New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here. If you’re unsure of what just happened after my extended break from the series, you can start from Here (two chapters back) to set the stage again!

We spent a whole day resting in the forest preserve. All of the Wayfinders needed a break, after spending so much time on the move, and even the Naturalists were ready for a breather after the stress of wondering if the monsters would catch up to us for a week. We did some light patrolling, using the cover provided by the forest to keep watch on the area without constantly moving, and were able to finally breathe a sigh of relief when midday came and went without any sign of the monsters.

For Cam’s group of Wayfinders, this was their first hot meal and proper rest in days. For the rest of us, it was a chance to finally settle everything we’d been putting off since we’d fled the depot ahead of the approaching monsters. It was a busy but restful day, marred only by the uneasy silence that occasionally settled over the general susurrus of conversation every time someone mentioned Ben or the monsters. People were still coming to terms with what I’d told them when I’d called everyone together to assign duties after breakfast. All of the Wayfinders had figured it out by then, but the Naturalists had all been surprised.

There’d been a few questions, mostly from the Naturalists, about what had happened, but everyone knew Trace protocol. Though it had been several years since the last major incident, all of the adults knew the stories about the disasters caused by undetected Traces and any of the kids who hadn’t heard them would hear them by the time the day came to an end. I could already hear the questions they whispered to their guardians, so it would not be long before they began blurting them out loud and badgering their elders for as much of the stories as they were willing to give.

Once the immediate and largely practical questions of the adult Naturalists were answered, I’d cut short further discussion until Cam said we were clear of any pursuit. Which is why I spent most of my lunch answering questions again rather than eating. This time, some of the Wayfinders stuck around to listen to what the Naturalists were asking. The Naturalists adults wanted me to spell things out more explicitly right at the start of the meal, while most of the little kids were still busy eating and could be spared the more gruesome and morally complex details. A few of the older ones, all of them somewhere in their teen years, joined the conversation as well, getting to hear all of the above and why I had acted without involving anyone else in the process. The Wayfinders, judging by their eventual questions, seemed more concerned with understanding the thoughts behind my decision than what, specifically, I’d done.

Once all that was finished and the younger children moved to join the growing circle around me, I asked if they had any questions they wanted to ask about the Trace and the monsters and got buried in a deluge of shouted queries. Most of them came from the smaller children, since this was probably their first experience with both. A few of the older kids had questions based on what I’d said earlier, specifically that I needed to act quickly when the Trace was involved. Most of the adults already knew of the Trace, having lived through the early years before we understood it, but I could tell they were a little curious about the specifics and the questions their children were asking. Most people didn’t have direct contact with the Trace, after all, since most who encountered it didn’t survive more than a few days past that moment.

Rather than try to forge a path through the stream of shouted questions, I held up my hands to quiet them. “The important thing to remember is that, back when we first ran into all this stuff, we had no idea what we were doing. The world was changing from one week to the next, new dangers were showing up constantly, and no one could talk to each other like we were used to because, any time you did, you and everyone around you would get attacked. It was difficult to learn new things because you had to learn them for yourself.

“So when the monsters first showed up, it took a long time for people to learn about them. Usually, like is still true now, unless you were with the right kind of people who had the right kind of gear and weapons, you wouldn’t survive. Now, we have the Wayfinders and the Enclaves. We have people who know how to travel safely, who can carry information from Enclave to Enclave, and who can create safe homes that can’t be detected by the monsters and can survive The Blizzard. We Wayfinders are used to carrying data drives around, from Enclave to Enclave, updating everyone’s libraries and research information so that everyone can keep track of what everyone else is doing.

“Only by sharing things like this have we been able to survive as well as we have. Back then, though…” I sighed, trying to avoid letting the memories pull me back too deeply. “We only learned from the mistakes we survived.”

