“Watch your mouth. What do you know of it anyway? You’re a child,” Tris said.
“A child with eyes and a brain. Don’t take much else to see what’s going on,” Randy said.
Tris slumped, her bluster gone. “No, I guess it doesn’t,” she said.
“You think they found anything out there? Peter and my ma, I mean?” Randy said.
Tris didn’t answer at once. She stared at Randy for a long moment, then looked out on the crowd, then up at the star filled sky. “I don’t know. I believe in the gone world. There’s too much evidence right here on Respite that proves it. All the Eco salvage. Now, I’ve also learned over the years that stories grow and fade not with the level of their importance or truthfulness, but with how well and often the tales are repeated. So whatever the gone world was, it was probably much different than we’ve been taught.”
“Did you want to go?”
Tris rubbed her eye where a tear threatened to leak out, but she said nothing.
“You wanted to go. You did, but you cared about Hazel more,” Randy said. He looked for Hazel and found her watching him and Tris, a weird smile painted on her face. “Did Hazel ask you to talk to me? Tell me to leave her alone? Because if she doesn’t like me and doesn’t want me around, I’ll stay away.”
Tris said nothing.
“Yeah, so as long as you can’t answer that question, I’ll continue to do what I think is right, and your father can piss off,” Randy said.
He tried to walk away and Tris grabbed his arm. “Don’t think that because I’m trying to be nice to you that you can disrespect me, or my father, Randy Hendricks. Apologize for what you said before I drag your pa into this.”
“Go ahead. Good luck with that.”
Tris’ grip loosened and pity filled her face. That look of sorrow that everyone gave him. That look that said “neither of your parents gives a shit about you.”
Ben stepped in front of Hazel and rolled his finger at Tris. She sighed and said, “Just remember what I said, OK?”
Randy looked away but didn’t nod.
The crowd churned and drank and ate. The moon rolled overhead and one by one the people of Respite, survivors and descendants of survivors from the Oceanic Eco, an environmental adventure cruise ship that had traveled around the world to exotic places, began to shuffle home to Citi or their hovels. Randy had a hard time believing it despite the pieces of the Eco in the surf, but if not that, what? An experiment like sacred text Divergent? Were they lab rats? Were people observing him right now with something called a camera, watching pictures that traveled through the air? In this he understood his mother, and felt the pull to leave Respite. To see the gone world and whatever was out there.
As the last stragglers left the Womb, Randy pretended to leave, but backtracked. Two fire guards were on duty, but they sat before the Perpetual Flame. One was asleep and the other looked drunk. He kept tipping to the side and almost falling every few seconds. Randy snuck past them to the Hampton Infirmary and stood before the hole where the pillar had been. There was a bamboo cover atop the hole to keep people from falling in, but there was a ladder and the tunnels his mother and Hazel’s father had found were used for storage and meat curing.
He lifted the bamboo trapdoor and made his way down the ladder. He had no light, and the darkness was complete. He stood in the silence, listening to the wind whistle above, the singing of the insects and the answering complaints of birds and frogs. He felt safe. Confined.
The tunnel lit up above and Randy looked up to see Hazel’s face silhouetted in the torchlight.
Chapter Thirty-one
Year 2076, Fort AP Hill, Virginia
The day was blustery, cold, and miserable. Dark dirty-white clouds filled the sky, and more snow fell, trillions of tiny spears of ice draining her energy. Milly trudged through the snow, stepping in Ingo’s footprints, but still sinking deep into weeks of accumulation. They’d been forced to leave the remains of the road because an old land bridge had collapsed, leaving a thin valley and a stream to traverse. Tester and Tye believed the bridge had been intentionally destroyed because there were blackened pieces of metal and concrete that had been ripped apart, most likely by explosives. Jerimiah confirmed this, saying the squires… greenies, destroyed many things in the final days to keep people from moving around and maintain order.
“We’re not far now,” Jerimiah said. “I’ve come this way many times.”
Wolves howled in the distance, and Milly checked her Glock. She’d managed to hold onto the weapon, and that thought made her reach for the axe Peter found when they’d first landed in Mexico. It hung from her belt, and she rested her hand on its head. She intended to give it to Hazel if she ever saw the girl again. What must the child think of her? In Hazel’s mind, Milly stole her father, hurt her mother, and there had been bad blood between her grandfather and Milly’s deceased mother. Their families were like a jumble of rope and fishing wire tumbled by the sea, tough as rock and impossible to untangle. Ten years of Hazel brooding surely hadn’t helped the situation, and Randy had been infatuated with the girl since she popped out.
She hadn’t seen Larry in days, and Pepper and Turnip were looking the worse for wear. Turnip’s fur was matted and dirty, and Pepper was a white and gray mess, her two black eyes barely visible in the sea of hair. With the thick covering of snow on the ground, Turnip
