The legionnaires hadn’t found any food inside the former restaurant.

“Nothing. No tortillas, no ketchup packets. Hell, there was only a thin layer of grease left at the bottom of the deep fryer!” Sueann said.

“People took the grease?” Micah asked.

“It has calories.” Even as I answered him, I wondered. Eating cooking oil sounded more likely to make people vomit than help them nourish themselves. Oil would be useful to drizzle over other foods for extra nutrition, but if someone was starving, they might not have other foods to pair it with.

The atmosphere inside the bus was quiet as we started moving again. The missing fryer grease from the restaurant was only the first of many hints about the desperation that surrounded us.

The smell was the second. Even our neighborhood, organized and stable as it was, had taken on a faint scent of sewage as people tried to figure out ways to deal with waste without working plumbing. With the arrival of the Shop, people had started to use water for washing, and it had become custom to dump your used wash-water into a toilet tank, letting us flush solid waste into the city’s sewer system. We weren’t really putting enough water down the drains to wash it all away (hence the continuing faint smell), but it had been at least partially dealt with. There didn’t seem to be enough water to spare here for people to do the same.

Or, maybe they had done the same, but there were just too many people here, living too closely. The Points Siphons were clearly far closer together than the ones in the Madison suburbs, maybe half the distance apart. There seemed to be one in or near almost every major parking lot. I’d been assuming the Siphons had been spread out equidistantly, with those in major urban areas stealing Points from tens of thousands of people, but maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe New York City was lit up like a Christmas tree, with sparkling Points Siphons flashing on and off through all hours of the day and night.

Most the office workers who hadn’t been in the buildings in Research Park had come here, apparently. There was a clear divide in the people we saw: the haves and the have-nots. Both sets traveled in groups, but the “haves” seemed organized and moved boldly, often in a car glowing with the light of Animate Machinery. The “have-nots” scurried along the edges of the roads, keeping out of the way of the bigger groups and looking gaunt and half-starved. I saw both groups duck in and out of shattered storefronts, usually emerging empty-handed: it seemed anything useful had been taken long before.

There were several grocery stores in this area of town, and every other business was a restaurant… but it clearly hadn’t been enough to feed everyone comfortably. Businesses either had shattered windows or bristled with defenses; car doors and hoods had been detached from vehicles to help form barricades.

Each grocery store seemed to have been transformed into a mini-fortress. Doors were concealed behind Blueprint-purchased walls. Silhouettes patrolled the rooflines, and cars had been pushed back to leave a clear perimeter with no cover. At one store, we actually saw the guards attack a person who approached. They didn’t seem to be aiming to kill, but fire still seared the man’s leg. He screamed, his agony clearly audible two hundred feet away..

“Mom! That store is full of bad guys!” Gavin shouted. “We have to stop them! They hurt that man.”

“I… don’t think it’s the right time for us to start a fight, but we can give that guy some food, at least.”

Our bus started to slow - I think the driver shared my thoughts - but the colonel interrupted. “Keep moving! We’ve got less than two hours of daylight left, and our top priority is to get the Shop set up. When we find a place, no one mention that Meghan’s the Shop owner, alright? Our best guess at what happened to the other place is that the owner died. Let’s not make her a target and encourage a repeat.”

Micah might not have made the same immediate fuss as Gavin, but he looked shocked when he heard the colonel’s order to move on. “We’re just going to ignore the hurt guy?”

“Yes. For now. We need to conserve our food to win over the locals wherever we set the Shop up… which isn’t going to be here. We’re still nearly two miles from where Nancy and the others are being held captive. We did discuss using the loading dock of one of the grocery stores to protect the new Shop, but given the aggressive defenses I’m seeing, that’s too risky.”

“We shouldn’t go all the way to Jordan Lane,” I interjected. “This area clearly has severe need; I don’t want to put the Shop out of their reach.”

The colonel nodded briskly. “Let’s check out Cozy Grove Apartments.”