As I took a moment to focus on what I was going to say next, Elder Brianna caught my eye and nodded her head at the children gathered in front of her. It took me a moment to realize what she meant, but I immediately changed what I was about to say when I did. It wouldn’t do to give the children the same nightmares most of the adults still lived with, after all.

After another deep breath, I carried on. “The Trace was probably the thing that took us the longest. By the time we started encountering it, all of the green had faded. There was snow everywhere. Instead of the seasons we were used to, we just had this endless cold. We’d mostly figured out how to survive the cold and how to hide ourselves in it by wearing heavy clothing that captured our heat, so the monsters started shooting people in a way that seemed to only hurt them, rather than kill them.

“Since we always tried to save anyone we could, we’d take these injured people back to our bases, our hideouts, what remained of our cities, and then, not long after that, the monsters would show up to kill everyone. As it turned out, those bullets they shot would break apart once they were inside you and start to grow into a little beacon that would call for the monsters that had created it.” I glanced up at Brianna, looking for an indication of whether or not I was providing too much detail but she seemed lost in her own memories, so I pushed on.

“It took a while for us to figure out what was going on. The Wayfinders were just starting out then, with mostly just me, the other officers still present, and a few of our other friends. We weren’t called anything then, but we were known for being able to travel, for finding lost people, and for helping the scientists and doctors talk to each other over a long distance. We didn’t have any of the records that we do now, so if a hospital or research lab was destroyed, we only knew what the people who escaped it could remember and that usually wasn’t a lot. It took a few years, but we did eventually figure it out, once the Enclave system had started.

“The first person they tried to remove the Trace from was one of the first Wayfinders, a person named Tyler who belonged to my group. We showed up to the Eau Claire Enclave with some information from the Chicago Enclave and an injured companion who’d been shot with one of those new bullets the monsters were using. We didn’t call it The Trace, then, since we were still figuring out how the monsters found us. We just thought our friend was injured.”

I relaxed my shoulders, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath, steeling myself against the memories. “Tyler had been shot in the foot, through his boot, and we’d rushed to the Enclave since they had a good hospital and we’d only encountered two monsters, which we’d killed. We figured that, if they couldn’t follow us, we should be safe.

“While they were trying to fix his foot, they found the Trace and saw it grow before their eyes, turning from a small series of tendrils into something bigger.” I bit back the words I usually said next, about how it had replaced his entire circulatory system even as the doctors tried to remove it until they were faced with the choice of continuing to remove it and killing him or letting it grow unchecked and seeing what would happen. After another quick breath, I carried on. “The doctors couldn’t do anything to remove it, so they patched Tyler back up and decided to ask Tyler what he wanted to do when he woke up. Before he could, only a couple hours after we’d left Tyler at the hospital and carried on with our mission to the Minneapolis Enclave, the Eau Claire Enclave was attacked by monsters and destroyed.”

I took a beat, to watch everyone’s faces, and saw a few hands pop up into the air. Rather than ask what they wanted to know, I filled in the gap for them. “The only reason we knew what happened is because Cam, the other Captain in our group here, stayed behind with their friend and managed to escape safely when the Enclave fell. Lots of other people escaped, too, but most of them  made it out with the injuries they’d gotten from the monsters. Lots of them bearing The Trace and not knowing it.

“Cam was the first one to put together that the thing the doctors found in Tyler was sending out a signal that any monster could follow. After seeing all that, and how the other survivors of that attack were hunted down like the monsters could see them from afar, Cam realized what was going on. When they caught up to us, they told us everything and we turned around to help as many of the people running from the Eau Claire Enclave.

“Out of the fifty groups we found in that next week, we only managed to save a dozen people. So many people had gotten hit with the trace and more of them got hit every time the monsters caught up to us. It was this horrible experience that taught us that the only way to stop the trace is to remove it immediately. To cut off the blood flow and remove the injured area as soon as possible.” I glanced up at the adult Naturalists and saw looks of horror and revulsion on their faces, likely a result of them remembering similar events from their lives during those early years.

