The wolves are hungry now. They howl in the night. When Mustang and I make a kill, we sometimes have to scare them off. But when we kill a caribou at dusk, a pack descends from the northlands. They come from the trees like dark specters. Shadows. The biggest of them is my size. His fur is white. The fur of the others is gray, no longer black. These wolves change with the season. I watch how they surround us. Each moves with individual cunning. Yet each moves as part of a pack.
“This is how we should fight,” I whisper to Mustang as we watch the wolves approach.
“Could we talk about this later?”
We take down the pack leader with three arrows. The rest flee. Mustang and I set to skinning the big white brute. As she slips her knife along beneath the fur, she looks up, nose red from the cold.
“Slaves aren’t part of the pack, so we can’t fight like them. Not that it matters. The wolves don’t have it right either. They take too much from their pack leader. Cut off the head, the body retreats.”
“So the answer is autonomy,” I say.
“Maybe.” She bites her lip.
Later that night, she elaborates. “It’s like a hand.” She sits close and cozy, leg touching mine. Close enough for guilt to crawl along my spine. The caribou roasts, filling the cave with a fine, thick aroma. A blizzard rages outside and the wolf fur dries over the fire.
“Give me your hand,” she says. “Which is your best finger?”
“They are all better at different things.”
“Don’t be obstinant.”
I tell her my thumb. She has me try to hold a stick with only my thumb. She easily pulls it from my grasp. Then she has me hold it without my thumb and only the other fingers. With a twist, the stick is free.
“Imagine that your thumb is your Housemembers. The fingers are all the slaves you have conquered. The Primus or whoever is the leader is the brain. It all works pretty gory seamlessly. Yeah?”
She can’t pull the stick from my grip. I set it down and ask her the point.
“Now try to do something beyond simply grabbing the standard. Just move your thumb counterclockwise and your fingers clockwise except your middle.”
I do it. She stares at my hands and laughs incredulously. “Ass.” I ruined her demonstration. Helldivers are dexterous. I watch her hands as she tries to do it too. Of course she fails. I understand.
“A hand is like the Society,” I say..
It is the structure of the armies at the Institute. The hierarchy is good for simple tasks. Some fingers are more important than others. Some are better at certain things. All fingers are controlled by the highest order, the brain. The brain’s control is effective. It makes your thumb and fingers work together. But the single brain’s control is limited. Imagine each one of the fingers had a brain of its own that interacted with the main brain. The fingers obey, but they function independently. What could the hand do then? What could an army do? I twirl the stick along my fingers in intricate patterns. Exactly.
Her eyes linger on mine, and her fingers trace along my palm as she explains. I know she wants me to react to her touch, but I force my mind to be lost on other things.
This idea of hers isn’t part of the Proctors’ lesson.
Their lesson is about the evolution from anarchy to order. It is about control. About the systematic accumulation of power, the structure of that power, and then its preservation. It is a model to show that the Rule of Hierarchies is the best. The Society is the final evolution, the only answer. She just slagged that rule, or at least showed its limitations.
If I could earn the voluntary allegiance of the slaves, the army created would look nothing like the Society. It would be better. Like if the Reds of Lykos thought they could actually win the Laurel, they would be so much more productive. Or if a Praetor on board his starcruiser could utilize not only his own genius, but that of his crew of Blues.
Mustang’s strategy is Eo’s dream.
It’s like an electric shock jolts through me.
“Why didn’t you try it with the slaves you captured?”
She pulls her hand away from mine after I don’t respond to her touch.
“I tried.”
She’s quiet the rest of the night. Near morning, she develops a cough.
Mustang takes sick over the next few days. I hear fluid in her lungs and feed her broth made from marrow and wolf and leaves boiled in a helmet I found. She looks like she will die. I don’t know what to do. We’re low on food, so I hunt. But the game is scarce and the wolves are hungry. Prey has fled these woods, so we survive on small hares. All I can do is keep her warm and pray a medBot descends from the clouds. The Proctors know where we are. They always know where we are.
I find human tracks in the woods the next week. A set of two. I follow them to an abandoned campsite, hoping they might have food I can steal. There are animal bones and embers still hot. No horses, though. Probably not scouts then. Oathbreakers, the Shamed who have broken their vows after being enslaved. There’s plenty of them now..
I follow their tracks through the woods for an hour before I grow worried. They circle back around, leading somewhere familiar, leading to our cave. It is night by the time I return. I hear laughter from the home I share with Mustang. The arrow feels thin in my fingers as I nock it on the bowstring. I should kneel to gather my breath. My wound aches. I pant. But I can’t give them more time. Not if they have Mustang.
