves a wet splotch on his shirt.

“So, we have a badge,” Nat says approvingly, glancing over the plastic card at Raven. She is sitting on the floor of the Van as Elena braids her hair. The badge has an RFID chip that contains an encrypted code, needed to get through security and unlock the door to the server farm; if Nat had a scanner, he’d be able to replicate it and make a new one, using Wolf’s photo. Wolf could go in at night, when the security guard shift changes, and pretend to be a new employee.

Instead, they’re stuck with Malcom S., Sys Admin, and his pale, doughy face, shiny balding head. None of them could hope to pass.

“I could cut and paste a new photograph over it,” Elena suggests.

“I don’t know,” Nat replies, thoughtfully running his thumb over the smooth plastic. “Maybe if they didn’t look too carefully.”

“Charlie might be able to do it,” Raven says, “but I don’t know about the RFID.” Raven’s sister makes fake IDs for high schoolers, though she resolutely refuses to supply one to her.

“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Nat says, “but we’d have to drive up to the city.” He starts writing out a message as Hatch. Oz looks predictably distressed at the idea of leaving their mother behind, driving to the city and back again.

“We’ll figure something out,” Elena assures them. If only she knew what.

. . .

Wolf needs to move the Van before it becomes too apparent he’s already violated the “No Overnight Parking” signs scattered throughout the lot. It is a small, barren town, but in addition to the grocery store there is a single motel across from a strip mall at the other edge of town from DataLess, closest to the highway. He decides to rent a pair of adjoining rooms for the night; he can have his own bathroom for a change.

When they check in, the receptionist doesn’t even bat an eye at the oddball group, which should have tipped Wolf off. They are also practically the only guests, which also might have been a red flag. The rooms are relatively clean, though, free from the tell-tale red specks of bed bug frass, and the air conditioning is running on full. They sneak Adam the cat into the room in a backpack from the Van.

Wolf lays down on his bed, uneasy, feeling as though his life has very rapidly spiraled out of control. He is supposed to be the responsible adult, here; but in the other room, four teenagers are plotting how to break into a secure warehouse, in order to rescue the mother who abandoned one of them. He has already helped them commit what was likely fraud, and he is probably going to continue helping them. Oh, and his daughter is in love with a girl who talks to birds.

He can only hope his savings holds up until he can pick up running jobs again. He pulls out his wallet; there’s still enough for dinner, so he won’t have to unearth the safe hidden in the van, yet.

Wolf heads out alone, again; he’d asked if anyone wanted to come with and was answered with a wall of blank faces.

Across the street from the motel is a strip mall that includes fast Asian food. Wolf stands in line behind a man in a business suit and a little girl, one tiny hand engulfed in his, clutching at his arm with the other. She looks behind them at Wolf, eyes wide and lower lip trembling, so he smiles, whispers, “Hey.” The girl doesn’t respond, but the man notices, turns, glares at Wolf, then pulls roughly on the girl’s hand as he steps forward to order.

After Wolf orders enough to feed an army, he is informed it will be about 30 minutes. So much for fast, he thinks; he decides to go for a walk to kill the time. Aside from the restaurant, the strip mall consists of a liquor store, a travelling dentist’s office, and a coffee shop slash bar, depending on time of day.

Wolf is considering going into this last one; he has never actually set foot in a bar before. Indeed, other than the great binge after Tia’s death that resulted in Elena, he has had very little experience with intoxicants. He also has very little memory of that week, for good reason; Wolf had accepted every single drug offered to him without question. With the ever-increasing doses of synthetic opioids spilling through the streets, he is amazed he didn’t overdose that week. A small part of him wonders if maybe he did, and he is just waiting for death to catch up with him.

Wolf’s consideration is interrupted by raucous barking coming from the alleyway behind the strip mall, to which he immediately races to investigate. As he turns the corner, Wolf sees a pack of wild hybrid dogs half-circling an enormous, fluffy black dog. It seems to be defending a dumpster, which is overflowing with wasted food. The black dog woofs, a deep, bellowing sound; one of the hybrids snarls and lunges, teeth snapping, but the bigger dog is surprisingly graceful at dodging it.

“Hey!” Wolf shouts, “Ahhh!” Waving his raised arms, yelling, he stomps towards the pack, which scurries away, whimpering. Hybrids, a long-lost mix of abandoned domestic dogs and coyotes, like to act tough, but they are cowards; most often, they can be found scavenging for roadkill off highways. As Wolf scares them away, the back door to the restaurant opens, revealing a chef waving around a metal spatula.

“Hey! Get out, shoo!” The chef waves his spatula half-heartedly, but the hybrids are already gone.

The big dog is not scared so easily; instead, as the hybrids flee, it approaches Wolf, tail waving, enormous pink tongue drooling. Wolf lowers his arms and holds out a hand for it to sniff.

“Hey! That your dog?” the chef shouts at Wolf, who shakes his head. “Get him out of here! He’s always coming back here and getting into my trash.” The chef retreats into the kitchen, muttering and shaking his head.

The dog has judged Wolf worthy with a slobbery kiss, and he places a hand on its big, blocky head. One of its floppy ears is as big as his hand. Its fur is long and black; a dog too fluffy to be living in the desert.

“Alright, go on,” Wolf says, turning to leave. The dog plods along, close behind him.

“No,” Wolf says again. Undeterred, the dog follows him around to the front of the strip mall.

At the entrance to the restaurant, Wolf tries again: “No. Go.” He hopes it will be gone by the time he has paid for the order, but still it remains, panting dumbly in the heat.

“No,” he says, weakly, as it follows him through the parking lot, across the street, back to the motel. The motel lot is thankfully empty as the dog follows Wolf straight up the stairs, into his room. It immediately plods to the toilet and starts drinking noisily; when it comes out, it is drooling buckets.

Then, it notices the open door to the adjacent room. It notices the four teenagers, sprawled out over two beds and a desk.

It notices a magpie, perched on a lamp, and lunges.

Chapter 18:

It is the sort of loud, abrupt chaos that would almost certainly have resulted in a complaint from a fellow guest, if the motel wasn’t nearly empty.

The dog, an enormous black mass of muscle and fur, bounds into the second room, up and over one of the beds; at the last second, it alters its momentum and avoids crashing through the large window. It leaps off the mattress towards the magpie, knocking over the lamp as the bird takes off, screaming. Adam digs his claws into Nat’s thighs, hissing at everything, as Raven tries to capture Nirvana and Elena tackles the dog, who must outweigh her by at least fifty pounds.

Delighted by this new game, the dog rolls out from under Elena and bounces to its feet, sneezing and bowing. Oz watches, terrified, as it growls and barks; they have never seen a dog before, but they have heard of the sneaky little hybrids. Elena seems unconcerned, letting it tackle her to the ground, smothering her face in wet sloppy kisses.

It takes a fair bit of coaxing, including an entire egg roll to himself, to convince Nirvana to stop squawking. Adam, not so easily swayed by food, digs his claws deeper into Nat’s skin any time he tries to move, so he has resigned himself to sitting at the desk for eternity.

Oz is laying on the dog like an enormous pillow while Elena tries to get his attention with various names. “Rex? Spot?” No response. “David?”

The magpie cackles, and Raven says, “Nirvana thinks we should call him ‘Pest’”

Wolf sighs. “This is supposed to be a pet-free motel,” he groans. Then, to Elena, “Would that dog even fit in the Van?” Barely, especially with four passengers right now.

It doesn’t matter, in the end; the dog has adopted himself into their lives, just like all the other strays he seems to be accumulating. Eventually, Wolf turns in to the other room, keeping the door propped open. The dog follows him, flopping onto the bed as he starts flipping through the channels on the motel TV. Wolf does not watch a lot of television on the road, although once in a while he and Elena would prop her phone up on the table between them, watching old sci-fi movies on the tiny screen together. He lands on some movie he’s never heard of, broken up by commercials for products he’ll never use.

In the other room, Oz excuses themselves to the bathroom. They fill the tub halfway with lukewarm water and gingerly sit down, careful not to splash into their chest. They sponge themselves off with a washcloth, too afraid of drowning the bees to do more than dip their hair in the water. This is the way it has always been, for them.

Without noticing, Oz starts crying, tears falling unabated; soon it devolves into great, chest wrenching sobs. They are terrified; in a new place; it has barely been two weeks since their grandmother died. In the room outside, no one can hear anything.

With the dog out of sight in the other room, the cat finally relaxes his grip on Nat’s leg. He is pretty sure it’s bleeding. He stands up, and Adam darts away, prompting a flurry of feathered movement from Nirvana.

Elena and Raven are sitting together on the side of one double bed, fingers interlaced. Nat sits down on the other bed across from them, and their hands release, pull away; he feels like he’s interrupted something, although they were not saying anything.

“You guys are cute,” he says. Elena blushes, looking away. “No, really,” Nat says again. He reaches over, gently clasps Raven’s hand. “Raven, you deserve to be happy.”

The moment feels particularly weighted, and Elena bites her lip, looking between Nat and Raven. But then it is over, and Nat stretches out on the bed with his hands behind his head, grinning; Raven has taken Elena’s hand once again.

Oz emerges from the bathroom, relatively cleaner, sometime later; their hair still sticks up wildly. Nat has wandered back to the desk and is looking through their computer at the information they have gathered on DataLess and the warehouse. Elena and Raven are on the far bed, not paying attention to a movie they have put on the television. Oz watches the flickering screen for a moment; the sound coming from the other room suggests Wolf is watching the same channel. They put their glasses down on the sink counter before stepping through the doorway to the other room.

Wolf sits up as soon as Oz enters. “You okay?” he asks, futilely; without their glasses, it is clear their eyes are red and swollen from crying. Their light blue irises stand out strikingly, almost iridescent against the red background. “Shit,” Wolf says, “what can I do?” If it were Elena, he would hug her, but he knows that Oz can’t stand hugs, recoils from physical contact in general.

Wordlessly, they point at the small sliver of bedspace left, on the other side of the dog. Wolf hesitates, then nods, and Oz gratefully curls up with the dog, burying their face in his fur. He waits until the kid is asleep, then creeps over to the other bed.

Neither Wolf nor Oz make it to the end of the movie playing on both TVs, but the other three are awake through it and the next one, though not necessarily paying attention. Nat eventually closes his laptop when he notices that the girls have quietly buried themselves under the covers of the bed; he retreats to the other room, stretching out in the spot Wolf had vacated.

Raven is introducing a variety of new techniques to their kissing; a strange, churning heat builds in Elena’s stomach, and she pulls away, panting, before it can get too intense.

“Are you okay?” Raven whispers.

“Yeah,” Elena says. She laughs softly, changing the subject. “Wolf gave me the Talk. You know,” she says, “he kept saying, ‘you need to be careful.’”

“He’s not wrong,” Raven responds, voice so quiet Elena has to strain to hear it. She pulls herself closer.

“What, it’s not like either of us is going to get pregnant.”

“Listen,” Raven says, reluctantly. For once, she is glad she cannot see someone’s face. “I have herpes.”

The silence is painful, but Elena’s simple “Oh” is devastating. Raven pulls away, to save the other girl the trouble.

“Wait,” Elena says, arms tightening. “I don’t know what that means.” Shit. “I mean, I know what it is, obviously,” she manages, “but I don’t know what it means, you know, for us,” she feels Raven tense, “or for you,” she finishes.

“Oh,” Raven says, surprised. “uhm, well, I take an anti-viral to prevent flare-ups,” she explains. “I’ve never even had symptoms... but it is an STI.” There is no guarantee that she will be able to keep taking the drugs, either, with the growing supply chain failure hitting pharmaceuticals particularly hard.

Suddenly, she feels Elena’s fingers gently tracing her lips. “So, it’s not stopping us from doing this,” she says.

“I guess not.”

The fingers are replaced by Elena’s lips, so gentle and soft. “Then we can worry about it when we get to the other stuff,” she murmurs.

Her fingers trail down Raven’s face, her shoulder, brushing past her breast and ribcage before resting on her hip, the strip of bare skin between her shirt and pants. It rests there through the night.

Chapter 19:

Wolf is awakened by the large black dog whining and pawing at the handle of the motel room door. The image mixes with whatever dream has already faded from Wolf’s memory, and for a moment he believes it is a bear; which is a good name for a dog, thinking about it. Bear is successful at turning and unlatching the knob, and even pulling the door, but he is thwarted by the metal chain. After a few frustrated attempts, he turns towards Wolf. Baroo.

“Okay, fine,” Wolf grumbles, rolling out of the bed. He stumbles over to the door, unfastens the chain, and pulls the door open; the dog is out and down the balcony before he has time to register it. Well, problem solved, he thinks.

Witnessing this, Oz begins to have an idea; they shake Nat, snoring next to them, to wake him. Their idea is galvanized when both get to witness the dog re-enter the room a few minutes later, using the same trick with his front paws and easily pushing the door in.

Wolf exits the bathroom and realizes too late that he forgot to lock the motel room door; Bear is back and somehow muddy-pawed, panting happily on one of the white beds between Nat and Oz, who are petting him while muttering to each other.

The girls are sitting chastely on separate beds by the time Wolf goes into the other room. The one Raven sits on has clearly not been slept in, but he chooses to remain oblivious to this fact. Nat pushes past to his computer, followed closely by Oz; and then the dog comes in to muddy up another white bed. Wolf shivers; the window was left open for bird and bees, and the cool desert night air lingers.

“Raven,” Nat asks, staring intently at his computer, “how many fire exits were there on the bottom floor?”

Raven concentrates, trying to picture the outside of the warehouse from a bird’s eye view. “Two each on the north and south sides,” she states. Oz traces them on the map, finger on monitor: one in the hallway with the stairs and armored door; another just past it, before the cage; there must be two more beyond the cage.

“The ones past the cage are heavily secured; they’ve got multiple alarms, including physical ones I can’t disable remotely,” Nat mutters, clicking through the network schematics. "But the one in the hallway, just after security, is just connected to the fire system. I can disable that.”

“What exactly do you have planned?” Wolf asks.

