Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

prologue

SPRING

When Abby Anderson dreamed, she dreamt of Salt Lake City, Utah.  It was her home, an old zookeeper’s residence on the outskirts of town, nestled in the middle of an abandoned zoo.  Back in Utah, she spent her days working closely with her dad, Jerry, to protect the local wildlife, to bring ailing animals back to health.  She loved watching her dad work, loved seeing how his face lit up every time an animal was able to stand on their own legs again.  She loved the feeling of a zebra’s muzzle pressing against her shoulder in appreciation, seeking comfort.

Abby hadn’t felt that type of comforting feeling one time since arriving in Massachusetts.  She and Jerry had made the cross-country trek a few months back, accompanying one of the leaders, Marlene, on what essentially felt like a wild goose chase.  The way that she had explained it one night was that she had made a vow to a friend, a former Firefly, that she would protect her daughter. 

“It got away from me,” Marlene had explained in the darkness of a vehicle on a pitch-black highway, somewhere in the middle of Nebraska.  She hadn’t been speaking to Abby, not directly, but Abby had overheard the conversation from where she’d been curled up in the corner of the van that they had been fighting like hell to keep running with a book open against her knees.  “Life always gets in the way, but I’ve always kept in contact with her school in the QZ.  They said they haven’t heard from her.  They don’t know where she is.  If something happened to her… if I wasn’t there to protect her?  I don’t know if I could forgive myself.”

Jerry had been quiet for a moment, and Abby found herself holding her breath as she tried and tried again to focus on the paragraph in front of her.  She didn’t know much about the girl that Marlene was talking about – actually, she didn’t know who she was talking about at all – but she found herself deeply invested in what had happened to her ever the same.  “You didn’t know,” her dad finally explained.  “You’re half a world away.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Marlene’s voice was wracked with guilt.  It was unusual to hear Marlene, someone who was always so damn sure of herself, so sure of everything , filled with so much doubt, so much guilt.  Quietly, Jerry reached over and laced their fingers together in the middle of the console.  He kept one arm comfortably draped over the steering wheel, but all his focus stayed on the woman beside him.

They hadn’t exactly told anyone that they were together, but Abby wasn’t stupid.  Nobody in their Salt Lake crew was blind enough to not see what was happening between the two of them.  She’d lost her mom when she was ten, and Marlene had always been there for her.  She knew nobody could ever replace her mother, but at the same time, she knew that Marlene was the closest to a mother figure that she had.  If she made Jerry feel loved, then what else really mattered?

They’d arrived in Massachusetts about a week after that conversation, and Marlene’s every waking hour in the days following had been solely dedicated to finding Ellie .  That was her name.  Ellie.  She had been Anna’s daughter, and from what Abby had gathered, Anna had been Marlene’s closest friend in the Fireflies.  She’d died after giving birth to Ellie, after being bitten, and Marlene had promised her that she would take care of her daughter.  Ellie had been enrolled at a military academy in Boston, and Marlene had been keeping tabs on her through letters sent back and forth between one of the wardens.  Why Marlene would ever be okay with Ellie training with FEDRA was beyond Abby, but maybe Marlene had thought it was the safer avenue for Ellie than to grow up around the Fireflies.  Admittedly, it would have been nice to have someone closer to her own age to grow up with.

There was Owen, Abby supposed, but he was a few years older than her and had always been more interested in following in her dad’s footsteps than spending time with Abby.  Abby having an actual friend – what a concept!

There were some Fireflies holed up in old brick lofts on the top floors of a few warehouses in Boston, and that was where they had been staying for the past few weeks. When she had first learned of the trip, Abby had stuffed at least ten paperbacks into her rucksack.  Her dad had barked out a laugh when he’d realized what she had done, pressing a kiss to the top of her head and assuring her that there was: “Nobody quite like you out there, Abigail Katherine.”

Every time he full-named her, she was torn between feeling annoyingly infantilized and feeling a deep ache in her chest at her middle name being her mother’s first.

It was late at night when she heard a sudden banging coming from the kitchen.  She sat up with a start, finding her copy of Wuthering Heights resting on her chest, her finger serving as a bookmark.  She didn’t know what time she had dozed off; all she knew was that Heathcliff was a ridiculous name for a character.

She grabbed the scrap of newspaper she’d been using as a makeshift bookmark, shoving it between the pages and pushing up off the mattress with a start.  There was a dim light glowing from the hallway, and she could hear her dad’s distinct snoring from across the room, so she knew the source of the sounds had to be Marlene.

Pushing the door open the rest of the way, she found Marlene rummaging in the spaces between the kitchen and the living room, grabbing her belongings in a hurry.

“Marlene?”

Marlene’s immediate reaction was a startled gasp, hand pressed to her chest, before she met Abby’s gaze in the soft glow of her lantern.  “Abby.  Sorry, did I wake you?”

“What are you doing?” Abby asked quietly.  “What time is it?”

“I got a call from a few Fireflies that work security detail just outside the QZ,” she explained, tone equal parts distracted and determined.  “He said there was a run-in with some infected at a mall on the outskirts, and there were a couple girls involved.  One of them…” her voice cracked then, and she swallowed thickly.  “One of them matches the description I have of Ellie.  They didn’t intervene, so I’m going to investigate.”

Abby’s eyebrows rose.  “Is that safe?”  Even as she was asking the question, she found herself moving across the room and tugging on her boots from where she’d kicked them off by the door.  If Marlene was leaving, Abby wasn’t about to let her leave on her own.

“I have to see this through, no matter how safe it is,” Marlene responded, shucking her bag over her shoulder.  “I owe it to Anna.”  There was a heavy weight anchored to the end of her words.  She paused when she saw Abby waiting for her by the door.  “What are you doing?”

Abby rose her eyebrows, giving her a pointed look.  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Marlene pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes for a moment.  When her eyes lifted, when her gaze met Abby, Abby saw how tired she was.  How scared.  She saw how little fight there was left in her after all this time.  Before she was able to counter, to tell Abby to stay back with her dad, Abby was shoving the heavy door open.  “I’m going with you.”

The sun was beginning to rise over the ghost-town that was once Boston, Massachusetts by the time they arrive at the mall.  It was a decrepit building, covered in overgrowth and ivy, all cracked walls and faded graffiti.

“Where do you think they are?” Abby asked as they hopped the large stone fence and their feet crunched into the dying earth on the other side.  Before Marlene could answer, there were two sounds that happened in rapid succession: shattering glass and a scream.

“There,” Marlene answered, nodding her head up, in the direction of the sound.

It took some maneuvering to reach the roof of the mall, using the occasional sounds as their guide to get closer and closer to the source. 

An unmistakable, bone-chillingly familiar groan splintered off the walls, and Abby and Marlene froze.  She saw the look of fear flicker across Marlene’s face, the way her fingers trembled as she reached for her gun in its holster.  They were too late.  They were too late .

Another grunt followed, but this one was undeniably more human than the last.  Marlene hoisted herself up the ladder, and Abby quickly trailed her.  The roof of the mall was littered in broken pots and shattered shards of glass bottles.  In the corner, there was a girl with auburn hair pulled into a ponytail.  She was trembling, a shiv in her shaking hand.  She had smears of blood on her cheeks, mixing in with the dried tear stains and dirt.  Her chest was heaving, and her mouth was moving like a motor was controlling it.

“What did I do?” she whispered.  And then, again, in agony.  “Fuck! What did I do?”

She didn’t see Abby and Marlene approaching, her eyes glazed over and focused on something off to the side.  Abby turned, seeing a recently turned runner covered in quick, messy stab wounds.  At least three to the chest, one against her collarbone, and another in her temple.

The girl’s eyes lifted, landing on Abby and Marlene.  She raised her hands in surrender, in fear, and everything that followed happened very, very quickly.

She had a bite, shiny and swollen and impossible to miss on the inside of her arm.  Marlene’s gun lifted autonomously, and Abby’s eyes widened.  They were too late.

“Ellie,” Marlene’s words came out thick and terrified.  A lifetime of regret in two whole syllables.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Ellie cried out.  It was almost like she didn’t even register that there was a gun pointed directly at her, all she could do was tremble.  Her eyes flickered back to the runner on the ground before appearing on the knife in her hand, which she quickly dropped.  “I didn’t know what to do,” she repeated, curling herself up tightly into a ball.

“Marlene,” Abby forced the words out.  “What do we do?”

Abby had grown up inside a secure nest of Fireflies, yes, but her encounters with infected had admittedly been few and far between.  It had just been in the past year that she had convinced Jerry to let her go out with the older Fireflies on missions and raids.  Admittedly, she wasn’t the most comfortable person when it came to wielding a weapon, but she was a great shot and had been spending more and more time lifting weights, running miles, trying to do anything to grow stronger .  Seeing a newly infected runner dead on the ground while another almost runner was shaking across from them?  She didn’t know what the protocol was in that situation.  She didn’t know what was supposed to happen next.

This was Ellie .  Everything that Marlene had been doing these past few months had all been leading up to her, to this , and now, they knew that it had been too late.  This was something that Marlene was going to have to carry around with her.  Abby felt a pinch in her gut, wishing that she had woken up her dad before they’d left, wishing that he could have been here, too.

Ellie’s eyes lifted back up to Marlene and Abby, and after a moment, a new look flickered across her face.  Her eyebrows furrowed, green eyes widening after a beat in a moment of recognition.  On wobbly legs, she stood.  “M-Marlene?”

