“Leave Settler’s Landing? They won’t. Marcus and Violet? They’d die first.”
My fists curled in on themselves. She was right. God, what had I started? Were they here because of me too? Had they come looking for me and Dad and found Fort Leonard instead?
We sat there, a moat of empty space between us. Jenny chewed on her thumbnail, staring at the ground. We both knew what was coming.
I had seen it in the belly of that plane and she had seen it in a mass of men with their guns and their wild, hungry looks.
“It’s not our fault,” Jenny said. “What we did was stupid, but it was Caleb who went to Fort Leonard. Not us. He started this.”
I murmured something in agreement, but I didn’t believe it and I knew Jenny didn’t either.
A light snow began to fall again, whipping through the trees and tapping against our shoulders. A laugh, loud and throaty, rose from the slave traders’ camp. It was like the grunting of an animal ready to hunt.
I took Jenny’s hand and we fled through the woods.
Violet and Marcus were at the kitchen table when we arrived. Violet was at one end, knitting distractedly, while Marcus leaned grimly over a mug of tea.
“What is it?” Violet asked.
Before I could speak, Jackson came thundering down the stairs. I felt a flash of happiness to see him again but as soon as he saw me and Jenny, he stopped where he was, grasping the rail and eyeing us sharply.
“What are they doing here?”
The way he spat it out, I knew instantly that Marcus told him everything about our raid on the Henrys’. How we had started all of this. My mouth went dry. I felt sick. Ashamed.
“Come sit down, Jackson,” Violet said. “Stephen and Jenny say they have something to tell us.”
Jackson crept down the stairs, then took a seat at the far end of the kitchen table. He didn’t look at me and I found I couldn’t look at any of them. How could I? I’d abandoned Jackson, stolen from Violet, and betrayed Marcus and everyone else in the town. “Well, Stephen?” Violet said.
They all sat there watching us. Waiting. I clasped Jenny’s hand under the table and told them about the slavers that Fort Leonard had hired. The jeeps. The weapons. That they were the same ones my Dad and I had fought. Everything.
When I was done, Marcus rubbed his hand over the thick collection of stubble on his chin.
“Slavers,” Marcus said carefully. “You’re sure?”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
Marcus looked across the table at Violet, but she stared down into her lap, all the color drained from her face.
“I know you don’t want to leave,” I said. “But you don’t know what these people will do. They—”
“They won’t do anything,” Jenny interrupted.
I turned to where Jenny sat beside me.
“What do you mean? Of course they—”
But Jenny wasn’t looking at me. She was focused on her parents. Her parents, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“Will they?” Jenny asked, holding the words out like bait. Marcus and Violet said nothing. Jackson didn’t move.
“I don’t…”
And then I got it. I saw what Jenny saw.
Ever since the night of our raid on the Henrys’, they should have been expecting the forces of Fort Leonard to arrive at any moment. But if they did, then why was Violet sitting at the table knitting? Shouldn’t she have been preparing for the coming fight? Shouldn’t Marcus’s rifle be close at hand instead of sitting in its rack on the wall?
And when I told them that a small army of slave traders was bearing down on them, they didn’t seem scared. They didn’t pack up. They didn’t flee town.
Most of all, they didn’t seem surprised.
I felt something like a barbed hook sinking into my gut and in that instant I knew.
Fort Leonard didn’t hire the slavers.
They did.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Caleb told us they were mercenaries,” Marcus said, looking down into his tea. “Ex-soldiers. I don’t know where he found them. He said they’d run the people at Fort Leonard off so they wouldn’t come back. That’s all. He said no one would get hurt.”
“What are you supposed to do for them?” Jenny asked.
“They want to expand west. Caleb said we’d be like a way station. Nothing more. They’d store fuel here, food. He didn’t tell us they were slavers, I swear.”
“When does it happen?”
“Tonight. Sundown. We’re supposed to meet them at the gates and then we all go together.”
“We have to talk to Caleb,” Violet said. “Now.”
Marcus looked up at her. “And say what? You don’t think Caleb and his friends know what these people are already?”
“Then we talk to everyone else. Sam, Tuttle — we’ll have a vote.”
“You think if we have a vote and we actually win, they’ll just leave?”
We all sat there, still as statues as it sunk in. Slavers were no different from starving animals. Deny them Fort Leonard and they’d eat Settler’s Landing just as happily.
“Then what?” Violet asked.
Marcus turned to face the swirl of white outside. It was mounting steadily on the porch and bending the trees until their branches hung down miserably, nearly ready to snap.
“We did well this year, but you know the winters as well as I do, Vi. We’ll lose at least ten people from the cold and lack of food alone. If we have to deal with Fort Leonard picking away at us too, we could be done for. Our home. All of us. Gone.”
“What are you saying? We let this happen? Marcus—”
“I’m saying we don’t have a choice, Vi.”
“We do,” Violet said. “We have a choice about what we become, Marcus. Maybe it’s the only thing we do have a choice about.”
“Do you want to be out there again? Us and not them? Is that what you want?”
“How many times have we come close to doing the right thing,” Violet asked, “and then stopped because we were afraid? This. Sean and Mary Krychek—”
“Violet.”
“—that girl of theirs, just nine years old?”
“We did the best we could for them.”
“We stood up for them for an hour before giving them an old blanket and a day’s worth of bread and sending them on their way! Because we were afraid!”
Violet was red with anger and shame, leaning up out of her chair, her nails digging into the table. Marcus had no answer for her.
The wind howled and the snow mixed with hail that sounded sharp and metallic, like fingers tapping on a tin roof.
“You remember that day we played Go Fish, Jenny?”
Everyone turned to Jackson. His back was to us, caught in the half-gloom at the edge of the kitchen, looking out past the marble-topped counter to the storm outside. “Yeah,” Jenny said. “I do.”
“Everyone in Fort Leonard is just waking up,” Jackson said, almost to himself, the words tumbling out. “They’re talking. Starting fires for breakfast. Wishing it wasn’t snowing. But then these people, us, will appear and some of them won’t live through the day. Some of them have maybe a few hours left until they’re gone, or their families are gone and they’re alone. And they have no idea it’s coming. They think it’s just another day.”
Jackson’s voice hitched in his throat. A redness crept into his cheeks like leaves of flame.
“Jack,” Marcus urged. “Listen to me. I don’t like it either, but it’s us or it’s them. It’s—”
Jackson turned from the window and faced Marcus head-on, searching his face. Marcus deflated. He dropped his head, looking down at his hands. They seemed so small now, framed against the hardness of the table.