“We’re not sure yet,” Oz answers. They turn back to the screen, back to the discussion with Nat. The pair of them remind Wolf of birds, squabbling over a seed.

He takes Elena and Raven to the coffee shop across the street. He finds it fascinating that the same girl who, just yesterday, casually pick-pocketed a man outside the grocery store, is also so easily willing to let herself be guided across the street by Elena’s extended arm.

It is on their return that Raven suddenly stops, freezes. “Shhh.” Nirvana flies on, screeching. She pulls Elena back behind the corner, and as Wolf waits for an explanation, he hears it.

Screaming: a child yelling, “No, no!” Wolf peeks around and sees the little girl from the restaurant last night. The same man is dragging her from a room on the opposite side of the motel to his car in the lot. It is too late to keep the girls from witnessing: the rough treatment; the look of terror on the girls’ face; her begging sobs.

“We have to help her,” Elena insists, trying to push through. Wolf holds her firmly, reluctantly.

“We can’t,” he says, gesturing towards the parking lot. The car the man is dragging the girl to, the only other vehicle in the lot besides the Van, is a clearly marked police car. Wolf feels like a coward, making them wait until the cop has driven away before proceeding to their room.

Elena is steaming, whirling on him to yell as soon as they get inside. “We should have done something!”

“We don’t know what was going on,” Wolf responds weakly.

Elena scoffs, “She was screaming ‘No!’” She feels Raven’s hand on her back, a gesture she cannot read; behind Wolf, the others have congregated at the doorway between the adjoining rooms. Bear is whining softly behind them.

“He was a cop,” he says bluntly. That’s really the only explanation he needs, he thinks.

“He was hurting her.” As she says this, Elena realizes she is crying, angrily swipes at the tears. Wolf pulls her into an embrace, and she collapses into sobs that choke her and soak through his shirt. “She looked so scared,” she finally whispers.

“I know,” Wolf affirms. Raven has pulled the other two into the other room, explaining what happened in quiet tones, and Elena allows Wolf to continue holding her, rocking and humming, until her breathing has normalized, the hiccupping sobs eased. A small part of him is relieved to know that Elena is not yet too old to receive comfort from him.

The morning mood has been thrown off entirely; only Bear the dog is happy as he swallows the extra muffin in one bite. Wolf spent the last of his cash on the dog; he is officially going to have to tap into his savings, now.

There is an awkward silence throughout the room, punctuated by Oz’s efforts to train Bear. Despite the dog’s appearance, made comical by oversized ears and lolling tongue, he is clever, and soon Oz has him pacing through the two motel rooms, nose pressed against the floor in search of hidden vulture bees.

Morning passes into afternoon; Elena and Raven disappear outside, ostensibly taking the dog for a walk. They return looking flushed and substantially happier, Bear desperately thirsty from the desert heat.

Then: a breakthrough. “Oz. Everyone!” Nat calls from his computer. On the screen, Dr. Po is being led to the middle room in the back of the server farm.

“Is this live?” Oz asks, watching Po on the screen. She doesn’t look like a hostage, exactly; they cannot tell if her hands are tied, but she is walking freely. The resolution is not clear enough for details, but something in the way she is trudging, hunched, the way she cringes away from her handler, makes it clear that she does not want to be there.

Nat shakes his head reluctantly, answers, “From this morning.” He watches as Kennedy Yates guides Dr. Po into the room with a small shove; then she closes, latches the door, secures it with a padlock.

The first real proof, for Wolf, that Oz really saw what they claimed to have seen, through their bees. He doesn’t have time to process; as the recording continues, Kennedy Yates does not immediately leave the area. She straightens her pencil skirt, her blazer, and waits. Once or twice, she glances up at the security camera, and Nat almost feels like she can see right through it to their motel room in the future.

Then they approach, those whom she was waiting for: him, in the same three-piece suit, and the little girl he drags along with him. She is no longer putting up a fight; she stares at the floor as she walks, resigned. The door closes, latch and padlock secured, everything silent on the security feed. Kennedy Yates and the cop shake hands and walk off together, back through the server farm.

Wolf and the kids stare at the now empty scene on the monitor in horror.

Chapter 20:

Kennedy Yates is leaving the warehouse half an hour early as usual; her schedule is one way of maintaining plausible deniability about the goings on at night. She says goodbye to the daytime security guard (she has never, truthfully, met the night guard) and steps out the main entrance. There she is immediately accosted by an enormous black dog; barking, it jumps and tries to attack her pristine suit dress with muddy paws.

Kennedy Yates’ exit is delayed by a further 13 minutes as Matt the intern and the security guard chase the dog around the dirt piles that pass for landscaping around the still-new DataLess campus. The dog thinks they are playing and cheerfully darts out of reach every time one of them gets close enough. Finally, seemingly tired, it rolls over on its back and accepts belly rubs while Matt grasps the stiff pink collar around its neck.

“He’s really friendly,” the intern assures Mrs. Yates as he pulls the beast through the security bay, “He’s got a tag and everything.”

The tag appears to be homemade, hand-stamped letters in aluminum declaring the dog’s name, “Bear,” and a phone number with an area code even Kennedy does not recognize.

The security guard calls the number. “Am I speaking with Bear’s momma? Mhmm... That’s right we did! Mhmm... Oh, dear... Yes, yes of course. Don’t you worry about him, sweetheart, he’s in good hands.”

Turning to Kennedy, who is now very eager to leave, she explains, “Poor family lost their dog during a road trip! I told her we’d keep him safe while they drove back, they’re only about an hour away.”

Kennedy Yates waves off the security guard and stomps out of the building, now entirely too late.

Matt brings Bear a bowl of water, which mostly ends up on the floor of the security room, on his way out for the night. An hour later, there’s a shift change: the day guard explains the situation with the dog to the night guard.

“He really is such a sweetheart,” she declares, thumping the grinning dog on the head. It is true; he has captured the heart of every employee at DataLess.

The dog’s charisma is such that no one even questions it when he follows a group of night techs through the door to the warehouse, tongue flopping and tail wagging. The night security guard assumes they are taking him upstairs to play.

The technicians do go upstairs, but Bear does not. He sits in the hallway, head cocked, staring at the door marked “FIRE EXIT.” It is solid white, with a large, flat metal plate. When the bees land on it, Bear checks to make sure the hallway is still empty, then jumps up, pushing onto the metal plate with his paws.

The door clicks open.

. . .

Outside, Oz, Elena, and Raven freeze, holding their breath, waiting for the crashing sound of the alarms.

Silence.

“It worked!” Nat’s tinny voice in Raven’s ear, “Alarm was disabled.” He is in the Van nearby, watching the cameras from his computer.

Elena holds the door while Oz crouches to praise the dog, a gesture returned with a sloppy kiss. “Go on,” they whisper, pointing towards where Wolf also waits in the Van.

“Quickly,” Elena says, watching the hallway wearily. She closes the door, slowly, quietly, then darts through the hallway to the server room door. Oz flashes Malcolm’s ID: a beep, a green light, and the door is unlocked. They step into the cold interior, followed by Raven, then Elena.

The next obstacle: the cage which surrounds the seemingly endless rows of servers within. Raven pulls out a keyring, pilfered by Nirvana from the security while she was distracted, chasing Bear around with Matt the intern. The fifth key she tries is the winner. Oz races down the freezing room; it feels almost endless, like a dream they’ve had before.

Nat is watching the video feed of the back of the warehouse. When Oz runs into the frame, he immediately cuts over to an empty loop he recorded earlier.

“You don’t have more than 15 minutes,” he says into Raven’s ear. She is inspecting the padlock on one of the doors; Elena has the other one. That they share this skill makes her enormously pleased. Oz watches anxiously as the girls pick and twist, gently pushing invisible pins into the right position so the lock turns with a soft click.

Elena’s lock is the first to click open. The room inside is lit with a bare, flickering fluorescent bulb; Dr. Po Miller sits on a mattress on the floor, looking exhausted and haunted. The door opens to the last thing she expects to see: Ozymandias, her child, her rescuer.

“Ozy,” she says, racing over to hug them; they stiffen, cringing. That’s right, Po has to remind herself, no touching. She releases them, looks over them in wonder. “What are you doing here?” She was expecting Hatch.

At the next door over, Raven’s lock clicks; she throws the door open and Elena, behind her, sees: a little girl, curled up on the mattress. She looks up at Elena with terrified eyes, lips trembling. She can’t be more than 8 or 9, and she is so skinny that Elena has no trouble picking her up. Her pants are damp, and she smells faintly of urine.

“Shh, you’re safe,” she whispers, but the girl just buries her face in Elena’s shoulder.

“Someone’s coming,” Nat’s voice hisses at Raven; a man in a suit and someone in a cop uniform are standing at the door to the server farm, apparently waiting for someone.

Po is somehow even more surprised to learn that Oz isn’t alone; they are joined by two teenagers, one of whom is carrying the girl who spent the day crying in the room next door.

“We have to go,” the one in sunglasses whispers. Immediately, there is a loud clang, then deep voices from the other end of the server farm, getting closer.

“The fire escape,” Oz says, pulling at Po’s shirt.

Raven shakes her head. “Nat can’t disarm that one.”

“It’s our only way out,” Elena points out.

Po pulls away from her child. “You guys go,” she says quietly, “Take the girl.” Oz shakes their head, vehemently. They are starting to panic, she can recognize the symptoms; but the bees remain dormant. It’s too cold for them, she realizes. She puts her hand on Oz’s shoulder to stop them rocking.

“Ozy, look at me,” she instructs. They do not, but they do stop rocking, their eyes focused off to the left. “You must go. They’ll think it was just me.” She opens the alarmed door herself, shoving the children out of the warehouse.

“Run!” she hisses.

They do.

Chapter 21:

They were sloppy, but then again, they were also kids; Kennedy Yates gives them kudos for their efforts. She watches the security footage, which had been inexpertly cut live with past loops; eventually, all three children’s faces are revealed, and she knows them.

“Mandy,” “Naya,” and “Charlie.” The other one, “Nathan,” is absent; Kennedy decides he must be the mastermind behind the heist. She watches the footage from the outdoor cameras, the trio racing across the barren landscape to some meet-up location out of sight.

Kennedy Yates sighs. She has massively underestimated these kids; in the meantime, her AI has dug up some fascinating new information about one of them, which she plans on using immediately.

Po has been restrained, her hands cuffed behind her in addition to being tied to the metal chair she sits on. She put up some fight against the two cops who quickly recaptured her; Kennedy now knows it was to distract them from the real escapees. The scientist sports a black eye and a split lip, one of her front teeth chipped.

“You’re not looking so pretty right now,” Kennedy sneers at Po, “I don’t think the cameras would love you so much, now.” The captive scientist does not speak.

“You’ve been keeping secrets,” Kennedy taunts. This makes Po’s eyes flash. They aren’t quite the same blue as the kid’s, Kennedy decides, but close enough; the same hue, just darker. “I met your son the other day. He’s different, isn’t he?” she asks.

“They,” Po spits.

“Them,” Kennedy nods, remembering. “They’re lonely, aren’t they. You’re their only friend on Xbook.” A few days ago, Dr. Po Miller was caught with contraband; now Kennedy knows what she was doing with it.

“Leave them alone,” Po says. She is agitated, pulling at futilely at her restraints.

“I don’t think I will,” Kennedy replies, “In fact, I think Ozy” – she pronounces it Oh-zee – “is exactly the person I need right now.”

. . .

After their near escape, Oz completely shut down, freezing up on the floor of the Van. Wolf had to carry them like a deadweight to the mattress in the back, and there they lay still, staring blankly at Elena’s various drawings she has taped to the wall.

Wolf is driving very, very carefully, and has been doing so for nearly four hours now. The Van is officially overfull: the addition of the massive, fluffy dog, who lays sprawled in the narrow space that passes for a hallway, is overshadowed by the young girl, who sits curled up next to Elena on the bench. She, too, has not spoken. Elena only briefly explained the situation as she climbed into the Van, propping the girl up on her hip.

Things are going very, very badly, in Wolf’s opinion.

He drives them all to the cabin, surprised he remembers the route. It is nearly dawn when they arrive, the nighttime forest dark and foreboding around them. They stumble blearily inside, Wolf carrying Oz, Elena carrying the girl, Nat and Raven trudging behind. Only Bear is energetic, excitedly running around the new place, sniffing everything and knocking over lamps with his tail.

The girl is trembling in her arms; Elena takes her into the bathroom, where she starts the faucet pouring warm water. “I’m going to find you some clean clothes, okay?” Elena says, but no response. The girl just stands there in the middle of the bathroom, shivering, as Elena closes the door behind her.

She heads towards Oz’s room, where Wolf has actually tucked them in; despite the blanket, their eyes are wide open, unsleeping. She quietly creeps over to the bedside and gently brushes their messy, tangled hair with her hand. “We can still find her,” she promises.

Nothing.

“I need to borrow some of your clothes,” she tries again.

Still nothing.

She quickly digs through the dresser, grabbing the first shirt and pants she finds. “Thanks,” she says, turning to leave.

“Elena,” Oz whispers, voice tiny. She stops, waits. “Thank you.”

At the door to the bathroom she knocks once, then again. There is splashing from behind the door. She knocks again, then, finally, “Okay.”

The girl is laying in the bath, water up to her neck; through the bubbles, Elena is horrified to see her arms and legs covered in dark bruises. She holds up the clothes, a sweatshirt and sweatpants. “They’ll be too big for you, but they’re warm,” she says. The girl nods, and she places them, folded, on the sink.

“There are towels there,” she points to the towels, obviously hanging next to the tub. “Will you let me know if you need anything?”

The girl’s eyes get wide; she looks terrified. “Don’t go,” she squeaks. She sits up; her back is crisscrossed with furious looking red welts, some of them cutting through the skin and bleeding. Elena sits on the toilet seat, eyes burning with tears as she watches the little girl wash her face with a small towel.

“What’s your name?” she finally asks. The girl shakes her head.

She tries again. “How old are you?”

“Eight,” the girl says finally. Then: “Can you help me?” She is holding out the washcloth.

