Chapter 7: The Count

I had not planned to see my street again.

We came over the hill at sunrise, the Alpha, Odessa, Emmett, and me.

The wind had been through the compound for six weeks, and it had taken most of the smoke.

It had left the ash, and the black frames of forty houses, and the smell of wet char.

The crows lifted off the lower row as we came down, and they screamed at us from the trees.

I walked behind Tobias on legs that did not feel like mine.

He walked slowly, and he did not speak.

Odessa had a clipboard and a pencil on a string.

"Count them as we go," Tobias said. "Every house. Every one of them."

"Alpha," Emmett said, "the ground is unsafe. The Moot has no right to demand this."

"I'm not doing it for the Moot."

"The pack cannot see their Alpha counting graves."

"The pack isn't here," Tobias said. "Walk, Emmett."

Emmett fell back, and I felt his eyes on me again, sliding over my neck and my hands.

The first lane was empty.

The second lane was the baker's, and a metal tray sat in the ash where the oven had been.

On the third lane, Tobias stopped.

A pair of small shoes lay in the black mud by a doorstep, with the laces tied.

They were red canvas, the kind kids wear in summer.

He bent down and picked one up.

It was no bigger than his palm.

"Six years old," Odessa said, from behind us, very low. "Maybe seven."

Tobias turned the shoe over in his burned hand and said nothing at all.

I watched his throat move.

Part of me wanted him to feel every bit of it.

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