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more like eighteen than fifteen. Beefy shoulders, arms heavy with muscle, and a dusting of beard smudging cheeks and chin.
    His clothes were soaked with sweat, and his eyes were filled with shadows.
    An old truck tire hung by a rope from a limb of the big oak tree. The weathered rubber was scarred by thousands of impacts from the bokken—the wooden sword Morgie held in his hands. Each blow made the tire dance and swing, and Morgie shifted this way and that to chase it, to continue hammering it, to smash at it over and over again. The force of each blow threw echoes against the rear of the house that stood vacant and silent at the other end of the yard. The bokken was hand-carved from a piece of hickory. It was his sixth sword. The first five had cracked and broken in this yard, defeated not by the tire but by the force of the hands that swung the wood, and by the muscle in arms and shoulders and back.
    And by pain.
    Each blow hurt. It wasn’t the shock that vibrated back from the point of impact and shivered through Morgie’s muscles and bones. It wasn’t that at all. The pain was in his heart. And he hammered at it every day. Several times a day. The training leaned him, burning away childhood fat, revealing muscles forged in a furnace of grief and regret.
    Morgie knew he was being watched, but he didn’t care. It was like that all the time, almost every day. Randy Kirsch, mayor of Mountainside and former neighbor of the Imuras, sat on his porch. Two men sat with him, each of them drinking coffee from ceramic mugs.
    •  •  •
    “Two ration dollars says he breaks another sword today,” said Keith Strunk, captain of the town watch.
    “Sucker’s bet,” said Leroy Williams, a big black man sitting to his left. He was a corn farmer who’d lost his right arm in a car crash after bringing a group of people through a horde of zoms after First Night. “Kid’s working on some real fury down there. He’ll break that sword or knock the tire out of the damn tree.”
    The mayor glanced at his watch. “He’s been at it for two hours now.”
    “Makes me sweat just watching him,” said Strunk.
    They all nodded and sipped their coffee.
    The thump, thump, thump of the sword was constant.
    “You ever find out what happened between him and Benny?” asked Strunk. “Heard they had some kind of fight right before Tom took those kids out of town.”
    The mayor shook his head.
    “I heard it was over the girl,” said Leroy. “Little Phoenix.Remember, Morgie went courtin’ at the Riley place that night Jessie was killed. Morgie got his head near stove in by Marion Hammer. And then seven months later Nix goes off with Benny.”
    “Ah,” said Strunk. “A girl. That’ll do it.”
    They all sighed and nodded.
    “I don’t think it’s just the girl,” said Mayor Kirsch. “I think it was that fight. I heard Morgie knocked Benny down.”
    “If they were fighting,” said Leroy, “then they were fighting over the Riley girl.”
    They all nodded again.
    Captain Strunk said, “Morgie asked me the other day if I’d let him join the town watch. When I told him he was too young, he got a job as an apprentice fence guard.”
    “Ugly work for a boy,” said the mayor. “And he asked me for an application to the Freedom Riders. He wants to roll out with Solomon Jones and that crew.”
    “Thought you had to be eighteen for that,” said Leroy.
    “You do. But he’s trying to get a special dispensation because he trained with Tom Imura.”
    “Ah,” said Strunk.
    Leroy grunted. “Maybe they should let him in. Tom trained those kids good . . . and besides, look at him. Kid’s bigger and tougher than any eighteen-year-old I know.”
    “Tom did a good job,” said Strunk as they watched Morgie hammer away at the tire. “Bet Tom would be proud of him.”
    The wooden sword whipped and flashed and pounded, again and again and again.

12
    B ENNY WALKED ALONG THE TRENCH —well away from Lilah—until the weight of the