The Release

PROLOGUE (#u3239141b-d125-57b8-8ebc-3ff8b1da0d77)

FROZEN SLOPES STRETCH THEIR icy fingers to leaden skies, and winter gales sweep clean the vast, white prairies. Though captured, he escapes. Though beaten down, he rises, even as the mountains rumble and the waters rush and roar.

But enemies persist. The dead and dying litter the long road to freedom, and many more must perish.

My beloved …

1. (#u3239141b-d125-57b8-8ebc-3ff8b1da0d77)

THE NIGHT WAS COLD, and each time I breathed out, my mouth released a haze of frost. I squinted past the cloud of white, peering into the dark. They were out there. It was just a matter of time before they showed themselves.

A tap on the shoulder made me jump. Diana, come to relieve me.

“My turn,” she said.

“Already?”

“Unless you want to stay longer.”

“Nope, I’m good.”

I pushed myself up from the snow and stretched. My toes and fingers were numb. My joints creaked. Argos uncurled from my side and also stretched, extending his back legs.

“Anything?” Diana asked.

“Some yellow earlier. Nothing recent.”

“How many?”

“A dozen. Maybe more.”

She nodded grimly. “They do anything?”

“Just circled.” Then I added, “They came closer than last night.”

We shared a look. Diana knew what I was talking about without having to say the words. Yellow meant wolves, the color referring to their eyes. The more yellow, the more wolves. Lately, the numbers were increasing, and the packs had started coming closer. The only thing that kept them at bay was an enormous ring of fire we’d built around our camp. We stoked it day and night like some primitive tribe from centuries past. So far, no wolves had dared go through it.

We intended to keep it that way.

The avalanche had wiped out all of Camp Liberty, flattening buildings, vehicles … and several dozen Brown Shirts. Their decomposing bodies released a sickening aroma of rotting, putrefying flesh. Just the thing to attract roaming wolf packs. Each night the wolves materialized from the mountains, alternately ripping at the corpses with their razor teeth and sending piercing cries to the starry sky.

As if the wolves weren’t bad enough, just days after the avalanche, howling swirls of snow came racing down Skeleton Ridge and descended on the No Water, wreathing our shantytown in five-foot drifts. What was cleared away one morning was buried in snow the next. Between the snow and wolves, we were prisoners in our own camp.

Diana took my place on the ground, folding her willowy body behind the barricade. She pulled her auburn-colored hair back into a ponytail and readied a bow and arrow. I found some logs and tossed them onto the nearest bonfires. Five hundred embers danced to heaven. I was about to go but found myself lingering, wiping the bark from my hands.

“What?” Diana asked, noticing I hadn’t left.

It was a long time before I answered.

“How’s Hope?”

Diana gave a small sigh. “She’s fine, Book.”

“She’s really okay?”

“No better or worse since the last time you asked—which was last night.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Hardly anyone sees her. You know that. Now get out of here.”

I started to leave.

“And Book?”

“Yeah?” I turned to her, hopeful.

“Stop thinking about her.”

That was what Diana told me every night. Stop thinking about her. There was little chance I could follow that advice.

I shuffled back through the snowy labyrinth of Libertyville. That was the name we gave our makeshift town of rickety huts. The buildings were an unsightly collection of recovered pieces from Camp Liberty. Bits of planking here, corrugated metal there, tree branches acting as joists and beams. A ramshackle village whose blue-tarped roofs dipped low from snow. Temporary housing.

Although we often talked about marching out of there, it would have been mass suicide. It was the dead of winter, and there were still Less Thans so emaciated they could barely walk. We’d rescued seventy-five of them from the Quonset hut that night two months ago, but malnutrition and sickness had taken the lives of four the first week alone. The long winter claimed three others. We couldn’t be on our way until all sixty-eight of them regained their strength—whenever that was.

Argos and I stepped into the shack that we called home. It was nearly as cold inside as it was out.

On the floor were seated Twitch and Flush, bent over a sheet of paper. Flush read a series of numbers out loud.

“Any progress?” I asked.

“There’s gotta be a pattern,” Twitch answered, tapping the paper with his fingers. “I just can’t figure it out.”

“And you’re sure they’re not random numbers?”

“Two people with the same series of thirteen numbers? Not likely.”

Back when we had been digging through the snow looking for building materials, we’d come across Colonel Thorason’s body. In his front shirt pocket was a slip of paper. On it was written a long string of numbers.

4539221103914

When we uncovered another Brown Shirt and found the exact same numbers in his shirt pocket, we figured it was a code of some kind. So far, we’d had no luck translating it.

“I keep hoping it’s a letter-number cipher,” Twitch went on. “Those aren’t so tough to crack. But if it’s a letter shift cipher, then things get tricky. You gotta create a whole grid to solve it.”

Leave it to Twitch to know all this. He’d been blinded by a mortar when the Brown Shirts ambushed us last summer. Although it slowed him down physically, it didn’t faze him a bit when it came to problem solving. The code was just another puzzle he was determined to break.

In addition to Flush and Twitch, Red was also in the room, carving a cedar branch. Like Flush and Twitch, he had been in that original group of Less Thans who escaped Camp Liberty. His shame for abandoning us in favor of Dozer was as easy to read as the radiation splotch on his face. There was never a moment when he wasn’t making arrows or tending to the survivors.