Maggie showed up just in time, her arms laden with heavy bags of flour that left white dusty trails on her forearms. At once, Hutch and I lurched up to unburden her, the bags heavier than they looked, dense and unwieldy in our grip.

  It wasn't that Maggie couldn't pull her own weight. Out of the three of us, she was the one who made no comments when shit got hard. Hutch and I liked to spew cuss words in long chains of frustration, as if it would make anything easier, but she just stayed quiet and simmered on her own rage. You could see it in the set of her jaw, the way her shoulders jumped up near her ears when things went sideways.

  And she was enraged about pretty much everything, all the time.

  I couldn't blame her. When we first met Mags, she was wearing nothing but a tiny sports bra and matching running shorts, her skin sunburned and peeling across her shoulders. She looked like a spitting cat as we approached, ready to claw our eyes out. I barely said my name was Jack before a shotgun pressed against my back—cold metal even through my shirt—and Eleanor made her first appearance in my life, ready to blow a hole through my torso if I so much as looked at Maggie's legs the wrong way.

  She had every right to be angry about the world. Dallas, where we'd all met, was her home. She lost everything: her boyfriend, her parents, her little brother. And her clothing. It took days for us to find a hoodie and cargo pants for her, scrounging through abandoned apartments and stripped-bare department stores.

  "You two look like you need a nap," she said, wiping the excess flour off her hands. The white powder drifted down in the afternoon light, settling on the cracked asphalt beneath our feet.

  I tugged her dark brown braid as I passed her to climb into the back of the Chevy, the truck bed hot enough under my palms that I had to shift my weight quickly. I was intending on organizing our haul before we took off, making sure nothing would slide around on the drive back. "You got to miss out on all of the dead people."

  She frowned, her nose wrinkling. "Where?"

  "In the McDonald's walk-in," Hutch told her. He held his hand out for her backpack, and Maggie shrugged it off dutifully, the straps leaving red marks on her shoulders. Today, in the October heat that still clung to everything like a wet blanket, she was wearing her sports bra again, but paired with some running leggings that seemed new. I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. If she wanted to go shopping in the big box store, she could. Her time management was not my problem.

  "That sucks."

  "It reeked. At least four of them were in there." The smell still lingered in my nostrils, that sweet-rot stench that you could never quite shake once you'd encountered it.

  "Must've been there since the invasion." Maggie folded her arms over the lip of the truck's bed, balancing her chin on a fist while she watched me stoop and go through boxes. Her dark eyes followed my hands with that hawk-like attention she always had, and I knew she would snap at me if she thought I was doing something wrong. So far, so good. "Poor guys."

  "I think they made it out luckier than us." Hutch picked up his second box, filled with processed coffee beans that rattled softly inside their vacuum-sealed bags, and handed it to me.

  "It's not so bad," I told him, settling the box into place with a dull thud.

  "Oh?"

  "You could have work tomorrow."

  Hutch snorted, a sharp exhale through his nose. "I guess you're right about that."

  Maggie watched me place the beans right up against the back of the cab, wedging them in tight so they wouldn't shift. "They don't have work tomorrow, either," she pointed out, her voice flat.

  "Buzzkill." I looked around for something to toss at her head, but no dice. Everything was either too heavy or too valuable.

  We finished packing up the truck, the bed now full of our scavenged goods—canned vegetables, bags of rice, the precious coffee, and Maggie's flour. Hutch slipped out a curse as he looked into the bed and realized we forgot to put up Marshall's signs. They were still stacked against the wheel well, forgotten in our rush to load up.

  As part of living in Eden, we had to follow most of the rules in Eden. It was okay to run afoul of them once or twice a week so far, but Marshall made it clear when we arrived that failure to uphold the New Law wouldn't be tolerated: what the council of Eden says goes, and no, we were not allowed to ask how the council operated, nor how they were voted in. All I knew was that they were around the area when the Fall began, and so they ended up cloistering together and hashing out a way of government before someone could walk along and strip them of the chance.

  Marshall, of course, thought the best way to mark our territory was with signs. PROPERTY OF EDEN, they said in all capital letters, the lettering smashed a bit at the ends like a birthday poster made by someone who'd run out of room. Hutch was tasked with hanging them up around the complex, so that way other survivors would think twice. He added, a little after explaining his plan, that it might help survivors come towards Eden if they knew where it was.

  I failed to point out that the signs had no maps. No directions. I couldn't help but feel that this was intentional.

  Hutch handed three of the signs to me, the cardboard flimsy and already warping at the edges, and I threw them on the ground and shrugged.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Maggie gave me one of her prolonged, wispy sighs, the kind that seemed to deflate her entire body. "Jack," she said, her tone exhausted. "We have to play by the rules."

  "Marshall said to put them out," I told her, gesturing around us at the empty parking lot, the crumbling strip mall, the whole abandoned wasteland we were standing in. "They're out."

  "Other scavengers will find them. Imagine if Dex comes out here next."

  "He won't," I replied confidently. Dex was even lazier than Hutch and I combined. I was the person who took his guard rotation, and that meant I had to clean up empty beer cans and beef stick wrappers from around my foldout chair, sticky and attracting flies in the heat. He got to leave messes, because he was Marshall's son. "No one but us goes out this far. They're all scared of… well, you know."

  "None of them have even seen one before."

