"Oh. I'm sorry, David."
"At least they're alive."
He looked into her eyes, and Tally saw that his panic had faded.
"So, Tally, do you still want to go after them?"
"Yes, of course."
David smiled. "Good." He sat next to her, looking back at the house and shaking his head.
"It's funny, Mom always warned me that this would happen. They tried to prepare me the whole time I was growing up. And for a long while I believed them. But after all those years, I started to wonder. Maybe my parents were just being paranoid. Maybe, like runaways always said, Special Circumstances wasn't real."
Tally nodded silently, not trusting herself to speak.
"And now that it's happened, it seems even less real."
"I'm sorry, David." But he could never know how sorry. Not until she'd helped save his parents, at least. "Don't worry, we'll find them."
"One stop to make first."
"Where?"
"As I said, my parents were ready for this, ever since they founded the Smoke. They made preparations."
"Like making sure you could take care of yourself," she said, touching the soft leather of his handmade jacket.
He smiled at her, rubbing soot from her cheek with one finger. "They did a lot more than that. Come with me."
In a cave near the house, the opening so small that Tally had to crawl inside on her belly, David showed her the cache of gear his parents had tended for twenty years.
There were water purifiers, direction finders, lightweight clothes, and sleeping bags-by Smokey standards, an absolute fortune in survival equipment. The four hoverboards had old-fashioned styling, but they were fitted with the same features as the one Dr. Cable had supplied Tally with for the trip to the Smoke, and there was a package of spare belly sensors, sealed against moisture. Everything was of the highest quality.
"Wow, they did plan ahead."
"Always," he said. He picked up a flashlight and tested its beam against the stone. "Every time I came here to check on all this stuff, I would imagine this moment. A million times I planned exactly what I would need. It's almost like I imagined it so much that it had to happen."
"It's not your fault, David."
"If I'd been here-" "You'd be in a Special Circumstances hovercar right now, handcuffed, not likely to rescue anyone."
"Yeah, and instead, I'm here." He looked at her. "But at least you are too. You're the one thing I never imagined, all those times. An unexpected ally."
She managed to smile.
He pulled out a big waterproof bag. "I'm starving."
Tally nodded, and her head swam for a moment. She hadn't eaten since dinner two nights before.
David rummaged through the bag. "Plenty of instant food. Let's see: VegiRice, CurryNoods, SwedeBalls, PadThai…any favorites?"
Tally took a deep breath. Back to the wild.
"Anything but SpagBol."
Tally and David left at sunset.
Each of them rode two hoverboards. Pressed together like a sandwich, the paired boards could carry twice as much weight, most of it in saddlebags slung on the underside. They packed everything useful they could find, along with the magazines the Boss had saved.
Whatever happened, there would be no point in returning to the Smoke.
Tally took the river down the mountain carefully, the extra weight swaying below her like a ball and chain around both ankles. At least she was wearing crash bracelets again.
Their journey would follow a path very different from the one Tally had taken there. That route had been designed to be easy to follow, and had included a helicopter ride with the rangers. This one wouldn't be as direct. Overloaded as they were, Tally and David couldn't manage even short distances on foot.
Every inch of the journey had to be over hoverable land and water, no matter how far it took them out of their way. And after the invasion, they would be giving any cities a wide berth.
Fortunately, David had made the journey to and from Tally's city dozens of times, alone and with inexperienced uglies in tow. He knew the rivers and rails, the ruins and natural veins of ore, and dozens of escape routes he'd devised in case he was ever pursued by city authorities.
"Ten days," he announced when they started. "If we ride all night and stay low during the day."
"Sounds good," Tally said, but she wondered if that would be soon enough to save anyone from the operation.
Around midnight the first night of travel, they left the brook that led down to the bald-headed hill, and followed a dry creek bed through the white flowers. It took them to the edge of a vast desert.
"How do we get through that?"
David pointed at dark shapes rising up from the sand, a row of them receding into the distance. "Those used to be towers, connected by steel cables."
"What for?"
"They carried electricity from a wind farm to one of the old cities."
Tally frowned. "I didn't know the Rusties used wind power."
"They weren't all crazy. Just most of them." He shrugged. "You've got to remember, we're mostly descended from Rusties, and we're still using their basic technology. Some of them must have had the right idea."
The cables still lay buried in the desert, protected by the shifting sands and a near-total absence of rainfall. In spots, they had broken or rusted through, so Tally and David had to ride carefully, eyes glued to the boards' metal detectors. When they reached a gap they couldn't jump, they would unroll a long piece of cable David carried, then walk the boards along it, guiding them like reluctant donkeys across some narrow footbridge before rolling it up again.
Tally had never seen a real desert before. She'd been taught in school that they were full of life, but this one was like the deserts she'd imagined as a littlie-featureless humps stretching into the distance, one after another. Nothing moved but slow snakes of sand borne by the wind.
She only knew the name of one big desert on the continent. "Is this the Mojave?"
David shook his head. "This isn't nearly that big, and it isn't natural. We're standing where the white weed started."
Tally whistled. The sand seemed to go forever. "What a disaster."