Before we’d left, the colonel had made an Announcement about our intentions, asking anyone in the area with suggestions of good places to set up the Shop to reach out. We’d come up with twelve or so good options, although more than half of them were off the table if we were ruling out loading docks. Cozy Grove was one I remembered. Supposedly, the apartment complex had four L-shaped buildings surrounding a central lawn. Depending on how large the gaps between buildings were, it might be easy to block them off.

Still…

“Shouldn’t we stop to help? That man is injured and hungry. We can help with both of those things.”

Colonel Zwerinski shook his head. “There have been people watching us since we turned onto US 72. No one’s attacked yet, but I’m fairly sure that’s because we’ve kept on the move and because they don’t realize we have a food supply. The moment we start trying to interfere in local politics or showing off our food, that’s going to change. We’re going to get mobbed.”

I didn’t have binoculars - or the colonel’s Clairvoyance - so it was hard for me to tell where the guards were focused, but his assessment was sickeningly plausible. The people on the road were watching us raptly. Their body language was guarded - those with shields kept them angled toward us - but I thought I saw hope in their faces too. In a way, we’d been lucky that the area around the taco restaurant Shop had been so deserted. While I wanted to get more information on what exactly had happened there, the colonel was right: if we stopped, we wouldn’t be able to leave again until we’d sold or given away every scrap of food on the bus, and it was likely that people would turn angry when we ran out.

It broke my heart to leave people behind who so clearly needed help. Intellectually, I knew there were more starving people ahead of us, and that the best thing I could do to help as many people as possible was to find a spot for the Shop and get it set up ASAP... but it still felt wrong.

My kids were less pragmatic. Cassie was too short to see out the windows very well, so she was simply confused, but Gavin and Micah were furious. Micah climbed across me to start looking for a window latch, while Gavin wrapped his tail around a brick of food and bolted for the door of the bus. There was only one of me. I saw Chester and Dane Zwerinski move toward Gavin, and prayed they’d be successful in stopping him as I wrangled Micah. I hit my oldest son with Draw Attention.

His face looked betrayed as he turned to face me. I could see water welling in his eyes. “Mom! Why are you stopping me? That guy needs us!”

I wrapped my arms around him, restraining him. “Micah, you’re going to get us all killed.”

“You know we should help! You’re crying! Let me go!”

I took a deep breath, and then another after a knee to the gut knocked the first out of me. “Micah! Give me a chance to explain. Stop fighting me for thirty seconds.”

“We’re getting farther away!”

“So? We can turn the bus around if we decide to. You know you can’t fight all those people all by yourself. This isn’t a cartoon.”

That struck a chord with Micah. He didn’t stop struggling, but he stopped hurting me as he struggled. He was putting pressure on my arms, no longer thrashing around like a feral animal. He had a sob in his voice as he responded. “Aren’t we the heroes? In books, the heroes never leave people behind like that.”

I sighed and kissed his forehead. “I wish this was a book. I wish I knew we were going to win. I wish we could save everyone. But… we’re not strong enough. Not yet. So we have to be smart, so we can save as many people as we can.”

The word smart got Micah’s attention, as I knew it would. “What’s smart about leaving that guy behind?”

“Why do you think the people in the store attacked him?”

Micah was silent, uncertain.

I let go of him. “Look out the window. Look at the people we’re passing. They all look really hungry, don’t they? I’m sure that man knew the people at the store would attack them, but he was so hungry he decided to risk it. The people in the store probably have some food, but not enough for everyone. That’s why they didn’t let him in.”

“They should share.”

“They should, but they’re scared. Some of them are probably parents with kids too. Would you give food to a stranger if it meant Cassie wouldn’t get enough to eat?”

Micah had to think about that one. “Yes! No. Um, I don’t know.”

“We need to get the Shop up. That’s our number one priority. If everyone can get food, maybe they’ll start working together instead of fighting each other. If we try to save that one guy now, we might not get the Shop up as quickly, and more people will get hurt and suffer.”