  "Dex claims he has," Hutch said as he walked over to a light pole, the metal base rusted orange and flaking. He went to stick the sign up before he realized he had no stapler, no tape, and no glue. Nothing but the cardboard and his bare hands. Squinting down, his thick brow furrowed at the signs like they'd personally offended him, he added, "Not the Mastodon ships. The Bees. He says he saw a pair of them circling a warehouse downtown."

  "We would've seen it, too," I told him. The hair on the back of my neck prickled at the thought. You didn't miss something like that.

  Hutch dropped the signs on the ground with a slap of cardboard against asphalt, giving up. Maggie glared at both of us, her jaw tight, but said nothing. Even she knew when to stop pushing.

  "I say we go look for it," Hutch finally said.

  Now both Maggie and I were looking at him like he was fucking crazy. The October heat pressed down on us, making the air shimmer above the parking lot, and for a moment nobody spoke.

  The Bees were the ground forces of the invasion, and so far, we'd only seen three pairs of them, which was six total. They came in smaller Mastodon ships that descended low over the buildings, the downdraft whipping wind and debris away from the drop site in violent spirals. Two Bees were launched out of the bottom of each ship. They melted through the hulls without any sort of portal entrance, their bodies seeming to phase through the metal as if they were one and the same. And maybe they were. I had no idea how any of it worked.

  Once they were here, they began scanning with giant, cleansing spotlights for humans. White beams that cut through darkness and walls alike, searching.

  Every time they came across someone, the Bees would shoot their plasma guns. The sound was like nothing else—a high-pitched whine followed by a crack that echoed off every surface. Sometimes they would even take the human corpse back to their ships, dragging the bodies up in those same white beams, but for the most part, it was as if the Bees were hunting for sport. Target practice with living things.

  Watching them was the only time that I truly feared for my life. No one knew what that felt like until it happened to them—that animal terror that made your legs want to run before your brain could catch up. I saw a Bee shoot down a soldier running from it, the man's body jerking mid-stride before he collapsed in a smoking heap. All I could think in that moment was that I had never wanted so badly to live until I was faced with imminent death. Everything else—all the bullshit, all the petty complaints—just evaporated.

  "You have to be fucking kidding me," Maggie said bluntly, her voice cutting through my thoughts.

  Hutch shrugged, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "For all we know, he's lying. But we have the rest of the afternoon, and we're all together. So why not?"

  "Why not?" I squinted at him, the sun making my eyes water. "Because I want to live? Is that a good enough reason?"

  "Sorry, I forgot. You have guard rotation." He scoffed and shook his head, kicking at one of the discarded signs.

  All three of us knew it was a farce. No guarded sandbags were going to stop a Bee from mass killing Eden. But I still agreed to it when we first joined up, because I had a sense that this group of people had no idea what was coming for us. They acted like the lights were out, but everything was fine. Like this was just a temporary inconvenience. None of them even seemed to care that we were on extinction's doorstep.

  "I just don't see the point, Hutch."

  "The point, Jack," he replied coolly, his voice taking on that edge it got when he'd already made up his mind, "is that I think Dex is a lying piece of shit. There's no Bees in this town. There's no point of them being here, we're the only three even around right now. So I want to see if Dex is right."

  Maggie picked at her nails, flaking off dried flour. "You're doing all of this just because you hate Dex?"

  "I'm doing it because I want to be ready the next time he talks out of his ass." Hutch paused, and added with a half-smile, "I also think Eden's boring."

  Well, that was the truth, at least. The most honest thing he'd said all day.

  I glanced at Maggie, and we exchanged a long, heated conversation in our eyes. The kind of silent argument we'd perfected over the past few months. She knew I would eventually side with Hutch, and I knew that she would rip our heads off with her teeth if we went without her. And she didn't want to go—I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way her fingers had stilled on her nails. We were at war for a few more seconds, neither of us blinking, before she finally broke eye contact. I won.

  I turned back to Hutch, feeling the weight of what we were about to do settle in my gut. "Here's the deal: we go take a look at the warehouses downtown, and if there's a Bee, we run like hell."

  I wondered what he was really doing with this. I could usually tell when Hutch had a good plan—there was a certain confidence in his movements, a purposefulness—but this one didn't make any sense to me. This felt reckless, even for him.

  I wanted him to be wrong, though. Desperately. If a Bee—or even worse, a unit of them—were anywhere near us, it meant they were dangerously close to Eden. Hate it or not, I didn't want to be the bearer of bad news when we came running into camp with them on our heels, plasma fire lighting up the sky behind us.

  It would make sense why we needed to take a look, I reasoned. And if we—and Eleanor—were the only ones who had seen Bees before, we were also the only ones in the camp that knew the risks. The only ones who understood what we were really up against.

  "Marshall would have our asses if we die," I told Hutch finally, my throat dry. "So we better not let him find out."

  "One hour, and then we go back," he offered, holding up a single finger like we were making some kind of sacred pact.

  Maggie rubbed her forehead, leaving a white streak of flour across her temple. "You guys are both so stupid." That was her Maggie-fied answer of a yes. I'd heard it around fifty times in the three-week span prior to Eden, and another hundred times since we'd all bunked together in the same tent. Maggie and Eleanor were in one chamber of the tent, and Hutch and I were eaten alive by mosquitos in the vestibule, slapping at our arms all night.

  "I think we've got a deal," I told them, and I was awarded with a rare smile from Hutch.

  I couldn't say it was because he was happy.