What the Council Said

The council met at first light in the old hardware store, which served as meeting hall, repair depot, and the closest thing Harper's Crossing had to a seat of government.

There were seven of them — the council — and all seven had heard the broadcast. Mara had played the recording three times on the hand-crank, and the third time Ellis Rowe, who had been a county engineer before and was now their best mechanic, had put his hand flat on the table and said: "Real transmission. Not a loop. The voice modulates. Somebody's there."

Then they had started arguing.

"Could be a trap," said Diane, who had been a nurse and was now everything a nurse could be when the supply chain was gone. She was not a pessimist; she was a diagnostician. "Someone who broadcasts 'we are not military' has thought about the fact that military would be a threat. That's sophisticated."

"Sophisticated means resources," said Torres, who handled the watch rotation. "Resources means they actually have something."

"Or they want us to think they do."

"Diane." This was Mara. "If they wanted to lure people out, there are easier vectors. They're on a frequency nobody monitors. They said they'd listen on the hour. They gave coordinates."

"Coordinates could be wrong."

"Coordinates could be wrong," Mara agreed. "That's why we'd verify before committing."

"You've already decided," Ellis said. He was looking at her with the particular expression of someone who'd worked alongside her long enough to read the tells. "You worked this out last night. You're not asking whether to go. You're asking us to agree."

The room was quiet.

Mara didn't argue with him, because he was right.

"We need to know if they're real," she said. "If they have medicine — actual antibiotics, not the stock we've been rationing since the Hendersons' baby — we need to know. If they have power generation that can run equipment we can't currently run, we need to know. This settlement can survive another winter the way we've been surviving. But Cass's cough hasn't cleared in six weeks and Prentiss's leg isn't healing the way it should and we're losing people to things that were treatable before."

She did not say: I will go whether you agree or not. She didn't need to. Ellis was right — they could all read the tells.

"Two hundred and fifty miles," Torres said. "Through what?"

"I've been through the maps. There are three routes. The highway is fastest but most exposed. The county roads add forty miles but keep us away from the cities. There's a third option — the old rail corridor, which is protected from both sides by grade embankments and hasn't been traveled since the first winter."

"How long?"

"Ten days. Maybe twelve with weather."

"And you'd go alone."

"I'd go with two others. I need someone with medical training in case we find something worth negotiating for. And I need Ellis, because if they have equipment and I need to assess it, I need his eyes."

Ellis looked at the ceiling for a moment. He was sixty-one and had replaced his right knee six months before everything ended and the replacement was good but not perfect. He looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man doing the calculation between what his body could do and what his conscience required.

"I'm in," he said.

"I haven't agreed to send anyone," said Marcus Hale, the closest thing the council had to a chair. He was careful and thorough and genuinely good at managing the seven personalities around the table, which was harder than it sounded.

"Marcus," Mara said quietly. "They broadcast again this morning at six. I had the radio on." She let that land. "They're still there. They're still listening."

Marcus looked at the table for a long moment.

"Two weeks," he said. "If you're not back in two weeks, we don't send a search party. We can't afford the people."

"Two weeks," Mara agreed.

She caught Ellis's eye across the table.

He gave her the small nod of a man who'd already packed his bag in his head.

They left the next morning at dawn, three of them. Mara, Ellis, and a young woman named Pell who had been pre-med and knew more than any of them wanted to need. They had food for twelve days, a hand-crank radio tuned to the Ardent frequency, and a set of maps Mara had annotated through the night.

They were two hours out of Harper's Crossing, in the third mile of the rail corridor, when Ellis stopped walking and pointed.

In the gravel between the ties, regular and deliberate, were boot prints. Recent. Multiple sets.

Going the same direction they were.