Lorna nearly burst into tears when she locked the cabin door. Ever since she was five years old, the cabin had been her home. It had kept her safe from dreadful weather, Merged creatures, and monstrous people. She had waited there for her uncle to return, and she had formed emergency treatment on him when he finally did.

Now she was leaving it, and she was not only going with a stranger but with a Merger, someone with superpowers.

“All set?” Alex asked as he repositioned his backpack straps over his chest.

Lorna had her own backpack, full of jars of rabbit stew, the skins that Alex promised she could sell in town—her heart leaped as she realized she was going to a town, a settlement with other people—and some of that accursed deer jerky that she was tired of eating after a full month of having little else to shove into her face.

Lorna nodded at Alex.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

Alex returned the nod, and he trudged ahead. He pulled out a map he had stashed in the coat he had borrowed from her uncle’s closet, and he opened it up. The map had many little Xs representing cabins on it.

“Now where exactly are we?” he asked. “I don’t remember much from the other day.”

Lorna stood on her toes to peer over his shoulder at it. She has seen maps of the area before, but she frowned when she failed to see her cabin marked on it.

“It’s not marked on there,” she said, and she pointed at a spot near to a lake and in between some other Xs. “We’re right here.”

“Really? It’s not marked?”

“Yeah, I guess someone forgot to mark it on your map.”

“I guess so, but it doesn’t matter. We can still get to where we need to go easy enough. Our destination is East.”

Alex stuffed his map back into the borrowed coat, and he trudged through the snow. Lorna was shorter than the man, and she found herself struggling to keep pace with him. Following right behind him where he had already left tracks made it easier to walk at least, but after a while, she felt an ache in her legs.

“How far are we from the town?” Lorna asked.

“Just a couple of days—maybe a day and a half. Not very far.”

“A couple of days as in walking all day?”

“Are you trying to say you need a break?”

“No, no, no, I’m fine. I could go a little longer.”

Alex stopped, and she nearly ran into him before she noticed. He turned to her with a grin, one that unexpectedly brought a strange flutter to her belly.

“Sure. There’s a cabin where we can take a break for a while. It’s just over here.”

They took a detour from the path that Alex had been taking her, and sure enough, another cabin came into view. It looked a lot like the one she had lived in with her uncle, but it was even smaller. Once she got inside, she found bunk beds, just like the ones that people used in comics. There was a microwave oven that allowed Lorna to heat up some of her leftover stew, and that was about it for cooking in the small space.

“This place is small,” Lorna said as she looked around.

“Yeah, you don't find big places until you get into towns," he said, "but it's funny you'd say that. Your cabin is not much bigger."

Lorna could not disagree with that. She remembered a time when she had lived in a big house, one that had been big even by Pre-Merge standards. Her parents had been wealthy, she understood, and when the Merge happened, she was suddenly stuck in small places. First, it had been a little treehouse because that had been the best way to get away from the larger Merged creatures, the monsters that had come into their world from the magical world. Those creatures had mysteriously died after just a few days, and then the bigger threats had been the smaller creatures, which were impossible to get away from in a crappy treehouse.

Then Ean had built their tiny cabin in the middle of the woods. It had proven itself sturdy against the Merged creatures, and she lived in that cabin ever since.

Until she had finally left it.

They kept their lunch break short. Lorna's legs still ached from her attempt to keep pace with Alex in the snow, but she did not want to spend too much time sitting when they had places they needed to be—when her uncle was still missing out there.

Alex left the small cabin first, but he paused at the threshold of the cabin. He raised his hands in front of him. Lorna frowned, and she peered around him.

There were people outside. She counted at least two of them from her limited viewpoint, and each of them was holding a gun.

One was a man wearing a knitted cap over his head. He held a rifle, pointing it at Alex. Next to him was a woman with a long ponytail, and she held pointed a large pistol at him—bigger than the one holstered on Alex's backpack. When the woman's eyes shifted to her, she gasped, and she ducked behind Alex's back.

"A girl's right behind him," Ponytail said in a rough voice.

"I don't know what you want," Alex said, "but leave the girl out of this, all right? Let's keep this between the four of us."

"Shut up, Merger," a man who was no the knitted-cap-wearing man said. "Step away from the door and let her through so we can see you both."

"We don't need to involve her at all."

"She's got a gun, too," Knit Cap added. "We know she'll just shoot us if we leave her behind. Let her out here, asshole."

Alex did not move from his spot in front of the door. Lorna peered around him again—in time to see Ponytail squeeze the trigger of her pistol, and she saw the dirt at Alex's feet kick up before she registered the startling crack of the shot. She gasped, and she pressed a hand to his broad back. Tears welled in her eyes as she realized where that bullet could have been hit.

"You know you can't kill me," Alex said.

Lorna pushed against his back, but he did not budge.

"Unless she's a Merger, too," the first man said, "we know that you're not bulletproof. We can shoot you, and it can go through you and hit her, too. Don't want us to get the both of you, do you, Merger? Step aside and let her through."

Alex glanced at her over his shoulder, and he sighed. He took a step forward, allowing her room to step beside him. She mimicked his pose. When Knit Cap turned his rifle to her, her legs shook, and she was amazed she could still stand.

"Put your bags on the ground," the first man said—a man with dark hair cut short. "Slowly. Don't try anything funny."

Alex gave Lorna a subtle nod, and he failed to hide a wince as he took off his backpack. She did the same. They both rested their bags on the ground in front of them. Ponytail grabbed her bag, and once her pistol was pointed at Alex again, the Dark Hair grabbed Alex's larger bag.

"Rifle, too, girly," the Knit Cap said.

Lorna wondered for a second if she could get a shot on them before they retaliated, but her uncle's voice came into her head, reminding her not to do anything rash when dealing with people, especially when they had guns.

She took off her rifle, and before she rested it on the ground, Knit Cap grabbed it from her and held it to Ponytail, who slung it over her shoulder.

"All right. Let's tie them up and go."