She doesn’t flinch as Elena gently runs the soapy cloth over the welts on her back. She tips her head back and allows Elena to scrub her hair with a bar of shampoo that smells like honey.

Once she is clean, dried, and dressed, she follows Elena to an empty bed that is soft and warm. She falls asleep almost immediately.

Elena is not surprised to find that Raven and Nat are still awake, having some discussion in the kitchen. They must not notice her approach, because Nat is talking.

“But you didn’t tell her how it happened?”

Raven: “She didn’t ask.”

Nat looks up now, making eye contact with Elena. “I think she deserves to know it wasn’t your fault.”

“Pfft.”

A pause, then: “Hi,” Elena announces, awkwardly.

Raven spins around. “You!” she declares. She steps over, wrapping her arms around Elena’s neck.

“Me?” Elena laughs.

“You are exactly the person I needed,” Raven explains, pulling her towards the stairs. “I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted.”

Chapter 22:

Lost together in their respective silences, it is ultimately Oz who is able to make the first connection to the little girl; or rather, their bees.

Over a day after their return to the cabin, Elena is finally able to coax Oz to leave their bed; she can direct them to the bathroom, to the kitchen to eat, to the couch to sit, but they remain detached, aloof. The girl follows Elena around like a shadow, equally silent.

In the afternoon, she gets the idea to take Oz outside. It is a beautiful, warm day, and birds are even singing somewhere nearby. They sit in the grass, and the girl sits next to them, curiously watching the insects flying around them. Finally, she breaks her silence. “I’ve never seen bees before.”

An opening: Oz returns to themselves, launching into an explanation of the life cycle of the vulture bee. The girl listens, fascinated; she asks about the chickens, the nearby trees, the singing birds. She grew up on the streets of a distant city; she never knew there was so much life on the whole planet.

Eventually, she quietly reveals a name: Silva. It is not the name her mother gave her, but one she takes for herself. She does not talk about what happened at the motel.

That evening, after Silva has gone to bed, Wolf calls the rest into a meeting of what he calls the “Pack”, which makes Elena cringe and Nat laugh out loud.

“We need to talk about what our next steps are going to be,” he starts. In truth, he wants the next steps to be: call the authorities about the girl and Oz’s mother; take Nat and Raven home; get back to work and forget about all this. Nat belongs in school; Raven, too, regardless of how long it has been since she dropped out. Maybe even Elena belongs there, and Oz, and whoever that little girl is.

Wolf confesses none of this; instead, he says, “We are in way over our heads.”

Nat admits that he has been kicked out of the system; they have no more eyes on DataLess or Dr. Po.

Tentatively, Wolf suggests, “I think we need outside help.”

“No cops,” the teens insist, collectively; he is outnumbered.

They disperse without a resolution, a pack meeting failure.

. . .

Later, Elena follows her friend through the moonlit night and into the woods; they stop just past the trees. “I need to tell you something,” Raven starts hesitantly. “A couple years ago, I decided it would be a good idea to sneak into a rave.” She was only 12, and that is probably how she managed to slip by unnoticed: through a back door, an anonymous hallway, into the club.

The music was deafening, and Raven blindly pushed her way through the throbbing mass of dancers until she was in the center of it. She danced with everyone who touched her and drank everything that was offered; it didn’t take long until she was stumbling, delirious, passed out.

“I woke up in someone’s apartment,” she says, “It hurt so much. I was bleeding.” Her sister, Charlie, had driven her to the hospital, hours later; she’d left as soon as Raven called, from the middle of class, hours away in college.

The rape exam was the worst part; she couldn’t remember anything, but she’d had to relive it anyway as the tutting nurse poked, swabbed, and prodded, announcing her findings to some distant, anonymous figure responsible for taking notes. She’d needed stitches, a pill to prevent pregnancy.

“Or maybe it’s even worse,” Raven remarks, “knowing that it’s probably still just sitting there in a warehouse somewhere, untested.”

No, the worst part was later, when the blood tests revealed she’d contracted herpes. Or, weeks later, after her stepfather found out about the incident, and decided, now that she wasn’t a virgin, she might as well get paid for it.

“That’s disgusting,” Elena says. She can’t think of anything else.

“Yeah,” Raven agrees. They are talking about different things.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says lamely.

“So I’ve heard.” Nat has said it enough. Raven knows it is unkind of her to expect anything different from Elena, especially when she has no idea what she wants to be said; but she does, and a small part of her resents her for not doing better.

When Elena returns to the cabin, she checks on Silva, who is not asleep but curled up on the bed, softly weeping. Elena sits down on the bed next to the small girl, who whimpers, “It hurts.” She is referring to the welts on her back, which are swollen and oozing. When she turns and lifts the back of her hoodie, the scabs stick and tear open.

“I’ll be right back,” Elena whispers, and rushes out, returning quickly with antibiotic cream. As she rubs the stuff on Silva’s back, she thinks about what Raven had told her earlier. “Should we take you to a doctor?” she wonders aloud, but the girl seems to shrink as she shakes her head, frantically. “Okay, okay.” She stays with Silva until the girl is asleep, then quietly ducks out of the room.

Apparently, everyone else has gone to bed; the cabin feels deserted. Even Wolf has abandoned the couch and returned to sleeping in the relative comfort of the Van. Elena gathers some charcoal and paper while boiling the kettle for tea, then sits down on the couch and begins to draw.

. . .

Things feel even worse the next morning, after Nat receives a video to his email; thankfully it is his personal account, not his Hatch account. He doesn’t want to think about what he would do if he was discovered as Hatch right now.

In the video, three figures on security cameras break into the DataLess warehouse. They are carrying large red cans of gasoline, which they pour all over the rows and rows of servers. Before leaving, Oz lights a match, setting the entire warehouse on fire.

“It’s deepfaked,” Nat explains to the disturbed audience. “They probably used the footage from our tour.” There’s nothing on the news about a fire; this is just a warning, or a threat. He is pretty sure it wouldn’t even hold up in court, but not confident enough to bet his life on it.

“Are you guys ready to accept,” Wolf asks, speaking slowly and deliberately, “that we are in way over our heads?”

Nope. There’s still the matter of rescuing Dr. Po, and now they have to work out the mystery of Silva. Maybe, hopefully, she has a family, somewhere, to go home to.

Raven has disappeared without a word, again, and Elena finds herself at the long-neglected chicken coop. The birds are thriving off whatever insects and seeds they can find in the woods, but the coop is a disaster. The hens have continued laying eggs despite the absence of anyone to remove them; there are great piles of eggs, most of them rotten or crushed, in each of the laying boxes, which appear to have been detached from the wall. From the extent of it, the neglect went beyond Oz’s absence from the cabin; taking care of a dying grandmother is distracting work.

Silva watches from a distance, stoic and quiet, as Bear happily chases the chickens around the yard; when he catches one, the chicken squats in the dirt, spreading her wings out as though to protect a nest. It almost looks like they evolved to get captured, but the dog just sticks his nose in their feathers, snuffling, then bounces off to chase another. Only the rooster fights back; twice as large as the others and carrying sharp spurs on his feet, Bear quickly learns to leave him alone.

Elena clears out the coop, dumping the piles of eggs and shells in the woods beyond the tree line and raking off the dirt floor, then spreads new, slightly mildewed straw from a stack of bales behind the coop. She wonders where they got it from; she does not even know where the nearest town might be. There is a feeder and waterer that have been knocked down; at one point, they had been connected to two tubes that extend to the outside, so that the chickens could be fed without having to open the coop. She can find no signs of chicken feed, however.

Oz appears as Elena is trying to figure out how to reattach the laying boxes to the wall; they, too, had some sort of mechanism that would tilt the eggs down a chute to the outside. “Did you build this?” she asks, watching them expertly repair the disarray.

“A few years ago,” Oz replies. They have put a lot of effort into creating devices to make their grandmother’s life easier on the farm: the coop, an automatic irrigation system for the gardens, devices for chopping and preparing produce in bulk. Anything that reduces the need for bending and kneeling or heavy lifting has the added benefit of making Oz’s life easier, too. “Everything here was set up for me to survive here by myself, eventually.”

That sounds incredibly lonely to Elena. “I don’t think they meant for it to happen so soon,” she says.

“I don’t think anyone did,” they reply, speaking of something grander, perhaps. The climatic chaos, the mass extinctions, the wars and careful whittling away of privacy for the sake of government safety. They are growing up in a world fundamentally different from the one Po or Wolf knew; and that is a world entirely unrecognizable from Oz’s grandmother’s. As every generation watched the fall, not one thought to put on the brakes.

Oz grew up isolated and believing their survival was a choice; from the road, Elena had a different perspective. She has met a great many people in all sorts of places in life. Yet the cities she has driven through all look the same: the people in the Inner Districts living in blissful ignorance of the devastation around them, a privilege shared by Oz in the cabin; the Middle Districts, struggling to scrape by, everyone a missed paycheck from eviction; the Outer Districts, where the population of tent cities often outnumbers that of the housed. Elena’s view is equally removed and disaffected: she has merely watched, through the glass window of the Van, as the less fortunate suffer next to her.

Where Raven and Nat spent their childhoods, survival was the only option, and it was something for which they had no choice but to learn to fight. If he was here, Nat could describe how he survived so far by using the same system which so badly failed Raven: schooling, a system which, no matter how bookishly intelligent Oz may be, would absolutely drown them in the real world. The people who do well in school are the ones who, for whatever reason, are better able to play by the seemingly arbitrary rules set for them by higher authorities. Nat can conform and comply; he is smart enough to glide along, but it eats him up inside.

If she were here, Raven could describe how, if you are different in any way, the system will squeeze you until you either conform or burst.

Elena, like Oz, has never been to school; she, too, has romanticized the idea at times.

After finishing in the coop, Oz shows Elena the garden; it has not yet been prepped for the spring planting, but there is still time. They work quietly together, removing weeds and loosening the soil bed. There is a weedy, overgrown herb garden that Oz insists is fine on its own, despite the dried, tired brown appearance of most of the plants.

“It is still early in the season,” they explain. Oz plucks the fragile early leaves off some of the more colorful specimens and crushes them between their fingers, holding them up for Elena to smell. She breathes in the aromatic oils; spices she’s never even dreamed of before. The mostly synthetic, processed food goods you can get on the road contains nothing like this.

Occasionally, Elena looks up to where Silva sits, still as a statue, always watching. Clouds move overhead, constantly changing shape, pushed by a wind they can barely feel on the ground.

By evening, Raven still has not returned, and Elena grows increasingly concerned, despite Nat’s assurances that “she does this all the time” and “she will be fine.”

“Being lost in the woods is a lot different than doing whatever in a city,” Elena argues.

“She’s not lost,” Nat repeats, infuriatingly calm. “Magpies don’t get lost.”

No, but they get separated, she thinks but does not say.

As she prepares a simple meal of canned vegetables and rice, Elena notices that the cabin’s pantry is nearly bare. Wolf brings in their supplies from the Van, but it is still clear that they are going to have to restock soon. This gets him thinking about his savings, and the fact that he hasn’t made a run in over a week now.

They eat together, minus Raven; Silva is entranced by Oz’s long description of the life cycle of various ant species that probably no longer exist. Thinking of extinction embitters Elena, who sulks through the meal, while Nat and Wolf have their own discussion about e-waste and the next landfill run. But why are they planning that? Elena wonders, We haven’t even finished rescuing Dr. Miller. Aside from that necessity, she really likes the idea of staying at the cabin, maybe even never sitting in the Van again.

Raven still has not returned by nightfall; even Nat agrees that was a bad idea. “But,” he points out, “it’s not like she needs the light, anyway.”

The light, maybe, Raven can do without, but without the sun the air quickly chills. After redressing Silva’s wounds, which finally seem to be healing and causing less pain, Elena sits with her in her bed again, stroking the girl’s hair until she is asleep.

Once again, she finds herself wandering through the cabin alone. It is sparsely decorated; there are no pictures of Oz or Po decorating the walls, no art or photographs of any sort. Just a few trinkets are displayed on the mantle over the wood stove: the long, ivory tooth of some extinct Arctic mammal; a sprig of wildflowers, long dried out; a plaque, some award for Dr. Miller.

She tries to imagine Oz, grown and living here alone; but of course, could that ever happen? Their grandmother did everything she could to prepare them, but what could she do about the way that they freeze up when anxious, how they forget to eat if someone isn’t there to remind them. Somehow, Elena doubts Dr. Miller, Po, will do any better; not after leaving them here, dedicating her life to a cause bigger than her family, bigger than herself, one that keeps her away more often than not.

Eventually, Elena falls asleep on the couch, waiting for Raven to return.

. . .

Raven creeps into the cabin sometime after midnight. Without her magpie, she feels lost; she stumbles around the bottom floor, first nearly knocking over a chair, then running straight into the edge of a wall. Dazed, she stands still for a moment, listening: Elena’s soft breathing, from the couch nearby. She walks somewhat more confidently towards the source, kneeling beside her friend and shaking her, urgently.

“Wake up,” she begs, “please, Elena. There’s a problem.”

The problem is the natural gas pipeline, the construction of which requires an enormous swath of woods to be cut down and rolled over, in order to make room for the busloads of workers, trucks, construction vehicles, and assorted other heavy equipment apparently necessary for building a pipeline. Armor Inc has demolished its way through the protected land to the north and is rapidly approaching Oz’s cabin.

“So much has already been lost,” Raven laments. “The birds are frantic.” So many nests, so many eggs close to hatching, so many trees and homes lost. The once rich understory, a food source for so many; exposed, compressed, suffocated. Territorial ranges cut in half. They have already lost so much, how much more will be taken away? She only realizes she is crying when Elena brushes the tears off her cheek with her thumb.

Then Raven breaks down, sobbing, hiccupping, “I lost Nirvana.” Elena pulls her down, shivering and shaking, to lay on the couch; wraps her in the shared blanket.

The magpie had seen the destruction first, and in the chaos of the birds fleeing, he was lost. Raven had been forced to stumble her way back to the cabin alone, following the creek as Oz originally advised. It was only when she heard the chickens that she knew she had made it.

