Chapter 21
Myra
“Hey kiddo, can we have that back now?” Myra asked, glancing into the rearview mirror at Jace who had been clinging to Cipher’s computer for hours.
It wasn’t lost on her why. She’d just taken him from the only home he had ever known, and in some way the device offered comfort. Still, Doc’s orders were clear. It was almost time for Jace’s meds and Cipher needed the computer to track Luci’s location.
Jace groaned, rolling his eyes before finally handing it back and folding his arms across his chest. “There’s nothing to do in the car.”
Myra caught Cipher’s raised brows in the corner of her vision as he reclaimed his computer without a word.
“I’m sorry, bud. We’ll stop to stretch our legs soon, I promise,” she said, softening her tone as she offered Jace a smile.
He didn’t return it. Instead, he angled his face toward the window and let his hands fidget restlessly in his lap.
The sight tugged at something deep in her.
Jace’s frustration was understandable. She knew he was holding grief he didn’t have words for, and now she was the only one left to help him through it.
She hadn’t asked for that responsibility and certainly hadn’t prepared for it, but the truth was simple.
She was all he had left. Even if he pushed her away, she wasn’t going anywhere.
“There were six of you, right?” Cipher’s voice cut through her thoughts and pulled her gaze to him. “Sable, Paxton, Grayson, Luci, Alex…and you?”
“Yeah.” Myra nodded. “Well — and Luna. So I guess seven if you count her.”
Cipher’s expression shifted and twisted in confusion as he looked out to the road ahead. There wasn’t much to see. All that was left was broken concrete and crashed cars — the remnants of what had once been. “Did you see them make it out?”
Myra’s chest clenched as she shook her head, “I just….I assumed they did. We always make it out, no matter how bad it gets.” She waited a moment before she dared to ask, “Did they not?”
Cipher tilted his head and continued typing as if doing so might yield a different answer. “It looks like Sable, Paxton, and Grayson are back in New-Chicago – their bodies at least. But Luci and Alex are a few hours ahead of us. So…I don’t know.”
The words hit harder than she expected. Myra had lost friends and family before, but her heart still dropped as though it hadn’t been trained for this.
Grayson had been one of the first friends she’d made at the academy, and he’d kept her sane in those early days when everything had felt so uncertain. She’d graduated alongside Sable and Paxton, celebrated victories and endured failures with them…and now, just like that, they were gone.
The reminder of how fragile their lives truly were felt cruel.
“Maybe they stayed behind?” Cipher asked, noticing the shift in her demeanor.
It was a more comforting theory, but it was based on no logic. Myra knew better. If Luci and Alex had chosen to keep going without them, the others would have found a way back, and they hadn’t, which could only mean one thing.
Her lips parted, ready to refuse the comfort of false hope, but then her gaze found Jace in the mirror again. His small hands twisted nervously, and his eyes were wide with fear. Myra’s throat tightened. He didn’t need to know, not yet. The world would try to break him soon enough without her help.
So she swallowed the truth, buried it deep, blinked away the tears in her eyes.
“Yeah,” she said, managing a smile even though every part of her wanted to collapse. “Maybe.”
She held that smile long enough to be sure Jace saw it.
“Is there any way to catch up to Luci and Alex faster? Maybe there’s a shortcut we can take?” Myra asked.
Cipher chewed at his lip in contemplation. He’d already severed Prometheus’s tracking on the both of them and Jace, but their momentary safety meant nothing if they couldn’t intercept Luci and Alex before they reached AZ-7.
“It’s risky,” Cipher finally said. “If we follow their exact path, at least we know we’re going the right way.
But if we try cutting across another route, who knows what we’ll run into.
Our best bet is to minimize our stops and trade off driving through the night.
It’ll be close, but it’s the best chance we’ve got. ”
Myra leaned back in her seat and absorbed his words.
A part of her was impressed and almost in awe at the fact that Alex, Luci, and Luna had made it that far on their own.
But another part of her wished that fate had tripped them up long enough for her to close the distance.
Because if Luci and Alex crossed into Arizona before she reached them, she had no idea what she’d do.
Could she be heartless enough to turn toward Sonora without them? She wasn’t sure. And maybe that was a good thing, maybe it meant some part of her was still good beneath all the blood she’d spilled.
Before she could spiral further into more what ifs, Jace’s small voice rose from the backseat. “Will you tell me where we’re going now?” he asked.
Myra kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead. “We’re picking up some friends, and then we’re headed to Sonora,” she explained. “It’s a place in Mexico. There’s a facility there that’s safer than anywhere else we can be right now.”
Jace frowned, and his eyebrows knitted together as he leaned against the window. “Mexico? Why can’t we stay here?”
Myra hesitated, and her throat tightened with all the answers she couldn’t give him. She didn’t want him to know about the danger, the fact that nowhere was really safe anymore. “Because Doc said there’s doctors there who can treat you.”
Jace was quiet for a moment before perking up again. “Don’t they speak Spanish in Mexico?”
“Yes,” she responded.
“We don’t speak Spanish,” he pointed out in a matter of fact tone.
Cipher finally glanced up from his computer. “I do actually,” he said.
Well that was news to Myra.
“You’ll pick up what you need fast enough. Trust me, kid. Humans are good at adapting when we don’t have much of a choice,” Cipher added.
Jace tilted his head, still looking unconvinced. “What if I’m bad at it?”
Myra turned slightly in her seat. “Then we learn together. Nobody’s expecting us to be perfect, Jace. We just have to be brave enough to keep trying.”