Her name leaving Ellie’s lips caught Marlene off guard – Abby could tell by the way the gun trembled in her hand.  She took a step backwards as Ellie took one forward, and Marlene remembered herself after a moment and kept the gun locked forward, pointed right at the young girl across from them.  She looked to be only a couple years younger than Abby, all round face and freckles and terrified eyes.  Her hands shook as she kept them held up in surrender, the universal symbol for showing someone else that you mean no harm.

But how could that be possible when there was a fresh bite on her arm?  When she was just seconds or minutes away from being another runner on the ground?

“You know my name?” Marlene asked, and Ellie nodded quickly.

“I have a picture of you,” she said hurriedly, damn near stumbling over her two feet as she reached for the backpack she’d thrown to the side.  She lifts the flap, pulling out comic books and a flashlight and a small water pistol before landing on a small journal.  She opens it up, pulling out a picture that’s wedged between two pages.  She stepped closer to Marlene and Abby, holding the picture out to her.  “My mom,” Ellie said softly as Marlene gingerly takes the picture from her grasp, “there’s a note from her on the back.”

Abby kept her gaze on Ellie for only another moment before her curiosity got the better of her, and she found herself looking at the scrawled writing on the back of the photograph.

This is Marlene, the cursive read, and she will keep you safe. 

When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.

Marlene flipped the picture over in her hands, tracing her fingers along the image staring back at her.  It’s Marlene, younger, her hair long and braided and her arms wrapped tightly around a girl who looks an awful lot like the one standing in front of them right now.  Marlene’s gaze shifted back up to Ellie, and Abby noticed that there were tears pricking at the corners.  She swallowed hard, taking a tentative step backwards.  She gestured down to the runner at their feet.  “They bit you.”  She doesn’t ask it like a question, because she doesn’t need to.  It’s obvious.  The runner bit Ellie, and Ellie did what she had to do, even if it was too late.

But Ellie shook her head.  Quickly, furiously.  “No,” she argued.  “No, w-we… we both got bit,” her words stumbled out of her.  “We were supposed to ride it out together, lose our minds together, but…” Her eyes welled up with tears, face screwing into a tight expression, like she could tell that there were eyes on her and didn’t want to show them any sign of weakness.  The heels of her hands pressed into her eyes and she shook her head.  “And she’s gone .”

Abby looked from the runner back to Ellie.  “Were you bit at the same time?”

Ellie nodded, wordlessly.

Most of what Abby knew about the outbreak, about the way that cordyceps fungus spread, was from medical journals that she’d read in the hospital back in Salt Lake City.  She knew that it happened slowly, and then all at once.  She’d read that the closer to the brain the person was bit, the faster the infection spread.  One glance at the corpse on the roof told her that the runner was bitten on their hand, not too far away from the bite on Ellie’s arm.  But they had already turned.  They had turned, and they had attacked, and they were dead.  And Ellie… Ellie was just here .  Shaking, crying, but alive .

Marlene frowned, slowly breathing in and out for a few moments.  “I promised Anna that I would look after you.”  Her words are labored, as if each one might be the wrong one.  The gun that she had left idle in her hand rose once more, pointing back at Ellie.  “I have to keep my word.”

“ Marlene ,” Abby’s words came out in a burst, came out before she could stop them.  Her hand gripped onto Marlene’s shoulder.  “Marlene, she hasn’t turned.”

Marlene laughed, but it was dry and cold.  It didn’t have any lightheartedness attached to it.  “She hasn’t turned yet , Abby.”

Ellie’s eyes darted around, taking a step closer.  “Marlene–”

Her voice was swallowed up by Abby’s own.  “ Marlene ,” Abby repeated.  “You told her mom that you would keep her safe.”

“This is keeping her safe,” Marlene argued, and she cocked the gun into place.

Abby doesn’t know how to explain the events that followed.  If she didn’t know better, she would have thought that she had merely been watching the events unfold in front of her, rather than being the person responsible for acting on them.  She felt like she was floating on the outside parameters of the roof, watching herself step between the gun and the girl positioned in front of it.

Marlene’s eyes widened in horror, looking back at Abby and surely seeing the ten-year-old version of her staring back at her, the six-year-old version who was obsessed with telling everybody in the Fireflies camp about the sea lion she’d spotted.  “Abby, what are you doing?”

“I…” Abby’s adrenaline began to dampen, replaced with a panicky feeling tight in her chest.  “I don’t know,” she breathed out after a moment.  “But, I don’t think you’ll forgive yourself if you do this.”

Marlene looked from Abby to Ellie and back again.  The grip on the picture in her other hand tightens, and she takes a frustrated step back, shoving the gun back into the holster.  “I can’t do this,” she breathed out, and Abby finally allowed herself the chance to exhale.  She looked back at Ellie.  “This isn’t how your mom would want you to go,” she whispered, tears catching on her words.  “I don’t know what to do.”

Was it more humane to let her turn, or to put her out of her misery here and now?

Ellie looked down at the bite on her arm before looking back at them.  “I don’t know why I haven’t turned,” was her response.  “I don’t… how-how does this work?”

Marlene took a step away from her, moving over to a cinder block and taking a seat on top of it.  She kept her hand poised on her gun, leaning her head back.  “I don’t know,” she said quietly.  “I guess we just wait and see.”

Abby swallowed hard, looking down at her feet before looking back at Ellie.  Ellie, who was looking right back at her.  So quiet she could hardly hear it at all, Ellie told her, “Thank you.”

Abby didn’t know if she could say, ‘you’re welcome,’ and truly mean it.  “I did it for Marlene,” was the response she managed after a moment or two.  “Not you.”

But she didn’t know if she meant that, either.

Time passed, but they didn’t leave the roof.  They stayed sitting above that mall as the springtime sun shone brightly overhead.  Periodically, Marlene would ask Ellie a question.  Not a personal one or anything like that, but a math or science or geography question.  She was testing her mental faculties, seeing if the cordyceps infection had spread into her brain.  Some of the math questions left Abby feeling like she was the one with a fungus mutating her frontal lobe, but maybe she was just bad at math.

The springtime sun made way for sunset, and nothing changed.  Dusk covered the city in hues of pinks and blues, and Ellie paced back and forth.  “What is taking so long?” she asked, frustrated, as if she was anxious to turn.  Abby, briefly, thought of the Sword of Damocles, the idea of eternally waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the sword to pierce through you.

“Dad is probably wondering where we are,” Abby breathed out after a few more moments passed, and Marlene let out a quiet breath and nodded in agreement.  But, what did they do about Ellie?  Did they just leave her here?

Abby had heard rumblings – as all Fireflies had – of people being bitten and not turning.  Of some sort of mythological immunity.  Her dad had researched it late into the evening, studying cases from around the world.  There was nothing concrete that confirmed that such an immunity existed, or what that immunity could mean as a whole.

Could Ellie be that piece of immunity?

Abby felt foolish for even considering the possibility for a fraction of a second.

It was getting dark outside as Marlene pushed herself up off the block.  Her hand stayed hovered over the holster like it was a safety blanket before taking cautious steps toward Ellie.  “You can come with us,” she said after a moment.  “We’re going to keep an eye on you.”

Ellie blanched back at her, looking at her with a curious look on her face, like she wasn’t sure if she should trust her or not.  Granted, considering that Marlene had spent the greater part of the day with a gun focused on her, Abby didn’t know if she necessarily could blame her for that distrust.

“I promised your mom that I would look after you,” Marlene finds herself repeating her own words again.  “I keep my promises.”

Ellie nodded after a second, taking a hesitant step in their direction.  A moment later, she paused again.  “But, what happens when–”

“–if anything happens,” Abby cut her off, “we’ll figure it out.”

The word “ if” seemed to catch Ellie off guard.  And if the flicker of concern across Marlene’s face was any indication, it caught her off guard, too.

Ellie made the journey with them back to the warehouse, Abby shrugging off her jacket and passing it wordlessly to Ellie to keep her arms covered.  “If people see it, they’ll kill you,” she said pointedly.  “People don’t ask questions before they act.”

“I know,” Ellie said, shoving her arms into the sleeves.  After a second, she looked back at her.  “Thanks.”

Marlene walked a few steps ahead of them, making sure that they quietly slipped around dark corners and out of the eyes of FEDRA.  It was well past curfew, and being caught out at this time – being Fireflies , no less – would get them each a bullet straight through the skull.

Ellie’s hands stayed shoved into the pockets of the hoodie, keeping her head low.  Abby caught herself looking at her, a thousand questions at the tip of her tongue, but none of them able to make it out.  She could count on one hand the number of interactions that she’d ever had with someone close to her own age, and she’d never been a particularly chatty person to begin with.

“Does it hurt?” she finally asked quietly as they ducked behind a few newspaper dispensers, keeping away from the spotlights positioned atop the tanks in the street.  “Your arm?”

Ellie paused, as if she had to take a moment to consider whether or not she was in pain.  After a moment, she shook her head.  “Not really,” she admitted.  “No.”

It took a while to get back to the warehouse district, climbing up dumpsters and across ledges before nearing the window of the loft.  There were a couple candles lit inside as they pushed the large glass window open and tipped back inside the room.

“Abby!” Jerry’s voice spilled out, hurriedly enveloping his arms around her into a hug.  “Abby, I almost had a heart attack.  What the hell were you thinking?”  After a moment, Jerry’s eyes rose to where Marlene and Ellie stood, and he slowly dropped his arms from around his daughter and took a step closer to Marlene.  His gaze shifted between Marlene and Ellie, before landing on the former and raising an eyebrow.  “Marlene?”

Marlene jerked her head to the bedroom.  “Can we talk?” she asked him quietly, fingers encircling his wrist and dragging him off before he had a chance to properly answer.

