Chapter 2: The Man With the Wooden Bird

Tobias Holloway had a rule about mornings. He didn't think until he'd had something hot in his hands.

It wasn't much of a rule. Most days the hot thing was just water boiled on a dented camp stove, with a pinch of pine needles dropped in so it tasted like something. But he stuck to it. Thinking came after. If he started thinking first, the day got away from him, and he ended up lying on his back for two hours staring at the water stains on the ceiling.

The ceiling today was a rust-colored mess. He'd found this place, an old rail maintenance shed, about fourteen months ago, and it was solid at least. Steel walls, one working door, a stove he'd rigged to vent through a hole he'd cut himself. He'd stacked old train ties against the north wall for insulation. It was ugly, and it kept the cold out, and he'd stopped asking for more than that a long time ago.

He cupped the tin mug and let the steam wash over his face.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, Toby. Up."

Nobody had called him Toby in years. His mother, a long time back. Mara, sometimes, when she was joking, or when she was too tired to say the whole thing. He still said it to himself because it sounded kinder than the other way.

He was thirty-eight, and he looked about fifty. He'd caught himself in a broken truck mirror last week and almost didn't recognize the guy looking back. Gray coming in at the temples. Beard gone ragged. Eyes sunk in, like somebody had pressed two thumbs into dough. He'd been a big man once, broad in the shoulders, the kind of guy people asked to help them move a couch. Now his coat hung off him like it belonged to somebody else.

He didn't mind it much. Hard to care what you looked like when there was no one around to look.

On the shelf by his bed there was a wooden bird.

He'd carved it himself, years ago, out of a piece of pear wood he'd saved from a tree they cut down in the backyard. Small, wings half-open, head tilted like it was listening for something. He'd made it for Wren's sixth birthday. She'd looked at it for a long time, and then she'd said very seriously, "It's not finished." He'd asked what was missing. She'd said, "It doesn't have a song."

So he'd hummed the first thing that came into his head, which was a dumb little carol his grandmother used to sing, and Wren had nodded like that settled it. After that, the bird sat on her windowsill, and every night she'd tap its head twice before bed. Twice, no more, no less. If she forgot, she'd get out of bed and go do it.

He'd been looking at that bird on the shelf for three years, and he still couldn't pick it up without his hands going funny.

He'd found it in the rubble of their old house, on the first week after the fire. It was the only thing left that was whole. He didn't know how. He'd just stood there in the ash with it in his hand, staring, until the cold made his eyes water. Then he'd put it in his coat and kept walking.

"Morning," he told the bird. "Don't look at me like that."

It didn't say anything. That was the one good thing about it.

He forced himself through the usual list. Check the door seals. Check the water jugs. Check the snares, which would be empty again, because they were always empty now. The animals had mostly gone, or died, or turned into the other things, the things nobody liked to name. He'd been living on canned beans and a kind of gray fungus that grew in the tunnel, and a few rabbits that'd gotten dumb enough to come close. Rabbits were good. Rabbits meant a day with some meat in it.

After the list, he sat down at the workbench in the corner. This was the part of the day he actually looked forward to, which was kind of sad.

The workbench held pieces of a radio.

It wasn't a pretty thing. A shortwave set from some dead trucker's cab, plus a coil of copper wire, plus a car battery he'd been charging off a hand-crank generator he built himself. He'd been working on it for eight months. Not to talk to anybody, exactly. Just to listen. He'd told himself that in the beginning. Just listen, see if anyone was out there.

The truth was a little less noble than that.

The truth was he'd built a vault. That was his job, the thing he'd put his whole life into before the world cracked open. He'd been the lead engineer on the Cradle Valley Seed Repository, a hole in a mountain with a hundred tons of steel around it and every kind of seed on earth tucked inside, waiting for a bad day. Everyone had called it a long shot. Doomsday insurance. A nice story for the news.

And then the bad day came.