They cannot see me as I stand at the edge of the frozen caribou skin and hardpacked snow that walls off our cave from sight and elements. The fire crackles inside. Smoke seeps out through vents Mustang and I took a day in making. Two boys sit together eating what’s left of our meat, drinking our water.
They are dirty and ragged. Hair like greased weeds. Stained complexions. Blackheads. Once beautiful, I’m sure. One boy sits on Mustang’s chest. The girl who saved my life is gagged and in her undergarments. She shivers from the cold. One of the boys bleeds from a bite wound on his neck. They are planning on making her pay for that wound. Knives heat till red in the fire. One boy obviously enjoys the sight of her nakedness. He reaches to touch her skin as though she’s a toy meant for his pleasure.
My thoughts are primal, wolflike. A terrifying emotion sweeps over me, one that I did not know I had for this girl. Not till now. It takes a moment to calm myself and stop my hands from shaking. His hand is on the inside of her thigh.
I shoot the first boy in the kneecap. The second I shoot as he reaches for a knife. I’m a bad aim. I get his shoulder instead of his eye socket. I slide into the shelter with my skinning knife, ready to finish the boys off as they howl in pain. Something in me, the human part, has turned off, and it’s only when I see Mustang’s eyes that I stop.
“Darrow,” she says softly.
Even shivering, she is beautiful—the small, quicksmiling girl who brought me back to life. The brighteyed soul who keeps Eo’s song alive. I shudder with anger. If I had been ten minutes later in returning, this night could have broken me forever. I cannot bear another death. Especially not Mustang’s.
“Darrow, let them live,” she says again, whispering it to me as Eo would whisper she loved me. It cuts to my core. I can’t take the sound of her voice, the anger inside me.
My mouth doesn’t work. My face is numb; I can’t lose the grimace of rage that controls it. I drag the two boys out by their hair and kick them till Mustang joins us. I leave them moaning in the snow and return to help her dress. She feels so fragile as I pull her animal skins around her bony shoulders.
“Knife or snow,” she asks the boys when she’s dressed. She holds the knives heated in the fire in her trembling hands. She coughs. I know what she’s thinking. Let them go and they kill us as we sleep. Neither will die from their wounds. The medBots would come if that were the case. Or maybe they won’t for Oathbreakers.
They choose snow.
I’m glad. Mustang didn’t want to use the knife.
We tie them to a tree at the edge of the woods and light a signal fire so that some House will find them. Mustang insisted on coming along, coughing all the way, as if she were worried I wouldn’t do as she asked. She was right to think that.
In the night, after Mustang has gone to sleep, I get up to go back and kill the Oathbreakers. If Jupiter or Mars finds them, then they will spill where we are and we will be taken.
“Don’t, Darrow,” she says as I pull back the caribou skin. I turn. Her face peers out from our blankets.
“We will have to move if they live,” I say. “And you’re already sick. You’ll die.”
We have warmth here. Shelter.
“Then we will move in the morning,” she says. “I’m tougher than I look.”
Sometimes that is true. This time it is not.
I wake in the morning to find that she shifted in the night to curl into me for warmth. Her body is so frail. It trembles like a leaf in the wind. I smell her hair. She breathes softly. Salt tracks mark her face. I want Eo. I wish it were her hair, her warmth. But I don’t push Mustang away. There’s pain when I hold her, but it comes from the past, not from Mustang. She is something new, something hopeful. Like spring to my deep winter.
When morning comes, we move deeper into the woods and make a lean-to shelter against a rock face with fallen trees and packed snow. We never find out what happened to the Oathbreakers or our cave.
Mustang can barely sleep, she coughs so much. When she sleeps curled into me, I kiss the nape of her neck softly, softly so that she will not wake; though I secretly wish she would if just to know that I’m here. Her skin is hot. I hum the Song of Persephone.
“I can never remember the words,” she whispers to me. Her head lies in my lap tonight. “I wish I did.”
I have not sung since Lykos. My voice is raspy and raw. Slowly the song comes.
Listen, listen
Remember the wane
Of sun’s fury and waving grain
We fell and fell
And danced along
To croon a knell
Of rights and wrongs
And
My son, my son
Remember the burn
When leaves were fire and seasons turned
We fell and fell
And sang a song
To weave a cell
All autumn long
And
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper swing, the reaper swing
the reaper swing
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper sing
A tale of winter long
My girl, my girl
Remember the chill
When rains froze and snows did kill
We fell and fell
And danced along
Through icy hell
To their winter song
My love, my love
Remember the cries
When winter died for spring skies
They roared and roared
But we grabbed our seed
And sowed a song
Against their greed
My son, my son
Remember the chains
When gold ruled with iron reins
We roared and roared
And twisted and screamed
For ours, a vale
of better dreams
And
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper swing, the reaper swing
the reaper swing
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper sing
A tale of winter done