Ellie rocked back on her heels for a moment, not moving from where she stood, and Abby moved into the kitchen.  There were bread rolls that had been left for them from a woman a few apartments down, and they still seemed soft enough to eat.  Abby tore one in half, offering the larger piece to Ellie.  “You should eat something.”  She took a bite out of it a moment later, in case Ellie needed convincing that the bread wasn’t a ploy to poison her.  It was stale and dry on her tongue, and she swallowed hard as she pushed it down.  “It’s really good.”

“Is it?” Ellie snorted, and the corners of her mouth twitched, but only for a second.  She took the piece of bread from Abby, and bit into it.  She chewed (and chewed and chewed) before swallowing it down and popping the other piece of it into her mouth greedily.  Her stomach growled loud enough that Abby was half-convinced that Marlene and Jerry could hear it from the other room.

Ellie’s fingertips curled against the hem of Abby’s jacket sleeves, looking down at her scuffed up sneakers for a moment before looking back up at Abby.  “It doesn’t hurt,” she said quietly, voice laced in disbelief.  “What do you think that means?”

Abby shook her head, because there wasn’t much else that she could do.  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly, softly.

Ellie’s teeth bit down into her bottom lip, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.  For a moment, everything between them was slow and still and eerily quiet.  And then, Ellie reached for her right sleeve and shoved it up.  Abby thought back to the time that she’d skinned her knee on the pavement when she’d been chasing down a runner last summer, how it had ripped the skin clean off.  Every time she’d pulled her pants on or off, she’d winced at the contact of fabric moving over ruptured skin.

Ellie didn’t wince as she pushed it up.

The skin was red and angry, but didn’t look as wet or raw or bloody as it had this morning.  In fact, it looked the way that Abby’s knee had looked after the first week.  It looked like it was trying like hell to heal.

Abby’s heart was a boulder between her ribs, sinking lower and lower into the pit of her stomach.  “Holy shit,” she breathed out, having to stop herself from reaching out and touching it.  She didn’t know how the infection spread, and she didn’t think it was from touching an open wound, but she didn’t necessarily want to risk it, either.  

The door to the bedroom opened, and Jerry and Marlene stepped back into the loft.  Jerry gave Abby a tight smile before taking a few steps closer to Ellie.  “Ellie,” he said softly, “my name is Jerry.”  He looked down at her arm, head tilting in wonder.  It’s the same look his face had held when he’d helped a deer whose hoof had been caught in a rabbit trap.  Like he was looking at something, someone, that he hoped he could save.  “Do you mind if I take a look at your arm?”

Ellie shook her head, holding it out to him.

The room was quiet.  Jerry pulled on a pair of gloves, dabbing around the surface of Ellie’s skin and asking her if it hurt.  Ellie shook her head, and he asked her a few of the same questions that Marlene had asked her earlier in the day.  Math equations, scientific facts, geographical terms.  Memory retention.

“Unbelievable,” Jerry exhaled after a few more moments of poking and prodding, taking a few steps back and removing his gloves.  He looked back at Marlene.  “This… this could be really fucking big, Mar.”  When he looked back at Ellie, Abby could’ve sworn there were tears sparkling in his eyes.  He repeated himself, softly, a whisper of disbelief.  “Really fucking big.”

Days passed.  There were always two people watching Ellie – Jerry or Marlene from a safe distance, Abby recklessly closer.  They didn’t speak much, and Abby didn’t know if it was from her own awkwardness or Ellie’s standoffishness, but it didn’t really matter.  What mattered was that nothing was changing.  What mattered was that she wasn’t changing .

Jerry and Marlene had several hushed conversations over the next few days, stepping away from the girls and looking at Ellie the way that Abby imagined people used to look at shiny new items through store windows.  They looked at her, and they saw possibilities.

Ellie spent her days in the loft, stir crazy as a cat on a leash.  She sat on the corner of the couch in the living room, eating stale cereal straight out of the box and thumbing through the few comic books that she had shoved into her backpack. 

“Is that good?” Abby asked after a couple days, and Ellie glanced up at her like she wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

“The cereal?” she asked incredulously, and Abby laughed despite herself.

“The comic book.”

“ Oh ,” she said sheepishly, and the smallest trace of a smile appeared for a moment before it vanished again.  She lifted it up, showing Abby the tattered cover.  It had a girl on it, clad in a black space suit.  There were multicolored flares shooting out from behind her, and she appeared to be floating in orbit.  On the cover, it read SAVAGE STARLIGHT .  “Riley grabbed them for me.”  Her voice caught on the name, and Abby spent the next few moments internally debating if she should ask who Riley was.

Before she had the chance to do anything of the sort, Jerry and Marlene appeared in the living room.  Marlene’s hands were resting on her hips, a power stance if Abby had ever seen one, and Abby wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

“Ellie,” she said slowly, carefully, stepping closer to her and sitting down beside her on the broken-down couch.  Her eyes fluttered back to Jerry, who was standing beside Abby, and they lingered there for a moment.  “We think…” she shook her head after a moment, like the words were impossible to say, “we think there’s a very good chance that you’re immune,” she said softly.  “And we want to find out what that means.”

“ Immune ?” Ellie echoed with raised eyebrows, jutting her arm out between them.  “This…?  You think this makes me immune ?”

“We can’t know for sure,” Marlene added a moment later, “but we want to see if that… if that could mean that there’s hope for a cure.”  She took Ellie’s hands in her own, squeezing them tightly.  “If you are our hope for a cure.”

Her eyes landed back on Jerry, as questions flooded from Ellie’s mouth one after another.  Marlene answered them as best as she could, but all Abby could focus on was how carefully Marlene was navigating her answers.

All she could focus on was the fact that whenever she looked back at Abby’s dad, she had an indisputable look in her eyes.

It looked like guilt.

Chapter Text

summer

BOSTON

“I’m not a baby, you know,” Abby argued, stalking across the loft to where her dad and Marlene were slinging gear over their shoulders, knowing full well that stomping and arguing was doing nothing to prove her maturity in this instance.  “I know how to fight and I know how to hunt.  I’ve been training .”

“Abby, I already told you that the answer is no,” Jerry countered, turning and shooting her a look that was equal parts frustrated and desperate.  “Just stay here.  These guys are no better than mafia goons, they could be dangerous.”

“What around here isn’t dangerous?”

“Abby, listen to your dad,” Marlene lamented.  She gave a nod in Jerry’s direction, jerking her head from his direction to the door that led out of the loft.  “I’ll be outside.”  One more small smile at Abby before she was heaving the metal door open and stepping out.

“Stay back with the kid,” Jerry told her, his voice a steady, but pleading, tone.  He gestured his head across the loft, to where Ellie was sitting with a copy of Savage Starlight open in front of her.  She had a stale breakfast pastry in her hand, the discarded foil wrapper dropped at her side.  Abby’s stomach churned at how disgusting that had to taste, but couldn’t help but wonder what kind of battery acid had to be in the filling of the pastry to make it still be in one piece after so many years.  Maybe it was better off not knowing.  Desperate times calling for desperate measures, and whatnot.  “She needs you more than we do.”

Abby knew, rationally, logically, that her dad didn’t mean anything hurtful by the comment, but it still made her stomach pinch ever the same.

For the past couple weeks, Marlene and Jerry had been working tirelessly to find a way to get all their ducks in a row to get Ellie back to Utah.  Abby wasn’t sure what they were waiting for, but it seemed like there was always another conflict popping up just when it was almost time to leave.

If the nervous looks that Marlene sent in Ellie’s direction whenever she didn’t think anyone was looking at her were any indication, Abby couldn’t help but wonder if maybe it was some kind of blessing in disguise that they had yet to make it outside of the Quarantine Zone.

“Who are these guys, again?” Abby asked.

“Robert and his cronies,” Jerry explained drily.  “Robert’s always getting into some sort of shady shit, but Marlene thinks he might have some sort of con–”

His words are cut short, interrupted by the sound of gunshots sparkling through the hallways outside.  “Shit,” Jerry stutters out, taking a few large steps backwards.  He held up a cautionary hand toward Abby.  “ Stay here ,” he insisted.  Abby wanted to grab at him, tell him he was being stupid for going after her when there were gunshots filling the empty space, but she knew it would be fruitless to argue with him.

He shoved the door open and the heavy metal creaked on its hinges before he slammed it shut behind himself.

“What the fuck is that?” Ellie asked, and Abby turned to see her standing behind her with panic blooming in her eyes.  “What’s going on?  Should we go out there?”

“And do what? Get shot at?” Abby scoffed, even though every instinct inside of her was fighting against itself to not be outside in the apex of it.  She wasn’t strong enough, and she hated feeling like that.  She hated seeing everybody around her becoming trained soldiers and fighters while she still felt like she was scrambling to keep up.

It wasn’t even that she liked fighting.  She actually fucking hated it.  She hated the idea of matching violence with violence, felt sick to her stomach whenever she encountered a dead body or a bloody wound.  She saw enough of it just from helping her dad in impromptu operating rooms – she couldn’t imagine being the cause of any of it.  At the same time, though, she hated feeling like she wasn’t doing a damn thing to help.  Helplessness felt like a disease she could never quite shake, and right now, it was gnawing at her from the inside out.

Ellie was pacing back and forth.  “This is my fault.”

“ How ?”

“I don’t fucking know, Abby,” Ellie countered.  Her personality had been coming out in spurts over the last few weeks, and Abby felt more drawn to her every time she heard her talking less like the scared child that she absolutely was, and more like the hyperactive teenager she also absolutely was.  “Maybe because of this .”  She waved her arm uselessly in Abby’s direction.