“I can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been,” Elena says. Raven has no answer. She has no words to describe the feeling of hopelessness that engulfed her as she lurched through the undergrowth, tripped over roots, walked into branches, grazed both knees and shredded the palms of both hands. The hike felt endless; for the first time in a long time, Raven felt disabled. She wonders if she has grown too reliant on Nirvana, his subconscious bird’s-eye-view that guides her.

She pretends to be asleep, but lies awake, listening to Elena’s breathing deepening, feeling her heartbeat, even and steady; eventually, Raven must fall asleep too. She dreams she is a bird, flying through a void; lost, with nowhere to land.

. . .

Nat is apologetic the next morning, for assuming Raven would be fine and for his role in convincing Elena not to go look for her in the woods. Knowing she lost Nirvana, it was obviously the wrong choice, “but you got out okay anyway, right?” He is trying to be positive, and it feels like trash.

Secretly, he is not entirely convinced he was wrong. Raven really does have a history of disappearing, for varying periods of time, often only reappearing when something has gone terribly wrong, and she needs help.

See: convincing Nat to run away from school with her when he was still in kindergarten, and she was nearly seven; sneaking into a club when she was 12, alone; a supposedly brief tryst with illegal drugs he’s really only convinced is over now that they are out of the city. Vanishing into weekly protests for this or that cause: stop genocide, apartheid, stop global warming, stop mass extinction and police brutality. Returning to Nat’s house Monday morning before he’s supposed to leave for school, because she doesn’t want Charlie to see her: usually smelling of pepper spray, occasionally bruised and limping.

He's being unkind, he knows, and instead of saying anything Nat pulls Raven into a hug, lets his resentment wash away. Raven sleeps her adventure off in Oz’s grandmother’s bed, while he works nearby on his computer; it is a comfortable, familiar scene.

Chapter 23:

Elena finds Silva outside, where she has been sitting in the grass; she watched the sun rise, watched ants and beetles awaken and start their marching through the soil, watched a single brown bird flit around, pecking at them. Silva feels an extraordinary peace watching these natural wonders. There is nothing like it where she grew up; entire neighborhoods had paved over their lawns, so even short grass was a scarcity.

Bear romps up and tackles Silva to the ground, licking her face with a wet, slobbery tongue. This is also something she has learned to appreciate; at home, the dogs roam in wild packs, often thieving and occasionally violent. She has never known one to show affection.

“We need to talk,” Elena starts; Wolf had advised she be the one to interrogate the girl, since she seemed absolutely terrified of him. Silva’s face immediately becomes a mask, her body tenses, her fingers gripping Bear’s long fur. “We need to know where you’re from,” Elena explains, “we might be able to find your family, take you home.”

Silva shakes her head; she has no family.

“Okay,” Elena is quiet for a moment, thinking. “I know you don’t want to talk about the motel, but can you at least tell me how the cop took you?”

The little girl speaks, finally, her voice so tiny. “What is ‘solicitation’?” she asks.

The police officer had nudged her awake with his boot; she’d been napping on the sidewalk beneath an awning in front of a closed store. He accused her of solicitation, placed her in cuffs, but instead of taking her to the precinct, he had kept driving; hours, she thinks, through the desert.

At one point, he stopped, pulled over to the side of the road. The world looked flat around them, just an endless plain of dried, brown grass. The road stretched on in front of them, devoid of any other vehicles. Removing the handcuffs, he told her, “You’ve been good. You keep being good, we won’t have a problem.”

“Can’t I just stay here?” Silva asks; she means this spot, here, outside. She loves the sun, the smell of pine, the mountain breeze.

Elena thinks she means the cabin, and she agrees. “That would be nice.”

Bear yawns; his mouth stretches so wide, it could have easily fit around Silva’s entire head, but instead he just lays his massive head on her lap and sighs.

. . .

Nat is a wanted person, or rather, Natalie is; the notice lists his nickname as Nat and appearance as “boyish,” including his recent mugshot. Officially the profile is for a “missing child”, but it also includes that he is wanted for “various digital crimes and theft.”

This is problematic for Nat in several ways: first, because it means his father has noticed his absence, and the cops have noticed his trickery with the GPS tracker. Second, that means that Wolf is not going to take him on his next run, which he’s preparing to leave for right now; so Nat is missing out on that potential e-waste treasure trove as well.

Finally, it gives Kennedy Yates the revelation that the kid who helped his friends break into their facility is not, in fact, the twin of a wanted criminal, but a wanted criminal himself. She knows now that her adversaries may be more capable than she had given them credit for; she hopes the message she gave them was clear. They have not been foolish enough to touch DataLess since that night, anyway.

Kennedy is willing to let them keep the girl, which thoroughly annoyed the police officers for whom she has been sacrificing an inordinate amount of time and effort to building a working relationship. The trafficking business was never meant to reach them down here, anyway; it was supposed to be relegated to the gas fields.

The important thing is, she still has Dr. Po Miller, whose avatar has been making great improvements to the public image of the family companies. She also needs the scientist for her adopted mother, owner of the last bit of land standing between the gas fields and DataLess’ new powerplant. The old bat must be on the verge of dying, she thinks, and then Dr. Miller will be able to sign everything over to her.

Kennedy is ready to release another video featuring Dr. Po and Armor’s alleged restoration efforts with the pipeline. She was thrilled to discover that cutting down the necessary swath of woods for the pipeline stirred up all sorts of wildlife, of which she now has plenty of footage.

Birds scream in the background behind Dr. Po’s visage, carefully framed to avoid the edges where the woods have been clear-cut. Dr. Po joyfully describes how Armor’s restoration efforts are already seeing birds returning to the area. “And now,” she announces, “a recent partnership with the machine learning geniuses at DataLess means we will be able to track the populations of birds and all sorts of wildlife in these newly formed habitats.”

. . .

“Lies,” Raven spits. The birds were not returning, they were fleeing; their chaotic, panicked chatter still clouds her thoughts.

“We know,” Nat responds. “Corporations lie, that’s what they do.” But it works; both Armor’s and DataLess’ stocks are still climbing.

The avatar has gotten more realistic, less uncanny; it is clear the machine learning algorithm is improving. “Why do they still have her?” Oz asks, “They don’t need her anymore.”

Nat isn’t sure about that; he thinks about the documents he skipped over in that USB drive, the wills for Dr. Po and Oz’s grandmother. He has a suspicion, but in order to confirm it he would have to violate the ethics that prevented him from reading them in the first place.

Ethics he has no qualms about violating when it comes to Armor or DataLess. He’s a complicated person. He taps through the folders on his computer, searching.

“Kennedy Yates thinks she can get the land from Dr. Po,” he suggests, showing them the documents. “She doesn’t know that your grandmother didn’t leave the cabin to her, she left it to you.” The Will is explicit: cabin, land, everything inside is for Oz.

“She doesn’t know grandmother died,” Oz realizes; Po doesn’t either. “Would she really just hold onto Po until she does?” Somehow they doubt it; Kennedy Yates would not let Dr. Po go, reveal her captivity, the deepfake videos, the false collaborations and ecological lies. Even if she did, trading a piece of land for a life of silence, it wouldn’t be so easy, since Oz has already concealed their grandmother’s death. Improper disposal of a body, a child living alone in a cabin; they would not escape this unscathed.

“What if she finds out you’re inheriting the land, not Dr. Po?” Elena asks. Then she will have no need for Dr. Po at all; she has the avatar. She watches the video again; it is the eyes, she decides, that the model has improved on. They no longer hold that strange, lifeless distance. She notices a flash of black and white amongst the birds in the background. “Wait, is that Nirvana?”

Raven listens as she plays it back. The cacophony has been altered, somehow, perhaps to make it sound less pained; but there is indeed the distinct, raspy chatter of a magpie. “I don’t know if it’s him,” she admits.

. . .

Wolf has made the reluctant decision to leave four teens and one child alone at the cabin, so he can earn money and buy necessary supplies. “Just don’t disappoint me,” he says to Elena, “okay kiddo?” He hugs her before leaving her, alone, for the first time since she was born in front of him so many years ago.

Oz watches the white Van disappear down the gravel driveway, then asks, “Where is he going?”

“We need funds,” Elena replies; she hadn’t noticed them approach.

“Oh,” they say, thoughtful for a second. “I have lots of cash.”

That is an incredible understatement, Elena realizes, standing in the chilly cellar. In addition to some food stores, there is a safe containing a ridiculous pile of cash; she couldn’t even begin to guess how much there is.

“Grandmother did not trust banks,” Oz says, “they invest your money in fossil fuels.” And Po did not abandon her child completely, either; she sent most of her paychecks to them, in cash.

“I didn’t realize climate scientists made so much money,” Elena remarks, but then again, she saw Dr. Miller’s web pages. She is also a professor, public speaker, author of several books. Dr. Po bounces from one institution to another, her options narrowing as universities lose funding and shut down entirely.

Oz explains, “It is one of the most dangerous jobs.” Police violence, public violence, counter-protesters, and hired assassins are just a few of the dangers climate activists have to contend with.

“Oz, why didn’t you tell us about any of this?” she asks.

They blink at her, squinting in the dim light. “No one asked.”

Later, as she describes the encounter, Raven starts laughing; a deep, joyful sound that makes Elena’s heart flutter. She reveals the stack of cash she had stolen from the younger kid, days before; they’d never mentioned the loss.

“Raven,” Elena admonishes, “you need to give it back.” She doesn’t like thinking about Raven stealing from Oz. She doesn’t like thinking about Raven stealing at all, or knowing that it is mostly how she has survived this long.

“What, obviously Oz doesn’t need it,” Raven chuckles. She can’t see Elena’s disappointed face, but she can read it in her tone. “Okay, okay,” she gives in, “But you’ll need to go yell at Nat, too.” He kept the change from his trip.

She’s still frowning; Raven can feel it like a buzz in the air, so she leans over and kisses her. It has the intended effect: Elena’s lips soften and her tension eases as she returns the kiss.

Chapter 24:

“Get a room!” Nat shouts from the open kitchen.

Somewhat breathless, Elena manages, “I don’t have one.” It’s true; with Silva in Po’s room, she has been delegated to sleeping on the couch on which she and Raven are currently making out.

Nat is making popcorn with Oz, who has to show him how to pop it on the stove without burning the kernels, in preparation for a night-long binge of old-time superhero moves. Oz has never watched them.

“They’re great,” Nat assures them, “Superheroes solving superhuman problems. Peak escapism entertainment.” Even Silva has deigned to come inside and join them in the movie watching.

“Nat moved his things into my room so you can sleep with Raven,” Oz reveals, their bluntness making both girls and even Nat blush, although he is only sleeping on the top bunk. “I am learning how to use a computer.” They are doing astoundingly well, too, picking up Linux commands like a toddler learning new swear words.

The movies are a mild distraction, as Elena struggles to keep a respectful distance away from Raven, and there are more than enough of them to stretch endlessly through the night. Eventually, Silva, half asleep, trudges up to bed. With her gone, Nat reveals a small plastic bag of weed, “courtesy of Dr. Po.” According to Oz, the odor is supposedly reminiscent of some now extinct Mustelids.

“What are the weasel things that climb the trees?” Elena asks, suddenly recalling the creature Nirvana called a Cat that skittered through the trees and hissed like Adam.

“Pine marten,” Oz responds, “they eat birds, mostly.” So, like a cat, but the martens belong here, in these woods. They are officially extinct, too.

Raven shreds the buds with her fingers, deftly rolling a small joint before passing it to Nat to light. He passes it to Oz, who stares at the glowing cherry for a moment before shrugging and handing it over to Elena. She tries to inhale and ends up choking on the smoke, coughing and gagging, feeling foolish as she hands it to Raven.

The joint continues circling, each hit a little easier to drag, until it is just a stub. Elena’s head feels like it is floating. She has never experienced drugs, never even watched Wolf drink alcohol, and things feel a lot less scary now; her head floating, surrounded by her friends, Raven, bees, the enormous bear named Dog, Adam the cat. Raven rolls another joint, which is mostly split with Nat. When the sky starts to lighten, the first of the sun’s rays glowing through the woods, Elena falls back on the couch and dreams of flying.

. . .

Bang, bang, bang. Elena’s eyes fly open, suddenly awake. Her head is pounding, and she starts to think maybe the sound was just her brain giving in; but then, BANG, Bang, BANG.

Bear manages a low growl before Nat reaches over, grabs his snout, shushing him. The four of them sit, tense, in the room they had slept in overnight; a superhero movie is still playing on the TV.

BANG, BANG. They collectively hold their breath as a shadow peeks through the window next to the door, but it is too dark in their room, the TV at the wrong angle; whoever it is sees nothing.

“It’s one of the pipeline workers,” Raven announces quietly. What’s more: Nirvana has returned. She waits, excruciatingly, for the danger to pass, before racing to the back door and throwing it open. A stream of sunlight makes the others groan; then Nirvana soars in and Raven catches him in her arms, and Elena swears she watches the magpie hug her with his wings. He chatters angrily, hopping around the room.

Then: “Oz, your mom is at the gas fields,” Raven reveals.

It is entirely too early, considering how late they all stayed up last night, and Elena’s head is pounding, her eyes feel like sand. Somehow, her friends have the energy to make breakfast: pancakes, of all things. She sits with her head resting heavily on the kitchen table. Raven plunks a glass of orange juice in front of her.

“Can’t guarantee it’s any good, it’s from a powder,” she says, and Elena drinks it gratefully, washing away the cottony dryness in her mouth.

To save her the trouble of going outside, Raven also takes a plate of pancakes to where Silva is once again already sitting in the grass. The tiny girl is so quiet that Raven has trouble tracking her down; she resorts reluctantly to asking Nirvana, from whom she still feels distant.

“How did you lose your eye?” Silva asks as she approaches, surprising Raven. She isn’t wearing her sunglasses, and hasn’t been for several days now. Without the dark filtered lenses, she is relearning to appreciate colors as they filter indistinctly through her vision.

