Owen Tovar turned out to be a tall man, thin and weathered, waiting just inside the door with a black plastic shotgun propped up on his shoulder. He smiled at Kira and Gianna.
“If that moron had told me you had women with you, I’d have let you in a lot sooner.”
Marcus stepped in front of Kira protectively, but Tovar chuckled and clapped him on the arm. “Nothing unseemly, son, just good manners. Soldiers I can take or leave, but I’m afraid my mama trained me a little too well to leave a lady outside in a storm like this.” He shut the door behind the last soldier and pushed his way through the group toward the dark interior of the house. “I gotta say, whichever one of you found me in here is a better tracker than most. You’re wasting your talents in the Grid.” He opened another door to reveal a brightly lit room—an old living room, maybe, with no exterior windows and a cheery orange fire in a stonework fireplace. The room was tightly packed with old couches and blankets, and a small wooden cart sat against a set of closed double doors on the far side. Kira turned to the right as she walked in, sizing up the area, and jumped back in surprise when she found herself nose to nose with a camel.
“Say hello, Dolly.”
The camel groaned, and Tovar chuckled. “Don’t be rude, folks, answer back.”
Marcus smiled and bowed to the camel. “Pleased to meet you, Dolly. Mr. Tovar failed to mention how lovely his companion was.”
“I don’t know if every camel’s as ornery as she is,” said Tovar, “but we get along more or less. I figure she must have escaped from a zoo or something; I found her a few years back, just wanderin’ around.” He ushered the group through the doorway and closed it behind them. “I went through a lot of trouble to keep this fire invisible from outside,” he explained. “Chimney still works, too, so with a storm like this to hide the smoke, you can’t even tell I’m here.”
“We followed the tracks,” said Marcus, pulling off his coat.
“The tracks don’t lead here,” said Tovar. “At least not directly.”
“I heard you,” said Jayden, a small smile creeping through the corner of his mouth. “Dolly needs a few lessons in stealth.”
Tovar shook his head. “She wanted more sugar. Figures you folks’d be passin’ by for the two seconds she decides to argue the point. Most folks—meanin’ those folks nosy enough to be lookin’—never find this place at all. They just follow my tracks down around the next house, back through the woods, and then give up when they hit the creek. Turns out the bridge is fallen down, if you’ll believe it, and the planks I use to get across are pretty well hidden on the wrong side.”
“You’re a drifter,” said Jayden.
“I’m a salesman. That makes me a target for all kinds of unsavories, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a target of opportunity.” He moved a pile of blankets from the couch nearest the fire. “Best seats to the ladies, naturally. This place is pretty cozy with just me in it, but we’re going to get downright neighborly with this many people trying to sleep.”
Kira watched the man as he sorted out the blankets, squeezing between the dusty couches to arrange sleeping space for ten people and a donkey. Is he a part of the Voice? There was no way to tell, not unless he tried to blow them up.
The drifter handed a blanket to Brown, who stared at him suspiciously before yanking it gruffly from his hands. Tovar smiled and stepped back.
“This is going to be an awful long night if we keep not trusting each other. You really think I’m a Voice?”
Brown said nothing, and Tovar turned to Gianna. “How about you?” He turned again, stopping in front of Jayden and opening his arms. “What about you, do you think I’m a Voice? Is risking my own life and sharing my dry blankets all part of some larger plan to destroy the last human civilization?”
“I think you’re ex-military,” said Kira, inching closer to the fire.
Tovar cocked his head to the side. “What makes you say that?”
“Some of the words you use,” said Kira, “like ‘intel’ and ‘target of opportunity.’ The way you stowed your gun when we came in. The way you and Jayden are standing with absolutely identical postures right now.”
Jayden and Tovar looked at each other, then at themselves: feet shoulder-width apart, back straight, arms folded loosely behind them. They moved away from each other awkwardly, shifting their weight and shaking out their wrists.
“Being ex-military doesn’t mean he’s not in the Voice,” said Brown. “A lot of them are soldiers, too.”
“If being a soldier is proof of guilt,” said Tovar, “seven out of ten people in this room are looking awfully guilty.”
“So tell us about yourself,” said Marcus, settling into a couch. “If I’m going to spend the whole night waiting for you guys to stop flirting and shoot each other, I want to at least be entertained.”
“Owen Tovar,” he repeated with a bow, “born and raised in Macon, Georgia. I played varsity football for two years, graduated, joined the marines, and blew off four of my toes in the war—this would be the Iranian war, not the Isolation War, the one with the Chinese that you kids are probably thinking of, the one we sent the Partials to fight for us. Though I suppose most of you are what, late teens? Two or three years old when that war ended, five or six when the whole world ended a few years later? No, when I say ‘war,’ you’re probably thinking of the Partial War, things bein’ what they are, but I hate to break it to you that that wasn’t no kind of war at all, just some fightin’ and some dyin’ and some ‘that’s all she wrote.’ War, see, is when two sides fight, maybe not evenly, but at least they both get a few swings in. What we call the Partial War was mankind gettin’ mugged in an alley.”
“I remember the Isolation War,” said Gianna. “We’re not all plague babies here.”
“Not my place to speculate on a lady’s age,” said Tovar, sitting down by the fire. He looked relaxed, but Kira noticed that he was still in quick, easy reach of his shotgun. Jayden sat across from him, but most of the soldiers stayed standing. Kira sat by Marcus, pulling his arm over her shoulders. He was warm and reassuring.
“Doesn’t matter which war it was, I guess,” said Tovar. “I lost four toes, left the marines on medical leave, and went home to Georgia to play hockey.”
“They couldn’t have played hockey in Georgia,” said Sparks. “That was one of the southern ones, right? Georgia? Hockey was an ice sport.”
“Hockey was ice-skating,” said Jayden, nodding, “and there’s no way you could do that in Georgia. Especially with no toes.”
Tovar smiled. “This is where you plague babies start to show your ignorance.” He turned to Gianna. “You remember ice rinks?”
A small grin crept into her face. “I do.”
“An ice rink,” said Tovar, “was a giant room, like a whole basketball court, inside of a refrigerator. Just imagine—a whole building so cold the ice stays frozen. And then you fill it up with people, hundreds of people sometimes—we were only the minor leagues—and they’d all start cheering and yelling and getting worked up, and that room would heat up like this one is now, all those bodies packed in there like logs in a fire, and that giant refrigerator would keep chugging away and cooling it down and that ice would stay so frozen that all they had to do was spray it with water between periods, and a few minutes later it was as smooth and as flat as a Tiger Sharks cheerleader.” He grinned maliciously. “I beg your pardon. Old rivalries.”
“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Sparks. “You could power a whole city for a year with the kind of electricity you’re talking about.”
“A little place like East Meadow, sure,” said Tovar,