“Does it feel okay?” Abby asked, which was the same type of question she’d been asking for the better half of the past eighteen days.  Eighteen days .  Finding Ellie on that rooftop had felt like another lifetime ago, even though it had only been a matter of months.

“Same as it did this morning,” Ellie replied, giving her a tense half-smile.  “Kind of like a scab.  Tight skin, a little sore.  Nothing like… nothing like the bite probably feels for everybody else.”

Abby felt queasy at the thought.  She had been born into this - born into the Fireflies, born into looking for the light and fighting off the bad guys.  More and more, it seemed like the real monsters were never the physical monsters at all.  The real monsters were always the cruelty of mankind.  The infected were just another piece of the puzzle.  And yet, the idea of anybody she knew – anybody she loved or cared about – getting bit sent a chill down her spine.

It was a few elongated minutes of shouts and fired shots before the sound of gunfire wound down and everything around them quieted.

For a moment, at least.

The next moment, the door was being pried open and Jerry was stumbling inside with Marlene wrapped under his arm.  She was limping, holding a hand to her side.

“Marlene,” Abby gasped out, pushing away from where she had been leaning against the brick column that separated the living room from the kitchen, and hurried toward her.  Ellie was at her heels.  “What happened?”

“Robert and his guys happened,” Jerry sighed, and Marlene winced at his side.  “He got away.  He’s nothing more than a coward, but he was selling the Fireflies some weapons, and shit went south fast.  Military got involved, and he took off.”

“We were trying to trade with him for info,” Marlene explained, breath caught in her throat.  “Didn’t work out the way we wanted.  Now he’s just a loose end someone’s going to have to take care of.”

“Well, it’s not going to be you,” Jerry said quickly, determined and looking down at her.

“Bullshit it’s not.”  Marlene gripped onto her side tighter before looking at Abby, and behind her to where Ellie stood.  “The guy Robert was supposed to sell those guns to is going to be looking to get his payout,” Marlene explained.  “We find him, we get him his guns, he gets us our way out.”

“What are you talking about?” Abby asked.

Marlene limped to a metal chair at the table in the corner, leaning against it to prop herself up for a moment before lowering herself down.  She lifted her shirt to reveal the gunshot wound that had torn through her abdomen.  “Not as bad as it looks,” she breathed out, even though everybody in the room that had eyes could see that she was lying.  “But, bad enough that I don’t think I’ll be able to head out of Boston any time soon.”

Something twisted in the hollow of Abby’s guts at Marlene’s words, at the way she sounded defeated .  Like she had come all this way just to make it to the end of her road.

“You’re gonna be just fine, Marley,” Jerry said, stepping closer to her.  He only called her Marley when the only person around to hear him was Abby.  The last thing he wanted was for people to view Marlene as weak just because somebody had given her a nickname.  He pressed a kiss to her head.  “I’ll make sure of it.”

Abby blinked, and she was suddenly back in her parents’ bedroom.  Her mom had looked like a shell of her former self, laid up in bed with an IV in her arm and a tube in her nose.  Jerry was at her bedside, only ever venturing out to get her more medicine, to get her anything to help her hang on for a little longer.

“Come here,” her mom had said to Abby, her voice barely more than a whisper.  Abby never stepped foot into the bedroom, always hovered in the doorway with her hands shaking and her heart in the pit of her stomach.  She didn’t want her last memories of her mom to be with her looking like this, and she was past the point of being naive enough to think that her mom could beat something that she might not have even been able to beat back before the world had ended.  Abby’s feet moved even though Abby’s head had no intention of doing so.  Her mom’s cold fingers wrapped around Abby’s warm palm.

“You’re my strong, beautiful girl,” her mom had said softly, her smile stretching across her cheeks.  It looked painful.  “And you’re going to do so many amazing things in your life.  I’m so proud of the person you’re becoming.”

Abby didn’t realize she had tears in her eyes until her vision blurred, until she tasted salt on her lips.  And then she was crawling into bed beside her mom, something she hadn’t done since she was four years old, and held on tight.  She cried into her mom’s shoulder until her mother’s nightgown was damp with her tears.

She didn’t know when she fell asleep, only that when she woke up, her father was crying at the edge of the bed, and her mother had gone still beside her.

The tears threatened to spill over now, where she stood in Boston, facing Marlene and her injury.  She doesn’t know if she has it in her to lose another mom.

Marlene’s eyes met Abby’s, and she reached a hand out to give her a squeeze.  “I’m not going anywhere, Abby,” she said softly, but Abby could hear the uncertainty lacing her voice and knew she didn’t quite believe her own words.  “I do have to see this through, though.  One way or another.  And I have to find a way to get Ellie back to Salt Lake City.”

“We’ll leave now,” Abby said, voice definitive, taking a few affirmative steps backwards.  “We can get our stuff, get into the van–”

“-it’s not that easy,” Marlene cut her off.  “In my condition, I will just slow you down.”  Her eyes turned to Jerry.  “You and Abby take her.  I’ll stay back and catch up when I can.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Jerry argued, all but adding on a blunt “and that’s final” as a punctuation mark.  “The smugglers who Robert owed the guns.  Like you said before.  We’ll find them, get them to take her part way, and we’ll meet up with them once you’re ready.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to be ready, Jerry,” Marlene said through a wince.  “You need to go.”

“No,” Jerry argued, and Abby heard the desperation behind the single syllable.

“His name is Joel,” Marlene ignored him.  “He works a lot with his partner, Tess.  They were the two who were owed the guns.  His brother, Tommy, was a former Firefly.  We used to be close.  If I know one thing about him, I know that he wants those guns and wants to get the hell out of here.”

Jerry nodded, curling a strand of hair behind her ear.  “Then let’s give him his way out.”

“And send Ellie off with some strangers?” Abby balked.

“It’s temporary, Abby,” Marlene assured her.  “Just… just until I’m able to get her the rest of the way.  Until we are able to get her the rest of the way.”

Abby turned, looking over her shoulder at Ellie, who was nervously folding and unfolding her fingers around each other.  “I’m okay with just staying,” Ellie explained after another beat had passed.  “We can wait, right?”  Her smile was sheepish as she gestured down to her arm.  “I mean, it’s not like it’s going anywhere, right?”

Marlene gave her a pained smile.  “It needs to be soon, Ellie.  You don’t realize how long people have been waiting for your miracle.”

The unsettling feeling in Abby’s gut had never quite gone away.  It stayed dormant through every nervous, secret look shared between Jerry and Marlene.  It stayed dormant when Marlene gave Ellie a hug, when she ruffled Abby’s hair.

It stayed and it festered.

Jerry and Marlene took off early the next morning, in search of Joel and Tess, while Abby stayed behind despite her several arguments.  

“We could always just go after them,” Ellie pointed out, as if Marlene hadn’t made it inherently clear that Ellie was under no circumstances allowed to step foot outside of the loft without at least one of the Fireflies present with her.  Abby supposed that she could be considered a Firefly… right?  No.  No, it was too risky.  Her dad would never forgive himself if something happened to Abby – and he’d probably never forgive Abby if something happened to Ellie, either.

“Yeah,” Abby snorted, shaking her head as if she thought it was a ridiculous idea.  As if her nerves weren’t trying to claw themselves out of her skin to go out that door and follow her dad and Marlene to wherever they didn’t wish for her to follow.  “They’ll be back soon.”

“How long have you known Marlene?” Ellie asked, sitting back on the couch and tracing her bite with her fingertips, watching, mesmerized, as her fingers glided along the puckered skin.  She lifted her gaze to meet Abby’s, who was sitting across from her with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in her lap, her finger tucked in between two pages to keep her space.  She’d finished Wuthering Heights shortly after they’d arrived in Boston, and hadn’t found herself reading as much as she would normally be, finding herself spending more time with the curious girl across from her than doing anything else lately.

“Pretty much my whole life,” Abby answered.  “For as long as I can remember.  She was really close with my parents, and then after my mom…” she trailed off, the words ‘passed away’ not coming easily to her.  “She’s just always been around, I guess.”

“I’m sorry about your mom,” Ellie spoke softly, because apparently the few brief words that Abby had managed to slip out had been enough for Ellie to fill in the blanks.

“I’m sorry about your… everything,” Abby gestured back to her, and found herself startled when Ellie let out a bark of a laugh at the words.

A laugh.  From Ellie .  A beam of pride swelled in Abby’s chest, like she’d single-handedly caused the sun to rise just this once.

She doesn’t know if it’s because she’s never really had many friends to begin with, or if it’s something else entirely, but Abby sank into her chair, more relaxed than she’d been a few moments before.  Something about sitting across from Ellie, hearing Ellie laugh at something stupid that she’d said…it made her feel like things were okay.  At least a little.

“I guess it has its perks,” Ellie said with a shrug after a moment.  “Cure for mankind, and all.  I kinda feel like I really am Savage Starlight, you know?”

Abby, who had never once thumbed through a comic book, did not know, but she felt confident in agreeing with a soft, “Yeah,” ever the same.

Ellie glances toward the dust-covered window before turning back to look at Abby.  “Is it just you guys?” she asked.  “You, your dad, and Marlene?”

“No, not really,” Abby responded, even if it didn’t feel like the full truth.  A beat, and she continued.  “I mean, it kind of feels like that, I guess?  But there’s a lot of people back home.  Few other doctors, soldiers, a lot of Fireflies.”