After a moment his small shoulders relaxed just a little before he turned back toward the window. Myra exhaled slowly, feeling grateful for Cipher’s backup.
“Since when do you speak Spanish?” she asked Cipher playfully.
“I had to learn for my Foreign Affairs certification,” he replied casually. Then, with a curious tilt of his head, he asked, “You didn’t learn Spanish at home?”
Myra shook her head. It didn’t surprise her that he’d been given the opportunity to learn, not when there had always been a different set of rules for people like him. “My parents and siblings didn’t speak it either.”
“Why not?” Cipher pressed, his question so straightforward that it almost sounded innocent.
“We just didn’t,” she said simply.
She thought that would be the end of it, but Cipher spoke again, trying to get at the question from another angle. “But…wouldn’t it have been easier? More natural even?”
Myra’s grip on the wheel tightened, and for a moment she considered brushing him off again. But the bitter words slipped out before she could stop them.
“Easier?” she said with a laugh. “If we had spoken Spanish at home, it would’ve made us look like we weren’t American enough.
If someone like me speaks it, it’s suspicious and wrong, but if someone like you does it’s…
” She paused, trying to find the words. “An accomplishment and something to admire.”
Myra didn’t bother to look over at Cipher to gauge his reaction.
After a moment, Cipher sighed and from the corner of her eye Myra caught the tinge of hesitation on his face.
He looked like he was turning her words over carefully, debating whether there was anything he could say that wouldn’t land wrong.
It wasn’t his fault that the world was this way of course.
It was just the system they’d both been forced to grow up in.
“Well…” he said at last, adjusting his glasses with a small, nervous motion. “They definitely didn’t cover that in Foreign Affairs.”
The unexpected dryness of his response made the tension in Myra loosen.
If it had been anyone else, she might have held the laughter back, guarding herself like she always did.
But this was Cipher and with him, the laugh escaped before she could stop it.
She let it out, then slid one hand from the steering wheel to lightly nudge his arm, playful in a way she rarely allowed herself to be.
Cipher chuckled boyishly at her nudge, but then his laughter tapered off. When she glanced sideways, his expression had changed.
“Sorry if I pressed too much,” he said, more careful this time. “I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable.”
The sincerity in his tone pulled at something she usually kept locked away. Before she could form a reply, he leaned closer and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. The contact was quick but it lingered all the same, sending a warmth through her that she still hadn’t gotten used to.
“What the heck was that?” Jace suddenly asked from the backseat.
Myra rolled her eyes as Cipher straightened in his seat and cleared his throat awkwardly. She gripped the wheel a little tighter, biting back another laugh that threatened to spill free.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, fighting to keep her voice even, though her smile gave away how much she loved the both of them.
After stopping to stretch, Myra crouched beside the van’s open door, pill bottle trembling in her hands. One dose every six hours. She’d repeated it to herself so many times, but saying it out loud didn’t make her any more confident.
Jace sat propped against a duffel bag, sweat slicking his brown hair to his forehead. “It’s okay,” he said. “You won’t mess it up.”
“I know,” she said, though her fingers fumbled anyway as she placed the pill into the syringe and pulled back the plunger a few times to crush it.
The syringe felt foreign and heavier than it should have.
She drew in the liquid next, careful to tap out every bubble the way Doc had instructed her to.
When she finally pressed the needle into the bend of Jace’s arm, she forced herself not to look away. He hissed but didn’t flinch. Myra exhaled only when the plunger reached its end.
“See?” Jace whispered, the corner of his mouth pulling into something like a smile. “You’re basically a nurse!”
“Hardly,” she responded, capping the syringe and tossing it aside. Just then, Cipher appeared from the front seat to swap places at the wheel, Myra caught his small nod of approval and felt something unclench inside her chest. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
She climbed into the passenger seat, letting the tension in her shoulders ease as the van rolled back onto the road ahead.
Myra had been sleeping deeply enough to forget the road and the weight of their task just for a little while until Cipher’s touch startled her awake.
Her body jolted upright and her heart leapt to her throat before she realized it was only him.
She exhaled sharply, catching her breath, and blinked until her eyes adjusted.
It was then that she saw them.
At first, her tired eyes struggled to make out the bodies in the dark, but then the patterns came into focus. They looked like horses in a way but with striped coats and slender legs. Their movements were casual, almost lazy, as though the apocalypse had never touched them.
Zebras.
For a moment, she thought she was still dreaming, but they were real and strolling by as though the world belonged to them.
“Jace,” she whispered, reaching over to the backseat to nudge him awake. “Look outside.”
He groaned and rubbed his eyes. When he followed her gaze his face lit up and wonder washed away the fatigue. “What are those?” he asked, pressing himself between Myra and Cipher. “Are they real?”
Seeing Jace experience something new made warmth bloom in her chest. “Yeah. They’re real.”
“They’re zebras,” Cipher added. “Although if I had to guess, they’re probably a genetically modified breed. Before the outbreak most zoos experimented with — ”
“Shhh,” Myra cut him off quickly, shaking her head with a quiet laugh. “Just let him enjoy it.”
Cipher’s mouth closed and after a moment even he leaned back and let the rare sight unfold in silence. Together they watched the herd cross the road until the last of their stripes disappeared into the shadows.
Myra knew they weren’t safe yet. There was still a long road ahead before she could let her guard down.
But for a moment, the struggle felt worth it.
Every mile so far had led to this small marvel, and being able to share it with the two boys she cared for the most was a blessing unlike anything else.