I hafta blink an awful lot whenever I think ’bout Circ.
As I have been every morning for a while, when I crawl out of my tent I’m excited for another day. However, as soon as I stand I know today’ll be different. Wilde’s headed in my direction, her face a nest of worry and concern. I’ve never seen her look scared ’fore, which scares me. “What happened?” I ask, my body tensing up.
“We need to talk,” she says. No good morning…how are you?...did you sleep well? Not a good sign. “Get your sister,” she adds.
I rouse Skye and we follow Wilde to the leader tent, where Brione and Crya are already waiting. Brione’s thick lips are pursed and Crya looks like she wants to hit me, her eyes throwing perfectly aimed spears in my direction. There’s another girl there, too, small, but with dark, serious eyes that show she’s a lot tougher’n she looks. The funny thing about her though, it looks as if she might keel over at any moment, like she’s exhausted. Huge, dark bags underline her bloodshot eyes. Her face is red and sweaty, as if she’s just run across the entire desert—maybe she has. In my head I’m thinking she should probably sit down.
No one sits.
“Tell them what you told us,” Wilde urges the girl.
“I’m Lye,” she starts. “I’m the eyes of the Wildes. Every full moon I make a trip to the Heater village, make sure they’re not onto us, scope out which Pre-Bearers might make good additions to our group.”
I’m surprised but I don’t act it, nodding like this is all very expected information. Was it Lye who chose me to join? Or did Skye and my mother have a say in it? But more importantly, why are they telling me this? I’m nobody.
Lye continues. “Just before the last call, I made my trip to the village to make sure all the escapes went off without any problems. I saw you leave the night of the Call.” I raise my eyebrows. She actually watched me run off into the desert. “You got away okay. A few Hunters went after you, tracking your footprints, but then the rains made it impossible to stay on your trail.” Everything makes sense so far.
“Yeah…” I say, urging her to get to the point.
Wilde says, “Siena, did you see anyone before you got to Wildetown? Did anything happen?”
I stop breathing and my heart skips a beat. The Cotees. Feve. I never told them ’cause I didn’t want them to think I was so weak I couldn’t even make the trip without help. But what does that hafta do with anything? I let out a slow breath. “Why?” I ask.
Crya charges at me, fists knotted, but Skye bars her path. “You don’t get to ask questions!” she screams. “You put us all in mortal danger!”
I shrink back, my face awash with horror. What? Danger? But how?
“Back off,” Skye growls. “We’re all on the same burnin’ side ’ere.”
“Are we?” Crya says, looking over Skye’s shoulder at me. “Because she’s keeping something from us. That’s what enemies do.”
“Crya,” Wilde says, her voice as controlled as ever. “This isn’t helping.”
Crya shoots me one last glare and then casts her eyes downward, backing off. She almost looks embarrassed at her outburst. Skye turns back to me, her eyes almost as sharp as Crya’s. “Are you hidin’ somethin’?”
I nod. “I didn’t think it was important,” I plead. “I was embarrassed.”
“It’s okay, Siena,” Wilde says. “Just tell us what happened.”
Keeping my eyes fixed on a splotch on the ground, I spill my guts. Tell them ’bout the Cotees, getting caught in the trap, thinking I was dead. Waking up to Feve, the Marked One, his bandages, his herbs, his rapid disappearance. Everything.
“He tricked you,” Crya says when I finish.
I glance up, shudder when I see the scowl on Skye’s face, and settle on Wilde’s gaze, the only one soft enough to bear. “He followed you,” Wilde explains.
“What? No! He saved my life!” I protest. There was no lie in his warmth, in his gentle care. I’d be dead if not for him.
“Maybe so,” Wilde says, “but he was only there because he was following you. Tell them the rest, Lye.”
’Fore I have a chance to consider what Wilde just said, Lye says, “I hung around the village for a few days more, being thorough, making sure your father and the other Greys weren’t going to take any further action to track down the runaways. That’s when he showed up.”
“Who?” I ask.
“The Marked One.”
“Feve?” I ask.
“I didn’t take the time to ask him his name,” she says sarcastically, her eyes narrowing, “but it must’ve been him.” I close my eyes, knowing exactly where this is going. “I knew it was serious though,” she continues, “because the Grey’s were in one of the hut’s all day with the Marked One, with Feve. Under the sunlight I couldn’t hope to sneak into the village, but when night fell, I crept in. I arrived just as Feve left the hut—I was searin’ lucky he didn’t see me when I ducked into the shadows. And then he was gone, like he’d never been there at all.”
I feel ill and hungry and angry. How could the man whose very presence was filled with so much warmth betray me like that? Easy—’cause my father probably paid him well, with skins and meat and wood. The baggards!
“The hut walls were thin enough to hear everything if I put my ear up to it,” Lye says. “They knew everything. The location of Wildetown, the approximate number of Wildes, the most direct route to get there. It didn’t take them long to decide what to do.”
“Yeah, hunt us down and kill or capture every last one of us,” Crya says, her words clipped and laced with anger.”
Lye nods. “They were going to organize the Hunters the next day, take as many men as they could spare.”
I count backwards in my head. “But then…shouldn’t they already be here?”
Lye sits down, as if her legs won’t be able to keep her up as she tells the next part of her story. “I was about to leave the village, to turn a five-day trek across the desert into two days to hopefully warn everyone before it was too late.”
“What the scorch happened?” Skye asks.
“The Killers attacked.”
~~~
The Killers bought us some time. According to Lye, they came by night, dark shadows with one thing on their mind: satisfy their namesake; kill. Lye had just slipped out of the northern edge of the village, probably through the same gap I escaped from, when the alarm sounded. She thought it was for her, so she ran hard, dove behind the biggest dune she could find.
She heard blood-curdling screams and hair-raising cries, and when she peeked out, the village was in turmoil. The shadows had broken through and were biting, slashing, clawing at anyone in sight. They killed many Heaters ’fore the Hunters were able to maim enough of the beasts to drive the rest away.
Lye waited until it was over, crept back in. No one noticed her. They were too busy carrying the injured to MedMa, dragging the dead to the center of the village where they’d be burned at dawn. Sixty four were killed, including forty six Hunters. In a village as small as the Heaters’, losses like that are catastrophic.
When Lye finishes her story about the Killer attack, I let out a deep sigh. Profound sadness rests upon me like a dark cloud. So many innocents killed. However, I realize it’s not only a sigh of sadness, it’s a sigh of relief at both having not been there when the Killers attacked and at being bailed out. The Heaters won’t come for us, not after being decimated like that. Will they?
“The Hunters are on their way,” Lye says, and I gasp.
“What? But they’ve just been slaughtered by the Killers. How can they…?” My voice is high and quivery and draws stares from everyone.
“Your father’s hatred for us runs deep,” Wilde says. “The Killers may have killed many of his people once, but we take girls every six full moons. And not just girls, Bearers. Those who have the ability to add to the population. Without Bearers, the Heaters will wither away to nothing, like a carcass picked clean by scavengers. He’s coming to take us back.”