“How many times do I have to explain this? Those people are most definitely not my friends.”

“Yeah, but don’t you know them well enough to ask them to stop trying to kill us?” he replied, searching her face for a hint of whatever she was hiding from him.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said, pulling him along the slope.

Wells gestured downward. “You seem to like complicated.”

She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, space boy. This will be worth it.”

When they were almost at the bottom, Wells pushed off the hill to jump down the last few meters. But instead of landing on grass, his feet struck something hard. The impact was enough to send a jolt of pain shooting up his legs, though fortunately, he managed to stay upright this time. He winced, but when he glanced down, surprise chased away all thoughts of discomfort.

The ground wasn’t grass or dirt. It was rock. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the rough gray surface. No, not rock—this was a road. Wells jumped back and looked from side to side, half expecting to hear the rumble of an engine.

“Are you okay?” Sasha asked, coming to stand next to him. Wells nodded, unsure how to explain. When he’d found Clarke stranded in the ruins of the church, he’d been too terrified to focus on anything besides getting her out. Now he leaned over to study the cement, the way its fissures cracked and grew, small plants growing in the gaps.

On the Colony, it had been easy to think about the Cataclysm in the abstract sense. He knew how many people had died when it’d happened, how many metric tons of toxins had been released into the air and so on. But now, he thought about the people who’d driven, ran, or maybe even crawled down this road in a desperate attempt to escape the bombs. How many people had died in this very spot as the earth shook and the sky filled with smoke?

“It’s just over here,” Sasha said, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Follow me.”

“What’s just over there?” he asked, turning his head from side to side. The air felt different here than it did in the clearing, heavy with memories that made Wells shiver.

“You’ll see.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes. With each step, Wells’s heart began to beat a little faster. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about this,” Sasha said. Her voice grew quiet, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder.

Wells hesitated. He’d learned the hard way what happened when you made promises you couldn’t keep. “You can trust me,” he said finally.

Sasha stared at him for a moment, then nodded. As they turned around a bend in the road, Wells’s skin began to tingle, his nerves buzzing with energy as his body braced for whatever awaited them.

But when the road straightened out again, there was nothing. Only more cracked pavement veined with plants.

“There,” Sasha said, pointing toward the trees that bordered the side of the road. “Do you see it?”

Wells started to shake his head, then froze as a geometric outline took shape among the tangle of branches.

It was a house.

“Oh my god,” Wells whispered as he took a few steps forward. “This is impossible. I thought there was nothing left!”

“There’s not much. But these mountains protected a few structures from the blasts. Most of the people around here survived the bombs, but died later from starvation or radiation poisoning.”

As they got closer, Wells saw that the house was made of stone, which he supposed had a better chance of weathering the destruction, although much of the right side had collapsed.

There was no glass left in any of the windows, and thick vines covered a large portion of the surviving walls. There was something almost predatory about the way they wrapped up the sides, snaking through the gaping windows and up out of what had once been a chimney, as if the earth were trying to erase all evidence of human life.

“Can we go inside?” Wells asked when he realized he’d been staring at the house in shocked silence.

“No. I think it’ll be more fun to stand here all day and watch you gaping like a fish.”

“Cut me some slack. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Sasha blinked at him incredulously. “You lived in space. You’ve seen Mars!”

He grinned. “You have to use a telescope to see Mars, and even then it just looks like a red dot. Now come on. Are we going inside or what?”

They walked toward the side of the house farthest from the collapsed wall, where there was a window about two meters from the ground with an inviting ledge beneath it. Wells watched as Sasha climbed up onto the ledge with ease, then lowered herself through the window, disappearing into the darkness inside.

“You coming?” she called back to him.

He grinned again and climbed through the window, landing with a soft thud that jolted all other thoughts from his mind. He was standing in a house, an actual home, where people had lived before the Cataclysm.

He turned his head from side to side. It seemed like they were in what had once been a kitchen. The floor was covered in cracked yellow and white tiles, and there were white cabinets hanging slightly askew over a deep sink, the largest Wells had ever seen. The only light came from the broken window, which, filtered through the surrounding trees, gave the room a faint, greenish glow, as if he were looking at an old photograph. But this was undeniably real. He took a few steps forward and gingerly ran his finger along the counter, which was covered in generations of dust. He reached up, and even more gently, opened one of the cabinets.

There were stacks of plates and bowls inside. Although they’d slid to the side when the cabinet came loose, it was clear they’d been arranged with care. Some seemed to belong to a set, others were one of a kind. Wells removed a plate from the top of the pile. This one had an illustration on it, though it looked like it’d been done by a child. There were four stick figures with oversize, smiling faces, standing in a line holding one another’s misshapen hands. I LOV ARE FAMLEE was printed in wobbly letters above their heads. Wells replaced the plate carefully and turned to see Sasha staring at him out of the silent, dusty gloom.

“It happened a long time ago,” she said quietly.

Wells nodded. The words I know formed in his brain but got lost somewhere on the way to his mouth. His eyes began to prickle and he turned away quickly. Eight billion. That’s how many people had died during the Cataclysm. It’d always seemed as abstract as any huge figure, like the age of Earth, or the number of stars in the galaxy. Yet now, he’d give anything to know that the people who’d eaten dinner together in this kitchen, with those plates, had somehow made it off the burning planet.

“Wells, come look at this.” He turned and saw Sasha kneeling next to a pile of rubble on the far side of the room, where the wall had caved in. She was brushing dust and bits of debris off something on the floor.

He walked over and crouched down next to her. “What is it?” he asked as Sasha pulled at what looked like a clasp. “Careful,” he warned, remembering Clarke’s snake.

“It’s a suitcase,” Sasha said, her voice a mix of surprise and something else—apprehension? Fear?

The case fell open, sending a new cloud of dust into the air, and they both leaned forward for a better look. There were only a few items inside. Three small faded shirts that Wells examined one at a time, carefully replacing each exactly as he’d found them. There was also a book. Most of the pages had rotted away, but enough remained for Wells to tell it was about a boy named Charlie. He hesitated before putting it back inside the suitcase. He would’ve loved to examine it in the sunlight, but for some reason, it didn’t seem right to take anything away from the house.

The only other recognizable item was a small stuffed bear. Its fur had probably been yellow at one point, though it was hard to tell with all the dust. Sasha picked it up and stared at it for a moment before pressing a finger against his black nose. “Poor bear,” she said with a smile, although she couldn’t quite keep her voice from catching.

“It’s just so sad,” Wells said, running his finger along one of the T-shirts. “If they had left sooner, maybe they would’ve made it out in time.”