Ellie stiffened a little at the mention of the Fireflies, and Abby could have sworn that she saw something like resentment flicker in her green eyes for a moment before it faded away.  “Your friend, Riley…” Abby found herself carefully, so carefully, treading over the words, “Marlene said that she was training to be a Firefly?”

It was something she’d said mostly in passing, probably a week ago.  Ellie had been asleep on the couch, and Marlene had been telling Jerry about the other girl on the roof, Riley.  When Abby had asked if Marlene had known her, Marlene’s response had been tinged with regret.  Riley had been a new recruit, had been training with the Fireflies for weeks.  Marlene had known that Riley knew Ellie, had told Riley that Ellie had been safer back at military school than joining the Fireflies.

And look at how all of that had turned out.

“Yeah,” Ellie finally responded, voice a little more clipped than it had been just moments before.  “I was… I was really mad at her.  But I think I was angrier that I wasn’t going to be a part of it with her, you know?”  She fiddled with something in her pocket, pulling out her switchblade a moment later.  It was loose enough that all it took was a flick of her wrist for it to snap open and closed, over and over like a metronome.  “I always wanted to be with her.  Be a part of things with her.  She was my best friend.”

It was a long pause before Abby spoke, allowing Ellie’s words to wistfully and mournfully hang in the air between them.

“I don’t have a best friend,” was what Abby managed to finally say back to her, and she hated how pathetic it made her sound.  Everything made her sound so fucking pathetic .  “There aren’t… I don’t know a lot of people my own age,” she explained sheepishly.  “There’s a few people a couple years older than me, but I think they see me as more of a little sister than anything.”

Owen Moore’s face flickered in her mind’s eye before fading away.  Owen had a few close friends, a guy named Manny and a girl named Nora, in particular, and while Abby was sometimes included in the things that they did together, she felt more like a pity invite than anything else.  Even when it had seemed like there could be something more with Owen, something beyond a stupid one-sided schoolgirl crush, it never quite happened that way.  He wanted to stay on Jerry’s good side, and would often explain to her that it would be hard to do if he was spending too much time with Abby.  

“Most people our age suck,” Ellie offered unhelpfully, but before Abby could give a retort, she added, “but being alone sucks, too.”

“Guess being stuck here with you has some perks, too, then,” Abby said, in a tone that she hoped sounded more playfully teasing than desperate for companionship.

Ellie smiled back at her.  It quirked up higher on one side than the other, and Abby wasn’t sure why she noticed that.

Before anything else could be said, they heard a clatter and a bang from outside, followed by gunshots.  A vision of yesterday flashed before her eyes, and in an instant, she was only picturing the worst case scenarios.  Jerry stumbling in without Marlene, Marlene wobbling in without Jerry, FEDRA storming the doors and Jerry and Marlene nowhere to be found.

Ellie jumped up from the couch with a start, switchblade planted in her palm as she bolted for the door.

“What are you doing?” Abby whisper-shouted, quickly padding behind her with her heart pounding in her ribcage.

“I don’t know,” Ellie hissed back, pressing against the side of the door with the knife shaking in her hand.  The door creaked open, and Marlene quickly stumbled in with Jerry tightly holding on to her.  It didn’t take much more than a glance to know that Marlene was in worse shape now than she had been when they’d first left.  The bandaged wound at her side was bleeding through, and Abby hardly had a moment to register that before she saw an unfamiliar, dark-haired man with a peppered beard following Marlene and Jerry into the loft, a woman with messy brown hair pushed under a headband at his heels.

For a moment, nobody said a word.  And then, Ellie lunged, flying at the strangers, before the woman grabbed Ellie tightly, and Abby charged forward.  “Let go of her!” she snapped, and the woman looked back at Abby incredulously.

The woman released Ellie after being shot with a warning look from Marlene.  The man, Joel, spoke up with a grunt.  “Recruiting kind of young, don’t you think?”

Marlene laughed, bitterly and without much humor, before nodding her head toward Ellie.  “She’s not ours,” she explained.  Next, she jerked her head toward Abby.  “That’s Jerry’s girl, Abigail.”

“Abby,” Abby answered on autopilot, eyes darting between the group in nervousness.

Ellie was focused back on Marlene, being held up by Jerry.  “What happened to you?”  Her eyes landed predatorily back on Joel and Tess, fire flickering inside of her.

“Don’t worry,” Marlene replied, voice strained.  “This is fixable.”  She gave a grateful look to Jerry, leaning against him.  “But, I can’t come with you.  Not right away.”

Abby swallowed hard, and Ellie scoffed, shaking her head.  “Well, then I’m staying.”

“Ellie,” Marlene shot her a pained look, “we won’t get another shot at this.”

The man across the room appeared bewildered, looking at Ellie with blown eyes before the gaze of disbelief honed in on Marlene, arms waving.  “We’re smuggling her ?”

Abby didn’t have a good feeling about any of this.

“There’s a crew of Fireflies that will meet you at the Capitol Building,” Marlene insisted.  “That’s as far as you have to take her, and we’ll take care of everything from there.”

The woman snorted, shaking her head back at Marlene with eyes narrowed into slits, mouth turned into half of a snarl.  “That’s not exactly close.”

“You’re capable,” Marlene threw back at her.  “You hand her off, come back, and the weapons are yours.  Double what Robert sold them.”

The woman and Marlene were going back and forth about the location of said weapons, but all that Abby could focus on was the way that they were talking about Ellie.  She was longer a person, but rather a piece of property, and they were all shareholders.

“Ellie will stay back with Joel and Jerry.  I’ll take you to them,” Marlene was explaining to the woman, and Ellie very quickly fired that she refused to stay anywhere with a stranger.  At the same time, Jerry was sending Marlene worried glances as if he wasn’t sure he’d ever see her again if she took off with this woman alone.  “She isn’t crossing to that part of town.”

“How do you know him, again?” Ellie finally asked.

“I was close with his brother, Tommy,” Marlene explained.  “He said that if I was ever in a jam, I could rely on him.”

The man standing before Abby right now didn’t seem like the kind of man that anybody could rely on for much of anything beyond a strong left hook.

“Was that before or after he left your militia group?” the man asked, and Abby recalled that Marlene had mentioned his brother being a former Firefly.  Did she know him?  Had she ever run into him before?  Would she even realize if she had?

“He left you, too,” Marlene said through a sharp intake of breath and a wince, hand grasping to her side.  “He was a good man.”

“Look, just… take her to the North Tunnel and wait for me there,” the woman explained.  The man appeared thwarted at the thought.  “She’s just cargo, Joel.”

Joel – Abby recalled the name now that she had heard it, but she could hardly concentrate on it.  She’s just cargo , was where her attention lay. The words had hit Abby like a slap of cold water on her skin.

If Ellie was bothered by the word choice, she didn’t show it.  Her attention remained fixed on Marlene.  “Marlene…”

“No more talking,” Marlene grimaced.  “You’ll be fine.  Now go with him.”

“I’m going with you,” Jerry countered, focused on Marlene.  “I don’t trust this.”

“I’m going with Ellie,” Abby blurted, and five sets of eyes all turned to stare at her at the exact same time.

Jerry shook his head.  “Nice try, kiddo.”

Abby moved closer, grabbing her dad’s wrist and pulling him off to the side.  “You don’t trust this, and I don’t trust it, either.  Why are you leaving her with a stranger ?  What if you never see her again?”

“What if I never see you again?” Jerry threw back at her.  “Abby, you can’t–”

“–I don’t feel good about this,” Abby felt the words tumbling out of her before she could catch them and hold onto them.  “Just… let me stick with her until we get to the Capitol.  Please?”

She didn’t know what was possessing her in that moment, what force was making her want to latch onto Ellie, to make sure that she stayed safe.  In part, she knew that it could be because of Ellie’s bite - if they found out she was bitten, what would they do? What would happen next? What would happen to her ?

Marlene and Jerry looked back and forth at each other, before Jerry’s eyes landed back at his daughter.  “Only until you reach the Capitol.”

A wave of relief washed over Abby at his words, even if she knew that logically there should be more fear bubbling up inside of her.  She could count on one hand how many times she had ventured off without her dad or Marlene or a Firefly close behind and still have at least three fingers left over.  Joel muttered something about being a ‘goddamn babysitter,’ which made Abby want to shove him right back out the door.  Tess grabbed his arm then, leaning in and saying something quietly to him.  He nodded in understanding.

“Don’t take long,” Joel said to Tess, before turning and pointing fingers in Abby and Ellie’s direction. “And you two? Stay close.”

The sky was darkening with storm clouds as they made their way through the backstreets of the Boston Quarantine Zone.  Joel was marching off ahead of them, a grumpy man on a mission, and Abby hung behind with Ellie.  Ellie had the sleeves of her shirt pulled down, the ends gathered in her fists, and Abby was relieved.  Ellie hadn’t kept the bite covered up much back in the loft, she hadn’t needed to, but Joel was a stranger, and even if Marlene and her dad trusted him to get Ellie across the city, that didn’t mean that Abby did.

“You didn’t need to come with me, you know,” Ellie said quietly, but Abby could hear the shift in her voice, the gratefulness behind her words.

“I wanted to,” Abby answered honestly, because it felt stupid to try and come up with a lie.  “You know, make sure he’s not a serial killer or whatever.”

“Two things about that logic,” Ellie countered.  “One: even if he is a serial killer, who’s to say that we’d find out his secret identity before making it to the Capitol?  Two : if he is a serial killer, we’ll probably be dead soon, and then it won’t really matter one way or another.”

“I can hear you both,” Joel grumbled up ahead, as they approached the North Tunnel.

