Chapter 4: What the Ash Makes

There were rules for going outside, and Mara had written every one of them down.

Don't walk in the open. Stay where the walls are. Never go out at dusk, never go out at dawn, never go out without a way back. Don't touch anything that's growing. And if you see one of them, don't run, don't wave, don't talk. Just go still. Wait for it to pass. Then go the other way, quietly, like you were never there.

She'd added that last one in her second winter. It had cost her a lot to learn it.

The street outside the pharmacy was white with ash, ankle deep in places, and the buildings on either side leaned in like tired old men. A bus on its side. A line of cars frozen bumper to bumper, as if the whole city had tried to leave at once. Somebody had spray-painted a message across a brick wall in shaky red letters, long ago. WE ARE STILL HERE. Under it, in different handwriting, newer: NO YOU'RE NOT.

Mara walked close to the wall with her cloak pulled up over her mouth and her eyes on the ground. She wasn't looking for much. Cans, if she was lucky. Batteries. A coat that still had its zipper. Mostly she just kept moving, because standing still in this city made her think too much.

She was three blocks from the pharmacy when she saw the green.

It was a small patch, at the foot of an old bank, right where the ash had been scraped clear. Moss, maybe. Something soft and bright. After three years of gray, it looked so wrong she actually stopped and stared at it, the way you'd stare at a stranger who knew your name.

Then she saw the woman.

She stood very still at the edge of the moss, her back to Mara. She was tall and thin, and for a second Mara's mind tried to file her as a regular person, some poor scavenger, some other lost soul. But the longer she looked, the more it fell apart. The woman's skin wasn't skin. It was dark and ridged, like the bark of an old oak, and it ran up her neck and into her hairline, where it turned to something finer. Threads. Little pale roots, soft as hair, curling out from her scalp and drifting in the wind. Along her forearms, small green shoots had broken through, tiny and delicate, each one tipped with a bud.

She was kneeling now, slowly, and pressing both palms flat into the ground. And where her hands touched, the moss spread. Mara watched it creep outward, bright as spilled paint, until it covered a patch the size of a doormat.

A Transfigured.

Mara had seen maybe thirty of them in three years. She still hadn't gotten used to it.

Nobody knew the whole of it. People had theories, and most of them were stupid. What Mara knew, from what she'd seen, was simple enough. When people died out here, in the cold and the ash, some of them didn't stay dead. A few days after, sometimes a week, they'd get up. Not the way the old movies said. They weren't hungry. They weren't angry. They didn't want anything from the living at all. They just came back different. Bark skin. Glass bones that caught the light. Limbs that glowed faintly, like a candle behind paper. They walked out into the dead places and they made things grow.

It should've been a miracle. In some ways it was.

But they didn't remember.

That was the thing. That was the price. Every single one of them came back with a blank place where their life used to be. No names. No faces. No children, no husbands, no mothers. Mara had watched one of them walk past a man screaming his wife's name, a man who'd been standing at her grave for two days, and the Transfigured had just looked at him with kind, empty eyes and said, "I'm sorry. Do I know you?"

The man had never recovered. He'd walked into the lake that night.

So Mara kept her distance. She'd never been afraid of the Transfigured, not exactly. They weren't dangerous. They were something worse than that. They were a sort of promise, one that came with a cost she wasn't willing to pay.

She waited until the woman had drifted off along the wall, slow and unbothered, leaving a trail of green behind her. Only then did Mara let herself breathe. She looked down at the new patch of moss, small and bright against all that gray.

Then she did something she shouldn't have. She crouched down and touched it. Just once. With one gloved finger.

It was warm.

"Huh," she whispered.

She stood up fast and wiped her glove on her cloak, like that would help. She hadn't felt warm in so long, even a little warmth felt like a trick. She pushed it out of her mind, fixed her scarf, and headed back toward the pharmacy with a single dented can of corn in her pocket and a cold feeling at the back of her neck.

It was only after she'd rounded the corner that she realized she hadn't looked at the sky. It had been brightening, slowly, to a thin pearly gray. For the first time in weeks it wasn't snowing ash. It just hung there, still, as if holding its breath.

* * *

Twenty miles east, in a concrete bunker under a dead hydroelectric dam, a man named Silas Voss was listening to a recording of a little girl.

He sat at the head of a long steel table with his hands folded in front of him, like a man at a funeral. He was tall and neat and gray at the temples, clean-shaven, which was an odd thing to be in the end of the world. His coat was black wool, pressed. His boots shone. Around him, in the cold light of the bunker, a dozen men and women in dark jackets sat very still and said nothing at all.

The recording crackled and looped. This is Wren Holloway at the Cradle Valley seed vault. If anyone can hear me, the doors open at midnight. Only once. I'm still here.

A young technician at the end of the table cleared his throat. "Picked it up about forty minutes ago, sir. Shortwave. Weak, but it's a real transmission. It's been repeating since."

"I can hear that, Corporal."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

Voss didn't look up. He ran a thumb along the edge of the table, slowly. There was a map pinned to the wall behind him, a big one, with a hundred little flags. The Concord's territory. Every settlement and every well, every road they held, every stretch of ground they'd bought or taken. It was the closest thing left to a country. He'd built it with his own two hands, over three years, out of nothing but patience and a willingness to do the things other people couldn't.

He knew exactly what the Concord needed. He'd been telling his people for months. Not guns. Not soldiers. They had plenty of those.

Food.

The ground was dead. The crops were dead. Everything that grew in the ash grew wrong, or grew in places no human being could follow. Eventually, if nothing changed, the Concord would starve. Slowly, and then quickly. And he'd be the man standing at the head of a very long table, looking at a lot of hungry faces

.

"Cradle Valley," he said, almost to himself. "A repository. The whole world's seed stock, sealed in a mountain." He finally looked up. "Tell me, Corporal. How long do you think it's been sitting out there, waiting for someone to open it?"

The boy swallowed. "Three years, sir?"

"Three years. And tonight, at midnight, the doors open. A child tells us so." Voss smiled, a small, polite smile that never touched his eyes. "Isn't that something? Isn't that just a gift."

Nobody laughed because nobody was supposed to.

"The child," a woman at the table said carefully. "What do we do about her?"

"We collect her," Voss said. "Gently. She's valuable. If she's inside, she'll know the place. And someone built that vault. Someone knows the lock." He tapped the table once with one finger. "Find out who."

He stood. The whole room stood with him, chairs scraping.

"Wake the convoy," said Silas Voss. "All of it. We ride within the hour."