“Just another few minutes. Where were your parents born?”

  Elizabeth opened her mouth to admit that she didn’t actually know when she heard Lana’s voice from somewhere else in the camp. “Dad! Derek!”

  She was obviously in trouble, and the certainty of it made Elizabeth’s heart race even harder than it already was since she’d been separated. Before she knew she’d moved, she was on her feet. “What’s going on?” she demanded. “That’s my daughter, what are you people doing to her?”

  “Ma’am.” The agent rose at the same time, one hand on the sidearm at his hip. He released the safety strap and held his other hand out toward her. “Calm down.”

  Elizabeth was half a second away from rushing him when a boom shook the air, and for a full second, the sky outside was lit up like the sun had suddenly burst through the clouds. She cringed at the sound, and her eyes went wide at the sight. She wasn’t the only one. The agent stared at the tent-flap, lips parted in confusion.

  She recovered first and lunged for the sidearm he’d freed but not yet drawn. If he’d been less surprised by whatever was happening outside, he might have avoided her, but Elizabeth managed to get her hands on the grip of the gun and pull it free of both the holster and his loosened fingers before he had time to properly react. She shuffled back, raising the weapon and pointing it at his exposed head, her finger on the trigger. “Take me to my daughter,” she growled, twitching the handgun toward the tent flap, “now.”

  The agent raised his hands, palm out. “Just calm down. There’s no need for this, ma’am. And I don’t know what’s happening outside, but we might be—”

  “Get me to my daughter!” she barked, and very nearly pulled the trigger by accident as she took a step toward him.

  His hands came up as his head ducked, and he gave her a placating gesture, waving his hands as he moved carefully toward the tent flap. “Okay,” he said quickly, “okay, it’s okay. I’ll take you to her. Just—wait, what?”

  The agent’s head was turned to his right slightly, his eyes no longer focused on her. “That can’t—Oh, God.”

  “What?” Elizbeth asked warily, watching for some sign that he was trying to distract her. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

  His eyes twitched back to her, and although the light from the lanterns washed everything out, she swore he was paler than he’d been a moment ago. “Uh... it... it’s St. Louis,” he stammered, and jerked a finger toward the tent’s exit. “They say it was bombed. Nuked. That’s what that light was.”

  The information didn’t process. It went in Elizabeth’s ears, and the words all made sense individually, but together they added up to nonsense. “What? No.”

  He tapped the side of his head. “Just reported from a station in the direction. They saw the blast. St. Louis is...”

  Again, his eyes went distant, a second before his expression twisted to a grimace. He eyed Elizabeth, then clenched his jaw and turned to open the tent flap for her. “Understood.” He nodded toward the exit. “You can go. Sounds like your daughter is fine.”

  Elizabeth frowned at him, then took a few careful steps in that direction before shuffling out of the tent with the handgun still trained on him. “Lana?” she called. “Caleb? Derek? What’s going on?”

  “Stand down,” the familiar field marshal’s voice called. “Everyone stand down, please. Everything is under control.”

  She tracked the voice, peering through the barely lit camp until she spotted her. She was outlined by the light of lanterns from another tent enclosure—along with Lana, who had a knife to her throat. Victoria’s hands were raised slightly, clearly trying to urge calm. Elizabeth’s gut twisted. What had Lana been thinking? She’d called for help—had she been attacked?

  “Liz,” Caleb said from behind her, his voice worried.

  Elizabeth glanced back at him, and saw that he was looking not at her, but at the gun in her hands. She lowered it, and he reached out to take it from her. “St. Louis,” she said. “He said it... but that can’t have happened.”

  Caleb’s lips thinned, and he glanced to the side as Derek stepped up beside him, watching Victoria and Lana.

  “So much for going peacefully,” Derek murmured. He glanced at Elizabeth, and then down at the gun in Caleb’s hand. “Okay, then. Should I get a rifle?”

  In answer, Caleb turned and leveled the handgun at a nearby agent, who stiffened and took his hands off his rifle. “Give him your weapon.”

