A blast of plasma took out half of the manager’s room ten seconds after the woman spoke to us from the air.

  Maggie threw herself at me like a wild cat, and I tossed her under myself and covered her head just as Hutch tackled us from the side. The three of our bodies was no match for what came next: the explosion that ripped apart the office desk, the chairs, the carpet, the side table, the glass. It shattered and shredded and bit at everything we’d just seen, completely taking Hutch’s gun with it, and throwing mine somewhere into the chaos. We were suddenly on a cliff’s edge. The jagged floor bit into my elbows.

  Right below us was a plasma gun pointing directly at Maggie’s legs.

  I grabbed the back of her knee and hauled her closer to the wall. My palm was slick with sweat.

  Maggie stifled a scream in my ear by shoving her face into my shirt. The fabric muffled the sound. She came up moments later, her eyes flashing. I swallowed. I knew that look, and it meant she was about to go insane.

  Unlike Hutch’s stoic attitude, Maggie was a bit of a spitfire. I meant it in a gentle way, because I was fond of her, but I was also a bit terrified of her. Before the Fall, I would have probably detained her. Of course, it worked in my favor now, but I wasn’t exactly looking for justice at the moment. We really just needed to survive.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, like an idiot.

  Maggie smartly replied, “Shut the fuck up, Jack.”

  Next to us, Hutch groaned and rolled onto his stomach. He winced, peeling a piece of ceiling off of his back. White dust covered his shoulders. Nothing was bleeding, thank God. “We have to go,” he moaned, but his body didn’t move an inch.

  We were all injured. I knew that at any moment, my pain levels would fluctuate and I would begin feeling it in my arms and legs, my head. Already my ribs ached from where Maggie had collided with me.

  The voice squawked, “Is anyone out there, can you hear me?”

  “We can hear you,” Hutch snapped back at the air. “Jack.”

  I was on it. I rolled off of Maggie, who began scrambling towards the door and away from the giant hole in the floor. My eyes began scanning the scene quickly, which was difficult, as most of the scene was completely obliterated and nonsensical. Smoke hung in the air. My ears were still ringing, and I reached up to test my right one before my finger came back with a trickle of blood. The wetness was warm against my skin.

  Behind me, Maggie scrambled through the debris. I didn’t have to ask her why to know she was looking for my rifle. She tossed aside chunks of drywall and splintered wood.

  I moved quickly, darting around the hole just as the white light seared into the room, searching for humans. The beam cut through the smoke. One of the Bees was directly below us. I knew if I could hear correctly, I would be met with the high-pitched whirring of its body as it stomped down and angled the light better, rooting out the three of us. The floor vibrated under my boots.

  “Do you see where it’s coming from?” Hutch asked. His voice was hoarse.

  “Not yet.” I threw open cabinets and peered in quickly before moving on to the next. I was looking for the source of that voice. Papers spilled out onto the floor, and I carelessly kicked them out of my way.

  It couldn’t have been a recording. The EMP took out all modern electronics. Some cell phones survived, but they all quickly died and were rendered useless from the lack of data. Record players, computers, tapes…everything else was gone. Marshall explained that car batteries might be able to survive, and he and his goons spent weeks ripping them out of every available vehicle in a ten-mile radius, but we’d not been able to get a single lightbulb on in Eden so far.

  But something made that noise, and as soon as my eyes landed on the set of them against the wall, I hurled my body forward.

  Radios.

  Specifically, walkie talkies. They sat on top of a shelf, and one of them had a small red light blinking on its top. The light pulsed in the dim room. Our whispering didn’t make a Bee look up through that ceiling, but that did. Like moths to flame, a Bee is attracted to the faintest trickle of energy output.

  My fingers snatched it up and I unceremoniously ripped the battery out, tossing it away like it was a snake. The plastic casing was hot in my hand. The walkie talkie died, but that didn’t stop another blast from ripping out the doorway and part of the wall from the way we’d come. Heat washed over us in a wave.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said, looking around. Dust floated down from the ceiling, coating my dark blond hair.

  Hutch gestured to the roof. “We hide out?”

  “Eventually they’ll start glassing it,” Maggie told him. She was breathing hard, sucking in all of the debris. I wanted to cover her mouth, but everything I owned was just as dirty.

