The windows sliced and slivered, and I covered my face with my hands, bailing before the pod slammed into the far wall of the room I’d entered, the impact shaking the ceiling and filling the air with debris.

I landed hard. My bones battered, but nothing broken. And soon as the air cleared, I began busting past tables and chairs and old gadget salvage, working my way out of the room and hunting some stairs.

I had to climb up—higher than the boat’s deck—if I was going to get back onboard when the boat hit.

The stairwell switchbacked up the inner core of the scraper, and it was crowded with bones, old bodies cluttering the steps, arrows all down the walls. The remains of some battle, I reckoned. But I had no time to ponder it as I raced up, clearing four steps with each stride. Just had to get high enough before the boat hit. Then I had to get the tank off the boat and into this stairwell.

These steps were our only way up to those bridges.

And the bridges would be our only way out.

When the boat smashed into the scraper, the whole building groaned and bent, as if it might topple from the impact. But I pushed on through the carnage, staggering into a room full of plastic booths, then kicking my way through them, crashing towards the boat as the boat crashed through the room towards me, like it was eating its way through the walls.

The back end of the boat was the only part still above water now, and strugglers were pouring off what was left of the deck, vaulting over the railing, then rushing into the building, their purple coats stained with blood, dead Harvesters mangled between them.

I saw Kade leap from the deck onto the railing, the sub gun strapped to his shoulder, his hand reaching out to keep his balance as he readied to jump into the room.

I rushed towards him, fighting through the strugglers swarming past me in the opposite direction.

“Where’s the tank?” I yelled, because it was always those trees that seemed to matter most to me. Even more than my friends, or the little kids I’d smuggled into the belly of the boat.

As Kade landed in the room beside me, he pointed back through the confusion, back onboard.

And there, rolling up the ramp out of the hull, came our big black box—the tank of trees, cloaked in steel and in motion. Zee was riding on top, the controller clamped tight in her fists. She was wheeling the tank back and forth across the sloping deck, trying to keep it steady as the boat slumped and sank beneath her.

She had Crow bundled beside her and was ramping up now, trying to steer through a hole in the deck’s railing and get off the boat before it sank too low.

But as soon as she touched down, just inside the torn-up room, the tank’s wheels skidded and snagged, and I knew they weren’t going to make it. They’d landed much too close to the edge.

I raced towards them, wires and sparks thrashing out of the walls and ceiling. And when I reached the tank, I grabbed Zee’s leg and pulled her off, dragging her towards me, Crow coming, too, the big guy landing in an unconscious pile at my feet.

But the tank was creaking and swaying and leaning back the wrong way, ready to topple and follow the boat into the freezing depths.

I grabbed the controller from Zee and spun the tank’s wheels in the right direction, keeping it upright, working it further into the room. Moving it away from the edge, steering it to safety as the last bits of the boat disappeared into the lake.

“Where’s Alpha?” I screamed, throwing down the controller and staring at Kade. The last of the survivors scurried past us and raced up the stairwell. Anyone still on the boat was trapped below the surface. Lost in the water.

Kade had reels of bullets hooked onto his arm and strapped on his back, and he had the sub gun resting on his shoulder. The sub gun I’d last seen Alpha using.

“Where is she?” I yelled at him.

He just shook his head.

I stared out of the shattered windows at where the boat was now just bubbles. I waited till it was nothing but gone.

Dread shivered my spine.

“She couldn’t have been onboard,” I whispered.

Everything seemed so quiet without the whine of engines. Everything was still for a moment, and everything was wrong.

“You think they have more of those speeders?” Zee sounded frantic, barely holding it together.

“Harvest’ll find a way in here.” Kade started shoving debris out of the way, trying to clear a path for the tank through the remains of the room. “We don’t have much time. We have to get up to those bridges.”

“But we have to find her,” I said.

“There’s nowhere to look, Banyan.” Zee had blood on her hip. Her whole body soaking wet and shaking as she grabbed at my arm. “You think Alpha would have wanted us to stay here?”

She started pulling at me. Every inch of her stained thick with fear.

“You can’t say it like she’s already dead.”

“There’s only one way to go.” Zee pointed at the stairs. And the steep way would always be my way, I realized.

I felt pressed into nothing, as if the sky was crashing upon me and the ground refused to yield.

I watched Zee shake Crow, checking to see if he was still breathing. But hell, she should have been checking me, too. If Alpha was in that lake, then she was nowhere, and I was nowhere without her.

My sister snatched up the control pad and punched it to life, the wheels beneath the tank clicking into action.

I’d never even known what to do, I realized. I’d never been able to show her or tell her in the ways I had wanted. There’d been no words to describe right the way that girl made me feel.

“Alpha,” I yelled out, turning back to the lake and the remains of the city. I screamed her name at the drowned buildings and the damned lake and the big empty sky.

“Get him up,” Zee called, and when I finally turned from the water, I saw Kade helping her shove Crow on top of our steel-cloaked tank of trees, while I just stood there, useless.

Then my sister grabbed hold of me again, pushing me through the furniture and junk, following behind Kade as he steered the tank through the rubble.

And I just let Zee keep me moving. As if there was nothing else I could do.

CHAPTER TEN

We had to pile up the bones in the stairwell, creating a crumbling ramp for the tank’s heavy wheels. Then our big black box cracked and crawled its way upward, Crow slumped unconscious on top of the thing, and the wheels spinning out underneath if we didn’t angle things right.

The remains of the dead were crisp and brittle beneath the weight of the tank, popping and snapping as we pushed higher. I peered back past the switchbacks, searching for signs of life behind us, but all I could see was the old bones, arrows pried into the eye sockets of skulls and skeleton ribs. This city was a graveyard, a place to rot and be forgotten. We were just rattling around in a tomb.

The scraper might have once been real pretty from the outside, all that glass and steel towering up to the clouds, but the roof was just flat, ugly concrete, vented with old shafts and exhausts. And it was littered like the stairwell had been—more bones and more arrows, even some broken old spears.

I hunched down on a pile of cinder blocks, gripping my knees with my hands so I might quit shaking. But the fear was spreading through me. The pain and the loss and the knives of the feeling. I stared up at the sky, and it was some of the prettiest blue I ever had seen, but I knew that everything pretty ended up like this building, ugly and wasted and ready to fall. I leaned over and puked, retching and wretched, covered in sweat but so damn cold.