“It’s warm in here,” Thelma said softly, as if she were in a place of worship rather than our living quarters.

It wasn’t, really. We didn’t heat the longhouse directly. But residual heat from the connected greenhouses was usually enough to keep the temperature in the longhouse in the fifties, which felt amazing after the subzero weather outside. I led Thelma through two sets of plastic drapes that separated the longhouse from one of the attached greenhouses. Thelma stared, jaw unhinged, at the neat, closely spaced rows of kale and wheat. In the greenhouse near the heating tank, it was so warm that I quickly started to sweat and had to strip off my coat, hat, and scarves.

“You’ll teach us . . . teach me . . . how to build all this?” Thelma asked.

“Well, I won’t—I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to do all this in a thousand years with a hundred monkeys helping me. But Darla and my uncle Paul will teach you. That’s part of the deal, right?”

“I want to learn everything.”

We found Charlotte in the kitchen area making some kind of soup for dinner.

“Heard we’re down to eighty-three,” I said.

“Three more died,” she said, giving me their names. They were all newcomers, nobody I knew well. “But we’re up to ninety-eight total residents, not down.”

“Wait, what?”

“Three families showed up together two days ago, not long after you left for Sterling. Evans gave them jobs and told me to add them to the census. Was that okay?”

“Yeah, fine. But how’d they find us?”

“I don’t know.”

I introduced Charlotte to Thelma and the four other Wallers. Charlotte had Thelma take over soup-making duties, so Charlotte could interview the others. They seemed to be doing fine, and I left them to check on the greenhouse we were building.

At dinner that night, I introduced myself to the newcomers and sat with them. They had heard a rumor that there was a new settlement east of Warren amid the windmills and that we had food. Then they had just wandered around the wind farm until they found us. I wondered how many more people would be showing up on our doorstep. We needed to get more greenhouses built ASAP.

For the next month, I spent my days working on the greenhouses. I couldn’t do the electrical work or welding, but after building the first four greenhouses, I knew enough to manage the structural part of them. We finished the fifth greenhouse and started building three more plus another longhouse. We planned to build four greenhouses around every longhouse. Those would require two windmills and a battery bank to power. Every windmill we powered up would include a sniper platform; that way, we would have interlocking fields of fire covering our whole settlement. All the longhouses would be built as defensive structures with walls thick enough to resist most small-arms fire.

I asked Ben to lay out an optimal settlement plan assuming we continued to grow. He presented me with plans for two hundred, five hundred, one thousand, and twenty thousand inhabitants. I hadn’t asked him for a plan for a city that size, and I hoped we wouldn’t grow to anything like that large. Managing a city of twenty thousand sounded like a nightmare. Ben also came up with a numbering scheme for everything. Each longhouse would have a number, and the associated greenhouses and turbine towers a letter. So Turbine Tower 2-A would be the first tower at the second longhouse, and so on.

At night I worked on the wedding. Darla did most of the planning, but she parceled out little tasks to me— figuring out whether we could bake a cake (no, we didn’t have baking powder or eggs), finding enough safety pins to hold preapocalyptic dresses and tuxes onto postapoca-lyptically thin bodies, and tracking down a wedding service to adapt. That last one was easy; nearly every abandoned farmhouse had a Bible, and one of them had a Lutheran Book of Worship with a wedding service too.

Belinda made great use of the medical supplies; only two more people died, and nearly everyone would be healthy enough to attend the wedding. Only one question gnawed at me: would Mom even come?

Chapter 56

I desperately wanted Mom to come to the wedding, but I was equally terrified to ask her. What if she said no? So I put off the trip to Warren. And put it off some more. I realized I was being terribly unfair to Rebecca—she loved Darla, and if she didn’t get to come to the wedding, she would probably skin me and make a winter coat out of my hide.

Three nights before the big day, I was on guard in one of the sniper nests. We had four of them built by then, and we staffed all of them 24/7. Our security procedures would make attacking Speranta with anything less than a tank suicidal. I routinely gave myself the worst shifts, the ones that started at 2:00 A.M. or 4:00 A.M., both because I figured that was when we were most likely to be attacked, and because I had noticed that people seemed more enthusiastic about heinous tasks when I was also willing to do them.

I was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars, looking at darkness, darkness, and more darkness, when a knock sounded on the hatch under me. I just about jumped out of my skin.

Uncle Paul’s muffled voice said, “You’re lying on the hatch.”

“Actually I’m having a coronary on the hatch,” I said as I scooted aside and pulled it open.

“Sorry. Can’t wait until we get a telephone system installed.” Uncle Paul flopped on the floor, panting. “That’s a ridiculously long climb.”

“You’re working on telephones?” I let the hatch clang shut and went back to scanning the horizon while we talked.

“It’s on the list. After the wedding. Should be possible. We’ve got power, and we can scavenge the components.” “What about cell phones? Or some way to communicate with scouts? Ben wants me to set up a patrol schedule.” “Tougher. I don’t know much about cellular switching systems. Maybe radios would be easier. I’ll work on it,” Uncle Paul said. “Anyway, I didn’t come up here to talk about telephones.” He paused for a long while. Just as I was getting ready to break the silence, he said, “Does my sister-in-law or Rebecca know you’re getting married on Sunday?”

I cringed. I had been avoiding the topic, even with myself. I certainly didn’t want to talk about it with Uncle Paul. “I don’t know.”

“Well, has anyone gone to Warren to tell them?”

“Not that I know of.”

“They’re going to be pretty upset if they don’t get an invitation to your wedding.”

“Mom’ll be upset either way. Sometimes I think the only thing that would make her happy is an invitation to Darla’s funeral.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it.”

“Neither is the way she acts around Darla!”

“Maybe not. You know, the relationship with parents is never easy. It’s so fraught with emotion that neither the parents nor their children can think about it rationally.”

“I don’t really think of myself as a child anymore.” “You’re not. But becoming an adult doesn’t make it easier. Harder, really.”

I rolled to a new sniper port to continue my scan of the horizon. “I don’t get where I went wrong with Mom, why it’s all screwed up so badly.”

“Assigning blame isn’t going to help. If you can, think about it like a political problem. You’re getting damn good at those.”

I snorted, my eyes still glued to the horizon. “You liked the way I outmaneuvered Evans, huh?”

“He still doesn’t know what hit him. If the relationship with your mother were purely political, what would you do?”

“I’d take the offensive.” And that was when I knew exactly what to do.

Chapter 57

In the morning I went to Warren. I left Uncle Paul in charge of Speranta and Darla working on a wind turbine—I thought my mother might be more open to the news if she wasn’t staring at Darla as she heard it. Darla asked who was going with me, and I said I had talked to Uncle Paul, which was technically true, if a little deceptive. I had decided to go alone—on skis I would be fast and stealthy.