  I looked down at the hole, all thoughts tumbling out of my brain. The edges glowed orange. “Jump,” I said finally, as if the word had been trying to weasel its way into my brain this entire time. “We have to jump.”

  “It’s too big of a drop, Jack.” Hutch shook his head.

  The entire building shook again, and the heat began to crawl up my skin. They’d been glassing a lot downstairs, and now the superheated plasma was turning up the temperature of the surrounding air. Sweat dripped down my back.

  “We jump down now,” I said, gesturing to the hole in the floor between us.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” Maggie snapped at me. Her face was flushed from the heat.

  “They’re slow,” I countered. “It’s our only way through. If we get past the door before they’re able to lock in on us, then we have a head start.”

  “And then?”

  “We fucking run.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Maggie stopped looking for my rifle. I could tell she was terrified. This was the closest we’d been to being glassed so far, and the blame was solely on me. Her hands were shaking. “Okay,” she said after a second, sucking in a deep breath to steady herself. “Okay. Fuck. This is happening, isn’t it?”

  “This is insane,” Hutch decided, but that was not a no.

  Another blast rocked the building, and all three of us grabbed onto something heavy. The white beam blinded us again, but this time, the Bee found nothing. I heard it crunch the ground as it swiveled, looking for another access point into the room. They were too heavy to climb the stairs, but if they were able to get the light inside and see our heads, they’d blast the rest of the office to pieces.

  I couldn’t think too much. I had to just do it.

  I steadied myself over the hot hole and sucked in one last deep breath. The air tasted like melted plastic and burning insulation. My lungs protested, along with my brain, my arms, my legs, my chest. I jumped through.

  Immediately, I wished I was dead.

  The pain from the fall cracked through both of my legs as I landed wrong. My ankle twisted beneath me and I tilted haphazardly to the side, nearly careening into the molten glass dripping from the ceiling. The heat seared my cheek. Up high, I saw Hutch helping Maggie to drop, and I barely had time to make sure she was okay before a light hit us from the farther end of the warehouse. “Run!” I shouted, bolting to the side.

  My legs screamed with each step. The concrete floor was littered with debris that crunched under my boots.

  Maggie flew behind another pillar as the Bee shot at us. The plasma hit the wall just behind my head. I felt the heat wash over my neck.

  Hutch was next. He didn’t even have a moment to consider his own fate; he just dropped down onto the ground and began running for the exit. His landing was harder than mine. I heard him grunt, but I had no time to source out what caused him so much pain. If he was upright, he was alive. That’s all that mattered. Maggie and I ran behind him, and I felt like my heart was going to rip from my chest.

  All I could see was the door. Daylight poured through it, and I had no idea what was behind me, or to the sides of me. I had no idea if a plasma blast was headed my way, or if these would be my last few seconds. I just ran. My feet carried me through the door and into the blistering afternoon, but I didn’t stop. I kept going, racing as fast as I could with pain shooting through my legs. My left ankle felt like it might give out. Ahead of me was suddenly Hutch’s dark hair, and I aimed for him.

  It took Maggie a block to fall down finally, and I couldn’t blame her. I stumbled into her legs before I finally buckled and curled on top of the sidewalk, ready to throw up. My stomach was lopsided with a horrible stitch in my right side, and if I had anything to cough up, it’d be on the ground right now. Hutch was facing away from us, his shoulders rocking from his gasps. His shirt was dark with sweat.

  I took a moment to examine myself as I tried to restrain my breathing. Each inhale felt like fire. My skin was a hot pink from the proximity to the hot glass, and I could feel my skin tingle along my face and neck. The sensation was almost like sunburn, but worse. I might as well skimmed my entire body over a boiling hot fryer. Maggie looked the same, her legs looking tomato red from the knees down. Blisters were already forming on her shins. We were close to death. Very close.

  When Hutch finally was able to talk again, he turned to me. His face was red and slick. “That radio?”

  “I know,” I said. My voice came out raspy. “I have no idea how it turned on.”

  “No, not that. Someone was talking through it.” He pointed back at the buildings, and his chest heaved. It looked like he might have a heart attack. His hand trembled. “Was it her?”

