His feet sloshed through an inch of water along the stone tunnels. Water that held a stagnant stench. Sewage and mold permeated that smell, but this was a path he knew as well as the veins tunneling through his own body. Besides the entrance to the Maze and the paths that were sacred within the Glade, Alexandra knew nothing about these secret tunnels, especially the one through which he walked, now. Alexandra didn’t know what she didn’t know. He lifted the vines and moss that camouflaged the end of the current trail and he crawled up onto the Alaskan ground. He was outside the city limits, the sun moving toward dusk.

  SQUUUEEEE . . .

  The sound sent a cold wave through Mikhail’s body. It sounded like a knife or an ax being sharpened across metal, ready to strike in battle, but once his brain caught up, he realized it was just the pig traps he’d set. A wild boar squealed at him again.

  “Oh. Hello.” He shivered with the good fortune. He’d take the poor animal to the Remnant Nation as an offering. A feast meal. He dragged the trap along, the thing kicking up dirt as the pig wrestled with the moving ground below it.

  SQUUUEEEE! SQUUUEEEE!

  He couldn’t blame the pig for crying. Emotions were what made animals and humans alike. Fear. Terror. The will to live. Mikhail understood that better than most. In a way, Mikhail felt like crying too, not just for the loss of Nicholas, his most trusted ally, but for the future. The future looked about as worthless as Nicholas’ body without a head.

  Heaving with the effort, he pulled the wild pig and the trap closer to the Berg, hidden just beyond the pine trees. “Juuust a little further.” He too felt like kicking and screaming. It brought him no joy to unravel the plans that awaited. The boar snorted and snotted and blew an attitude that made him question if he shouldn’t do the same. He could throw a Godly fit. Abandon his plan. Stop Alexandra in a way that would be less violent. Less death. Less destruction.

  But for nearly thirty years Mikhail had known his part of the New Alaska would end everything that Alexandra and Nicholas had built. Removing Alexandra would be easy, but her cultlike followers of the Godhead might take generations to deprogram. Death and destruction were a shortcut for humanity to thrive.

  He lifted the wild pig onto the Berg with a mighty groan. “Just a few hours in the air, and we’ll be there,” he told the pig, and the animal squealed back as if it knew its fate, already. Mihail would enjoy having company on the flight, even if it was a crying, squealing, smelly mess of an animal.

  Once he arrived at the Remnant Nation, he planned to do what he’d done every month for years— meet with the Grief Bearers and instruct them on the coming war. But this go-around, there’d be an escalation.

  Time to end the Godhead once and for all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Library of Secrets

  She wrapped a scarf around her mouth and nose, but the material was too thin. The smell of rotten flesh and spoiled meat filled Nicholas’ apartment and seeped through. She’d do her best to get what she needed and get out, even if she wasn’t exactly sure what it was she needed. If she found something to answer even one of the hundreds of questions she’d had over the years, the foul-smelling visit would be worthwhile. Even though Nicholas’ body was no longer physically in the room, the weight of his stench hovered over her like spoiled mist.

  Dear Alexandra, what you search for is already within you, he’d say if he were there watching her rummage through his belongings, and even the thought of the man’s voice caused tension throughout her body. Her shoulders scrunched and her head pounded. The buzzing in her ears started again. Dammit.

  She thought death had freed her from Nicholas’ control, but instead it seemed to allow him to be everywhere at once. She pictured his smug face reading her thoughts now. She recited the digits, but even those reminded her of Nicholas’ teachings. His words. His rules. His power. The only way she could disconnect from the bit of control that still remained was to visualize his head removed from his body. His bulging eyes that no longer could blink. She pictured that and it brought her peace. The buzzing in her ears steadied, and she continued on through his library.

  She flipped through books upon books. Nicholas was a hoarder when it came to publications of old, and rarely did he ever share the good ones. The ones she could have used to enhance her gifts. Books on history, books on psychology, books on telepathy and the invisible sciences. She set aside a pile for herself and stopped at a large leather tome of a thing. She opened the cover to find the book itself had been hollowed out. Her mind went straight to the Hollowings.