“Cancer,” she answers, handing her the plate. She hesitates for a moment, then sits down next to her.

Silva takes a few bites of the syrupy pancakes to be polite, though she has little appetite. It doesn’t take a lot of energy to sit out here all day. “I like your bird,” she says. She is watching Nirvana soar lazy circles above them.

“Me too,” Raven replies.

“I saw him outside the motel that night,” she says. Raven’s jaw clenches, her teeth grinding. Silva looks closely at her face: the sunken, bruised looking eyelid covering the empty socket; the other eye clouded and grey. But also: stern jawline and chin; pink, heart shaped lips; black hair pulled back in two tight braids. “You are very pretty,” Silva remarks with a sweet, innocent tone that betrays her age. She wants the face to relax again.

Raven has no response; for a few moments, they sit in silence, absorbing the outdoors together. Then, she asks, “Are you okay?”

Now Silva has no answer, but the older girl does not press. She thinks maybe she will be, now and here, where ants crawl freely and birds chirp cheerfully and the trees sing secrets in the wind. Finally, Silva confides, “In the motel, I just froze up. I prayed to become a tree.”

“I think I know that feeling,” Raven says.

“I was supposed to go north with the doctor,” Silva says, “He said there would be other girls like me.”

The thought chills Raven’s blood. Nirvana hadn’t mentioned seeing any children; just a few men, the gas fields not even running yet, and Oz’s mom. She’s not even sure who taught the magpie to recognize Po. Probably Nat, but possibly also Oz, who has made some rather rapid progress with both Bear and Adam the cat.

Eventually, Raven leaves the girl sitting alone outside and returns to the cabin. Elena is showering off the long night; Raven tentatively knocks on the bathroom door.

“Occupied,” her voice sings out, making Raven’s heart jump.

“It’s me,” she says, “Can I come in?” The air is heavy with steam and Raven sits on the cool, ceramic tiles as she describes her conversation with Silva.

“More girls?” Elena repeats, voice filled with dread.

“I think,” Raven answers, “we might be in over our heads.”

. . .

“The link between sex trafficking and natural resource extraction is one of America’s worst kept secrets,” Nat explains, pulling up half a dozen news articles about the topic, some dating as far back as the early ‘aughts. “You’ve got a dangerous, labor-intensive job with a male-dominated work force in isolated, rural locations. A military or a police force willing to look away, or even participate. The news makes it sound inevitable.

“Most cases they talk about are international, but it happens here, too.” The most common victims are Indigenous, picked up off nearby reservations and never seen or heard from again, followed by foster kids and homeless children. Silva came from the latter category, falsely arrested then imprisoned.

“So you think that is happening here?” Oz asks.

“I know it is,” Raven says bitterly. She does not clarify.

“How do we stop it?” This is from Elena. She knows if Wolf were here, he would urge them to call the cops; by this point, maybe he would do it himself. How he could even consider it as an option is beyond her.

. . .

Wolf, in fact, would not advise calling the police; he has been having a rather negative experience with them, recently.

He had thought leaving Nat behind would allow him to escape notice, but he had been wrong. Within an hour of picking up a load of illegal electronic junk, he was greeted with flashing blue lights on the otherwise empty highway. The goods were secure, and it would take a decent search to find them, but it turns out the cops were not interested in digging through the Van. They wanted Wolf, and the person in charge of them was not particularly concerned about what state he arrived in, as long as he could talk. When he was finally pushed in front of Kennedy Yates, his left eye was nearly swollen shut, his nose dripping blood.

“Wolf,” Kennedy says, voice dripping with disdain. “I’m assuming it’s a nickname.”

He doesn’t respond.

“I know another nickname of yours,” Kennedy leads, “Hatch, is it?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.” This is not a lie, but Kennedy assumes otherwise.

“You and your little friends have been causing a lot of problems for my company,” she mock-whines.

“I have no friends,” he states, “I’m a lone Wolf.” The assertion makes Kennedy roll her eyes.

“You had an awful lot of minors with you in a motel, for a self-proclaimed loner,” she mocks, and Wolf cringes. “What were you doing in that room with them, I wonder?” He shudders, sickened by the implication.

Eventually, Kennedy gets bored with mocking him, calling for the cop who arrested him to take him away. Wolf tries to pay attention as he is marched through what is apparently a working camp, but each long metal building is identical, and the landscape through his swollen eye looks like nothing but a brown blur.

He does, however, recognize the woman he is locked into a room with, her limp red hair and tired eyes. “Dr. Po,” he says, and she looks up, surprised. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

. . .

Wolf was supposed to return by the afternoon, but his delay is not noticed until well into nighttime; everyone is busy plotting the rescue of not just Oz’s mom, but now, potentially, an unknown number of traumatized children. And the little issue of the pipeline that is creeping its way across wildlife habitat. It is not until Silva finally comes inside, after dark, that Elena recognizes Wolf’s absence, but then she is more concerned that she let the young girl stay out so long into the night. After ensuring Silva has gone to bed, inside, Elena goes into the next room over, where she is further delayed.

Raven is sitting on the bed, removing her braids, shaking out her wavy black hair. Elena sits behind her, combing her fingers through the soft waves, so different from her own, coarse, straight hair. She moves the hair aside and softly kisses her neck. Then Raven twists around and presses her mouth against Elena’s, pushing her down into the pillows, hair fanning down around them. A warm thrill pulses through Elena as their kisses grow deeper, more urgent. Raven’s hand wanders, slips beneath her shirt, tracing her curves, caressing soft skin.

I love your body, Raven wants to say; but then, suddenly, she pulls back, face panicked.

Elena sits up, reaches out. “Are you...” she starts, but no, she quite obviously is not okay; Raven is having a panic attack, trembling and gasping, hyperventilating. She sits hunched, locked down, arms wrapped tight around her stomach.

“Okay,” Elena starts again, trying to keep the tremble out of her own voice, “okay, I need you to know you are safe here.” She feels like she is rambling, trying to stay calm as she continues. “Uhm, I want you to feel safe here. Do you want me to leave?”

Raven shakes her head, barely perceptible.

“Do you want to leave?” Another no; Raven wouldn’t be able to move if she wanted to. “Can I hold your hand?” It takes so much effort to loosen the muscles and stretch out her arm, but this is the goal, to keep Raven from closing in on herself. Elena strokes her palm with her thumb, rhythmically, soothingly.

Raven can’t stop thinking about the little girl in the next room, waking up scared and alone in a motel room. No; she can’t stop thinking about herself, waking up scared and alone and bleeding in an apartment, somewhere; blindly pulling on clothes, but not her own; stumbling dizzily through a hallway, the wrong way first so she could hear the person who brought her there singing in the shower; from the kitchen, a stack of rough napkins to stop her bleeding through the pants. An echoing apartment hallway, linoleum floor and an endless flight of stairs, clutched to the metal railing. Stumbling out into an unknown, freezing street, barefoot; shadows and greys and clouds and smells and noises everywhere; wandering at random just to get as far away from the building as possible.

Finally, finding a stranger: I’ve lost my phone, can I borrow yours?

Do you know what the nearest intersection is? Repeating the names; they had no meaning for her.

Then: Charlie’s gentle chiding, her mother’s disapproving sneer, her stepdad’s heavy breathing.

Raven shudders, but eventually she does regain control over her breathing; with Elena’s gentle persuasion, her posture relaxes somewhat.

“I need to open the window,” Elena says, “Can I get you some water?” A nod. As soon as she opens the window, Nirvana swoops into the room, landing in Raven’s lap. She has to push Bear away from the doorway as she closes it behind her, to keep him from bursting in with his usual brand of chaos.

Elena is surprised to see Nat and Oz in the kitchen; the former typing away on his laptop and the latter mixing something in a large metal bowl. “Isn’t it a bit late for making cookies?” she asks, filling a glass from the filtered pitcher in the fridge.

“It is never too late for cookies,” Nat responds without looking up. He and Oz have been working hard on the ‘net, all day, making a ton of progress, “and Oz is an excellent chef,” he concludes.

“Baker,” Oz corrects, grinning. Their rare smiles hold the same pure delight as a bird, splashing in a clean puddle.

“Check it out,” Nat says, holding up a jar half-full of something tan and speckled, “they can even make their own bread.” A smiley face has been scribbled on the glass with a black marker, two uneven circles for eyes and a flat smile. A pet jar of yeast; how fitting for Oz.

As Elena is leaving the kitchen, Nat remembers. “Hey, have you heard from Wolf?”

She pauses, hesitating. “He was supposed to be back this afternoon.”

“I know.” She looks so anxious, standing there, so he adds, “I’m sure he’s fine.” He waves her off and she darts back up the stairs.

It is not uncommon for trips to be delayed by some factor or another, but Elena has always been alongside him before; why hasn’t he contacted any of them?

Chapter 25:

Elena awakens the next morning to someone gently prodding her cheek; opens her eyes to Silva’s round, innocent face, brown eyes wide, bottom lip trembling.

“I wet the bed,” the girl whispers.

Elena groans, still half asleep, then catches herself; Silva’s eyes are glistening, threatening to spill over. “It’s okay,” she whispers softly. Raven is curled up on the other side of the bed, not even under the blanket. Miraculously, her mp3 player has lasted through the night; Elena can hear the overloud music still playing in her earbuds.

She plants the girl in the shower and removes the wet sheets from Dr. Po’s bed, bundling them in the corner when she realizes she has not seen anything resembling a clothes washer in the cabin. She creeps into Oz’s room, feeling awkward again, but Silva needs new clothes; and as far as Elena knows, Wolf still has not returned from his trip. She places the oversized clothing, neatly folded, on the bathroom sink, then strides downstairs to peak out front. The Van is still absent.

Refreshed from the shower and not at all bothered by the early hour, Silva skips outside to her usual spot outside. She has come to recognize several different species of ants, each with their own unique behaviors. Her favorite, the large, docile black ones, are early morning workers. She watches the sunrise, pinks and purples and soft yellow fading away to blue. The sky is dotted with puffy clouds that remind her of Bear.

Knowing she’ll be unable to go back to sleep, Elena paces through the kitchen, staring at her phone; even if Wolf has tried to contact her, she wouldn’t know. Only Nat’s satellite connection reaches out here. She eats one of Oz’s cookies, which is admittedly quite delicious, then another. Still restless, she eventually finds herself outside, bare feet brushing dew off the prickly grass. She heads towards the trees away from Silva, so as not to disturb the girl’s quiet contemplations.

A single bird sings nearby; the terrified chatter of displaced birds has not yet reached them, the peace not yet disturbed. Elena tries to ignore the various painful stones and sticks and thorns beneath her feet; they are too soft, she thinks, from being too protected. She has always hated textures under her feet, rocks in her shoe, socks that felt wrong. She was old enough when she finally started walking that she remembers Wolf’s exasperation, trying to get her to put her feet down on anything. How funny that now she sometimes feels like walking and never stopping. Or maybe she would rather just learn to fly.

It is not long before she reaches her destination, one she had not realized she was headed towards. It is the tiny, two-party family of deer; a week older, the fawn is now sturdier on its feet, confidently bouncing around and nibbling at the grass. The doe looks at Elena like she was expecting her, then continues to graze even as her fawn cautiously approaches. Its fur is soft, the stark white spots already fading.

The deer are much closer to the cabin than they were when Raven tracked them down. They are being pushed down this way, like the birds, Elena realizes, though they might not even understand why. Out here with the deer, she can almost understand Silva’s desire to sit outside all day; but her legs grow stiff from sitting on dirt and rocks, and she constantly has to readjust to keep her feet from falling asleep.

She lingers even after the deer have gone, enjoying the space. She stretches out on the hard ground, feeling truly alone for what is probably the first time in her life; she is too used to Wolf’s constant presence, always just a few feet away in the small Van they call their home. Out here the solitude feels as though it stretches on forever; her eyes unfocused, she can pretend the trees are infinite.

Elena closes her eyes and thinks about Raven: her small, compact body, lean and muscular; soft lips and warm hands, tracing her curves and feeling the goosebumps on her skin. A warm heat forms in her stomach, an incredible pressure building between her legs. Elena reaches down, slips her hand beneath her waistband to touch herself; she wants to touch Raven like this, wants Raven to touch her like this. The thought, and the exhilarating terror accompanying it, are overwhelming. She moans for the eavesdropping trees as she comes, then retracts her hand, trembling, and wipes her fingers in the grass. She continues to lay there, dreaming of Raven and staring at the sky until the blue has burned into her retinas and she has lost track of time.

As if summoned by her illicit thoughts, a blur of black and white feathers rustles Elena out of her trance, and she sits up, looking behind her to see Raven quietly approaching.

“Hey!” Elena says, her still-damp underwear making her blush. She does not know how long she has been laying there; how long Raven could have been listening, or Nirvana watching. “I was just thinking about you.” If Raven heard anything, she keeps it to herself.

“Hey,” Raven replies, sitting down beside her. “I thought I was the one who was always running off.”

Elena cringes, remembering Nat’s casual indifference to Raven’s disappearance. “I guess you’ll have to share.”

“I can go, if you want,” Raven says, “I just wanted to apologize. You know. For last night.”

“Woah,” Elena answers, “No. No, it was a panic attack. You don’t have to apologize for that.”

Raven shrugs. “Nat gets tired of them,” she explains, “He gets tired of ‘all my drama.’” She enunciates the air quotes by flopping over dramatically onto her back.

Elena frowns. “Nat loves you,” she says.

“They’re not mutually exclusive,” Raven responds from the ground. “Trust me, no one can love me without growing tired of me.”

“I could,” Elena says, so softly that Raven can’t decide if she actually heard it. She sits up again, reaches out to orient herself, but mostly just to touch Elena, who says, louder this time, “I hope I didn’t do anything to trigger it.”

Raven reflects, a half-smile forming at the thought of what she had been about to say. “No, I think I triggered it myself.” As usual, Elena does not ask for her to elaborate. “How did you know what to do?” Raven asks instead. “You were so calm. First time it happened with Nat, I think it triggered one in him, too.”