My son looked out the window, his face sad. “I don’t like it.”

“Me neither.”

He sighed. Tears ran down his cheeks, but he stopped fighting me.

Gavin was less reasonable. It ended up taking six adults - one for each limb and two for the tail - to fully immobilize him, and he didn’t stop fighting us for a good ten minutes. Even after he finally calmed down enough to be let go, he claimed he hated us all and that we were evil.

I kinda hated us now, too.

Even traveling slowly to avoid hitting the many pedestrians, we made good time. We reached Cozy Grove Apartments about an hour before nightfall.

The buildings were in good shape. They weren’t the newest or most modern apartments, but that was probably for the best; they were sheathed in a sturdy dark brown brick that had stood the test of time, rather than flimsy siding. Huntsville had expanded a lot in recent years, and many of the newer housing developments had been built with an eye to getting something up quickly.

The area between them was nice, a rectangle of greenery criss-crossed by walking paths and shaded by a variety of ornamental trees; I recognized one as Japanese Maple, but that was the extent of my horticultural expertise. There were bushes against the building, but most of the central area was open, with plenty of flat grass for residents to use as they wished; I imagined the complex was popular with people with dogs or small kids.

There was no one outside right now, but I could see people peeking out at us around window barricades. One older woman stood defiantly on a second-story balcony, glaring at our arrival, hands boldly on her hips as if daring us to start something.

We parked the bus and the truck, and the military engineer got out to look around.

“I think this will work,” he said as he climbed back aboard. “I’m judging the gaps on the narrow ends to be about 30 feet, with the gaps on the wider ends at 40. It’s not ideal, but I understand that speed is a factor. I doubt we’ll find much better than this in a few hours’ search.”

“Good. Do we want the Shop right in the middle?”

“Meghan! No! Wait!” The colonel sounded alarmed, reaching out a hand toward me.

I turned to him, irritated. “What am I waiting for? This was the plan, right? We ignored all those hungry people to rush over here as fast as possible.”

“It was the plan, but we’ve got concrete proof that Shops can be broken, and we know there are armed groups in the area.” The colonel jerked his head toward the sky, where I could see the faint orange tinge of oncoming twilight. “Give us a little time to get defenses set up and scope out the area. Take the kids and find an empty apartment. Rest up while we make fortifications and try to find allies.”

“I’m not that tired. I can help with setting up defenses.”

“Rather you didn’t.” He said it briskly, but then hastened to explain. “Uh, that came out wrong. The people with us ain’t actors. Even if they were, havin’ your kids with you is gonna mark you out as different. I’d rather have you get out of sight quickly. I’ll contact you mentally when we’re ready for you to put the Shop up.”

“You think it’s safe in the buildings?”

He nodded. “Pretty safe, anyway. Been scouting ahead. No signs of any organized groups. Plenty of empty units. Don’t think anyone will bother you if you don’t bother them. Let’s keep you unobtrusive.”

I frowned. “Prices at the new Shop will probably be elevated until I can get inside, unless it copies the settings from my other Shop. People might figure out I’m the owner if it changes when I enter.”

“Do you have a better plan to conceal your presence?”

I thought about it. “No.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. It’s too risky to try to travel at night, so you can bunker down here and we’ll send you home in the morning.”

“I’m not going home until the afternoon. There’ll be a new monster appearing at the Deadline tomorrow.”

“I knew that,” Dane muttered. “I knew that. Yeah, we should take its measure before you go.”

“There might be a Novelty challenge as well, since it's the end of a 12-day cycle. I could have declined the last one, so hopefully we can avoid this one, but…”

“We?” The colonel looked confused. I guess I hadn’t spoken to him much the past couple days.

“Didn’t I tell you? The boys got max Novelty during the Mandatory Trial. Cassie didn’t - thank God - but…”

He shuddered. “I’ll keep y’all in my prayers. Alright, then. We’ll plan on you heading out early afternoon, soon’s we figure out tomorrow’s new monster.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”