“Are you going to tell the others?”

“I’ll tell Drake. I don’t want our new society to be a place of secrets. But we won’t spread news of your former occupation to others. You can have a fresh start, but you have to stop pretending to be less skilled than you are. We need you.”

“Will you tell Rachel?”

I imagine Rachel’s reaction to the news that we have an apprenticed member of the Brute Squad in our midst, and shake my head slowly. The Brute Squad held her captive in a wagon while the Commander tortured and killed Oliver. And then they surrounded me on the Claiming stage and nearly took my life. If I told her Ian was apprenticed to the Brute Squad, I don’t know what she’d do. Maybe nothing. Maybe decide he’s an acceptable proxy for the Commander and beat him with her Switch.

“Thanks.” His usual flippant charm chases the seriousness from his face as he crouches beside the silent machine. “Now, are we going to fix this or stand around sharing life stories all day? I have four or five girls I’ve promised to eat lunch with, and I hate to disappoint the ladies.”

I kneel beside him and drive my torch into the ground for light. The machine looks like a multitiered plow with a catch-tray beneath each row of teeth and a pair of pipes attached to each tray, ready to sluice dirt away from the teeth and shoot it backward at the completed tunnel in its wake. Dumping the contents of the tech bag onto the ground, I grab a new gear and exchange it for the stripped one while Ian removes the broken teeth and uses large metal scraps in their place.

The afternoon tunnel crew approaches as Ian hammers the last tooth into place. I flip the power switch, and the machine instantly hums to life. Chugging forward, it digs into the wall of soil in front of it and spews dirt out of the pipes, nearly hitting me in the face.

I step back as the tunnel crew leaps into action. We need to tunnel another seven hundred yards into the Wasteland to feel truly safe. I just hope we don’t run out of time.

Chapter Four

LOGAN

“I can do it this time.” I slide the arrow into place the way Rachel showed me and slowly pull the wire taut, my elbow perfectly parallel to the ground.

At first, it was nice having Rachel teach me how to use a bow and arrow to hunt. We headed south out of Baalboden immediately after lunch, carefully climbing over the slabs of steel and stone that litter the ground in front of the remains of the gate. I’d taken an extra moment to double-check that the explosives we’d removed from the compound and laced along the gate as a defensive measure were still in place, but I hadn’t lingered. With Drake in charge of the camp, and an entire crew of men working in the tunnel, I figured I’d take down my first rabbit, and then we’d have plenty of afternoon to spare for . . . other things.

Five misses later, I’d adjusted my description from “nice” to “somewhat unpleasant.”

Eleven misses after that, I’d decided the best word to sum up the experience was “humiliating.”

“Turn your left shoulder toward the target,” Rachel whispers.

“I did.”

“Not enough.” She nudges me to make her point. The rabbit in my sights freezes. “Now,” she breathes against my ear. “Shoot now.”

My fingers curve around the wire, and I quickly run through the steps in my head. One vane turned away from the bow. Body perpendicular to the target. Feet shoulder width apart. Relaxed tension—whatever that means—in my stance.

“Logan, now.”

The rabbit will run when I shoot. The faint noise of the arrow launching from the bow will send it scrambling for safety. Which way will it go? I’ll need to compensate. Aim slightly to the left, to the spot where it first nosed its way out of the undergrowth? Or to the right in case it sprints forward?

Probably to the left. He’ll try to return to what he knows is safe.

The rabbit jerks its head up, ears swiveling. I try to find the anchor point along my cheekbone in time to shoot with any sort of accuracy. I release the wire, and the arrow wobbles slightly as it sails toward its target.

The rabbit dodges safely to the left.

That’s what I get for ignoring logic.

I hook the bow over my shoulder and move forward to collect my arrow. Sunlight filters in through the oak branches above me and hangs in the air like golden mist before disintegrating into the deep shadows that stretch across the forest floor.

“I should’ve torqued my shot to the left,” I say as I bend to dig the arrow out of a bush where it has gallantly speared a handful of thick green leaves. “I knew it was going to run.”

“Well, of course it ran. You gave it a good ten minutes’ notice that you were going to shoot it.” Rachel steps to my side as I brush the last of the leaves off of the arrow’s chiseled copper tip.

I stare her down. “I was double-checking the steps you gave me.”

“You’d already done the steps.” She crosses her arms and taps her fingers against her elbow. “You were wasting time.”

I speak with as much dignity as a man who’s missed seventeen shots in a row can possibly speak. “I was making calculations.”

“You were doubting yourself.” Her eyes meet mine. “Hunting with a bow and arrow isn’t science, Logan. It’s poetry. Let me show you.”

“It’s a specific algorithm of speed, mass, and velocity.” There’s nothing poetic about that, unless you appreciate the beauty of a well-defined mathematical equation. Which I do, but that isn’t the point. The point is that hunting with a bow and arrow isn’t some romanticized communion with one’s inner poetic instincts. It’s cold, hard science, and there’s absolutely no reason why I should continually fail at it when I understand science better than I understand anything else.