Abby didn’t know how much time passed, how far they were traveling through this unfamiliar city.  They climbed over fences and used dumpsters as stepladders, going higher and higher, further into the depths of Boston.

It wasn’t until they were moving down the hallways of a beat-up apartment complex that Ellie asked another question to Joel.  

“This tunnel,” Ellie began, “you use it to smuggle things?”

“Yup,” was the enthusiastic response she received.

“Like…illegal things?” Ellie asked, and Abby shot her a pained look.  Nothing that Marlene and Jerry had told them about Joel and Tess gave off ‘these are two very safe, responsible, non-threatening people’ energy, which made Abby pretty sure she didn’t need to know how much illegal activity they were getting into.

“Sometimes,” Joel said.

“Ever smuggle a kid before?”

A hint of amusement, hardly noticeable at all, came in Joel’s response.  “Nope.  That’s a first.”  Abby thought back to how they had been talking about Ellie like she was a parcel rather than a person, and felt a twist in her gut.  That ever-present, unsettling, festering feeling.  “What’s the deal with you two and Marlene anyway?” he carried on, not even glancing far enough over his shoulder to meet their eyes.

“I’ve known her my whole life,” Abby answered hollowly, the response coming out on autopilot.

“I don’t know.  She’s my friend, I guess,” Ellie contributed, voice sounding as unsure with her words as she probably felt.

“You two are just buddies with the leader of the Fireflies?  What are you?  Like, twelve?  Thirteen?”

“She knew my mom, and she’s been looking out for me,” Ellie lamented, voice quickly dripping in defensiveness.  “And I’m fourteen , not that that has to do with anything.”

“I’ll be sixteen in October,” Abby chimed in, hiking the straps of her backpack up on her shoulder.  A child.  She felt like a child.  It didn’t matter that she was older than Ellie, she still felt like a child.  An imposter.  Someone who wasn’t where they were supposed to be.

“So, where are your parents?” Joel asked, and a flash of defensiveness sparked under Abby’s skin.  Before she could tell him to mind his own business, Ellie was responding.

“Where are anyone’s parents?” she said.  “They’ve been gone a long, long time.”

“So, instead of just staying in school, you decided to run off and join the Fireflies?  Is that it?” 

“Look, I’m not supposed to tell you why you’re smuggling me, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“You want to know the best thing about my job?  I don’t gotta know why.  To be honest with you, I could give two shits what you’re up to.  I was just pointing out the company you’re keeping,” he gestured over to Abby.  “Firefly in training, and all.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Abby challenged.

“You say that like you’re surprised you don’t have the best reputation,” Joel countered.  “Fireflies and FEDRA, two fucked up sides of one damn coin.”

“FEDRA can burn,” Abby bit back, seeing the bars that covered most of the doors in the apartment complex, the FEDRA logo staring back at her.  “FEDRA deserves to burn.”  She thought back to the FEDRA deserters that the Fireflies had picked up over the years, about the horror stories that she’d heard about how people were treated in the Quarantine Zones.  They could say that it was about law and order and safety, but it really boiled down to power and control.

Joel grunted.  “That we can agree on.”

They quieted down again after that, nearing Joel’s apartment and waiting as he pushed them through the door.  The apartment wasn’t much, nothing much more than a small kitchen, a couch, and a bunch of boxes.  Joel dropped onto the couch, grumbling something about killing time, and Abby followed Ellie over to the window, to where the storm clouds were giving way to trickles of rain.  Ellie looked over her shoulder at Joel one last time, looking at the way that his breath was already leveling out with the beginning stages of sleep.  “Your watch is broken,” she noted, and he hardly scoffed back at her.

In front of the window was a large armchair.  It was probably big enough to hold both of them, but once Ellie curled up on it, Abby lost the nerve to sit beside her and opted for sitting on the floor instead, back pressed to the wall as she listened to the sounds of the storm outside.

“What do you think it’s like out there?” Ellie asked after a few quiet moments.  “Beyond the QZ?”  Before Abby could answer, Ellie was quickly adding on.  “That was a stupid question,” she said nervously.  “You’ve been out there.  Sorry.  Ignore me.”

“You’ve never been outside the QZ?”

“I’ve never been anywhere.”

Abby went quiet for a moment, looking up at the pockmarked ceiling, the white paint peeling away and leaving strips of brown.  “It’s different than here,” she finally responded.  “Where we live, it’s really beautiful.  There’s a lot of animals, and a lot of communities.”

“A lot of infected?”

“They’re just another part of nature,” Abby noted.  “A really messed up part of nature, but another part of it.”

“Apparently, FEDRA’s been telling everyone that the number of infected in Boston has gone down lately, and that’s all bullshit.  The numbers aren’t going down, they’re just…covering shit up.  As if we don’t know everything that’s going on, you know?”

“You have to be careful,” Abby told her, gesturing to Ellie’s sleeve.  “You can’t…people will kill you, if they find out.”

“Obviously,” Ellie snorted, but she fidgeted with her sleeve, tugging it further down into her palm.

From the couch, Joel was muttering in his sleep, his breathing labored and quick.  Abby and Ellie watched him for a moment or two before sharing a look between one another.  “What do you think his story is?” Ellie asked.

Abby shrugged.  “Who knows?  All that matters right now is that he gets us to the Capitol, gets his guns, and we get out of here in one piece.”

“Well, if he’s a serial killer …”

Abby swatted her arm, and Joel stirred awake, sitting up with a start a moment later.

“You mumble in your sleep,” Ellie pointed out, shooting him a sideways glance before looking back out the window.

“Probably a bad dream,” Abby said quietly.

“I hate bad dreams.”

Ellie looked back at Joel, giving him a sort of hopeful look.  “I’ve never really been this close to the outside,” she explained to him.

Instead of a proper response, Joel countered with, “What on Earth do the Fireflies want with you?”

“I don’t really think that’s any of your business,” Abby pointed out before Ellie could respond.  “Isn’t that what you said earlier, anyway?  That you didn’t need to know why?  That you didn’t give - what was it?  Two shits?”

Joel harrumphed, but didn’t manage to get much more of a response out before the door was pushing open and Tess was barreling inside.  She barely registered Abby and Ellie at the edge of the room, making a beeline straight for Joel.  “I saw the merchandise, and it’s a lot ,” she told him.  “Wanna do this?”

Joel’s response isn’t much more of a grunt and a single syllable of reluctant agreement, and Tess turned to look back at Ellie and Abby, giving an affirmative nod of her head.  “Then let’s go.”

The rain showers had turned into a full-blown thunderstorm by the time they had climbed up from the manhole and appeared on the outskirts of Boston, on a dilapidated interstate.  

“Holy shit,” Ellie breathed out in disbelief, Joel and Tess running off ahead of her.  Abby paused, turning to look back at her.  “I’m actually outside.”  Ellie’s smile was wide, mystified as she held her hand out to feel the raindrops on her skin.  “I’m outside the QZ.”

Joel led them onward, up a jagged on ramp and through the back of an eighteen-wheeler.  It wasn’t until he was hopping out the other side that Abby realized the mistake that they had made, the mess that they had just found themselves in.  The blunt end of a rifle was thrust into Joel’s temple, sending him toppling to the ground.  

“Shit,” Tess muttered under her breath, and Ellie was standing directly in front of the fluorescent beam of the FEDRA agent’s flashlight. 

“Don’t do anything stupid,” the officer commanded, directing Ellie down from the truck and onto her knees.  Abby’s pulse was racing, watching as Tess followed suit.  She could hear her dad in her head, all of the warnings he’d given her, the way that he had pleaded with her that he didn’t know how safe this would be.

She hated proving him right.

But what good was her safety if other people were put in danger?

With her heart caught somewhere between her throat and the pit of her stomach, she followed Tess and Ellie, dropping onto the patch of wet, muddy earth.  In a moment of clarity, or perhaps panic, she shoved her Firefly pendant under her shirts.  The last thing she needed was to get caught as some sort of “anarchist,” or whatever label they were throwing at the Fireflies today.  She’d been so proud to earn her dog tag, even if she still didn’t feel like a full-fledged member just yet.  She’d be damned if she did anything to jeopardize that.

Whatever thoughts she had about her standing in the Fireflies dulled to nothing more than a quiet throb when she saw the temperature scanner that the agent who had just stepped off the back of the truck was pulling out.  She didn’t know much about the cordyceps infection, but she did know that if a person had been bit, they would populate on the scanner as infected .  Even if they weren’t.  Not really.

It wasn’t that she was worried about finding out that she had been infected with some bite she didn’t recall getting or anything like that.  All of her nerves were targeted at the fourteen-year-old girl next to her, who seemed to be off in her own world.  Her eyes were wide, and Abby could almost swear that through the lightning overhead and the floodlights blaring on them, that she could see a lump forming in her throat, could see the hitch in her breath.  The FEDRA soldier held up the temperature gauge, pointing the gun first against Tess, and then at Joel.  Abby couldn’t even manage to squeeze her eyes shut as she felt the cold metal press into the nape of her neck.  Her eyes remained open and focused on Ellie, as if she could see into her head, as if she could pinpoint what her next move would be.

The familiar chirp that indicated, All Good Here! , chimed as they pulled the thermometer away from Abby, and shifted down the line to where Ellie was waiting.

