45

FEN WAS GONE. DANIEL LOOKED AT THE ridiculously small child in his arms and swallowed hard. He moved through the trees downstream, and into the tall standing cattails on the edge of the moat. Wait for her signal.

The moat wasn’t that impressive here, not like the wide swampland he pressed through on his jetskip. It was like a canal, a concrete culvert maybe fifteen feet across. A token blockade, really, this close to the Wall. The water was too murky to see the bottom, but Fen and Mr. Go had both said it wasn’t deep. Nothing to worry about. He edged closer to the water, as close as he dared, allowing the reeds on the bank to conceal him from the soldiers upstream. A soft rain was starting to fall, further darkening the cloudy sky. The tiny raindrops were almost beautiful, flashing brightly in beams from the searchlight on the Wall as they swung across the treetops and shoreline. Daniel ducked down flat as the lights washed over his head in a lazy arc.

He adjusted his grip on Enola. Wait for the signal, he thought, but what would it be?

Daniel flinched when it came. A splashing sounded from farther upstream and the searchlights passed him over, converging on one spot. Daniel risked a look upriver.

Fen was in the water, lit up like the midday sun. One arm tucked under the bundle of his coat, the other waving in the air. She was shouting, drawing the attention of every soldier at the post. She hollered the way she had at the blood farm, like a madwoman. Insane.

Daniel’s heart leapt into his throat. His stomach dropped. As fast as he could, he lowered himself into the water, trying not to splash. It was chest-deep, deeper than where Fen was wading waist-high in the muddy water. Daniel scooped Enola up, away from his body, over his head, and willed himself across the moat.

His splashing was drowned out by the frantic squawks of the soldiers’ radios along the wall. “Stop where you are! Stop where you are! Hands in the air! You are in a restricted military zone!”

He broke into a cold sweat beneath his suit and felt the industrious suck of the equipment as it pulled the sweat back in to be recycled for later. His hands, his face felt like they were on fire. He pushed on. The soldiers were not shouting at him.

At last, Daniel pulled himself along the shoreline to where the vines grew up and over the Wall.

There. The vines gave way in the center. There was a crevice, maybe three feet to the other side, where he could see gray daylight again. Taking a deep breath, Daniel pushed an arm through the vines. He could feel it, the crack in the wall, like a tunnel hidden from view. Behind him, Fen stood silhouetted against the searchlights, rain spattering the water around her. Her arms were raised, her face turned up, the bundle held high in the air. She rotated in a slow circle as the rain washed the mud from her skin.

For an instant, she looked at him. The moment hung in the air, Fen’s mouth curving into a smile, seeing Daniel and the baby almost there. Almost there. She turned away.

A shot rang out. The bundle fell from her hands.

Daniel jumped, pushing himself desperately through the vines. Don’t stop, don’t stop. He had made a promise to protect this child. To take her to a better life. And that’s what he was going to do.

The vines fell back into place as he pressed into the crack, all but crushing Enola to him as he passed beyond the dead city and the madness of the Delta. He was sucked into darkness smelling of green and loam, the sharp bite of asphalt and stone and, somewhere up ahead, a cool breeze.

They had made it.

Daniel stumbled through the last stretch of narrow tunnel to emerge, exhausted and blinking, into the light. Ahead of him was a wasteland, thirty feet of barren ground, empty now but for unoccupied military vehicles. All attention had been drawn to the girl at the gate.

Daniel closed his eyes for a moment, blinking back hot tears, still seeing that last glimpse of Fen swirling through the water, spinning like the wheel that turns the world. He braced himself, then ran for cover across the heart-pounding expanse, into the trees that would hide his passage back into Mississippi and the Outer States of America. In his arms, Fen’s baby girl was awake and wriggling against him, waving her small fists at the weeping sky.