Daryl is gone in the morning, probably on that supply run to the veterinarian school. Carol goes up to the big house a half hour after Sophia goes to school. When Jeeves—Arthur, Carol reminds herself—opens the door, he looks at her with a combination of irritation and trepidation.

"I know it's not library hours," she tells him, "but I was hoping I could visit Cody, please, in the infirmary."

"I suppose if I don't admit you, there will be a brandishing of firearms?"

"I wasn't brandishing at you. I heard the shots from the range and mistook them for a threat. I promise I didn't mean to frighten you."

Arthur makes an uncertain noise but opens the door wider. "Very well, madam, I will show you to the infirmary."

Carol knows where it is, but she lets the butler lead her. He tells her to ring when she's ready to have him "see her out" and points to a pully on the door that apparently rings a particular bell in the foyer.

The infirmary has three hospital beds, a working sink with counter space that houses medical equipment, a large metal storage cabinet, and a small refrigerator that is plugged in and humming, perhaps to store medicines. Carol wonders what the room was used for before the collapse.

Cody is much happier to see her than Arthur was. He looks a little tired, propped sitting up in bed with two pillows, but he's all smiles. "I heard what you did for me, you know," he says. "How you waved that gun in Arthur's face to make sure I got my medicines."

"I didn't…" Carol sighs. She doesn't suppose there's any point in trying to set that record straight. Who knows, maybe she could benefit from the reputation. "I was worried about you." She puts a hand on his wrist atop the blanket and squeezes gently. "You were my first friend here."

Cody beams. Then he asks, "Does that mean you've made a second one?"

"Maybe. I met Nadia. And Ryan. And, of course, there's Daryl. Though I don't know how friendly I'd say he is. Although he did bring me flowers yesterday. And give me and Sophia each one of his knives."

"Flowers?" Cody asks doubtfully. "Daryl?"

"As a thank you for helping you. I think he was really worried about you."

"Hah! I don't think Daryl thinks much of me. He once said I didn't have enough brains to saddle a June bug."

"He also once said you have balls the size of Texas," announces Bonnie as she walks through the door. Arthur is not behind her, which makes Carol wonder if the supposedly required guidance about the mansion was for her alone. "I made you an omelet. With tomato and onions."

Cody's eyes light up as Bonnie swings the hospital tray in front of him and sets a pink plastic plate down. "My favorite!" Then he looks at the plate suspiciously. "How'd you get so many eggs?"

"Daryl gave me some."

Cody's eyes narrow, and he looks at Bonnie with a glimmer of accusation in his gray-blue eyes. "Why's Daryl giving you eggs? You said you were done trading for extras."

So Cody's not ignorant of his sister's activities after all, Carol thinks. He knows more than DeShawn imagines he does.

"I didn't trade them!" Bonnie insists. "He just gave them to me because he felt bad that he might have gotten my brother killed. As if three eggs would make up for it! He's lucky you pulled through. I can't believe he talked you into that!"

"I volunteered, Bonnie. And just think. Now I get two MREs and three bottles of booze as a finder's fee."

"Garrison said it's one MRE and two bottles of booze," Bonnie corrects him.

"Well Daryl said it's two and three," Cody insists.

"Then Daryl must be giving you part of his finder's fee. Though if he were really sorry, he'd give you both bottles of his booze." Bonnie sits down in the padded blue chair by his bedside. "Did you know Garrison's about to be a hundred and fifty percenter? He told me he's getting promoted to the outer circle after all the work he's done with Daryl and DeShawn."

"Well what about me?" Cody asks. "I went with them to track the truck, you know. I went on the raid with them."

"Oh, honey," Bonnie says. She winces sympathetically. "You know it's probably because Garrison's such a good shot. And there's only the one slot to fill. Merle's."

"You're not going to start making trades with Garrison now, are you?"

Carol, uncomfortable at being a fly on the wall to this family conversation, says, "Well, I'll leave you to your breakfast, Cody, I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

She doesn't go straight to the foyer. Instead, she pokes around the first floor a little. There's a drawing room with a long door that opens onto a porch, and she can see the range out back. Some of the kids are out there, with rifles on their shoulders. Sophia's one of them.

The instructor, a young man Carol assumes is Noah based on what Sophia told her, announces, "We have a special guest today!" His exclamation is clear through an open window in the sitting room.

