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other night, one of the kids who had saved him.
    The one with hate in her eyes.
    He couldn’t speak since his throat was so dry, so he nodded at her hands, filled with bread in one and a cup of something in the other.
    The girl opened her mouth as if to speak, but before she said anything, one of the boys from the night before — the one who had jabbed him — appeared behind her in the doorway.
    “Hurry up,” the boy said.
    The girl turned back, glared, then looked at Jonah.
    “Y’ hungry?” she asked in a weird accent he couldn’t place and was sure he’d never heard before. He wondered, as he had the other night, if it was accent or speech impediment of some sort.
    “Yes,” he managed to push the single word through the desert in his mouth. “Thirstier, though.”
    She brought the cup to his lips, and he swallowed a cool gulp of water. It tasted like the best, cleanest water he’d ever had.
    She then tore a piece from the hunk of bread and shoved it roughly between Jonah’s lips. He slowly chewed, feeling numb, then swallowed and opened his mouth for more. The girl tore another piece of bread of bread from the hunk, her hand now shaking as she brought it closer to his face.
    The boy seemed like he was standing guard behind the girl. Her eyes could barely meet his. Jonah wondered why she was scared.
    “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said.
    “I know,” she said, her eyes meeting his, burning with the same hate they had the night before when she and the others had saved him. “’Tis you who should be worried about me hurtin’ ya.”
    “Why?” Jonah asked, confused.
    The girl brought the cup of water to Jonah’s mouth before he was ready, spilling it past his lips and down his shirt. He choked as he stared into her eyes, glimmering with hate and maybe glee from his choking.
    “Calla!” the boy called out, shocking the girl to attention.
    She yanked the cup back, spilling more water on Jonah, then retreated, leaving the room without another oddly accented word.
    The boy wasn’t guarding the girl from Jonah, he was guarding Jonah from the girl.
    The boy stood there, glaring.
    “What was that about?” Jonah asked.
    “Her name is Calla Egan. And you’re the reason her mother died,” he said.

CHAPTER 13 — Anastasia Lovecraft
    T wilight threatened darkness as Ana crept through the forest, too scared to slow her pace but too timid to keep from worrying through every other step.
    She inched her way south as Liam had directed, following the Fire Wall and trying to remember how long it ran, racking her brain as she tried to replay the insufferable song of Kirkman’s annoyingly chipper voice from any one of the previous games, where he loudly announced its length.
    Ana felt a stab of guilt for the many times she had enjoyed watching Darwin, especially the parts with the Fire Wall, which she had found especially exciting. The bright blue at the bottom of the seam, where plumes of screaming orange ascended twenty feet into the air. Ana had to admit, the fire was more alluring when watching from the safety of City streets, the comfort of their flat, or even the horrible wall of monitors in Chimney Rock’s TV hall.
    In person, it was nothing more than a hissing promise of death.
    Ana was wondering if the Fire Wall would ever end when she spotted a swath of shadows in the distance, dark enough to make her certain there wasn’t a flame anywhere near it.
    Ana walked faster, nearing the end of the fire and allowing herself to feel suddenly hopeful. She doubled her speed, almost racing toward the end of the seam, running so fast that she nearly crashed into a cluster of zombies swarming between her and the end of the Fire Wall.
    Ana bit her lip hard enough to draw blood but managed to keep the scream inside her mouth. She dropped to her knees, then looked to the cluster, confident that between her speedy drop, the forest’s many shadows, and the zombies’ near-complete stupidity, she was, and would be, free from their sight so long as she remained careful.
    After a minute of zombie watching, her confidence doubled. Ana rose to her feet and slowly moved to her right, deeper into the woods, to navigate her way around the zombies. She inched through the darkness a tentative step at a time; careful, scared, and half-certain that every foreign sound was the song of a zombie beside her.
    Well past the zombies, and ready to circle back toward the Fire Wall, Ana was startled into a scream too sudden and