“Oh man,” Ellie whispered as an unfamiliar alert was chiming from the temperature reader.  Before Abby could blink, Ellie was whipping around and lunging the tip of her blade into the soldier’s knee; a yelped “SORRY!” escaping her lips in a short breath.  The man shoved Ellie to the ground, hard, and Abby was grabbing her gun from her holster before she could think.  She could hear a gunshot from behind, Tess shooting at the second soldier, and Abby didn’t have a moment’s hesitation before she was shooting at the soldier with the thermometer in time with Joel shoving him to the ground, mud splattering from the impact.  A flash of light, and she was dropping the gun with hands shaking.

She’d shot the soldier.  She was pretty sure she had killed the soldier.  She’d shot infected before, but she had never shot a human .  It made her stomach churn, but her attention quickly moved to Ellie, who was curled into a ball against the side of the truck.  “Oh, fuck,” she stuttered out through a gasped breath.  “I thought we were just gonna hold them up or something.”

From in front of her, Abby saw the thermometer face-down in the mud.  Her body moved faster than her mind, trying to reach the scanner before it wound up somewhere else.  Before it wound up…

…in the custody of Tess, who swiftly picked it up and barely gave it a second glance before she was scoffing and shaking her head in disbelief.  She chucked the thermometer to Joel, who swiftly caught it in his hands.  Abby could see the reading from the ground, the word INFECTED bright and red and angry on the screen.

“Marlene set us up?” Joel asked, incredulous.  “Why the hell are we smuggling an infected girl?”

“I’m not infected,” Ellie insisted.

“No?  So was this lying?” he threw the radar in Ellie’s direction, and it ricocheted off the wall and into the mud.  

“I can explain–”

“–you better explain fast,” Tess demanded, pulling her gun out and pointing it directly at Ellie.  Something in Abby’s chest stuttered, and she moved on instinct.

Abby jumped up in a panic, stepping in front of Tess.  “Put it down.  Listen to her.”

“Look at this!” Ellie exclaimed, shoving the sleeve of her shirt up and showing them the bite. 

“I don’t care how you got infected,” Joel had venom in his words, and it made Abby want to shove him face-first into the mud.  Rationally, she knew what this looked like, but if he would just listen to her.

“It’s three weeks’ old,” Ellie explained, and for a moment, it left Abby taken aback.  Had it really only been three weeks ? 

“No, every one turns within two days, so you stop bullshitting .”

“She’s not bullshitting,” Abby argued.  “We’ve been with her since the night she was bit.  This is real .  She hasn’t turned.  Nothing has happened.”

“I ain’t buyin’ it,” Joel shook his head, waving his hand between the two teenagers before looking at Tess.  “This is some sick fucking joke, and not worth the headache.  Leave ‘em here.”

Abby’s brain rolled into overdrive, part of her wanting to smash Joel over the head with the nearest bar she could find, and the other part desperate to get Ellie to safety, to get Ellie the fuck out of here.

“Why would Marlene set you up?” Abby argued, stepping past Tess and moving closer to Joel.  “What would she have to gain from that?  Why would my dad let me go with you if it was a set-up?”

“You’re only here because you don’t trust us, let’s call a spade a spade here,” Joel argued, gesturing over to Ellie. 

“Yeah and you’re really proving me wrong about that.”

The argument was derailed by a flash of headlights, and another swarm of FEDRA soldiers approaching in their vehicle.  Joel looked at Tess, telling her they need to go. Even though he didn’t stop to give a second look at Abby or Ellie, Tess did.  She reached forward, pulling Ellie up by the elbows and pushing at Abby’s shoulder. “Run ,” she commanded.

So, they do.

The rest of the night went by in a blur.  A bloody, wet, noisy blur.  Abby’s body began moving on autopilot, focused on getting to the Capitol, to getting away from FEDRA and away from the hordes of infected that seemed to follow them through city streets, back alleys, and dilapidated office buildings.  Every muscle in Abby’s body was throbbing from the climbing and lifting and running that she had been doing over the past few hours, her body screaming at her for a moment’s rest.

For most of the journey, they didn’t speak.  It wasn’t until they were in a garage, a brief minute of quiet, that Tess asked about Ellie’s immunity status.  Ellie gave an abridged version of what had happened at the mall, what had happened when Abby and Marlene had found her on the rooftop, and Abby braced herself for more moments of disbelief from Tess and Joel. 

She didn’t know why she hated the idea of Ellie sharing so many vulnerable parts of her story with strangers, as if she wasn’t a stranger herself.  The difference was that Tess and Joel seemed like two people who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot Ellie down the moment things took a turn for the worst, and Abby wasn’t so sure that she could do the same.

“Do you think Marlene’s going to be okay?” Ellie asked, her voice small, and Tess placed a hand on her shoulder.

“I told you, she’ll be fine,” she assured her softly, before her gaze met Abby.  “I take it she’s in good hands with your old man.”

Abby nodded, a small attempt at a smile appearing on her lips.  “The best hands, yeah,” she said quietly.  The one good thing about running for her life over the past six hours, or however long it had been, was that she hadn’t had much time to think about how Marlene and her dad were faring, hadn’t had much time to wonder where they were, to hope and pray that Marlene was able to walk, that they were able to make it to the Capitol.

They moved forward, out of the garage and into a decrepit museum that had certainly seen far better days.

The museum was filled with artifacts from the Revolutionary War.  It made Abby think about the old history textbooks that she’d found at an abandoned school back in Salt Lake City, and how she had torn through them.  The Revolutionary War – everything that happened within Boston city limits, really – had fascinated her.  She would be lying if she didn’t admit that she took a few moments within the museum to just absorb all of the history that was staring back at her.

Ellie and Tess had moved ahead, creeping under wooden beams to make it to the room on the other side.  Joel moved to the large block of wood, moving to lift it so that they could pass through.  Abby came up alongside him, thinking about everything that her dad had always taught her about how easy it was for people to fracture bones by moving recklessly, and helped to brace the beam up so that Ellie and Tess could go ahead.  She was about to crawl under it herself when it collapsed, sending a few beams overhead down on top of it, and sealing Abby and Joel on one side of the room, and Ellie and Tess on the other.

“Are you okay?” Ellie asked in a panic, eyes flitting between the two of them but settling on Abby.

“We’ll be fine,” Joel said through clenched teeth.  He rubbed at his arm, and Abby wondered for a moment if she needed to check for broken bones or injuries.  As if he wouldn’t be stubborn enough to refuse any help she offered him.  “Just go on ahead, and we’ll find a way around.”

The all too familiar shriek of a clicker drew them quickly out of their conversation, Ellie and Tess running for the door while Abby and Joel stayed ducked down, creeping back into the main hallway.

Abby looked over, seeing a tumbling, staggering clicker teetering through a hall of display cases.  She held her breath.  She was familiar with infected – relatively, at least – but clickers never seemed to get any less terrifying.  She didn’t know if anything could ever prepare somebody for an encounter with one.

Her eyes landed on a bottle near the door frame, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Joel sending her a small nod of encouragement.  Without a breath, she reached for the bottle and aimed it to the wall behind the clicker, forcing it to turn and stagger away from them, its head reeling back and bent arms flailing on either side of its body.  She took it as her opening, darting forward and plunging her shiv into the base of its skull.  It let out a scream, loud enough to alert the other clickers in the room.  She let the clicker drop to the ground as Joel smashed another’s distorted face in with a brick.  The smell of rotted skin and decay filled the air as it collapsed to the floor.  Joel threw another bottle to distract the final monster, and Abby shoved the blade so far into its head that her tool snapped in half.

She didn’t have time to let it fall before Joel was grabbing her elbow and hauling her out of the room.  “Let’s go before their friends come lookin’ for them,” he huffed.

They spent a few moments poking around an old gift shop and food court for some supplies before a shout from the floor above them broke them from their stupor and sent Joel taking the stairs two steps at a time.  “Tess!” he called out, and Abby felt that tug of familiarity between the two of them - the same tug she felt when she saw a quiet moment between her dad and Marlene.  There was more to Tess and Joel’s story, Abby figured, than they would ever let on.

At the top of the staircase, there was a set of closed double doors with a metal pipe discarded against it.  Joel picked it up, tossing it back to Abby with a quick, “Think fast.”

Abby’s reflexes kicked in, catching it swiftly in her hand and tucking it into the strap on the outside of her backpack for safe-keeping.  Joel shoved through the doors, holding up a hand to quiet Abby as they cautiously stepped through the dark hallway.  Even if they couldn’t see much of anything, the familiar, shadowy thrash of a runner slamming into the door at the end of the hallway was hard to miss.  Joel pointed his pistol at it, a clean shot to the head that sent it dropping to the ground.

“Joel?” Tess’ voice called from the other side, muffled and out of breath, before it was quickly overshadowed with a more panicked, frantic, “Ellie, get out of here!”

Joel’s eyes widened, slamming into the door with one heady push and sending him and Abby tumbling into the closed room.  Tess was in the corner, a runner clawing at her before Tess could shove a plank of wood into his chest like a stake into a vampire, sending it dropping backwards to the ground.

“I’m fine,” she breathed out, holding a hand to her chest.  “You guys okay?”

Joel nodded, but Abby’s eyes remained focused on Tess, on the hand still pressed to her clavicle, as if she was trying to slow down her heart.

“Where’s Ellie?” she asked, but before anyone could answer, she heard Ellie shouting from the next room over.

“The girl!” Tess exclaimed, and Abby was already wrenching the pipe back out from her backpack and charging ahead, blindly swinging at the clicker that was screeching and stumbling in Ellie’s direction.

She bashed the beast over the head, and Ellie exhaled.  Her voice had a laugh to it as she exclaimed, “Holy shit!”  Eyes wide, she looked back at Abby with raised eyebrows.  “You have another one of those things I can use?”