Carol watches as Jefe strolls into view and comes to stand next to Noah. She's not wearing her office attire anymore. She has on combat boots and blue jeans and a high-neck T-shirt.

"Ms. Garcia's going to do a little demonstration for us," Noah announces. "Now remember the range safety rules!"

The kids step back behind a red line spray painted on the dirt and squeeze orange foam earplugs into their ears. They raise yellow plastic glasses over their eyes. Carol creeps closer to the window to better see the scene. She watches as Jefe takes aim at four tin cans situated a long way away. The woman makes four clean shots in rapid succession, plinking every one of those cans off the rail in under two seconds.

"Whoa!" a couple of the kids say.

A new set of cans is arranged, at a much shorter distance, for the kids. They're made to sit at shooting benches, one at a time, to take their shots, four attempts each. Carol feels an incredible swell of pride when Sophia, on her third shot, plinks a can straight off the rail. Her fourth shot hits, too. When Carina takes the bench, she doesn't have a single hit. She doesn't even come near the rail. Every shot is low and sends dust clouds of dirt hopping up from the range. The teenage girl, looking mortified, stands and lets Ivan have her spot at the bench. Sophia whispers something to her that seems to reassure Carina slightly.

Jefe turns momentarily from watching Noah instruct Ivan on his position and spies Carol through the window. Carol retreats, but not fast enough. Jefe catches up to her just outside the drawing room, calling. "Ms. Doyle! May I see you in my office?"

Feeling like a child summoned to the principal, Carol turns. "Of course."

When Jefe leads her into the library, some younger kids are having story time. They're seated in a half circle around an elderly, white-haired woman in a chair. Upon seeing Jefe, the woman abruptly stops reading, closes her book, and says, "Come now, children. It's time for our math lesson. Why don't we go for a walk while we add and subtract?"

"Yes, Ms. Swainson!" the children chorus.

She leads the kids out the door and closes it behind herself.

Carol, somewhat cautiously, eases down into the wine-colored chair to which she's been directed.

Jefe retrieves a file folder labeled Doyle, drops it on her desk, sits down, rolls her chair forward, and asks, "Where's Arthur? He doesn't usually allow people to wander the mansion. I hope you don't have him gagged and bound somewhere."

Carol doesn't dignify that with a response. It's probably not wise, but she can't help but say, "I see you dress more comfortably for range days."

"I just wear that sexy librarian get-up to screw with people the first time I meet them," Jefe says. "It works, doesn't it?"

"I guess that depends on what you're trying to accomplish."

"Well, it works on the men anyway," Jefe assures her. "Merle couldn't keep his eyes off my chest the first time he came into my office, and I had him disarmed in a second. I mean that literally. Of his handgun. And then once I had that handgun in his face…Then I really had his attention." She drums her fingertips on the file folder. "It didn't work on Daryl though. He had his bow up and trained on me at the same time I got Merle in my sights. I used to think he must be gay."

Carol wonders what changed her mind. Maybe Daryl himself changed it in her bed.

"By the way, I had a talk with my daughter, and Carina apologized to Sophia for being mean about her shirt."

"Oh." Carol wasn't expecting that. "That's good."

"I think Carina just lashes out sometimes. She feels badly that she's a terrible shot. She jumps every time her gun goes off. And any kind of blood makes her downright squeamish." Jefe sighs. "I mean…she's my daughter. People expect her to be…well. They expect her to be like me. But it turns out children aren't actually pieces of clay we can mold in our own image, are they?"

"No," Carol agrees. "It's almost as if they're their own people."

"Damned inconvenience, if you ask me." Jefe flips the file folder open. "So, you need some community chores. Most of your duties will be to your sponsor, but everyone has to contribute to the community, or this place doesn't stay afloat." She picks up a pen and scans it over the page like a moving bookmark. "According to DeShawn, when they found you, you had managed to covertly and deliberately conceal a kitchen pairing knife from your attackers and then to calculatedly deploy it at the opportune moment?"

"Well…" Carol had forgotten she'd slipped that knife it into her shirt pocket until Daryl's bolt was in that other's man's neck. "It was what I had available. I'd been disarmed."

"And Garrison tells me you rapidly and surreptitiously recovered your firearm from one of the dead men and had it trained on him and were prepared to blow his head off the moment he rounded the house?" Jefe looks up from the file at her.

"That's…that's a bit of an exaggeration. That's not quite what happened."