He'd designed the thing so well that he'd locked himself out of it. That was the part that made him laugh when he was tired enough. The inner door ran on a time-lock, and the lock was set to open once, at midnight, on the third Christmas Eve after any emergency. He'd done that on purpose. A cooling-off period. Nobody would be able to crack it in the first chaos, looters or soldiers or whoever came sniffing, because the whole thing just sat there, sealed and patient, until the clock ran out. And when it finally did open, the only way inside would be his code.

He'd been proud of that design.

God, he'd been so proud.

Because the emergency plan, the one he'd written himself, the one the school district had signed off on, said that in a catastrophic event, children in the surrounding district would be evacuated to the vault. There was a tunnel. A dozen buses on standby. A whole system he'd built to keep kids safe.

Wren's school was eleven miles from the valley.

He didn't know if the buses ever ran. He didn't know if they'd made it. He'd been at work, two states over, on the night the sky went white, and by the time he'd crawled his way back, there wasn't a school, or a road, or a house, or anyone to ask. He'd walked to Cradle Valley once, in the first month, and found the outer gate buckled and the mountain silent. No lights. No sound. He'd pounded on the steel until his knuckles bled, and nothing answered.

Once was enough. After that, he couldn't go back. Not until the lock ran out. Not unless he wanted to find out.

And Mara, God. He hadn't seen Mara since the day they signed the papers.

Four years ago, in a lawyer's office that smelled like carpet cleaner. They hadn't yelled. That was the part he still couldn't shake. They'd sat on opposite sides of a long table and signed their names, and she hadn't looked at him once. Not when she handed him the pen. Not when he said, "I'm sorry, Mar." Not when she stood up and walked out.

He'd gone home that night and sat in the dark kitchen where Finn's chair was still pushed in at the table. He'd waited for it to hurt in a big, cinematic way. It just didn't. It hurt like a slow leak. It still did.

They'd lost their boy. That was all it was, really. A six-year-old, a long winter, a hospital that didn't have the answers, and a mother who was a nurse and knew exactly what every beep on the monitor meant, and a father who didn't, who just stood in the corner feeling useless. And afterward they'd turned into two people who couldn't be in a room together. She went silent. He ran. Nobody was a villain. That was the worst part. Nobody to hate.

Tobias turned the dial on the radio, just a hair, and listened to the hiss.

He'd been through every frequency a hundred times. Static, static, a little static. Once a burst of what might've been music, a few seconds of strings, and he'd sat up so fast he hit his head on the shelf. It never came back.

He pulled the headphones on anyway and slid down the band, slow.

Hiss. Hiss. A crackle. Hiss.

"Come on," he whispered. "Come on, come on. Give me something."

It was Christmas Eve. He knew that, too. He'd known it all week, the way you know a bad tooth is going to ache before it does. Three years to the day. In about fifteen hours, a steel door in a mountain would grind open by itself, and he'd be standing out here in the cold, or he'd be standing in front of it. And whichever one he chose, he'd learn something about his own life he couldn't unlearn.

He had a plan. It wasn't a good one. Hike to the valley, find the lock, punch the code, hope. Thirty miles, give or take, through ground he barely knew. He'd gotten lost twice just trying to scout the first half. He didn't know the roads anymore. The old maps were useless. Half the highways had been cut up by the quakes, and the rest were crawling with people he didn't want to meet.

He needed someone who knew the way.

He knew exactly who.

He'd been pushing that thought away for three days, which was a lot, for him. Because the one person left alive who might've mapped every inch of this broken country, who might've walked it every day with a notebook and a stubborn jaw, was a woman who had made it very clear she didn't want to be found.

He pulled off the headphones and rubbed his eyes.

That was when the static changed.

It was small. Barely anything. A shift in the pitch, like a breath caught. He froze with one hand still on the dial. Then slowly, the way you reach toward a deer in the woods, he put the headphones back over his ears.

Something was under the hiss. A rhythm. Thin and faint and steady. Something that sounded, for just one heartbeat, almost like a voice counting.