  Had Nicholas been responsible for the town rituals and emptying bodies? She had always assumed it was Mikhail and his remaining animalistic instincts that kept madness in its every form right at the tip of his brain. She ran her fingers along the roughly cut pages that left an empty space in the book. What did Nicholas hide in here? She frantically flipped open each and every book in Nicholas’ entire collection. A storm of paper and board flew through the library, but none of the others held a compartment within them.

  When he was alive, Nicholas had always invaded her space, and for the first time she felt as though she could return the torture. Being inside his room in the tower was like being inside his head. But even then, she found only the things he wanted her to find. How could one man keep so many secrets?

  She counted the digits. The Flaring Discipline helped her to hone into what she needed. Patience, dear Alexandra, she could almost hear Nicholas say as her eyes landed on his workspace. She hated his lessons in patience that felt like lessons in torture.

  She walked over to his mess of a desk, where he wrote letters and reviewed the needs of the Pilgrims, but the contents held nothing more than written prayers. She stopped reading the letters of the people decades ago. Why Nicholas still bothered to read and reply to them was beyond her. The single solution to all of the problems within the city could be solved by the culmination of the Evolution. Not everything was complicated.

  A plea for more rations. Wild pigs outside of town, no plea or prayer, just a letter of useless information. Of course there were wild pigs outside of town. There were wild animals, wild Cranks, wild everything outside. She threw the letters back on the desk but from within the center of the stack fell out a page in Nicholas’ handwriting. One of his unsent replies. She held the letter in her hands. She started to open it, but as she did, pain surrounded her. Her ears started to buzz. Her head vibrated with noise.

  Was Nicholas torturing her from beyond with these headaches and buzzing? She almost hoped for it, because if it wasn’t him influencing her now, she was surely going mad. The buzzing grew louder and she lowered herself to the floor. She couldn’t allow any more of his words into her head. Whatever advice he had written to the Pilgrims, she didn’t need it. She opened the center desk drawer from the floor and shoved Nicholas’ letter into it, slamming it shut. And as if the drawer talked back to her, it bounced off its track, collapsed onto the chair, and emptied its contents on the floor.

  “You’re a mess of a God!” Alexandra screamed, as if Nicholas were standing right there. She sifted through the pile of pens, envelopes, rubber bands, for something—anything of value—but it was clear to her that Nicholas had gotten caught up with the day-to-day of power and lost clear sight of the greater picture. How did he still call himself a God with such lost focus?

  Nicholas may have had the time to respond to all the people to silence their fears, but Alexandra refused to be a Goddess who held the hands of her people—she would be a Goddess who taught her people how to hold their own. Under her, the people could rise. They’d be stronger, and smarter, and not send in weekly written complaints. The people of Alaska would be the opposite of victims, become the problem solvers of the world.

  On her hands and knees, Alexandra shoved the rest of the clutter back into the desk, but once she did so, felt a false bottom to the drawer. Dear Nicholas, always the secret keeper. Under the lining of the drawer she pulled the wood free to reveal a small, pathetic, folded piece of paper. She didn’t expect riches or gold, but surely more than a simple note. She carefully unfolded the aged parchment and despite her gentle effort the paper nearly ripped in half. How old was this thing? Every fold went so deep into the paper that she could only see the creases within the document until her eyes focused on the picture as a whole. Could it be?

  A map to the Villa.

  The mythical place Nicholas often referred to but never breathed a word more. He brought the Villa to her, he’d say. She half-expected the Villa to be some private room beyond his library with a secret passage. She looked closer at the map and the placement of the secret location. She never imagined it to be on the most remote island of Alaska. In fact, whenever she searched her mind of ever-expanding knowledge, she sometimes pictured the Villa along the California coast. Sometimes she pictured it within the city limits of Crank Palace in Colorado. But never did she picture it in Alaska.