“Wolf gets them, sometimes,” Elena confides, “The first time I saw one, I think I was younger than Silva is.” She’d made Wolf go to the ER, driving himself, of course, because she was just a kid. By the time they arrived, it was over, but she still made him go in, convinced he was dying until a young nurse kindly explained to her the difference between a panic attack and a heart attack.

“Isn’t that kind of weird, helping your dad like that?” Raven thinks of Nat’s dad, his disabling chronic pain that left him a lump of unmolded clay on the couch. Lionel would angrily refuse help or criticism; she remembers the loud crack of a slap, once, when Nat asked why he was drinking before lunch.

“Well, he was young,” Elena says. “Even if you don’t believe the deer story, he would’ve been, what, my age when he had me.” So much of growing up with Wolf has necessarily been a mutual rearing, him learning and making it up as he struggled along.

“I absolutely believe the deer story,” Raven says, grinning. “No one would make up something that fucked up, just to deny having sex.”

“Ugh,” Elena groans, but her laughter falters. “I don’t suppose he’s shown up by now?” she asks, biting her lip.

“Don’t worry,” Raven says, “Nat’s looking for him. He’s probably got a GPS tracker on all of us.”

. . .

It’s not on Wolf, Nat explains, but on the Van, which he has tracked to a tow lot just outside a town 20 miles to the north. On the map, he points to a spot nearby: the natural gas field owned by Armor Inc.

“So, Kennedy Yates got him?” Elena asks.

“That seems probable,” he says, “but that is not a problem, at all.” He explains what he and Oz have been up to, lately, and even Raven has to admit she is impressed.

First, Just Stop organizers have announced the location of their latest protest: the GPS coordinates provided by an anonymous hacker from YakAttak, which point to the current storm front of destructive equipment preparing the land for the pipeline. The organization’s infamous tactics will keep them from progressing, at least for a while.

Second, one of Hatch’s contacts has secured both access cards for Armor’s northern gas field; as well as transportation, so they do not have to hike the entire way.

Raven groans. She only knows one person with their own car: Charlie.

Chapter 26:

When Charlie first sees the literal children gathered around the cabin at the meet-up location Hatch had provided, she almost pulls a u-turn and leaves. But then, squinting, she realizes she recognizes two of them, and she drives straight up and stomps out of her car, ready to slap her little sister silly. Raven’s got that stubborn, unseeing scowl that Charlie is pretty sure is designed to irritate her specifically.

She is also holding someone’s hand, and the sight is just cute enough that Charlie finds some restraint within herself. “What are you doing here?” she demands, glaring straight through Raven’s unseeing eye, then at her little twerp friend, Nat.

“We might have a lot to explain,” she, no, HE, says sheepishly. No kidding.

Charlie doesn’t want to believe that Hatch is actually Nat. No way, not scrawny little Nat, who once wet his pants because he was too involved in a video game; who spent an entire summer meowing at her while she babysat him; who cut his locs in her bathroom last year and left them in her sink. Even when he pulls up the encrypted chat logs, she’s pretty sure she’s being pranked.

But then, as he explains the situation these kids have gotten themselves into and starts confidently explaining how he intends to get everyone out of it, Charlie finds herself nodding along. He does have a substantial amount of information that is definitely not easily available to the public, and his presentation is like something out of a forensics show.

“So you want me,” she clarifies, “to print your little baby faces on these cards,” she fans out the blanks, RFID chips invisibly embedded within smooth white plastic, “and drop y’all and my blind little sister off in the middle of the woods somewhere, so you can rescue their parents?” Nat and Raven both nod; close enough.

Then: “Nat, do you realize how much trouble you are in?” The cops had even come to Charlie’s house; his dad was calling her daily. “What about when they find out about all this?”

Nat just shakes his head; he really doesn’t know.

Later, when the shock has worn off a little, Charlie pulls Raven aside to interrogate her about her girlfriend.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” she protests, blushing.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” Charlie retorts. “Do I need to ask her what her intentions are with my little sister?” No; she could picture, has seen far worse for Raven than this girl Elena. She will never get the image out of her head of her little sister cowering outside some Mid-District convenience store on the other side of town, unable to tell where she was or how she got there.

The last bombshell is more than enough to send Charlie home, if not for the cash she is offered. Elena points out the tiny child in the yard, unmoving and staring at the ground. “She doesn’t need much,” she explains, “Sometimes you have to make sure she eats.” It’s still not exactly clear what they expect from Charlie until she is introduced to the child, called Silva.

“Do you think you will be okay with her?” Elena asks carefully, and the girl looks at Charlie, panicked, before nodding reluctantly.

“Wait, if I’m babysitting the kid,” Charlie asks, “who’s driving my car?”

That would be Elena, behind the wheel for the first time since her failed lesson with Wolf.

“I promise I won’t let you hit any birds,” Raven vows from the passenger seat beside her. The car is one of the old electric types, and it is too quick to respond to Elena’s erratic pedal work. Nat directs her from the back seat next to Oz, who presses their head against the cool glass window to try to quell the nausea rising in their throat.

Driving gets slightly easier when she gets to the highway, although by the time she starts even approaching the speed limit Elena’s leg is shaking erratically; at least until Raven reaches over and places her hand on her thigh. Then her stomach clenches for a different reason, but she pushes that thought away; she cannot get distracted while driving.

Fortunately, she does not have to drive all the way to the gas field, which involves crossing a state border and, Nat has learned, driving through a reservation. He has a feeling the gas fields may be encroaching on Native territory.

The protected wilderness has an old scenic route, which sounds nice to Elena until she is driving it: winding, narrow lanes, towering trees on both sides. It passes by a trailhead for a route that would take them the opposite direction they need to go, deeper into the wilderness. She parks the car near the back of the empty lot, managing to cross over the lines on both sides, much to Nat’s amusement. Each hefting a backpack, they set off on foot, away from the trail and towards the pipeline.

Oz is clearly the most equipped for this sort of rigorous hiking; they have no problem traversing the uneven ground, skipping around crooked roots and prickly undergrowth with ease. Nat trudges along behind them, and Elena’s legs quickly feel like they are going to collapse beneath her. The forest is eerily silent, as though it has been abandoned, and they do not have to hike for long to discover why: a wide swath of clear-cut forest, stumps burned and blackened, dirt trampled and packed with heavy machinery, all to make room for a rickety metal tube and its shiny metal support struts.

Oz freezes, gapes; it is one thing to hear about the destruction, something else entirely to see it up close. Hundreds of homes destroyed; not even the flowers in the ground survived, and Oz’s bees hover around anxiously, wondering why they have left their meadow again. The narrow wasteland cuts straight through ancient migration routes; not that it matters now, they suppose, since the deer are nearly gone now. But how gone is gone? No one gets paid enough to keep track of that anymore. Oz wonders what the minimum population for deer might be; they vaguely recall an equation from one of the books in Po’s library, but numbers always felt foreign to them. They know deer populations have recovered before; could they recover again?

Nat has carefully mapped out the surveillance ranges for all of Armor’s cameras and traced out a route for them to get to the natural gas fields unseen. A few miles other way, he explains, Just Stop whatever protesters are chaining themselves to trees, disabling trucks, harassing construction foremen. They hike north, Oz filling the silence by naming and describing nearly every plant and fungus they come across.

Nirvana flies overhead, grim and quiet. Raven has avoided his commentary, the mental painting he projects of the stripped-down forest. There are no more birds here, and she feels lost. As if sensing her distress, Elena squeezes her hand once; twice; three times.

. . .

The long, narrow strip of cut forest felt devastating, but the amount of forest cut down for the natural gas drills and their associated labor camp dwarfs it.

“No, it’s not a labor camp,” Nat clarifies, “it’s a man-camp.” Completely different, he’s sure.

The man-camp consists of seemingly endless rows of identical metal storage containers, each divided into two units. Even if they knew for a fact Wolf and Dr. Po were here, it would be impossible for them to find the right unit without getting caught.

“That’s where you come in,” Raven informs Nirvana, passing him a treat (half of one of Oz’s cookies) from her pocket. The bird squawks as he takes off, disappearing amongst the metal buildings.

The camp is ringed by a tall fence, topped with barbed wire; the pipeline goes through a hole cut into the chain links, and there is an access gate nearby. A single security camera points to the gate.

“Armor’s main security strategy is isolation,” Nat explains. They are waiting for dusk, hidden behind the shrubs some distance away. Oz reminds Elena of Silva, closely watching the ants skirt through the sand; she hopes the girl is doing okay with Charlie.

. . .

It is Po who first spots the odd black and white bird hopping around the graveled yard surrounding the metal box that is her prison; sparsely furnished, it at least has its own bathroom, which makes it a step up from the last room she was held in. That she has to share it with a man named Wolf, who has apparently spent more time with her child in the last week than she has in several years, makes it more conflicting.

That secret she has kept for so many years, her Ozy and their chest full of bees, was one of the first things Wolf described in his effort to convince her he knows them. The way he said it, casually, like it was the most normal thing for one’s child to have bees living inside them, coming and going at will, foraging and scavenging and building wax comb in their body.

Then he described his daughter’s birth, out of a roadkill deer, and Po started to think that maybe he was just crazy.

Since his arrival, Wolf has been removed from the unit twice; each time he returned with new wounds. Po recognizes the taser burns from her own experiences with Kennedy Yates, but whatever Wolf was suspected of doing, he isn’t talking. On the other hand, that meant he wasn’t doing much talking to Po, either, so she aside from the revelation that her mother was dead, a fact she has stored away inside to deal with later, she has little idea of what her child has been doing with this stranger.

“Is that a magpie?” she asks now, watching the curious creature.

Wolf jumps over the couch, his sudden agility surprising given his physical condition. “Nirvana?” he asks. Po gives him that look he has come to recognize, the one that says, you are an idiot, and I have a PhD. I am above you.

It is, in fact, Nirvana, and as soon as Wolf’s face pops in the window he starts going nuts, hopping and screaming and making so much noise he’s concerned it will draw the wrong attention. The window is barred from the outside, but the glass is not locked; he slides it open and calls again, whisper-shouting, “Nirvana!”

Wouldn’t you know, the damn bird flies right over, perches under the window, head cocked, staring at them both. Wolf wrestles the screen in by bending its frame, which will no doubt be noticed by the next round, Po thinks. He reaches through the bars and the magpie hops straight onto his arm, squeeze in through the metal bars, flits to the kitchenette counter and caws expectantly.

“Empty,” Wolf says, out loud, talking to the bird. “No food.” It’s like talking to a toddler. Po watches as he steps over to the bird, puts his hand under its beak, says directly, “You guys need to go home.” He scritches the feathers around its neck, then picks it up, returns it to the window, and the bird flies away.

“Who’s your friend?” Po asks mildly, as Wolf returns to his place on the couch. He has been sprawled there, staring at the ceiling, since returning from Kennedy Yates’ latest attempt to extract information about “Hatch.” He regrets the burst of activity that vaulted him over the couch; his ribs twinge angrily.

“Nirvana,” he grunts, “he belongs to Oz’s friend.”

“Ozy has friends,” Po wonders aloud, the idea still foreign and surprising. They have never been particularly sociable, preferring the company of their bees to people even when she would try to take them out to get a glimpse of the real world. She used to dread these trips in public; it seemed like anything could trigger Oz, which in turn triggers the bees and their agonizing bites. She was relieved when they said they would prefer to skip the “unnecessary things”, which is, apparently, everything but the optometrist.

Wolf sits up, ignoring the pain, just to glare at Po. “They do now,” he says. He falls back, ribs screaming. “There’s what, like, five of them out there, now,” he grumbles. No, he will not elaborate.

. . .

The group collectively decides to ignore Wolf’s directions, relayed by Nirvana through Raven; she tries to hide her concern, as the magpie had also taken note of Wolf’s bruised face.

“She’s keeping them together?” Nat asks, incredulously; his opinion of Kennedy Yates’ criminal prowess is steadily decreasing.

Indeed, Kennedy had thought through her decision to keep Dr. Po Miller and the man named Wolf, whom she thinks is Hatch, together, but since the unit is bugged to listen to their conversation, she feels the benefits have far outweighed the potential for the two adults to be collaborators.

The bit about the bees and deer was confusing, until Kennedy realized he must be talking in code; which is all the proof she needs that Hatch and Dr. Po have been collaborating, and those annoying little children are involved. She regrets letting them have the street rat, but she can work on them later; because the other tidbit of information, that Miss Pearl Marie is finally dead, means that Kennedy Yates is just one signature away from being able to finish her pipeline. Soon, powering the newest DataLess server farm will be not just feasible but highly profitable.

Just after sunset, which Oz explains in a whisper is called “civil twilight”, the lone security camera pointed at the back gate of the Armor Inc. man-camp flickers indecisively between day- and night-vision when it is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of black.

The back gate is not energized, just locked with an old-fashioned gate latch and the same brand of padlock used in the DataLess warehouse, which Raven can now pick in less than 30 seconds. Elena watches on, impressed, kisses her cheek as she creeps past through the gate. When they have left the range of the camera, the swarm of bees that had been clustered over the lens retreats, and the camera goes back to watching the empty gate, now solidly in night mode.

Only one other area of the man-camp is secured, and as they follow Nirvana through the endless metal containers, Nat realizes it would have been obvious even without his directions. Their destination is the only well-lit area: a section of four or five shipping containers, with cameras trained at each. The rest of the camp has sparsely scattered floodlights, providing plenty of hidden shadows for sneaking and hiding.

As they approach, however, Nat realizes they might be too late. Three tall figures stride through the yellowish pools of light ahead of them: Kennedy Yates and two others. She keys her way into the farthest unit – card entry – and enters with one of the guards. The other stands outside, waiting.

Chapter 27:

“Hatch,” Kennedy announces without preamble, staring down at Wolf’s form, sprawled out on the couch.

Po has to restrain herself from reacting to the name. No way. He had used a voice changer during their one and only phone exchange; but they had worked together extensively for at least a few years now, in the encrypted YakAttak forums owned and administrated by Hatch.