I took a moment to pause, clear my mind, and examine the reactions of the Naturalists in front of me. Most of the adults looked upset or at least bothered by what I’d shared, but a few of them looked skeptical. It was not uncommon for people to think that there’s no way I could have been there for all that, on the front lines this entire time. A few of them just looked upset that I’d shared even this much lighter version of events with their children. Still, I’d avoided the worst bits. The stories of what I’d witnessed, the calls I’d had to make about how to treat people, the things I’d done to try to save people.

When it looked like no one else had more questions they were willing to ask right then, I spoke a little longer about how all of that had influenced my decisions with Ben. About how we’d only barely managed to avoid them by being faster than the monsters expected and by splitting up our group so they couldn’t hit more people with the Trace. We’d gotten lucky and, by the time I realized what had happened, it was too late to do anything to save him.

“Even after all these years, there’s still no way to fix the Trace. All we can do is stop it.” I smiled sadly, and shrugged my shoulders. “And sometimes, when you’re in charge of protecting people, you have to do something you really don’t want to in order to make sure as many people as possible make it out alive. I’m good at acting swiftly when those things happen, at deciding what to do and getting it done. That’s why I’m in charge and that’s why I’m not going to ask anyone else to do my work for me. It’s my responsibility.”

After that, I had a couple minutes of silence as the children thought over what I’d said, talked to each other, and talked to their guardians. A few had more questions, mostly clarifications about something I’d said, but eventually even those faded away until all that remained were the intermittent and barely tangential interjections from one of the younger Naturalist children. After a couple more minutes of pensive silence interrupted by stammering, meandering questions that were mostly fielded by the children’s guardians, I finished my lunch and told them all they could ask me more questions as they thought of them. When I got no response, I accepted the heavy silence of the adults and the somewhat confused silence of the older kids as I stood up and walked away.

No one showed up to ask anything that afternoon, though I did see a few of the teenagers pause what they were doing and look my way long enough to suspect they’d been told not to bother me. It made sense that the adults would want more time to process what had happened, but I found it a little surprising that the Naturalists seemed to be trying to shield their children from this unfortunate but incredibly important aspect of surviving outside the Enclaves.

The Wayfinders kept mostly to themselves since more than a few of them were mourning and rationalizing the loss of someone they’d trusted. They just needed time to grieve and, for most of them, to get enough sleep that all of this could sink in. The Naturalists, though, seemed to be struggling with the fact that they were, once again, coming face-to-face with the brutal world outside of their old home. It was a lot for anyone to deal with on a normal day, much less so soon after losing so many people to the Cultists.

I wasn’t exactly going to push them to talk about it, either, since I was busy trying to stop thinking about the look stuck on Ben’s face as I’d tossed him into the loose snow in the amphitheater. The only person who came to talk to me that afternoon was Cam, who spent most of the conversation fuming at not having noticed that Ben’s group was always the one getting attacked. 

The only person who didn’t seem preoccupied by it all was Tiffany, but she could tell that not everyone was up for her grim and somewhat fatalistic approach. Once Cam was done fuming, Tiffany joined them in figuring out new guard and scouting rotations, with Lucas looking on in bemusement. When the three of them were done with that, she moved over to where Natalie was pouring over her maps and watched as our navigator planned the remainder of our route now that we were done rushing eastward. I watched her move from job to job, doing her best to stay busy, and it was only once I threw myself down in an exhausted heep in my tent after darkness forced me to wrap up my labors that it occurred to me that she’d probably been trying to keep too busy to think just like me.

The next morning, as we set out again, Natalie pointed out that there was a waystation not that far from our proposed route. She suggested we use it as a better shelter for the night so we could maybe clear a few of the injured folks once I’d had a chance to look at them in better conditions. Cam also pointed out that we needed to leave word of the monster attacks and trace events everywhere we could along our route, so we wound up having a pretty short day. It only took a few hours of hiking to get there, not even our full morning, but no one seemed to mind a chance to rest some more.