  I blinked at him, suddenly remembering the woman in the window. “Her?” I asked dumbly.

  “It had to have been.” Hutch rubbed his face as he paced. His legs were unsteady. “How did she get through to us? She must have had the same radio, or knew the channel…”

  Maggie shook her head. “Hutch,” she warned, “not the time.” She was still on the ground, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

  “Was that a fucking setup?” Hutch demanded. His voice cracked.

  “A setup?” I squinted at him. The sun made my head pound. “How would it be a setup?”

  “We have to go,” Maggie told us, and her hand found my sleeve. Her grip was weak. I didn’t pull away from her, despite having the strength. It wasn’t smart to begin arguments right now, and she was trying to convince us to avoid one.

  But I still stood my ground. Someone was back there that needed help. My legs protested as I straightened. “While the Bees are distracted, I can get her out of there. She was probably just trying to signal.”

  “She signaled two fucking Bees below our feet, Jack.” Hutch’s jaw was tight.

  “And we came here, knowing that was a possibility, Hutch.”

  The two of us glared at each other. I wondered who would lose. The silence stretched between us. I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

  He was going to try and blame someone who had no idea who we were. For all I knew, she was just trying to ask for help. It was hard to scorn someone wanting to survive. All we wanted to do was survive.

  And I couldn’t help but picture it being Maggie or Eleanor instead.

  I’d quickly gotten attached to the two of them on our journey. They too were strangers, just like me and Hutch. When we agreed to go together, it was a strange sense of homecoming that washed over me. I could never explain it to myself, not even now. But I’d seen Maggie for the first time and I just knew that they were coming with me, and that I’d open up myself to trust them.

  That woman in the window could’ve been either of them, and I would have sentenced her to die. Those Bees were going to begin rampaging in the streets at any second, though. The thought made my stomach turn.

  “We’ll come back for her,” Maggie suddenly said, gripping my wrists now. Her fingers dug into my skin, hard. She began wheeling me away from the street, and Hutch took up my rear. “When we have more rifles, let’s come back. But there’s nothing we can do right now, Jack. We have to save ourselves.”

  “She’s going to think we abandoned her,” I told Maggie softly.

  Her eyes betrayed her harsh tone. They were wet at the corners, and I knew for a fact that she didn’t like this any more than I did. Maggie might have been practical, but I knew there was a young woman under that protective shell of hers. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that a few months ago, Maggie was an entirely different person. She was normal back then. “There’s nothing we can do. If I got split from you two, I’d have to find my own way back.”

  Bullshit, I thought, giving Hutch a glance. He had it written across his face, and I knew it too: we’d never leave Maggie behind. Not just because she’s Maggie, but because Eleanor would fucking kill us.

  But if I left them now, they would come for me, just like I would go to them. It was that same loyalty, how we found each other and now are glued together by survival and fate. It would devastate Eleanor to lose any of us. At this point it was like losing a family member, especially one that you never expected to go.

  But none of this was going to make me feel any better about leaving her behind. I struggled to swallow, shoving thoughts of that terrified woman out of my head. Her face seemed so familiar to me, and yet I couldn’t pin down a reason why. Maybe I’d cuffed her in the past, or responded to a distburance call. Maybe she worked at one of Austin’s outreach shelters and I was there giving my typical presentations on personal safety and self-defense. Whatever the reason was, I knew that I’d seen her somewhere before, and the thought of abandoning someone who’d already been in my life somehow rubbed salt in the wound.

  Maybe if I knew Austin wasn’t compeltely decimated by the Mastodon ships, I would go back home and see what part of myself was still alive down there. I knew there was no pre-Jack to go back to. But if there was anyone in the world who knew that person, there was proof that part of me still existed.

  I had a sudden yearning for that proof, more than anything else in the world.

  As we walked back to the car, Hutch and Maggie stood close on either side of me, their presence steady and watchful. Both of them were probably ready to tackle me if I turned around. They were probably also thinking about the last few minutes, though I couldn’t imagine specifics. Hutch was probably cussing out the world in his head as always. I couldn’t really figure out Maggie, except to know that she was upset and unwilling to talk.

  None of us spoke as we hobbled back to the truck unarmed.