  Derek went to the man, who didn’t resist as Derek relieved him of it. They made their way toward Lana and the hostage field marshal and collected two more on the way, though Elizabeth didn’t know if she was even holding hers correctly. It was surprisingly light and not anything like the rifles she’d shot in the past.

  Once they reached Lana, she angled her hostage toward the walkway. “We’re moving.”

  Victoria didn’t resist as Lana nudged her forward, and together the five of them made their way across the little camp and to the walkway they’d come down. All eyes followed them, but no one made any move to stop them. Either because Victoria had ordered it, or because they were all still in shock at the news. Either way, Elizabeth didn’t care as long as they got back to the SUV safely.

  “You should reconsider this,” Victoria said as they backed up the walkway.

  “Shut up,” Lana told her.

  Victoria didn’t, and she didn’t sound especially alarmed at having a knife to her throat. “No one was going to hurt any of you,” she insisted. “Class S3 is a good thing. It means you’ve got a future, Lana. That you’re bound for great things. You could even work with Mr. Trusk himself with that classification.”

  “See,” Lana muttered, “that’s the whole problem right there. Classification? Of what?”

  “Everything,” Victoria answered. “It’s your designation, your place in the new world he’s building.”

  “We’ve heard that line before,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “It didn’t work out that time.”

  Victoria gave a snort, but it was cut short as Lana tugged her up over the final step of the walkway and they angled for the vehicle. “I don’t know what you’ve been through,” she grunted as she struggled to keep her footing, “but Apex is a program that’s going to fix everything that was wrong before. No more divisions of rich and poor, no more racial inequality, no more gender disparity. No more rampant capitalism.”

  “Oh,” Lana said, her voice dripping sarcasm, “is your class system going to be better? Fantastic. Good for you. Get in the car.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “Lana...”

  Her daughter flashed her an irritated look. “The second we let her go, they’re going to gun us down.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Caleb offered.

  There were already Apex agents coming up the stairs carefully, rifles still lowered but at hand. As they reached the car, Elizabeth moved in front of the back driver’s side door. “Are we really taking a hostage now?”

  “Unless Victoria here wants to order her men to strip down and go stand on the far side of town,” Lana growled, “yeah, we are. Mom—please, can we not argue in front of the fascist?”

  “We’re not fascist—” Victoria started.

  Lana’s knife pressed harder into the field marshal’s neck, dangerously close to cutting her, and Elizabeth sucked in a sharp breath, her arm jerking forward instinctively to intervene. She stopped herself before it happened, but stared hard at the depression the blade made in the woman’s neck. “Careful,” she breathed. “Lana, don’t hurt her.”

  Behind Elizabeth, a door on the SUV opened. She glanced back to see her husband climbing into the driver’s seat. He cranked the car, then leaned out. “Everyone in. We’re going.”

  “Order your men to let us pass,” Lana told Victoria.

  Elizabeth waited, frozen for the several seconds that the woman hesitated before she said, “Keep your weapons down. That’s an order.”

  “Good to see that old fashioned self-preservation is still alive and well in the world.” Lana jerked her chin at the door. “Open it, Mom.”

  Jaw clenched, Elizabeth opened the door. She met their hostage’s hard eyes briefly as Lana turned her around and took the knife away from her throat, finally, to push her into the back seat of the car. She was surprised to see that there didn’t appear to be any anger on her face. Or even fear. Just a kind of stony acceptance. What did that mean?

  There was no time to think too much about it. Derek got in the opposite side of the car, placing the field marshal between him and Lana, and Elizabeth left them to circle the SUV and get in the passenger seat up front. She glanced back to see that Lana still had the knife on Victoria, but at least didn’t have it pressed to skin where she might accidentally stab the woman while they were moving. Caleb adjusted the rear-view mirror. “Are we going to have problems?” he asked the woman.

  Victoria shook her head. “My people will follow orders and stand down,” she said, with a little more calmness than the situation seemed to warrant.

