1503951200 by Camille Griep Read Free Book Online Page B

what?”
    “You remember how to do this, right?” she asks. “Do you need a leg up?”
    At first I decline. I’m embarrassed to admit that without my morning stretches and after two days white-knuckling a car, I do, in fact, need help. I get my leg in the stirrup, but I’m too tired to pull myself up. I get about halfway there before falling back into her arms.
    “How about now?” I can tell she’s trying to keep the I told you so from her voice, and somehow that makes it even worse. “Knee or hands?”
    “Your choice,” I say. She laces her hands together and I put my left foot on them, bouncing our long-ago agreed-upon three times before she launches me into the air. I heave the rest of my right side across the saddle, the high pommel horn digging into my sternum before I can right myself. Cas checks my stirrups and hands me my reins. “All set?”
    “Guess so.” I take one last look at Cress, trying not to cry. Abandoning her out here alone feels ungracious, at best.
    A few tears escape but Cas and Len have the good grace to ignore them, continuing their low-level bickering until we reach a clearing.
    “The camp is just through there,” Cas says, pointing to a copse a little ways off to the east, the sun beginning to sink into the hills behind her. “Don’t be too long, okay? We’re on watch, so we’ll say we met you here. It’s up to you to say why, if anyone asks.”
    “If anyone even sees,” Len says, taking another swig of whiskey.
    Cas seems disappointed. But I’m disappointed, too. My childhood best friends aren’t exactly my enemies, but they aren’t on my side, either. Sure, they’re sorry my dad is gone, but what about everything else? My whole life is gone and they’re here living in some time-warp Garden of Eden. Though it’s near dark, the land is so much greener than I remember it. There is water and birdsong where I remember dust and vultures. Cas and Len are freckled and healthy and well fed. And I’m pale and exhausted and hungry and bitter.
    I try to feel something besides resentment, but I’m coming up empty. And then I think I should start paying attention because the clearing is starting to close in around me. I begin to whistle, so as not to surprise whoever is behind the line of cottonwoods.
    I hear the telltale chock of a shotgun. The horse underneath me does, too, coming to a halt before I even touch the reins.
    I sit back and lift both hands. I use my best stage voice to carry across the distance. “Hello? My name’s Syd. I’m looking for a camp of Survivor diplomats. I have some supplies for you from the City.”
    “Are you a Survivor, Syd?” A low, warm voice comes from the trees. A woman steps out. She’s black, her hair braided back into swirls. She isn’t exactly frowning at me, but she’s not smiling either.
    “For all intents and purposes. I’m from the City. To the west,” I say. Hers is a complicated question. I’m not sad I didn’t get sick, but Survivors wear their survival as a badge of honor. And passing for one without having survived anything, well, it’s a stupid kind of guilt, Danny used to say, but it’s guilt all the same.
    “Me too. Though we haven’t been back in years.”
    I nod. “I know you’ve all been at this for a while.”
    “If you’re from the City, why do you travel with New Charitans?”
    “It’s kind of a long story, and I have to get back to Cas and Len.”
    “Wait, you don’t mean Casandra and Len Willis ?”
    “Yes.” A slice of dread zips through my stomach. “How—”
    “The Governor’s children?”
    “Um, look, I don’t . . .”
    She holds a finger up at me, as if she’s thinking on the fly. I have a horse and some distance, and the gun she’s holding isn’t cocked at me anymore. I could make a break for it.
    She shifts her weight. “Do you happen to know if Perry Willis made it back inside? I’d like to talk with him.”
    Perry is Cas and Len’s eldest brother. Though I didn’t see him as