The converted warehouse we stopped in was empty except for the customary Wayfinder maps and a few scattered supplies that Natalie told us to leave for a smaller group. We had enough to get to the Chicago Enclave, even if we moved at half pace the entire time, and there was little risk of that. The general restless energy that settled over the warehouse made it clear that everyone was excited about being done with this horrible trip.

By the end of the day, the only person I was able to clear was Lucas. Tiffany’s stump seemed to be healing fine, so I told her to keep up whatever level of activity she felt comfortable with. I refused to return her to full duty, though, and we had a small argument about how capable she was, which was only settled when I told her that she could do whatever administrative and logistical work Natalie agreed to give her. Unfortunately, the other two injured Wayfinders hadn’t made nearly as much progress as Tiffany seemed to be making. Her injury was something that left most of her body in fine working condition while the other two had to remain seated in order to avoid straining their abdominal injuries, so it wasn’t exactly a perfect comparison.

The two of them seemed to be doing fine mentally, but this much inactivity would get to anyone eventually. When I managed to clear a space that Jaz, our tallest Wayfinder, could stretch out while I examined hir abdomen, I took my time about it. Ze was able to move around on hir own at camp, but I made sure to help ze to the table and then gently lay hir down to avoid requiring hir to put any strain on hir gut. As I did, I smiled. “Good thing I’m so dense. Otherwise you’d probably just pull me over.”

Jaz rolled hir eyes and smirked. “I’ll ignore the bad joke. It’s not often I get to admit that I look up to you, Captain.”

I chuckled and gestured for Jaz to untuck hir shirt so I could get to work. As I checked the bandages, only a few small spots of blood from where the strain of spending time during our flight on rearguard had pulled at hir barely-healed stitches, I looked over at hir. “How’re you feeling now that we’ve gotten a chance to breath after all that business?”

Jaz took a deep, slow inhale and then blew the breath out through pursed lips. “I kinda liked it better when things were tense. Though, you know, I wish it’d been any other kind of tension.”

I nodded, shifting my attention back to checking Jaz’s stitches for any further tearing. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“I just miss having something to do other than think.” Jaz sighed again. “I mean, I know you made the right call, Captain, but it just sucks that we were betrayed by one of our own, you know?”

It was my turn to take a deep sigh and then nod as I spread a little antibacterial gel on the wound. “Yeah. I wish it had gone a different way.”

“Sure.” Ze nodded. “You were absolutely right, though. As soon as you and that little asshole split off, they stopped showing up. That, plus a bit of a whisper started by Tiffany meant that almost every single one of us figured out what had happened a while before you showed back up. I don’t think any of us were surprised when you came back alone.”

I applied a new bandage to Jaz’s abdomen and jumped in, trying to pump the brakes on the tirade I could hear building in hir voice. “Still sucks, though.”

Ze paused, mouth open, and then nodded. “Yeah, it sucks, but it’s also difficult to feel too upset, though. No one really knows the whole story, of course, but the results speak for themselves. Tif says she doesn’t really remember a lot of what happened during the lead up to her amputation, so she wasn’t able to tell us more than that he’d been hit. That’s enough to know, though. Ben got hit, lied about it, and we got chased for days since the Trace couldn’t even do us the courtesy of killing that little self-centered cretin.”

I didn’t say anything as I taped the bandage in place on Jaz’s stomach, not trusting myself to speak as I remembered the emotions that had raced through me when I realized what Ben had done and ignored Jaz’s grumbling as it dropped in volume until I couldn’t make out specific words anymore. Once the bandage was firmly in place, I gestured for hir to pull down hir shirt and then helped carefully lift hir back onto hir feet.

