Rootless Read Online Free PDF Page A

But then I saw the maps.
    They were huge and crinkled, plastered on the wall. And there was a ton of them. Marked up in ink and labeled. Big chunks of green pointing at each other across patches of blue. Someone had drawn a crude picture of the tattoo tree and taped it in the middle of the wall. I inched closer, straining for a better look. But I heard a door squeaking shut and I froze.
    Footsteps. A voice singing.
    Crow. Back inside the house.
    I left Frost drooling in his pile of paper and I backed up into the hall. I stopped. Listened. I tried to focus myself. Breathe. But it was like my brain wasn’t working. My thoughts were all stuck in the same gear.
    I tried the next door. The last door. And there, spiraling up into the shadows, was a tower of metal stairs. I yanked my shoes off and laced them together, and then I slung them around my neck as I ran upward, soft and quick.
    The top floor was even hotter and I was sweating now, wiping my hands on my shirt. I found a room with a tub, another with an unmade bed. Three more rooms. All empty. Bare steel walls shiny in the dark. But then I found a room that wasn’t empty.
    Jackpot.
    Zee was curled up and her momma was stretched out beside her. Neither of them had much on, it being so hot and all, and right away I could see Frost had bruised Zee up pretty good. But there was something else wrong with her. I watched as her chest rose and with each breath she made I could hear the gurgling sound of things growing tight inside.
    I could hardly believe it.
    She was cooped up in this house. Out of the dust. But that wheezing sound, there’s no mistaking it. Only crusted lungs make a noise like that.
    I spotted the momma’s tattoo sticking out, like a flame of color. I crept closer and studied the roots and branches bending across the woman’s belly. And as I looked, I noticed something about the leaves I’d not seen before. Each leaf had a number on it. A long number, printed in tiny black ink.
    Zee blinked herself awake and stared at me, a big grin on her face as her eyes grew wide. She grabbed a bag off the floor and crept over to join me, and she was beaming at me the whole time like I wasn’t in the worst place on earth I could be.
    We tiptoed down the stairs and crept along the hall, listening to Frost snore and sputter. Crow was down the far end, still singing, rattling at the pots and pans. But then we were out the door, on the porch, bolting around the house and out on the street.
    Zee was still grinning as she sprinted toward the wagon, though I could hear her broke lungs all straining and squeezed. I still had my shoes around my neck and they were bouncing and jiggling, whacking me in the face. And I kept thinking about Crow checking each room in the house and him finding Zee missing.
    And how, if that happened, there’d be no going back.

The roads were mostly vacant as I steered through the night, heading east toward the ocean. We left all semblance of the city and the shantytown sprawl, and soon the only lights we saw were the odd scruffy settlement or lonely passerby.
    Closer you get to the coast, the more nothing there is. Been that way forever. Folk stopped building too close to the Surge a long time back, afraid of everything they had breaking off and slicing into the water. That was the risk in heading out that way, seeing as you never knew when the land might crumble, the cliffs disappear.
    “You always sleep in that room with your momma?” I said, spooked to the bone that Crow was going to find Zee missing.
    “Not always,” Zee said. “But it helps her sleep.” She’d been snapping pictures with her camera, but they were smudged and dark and she shoved them in the bag at her feet.
    I watched the old stone road as it droned beneath the wagon. “And how often you think Crow comes and checks on you?” I said, not being able to quit thinking about it.
    “Now and then.”
    I tried to picture Crow passed out and snoring. Done for the night. I mean,