"Psst."

I push something off my nose. What a great way to wake up. My eyes pop open to see my own hands ready to attack Owen's smirking face. "You're adorable when you're sleeping." He tries to poke my nose again and I slap him away.

"What'd you guys find?"

"Two cars. Just like he said. Well, a car and an RV. With food. And we all had some great bonding time, y'know, laughed, cried . . . Jesus, Sydney, you look like a ghost."

". . . You still look worse."

His eyes slip to my hand and lift to meet mine again. "This guy was telling the truth about the cars. I think he was telling the truth about the camp. We're gonna go and you're gonna get fixed up."

"You're the third person today to make me a promise he can't keep."

"Yeah, you just watch me keep it."

He heads outside to get more food to add to the pile forming in the center of the barn. Leah passes him on his way, her arms full with cans and colorful boxes. She deposits what she has before coming over and crouching a couple of feet from me. "How do you feel?"

"I'm okay."

She starts to reach out her hand, but stops. Her tongue stumbles around. "Can I feel your forehead?"

Her hand would feel cool. Soft. Loving. Familiar, the most familiar thing in the world, really. "Rick already did. I have a fever."

She lowers her hand. And her eyes. "I'll get you something to eat – do you feel like you can eat?"

"I already had some peaches that were in Aaron's pack."

She smiles a little, just for a flash. "Your favorite."

The rest of our people are streaming through the door now, everyone who was on perimeter duty, Dad included. He makes a beeline for me.

"You alright?"

"Yeah."

But he kneels and feels my forehead. His hand is familiar, too, and loving in its way, but it was never as cool and soft as my mother's. Not the best hands for dealing with a sick person, but they're Dad's, so I've never minded, really. "How's the hand?" he asks.

"Same. Owen said I look like a ghost. Everyone else keeps talking to me like I look terrible."

"You look like you. Just sick. We'll get ya taken care of."

I sigh.

When everyone and all the food are safely in the barn, Rick gestures at the impressive food pile and tells Aaron it's ours now.

"There's more than enough."

"It's ours," Rick repeats. "Whether or not we go to your camp."

"What do you mean?" Carl's standing above me, the toe of his boot touching mine. "Why wouldn't we go?"

It's Michonne who answers. "If he were lying. Or if he wanted to hurt us . . ." She turns to Rick. "But he isn't. And he doesn't. We need this. So we're going. All of us." She looks us over. "Somebody say something if they feel differently."

I watch Rick watching Michonne. She's wasn't asking him. She wasn't suggesting. So we're going. That was a decision. But Rick doesn't look angry. Maybe a little confused, but . . . I don't know, I can't tell exactly what he feels like. I'm tired.

But . . . Rick used to surprise me by talking like this, like how Michonne's talking, a long time ago. Talking like he was the leader when he wasn't, or at least wasn't supposed to be, or so I thought. Back when there was still an RV of our own, and it was me who had the dead mother, not Carl. And there was Shane, whose eyes got darker every day.

Dad's talking now.

"I don't know, man," he says from beside me, but adds, "Syd needs somethin'."

I slide my bad hand under my knee. But I can hide the hand all I want, I still can't hide what's happening to my body, the sickness that's starting to set into it. The worried looks I keep getting, the double-takes, they all scream that I can't hide that at all. Dad's right. I knew it last night, after the storm, when I felt all that blood seeping out from my bandage yet again. I need something. A doctor, medicine, one or the other . . . just something. Or things are going to get bad.

"Yeah," Rick finally says, eyeing me, his son, Michonne. "We're goin'."

. . . . .

But Aaron won't tell us where his camp is.

"Every time I've done this, I've been behind the wheel, driving recruits back," he insists when Rick presses him. "I – I believe you're good people, I – I've bet my life on it, I'm just not ready to bet my friends' lives just yet –"

"You're not driving," Michonne tells him. "So if you wanna get home, you'll have to tell us how."

And so a back-and-forth begins, and nobody gets what they want, exactly. Aaron says to take one way, Rick says we'll take another, Aaron says that's a bad idea because his people haven't cleared that way but Rick sticks to that plan, and my head aches and I really just want them to stop talking and Dad gives me a bottle of water and rubs my neck. Rick says we'll leave at sundown. If we get there in the middle of the night, we're more likely to make a clean getaway if the place turns out to be bad news. Aaron tries one more time to get Rick to believe – to get us all to believe – that no one will hurt us. He says Rick's putting us in danger. But he still won't tell him the exact location of the camp. He just wants to give us one direction at a time, as we go along, and if he wants to do that, Rick's taking the way Aaron doesn't want us to. No trust anywhere. There's no other way to play it, but it's a dangerous game.

. . . . .

A half-hour before nightfall – a half-hour before we leave – I find Owen standing by the double doors, watching a slice of the dimming world through the panels. "You should be sleeping," he informs me.

"Have you slept at all?"

"I can't. I'm too psyched for our newest adventure."

I hand him a can of food. "Here."

He checks it over. "S'getti Rings."

"They'll make you grow big and strong."

"I'm sure." He pulls the top off by the tab and takes a gulp. "Guess you and your dad are doin' better."

"Guess so. We didn't really talk. Well, we didn't really cover much ground. It was a starting point, I guess."