As we stood there, Jaz seemed to realize that I’d been silent for a while and put an arm on my shoulder. “Sorry, Captain. I don’t think you need to listen to me rant about Ben. I know it was a difficult call to make. A difficult job to do.. I mean, that little asswipe was one of my friends before he chose himself over all of us. I was a part of his Wayfinder certification exam three years ago, after all. But he betrayed us. He not only put his life ahead of the group’s, but risked everyone’s life to do it.”

“You don’t need to comfort me.” I sighed and looked up at Jaz. “I know what I did was right and that this could have been avoided just as easily as Tiffany’s was if he’d followed procedure. Sure, he’d have lost more arm than she did, but he’d have been able to retire with full benefits. He could have had a life still.”

Jaz gave me an encouraging smile and shoulder squeeze. “Now, am I clear?”

“No.” I shook my head ruefully. “Not by a long shot. Sit down, though.”

Jaz gingerly lowered hirself into the chair I’d gestured at. “What’s up, doc?”

I rolled my eyes and settled into a comfortable lean against the table Jaz had just vacated. “Just the usual questions. You know the drill. You’ve been inactive for a while and just about anyone can tell you’re getting frustrated.”

“Yeah, sure.” Jaz rattled off a bunch of answers quickly, preempting all the questions I’d memorized based on recommendations from one of the last psychiatric practices in what remained of the midwest. I got it updated ever few years, but since it was supposed to be a screening thing, most of the Wayfinders had gone through it many times by now. Especially the Wayfinders who had been around as long as Jaz had.

When ze was finished, I made hir repeat hir answers again, this time after I asked the corresponding questions, making sure ze was taking time to think through the questions as I asked them. When that didn’t turn up anything new, I got the feeling that I either needed newer questions or to use this mental health screening quiz less frequently. I took a moment to study Jaz’s face and hir intensely relaxed posture.

“It’s just taking longer than you think it should because you got older.”

“Excuse me?” Jaz blinked, surprised.

“You’re probably one of the ten oldest Wayfinders, Jaz. Not quite as old as me and the other officers, but older than most. Few make it to your age without getting killed or retiring. The stress of this life and the need to push through the pain already slows down healing and leaves some injuries in a state where they never quite fade, especially the ones from before we started getting some physical therapy stuff in our medical training. Throw in your body’s decreased ability to fix itself as you get older and it makes sense that what should have been a fairly routine abdominal tear a decade or so ago has turned into something that will need some serious recovery time.”

Jaz looked at me blankly for a couple moments before nodding begrudgingly. “That…” Ze sighed. “That makes sense. Hell, I feel like sitting on that sled is making my joints stiffer just because I can’t do as much to keep them loose as I used to. All this sitting around in the cold is making me feel every one of my forty-seven years.”

“Then think of this as a recovery season. It just had the bad luck of starting horribly, super far from an Enclave. You’ll rest a bunch, rest some more when we get to the Chicago Enclave, and then, after the next Blizzard, you’ll be right as rain.”

Jaz nodded, hir eyes looking off into the distance. As the silence stretched on, I relented in my fight against my internal monologue and gave voice to the thought rattling around my own mind. “Or retire.” When Jaz looked over at me, shaken out of hir contemplations, I shrugged. “You’ve earned your full retirement package, and more besides. Chicago always needs good people.”

Jaz’s attention drifted away, but this time there was a frown on hir face. When the silence drifted on a bit longer, I added “it’s not like you’ve gotta decide now. Or even any time soon. You’ve got at least a month before The Blizzard starts up again, maybe more, and we definitely won’t be leaving the Chicago Enclave until after that since we’re going to need to do a bunch of restructuring to fill in our ranks before we can take any more big jobs.”

By the time I stopped talking, Jaz’s frown had disappeared. “I’ll think about it, Captain. Thank you for talking me through this. I know you don’t much like to talk about folks retiring, so I appreciate that you put the thought out there.”

I shrugged again, this time as a way to hide my discomfort. “I just want to take care of my people. And you’re one of my people, Jaz.”

