Figuring that there’s no point waiting any longer, I start making my way through the forest. The rain has soaked me before I’ve managed more than a few steps, but that’s fine. If anything, the constant hiss of the storm provides a little extra cover as I creep forward with the knife in my right hand.
Stopping next to another tree, I realize I can just about make out the silhouette of a figure up ahead, although the low evening lift makes it difficult to see properly. Someone has been left on guard duty, no doubt to make sure that I don’t try to sneak my way back into town. I wouldn’t be surprised if Harold has given orders to kill me on sight, as a means of underlining his power, but there’s not a person in Steadfall who I can’t take down. Heading between the trees, I start to approach the town from the south, creeping closer and closer to whoever is—
Suddenly a hand grabs me from behind, pulling me back through the darkness.
“You’re an idiot!” Deckard hisses, as the pitiful fire flickers nearby and casts lights and shadows across his face. “Don’t you think they were expecting you to go back? If I hadn’t stopped you, you’d be dead by now!”
“Don’t underestimate me,” I reply. “You know I can handle myself!”
“You’d be dead!”
I can’t help sighing. “I’d have managed!”
He shakes his head, as if he finds me exasperating.
Opening my mouth, I’m about to tell him he’s wrong when I realize that he might actually have a point. After all, I didn’t actually have a plan. All I had was anger, and maybe a little humiliation too.
“I had to try something,” I mutter finally. “Was I supposed to just walk away?”
We’re in a small cave just a mile or so from the town, overlooking the barren and deserted beach. A little further off, a band of bright light burns beneath the rain-lashed sea, serving as a reminder of the vast electrical barrier that keeps us all from trying to leave the island. Beyond that, there’s nothing but darkness, since the island is several hundred miles from the mainland, maybe even further.
“Going back tonight would have been suicide,” Deckard tells me, “and you know it.”
“What would you have done?” I ask.
“You never cease to surprise me,” he continues, crouching down to set more twigs on the fire, which is already better than my effort from last night. “Just when I think you’re done making mistakes, you go and find new ones.”
“They threw me out of my own town!”
“You walked right into a trap.”
“Harold manipulated me!”
“I saw that coming from a mile off,” he mutters, before sighing as the fire conspicuously fails to get any stronger. “I don’t know if I can keep this going all night.”
“Here,” I reply, kneeling next to him and grabbing a handful of twigs. They’re damp, so I squeeze them tight in my fist until they’ve been broken down and then I toss them into the meager flames. “An increase in the dry surface area should help. They’ll burn away faster, but at least they’re not damp all the way through.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but the fire is already starting to build just a little.
“Where did you learn that?” he asks cautiously.
“I had some training once,” I reply, “but…”
For a moment, I can’t help feeling as if something has changed in my head. Last night I couldn’t get a fire burning properly at all, yet now I seem to be an expert. It’s as if more and more memories from my time in the military are starting to come back.
“I was trained,” I continue, still trying to make sense of it all. “I was a… From a really early age.”
“So you keep saying,” he continues, “but you never actually admit to the details. Who trained you? Where? Why?” He waits for an answer. “Obviously it was something military. You try to hide it sometimes but—”
“I’m not hiding anything!” I snap, although I immediately regret losing my temper.
“I’ve seen you in fights,” he adds. “You use just enough skill and precision to win, but no more. You hold back. The other week, when Tomball attacked you, you spent several minutes subduing him but I think you could’ve dropped him in about two seconds if you’d wanted.” Again he waits for me to say something. “What were you before you came to the island, Asher? Clearly it was something more than the regular military.”
“It’s something I don’t want to talk about,” I reply. “I think I’ve opened up enough to people over the past twenty-four hours.”
As I crush more twigs and add them to the fire, I can tell Deckard is still watching me.
“You have walls around your soul,” he says finally, “but Harold was able to get through them. How?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. He obviously pinpointed your weakness.”
Glancing at him, I realize that he’s not going to give up until I tell him something. “He has a military background too,” I tell him after a moment. “I guess that might be how he got under my skin so quickly. Even though our minds were routinely wiped when we returned from war, there are things…” I pause as I try to make sense of it all. “There are just things, even forgotten things, that we have in common. We understand each other.”
“Did you fight on the front-line?”
I turn to him.
“I don’t know,” I admit finally. “I think so. I mean… Probably.”
“I can see it in your eyes,” he continues. “I’ve met soldiers before, but none like you. You were trained, and you…” He pauses, watching me as if he’s trying to tease the truth from my expression. “I remember hearing about soldiers being sent to fight in the war. I’m talking about the ones who really fought now, the ones who went beyond the frontier, out into the lands that were lost. The government wouldn’t even tell the general public who the war was against, they said that information was classified and—”
“They wiped our minds at the end,” I tell him.
“You don’t remember the war?”
“All I know is that I survived.”
“But you don’t remember any of it?”
“Judging by the dates,” I continue, “I spent a little over three years away on the battlefield. What I did during that time, what I saw, who I fought… It’s all gone.” I pause for a moment. “There are little clues, though. Here and there. I find it hard to sleep. Loud noises unsettle me. I have this simmering resentment and anger that just seems to be in my chest for no reason, and…” Another pause, and for a few seconds I feel as if there are tears in my eyes. “I had this friend during training. Her name was Mads. We got on really well, we basically teamed up to make sure we both made it through. For a while, we were inseparable, and we swore we’d stay in touch when it was all over. We were even in the same unit, so we were set to fight shoulder-to-shoulder. Somehow that made the whole thing seem a little less terrifying. After I came back from the war, there was no sign of her. She doesn’t exist anymore, and that can only mean one thing. She didn’t make it.”
“And you don’t remember what might have happened to her?”