Dr. Patel reveals a radio from his belt, and as he speaks, his voice projects through the room. A loudspeaker. "Dr. Kunkle please report to the infirmary. Dr. Kunkle to the infirmary."

"Who is Dr. Kunkle?" I ask once his voice stops echoing.

"He is our resident botanist. He will show you around."

"Why a botanist?"

"You said you had a garden. You used the possessive pronoun my, so I assume gardening is a passion of yours. Am I correct?" I nod, feeling uneasy by how easily he read me. "Then you'll have that in common with Dr. Kunkle."

The beeping sounds return on the other side of the door before it opens. In steps a short, skinny man with shaggy hair the color of dried mud, and thick rimmed glasses resting on his pointed nose. He can't be much younger than Mom, but his eyes look like they've lived an entire lifetime already.

"What's up Patel? I'm in the middle of testing my seed potencies."

"It can wait. This young lady here is Scout Finch."

Dr. Kunkle crosses his arms over his chest and smiles. "Okay...?"

"She doesn't trust that I'm telling her the truth that the Deathless won't hurt her, so I'd like for you to show her around a bit."

"Dude, really?" he asks, and I smile for the first time since waking up. It's funny to hear such casual language from a scientist. I always imagined scientists as very serious people. "That's why I'm here? Why don't you get Nate to do it?"

"Nathan is busy working on our project, and Scout is a budding botanist."

He looks at me, brows raised. "Really?" I nod, and he sighs. "Okay, I'll show you around. But it has to be quick, I have work to do."

"That's fine," I say. "I don't want to leave my mom for very long anyway."

I hobble toward him, still limping. "Ah, jeez," he says, watching me walk. "Patel, don't you have a wheelchair around here? We can't have Scout limping all over the place." I smile at him as Dr. Patel retrieves a wheelchair from another room just outside the door, and he smiles back. Dr. Kunkle's smile is thin, like his lips, but at least his eyes are narrow enough now that I can hardly notice how hollow they appear. He pats the seat of the chair when Dr. Patel returns, and helps me to sit, his bony fingers guiding me. "Better?" he asks.

"Yes, thank you," I say, still smiling. If he had questioned me in the first place, I might not have lied about my name. With Dr. Kunkle, I feel at ease, but maybe that's the point. This could be a trick. I have to keep my guard up, at least until I see what's going on here.

He wheels me out of the infirmary and down a long cement hall. Exposed glass bulbs glow on either side of the rounded walls, and we pass door after metal door, each with words painted on them: physics, mechanics, chemistry, and biology.

"This is the hall of laboratories," he says.

"All of these are labs?" I ask. I always felt like a scientist in the greenhouse, and I think about how much Daniel would have loved this. I try not to feel sad wondering which lab he'd like better, mechanics or physics, but I frown. He would have found a way to work in both. He was always an overachiever like that.

"Yep, these are all labs. We're mostly scientists here. Just a bunch of nerdy rebels," he jokes.

I let myself laugh a little. "Dr. Patel said you all broke away from the government."

"Oh, yeah. We finally figured out all the crap they were doing and decided to start our own organization."

"Like what? What were they doing?"

"Um, like the collector droids, for example. We realized they were using them to gather together an army of people instead of collecting specimens for us to study. And one of the scientists there started doing some weird stuff with genetics and neuroscience that we wanted nothing to do with."

"So if you all didn't save me from the collector droids I would have been in the government's army?" I ask, hoping that maybe that's what happened with Daniel so that at least he's still alive.

"No, probably not," Declan says. "You probably would've died. That's another thing: They don't care that most of the collector droids bring back dead people and specimens. We made those upgrades for ventilation." He sighs. "When the people housing you don't care about preserving life, you start to wonder how long they'll care if you live or die."

We near a set of doors at the end of the hall. "Well, up ahead we have the patio. Want to see it?" He doesn't give me a chance to say anything before he answers himself. "Well, I guess it's part of the tour, so...." He lets his words trail off as he pushes the double doors open and wheels me outside beneath an overcast sky. "This is the patio. And through those doors ahead of us are the dormitories and the cafeteria. Want to see?"

The wind feels warm against my skin. "No," I say, "I'd like to stay here. This is nice." I lift myself from the chair and hobble over to the barred balcony.

The land is hilly, much more so than back home, and trees blanket the earth. The Immortal is easily 50 feet tall, and its silver body stretches at least as long as our farm does, or did. Circular windows spot the side in five rows, probably signifying five floors. Beneath the balcony are huge black letters that spell out "Immortal" along the body of the tank, and below that are the massive wheels that crush anything that comes in our way: trees, rocks, it doesn't matter.

I think of all the people who must be on board and smile. We're not alone. If we stay, I wouldn't ever need to worry about being alone again. One less thing to be afraid of.

The tree line breaks in the distance ahead of us. "What's that out there, Dr. Kunkle?" I ask.

"Call me Declan. And that was a city. See how the trees just before the gap are kind of slanted?" he asks, leaning toward me and pointing toward the city.