  On St. Matthews Island.

  Marked with an X.

  How quaint.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rash Decisions

  She kept the fire going that night and let Old Man Frypan rest on the rock closest to the flames. When it was just the two of them left, awake in the middle of the night, Sadina could finally ask some of the questions she felt too silly bringing up during the day. “If Newt wasn’t immune, what makes his family blood so important? Why not Thomas, or Chuck, or . . . you?” She snapped a thin piece of firewood and tossed it onto the flames.

  “That’s a good question.” He stretched his back and looked up at the stars. “Newt was always special. The kind of special you didn’t need to look at nobody’s blood to see.”

  “They chose everyone they studied back then for a reason, right?”

  “They had their reasons.” The ancient man rubbed the back of his neck. “We’re all our own curse and we’re all our own cure. I don’t pretend to understand science, but if you ask me, humans are a lot like these trees . . .” He looked to the woods and then pointed to the cut branches in Sadina’s hand. “Trees have a root system that goes down deep into the earth as wide and vast as their branches above the earth. Often, the roots branch out to weave into other trees. Deeper and more complex than the palms on our island back home.”

  Sadina looked around. She had never thought about roots being intertwined underground. “Ah. There’s too many of them planted here so they fight for their space underground?” She was proud, thinking she’d figured out Frypan’s latest parable, that being overcrowded meant there wasn’t enough room for everyone to grow as tall and strong as they might if they had more space.

  “No, it’s quite the opposite.”

  Sadina felt deflated a little, then proposed the opposite idea. “So . . . the more trees around, the stronger and better they’ll grow?”

  He gave a single nod. “Exactly. See, out here, the more trees that grow together, the better they protect each other from the wind or a big storm. And forests with different types of trees grow better than a forest of just one species.” He pointed across the woods behind them as if to count the variety. Other than the times on the island when storms had blown through hard enough to uproot a couple of palm trees, Sadina hadn’t thought much about species of trees or their roots. It wasn’t her thing. She almost felt bad stacking the cut firewood onto the flames but the colder nights required more warmth. Plus, the fire kept the riff-raff away, as Dominic said. Ever since his bee sting or ant bite, he’d gotten a little soft to the elements.

  “How’d you learn so much about plants?” Sadina asked, but as soon as the question left her mouth she knew. She shook her head. “The Glade.”

  “Yep. There were a lot of trees in the Glade.” Frypan nodded and the fire popped. “And from watching the trees we could see that when one got cut or sick, it healed itself. But it wasn’t truly healing itself. The other trees connected underground to send nutrients to the one in need. The root systems are complicated.”

  Sadina watched Old Man Frypan speak. She was in awe of how much he knew about so many things. Living in the Maze must have been awful—truly awful—but she appreciated him sharing what he had learned there with her.

  “Why didn’t we learn about this in school?”

  He let out a sigh with just a hint of a laugh. She liked that, even if it was because she asked a dumb question. “Island school is for island life. Not enough variety of topics to expand your horizons.”

  “Only in the Glade.” She examined the forest and imagined all those trees connected underground, sharing nutrients with each other as if they held hands through their roots. This made her think of Trish. Maybe she just wanted connection, to fix the parts of her that needed healing. Not every person, or tree, had a love like that—Sadina was lucky. She studied Frypan, who didn’t seem tired at all. “You know what, you’re the smartest person I know.” Sadina smiled.

  “Well, that doesn’t say too much with the characters around here,” he joked. “Nah. A lot of brains in these people. I’ve just had more life experience being my age.” He handed Sadina another block of wood.

  “My mom is educated. But she’s also very stubborn. And her stubbornness gets in the way sometimes.” Sadina still thought about that night when they left the amphitheater and poisoned everyone on the island to escape. Why couldn’t they just tell them the truth, that it was Sadina’s choice to leave and to donate her blood for whatever higher purpose? She loved her mom, but if Sadina were on the town congress she’d have done things much differently. It felt like only damage could result from how they’d left things on the island, like the flames that grew in front of her.

