Time to scrounge, we’re on the outskirts of a city, I told Tucker to wait with Theseus in the car and keep an eye on everything.

It’s going to be hard adjusting to exclusively canned crap again. I shouldn’t have held off on Samier’s food for as long as I did. I wonder if anything bad happened to him after we left. Not that I really care, but…I don't think I'd want him dead.

The strobe Tucker saw in the distance was a broken streetlight, by the way. Not a strobe.

Jackpot. We found a house thirty minutes from any city, we might be staying here for a while.

Tucker, the beautiful genius that he is, nabbed one of the grow lights and a few seed bags on our way out. Gotta find a power source, but we’re going to be okay.

For those curious, the house we found is kind of like a small farm house, miles away from anything else. It’s a good place to be free from strobes, and the harvested seem to pop up much more often in cold spots so I’m feeling good about this. As good as I can at least.

We have a problem. Tucker’s asleep, and his phone buzzed. I saw this message from an unknown number: “Send over your coordinates so we can check up on you and Natalie if need be and our deal will be complete.”

New text. “Hello Natalie. We’ll save you the trouble of trying to remember Tucker’s passcode. It’s Lucid.”

Another one. “See, one of our inside men found out about the good doctor’s plan and alerted Tucker.”

“This was a good few weeks back, right when he got out of his time-out in the Resistance camp.”

“In exchange for finding a fall guy for him so full of the water he wouldn’t remember what had happened, Tucker would keep us aware of where you two end up.”

“If it’s any consolation, killing the medic was the only true course of action. The boy would have ended up dead. He said he would tell you when things were safe.”

“We’re sorry for robbing him of a chance for honesty, but…things never work out so smoothly, do they?”

I don’t…I don’t know what to do.

I’m scared. I didn’t…an innocent person. An innocent person died, and I had to see it, and Theseus had to see it.