  Self-assurance: that’s what it was. And it made Elizabeth nervous. Like the woman might not really be a hostage at all. “I don’t think we should take her with us. We can drop her at the far end of the bridge.”

  Lana opened her mouth to argue, but Caleb cut her off. “Your mother’s right,” he told their daughter as he glanced at Elizabeth. “Once we’re clear, we drop her. We don’t have the resources to feed a hostage, and the last thing we want is for them to be on us looking for her.”

  “Fine.”

  Elizabeth turned back to face the front as Caleb put the SUV in drive and pulled carefully forward. It was only then, once they were moving again, that she looked out of the west side of the bridge, into the night. Out there, a hundred miles or so down the river, was a city that had just been destroyed.

  A nuclear weapon had been used on US soil, in the middle of all this. As if a world-wide catastrophe wasn’t bad enough for them all to have to deal with. What kind of monster added to that misery by doing something so awful?

  “Are you religious?” Victoria asked.

  “Shut up,” Lana muttered.

  But Elizabeth knew somehow that the woman had been talking to her, and the woman ignored Lana. “Now is probably a good time to start praying. That whatever happened to St. Louis doesn’t happen again—and that one of those windstorms doesn’t pick up. The kind of storms we’ve been getting these days, the fallout could spread far and wide. Apex hubs will have the kind of meds people will need, of course. Folks caught out in it, though... well, I suppose they’ll be pretty much screwed.”

  “I told you to shut up,” Lana snapped, and put the tip of her knife under the woman’s chin.

  Elizabeth had to admit, though: Victoria wasn’t wrong. She turned to Caleb, and as if he could sense her worrying and she found him looking at her. They had the same look on their faces, she was pretty sure, and didn’t need to speak to share the question weighing on both of their minds.

  What if they were wrong?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CALEB

  Jefferson City, MO

  Thursday, July 19th, 7:31 pm CST

  True to the field marshal’s word, they made it across the bridge without issue. Agents lurked at the other end, weapons down, as Caleb drove the SUV cautiously past them. Beyond the bridge, he picked up speed before taking the first available turn west. A mile down the road, confident they were well ahead of anyone from Apex following on foot, he finally pulled over.

  “Let her out,” he told Lana.

  “Let’s go a little further—” Lana started.

  Caleb adjusted the mirror and gave her a long, stern look.

  His daughter sighed, tugged the door open, and grabbed Victoria’s jacket to drag her out of the SUV. Caleb hurried to assist, shoving the driver’s door open. His daughter might have listened earlier, but she seemed angry and unpredictable now.

  Lana waved the knife she must have stolen from an Apex agent toward the field marshal. “Better hurry back to your dystopian nightmare. It’s gonna get colder before it warms up.”

  A wall of wind buffeted the SUV and Caleb stepped back. Was it coming from the west? How long before particulates from St. Louis made it this far? An hour? Eight? An entire day? He had no idea.

  Victoria cracked her neck, first one direction and then the other, all the while staring Lana down. “It didn’t have to be like this.” She turned to Caleb. “We didn’t intend to harm any of you. Whatever idea you’ve got about Apex, I can assure you it’s entirely wrong.”

  “That’ll be too bad for us, then.” He stepped closer to the vehicle. “Wind’s picking up. You should hurry. Lana? Inside.”

  Lana paused when the field marshal spoke again. “This could be just the start. You may come to wish you’d gone with us when you had the chance, Lana. There’s still time.”

  Caleb’s brow furrowed, and he tore his gaze away from the sky, focusing on the woman. “What did you say?”

  Lana shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Dad. Whatever she’s selling, I don’t want any of it.”

  “I’m offering safety.” She took a step toward Caleb, but he shot her a warning eye and she stopped. “Security. The promise of a bright future. Apex isn’t some... regime, Mr. Machert. It’s a path back to normal. Better than normal, even. Sustainable energy, equity, and equality that the old world never could have achieved, an end to poverty and hunger.”

