Her hand grasped the side of the cot and she leaned down by my ear.
“Looks like I was wrong, Cal,” she said. “I guess this is where you really belong.”
I peered through her veil until the lines of her face resolved into a sharp jaw and amber-colored eyes.
“Nat?”
I reached for her arm but she jerked it away from me. The shepherd called out to her across the infirmary.
“I guess we both do now,” Nat said. Then she backed into the aisle, sweeping across the infirmary and melting into the white sea of her sisters.
I sank into the cot, any scrap of energy I had gone, my head buzzing with a flat hiss of static. If they got Nat, then what chance did I have? What chance did any of us have? Beyond the tent flap, soldiers marched back and forth and engines revved. I held on to Bear’s collar and searched for the drumbeat that would urge me on, but there was nothing there. We were all lost.
Two days later I was put on my first work detail.
A young corporal showed up with a pair of standard-issue novice fatigues and led me out of the infirmary to where I would be helping to dig latrines.
I covered my eyes from the blast of sunlight that came when we stepped out of the gloom of the infirmary tent. My body was still weak, loose limbed, from days on my back. I kept my eyes on the corporal’s back and tried to keep up as he led me through the base.
Kestrel sat in what had once been a grassy clearing before it was trampled into muddy ruts by thousands of Path boots and Humvees. It seemed to be laid out in a mirror image of Cormorant, only bigger and more hastily put together. One quick walk through it and I had picked out the novices’ and citizens’ barracks and the sequestered ops center. A canvas-walled Lighthouse towered over everything in the center of camp.
The base was surrounded by a high fence topped with rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire. Plywood guardhouses, stacked with sandbags and bristling with heavy weapons, sat at every turn. The camp had clearly been constructed with a typical Path focus on security, but it was new and partially unfinished. I told myself there had to be a hole somewhere, that all I had to do was find it, but then I remembered all the years that James and I spent in Cormorant thinking the exact same thing.
I scanned passing groups of companions, looking for Nat, but I didn’t see any trace of her. She hadn’t come back to the infirmary since the day we spoke and part of me wanted to believe I had imagined the whole thing, that she had been some kind of fever dream. The idea that Nat could have been taken, and that she would have submitted to the Choice if she had been, seemed too impossible to be real. Of course, I knew it was. The Path had swept across the whole of the country, and now controlled nearly two-thirds of it. Anyone could be taken, and once they were, no one was immune to wanting to live.
The corporal led me up a hill at the southern edge of the camp and gave instructions to me and a group of ten or fifteen other novices. Since I still had my cast, I was on gofer duty, ferrying supplies and water, while the rest of them dug in the noonday sun. It took us till nearly sundown to finish the pit and construct the latrine housing. The group was almost ready to drop when the corporal led us to the novices’ barracks, where we were allowed a tepid shower before being shuffled off to dinner and prayers.
The Kestrel Lighthouse was nowhere near as impressive as Cormorant’s had been — it was simply a large tent full of chairs facing a makeshift altar. Drained from the sun and the day’s work, it was actually a relief to find my place among the others and rest on the flat pew. I helped a bewildered young novice find the right page in the book of prayers and then Beacon Radcliffe emerged and began the service.
“I am the Way and the Path…”
The voices around me fell into a tentative unison. The beacons stalked the aisles, their eyes hardest on the newest of us. Luckily, the service was still deep in my bones and I followed along easily, making myself nearly invisible in the cadence of the prayers and the flow of kneeling and standing. The rhythm of it was so familiar that I felt myself dissolving into it.
After prayers I followed the men to the novices’ barracks and found an open bunk, falling into it without even bothering to turn back the thin blanket. The men talked for a while and then one by one the lanterns were blown out and the tent fell quiet.
I was tired, but sleep seemed impossible. One look at the bunk above me and for a second I felt sure that all I had to do was stand up and James would be there, reading The Glorious Path by candlelight. When I turned onto my side and set my hand on the rough wool blanket, all I could feel was the warmth of Bear’s fur.
I slipped out of my bunk and stepped into my boots. A private was supposed to be keeping an eye on us but he had stepped away. I ducked through the flap in the barracks tent and into moonlight. Kestrel was restful in the dark, quiet except for the rhythm of helicopter landings and the distant artillery booms out at the front.
The ops center glowed with its electric lights. A few soldiers moved importantly from building to building within it. I could predict their every twist and turn: from the command center to the drone operators’ room or, if it was the end of their shift, to the cleansing tent to pray for forgiveness amid the scent of sandalwood. I hated the part of me that grew calm watching them. I kicked at a tent pole as I passed it, welcoming the jolt.
I found myself at the northern edge of Kestrel. Directly in front of me was the perimeter fence and a guard tower. I could see the soldiers inside, one leaning against a wall while the other stood over a machine gun, barrel pointed north. There was a blind spot along the side of a plywood hut. I stepped into it, pressing myself against the boards to watch.
Over the course of an hour a guard with a dog moved along the base of the fence and then vanished around a bend in the line. Later, two new guards emerged from their barracks and crossed toward the tower. The replacements climbed the ladder, and once inside, the four of them gathered in the center of the platform. I could hear a whisper of talk and even laughter. Lighters flared as illicit cigarettes were lit. The place may have looked like Cormorant but these were not her soldiers. I felt a twinge of disgust at their lack of discipline.
Gravel shifted out in the dark. I turned as a figure stepped out of a doorway and down the far side of the street. The last thing I saw before it disappeared into a dark patch was a flutter of white robes. There was no reason a companion should have been out at this hour.
The guards in the tower were still talking among themselves, so I slid along the length of a deep shadow, then across the road. I spotted the companion again, moving through a tight alley behind a line of tents. She stayed low, moving quick and decisively, not like a scared capture, like a soldier. I knew at once that it was Nat. But what was she doing?
Keeping my distance, I followed until she came to the end of the alley and crouched down with her back to me. She pulled her robes off and hid them just behind a tin garbage pail. Underneath them she was wearing nondescript gray coveralls.
The eastern fence was directly ahead of her, a hundred feet down a shallow slope. When she moved, she didn’t look left or right, she just ran straight toward it. Once there, she knelt near the struts of an unfinished guard tower, disappearing into the darkness.
Of course, I thought. Nat would have been looking for an escape route from the second she was taken. I couldn’t say I was surprised that she had already found one. I was just happy she saved me the trouble. A rattle of steel came from the fence line, followed by footsteps dashing away across the grass on the other side. I hesitated, certain I should go back and gather supplies, food and water at least, but then I heard the guard dog bark across the camp. His master was bringing him back this way. I left the cover of darkness and raced across the yard, running for the fence.