“I told you, I don’t know who Hatch is,” Wolf grumbles, squinting at the sudden overhead light. He sounds convincing, but Kennedy isn’t buying it. She walks around the couch and places a heeled shoe on his ribs, pressing hard. A look from the bulky security guard who entered with her keeps Po planted in her spot by the still open window.

Pressing hard on her foot, Kennedy continues. “You and your friends have been making a lot of trouble for my company,” she sneers down at Wolf, who only shrugs. Sighing, she presses harder before lifting her foot off his chest, prompting him to gasp and start coughing.

“You,” she says, gesturing towards Po, and the bodyguard trudges over, pulling her hands roughly behind her back.

“You stole some very important information from me,” Kennedy warns Wolf before leaving, “And I don’t intend to let it get released. By any means necessary.”

She follows the bodyguard and Dr. Po out of the Unit; the one who had previously been guarding the door slips inside to join the man named Wolf. This guard is a specialist: regardless of whether he is successful in extracting the information Kennedy needs, Hatch will be dying tonight.

. . .

Watching Kennedy lead her hostage and a bodyguard into the shadows, Nat realizes they are going to have to break up the party. “You guys get Wolf out,” he says, “me and Oz will get Dr. Po.”

Oz shadows him as he ducks between metal containers, each one unoccupied; laborers aren’t needed until the pipeline is finished, they realize. Kennedy leads them to a much nicer-looking prefabricated house with blue siding and fake window shudders. It is clearly meant as space for upper management.

Nat turns to Oz. “I have an idea,” he says cautiously, “stay here. I’m going to need your bees soon.” Before they have a chance to respond, he walks right into the light that pools in front of the building, up the neat blue steps, and knocks on the door.

. . .

Waiting, crouched in the night, legs cramping, Elena has noticed that the shipping container on the left has windows that have been boarded up from within; light peaks through, spilling into the darkness. When she points this out, Raven frowns.

“I can’t hear anything,” she says, “it’s all too far away.” They circle around, approaching the containers from behind, and Raven hears something from the one Po came out of that holds her attention: Wolf, getting beaten rather heavy-handedly by the second bodyguard. Elena risks a brief glance through the window; she notices it is completely open beyond the iron bars.

“Hold out your arm,” Raven instructs, positioning it just below the edge of the windowsill. Nirvana hops on, shockingly light, claws prickling through Elena’s sleeve. “When I give the signal,” Raven whispers, “send Nirvana through and run around the front.” Then she ducks around to the other side of the building.

Elena stands there, awkwardly holding her arm up for Nirvana’s perch; then she hears a whistle: chirrup, chirrup, peu peu peu. The notes are crystal clear, nothing like the pathetic attempts she and Oz made at whistling just a few days ago. She recognizes it as the song of the mountain bluebirds, a fact she barely has time to process because Nirvana is squeezing through the window. Elena watches the magpie dive straight for the bodyguard’s face, screeching, claws extended; she cannot see Wolf, but assumes he is on the floor at the man’s feet. She starts running as the bodyguard yells, ducking and swatting at the bird.

As soon as Elena turns the corner to the front of the shipping container, the unit’s door bursts open; the lumbering bodyguard stumbles out and down the stairs, tripping over what turns out to be Raven’s extended arm, reaching through the handrails. She grabs the man’s ankle and he sprawls out flat, skidding in the gravel, head bouncing off the ground. Then Raven immediately jumps on his back, grabbing both arms and roughly twisting them behind him.

Elena runs over to help her zip tie his wrists together; he is still conscious, but dazed and complicit as Raven leads him back into the unit he just escaped. His face and scalp are bleeding from dozens of scratches and cuts; most of them are shallow, though one or two might could use stitches. The bird has disappeared, for which he feels strangely grateful. He did not sign up to be attacked by birds out here.

Wolf is not so lucky, barely pulling out of unconsciousness when Elena’s concerned face appears in front of him, surrounded by stars.

“You,” he says, groaning. The pain in his head is something next level, and his voice echoes through his own skull. “I thought I told you to go home.” There is a metallic taste in his mouth.

As Elena gets Wolf to his thankfully unbroken feet, Raven drags the bodyguard to the window, where she crudely affixes his hands to the iron bars behind him. Despite her clumsiness getting him there, she easily dodges the kicks and twists as he tries half-heartedly to escape. The bodyguard’s head hurts, too, but not nearly as much as Wolf’s, he hopes.

“Can you check that?” Raven asks, coming over to help prop Wolf up. Elena confirms the bodyguard will at least be temporarily thwarted in trying to escape, then awkwardly begins emptying his pockets: key ring, ID placard, wallet.

“He’s carrying,” Raven warns, “left side.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Elena wonders, running her hand under the bodyguard’s shirt, feeling for the holster under his arm. The gun is cool to the touch, dangerous in her hands. She shudders.

“I felt the strap when I tackled him.” Raven helps Wolf down the stairs while Elena makes sure the door locks behind them.

“Did you really tackle him?” Elena asks as she catches up, teasing, “I mean, he was already down...”

“Shush.” She was joking, but in the ensuing quiet, Raven does hear something, coming from the metal container next door: a child, crying.

. . .

Po looks up from the papers in front of her. “All this was to get my inheritance?” she asks incredulously.

Kennedy nods, sliding over a pen. “All I need is your signature and you can be on your way.”

Po starts laughing. She can’t help it; this is absolutely ridiculous. She cackles deliriously, laughing to the point of wheezing. She has been held prisoner by Kennedy Yates for nearly three months; foolishly lured to a meeting of compromise, privately, at the billionaire’s mansion and drugged with a cup of coffee. Their encounters during her imprisonment have ranged from ranting monologues, attempting to discredit everything Po believes in from climate change to taxing the rich; all the way up to physically torturing her for information, incoherent lines of questioning that seemingly didn’t matter what answers were provided.

Apparently, all this was just for fun; all she needs now is a signature. Joke’s on her, she thinks, trying to contain her giggling enough to explain. “You think my mom left me anything?” she manages, sobering somewhat at the fury in Kennedy Yates’ eyes. Pearl Marie had been very clear when they sat down together to write their wills, so many years ago: Oz was getting everything, and Po deserves nothing.

Po is spared whatever immediate retaliation Kennedy has planned by a sharp, confident knocking at the door. The bodyguard, standing in the hallway, gives her a bewildered look.

“I don’t know,” Kennedy hisses, “just answer it.”

The bodyguard opens the door to reveal a kid, who looks up at him with a wide smile. “Hi!” Nat says chipperly, “I’m here to see Kennedy Yates.”

“Is she expecting you?” the bodyguard asks, loudly. He angles his head back towards Kennedy, who is peeking around into the hallway; she shakes her head, irritated. From this angle, she cannot see the visitor, but of course she wouldn’t be expecting anyone at this time.

“She’s been looking for me,” Nat announces, confidently. “Just tell her I’m Hatch.”

Hearing this, Kennedy steps into the hallway; it’s the annoyingly lanky Black kid, Nathan or Natalie or whatever. She nods at the bodyguard, who turns and grabs the kid’s arm, jerking him inside. This ought to be good, she thinks. He drags the kid along roughly, despite the lack of resistance, sitting him down at the same kitchen table as Po. Nat nods at her, and she stares, uncomprehending.

“What business does a petty electronics dealer have with me?” Kennedy asks, “Did he put you up to this?”

Nat shrugs, a difficult task considering the bodyguard’s heavy hands holding him down by the shoulders. “Who?” he asks, trying to ignore the grip of the man’s fingers.

“Hatch,” Kennedy spits, “Wolf, whatever his real name is.”

“I told you,” Nat responds, “I am Hatch.” Po doesn’t believe it, not a kid, and clearly, neither does Kennedy Yates. She signals to the bodyguard to ease off, and he releases his grip, takes one step away.

“If you are Hatch,” Kennedy sneers, “what is stopping me from disposing of you alongside Dr. Po here?” Po stiffens; she’d been expecting that, but the business with the will had given her a flare of optimism.

“I have a dead man’s switch, obviously.” Nat responds, unimpressed by the threat. “If I don’t update it every 24 hours, everything goes out to the public.”

Kennedy hesitates. “What sort of things?” she asks.

“Email chains, financial statements, shipment records,” Nat lists, “the usual.”

Kennedy starts pacing in front of the table. Of course, depending on what he is referring to specifically, there could certainly be incriminating evidence against DataLess and Armor, Inc; not least of all the business with the girls in Unit 67. She watches the kid wearily; he’s sitting straight up, perfectly still except those eyes following her around. Then again, it’s not like he has offered any proof that he is who he says he is, or that he even has these files he claims.

“Hatch took something very personal from me,” Kennedy starts, “if-“

Nat interrupts, unhesitating. “A birth certificate,” he says, “adoption papers, and a non-disclosure agreement.” He spells out the acronym, enunciating each word.

To Po’s surprise, Kennedy stops her pacing and gapes, almost speechless. “And what did you need with those?” she finally asks.

“I needed the birth certificate. It’s mine.”

“Nonsense,” Kennedy says, revealing herself, “I had a daughter.”

Nat is smirking now; he’s heard this one before. “That’s what everyone thought,” he says.

Kennedy looks at him more closely: golden eyes, same as hers; but then she sees someone else. Lionel, that sexy pool-boy with the exotic accent, refugee from some island nation that is buried in the ocean, now. Their fling had lasted only a summer, as her former husband was filming; of course, Paul had been conducting his own affairs off set. After Paul returned, she fired Lionel; she only saw him once more, to hand over the dark-skinned infant she hadn’t even bothered to name.

This would kill her reputation.

“What do you want from me?” Kennedy asks. She has paled, and the bodyguard keeps looking back and forth between her and Nat, perplexed. He has a sudden, strong sense of foreboding.

“Nothing,” Nat responds, “I just wanted you to know that I think you are a despicable human being.” Absolute silence. Po’s eyes are wide, and Kennedy’s mouth hangs open; she was expecting the kid would want money. He continues, “I mean, just a real piece of scum. I cannot wait to see you fail.” Finished, he turns around to the bodyguard, picture of innocence, and asks, “Hey, can I use your bathroom?”

The bodyguard looks to his boss, who is not giving any instructions. “Urh,” he stutters, “down the hall to the left.”

Kennedy watches, silently fuming, as Nat practically skips past her and down the hall. She turns to Dr. Po, who looks entirely bemused. This problem, she can solve; has no idea what to do about Nat, but she has always had a plan for Dr. Po.

“Take her,” Kennedy instructs the bodyguard, “She’s done here.”

Chapter 28:

In the bathroom, Nat opens the window and crudely punches out the screen, noting the lack of iron bars. “Oz,” he whisper-calls into the darkness, “Bees!”

He waits until a reasonably sized cloud is swarming in the small bathroom, wondering at how so many bees could come from such a small person. Then he opens the door and leads them out.

In the kitchen, the bodyguard is trying to drag Dr. Po out, but she is putting up an impressive fight despite having her hands tied. The swarm fills the space quickly, immediately landing on both Kennedy and the bodyguard and digging their sharp, hardened mandibles into their skin, injecting their enzymatic saliva that causes searing pain and near-instant boils.

Kennedy swats, turns, swats more; the bodyguard drops Dr. Po, arms flailing, and both flee the infested house.

Nat races over to Dr. Po, sitting on the floor. “Don’t worry,” he assures, “they’ll leave us alone.”

She has already noticed; she watches the cloud of insects in awe. “Ozy,” she whispers.

“Yeah, Oz is great,” Nat confirms. He cuts the plastic ties around Dr. Po’s wrist, helps her up. “They’re outside.”

He leads her outside, where the bodyguard has disappeared entirely. The vulture bees have followed Kennedy Yates into her car, which she is struggling to start, distracted by constantly swatting at her arms. After a moment, the car starts, and she races down the road towards the front gate, windows open. They can hear her shrieking as she drives past; she doesn’t even notice them.

Oz is slumped against a nearby building, exhausted from the effort the bees made at their expense. The swarm returns, their job done; but some do not, and the hive mourns each of them. Nat helps them stand up; clasping each other’s forearms, Oz beams, and Po recalls that peculiar alternative to a hug that she could never get right the first time.

“Ozy,” she whispers, “I’m so proud of you.”

. . .

Every window of Unit 67 is barred and sealed; the single access door has several different locks, including some sort of biometric scanner. The guard’s stolen keys only account for one. Standing in front of the door, Elena and Raven might as well be lit up by a spotlight: several cameras pointed straight at them both.

“You and Wolf go get the others, and get the Van,” Raven instructs, “I’ll work on getting them out.” Aside from the biometrics, the other locks may be complicated, but they aren’t unbreakable.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elena hisses, “It’s miles away. Let’s go, we’ll come back for them.”

Raven’s face turns stony. “I’m not leaving them,” she insists.

“What if you get caught?”

“Nirvana will keep track of me.”

Elena tries again. “You can’t stay here.”

“No offense,” Raven says, turning back towards the deadbolt she was working on, “but that is not your decision to make.”

Defeated, Elena leaves, supporting Wolf, limping their way to the front gate. If he weren’t so dazed, he might notice she is silently weeping, tears sliding down her cheek and chilling in the cool night. The front gate is some distance away, and by the time they arrive, Nat has already taken control over the security systems across the complex. She finds him, Oz, and Dr. Po in the security booth beside it, a hint of celebration in the air.

They still have several problems: Kennedy Yates has disappeared in her car; one bodyguard has disappeared into the man-camp; the other has likely already escaped his restraints, if not the Unit he is trapped in; and now Raven has decided to stay behind until she can break into the next one over. They are still technically stuck here, unless they can drag Wolf to the Van or through several miles of backcountry hiking.

But Dr. Po is safe, and Wolf is safe, if injured, and for now, Kennedy still has no way to destroy Oz’s woods; plus, Nat got his confrontation, and now she knows her secrets are not safe.

“I think I have an idea for getting out of here,” Nat says, turning to the computer at the security desk. “We’ll just need to hold on through the night.” He types quickly, fingers blurring over the keyboard.

