“Where did you come from?” I asked softly, not wanting to scare him. “Who are you?”
“This is my brother’s.” He held up the pad like a prize.
“I wasn’t trying to pry,” I said slowly, not taking my gaze off his small body. I remembered the little girls who were in School—a year behind us, then two years after, then three, the classes shrinking down to nothing as the King organized people in the City, sorting the orphans out. Some children were occasionally found in the woods, born to Strays in the wake of the plague, but it was rare. I hadn’t seen a child this young in so long. And I couldn’t remember ever having seen a male child. “I just—”
“He was learning to read,” the boy said. His toe touched down on the floor, punting a pebble across the dirt. He looked no more than six and had the expression of someone who rarely smiled. “He was going to teach me, but then he died.”
I glanced in the corner, where Arden lay motionless on the mattress, her skin gleaming with sweat. A full plate of vegetables sat at her side from the night before. “What was wrong with him? Was he sick?” The words caught in my throat as I watched her face.
“He’d just started hunting. Caleb said it was a flash flood.” He flipped through the notepad as he spoke, revealing pages and pages of shaky scribbles. “Paul took care of me when our parents disappeared. He was the one who brought me here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t get why everyone says that.” When he looked up at me his eyes caught the light. “It’s not like it’s your fault.”
“I guess . . .” I thought of the visions that came to me every time I was pulled into sleep. Pip in a thin white bed, her stomach protruding over her legs. Sometimes she was wriggling from the restraints’ leather grip, screaming out to the others who lay beside her, reaching for hands she could not hold. Other times she’d be as I remembered her, at her desk doing math problems, her pencil banging out a familiar, steady beat on the wood. She’d turn suddenly, her face flooded with anger as she exposed the pregnant mound of her profile. Why is this happening? she’d ask, taking a step toward me, then another. Why? I’d keep saying the same words—I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—until she lunged at me and I’d wake up.
I cleared my throat and met the boy’s eyes. “. . . Sometimes it’s like saying I’m sad. Or I’m hurting for you. Maybe it’s silly. Maybe it’s just what people say.”
The boy studied me, taking in the hair that fell past my shoulders, the ends frayed. I’d combed it with my fingers to keep it from tangling into knots. “They told me you’re a girl,” he said.
I nodded.
“Are you my mother?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not.”
Silence followed. He picked at the chapped skin on his lips for a moment.
“I’m Benny,” he finally said as he shuffled to the door. “Want to see my room? You can meet my bunkmate, Silas.”
I hesitated. My gaze moved to Arden. She was curled up, her eyes squeezed shut as they had been since yesterday evening. “All right,” I said to the little boy, glad to have someone to talk to. “Let’s go.”
I followed him down the winding corridors to a small, narrow room. Two mattresses sat on the floor and mud-covered trucks and cans were scattered across the dirt. Another boy with chestnut skin was drawing in the hard ground with a stick. His black hair was all different lengths, revealing patches of scalp, and he wore a long T-shirt tucked into a familiar accessory—a purple tutu.
So this was Silas. The little girl I’d chased through the forest was in fact a little boy.
“I know you,” I said, stepping toward him. “You frightened me that night. Why wouldn’t you stop running when I called?”
Silas froze in my gaze. “I was running,” he said, dropping the stick on the floor, “because you were chasing me.” His feet were folded beneath him, making him look even smaller than he was.
“Are there more of you?” I asked. Silas picked up his stick and carved more circles in the dirt. He ignored me, instead focusing on his drawings. “You’re the youngest?”
Benny plopped down beside him. He turned and for the first time I noticed a long, pink scar stretching from the back of his neck to his ear, half hidden by his matted hair. “Yup. Then there’s Huxley. He’s eleven. He plays with us sometimes, but everybody else is always doing chores or in training.”
“Training for what?”
Silas kept his gaze to the floor. He drew something that looked like a deer, making Xs for the horns.
“The older boys become hunters when they turn fifteen,” Benny answered.
“So your brother was fifteen,” I said. I’d assumed Paul was a child, because of all the picture books. But he must have started with the simplest things he could find. “And he was teaching himself to read?”
Benny nodded. “Do you know how to read?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“Will you teach me?”