Ruins by Dan Wells

situation like this she might step in. But Xochi or Isolde or both might already be dead by the time Nandita came out, and maybe even Ariel herself.
    At last Chas turned away.
    “Let’s go.”
    He walked to the door, and that was it—no warnings, no parting words, no acknowledgment of Khan’s illness or Isolde’s desperate cries for help. They were looking for Arwen, and this wasn’t Arwen, so they left. Isolde clutched her baby close to her chest, and Xochi closed the door the soldiers had left hanging open.
    Ariel grabbed her rifle, checked the barrel, and tried to slow her breathing.
    “We’ve got to get out of town tonight,” said Kessler, stepping into the room with her own rifle gripped tightly in her hands. “That was too close.”
    “I think we handled it pretty damn well,” Xochi snapped.
    Kessler growled, rolling her eyes. “I never said you didn’t.”
    “Be quiet or you’ll make him start crying again,” said Isolde, and hurried out of the room. Ariel slowly peeled her fingers off the rifle, though she still couldn’t take her eyes off the locked door, or the windows they’d so carefully blocked to keep from being spied on. Xochi and Kessler pulled the bags out of the cupboards in the kitchen, running last-minute checks to make sure everything was ready. Ariel set her rifle on the table beside her but couldn’t bring herself to take her hand off it.
    “You may have saved their lives, Ariel,” said Nandita, so close behind her that she almost jumped when she heard the old woman’s voice. She shot her a dark glance over her shoulder, then walked into the kitchen to help with the bags.
    “The other girls froze,” Nandita continued. “You didn’t. I thank you for that.”
    Kessler glared at Xochi, but neither of them spoke.
    “You still haven’t told us where we’re going,” said Ariel.
    “Does it matter?” asked Madison, walking in with Arwen on her hip. “We need to get out, I don’t care where.”
    “Where this group goes matters more than almost anything else in the world,” said Kessler. She had a soft Irish lilt in her voice; Xochi, her adopted daughter, was Mexican by birth, but had lived with Kessler so long that the same lilt crept into her voice when she was angry.
    It was fully evident now. “You know that’s not what she meant, Erin.”
    “Yes, we have to get the children away from the Partials—” said Madison, but fell abruptly silent almost before she could even finish speaking. Ariel felt everyone’s eyes on her but said nothing. “The Partial soldiers,” said Madison, correcting herself. “We had the perfect cover today, and it still almost fell apart.”
    “I’m not suggesting we stay,” said Kessler. “I’m just agreeing with Ariel. We need to know where we’re going.”
    “To the same lab where I spent most of the last year,” said Nandita.
    “That doesn’t tell us anything,” said Ariel.
    Nandita sighed. “And what if one of you is captured? They could torture you, and get the location, and cut the rest of us off before we even arrive.”
    “What are you expecting this trip to be like?” asked Ariel. “Two infants, an old woman, and barely enough survival training to go around. We’re sticking together just to stay alive, and if they find one of us, they find us all.”
    Nandita glared back at her, but after a moment of silence she spoke. “Before the Break there was a government laboratory on a tiny island off the eastern tip of this one, the Plum Island Disease Research Center. Being separated from the rest of the continent made it the only safe place to study the most contagious organisms, but it turns out that same isolation saved it when the rest of the world fell apart. It has its own power source, its own air and water recycling system, and a hermetically sealed interior—it hasn’t fallen apart the way everything else has. That’s where I made this.” She held up the hand-sized leather bag that hung around her neck,