These woods stretch all the way to the dunes, and the newly formed beaches where the waters rose. After the string of natural disasters, people learned from past mistakes and stopped trying to rebuild near the oceans or on old floodplains. Now the waters rise naturally in the spring, spilling over from the rivers and the oceans and onto land like the woods we’ve been hiking through all night.
The nearest town or city isn’t for miles, the old ones swept away years ago, the highways and roads rebuilt farther inland. We are in the middle of nowhere out here, lost in a wilderness where there used to be none.
“We’ll stay long enough to get cleaned up,” Wes says. “We could all use new clothes, if we can find them.”
Twenty-two opens her mouth, but shuts it when Wes gives her a look. She scowls and keeps her hands firmly on her hips, though she follows us through the last few feet of the pine forest. At the edge of the old lawn there is a tangle of weeds and brambles to cross, and they pull at the ruined silk of my dress, scratch the swollen skin of my ankles. After the protection of the woods, it feels overly exposed in this small clearing, and we sprint as we push through the long, untamed grass of the forgotten yard. The barn door is at an angle, and we slip through just as dawn breaks against the edge of the trees.
Inside it smells like sweet hay and dry wood and the musky, warm scent of horses, though the barn is long empty. The caved-in wall is on the right side, resting on the wooden beams of the old animal stalls and letting in light through the splintered boards. It’s a large space, with a hayloft above our heads and a tack room in the back. I can see a strip of darker wood that runs near the floor—the flood line, where the water rose, and still rises in the rainy months. The way the color fades as it gets to the top reminds me of the rings on a tree, a slow marking of time.
“If there are clothes, they’ll be in the back,” Wes says.
“I’ll look.” I walk forward, the heels of my sandals sinking into the soft dirt floor. Wes moves to follow me, but Twenty-two holds him back with a hand on his arm. It is the first time she has touched him not in character as Bea, and I stop, frozen, unable to look away from where she curves her fingers into his mud-spattered black jacket.
“Come on.” Tim stands beside me. “I want to see if they have any medicine.”
“Fine. Let’s look.” It is such a small thing, her hand on him, so why does it make my chest hurt so much? I touch the exposed skin near my collar, remembering a time when Wes’s pocket watch would have swung there. It was the only thing that he had from his old life, from his family, who died or abandoned him so long ago. When he first gave it to me, I knew that he loved me. But then he took it back in 1989, and I was no longer sure of anything.
I turn, knowing Wes is watching, but then Twenty-two whispers something and he whispers back. Tim and I are already too far away to hear.
The tack room is on the left side of the barn, spared from the fallen roof. We push open the door to see a small workbench, a cot, a set of drawers. The walls are lined with old tools—a rusted scythe, a saw with rotting wooden handles. Propped against the wall is an old shotgun.
Tim picks up a box of shells on the desk. “At least we’ll have a weapon we can use.”
I find clothes in the drawers: old workpants, T-shirts, moth-eaten sweaters. This room must have housed a field hand at some point. Judging by the size of his clothes he was around the same build as Wes. There are also two pairs of scuffed boots tucked up underneath the cot, and a boxy TV sits on a milk crate in the corner. It is not a plasma, not a hologram, not even solar powered, and I wonder if maybe this place was abandoned long before the flooding.
I find a bottle of rubbing alcohol in a chipped enamel cabinet on the wall. It will have to be enough; there are none of the modern 2049 bandages that automatically clean the wound and knit the skin back together, eliminating any risk of infection. Tim stands next to the high bench, finally letting go of his elbow and laying his left arm flat on the rough wood. The gash there is deep, running the length of his forearm. The bleeding has stopped, but it has not scabbed over yet, and the wound is still a deep red, the color of ripe cherries. I rip up an old T-shirt and soak a strip in the alcohol. It stings the small cuts that line my wrist. When I start to clean his arm, Tim grits his teeth, his hand clenching into a fist then opening over and over.
There is dirt caked in the open wound and I carefully pick out the larger chunks with my fingers. “Was this from the crash?”
“I think from when the door was pushed in, but I don’t really remember. It was hazy.”
“You didn’t black out?”
I glance up to see him shake his head, his thick neck barely moving. “You were the only one who did. The impact was right on your side.”
“It felt like I was being crushed.”
“You were.” He is silent for a beat. “Eleven was worried.”
“Was he?”