  “Smart people tend to be stubborn,” Frypan agreed. “They know what they know and they don’t want to know what you think you know.” He chuckled. “But that’s why I think the trees can teach us a thing or two. Nature doesn’t need science. Nature does what it does. It’s people who need science to understand nature.”

  She thought that people needed science to understand nature. If her blood was something special that Kletter had searched the whole world for, then maybe she didn’t need to understand all the hows and whys of it. Maybe she just needed to trust in nature and let nature do what it was going to do. Could it be that simple?

  Jackie, Trish, and Miyoko helped carry armfuls of palm leaves and branches aboard the ship. If they’d learned anything from their first adventure on the boat it was this: Jackie did not have the stomach for ocean travel and they could have used something to work the boredom out of their days. Miyoko had the idea to braid and weave palm leaves into mats, blankets, hats, and bowls. Or for Jackie: a puke bucket. Not like they planned to show up in Alaska looking like a bunch of islanders wearing palm hats, but something about the idea of weaving while sailing put Sadina at ease. At the very least, it might keep her hands busy to distract from her anxiety.

  The closer they got to boarding the ship, the more intense Sadina’s nerves got, because despite Minho’s drive to find the Godhead, he actually knew very little about who made up that trio. Every time she asked him, he just repeated the same thing, The Godhead is not what you think it is. Whatever that meant. She didn’t have enough thoughts about what made up the Godhead to even have an opinion about what it was or what it wasn’t—that’s why she asked. Letti and Timon had seemingly known just as much about the Godhead as Minho—absolutely nothing.

  WHOOMP . . . the horn of the Maze Cutter blew louder than any noise Sadina had ever heard a man, animal, or machine make. Except maybe the Grief Walker. The vibration of sound shook her bones as it reverberated within the ship’s deck.

  “Dominic!” Miyoko turned to look for him, but he stood right behind her, a little dazed, himself.

  “Wasn’t me!” he protested.

  “Sorry everyone . . .” Minho poked his head out of the Captain’s room. “I’m just adjusting everything to get all the knobs and whistles figured out.”

  Miyoko glared at him. “Yeah. Take your time. And make a note, that one you just hit was the horn.” Dominic laughed.

  “Thanks.” Minho looked around at those on the deck and the disassembled camp on the beach below. “Everyone ready to go soon?”

  Sadina carried her last sack of belongings down into the cabin. “I’m ready.” She handed her sack to Trish. It was the original pack she’d brought from the island plus a few items she’d collected along the way. Rocks that were sparkly, a stick she used to poke the fire every night, and the special piece of wrapped metal Isaac helped her create on the temporary forge.

  “You’re ready?” Trish asked as she set Sadina’s pack beside her own on the cot.

  “I’m not ready ready, but that’s the last of my stuff.” She wasn’t looking forward to the seasickness and the cold nights out on the ocean without a fire to keep them warm. She knew the road—or the waters—ahead were bumpy. They went back up to the deck.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Dominic patted Minho on the back. “Captain.”

  “Where’s Isaac?” Sadina asked. She didn’t see him in the cabin or on the deck. She looked over the railing and found him still on the beach with his pack standing next to Sadina’s mom and Old Man Frypan. “Isaac, same sleeping spots as before! You’re downwind of Dom. Sorry.” She waited for a laugh but he only looked to Sadina’s mom as if it were up to her what he should do.

  “Can everyone come here for a moment?” her mom asked. Trish followed Sadina off the boat.

  “Stricter rulers for the trip,” Trish whispered, but Sadina had no idea what her mom was doing. Some kind of proper bon voyage send-off or prayer on land? One by one Jackie, Dominic, Miyoko, Orange, Roxy, and then finally Minho—a little peeved—walked off the ship and joined them on the beach.