Zik convened a jury to hear the men out. The jury found them both guilty, and Zik sentenced them to spend two weeks with their hands tied together. He said they’d either get over their animosity, or they would kill each other. Zik also gave them manure duty for the whole two weeks. The hearing took less than an hour. Best of all, they were mad at Zik, not me. I started to truly appreciate the genius of divided government.

More people straggled in, generally starving and filthy. We welcomed them all, and our population grew past twelve hundred. I kept our greenhouse building program going flat-out, and our food production continued to grow even faster than our population. I ordered a cutback on kale planting, shifting to more beans and wheat, which stored better than kale. We squirreled away tons and tons of food—I wouldn’t relax until we had more than a year’s worth stored.

I sent an expedition to raid an old highway depot, hauling off tons of rock salt to use as seasoning and for preserving meat from our rapidly expanding herd of hogs, bred from the pigs Eli had brought us. We could freeze the meat, of course, but we couldn’t make bacon, ham, or even prosciutto without salt.

I woke one night to hear a whispered conversation taking place a few bedrolls over from mine. Someone had left a nightlight plugged in, and it cast just enough light that I could make out faces. Alyssa was sitting up in bed, one hand holding Anna’s wrist. Something glinted from Anna’s hand—a piece of gold jewelry, perhaps.

“You should have told me sooner,” Alyssa whispered. “I . . . I just couldn’t,” Anna said. She sounded utterly crushed.

“I like you. I like you a lot. Just not that way.”

“I know . . . It was silly of me to keep hoping. I knew you liked boys.” Anna’s sigh was louder than her words.

“I do. Although I’m not sure why. They’re all liars.” “Huh?”

“Max told me he’d been giving me gifts.”

Anna’s arms tensed so much, I could see her muscles swell even in the dim light.

“I swear to God I’ll strangle him in his sleep.”

“No. Please don’t. I’ll deal with him.”

Anna was silent for a moment. “That might be worse for him than strangulation anyway.”

“Yeah . . . I love you, Anna. Like a sister. Okay?”

Anna nodded. I could see tears shining on her cheeks in the dim illumination of the nightlight. “Like sisters.” They hugged, and Anna pressed whatever was in her hand into Alyssa’s hands. Then Anna stood and silently stalked back across the roomful of sleeping people.

I lay awake most of the night, thinking about what I’d overheard. I was worried about Anna—crushing on someone for two years and getting rejected, however gently, was painful. But I wasn’t sure what to do.

The next morning I called Uncle Paul into my conference room and told him the whole story. I felt a little bit uneasy telling Anna’s secrets, but I wanted someone to keep an eye on her, and I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough time given everything else I had to do.

Later that day I heard that Alyssa had dumped Max. Max moped around for a few weeks, and then he started chasing after one of the newcomers, a stunning eighteen-year-old girl who was clearly out of his league.

The only thorn in my side was Red. He was still out there with a group of Peckerwoods. Occasionally they tried to raid one of our expeditions, which forced us to post a heavy guard on every foraging party and supply convoy, wasting a lot of manpower. But all in all, things were going well. At least until Rita Mae called on the shortwave.

A messenger ran up to me at the building site where I was working. “Rebecca says you’re needed at the shortwave set, stat.” I commandeered two workers, the messenger, and a Bikezilla and pedaled my way back to Longhouse One.

As I approached the table near the turbine tower door where we kept the shortwave receiver, I heard Rita Mae’s rough, distinctive voice, “Is he here yet? Over.”

“Running up now,” Rebecca replied. “Over.”

She handed the mike to me, and I mashed the talk lever. “Good to hear from you, Rita Mae. Over.”

“I’ve got no time,” she said, and I heard the pop and rattle of gunfire in the background. “The DWBs are here. Hundreds of them. They’ve taken half the city. Mayor Kenda’s dead. We’re going to have to bug out any minute now. Over.”

I thought furiously. Last I’d heard, there were still flensers in Dubuque. Peckerwoods, though, not Dirty White Boys. It would take at least four days to get a force of any size all the way to Worthington. Obviously Rita Mae didn’t have that kind of time. “Head for Bellevue. I’ll meet you there. Over.”

“We may not—” There was a pop and a hiss. The line went dead.

Chapter 75

It took all day to get ready to leave. Ed and Nylce had all kinds of questions I couldn’t answer and issues I didn’t know how to deal with. Charlotte and Anna were panicked about the dent that taking three hundred people out of Speranta on an expedition toward Worthington would make in the work rosters. And then, to top it all off, a council meeting was called, and I spent more than an hour twisting arms, trying to convince four of the seven of them to vote to authorize the expedition. The real sticking point was whether I would be allowed to go, but I wasn’t willing to compromise on that—Rita Mae was in trouble, and I owed it to her to help. By the end of the meeting, I was cursing the stupid system of divided government we had adopted. We didn’t get away from Speranta until the next morning.

Rebecca stayed up all night personally monitoring the shortwave. She heard nothing from Worthington; the frequency they normally used was dead. The delay did have one benefit: Ed and Nylce had used the time to prepare superbly—we had more than three hundred armed men and women ready, all of whom were on Bikezillas or skis. The Bikezillas carried tents, bedrolls, tools, cooking gear, medical supplies, extra weapons, ammo, and about a month’s worth of food for the entire force, plus extra for the folks in Worthington we hoped to rescue. Ed would stay behind— he was responsible for the overall defense of Speranta—and Nylce would lead the military side of the expedition. We planned to be gone less than a week, but in the postvolcano world, there was no such thing as overprepared.

We made great time, reaching the Illinois side of the Mississippi, just before dark on the second day. Uncle Paul and Darla had modified one of the Bikezillas with a small battery pack and pedal-powered electrical generator that allowed us to run a shortwave transceiver and stay in touch with Speranta. The gleaner, Grant, had turned up offering to sell us another transceiver at a ridiculous price, and after hours of haggling with him, I had bought it. We could listen to transmissions any time, but to send our own farther than a couple of miles, we had to stop and string an antenna. Each night, I spoke with Rebecca and

Darla via the shortwave. Rebecca hadn’t heard anything from Worthington. Darla was fuming at being left in charge of Speranta—she hadn’t been able to work with Uncle Paul at all since I left, but it sounded like everything was running smoothly in my absence.

The next morning we rode across the frozen Mississippi—a five-mile trek. When we arrived in Bellevue, Iowa, midmorning, it was empty and abandoned. Rita Mae and the folks from Worthington were nowhere to be found.

Nylce sent out nearly a hundred scouts in small groups. If Rita Mae was still on her way from Worthington, it would be easy to miss her. We left a group hidden on the second floor of one of the old brick buildings in downtown Bellevue to keep watch in case Rita Mae showed up, and then we moved out, heading slowly toward Worthington.

Our scouts found no sign of Rita Mae, the DWBs, or anyone else from Worthington, and we made camp that night around an abandoned farmhouse near La Motte, Iowa, about twelve miles west of Bellevue.