Jefe turns a page. "And Cody tells me that when one of the dead men reanimated and seized your daughter, you reacted with remarkable aplomb while he slew it."

"Cody said that?"

"He didn't use that vocabulary, but that was his gist. And Daryl says you're, and I quote – a fucking fantastic cook."

Carol smiles. "He does seem to appreciate my cooking."

"Well, I gather he didn't get much home cooking in his childhood." Jefe leans back in her chair. "He once told me a story about getting lost in the woods as a child. He survived for nine days on berries. And no one even noticed he was gone."

"How could no one notice?"

"His father was on a bender with some waitress, he said, and Merle was in juvenile detention. His mother had died the year before. But he made his way back home eventually, walked in his house, and made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He just picked out the moldy parts on the bread."

Carol thinks of that book buried in Daryl's nightstand, about surviving childhood abuse. "That's terrible."

"For some people, this world isn't all that much of a downgrade. For some, it's even a step up on the social ladder. Those are the people that will swing hard one way or the other – to become great villains, or great men. I was never fully confident which way Merle was ultimately going to swing, and because of that, a part of me is almost relieved I don't have to keep him close at hand anymore. But I think I've got Daryl figured out. You, on the other hand – you're a bit of an enigma."

"Oh?"

"But it's only been three days." She turns another page in her folder, and when Carol leans forward and tries to peer at the papers, Jefe draws them closer to herself. "We know you can cook, but I have a house chef already. Daryl says you can organize well, said you were, and again I quote, a fucking feng shui jigsaw magician with his pantry." Jefe peers at Carol over the rims of her glasses.

"He has a way with words," Carol quips.

The other woman shows no sign of amusement. "So I might assign you to help Andrew in the warehouse."

Carol tries her hand at levity again. "It's good to know his name. I've just been calling him Clipboard Man."

Once again, Jefe doesn't crack smile. "Your file also says you've personally killed dozens of thrashers?"

"Yes. Of necessity. Over several months."

"With a gun or knife or – "

"- Both. Once with a rock. And once with a knitting needle."

"A knitting needle?"

"It's what was handy at the time."

"Then I might have you help clean the pike lines."

"Pike lines?" Carol asks.

"Outside the iron fence, there are other partial fences of a sort, here and there, just to slow down any packs that might be roaming through the general area. We keep expanding the pike lines bit by bit when time permits. Thrashers get caught up on the pikes. Cleaners go out twice a week, kill the thrashers, and recover anything of value from them. Would you be comfortable doing that?"

"Is anyone really comfortable doing that?"

"The cleaners usually are, within a few weeks. But if you're not – "

"-No. No. I'd like to be a cleaner."

"You're sure?"

Carol doesn't want to become too soft behind these gates. She doesn't want to forget how to kill those creatures, what it feels like to thrust a knife in and pull it out. She used to be so squeamish at first. She threw up the first time she killed one. Her heart still thudded the last time she did it, but it was getting a lot easier. She doesn't want to lose that progress, in case this camp doesn't work out, in case she ever has to flee with Sophia again. "I'm certain. Make me a cleaner."

"Okay then. Cleaner it is. Two days a week. The shift is four to six hours, however long it takes. And maybe I'll give you two, three-hour shifts a week in the warehouse as well. That's a maximum eighteen hours a week. That should leave you plenty of time for your duties as a sponsee." She scribbles something on a page in the file folder. "I'll prepare your work schedule and send it home with Sophia after school." Then Jefe puts the folder aside and asks, "Were you ever in a camp outside of Georgia?"

"No."

"I'll just get the Georgia map then." Jefe pulls a large, two-sided map out of her desk drawer and unfolds it. The map covers almost the entire surface of her desk. She asks Carol to point to the location of every camp she's ever been inhabited and describe what happened to it.

That's a painful process, dredging up memories she'd rather not re-live, but she does as she's asked. She tells Jefe about the Atlanta survivor camp, how it was overrun, and how the group split when they left, some following Shane to Fort Benning, some Rick to the CDC. She sees Fort Benning has an X on it, next to the number 1, and asks about it.

"A couple of my supply runners said it was overrun with thrashers when they swung by. That was about…seven months ago?"

So after Shane and his group went there. Carol wonders if they were overrun with it, or they found it already overrun and moved on. "Did it seem recently overrun?"

