“It’s a railroad track,” Rachel says, shoving the toe of her boot against the metal bar I’m touching. “Dad showed me one on a trip once. He said the earlier civilization had giant wagons called trains that hitched together and ran on fuel instead of horses and donkeys. This was the road the trains used.”

I stand slowly, my eyes still on the track. “Can you imagine being able to travel from city-state to city-state without walking? Of course, we’d have to build better roads. And we’d have to figure out a way to build trains that are quiet enough to escape the Cursed One’s notice—or maybe equip the trains with the same sonic pulse that repels the beast. I bet I could—”

“Hey!” Rachel snaps her fingers in front of my face, and I realize the rest of the group has nearly caught up to us. “Before you decide to invent super-quiet trains with sonic weapons mounted on the front, maybe we should find that old sign and stop for lunch.”

I grin. She smiles back, and the shadows momentarily lift from her eyes.

“You’re right. Besides, I have enough inventions to worry about at the moment without adding another one to the mix.”

“How’s that going? Are we still going to be able to drop these people off at Lankenshire and then go hunt down the Commander?” She steps across the tracks, and I follow as the broken road beneath us curves through a sparse clump of trees.

“If Lankenshire makes an alliance with us—”

“Of course they will.” She kicks a chunk of crumbled stone off the trail before it can snag a wagon wheel or trip an unwary traveler. “You’ll have a replica of Rowansmark’s device to offer them. They’d have to be pretty stupid to turn that down.”

The Rowansmark tech is easy to use, but hard to duplicate. The internal wiring is a braided copper wire, sixteen gauge. The mechanisms that make up the levers are obviously handcrafted out of paper-thin silver. I don’t have anything in our salvage wagon, or in the bag of tech supplies I recovered from the abandoned armory in Lower Market where I’d stashed a few backup plans, that’s comparable to either the braided wire or the silver. And everything else I’ve tried has failed. Without the ability to duplicate the device, and with the worry that it will somehow malfunction when I need it most, I’ve settled for increasing the power in the booster I built for it, even though it now uses all but two of my remaining batteries. I may not be able to replicate Rowansmark’s tech yet, but I can improve it.

All of which does nothing to help me broker an alliance with Lankenshire, because I have no intention of handing over the only working model.

“I still have some issues with the Rowansmark design,” I say as we pass an evergreen whose top half has snapped off and balances haphazardly on the thin arms of the tree beside it. Placing my hand on the small of Rachel’s back, I guide us both away from the tree and shout a warning back to the others as well. In wind like this, we don’t want to take any chances.

“What about the device you’re building to find the Commander?” she asks, and it’s clear from the impatience in her voice that this is the only invention she truly cares about.

“It’s coming along.” Something else gleams beneath the thick greenery of the Wasteland. Something just off the path, about fifteen yards ahead of us.

“How can you be sure it works? Don’t you need his individual wristmark signature? Not that we couldn’t just search for the bright red Carrington uniforms, I guess.”

“I have his signature.” I quicken my pace as I see rusted metal poles, laced with vines, stabbing the ground like twin legs braced several yards apart. “I traded six fully functioning cloaking devices once to get it because I thought I might need it someday.”

“And you just happened to have stashed it with your extra tech at the armory?”

I turn to face her as we reach the metal poles. Something large is bolted to the rods, about halfway up, but the vines obscure it.

“Memorized it.” I tap my temple with my finger. “I didn’t want to write it down and get caught with it in case the Commander ever had cause to search my house. Plus, I couldn’t risk misplacing something so important.”

She smiles, but her eyes are fierce. “I love that you always think five steps ahead.”

“I seem to recall you once comparing my plans to an overly cautious grandmother crossing Central Square.”

“Well, I was still mad at you for everything when I said that.”

“And by ‘everything’ you mean my clumsy use of logic and reason to turn you down when you told me you loved me on your fifteenth birthday?”

She winces. “Don’t remind me. It’s still humiliating.”

I frown. “Why? You did nothing wrong.”

A pink glow suffuses her cheeks. “I embarrassed myself. Throwing myself at my father’s apprentice because I was so sure you felt the same. What an idiot.” She refuses to look at me.

I wrap my arm around her waist and lean down until my lips are right beside her ear. Quietly, I say, “I used to feel like someone sucked all the oxygen out of the room whenever you came near me. I would sit at your father’s dinner table, eating his food and discussing my job requirements, and I would have to force myself not to study the way the lamplight turned your hair into flames.” My voice lowers. “You reminded me of fire—brilliant, warm, and strong. And every time you brushed against me, I felt like I’d swallowed some of that fire, and that if your father looked at me then he’d know it.”