Jaz held out a hand and I grabbed it, hoisting hir out of hir chair and back into a standing position. As ze moved toward the door, ze paused and carefully turned to look back at me. “I’m only saying this because you started it, Captain, but I hope you’re considering your advice just as much as you’re asking me to.”

I didn’t say anything, not sure how to respond as emotions roiled through me in an uncontrollable storm. After a minute, I managed to make myself nod and that seemed to be enough for Jaz. Ze walked out of the room and I could hear hir voice from just outside. “Might want to give the captain a couple minutes, Hughie, but then he should be good to go.”

I spent that time cleaning up from Jaz’s treatment and preparing for Hughie’s. Hughie had more injuries than anyone else, with tons of small puncture words from shrapnel, a fractured leg, a  few cracked ribs, a bad bullet wound that had just barely missed his stomach, and a concussion. Unlike Jaz, Hughie probably wasn’t ever going to be cleared for active duty again, not unless all his bones healed straight despite how long it had taken me to get to him back in the Cultist base.

Having something to do that required me to focus helped clear my mind, so I called Hughie in only a few minutes after Jaz had left. When Hughie limped in, I gestured for him to lay down on the table and got to work. After a quick undressing, I checked on the mostly-closed shrapnel wounds. They’d been spread out his entire body, but they weren’t very deep so I was confident there was nothing still lingering in any of them at this point. I couldn’t do much for his broken leg that I already hadn’t, so I just moved to checking his ribs.

While I was doing all this, Hughie just lay there on his back, starting up at the lantern I’d hung about his head. Usually he kept up a string of conversation, cracking jokes and hissing in pain every time he laughed enough to put pressure on his broken ribs, so my concern grew as I worked my way through changing bandages, checking wounds, and preparing another little bottle of pain meds.

As I counted out pills, I finally broke the silence. “What’s going on, Hughie?”

I heard a small scuff noise as Hughie shifted in place, but he didn’t start talking right away. I let the silence hang for a bit while I finished with his pain medication and started packing up the supplies I hadn’t used. Eventually, as I went to grab the chair I’d set Jaz in, Hughie broke his silence. “He was my friend, Captain.”

I paused, silent, halfway into the chair, but didn’t say anything when I eventually sat down. I could hear in his voice that Hughie had more to say.

A few seconds later, he carried on. “I know why you did what you did. I don’t even think it was the wrong choice, by then. It’s hard to process it because we’d shared a tent for a while there. I wouldn’t have thought…” Hughie lifted an arm to his face and brushed at his eyes as he continued to stare at the lamp hanging above him. “I didn’t… I expected better of him.”

I nodded, staying silent, even though he couldn’t see me, and he carried on. “I just… also expected more from you, I guess. I mean, I know you are the one calling the shots. That’s why we’ve got a chain of command, after all, so everyone knows who to listen to when there’s no time to explain… But couldn’t you have checked with someone? Talked to someone? Anything other than just taking him away to be dumped who knows where for the monsters to find and… do whatever they do with corpses.”

Hughie placed both hands over his face and sighed into them, all of his steam starting to run out. “I know, Captain. You needed to act before he figured it out. I know. I remember the procedure. I just… I wish it could have been different. That things could have been different.” When he lifted his hands away from his face, I could see they were damp. He seemed to see that as well and chuckled wetly. “Lot of that going around, lately. Wishing things could have been different. I just thought we’d left all the death behind, finally. But I guess not.”

I got up from the chair, walked over to where Hughie lay, and put a hand on his shoulder. I gave it a small squeeze and, when he didn’t say anything or pull away, I said “me too, Hughie. I’d give just about anything except our lives for things to have been different.”

“You coulda told someone, Captain. You didn’t need to make us find out the hard way. You could’ve left word.”