  “Just so long as there’s a billionaire overlord at the top of it all, right?” Lana asked, turning sharply to face Victoria. She threw her hands up. “What kind of utopian snake oil future involves conscripting people into your little army?”

  “Not an army. Not for you, at any rate. I know you don’t believe me, Lana, but you would be happy working at the central hub. I didn’t believe it when I was first given my assignment, but Apex’s algorithms are the most advanced ever developed. If they tell us that’s where you belong, it is.”

  “What is she talking about?” Caleb demanded. “What assignment?”

  Lana gave a snort and rolled her eyes. “They wanted to cart me off to who-knows-where, because their system says I have potential, whatever that means.”

  Victoria. “Exactly. Untapped pot—”

  Caleb held a hand up to silence the woman. “This conversation is over. Lana, get in.”

  “It won’t matter where you go.” Victoria’s voice carried as they ducked into the vehicle. “This is happening with or without your involvement. When you’re ready, we’ll be waiting for you. You’ll see, Lana. You’ll be hap—”

  Her voice was cut off when the doors closed. Caleb put the car in drive and pulled away, leaving the field marshal behind them. He watched her recede in the rear-view mirror until his taillights were too far away to illuminate, then checked on Lana. His daughter wore a grim look, and she raised her fingers to one arm and seemed to gently rub a tender spot near her shoulder. “You okay?”

  She took her hand away and nodded. “Yeah. Fine. Just... tired from the adrenaline.”

  “Get some rest. I’ll drive through the night. The more distance between us and St. Louis, the better.”

  They all gave grunts and mutters of agreement and Caleb put his focus back on the road ahead of them.

  At the first chance to leave the highway, Caleb paused long enough to check the map with Derek’s assistance before driving into the sparsely developed land along the Missouri River. The drive to the next bridge that would let them cross back south through Kansas and toward Colorado, was fifty miles.

  They fell into an uncomfortable silence, each lost in his or her own thoughts, or attempting to sleep. Here and there, flickering candles lit windows of farmhouses along the way. The closer they came to the river, the fewer he noticed, until most everything dwindled down.

  He drove across the river, eyes open for any sign of Apex as he entered Kansas. A tangled mass of metal blocked a portion of the road and Caleb eased by it until recognition dawned. He shifted into reverse and pulled into the dilapidated gas station, all but obscured by fallen trees and the mangled sign.

  Derek hopped out and checked for gas, finding one older pump with a few gallons remaining. Not enough, but it was something.

  For a while the trip went smoothly, with Caleb skirting close to highway 70 in hopes of finding another gas station. Lana and Derek fell asleep in the back and Elizabeth followed shortly after. He was left alone with the night and his thoughts.

  Apex was something worse than he imagined upon first meeting. If they were as organized as they appeared, he feared the field marshal would be searching for them. Could they reach Springfield before Apex caught up with them? Was there anything in Colorado even worth finding?

  “Any idea where we are?” Elizabeth roused from sleep and shifted beside him.

  “We crossed the river a while back, but that’s the best I can do. I think I saw part of a sign for Odessa sticking out of the side of a truck a little way back.”

  “Any gas stations?”

  He peered at the gas gauge and frowned, shaking his head. “Nothing accessible. I think this region got hit hard; some of the exits collapsed, and the couple of stations we passed were wrecked. If we don’t find something soon...”

  She glanced into the back seat where Derek was leaning against the door, his head on the window, and Lana’s head rested on his shoulder. When she turned back to the front, she wore a look of exhausted worry. “Our daughter took a hostage.”

  Caleb nodded. “She did. And we got out.”

  Elizabeth flashed him an annoyed look. “I thought you talked to her about making rash decisions?”

  “That’s not what I said,” he countered. “I talked to her about risk assessment and encouraged her to think things through a bit more. We did get away.”

  “You need to tell her that’s not okay,” Elizabeth pressed. “We can’t be the kind of people that take hostages and hold people at knife point.”