Page 109 of Ember Rising

I nod, finding it hard to stay angry. Jeff starts up the cart, the whir of its battery louder than I expected. We don’t talk much on the drive across campus, and when he comes to a stop near a lake on the edge of it, Evander is there.

He’s standing between two tall buildings, with a high, solid-wood fence visible in the background. My pulse races when he glances up at us and then back down to his hands. He’s rubbing something with a cloth—looks like he’s cleaning a gun. He’s meticulous about keeping his guns cleaned and his knives sharpened.

Jeff was right. My worn, filthy canvas bag is on the ground near Evander’s feet.

I open the door and step out of the cart, looking at Jeff.

“Are you leaving?”

He nods. “Good luck. I hope we see each other again. Evander is a dear friend to Diego and me.”

“Thank you.”

I close the door and he gives me a final smile, waving at Evander. Then his vehicle whirs back into motion and he drives away, leaving me with the image of his “Have a Gay Day” bumper sticker.

Approaching Evander, I swallow hard, trying to figure out what to say. When I’m a few feet away, he saves me the trouble.

“My squad was assigned to evacuate and protect designated survivors in the presidential line of succession right after the virus hit.”

That’s ... not what I was expecting him to say. I knit my brows together, puzzled.

“It was a shit show,” he continues, his gaze on the gun he’s cleaning. “Every time we’d reach the next successor, they were either already dead, they died in transit to the swearing-in, or they died shortly after. Members of my squad were dying, too.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He flicks his eyes up to meet mine. “I realized when I told you yesterday that I had no more secrets, I still hadn’t told you this. It’s supposed to be above your ILF clearance, but I don’t care about that anymore.”

I don’t know what to say. I clear my throat and manage, “Okay.”

“I’ll skip the unnecessary details. When I reached the Secretary of Agriculture, she was dying. I don’t know if she had the virus, but that’s my guess. She was adamant that I take a small metal briefcase and get it to the next successor. And she said something that seemed like nonsense at the time—thought he could beat Apollo.”

My mind races over where he could be going with this.

“I was the only member of my squad left. Some FBI and CIA agents helped me after that. The next successor was also dead, and then we started having major trouble even finding the successors. Cell towers went down.” He furrows his brow. “You know all this. We got to a point where there was no one left to swear in as the new president. So we gathered every federal employee with any connection to national security together and decided we’d try to hold things together ourselves.”

He’s putting the gun back together now, his back straight and his tone the no-nonsense one I know best.

“When I told everyone about what the ag secretary said when she gave me the briefcase, a deputy CIA director told us there’s a top secret compound built in a mountain in Montana. The US government started working on it a long time ago, as a fallback location for the executive branch in the event of a global catastrophe. It’s got everything needed to reestablish order—planes, vehicles, supplies, weapons. There’s a password to open the entrance to it, changed by every administration. President Thompson was a big history buff, so we knew the clue had something to do with that.”

He slides the gun into his waistband, finally meeting my gaze.

“We went there. Tried to open it and failed. We heard over our radios that Soren Whitman was starting a new government and a rebellion group was being formed.”

“The ILF.”

He nods. “We talked to the leader, Smythe. She asked us to join and help her. So we did. I have top clearance with the ILF, but I prefer to be a field operative. The unvarnished truth is that we’re losing this fight. We’re almost out of planes and ammo. Whitman hasn’t expanded his borders in months—he’s got his hands full holding what he has and fighting the wildfires. This is our opening. But the Deadmen are hammering us hard, killing our people when our numbers are already bad. When we first started, we held the clue about Apollo close. Only nine of us knew it, including Smythe. But we’re getting desperate, so we ask everyone and just don’t elaborate on what it means.”

I exhale deeply, floored by everything he just told me. His eyes plead with me to understand why he’s done everything he has.

“There’s no other way to get in?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “It’s a literal vault, on a massive scale. They built it to withstand bombings. The password is seven letters long, and it’s programmed to only allow five attempts.”

“Did you guys use them all?”

He shakes his head. “We used four. Smythe was sure the password was Marsyas.”

“The satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest. That’s my best guess, too.”