Despite herself, despite everything, Abby cracked a smile back at her.

It was going to be a long night.

The sun was beginning to rise over the Boston skyline as they made it out of the museum, climbing up flights of stairs and ladders to the rooftop.  She could see the beacon of hope up ahead, the domed top of the Capitol building.  The sun hit the rusted gold, causing it to shine bright against all the other buildings surrounding it.

It was almost over.  The night was almost over.  Beyond those final city blocks, her dad and Marlene were waiting for them, and they would part ways with Tess and Joel.  They would get Ellie out of Boston and begin the trek across the country, back home to Salt Lake.

Maybe it was naive and stupid and a million other things, but as Joel found a plank to get them from one rooftop to another, Abby allowed herself a moment to imagine the drive back home.  Maybe she could get her dad and Marlene to make a couple stops along the way, to show Ellie so many of the places that she had never had a chance to see.  Hell, there were so many places out there that Abby had never had a chance to see – would probably never have a chance to see.

They’d go back to Salt Lake, and Marlene and her dad could get whatever samples they needed to run tests on.  Abby could introduce Ellie to Owen and his friends, and they would think Ellie was cool because she was cool.  She would feel like less of an outsider looking in, would get to be a part of something, would get to help Ellie be a part of something, too.

“I’ve never seen the city like this,” Ellie breathed out, drawing Abby out of all the daydreams that were nonsensically swimming through her mind.

“Watch your step,” Joel was cautioning as he laid the plank in place, but Ellie was stepping onto it before he could get the last word out all the way.  Abby’s face paled, her stomach dropping lower and lower into her gut until she felt like she could feel it seeping into her spine.

Ellie frowned.  “You good?”

“Oh my god, move ,” Abby choked out, a million worst-case-scenarios ripping through her mind in tandem with each other.  It wasn’t like a piece of plywood was anywhere near as reliable as a bridge .  The longer Ellie stood there, the higher the likelihood of her crashing to the ground.

“You scared of heights?” Ellie teased, and Abby could have shoved her from the plank herself.

“I’m not scared ,” she lied, guffawing as if it was a ridiculous thought.

“You seem scared.”

“Kid, we don’t have all day,” Joel muttered.

Ellie rolled her eyes, taking a step backwards and turning, holding a hand out to Abby.  “Come on.”

Abby stared back at her like she had sprouted a second head.  “ No .”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Ellie asked, voice issuing a challenge.  “We die ?”

“Yeah, that’s probably the worst that could happen,” Abby snapped back at her, laughing in the way that she always did whenever she felt nervous.  Ellie was relentless, taking Abby’s hand in her own and dragging her forward, until Abby’s feet were moving on their own accord and she was stepping up behind her on the plank.

Her pulse raced, firing on all cylinders from between her ribcage.

Don’t look down.  Don’t look down.  Keep your eyes forward.  Don’t die.

“It’s barely four feet across,” Ellie said, her voice unbelievably steady as she stepped forward once, and then twice.  “I’m right here.  You’ll be fine.”

“Easy for you to say,” Abby all but wheezed, having to force her feet to take each step forward.  She was only reminded of the fact that Ellie’s hand was still in hers, a tether between them, when she felt Ellie’s fingers squeeze against her own.

One step at a time, her heart pounding in her ears, they made it to the other side of the rooftop.  Ellie hopped down as if it was the easiest four feet anybody had ever taken, while Abby dropped to her knees the second her feet hit the solid ground.

“You’re lucky I didn’t die, because I would have killed you ,” Abby threatened with a wheeze, hand pressed to her chest.

Ellie’s laugh was small, but genuine, and she crouched down in front of Abby, placing hands on either side of her shoulders.  Abby’s eyes lifted, blue meeting green, and Ellie’s smile was higher on one side than the other as she told her, “You need to give yourself a little more credit, Anderson.  You’re braver than you think.”

The sun was shining down overhead as they finally approached the Capitol, and the sense of relief pouring out of Abby was too big to ignore.  Finally, this hellscape of a night was almost over.

Joel looked over at Tess, giving her a tight smile, and Abby could tell that his sentiments mirrored her own.  The smile that Tess gave him in return, however, didn’t quite seem as sincere.  Abby didn’t have more than a moment to think about it before Joel was pushing through the doors to the entrance, leading them inside, to where her dad and Marlene were waiting.

Except for the fact that they weren’t.

In fact, the people that were waiting for them on the other side of the closed door weren’t alive at all.  Fireflies.  A room of Firefly corpses, bloody and left for dead in heaps across the marble corridor.

Abby’s stomach churned, picking up one of the Firefly tags that lay on the floor at one of the corpses’ feet.  She didn’t recognize the name, but felt like she’d been punched in the gut nevertheless.  Her body doubled over, crouching down and dry-heaving with her head roaring and heart aching in her chest.

From her peripheral vision, she could see Tess frantically shoving the corpses aside, feeling around at their pockets.  She told Joel that she was looking for a map, looking for anything that could give them information to where they were heading next.

Ellie crouched down beside Abby, placing a hand on her back.  “You okay?”

“I don’t know where my dad is,” was the pathetic response that Abby was able to muster back to her.  “Or Marlene.  Or anybody.”

“How far are we gonna take this, Tess?” Joel asked, his voice and Tess’ overlapping in a droning chorus from behind Abby.  

“As far as it needs to go,” was what Tess offered him in response.  She turned, moving toward Abby.  “Look at me,” she spoke, commanding Abby’s attention.  Abby’s gaze lifted.  “Where is the lab?  Where do they need the girl to go?”

“Salt Lake,” Abby exhaled with a shaky voice.  “Out West.”

“That’s where you have to go,” Tess declared, standing up and brushing her hands on the knees of her jeans.  She marched toward Joel.  “You have to take her.”

“What are you talking about?” Joel argued.  “This is not us.  We are not these people.”

“What do you know about us?” Tess countered.  “About me?”

The knot that had been steadily growing tighter and tighter in Abby’s gut was twisting into a bomb, watching the conversation unfold between them.  She saw the outcome before it happened, as if she’d already seen it in action.  She saw Tess tug down the collar of her shirt, revealing the bloody, seeping bite mark that was hiding underneath.

Everything happened in slow motion.  Tess stomped across the foyer, grabbing Ellie’s arm and shoving up her sleeve.  “This was three weeks,” Tess cried out.  “I was bitten an hour ago, and it’s already worse.  This is fucking real , Joel.  You’ve got to get this girl to Tommy’s.  He and Abby can help you get her the rest of the way to Salt Lake.  He used to run with their crew.  He’ll know what to do.”

“Tess…” Ellie breathed out, voice pleading and desperate.  There were tears welling up in her eyes, and Abby pushed herself back onto her feet to step closer.

Joel was arguing, pleading and waving his arms back at her.  Everything he was saying, every argument that he was making to Tess was swallowed up, silenced by the ringing in Abby’s ears, the steady chorus of, Where’s my dad?  Where’s my dad?  Where’s my dad?

Those thoughts were cut off too short, the sound of FEDRA soldiers approaching in their trucks bringing all other conversations to a close.

“I can buy you some time.  Take her.”  Tess turned, looking at Abby and giving her a somber nod.  “And her.  Get them out of here.”

Everything that followed was too fast to keep up with.  It was nothing more than adrenaline that carried them out of the foyer and up a flight of stairs.  Gunshots filled the space, echoing off the vaulted ceilings like bells in a cathedral.  Abby refused to look down, refused to see Tess’ dead body littered with all the others in the entryway.  They dove through the rest of the Capitol, wordlessly, creeping around corners and ducking past soldiers through smoke and powder.

She didn’t know how long they ran, everything blurring out around her until she was left with nothing more than tunnel vision.  Tunnel vision was the only thing that was going to keep her from spiralling, from panicking over not knowing where her dad was, not knowing if Marlene was okay, not knowing if they had been captured or held up or left for dead or killed all together.

It wasn’t until they were out of the Capitol, until they were catching their breath outside of a subway station, that anybody managed to get a word out.  

“If we’re doing this, we need to have some ground rules,” Joel explained, voice hollow and tired.  “You don’t talk about Tess, ever .  In fact, let’s just keep our histories to ourselves.  Secondly,” he jabbed a finger at Ellie, “don’t tell anyone about your… condition .  They’ll think you’re crazy and try to kill you.”

“Told you,” Abby’s voice moved faster than her brain, the words a much needed distraction from everything else swimming through her mind, and Ellie jabbed her elbow into her side.

“And lastly, you do what I say when I say it.”  He looks over at Abby.  “That goes for both of you.”

Abby scoffed.  “Excuse me?”

“I’m not a babysitter, and things will go a lot smoother if we stick together and you listen.  I take it you know how to get back to your base, to wherever… wherever she needs to go.”

Abby saw a flash of her home, of Salt Lake City, of her home by the hospital.  “Yeah.  I know.”

She knew where it was.  Did she know how to get there?  Could she re-trace the drive that she and her dad and Marlene had taken just a few months before and navigate them back?  Would he trust her to do that?  Would she trust herself to do that?  Surely, Joel had a fucking map , right?

“There’s a town a few miles north of here, fella there that owes me some favors,” Joel explained, gesturing off toward the woods and everything beyond the Boston city limits.  “Good chance he could get us a car.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s get a move on.”

Joel took off, stalking toward the woods, and beside Abby, Ellie hung back.  Abby felt like an exposed nerve, a live wire sparking flames dangerously close to a puddle of oil.  She didn’t know where her dad was.  She didn’t know anything .

“Abby?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re here.”