“Can you bring the security cameras up?” Elena asks when he is finished. She has delicately placed the confiscated handgun in one of the metal drawers of the security desk after wiping it off with her shirt. She is tremendously relieved not to be carrying it.

Nat finds Raven still exposed to the cameras outside Unit 67. She has finished picking the mechanical locks, but the biometric lock is still secure; she appears to be working futilely to break the door down. There are no signs of activity in the next unit over, and the door is still closed and locked.

“It’s some sort of biometric scanner,” Elena explains to Nat; the video resolution is not great.

“What kind?” he asks, but she doesn’t know. He wonders if Kennedy was really so naïve, and decides she probably is. In the back of the security building is an office space -slash- breakroom, where three personal lockers stand in a row. In the second one, Nat finds a make-up bag. “This is going to be ridiculous if it works,” he says, emerging from the backroom, bottle of pale powdered foundation in hand.

They leave Oz at the security booth with instructions to watch for the missing bodyguard; if he is in range of Unit 67, they will flicker the lights. Wolf is stretched out on the row of seating outside the office, while Dr. Po digs through the security first aid kit for an ice pack.

The trek across the man-camp is much shorter the second time, Elena notices, without Wolf leaning on her. Raven doesn’t detect their approach; she has failed at kicking down the door, which has only made her more furious. She kicks and hits at the door wildly, randomly; a small part of her realizes she is probably terrifying the kids inside. She swings at the door with a closed fist, immediately regretting it when she hears bone snap in her hand, the sound reaching her ears before she even feels the pain.

“Oof,” Nat remarks from behind, alarming Raven and wrenching her out of her rage. “I think I have a better way of opening that.”

She whirls around, cradling her hand. Elena carefully pulls Raven away from the door, drawing her into her arms.

Nat examines the scanner. “Perfect,” he says, lining his face up with the lens. It beeps, whirs, then a red LED flashes. Here goes nothing. He starts blindly applying the stolen foundation with the soft brush; it doesn’t need to look good, just lighten his skin tone. “I need more light,” he says, and Elena pulls a flashlight out of her pocket. “Shine it at my face.”

Concentrating on Kennedy’s image, he sucks his cheeks in slightly, purses his lips, and stares wide-eyed at the camera. Elena tries not to giggle at his ghostly powdered face. His concentration broken, Nat scolds, “I’m pretty sure that’s racist,” laughing and stretching his facial muscles before attempting to make the face again.

After a long, breathless moment, the LED flashes green, and a mechanical whirr suggests an unlatching. Nat grins; kids figured out how to hack into their parents’ phones back in the ‘20s using the same method.

“Nothing ever improves,” he says. He opens the door.

Inside: half a dozen terrified faces, the youngest smaller than Silva, the oldest maybe Oz’s age. They stare out at the newcomers; behind them, Nirvana crows, and the lights flicker.

“Shit,” Nat says, gesturing the girls to go inside; he follows, closing the door only partially to stop it from latching.

“Hi,” he says, waving awkwardly at the scared faces, “Uhm, my name is Nat, and that’s Elena, and Raven,” he continues, pointing. Elena tries to smile, while Raven keeps her head down, cradling her newly broken hand to her chest. “We’re here to rescue you,” Nat finishes.

Each of the captive children is dressed in a simple white nightgown; it must be past midnight, Nat realizes, and they were all probably asleep until recently. The littlest one looks like she has been crying; she rests her head sleepily against the one carrying her.

“Hang on,” Nat carefully peeks out the door, making eye contact with the camera. The lights flicker again. “We might have to stay here a little longer, but help will be here soon,” he promises.

. . .

From the security cameras, Oz watches the bodyguard wander through the complex, finally free of the bees tormenting him. They chew on their cheek as they watch their friends gather around outside Unit 67. They flicker the security lights as the security guard approaches, and again when he is inside, freeing his coworker.

Incredulously, Oz watches as the pair of bodyguards walk right past Unit 67, the door apparently closed.

They continue strolling past Oz in the security room, straight to the front gate, where they are thwarted by Nat’s disabling of the security system; apparently, these gates fail closed. The bodyguards help each other climb over the fence, clumsily avoiding the barbed wire, then climb into their shared car and drive away. Both men will spill everything they know about the business as soon as they are questioned; they were never paid enough to deal with manic birds or swarms of bees.

Oz then walks alone through the dark camp to reunite with their friends, while Po and Wolf wait for morning in the security booth.

In Unit 67, they collectively try to answer questions; listen to the kids who want to talk; offer solace to those they can. Each person in there has suffered unimaginable trauma and the teens are ill-equipped to handle it, but they do their best.

At dawn, the first of the Just Stop protesters arrive at the front gates of the new Armor Inc. gas field. Nat races back to the security booth to repower the front gates, and Dr. Po greets the protesters with an access card, printed with Wolf’s face; this card quickly disappears into the ether. The activists trickle in at first, fanning out through the abandoned camp; soon, someone comes across Unit 67 and the captive children.

The authorities are called, and with the number of cameras, witnesses, and members of the press scattered throughout the crowd, there is no burying this. Of the children rescued, three had been on the missing children’s list; the two taken off the nearby reservation were reported missing by their parents, but the call was never recorded by their local police station.

By this point, Kennedy Yates, dotted with hundreds of painful blisters, has driven to the DataLess warehouse to the south, where she is attempting to erase all evidence of her company’s involvement with Armor’s side business. She expects her guards to finish their jobs; she does not anticipate them defecting.

She really should have paid them better.

Armor Inc. will be forever remembered for its involvement in child sex trafficking; only history will tell if this blemish impacts their profit margins.

By the time Just Stop gets involved, the four teenagers that orchestrated the rescue have disappeared out the back gate and are hiking their way back to the car. Everyone is quiet, drained, lost in their own thoughts; they tread single file, Nirvana flying overhead. Elena grasps Raven’s unbroken hand once the parking lot is in view, holding it tightly until they reach the car. She scarcely remembers the fear she felt driving, before.

Chapter 29:

Bear bounds towards the car as Elena pulls up the gravel driveway; he knocks Oz over the moment they get out of the car. Charlie watches them trudge exhaustedly up to the cabin; although it has only been one night, they each look like they have aged years.

“I couldn’t get her to come in,” Charlie explains apologetically, and for a second, Elena is not sure to whom she is referring; then she spots Silva, still in her place in the grass, basking contentedly in the morning sun. She leaves the others inside, somewhat reluctantly, to go speak to the girl, who had indeed spent the entire night outside, watching the stars move above.

“Weren’t you cold?” Elena asks, recalling the chill of the night air at the man-camp.

Silva squints at her, as though unused to focusing on something up close. “I don’t know if I feel cold,” she muses, “or hot.” She feels the sun, its power and heat; she feels the moisture in the air, the quiet breeze. She feels the life in the soil underneath her feet, and she wants to be a part of that life.

Elena nods, only partially understanding. “You will have to come in, at least during the winter,” she warns as she stands to leave.

“We’ll see,” Silva answers, closing her eyes and turning her face back towards the sky.

Inside, Raven holds onto a roll of gauze as Elena carefully wraps up her broken hand. “This isn’t my first boxer fracture,” she grimaces, and Elena gently kisses her bruised knuckles. When she is finished wrapping the hand, her touch disappears, and Raven feels temporarily disoriented, alone.

Elena is stretching, yawning. “I wish I could take a shower and a nap at the same time,” she says. She looks over to Raven, who is still standing there, uncertain. She looks like she might be in shock, eye-wide, face blank; deer in the headlights, Elena thinks, amused. “Bed is about two feet to your left,” she says mildly.

Raven sits, rubs her face with her hands. “Elena,” she says, “what are we going to do now?” What will Nat do, still wanted, missing, certainly expelled? Or Oz, since Dr. Po will never stay here, even after they have rescued her, that much is obvious about the scientist. Will Kennedy Yates leave them alone? Will the birds find a place to live in these woods, the deer, the pine marten that attacked Nirvana their first day exploring?

Elena sits down next to her, hesitantly places her hand on Raven’s leg, then leans in to kiss her. It doesn’t solve anything, she knows, but she whispers into the air between them, “I think it will be okay.”

Don’t think about global warming, melting ice caps, the desertification of half the country. Don’t think about the toxic microplastics in the air, the water, the food. Don’t think about the next plague, extinctions, genocide and impending nuclear disasters. Raven wraps her good hand around the back of Elena’s neck, drawing her in for a deeper kiss; she falls back onto the bed, pulling the other girl with her. A warm, pleasurable ache builds with every touch.

For a while, at least, things can be okay.

. . .

Wolf returns with the Van that afternoon; Dr. Po has been arrested for breaking and entering the Armor Inc. property, he explains, but that will probably blow over after the scandal they’ve unleashed. Aching, bruised, and exhausted, he kicks the kids out of the Van and passes out on his overhead mattress, feeling quite at home.

“I’m sorry about Dr. Po,” Nat tells Oz. They are sitting on opposite ends of the couch, Bear sprawled between them. Adam is curled up on his lap, occasionally hissing at the dog and the vulture bees that dare approach. Raven is stretched out on the floor near the open window; Elena sits at the table, drawing.

“That’s okay,” Oz admits, “I’m used to it.” Their fingers tap rhythmically on the remote, sitting on the armrest next to them. “Do you mind watching an old nature documentary this time? I didn’t like the superheroes.”

Nat laughs, “No problem.” The soothing tones of some long-dead narrator discussing the now extinct animals flitting about the screen lull him to sleep.

Epilogue: The Girl Who Turned Into A Tree

Silva, a girl like many others, turned her heart into stone from the things she saw, and the things done to her. She tried to carry on as the weight in her chest grew heavier and heavier, trudging, hunched, and dragging.

Until the stone grew too dense and she finally thought to bury it.

Nestled there, in rich earth, beneath a blanket of soft moss, the heart of stone began to thaw, lulled by tiny murmurs of life: worms digging, ants pacing, mycelial humming, the soil itself, alive. The girl thought to leave but found she could not; drawn to that peaceful underworld, her feet were rooted.

Instead, she sat, and she watched: as the sun rose and set; beneath the passing moon’s cycles; enduring the season’s changes. She sat, her distant conflicts long forgotten as the years blurred together as one.

She sits there still, more beautiful than ever: skin so weathered and rough, hair so gnarled and knotted, her limbs stretching out to shade that tiny sacred stone.

As a tree, she witnesses everything: friends grow, together and apart; lovers quarrel, reconcile, repeat; family comes and goes, then disappears forever.

Eventually, there is no one left to notice her except the birds and the bees.

Appendix:

This story is set in the future, but I was hesitant to put any real indication of timing. We simply do not know what the future holds for us with regards to climate change; it is entirely possible that we are currently living in a death spiral, and even if we stopped emissions tomorrow, the carbon-climate backlog could still push us past the brink.

What we do know is that if we keep going with “business-as-usual” for the corporations responsible for destroying the environment, it will be much worse than I have described, much sooner than you can expect.

At the time of this writing, the global average temperatures have steadily reached the highest ever recorded; including October 2023, which breeched the so-called “1.5°C to keep us alive” limit¹. Rest assured, the news media claims, it’s not “the” 1.5°C; besides, they have already shifted the goalposts to “hopefully less than 2°C by 2100.”

1.5°C is deadly; 2.0°C is devastating; anything beyond 3.0°C will result in most of the planet becoming uninhabitable².

Canada just experienced its worst fire season ever, by far³. Heat deaths in Phoenix, AZ rose 50% over the summer, as the city experienced 31 consecutive days of 100+°F temperatures⁴. Flooding, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, and rising coastal waters are threatening millions of human lives, already. We are running out of superlatives to describe the extremes we are experiencing.

Insect populations have declined between 60-90% in the past few decades⁵. Bird populations are dropping at a similar rate⁶. Amphibians are going extinct due to climate change induced fungus spread⁷. Human beings and livestock now make up over 94% of mammalian biomass on Earth⁸.

At the time of this writing, fossil fuel companies are still being granted new extraction permits. If our country’s emissions are decreasing, it is only because we have outsourced the need to burn our own fossil fuels to countries where goods can still be produced by slave labor.

As the ice melts in the North Pole, countries around the world are preparing to go to war for control of and rights to drill the newly exposed waters. There is a good chance we will run out of resources before we have a chance to recover what damage has been wrought; future generations, if there are any, will grow up in a world completely unrecognizable from the present.

Climate scientists agree: if we want to have any hope of having a future for humanity, the fossil fuels that are in the ground must stay underground. But climate change is only one of the many environmental catastrophes we are facing due to human actions. Depleted groundwater, air pollution, and ecological overreach are all contributing to a global polycrisis that will no doubt mostly impact the global poor.

Some economists suggest the most cost-effective target limit is 4.0°C, because dead people are less expensive to deal with than poor people⁹. On the other hand, the wealthiest 1% are responsible for over 60% of global emissions¹⁰. You can do the math.

Let me be clear: Oil barons, fossil fuel executives, and capitalist oligarchs are profiting off our suffering; they are profiting off environmental destruction; and they are profiting off the future collapse of society. Billionaires will watch us burn to heat their houses.

Eat the rich.

-Liz

1: Zack Labe, 2023. https://fediscience.org/@ZLabe/111557933384904475

2: The Economist, 2021. See what three degrees of global warming looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uynhvHZUOOo

3: NASA. 2023, Tracking Canada’s Extreme 2023 Fire Season. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151985/tracking-canadas-extreme-2023-fire-season

4: The Guardian, 2023. Deadliest year on record in Phoenix as heat deaths rise. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/11/phoenix-heat-deaths-record-climate-crisis

5: Reuters, 2023. The collapse of insects. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/

6: Wired, 2023. Bird populations are in meltdown. https://www.wired.com/story/bird-population-decline/

7: National Zoo, 2019. https://nationalzoo.si.edu/news/mass-amphibian-extinctions-globally-caused-fungal-disease

8: Hannah Ritchie, 2022: https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

9: The Conversation, 2023: https://theconversation.com/4-c-of-global-warming-is-optimal-even-nobel-prize-winners-are-getting-things-catastrophically-wrong-125802

10: The Guardian, 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66-report-says