"My men didn't bother coming close enough to investigate. They saw from a distance, through binoculars, that it was filled with at least a hundred thrashers inside the closed walls, and they marked it and moved on. We don't ever bother trying to loot places with more than a few dozen thrashers. It's not worth the risk. Next camp?"

Carol tells Jefe about the explosion at the CDC and everything Dr. Jenner told them, including that the French were the last to hold out.

"The French?" Now Jefe is finally amused. She laughs. "Who would have thought?" She leans forward and marks the CDC with an X and writes the number 3 next to it.

Carol can only point to the general area of the Greene Family farm. She relies on the nearby town to estimate its location. Jefe marks the spot and writes a 1 and a 3.

Next, Carol tells Jefe about Terminus, and how when the bandits came, she and Sophia hid in a root cellar. "We snuck away by night. I left them all behind," she says guiltily. "My only goal was to get Sophia out alive."

"And you succeeded in that goal, clearly. I would have made the same choice in your situation." She draws a red X on the map at the end of the railway station and writes a 2.

"What do the numbers mean?" Carol asks.

"If there's a 1, it's been overrun by thrashers. If there's a 2, it's ruled by people we intend to avoid if possible. If there's a 3, it's been destroyed, typically by bombing, fire, or flood. If there's a 4, we've already looted it clean."

Carol scans the map for 2s, to see how many bad men Copper Creek is avoiding. She spies a 2 on Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, another on a neighborhood labeled Woodbury, a third on the West Georgia Correctional Facility, and a fourth on the University of Georgia in Athens.

"Next camp?" Jefe asks.

Carol shakes her head. "There were no more camps after that. I mean, not with other people. We camped a hundred places. Country houses, mostly. Parks. We slept in the car a lot."

"Well, thank you for your assistance." Jefe folds up the map and pushes a button underneath her desk. Carol thinks she hears a distant bell ring. "How is Daryl treating you?"

Jefe studies Carol while she awaits an answer to that question, and Carol wonders if she's sizing her up like some kind of rival. If Jefe is having a sexual relationship with Daryl, she probably isn't thrilled he offered to sponsor a woman.

"He's…it's been fine."

The doors to the library swing open, and Arthur walks in. "Please show Ms. Doyle out, Arthur," Jefe says.

"It would be my pleasure. This way, madam."

[*]

Daryl doesn't come home that evening, but Nadia says it's not unusual for the supply runners to stay out for one or two nights. Sometimes they have to detour around packs, or they decide to check out more than one place. He's gone with Garrison, who Nadia reassures her is a good shot.

"It was my idea," Carol tells her as they sit on Nadia's front porch in two rocking chairs, watching Ivan and Sophia take turns on the swing, while DeShawn scrubs clean a grill in the side yard. "I'd feel pretty awful if I got my sponsor killed."

Nadia extends a small golden flask in her direction. "Sounds like you could use it."

Carol takes it from her, takes one sip, and feels fire burn down her throat. She hisses and hands the flask back. "I think that's a bit too strong for me."

Nadia smiles, takes a sip of her own, and screws back on the top. "DeShawn's been acting weird since he got back from that raid."

"How so?"

"Just…He didn't ask for sex last night, which was odd enough, after a victory like that. I thought he'd want to celebrate. But the weirder thing is that he hasn't touched me once in the past twenty-four hours. Usually, whenever Ivan's not around, he's affectionate. Ivan's been gone most of the day, and DeShawn's been home and has the day off. We've had the cottage all to ourselves all morning and afternoon. But he's just been furiously fixing things around the place. I wonder if something happened? During that raid? I mean…something worse than usual."

Carol looks toward DeShawn, who is now dumping the scrubbed-off ash from the grill. "I think it might actually have something to do with something Daryl said to him last night."

"What?"

"I wasn't eavesdropping," she lies, "but the window was open. DeShawn referred to you as his girlfriend, and Daryl may have suggested that you may have only said yes to ensure you maintained your sponsorship arrangement."

Nadia turns her head to look at DeShawn, who is now reassembling the grill. "He called me his girlfriend?"

"That was the word he used."

"Interesting." Her eyes sweep from the heels of DeShawn's cowboy boots up to his Stetson. "Very interesting."

From beneath the walnut tree, Sophia laughs as the swing Ivan has wound up untwirls in a rapid circle. A couple of children, eight or nine, come flying by, frantically pedaling dirt bikes as they race each other. Somewhere in the distance, a horse whinnies happily, and Carol thinks she could get used to this place.