I thought about my mother—so many years trying to make trees for the mainland. All those lives she took, and then, in the end, taking a bullet for me. I thought about Hina. I thought about Sal. I thought of all the strugglers behind us. And I thought about my father. The dead and the gone.

But mostly, I thought about Alpha. Little things that were big things. The way she’d talked to me and how her brown eyes had turned soft when she smiled. Her hips and her warm lips. Goosebumps on her golden skin.

I thought about the way she’d trusted me, and the way I’d felt I could trust her forever. And I remembered the first time I’d held her, on the walls of Old Orleans.

I tried to put myself back inside that city. Tried to relive each moment, making dreams out of memories, but I couldn’t do it right. It was like all my dreams had burned down.

“Zee?” I said, but she was sleeping again, and it was Kade’s eyes that snapped open.

“What you doing?” I asked him.

“I’d be sleeping. If you could keep your mouth shut.”

I listened to the sound of Crow snoring, and the endless beat of the wind, and Kade sank back into the gloom, then let his voice soften. “How are you holding up, anyway?”

“Like you give a damn.”

“Of course I do.” He let out a sigh. “Who else can I count on? The giant’s just dead weight.”

“Don’t say that.”

“He could hardly walk before. Now look at him.”

“He’s a Soljah,” I said.

“Used to be. There are no Soljahs in this wasteland. It’s a blank slate out here, my friend. For all of us.”

“So what did you used to do?” I asked. “Before you got taken.”

I figured if we were stuck with this redhead, I’d better get the lowdown on him, blank slate or no.

“Thought I told you,” he said. “I was a scholar. And a drunk. A chaser of women.”

“Said you were a poet.”

“That, too.”

“Ah, you’re full of crap. Come on, what did you do? Open book, and all that.”

“Bootlegger,” he said. “I ran corn all around the southeast, helping out those who couldn’t afford GenTech’s prices.”

“Fine. Don’t tell me.”

“You can’t picture me bootlegging?”

“We can drop it,” I said, deciding to act like I didn’t give a damn. Figured that might make him more honest. Someone thinks you don’t care about their story, they’re more likely to start itching to tell it.

“Would you believe me if I said I worked the fields?” he said, after we’d sat in silence for a bit.

“In the corn?” Now this, I could believe.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was a picker. A good one, too.”

“You ever drive them big dusters?” I asked, but then I wished I hadn’t. I remembered me and Alpha trapped inside of that duster’s cockpit, when we were escaping the locusts, back in the cornfields. That was the first time she’d really touched me. The first time we’d kissed.

Kade was shaking his head. “A duster comes back, and there are cobs in the blades and under its wheels, bits of corn caught all over. I worked on the crew that picks it clean.”

“Your whole life?”

He pulled up his sleeve and examined the stump of his arm. “Until my hand got plucked like a kernel. Snatched off by blades that weren’t meant to be moving. Then I was useless to GenTech, and they dispose of any field hand that’s unable to work. Some get killed. Some get taken. So I ran before the agents could get ahold of me. I traveled all over after that. Did all sorts of things, like I said.”

A cloud of snowflakes blustered in through the open panel, and I glanced outside, listening for the sound of Harvest’s commandos, imagining them trudging through the blizzard towards us.

All I could hear was the wind.

“How’d you learn to be good with a gun?” I asked, but it was one question too many.

Kade sank back inside his hood. “What makes you so interested?”

“Just curious how you ended up taken. Ended up on that island.” I decided to pry a little further. “Got snatched by Harvest?”

“GenTech agents,” he muttered. “Harvest doesn’t take field hands.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“I know enough.”

I faked a yawn, acted like I’d lost all interest.

“And I don’t think Harvest snatches anyone anymore,” Kade said. “Now he’s just after the trees.” He was scratching at his arm, fingering the holes GenTech’s cables had left behind. “I knew a woman once who said they had to be out there, growing somewhere. Across the ocean, maybe. Somewhere we couldn’t get. She said we wouldn’t be able to breathe unless there were still trees left. Still, I never believed it.”

My old man had always said GenTech’s cornfields made it so we had air to breathe. But I kept quiet now. I felt like there was something Kade wasn’t telling me, and my silence was the one thing that might get him to speak.

“Come winter, when there were no locusts hatching, we would rove all over the fields,” he said, almost whispering now. “Anywhere the agents told us to go. But all summer long, every field hand has to live in the Stacks, right in the heart of the fields. You’ve heard of them? The Stacks?”

I acted like maybe I was sleeping, though I was trying to picture how any sort of settlement could survive in the cornfields—corn being the one thing locusts can’t eat, but the stalks being the one place they can nest.

“The Stacks are made of blood, sweat, and tears,” he went on, like he was happy enough just to talk to himself. “The walls are made of woven cornhusks, layered five yards deep. Gets so hot, but no one ventures outside when the locusts are hatching. Unless you’re on shift, of course. Agents get rid of the lazy ones faster than you can sit down on the job.”

When he paused, I knew there was more.

And I knew he wanted to tell me.

The wind rattled the walls, another gust of snow blew in.

“Better close that panel,” Kade said, and he unwound himself so he could reach up and latch the steel back in place. It sealed us inside, making the wind no more than a distant rumble.

I waited for him to speak again. Biding my time.

“There’s nothing to do in the Stacks,” he said at last. And it was like some part of him had just been unplugged, his voice was so flat. “There’s nothing to do in the fields, either. Except watch for the locusts and make sure your work gets done.”

“Long days,” I said, a little prod to keep him going.

“Every day. It’s mindless. There’s nothing to think about. Nothing to hope for.” He took a deep breath, then blew it out in a big, sad sigh. “So you hit the crystal pipe as soon as your work gets done.”

And there it was. The dude was a crystal junky. Or he had been, anyway. And either way, it didn’t fit with his smooth talking or his acting like he was so in control.

I remembered Frost, all hopped up on that shit. And being hooked on crystal ain’t something you just make go away.

“GenTech turns a blind eye?” I asked.

“A blind eye? They’re the ones that made sure we got it. Used to be field hands would smuggle it in, now agents bring it to the fields and deal it direct. Half of them are hooked on it, too, of course. But what they don’t smoke, they pass out to the workers.”

I wondered if that’s how old Frost had reached Promise Island. Had he traded crystal for a way to the trees?

“Where do they get it all?”

“The crystal? Straight from the source, bro.” Kade was on a roll now. “The Samurai Five.”

I’d heard of them gangsters. A syndicate, is what people say. They’re like ghosts in the Steel Cities. You don’t see them, you don’t know no one who knows them. But they brew the crystal that cripples anyone who touches it. Take one hit, and you’ll crave it till the day that you die.

“So you used to smoke it,” I said, not a question.

And Kade didn’t answer. He was coiled and hunched in the darkness, and I wondered how deep the demons burrowed inside him. They say once you been hit by the crystal, nothing’s the same in your head.