"I'm glad." He pauses. "Sydney . . . You know I'll lie for you anytime you ask. But you said . . . Damn it. You said – you wanted me to feel like I was a part of the group. I can try to do that, but . . . I don't wanna lie to them. I don't wanna have to tell Rick I let you wander off into the forest again, I hated the way he looked at me." He huffs out a breath. "Jesus Christ, I actually just said that. What the hell is happening to me?"

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I'm seriously . . . I'm sorry. Rick likes you. He thinks of you as part of the group. He wouldn't have had you go with Michonne and the others if he didn't. That meant something."

"It was a test run for me, wasn't it?"

"Maybe a little one. I'd say you passed."

"Damn straight." He shakes more noodles into his mouth, swallows, and smacks his lips, reading the label. "Wow. These are horrible."

"I won't ask you to cover for me again."

"Do what you need to do. Like I said, I'll always do it. If you really need me to."

I dig into my pocket. "I have something for you, but I'm not sure you'll want it."

"Something better than S'getti Rings?"

I pull out the crucifix and let it hang from my fingers. Owen eyes it warily. "Your dad used to wear one like this, didn't he? Your real dad? I mean, not – not your realdad –"

"He was my real dad," Owen says softly. "Not my real father, but that's a different matter entirely." He takes the cross in his fingers. "Yeah. He wore one. Always the good Catholic . . . Such a hypocrite. Knocked up his girlfriend. But he went to mass on Sunday, so that made it okay."

"He knocked up his girlfriend?"

"She was five months along when the bombs hit Atlanta." Owen plays with the cross dangling between our fingers. "They were living together. Dad wanted to get married, but she was gun-shy."

I stare at him. "Tyler never told me."

"Ty was having a rough time. Dad's new baby, my . . . my blossoming criminal career . . . He wasn't getting enough attention. He never talked about the baby, not even at home."

"I'm sorry," I whisper. It's not enough, but I don't know what else to say.

"I was only in juvie for a month. Went in right before things started to go bad, got out when this group of guards helped a handful of their favorite teenage delinquents run away home to their families . . . They were actually some pretty great guys . . . Have I never told you that?" He shakes his head like he's shaking off dust. "Point is, while I was in there, Dad visited me every week. More than anyone else. And I didn't even want to see him. Ever."

"Why not?"

"Because I started doing all the stupid shit that would eventually get me arrested because I found out my dad wasn't my biological father. I blamed him for keeping it from me. It was like Mom to lie about it. It wasn't like him."

"Did he tell you?"

"No. Joe did."

I can still see Joe the night he died, standing over Owen after he finished pounding him, as indifferent as could be to his son's pleas to not be a murderous asshole. And I remember his laugh. It makes my skin crawl. He's the last person you would ever want to hear life-changing news from. He'd say it and huff that cruel laugh while your world tipped over.

"You don't have to talk about it," I say.

Owen stares at something outside. Or maybe there's nothing worth staring at out there and he's just somewhere else right now. "Joe used to come stay with my mom once or twice a year, after she and Dad divorced. I knew the two of them had been army buddies, but Dad never wanted to see him. Said they'd had a falling out, that's all he ever said about it . . . And one night, when Joe was over, he was drunk and my mom was asleep. He gave me my very first beer, and said, 'Sit down, boy. Have a drink with your old man.' Told me the whole story. It was a hell of a father-son bonding moment." His lips twitch. "The worst part is that I believed him right away. I mean, I asked Mom and Dad, of course, made for damn sure, but deep down . . . Nothing had ever made more sense. For as long as I could remember, with my mom, things had been like, me –" He holds his hand in line with his shoulder. "– and Tyler." He lifts his hand above his head. "I already felt like the bastard son. Turns out that feeling was totally justifiable. But my dad . . . looking back, he was way fairer about things than my mother ever was. Concerning me and Ty. But naturally, I didn't realize that until it was too late. It's that same old sad song." He takes a gulp of S'getti Rings. "These are still horrible."

"I'm so sorry."

"You know I hate it when people say that. You've said that . . . three times now, in, like, two minutes."

"Sorry."

He chuckles. "Hell, at least I got a beer."

"You actually drank the beer?"

"I think if ever there was a time to drink a beer –"

"Okay, fair enough."

He grins a little, but it doesn't hold up very long. "Listen, don't – don't think less of my mom. You knew her. She was a great person, she just . . . she just loved Tyler more. I mean, he was more like her. Sweet. Kind to a fault. And then there was me. The defiant, selfish smartass . . ."

"Don't. Hey. You rescued me from half a dozen men twice your size when you found me in that house. You risked your neck more than once. You are kind to a fault. And it shouldn't even have mattered. She was your mother. Unconditional love is supposed to be part of the package. Hey. You hear me?"

"Yeah, I hear you. Brat."

I punch his shoulder three times. "Don't. Call me. That."

He laughs. "I forgot you don't know how to punch. It's cute. Like a kitten batting at yarn."

"This is what I get for being nice to you."

"Yeah, poor you. You came over here to give me cheap pasta and instead I cry on your shoulder."

"I came to give you this, too." I hold up the crucifix again. "You want it? You don't have to wear it, if you don't want, but I just thought . . . you know, it's something."

Owen takes the cross in his hand. "Well," he says. "If all else fails, it'll keep the Count away." He closes his fist around it. "Thank you."

"Yeah."

I hold onto the crucifix for a second too long, but realize what I'm doing and let go, and our hands part and Owen clears his throat and steps away. "It's almost dark. Time to get this show on the road."