In The Afterlight

“I was hoping you’d have some idea of what he was talking about,” Cole said as we headed down the hallway. “I’ll look into it.”

I was headed to the large former rec room just to the left of the stairwell for dinner, but he was clearly escaping into Alban’s old office. I caught his wrist as he brushed by me. “When are we going to firm up a plan for the camps?”

“Not tonight,” he said. “We’re still waiting on two more cars, and I want to try making a few calls to old supply contacts. Outfitting this place has to be priority number one. No one is going to believe we can do anything if we can’t even get the kids clean clothes and a few warm meals. I asked some of the Greens to start thinking about how they would stage a camp assault. In the meantime, take a breather. We’ll be working soon enough.”

I returned his wave as he crossed through the doors connecting the hallways, and followed the smell of spaghetti sauce into the rec room. Someone had assembled folding tables and chairs in neat lines, brought in a small radio, and propped it on the scuffed-up pool table the agents had oh-so-graciously left behind. Next to that were two large pots with serving utensils, and a dismally small stack of paper plates.

It had taken me a few hours to notice that the Ranch was reassembling itself into something that seemed kind of...clean. The silent downstairs halls were punctuated by the banging of washers and dryers, which seemed to be going at all hours of the day. I finally saw that the floor tiles were more white than yellow. And when I went to splash some water on my face in the bathroom, there were no drizzles of rust-stained water streaking across my skin. I smelled bleach. Detergent. It was almost...homey.

I passed by two sheets of paper tacked onto the door, stopping to examine them. I recognized the handwriting immediately as Liam’s, but it took me a moment to understand what the charts were, why there were stubs of pencils attached to each one with string. They were sign-up sheets, divided up by chore: laundry, cleaning, organizing, food preparation. Under each of these headers were the names of kids. Everyone had to help, but they could choose their chore. That was Liam’s style.

I spotted Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Zu sitting at their own table, heads bent close together. Vida saw me first and instantly shut up, pulling back and casually picking up her fork again. I finished spooning some pasta onto my plate and moved toward them.

“What’s going on?” I asked, taking the open seat and turning to poke Liam’s side. “I saw the chore charts—you should have told me earlier so I could have signed up for something.”

Liam glanced up from his notebook. When he moved his hand, I saw a string of numbers—equations he seemed to be untangling. “It’s all right. You’re busy with other things.”

Other things that were, unfortunately, not spending time with him alone in the pantry.

“What’s this?” I asked, leaning over to get a better look at what he was doing.

He shot me a rueful smile. “Trying to figure out when, exactly, we’re going to run out of food. I’ve been looking at the nearby towns, and I think I have a few we could hit for supplies where there’s minimum contact with the population.”

“Cole said he’s handling it,” I said.

He snorted.

Something about that rankled me. “It’s too dangerous to leave the Ranch right now. He’ll take care of it.”

Zu turned to study me, her expression troubled. I pointed to her plate of pasta, but she still didn’t touch it.

“We could go out,” Liam pressed. “You, me, Vi. Hell, I’d bet Kylie would come—it’ll be like old times.”

Zu reached across the table, gripping his forearm, holding it down against the table. She kept shaking her head, eyes wide. He wasn’t allowed to go. She wasn’t going to let him leave. And secretly, I was glad she was the one telling him so, because I was right there with her. I wanted him here, where he was tucked safely out of harm’s way.

“I’ve done it a hundred times,” he told her softly. “What’s got you like this?”

She released his arm, shrinking back in a way that was very unlike her. I started to ask her what was wrong, only to be interrupted by a frustrated groan.

“Oh, never mind! I’m not even hungry,” Chubs exploded, shoving his plate away from him. There was more sauce down the front of his shirt than there was left on his plate. It turns out it’s fairly difficult to get a fork full of slippery noodles up to your mouth when you were missing the eye part of hand-eye coordination.

When Vida didn’t go in for the kill on that one, I shot a sideways glance in her direction. The whole room vibrated with happy chatter, laughter. Which made Vida’s silence that much more unnerving.

“You shouldn’t have thrown the old lenses away. They weren’t cracked that badly.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Chubs snapped. “Tape them to my face? Walk around holding one up to my eye like a magnifying glass?”

“Wouldn’t that have been better than sulking around and blindly bumping into things?” I asked. He’d gone off earlier and pitched them into a trash can in hopeless frustration. I’d fished them out and brought them back to the sleeping room for when he calmed down and started thinking rationally again. “We can ask Cole about getting glasses added to our supplies list,” I said.

“The lenses are prescription,” Chubs said sharply. “I don’t have the information, even if he could get them made. Reading glasses aren’t strong enough, and they give me a headache when I wear them too long—”