"Yeah?"

"That's from the sonic wave that followed the bombs. I think that is—was—the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh." As the Immortal continues, we near the area of the gap, and I watch as it opens onto the destruction. At the point of three muddy rivers is a black, scorched city of metal skeletons and rubble. Everything around it is flat and darkened. It looks a lot like DC.

Every year around early autumn, Dad and Ben would hike to and from DC. For a long time they wouldn't let Daniel and I come with them, and they wouldn't tell us why they were going. Finally, last year, we went with them. When we reached DC and saw the blackened earth and crumbling monuments up close, Ben finally told us why we were there.

"My brother Jacob and Todd's family left for DC," Ben told us. "They never came back. We do this trip each year to try to find them. Even if we just find remains to bury."

As I look out over the blackened gap where Pittsburgh once stood, I wonder if there are any survivors searching for their loved ones in the rubble still or if we were the last to hold onto hope.

Declan joins me at the balcony and leans his arms against the railing, staring at the old city. "I went there once to visit a friend. It was a nice place."

"What happened to your friend?" I ask.

He doesn't say anything, but I know what the answer is. His friend is somewhere there, in the ash still left over.

"Is that why you're here with the Deathless? To make up for what you've lost?" I ask.

He swallows hard. "Well... no, I've been with them since the beginning. I was one of the scientists preserved in the bunker. I believe in what we're doing. I think the President should be stopped, but getting revenge is always nice too."

"What's the government's cause?"

"They did all of this to lower the population, so they could make a new race of humans. One that wouldn't screw up as badly as we did. They're using survivors to help them rebuild, and taking their DNA to create perfect human specimen. Of course, we didn't know this, and we worked for years under the impression that we were going to be saving survivors and creating a world from the ashes, not building over them. All of us scientists created machines for them, first the collector droids to collect plant and animal samples for testing and reproduction within our labs—"

I can't help myself or the volume of my voice: "You created the Prowlers?"

"The what?"

"The droids! Those machines took everyone I knew and loved."

"Well, not me specifically," he stutters. "But that's why we left and formed the Deathless. We're the good guys here, Scout. Or whatever your name is."

I take a deep breath to calm myself down. It's not his fault. I need to be fair. "Sorry I yelled," I say. "It's been a really crazy few months. It's tough to take it all in. I thought my mom and I were alone, and then I thought I would be alone."

"Well, that's another great thing about the Deathless. You're never alone. There's always someone around to check on you," he says sarcastically. He looks out over the edge of the balcony and sighs. "You want an honest impression of the Deathless?"

I nod. "Yes, please."

"I know I'm crazy lucky to be here, I do. But sometimes it sucks. I don't have any friends or family left, and you could probably tell from Patel and my interaction that I'm not taken very seriously here. It's tough being a scientist when no one respects your work."

"I know what you mean," I say. I remember how Dad stopped including me on runs, and always sent Daniel with me when I left the house after the rabbit incident. He meant to be nice, to take my feelings into consideration, but he made me feel weak instead. "My family valued hunting, and I was the vegetarian gardener."

"You're a vegetarian?" Declan asks, smirking a little.

A familiar wave of defensiveness rolls through me. "Yeah. Surviving is hard enough as it is, I don't want to contribute that. Everything deserves a fair chance to survive. So I figured out which vegetables I could plant to get the same amount of protein as my family did through the meats they hunted. Dad thought I needed to kill to survive, so I proved him wrong. I'm sure the family thought that choosing to be vegetarian was stupid of me, and maybe you do too—I get it, survivors can't be choosers—but we all have our ways of living with the apocalypse. That's mine."

"No, I don't think you're stupid," he says. "I think you're ballsy." Declan looks away, and I smile to myself. "Were they collected? The rest of your family?" he asks.

"Yeah," I say as calmly as I can. "At the worst possible time too." I take a deep breath, watching the blackened city shrink on the horizon. "Okay... I think I'm ready to go back to the infirmary now."

"You don't want to see the cafeteria or dormitories?" he asks.

"No," I say, "I'd just like to get back to my mom now."

He helps me back into the wheelchair and pushes me toward the hall of labs, but pauses just before the doors. "You know, you can feel safe about staying if that's what you want. Plus, if you leave, it'll be even harder for you and your mom out there. You're both hurt, and it's not safe out there."

I nod without looking back at him. He's right. Besides, if we leave, who's to say the Prowlers won't just collect us again?

"Also, you can trust your real name," he says, pushing open the doors. "Obviously it isn't Scout Finch, but I admire your choice in literature."

He wheels me back to the infirmary. It isn't smart to trust him, but he's like me—we're both plant people who feel powerless—so I decide to tell him my name. "I want you to know first. I trust you to tell me if I should tell Dr. Patel or not."

"Okay...?" He stops the wheelchair.

"My name." I check to make sure no one else is around, and he comes around to face me. "My name is Isla Blume."

He opens his mouth, but doesn't make a sound until: "You're the girl the government is looking for."