She finds that reading all the books she can get her hands on kills the time. Not all of it and that's mostly because Sasha doesn't understand some of the material in the books, but at least trying to figure out what words mean and what the concepts are keeps her busy enough to not worry about Connie. He keeps leaving them, out of nowhere, with no head's up about anything. And sure, she's offered to take him with her on supply runs if he just couldn't sit still, but he's never agreed. So she, like everybody else in the compound, sits and waits for him to return, if he returns.

Sometimes Sasha thinks he might not. This is one of those times.

One day was one thing, same for two days. Two whole weeks usually meant something bad went wrong. She didn't want anything bad to go wrong for any of them, but secretly, she thought that more about Connie. So the day he returns, dirty and ripped up, looking like a caveman with his hair free and wild, she drops the three year old Farmer's Almanac she was paging through and jumps up to greet him with a hug and a knock to the head that he probably doesn't feel through all that hair.

"Connie! You're alive! STOP DOING THAT!"