Eliassss.
A low hill rises before me, and when I reach the top, the night breeze curdles, bringing with it the unmistakable smells of war—blood and dung and rot. Below me sits a battlefield—a killing field, actually, for no battle rages here. Everyone’s dead. Moonlight glints off the armor of fallen men.
This is what I saw earlier, from the rise.
It’s a strange battlefield, unlike any I’ve encountered. No one moans or pleads for aid. Barbarians from the borderlands lay beside Martial soldiers. I spot what looks like a Tribal trader and beside him, smaller bodies—his family. What is this place? Why would a Tribesman battle against Martials and Barbarians out in the middle of nowhere?
“Elias.”
I practically leap from my skin at the sound of my name spoken in such silence, and my dagger is at the throat of the speaker before I can think. He is a Barbarian boy, no more than thirteen. His face is painted with blue woad, and his body is dark with the geometric tattoos unique to his people. Even in the light of the half-moon, I know him. I’d know him anywhere.
He is my first kill.
My eyes drop to the gaping wound in his stomach, a wound I put there nine years ago. A wound he doesn’t seem to notice.
I drop my arm and back away. Impossible.
The boy’s dead. Which means that all this—the battlefield, the smell, the Wastes—must be a nightmare. I pinch my arm to wake myself up. The boy tilts his head. I pinch myself again. I take my dagger and cut my hand with it. Blood drips to the ground.
The boy doesn’t budge. I can’t wake up.
Courage to face their darkest fears.
“My mother screamed and tore at her hair for three days after I died,” my first kill says. “She didn’t speak again for five years.” He talks quietly in the just-deepened voice of a teenaged boy. “I was her only child,” he adds, as if in explanation.
“I’m—I’m sorry—”
The boy shrugs and walks away, gesturing for me to follow him onto the battlefield. I don’t want to go, but he clamps a chill hand on my arm and pulls me behind him with surprising force. As we wind through the first of the bodies, I look down. A sick feeling seeps through me.
I recognize these faces. I killed every one of these people.
As I pass them, their voices murmur secrets in my head—
My wife was pregnant—
I was sure I’d kill you first—
My father swore revenge, but died before taking it—I clap my hands over my ears. But the boy sees, and his clammy fingers pull mine away from my head with inexorable force.
“Come,” he says. “There are more.”
I shake my head. I know exactly how many people I’ve killed, when they died, how, where. There are far more than twenty-one men on this battlefield.
I can’t have killed them all.
But we keep walking, and now there are faces I don’t know. And it’s a kind of relief, because these faces must be someone else’s sins, someone else’s darkness.
“Your kills,” the boy interrupts my thoughts. “They’re all yours. The past. The future. All here. All by your hand.”
My hands sweat, and I feel lightheaded. “I—I don’t—” There are scores of people on this battlefield. Well over five hundred. How could I be responsible for the deaths of so many? I look down. There’s a lanky, fair-haired Mask on my left, and my stomach sinks because I know this Mask. Demetrius.
“No.” I bend down to shake him. “Demetrius. Wake up. Get up.”
“He can’t hear you,” my first kill says. “He’s gone.”
Beside Demetrius lies Leander, blood staining his halo of curly hair, trickling down his crooked nose and off his chin. And a few feet away, Ennis—another member of Helene’s battle platoon. Further ahead, I spot a mane of white hair, a powerful body. Grandfather?
“No. No.” There isn’t another word for what I’m seeing, because something so terrible shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I bend next to another body—the gold-eyed slave-girl I’ve only just met. A raw red line cuts across her throat. Her hair is a mess, snaking out every which way. Her eyes are open, their brilliant gold faded to the color of a dead sun. I think of her intoxicating smell, like fruit and sugar and warmth. I turn on my first kill.
“These are my friends, my family. People I know. I wouldn’t hurt them.”
“Your kills,” the boy insists, and the terror inside me grows at the sureness with which he speaks. Is this what I will be? A mass murderer?
Wake up, Elias. Wake up. But I cannot wake, because I’m not asleep.
The Augurs have somehow brought my nightmare to life, unrolled it before my eyes.