“But I didn’t. That’s not an excuse” I added, as his shoulders stiffened, “just the reality of the situation. I made the best decision I could at the time. If he got suspicious about why he was being pulled away, he could have fled. He could have gotten someone else hurt. I figured out what was going on and I acted on it immediately. At that point, waiting any longer would have been irresponsible. We were all so tired. We couldn’t have fended off a full attack.”

“Yeah.” Hughie gingerly pushed himself into a sitting position, brushing my hand off as he did. “Doesn’t make me any happier, or all this any easier. If that’s all, Captain, I’m going to go.”

I got up as Hughie shuffled to the end of the table and pushed himself gingerly to his feet. As I stood before him, he looked away, not wanting to make eye contact. I suppressed a sigh and just held out the refilled pill bottle. “No more than two at a time, no more than once every six hours. You know the drill.”

Hughie gently took the pills from me, nodded, and limped out of the room, all while refusing to make eye contact. Mulling over his expression and what he said had me caught up in my own head as I cleaned the room, as I did a supply recount with Natalie, and as I sorted through the medical supplies for what was still good and what had gone bad. Only as the sun began to set was I able to drag myself out of my reverie.

That night, as we all ate a warm meal and enjoyed being out of the wind, I paid more attention to the undercurrents of the group. Most of the Wayfinders shared Jaz’s opinion. This was one of the few ironclad rules of the Wayfinders, after all, and it was on me to enforce it no matter what. No matter who. Most of the Naturalists and a few scattered Wayfinders shared Hughie’s opinion, that maybe I should have talked to someone first. Word had, by then, gotten around to everyone about what Tiffany had told me, so they knew that I had drawn a conclusion rather than acted on irrefutable evidence. It didn’t seem to help much, though, since most people already accepted that it had needed doing and just didn’t like that I’d acted so unilaterally.

When I went to bed after dinner and listened to the conversations happening outside my tent rather than go to sleep, most of the conversation revolved around my decision. There were a lot of hypotheticals tossed around, even by those who didn’t have an issue with what I’d decided or how I’d decided it. What if I’d been wrong? What if Ben had just been exhausted by everything that had happened? It wasn’t until afterwards that Cam had put together that the group getting attacked by monsters had been Ben’s group, so I must have acted without that knowledge, which had apparently been a core part of how the group had put together what was happening enough to ask Tiffany for her story. A lot of them agreed that it was an awfully big step to take on what seemed like shaky reasoning, even if I’d turned out to be right.

I thought for a while about going out to say something again, maybe try to start another discussion since it was clear that no one wanted to bring it up formally, but the entire camp had gone to bed for the evening before I’d made up my mind, much less figured out what to say. I didn’t particularly want to talk about it, either, since I just kept seeing the pleading look on Ben’s face every time I thought about it. Hughie’s tear-streaked face popped up occasionally, too, every time I thought about how I could talk to the Wayfinders who had been close with Ben. Nothing I came up with ever seemed good enough to face them.

This was only the fourth time I’d had to execute someone. Even if I’d written this rule and been witness to all the blood it was written in, I couldn’t shake the way it made me feel like I’d given up on hope. Losing as many people as we did to just two groups of Cultists had been a blow, but they’d all gone down fighting. Everyone who had died had been on their feet, refusing to go down without doing everything they could to survive. Everyone had known what we were getting into and thought it was worth their life to protect not just the people with us, but everyone who would pass along the routes we used afterwards. Ben, though, had been acting selfishly and I’d just killed him.

When Cam, Natalie, and Lucas came in to make plans, I glanced over at them, but didn’t say anything. The three of them were talking about our path to the Chicago Enclave and I had enough on my mind. Plus, between our logistical officer, our head scout, and our battle commander, I figured they had it pretty well covered. Natalie shot me a look every so often as the three of them talked, like she was expecting me to butt in at some point, but I just lay where I was, on top of my sleeping bag, and tried to figure out what I should say to the group until sleep eventually claimed me.