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in the first forty-eight hours, when the problem might have been contained.
    The general belief was that the locust’s design team had died as soon as it got loose...and by the reckoning of most survivors, they probably hadn’t died slow enough.
    There was no punishment hard enough for this crime. No human language even had a word to describe what had happened.
    But the goal of the search for the locust’s designers, at least in Ruth’s mind, had never been revenge. They wanted insight, answers, a key to stopping it.
    She said, “Tell me you found the lab.” But even James would have been shouting.
    “It’s just a lead,” he said. “Hardware.”
    “Are they sending someone after it? Where?”
    “They’re still costing out fuel and bottled air.”
    “But this could be everything we need! Original schematics, customized gear, even clues to what happened to the design team!”
    James didn’t reply for several moments, maybe letting her calm down. Maybe wishing, like her, that it could be true. He said, “No one’s convinced it’s solid information yet.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Three years ago Select Atomics delivered a fabrication laser to a Stockton location that can’t be accounted for.”
    Ruth had never been to the West Coast but had grown familiar with the area, at first from watching news coverage, then from interviews with the FBI and NSA. Every survivor associated even vaguely with nanotech, even security guards and janitors, had undergone extensive debriefing as the intelligence agencies combed for potential leads, names, rumors.
    Based on the pattern of infections, the authorities’ best guess was that the locust’s designers had worked in Berkeley or Oakland in the congested urban heart of the region.
    “Stockton,” Ruth said. “That’s east of the Bay Area near Sacramento, right? Near the foothills of the Sierras?”
    “I know what you’re thinking. But you have to realize—”
    “Get a plane out there! As soon as we can.”
    “Ruth, you have to realize that the laser could have been taken anywhere. Even if they were in Stockton, things got crazy in a hurry. The freeways were traffic jams. Half the city burned. And it was snowing something like two inches an hour everywhere above 6,000 feet.”
    She shook her head, the earpiece hurting her ear. “The original team might have made it.”
    “Ruth—”
    “Some of them might have made it.”

6
    Sawyer prowled back and forth across the shallow drainage that led up to their peak, moving laterally, as if the small markers of rock they’d built at 10,000 feet were an impassable fence. He wasn’t interested in good-byes.
    Cam gathered with the others on the ridge where they’d lit their signal fire for Hollywood. Faulk, who was staying, had agreed to burn two armloads later in the day. Much later. Sunrise remained a great yellow promise beyond the ranges to the east, and in the frost-hard twilight even whispers sounded sharp and loud. It was April 14th, Year One. Plague Year. The broadcasts out of Colorado had served as a reliable calendar for Hollywood’s group, and he said the radio had just begun to talk about the future that way—and the idea caught on here immediately, for obvious reasons, Cam thought. A new start.
    “Throw a bed frame over the pile,” said Doug Silverstein. “That should keep it dry long enough to really get it roaring.”
    Faulk nodded. “They’ll know you’re coming.”
    To the west, gray clouds emerged from the lingering night and absorbed the familiar shapes of the nearest mountains, earth and sky bound together by charcoal sheets of rain. The damp, erratic wind was fragrant with oxygen.
    Sawyer’s voice whipped over them—“M’on!”—and most of their heads turned. He pumped his balled fist up and down and Cam remembered, strangely, making the same gesture to truckers from the backseat of his dad’s car when he was a kid, baseball on the radio, horsing around with his brothers in the tightly packed