She stops suddenly, finally looks at me. There is fire in her eyes.
“It is.” She points up. “We saw it on the Xolotl.” She points back toward the city. “We saw it on the Observatory steps.” She puts her fingertip on my chest. “And now we’ve seen it from you, when you killed that Springer.”
I slap her hand away.
“The deaths on the Xolotl belong to Matilda, not me, and so does the Observatory. And as for the Springer, you weren’t there. I had to kill to survive.”
She huffs. “Did you? Because from what Bishop and Coyotl and Borjigin said, it takes the Springers a long time to load their weapons. Why didn’t you just run away like Bishop did? Why did you go back to kill?”
(If you run, your enemy will hunt you…kill your enemy, and you are forever free.)
I went back because my father’s words are always rattling in my head. When things overwhelm me, I listen to those words. They make me act like a puppet. Spingate is right—maybe I didn’t realize it at the time, but I went back because I wanted to kill.
The sky darkens. Clouds close in.
I spot movement up high in the treetops. I stop, stare. Is there something behind the thick yellow leaves?
I point. “Did you see that?”
Spingate looks, concentrates, but shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “It was probably just an animal.”
The first drops of rain plunk against the jungle canopy. Then the skies open up—a light drizzle one second, a total downpour the next.
Spingate lowers her head and raises a hand to block the rain, but I ignore the splashing on my face—I keep looking.
Then it moves. Half my size, perhaps, the same yellow as vine leaves. Long, thin legs launch it from the treetop. Arms stretch out: something darker between the arms and the body, not wings, but skin, skin that catches the air and lets it glide. The small creature plunges through more vines and it is gone.
Spingate was right—it’s just an animal.
We keep moving. The rain beats down.
“I’m glad you came,” Spingate says. “But I wasn’t sure if you should. I’m still not. I’ll be honest—I’m afraid you’ll do something bad, that you’ll start the war you think you want to stop. And that’s if you haven’t started one already.”
It hurts that she doesn’t trust me, but in a way I’m glad she doesn’t. One mistake on my part and people could die—that’s more important than my feelings.
I take her hand. “I can’t trust myself, either. But I can trust us. Help me get this right.”
She squeezes my hand once, smiles at me, then lets go.
When I again look down the trail, I see something off to my left—the barrel of a musket, sliding out from behind a tree. A Springer, blue and wrinkled, aiming at me.
“Don’t move,” I say quietly. “They found us.”
I slowly look to my right—and see a second Springer, purple-blue, less wrinkled, mostly hidden by a fallen log. It is also aiming a musket at me.
Up ahead of us, a third Springer steps onto the trail.
Bullets are going to rip through my body, blast my brains out like Visca. I’m going to die here. On the Xolotl I would have become dust, but here it’s hot and wet. My body will rot away, drip into the mud.
“The spear,” Spingate says.
“They can see the stupid white flag. They don’t care.”
“Not the flag,” she says. “The spear. It’s a weapon. We made a mistake, we shouldn’t have used a weapon. Set it down, slowly, show them you mean no harm.”
Set it down? Is she crazy? They could rush us, beat us to death with the flat part of their muskets and not even have to waste a bullet. If I strike first, if they miss like they did last time, I could quickly kill the one on the left.
(Attack, attack, when in doubt, always attack.)
My father’s voice—again—but this time, my own voice seems to answer.
(Dad, shut the hell up.)
I tilt the spear forward, then let it go. It drops, wet white flag fluttering behind it until spear and flag both smack into the trail’s mud.
From farther down the path, a fourth Springer steps out of the jungle, skin of pure purple. It stares at us with three green eyes, then hops our way. The other Springers start screaming, a nasty sound that calls up Matilda’s memories of monkeys in a zoo. So loud, so angry.
My fingers flex. Without my spear, I feel naked.
Spingate takes my hand in hers.
“Be still,” she says quietly.
The Springer comes closer. It holds a musket, hammer already cocked. The barrel points to the side, not aimed at anything. I see a knife with a white bone handle dangling from a belt sheath. A hatchet is stuffed through the belt as well, its surface black save for a sharp edge that glints in what little light peeks through the storm clouds.
I’m letting Spingate control this situation, but I shouldn’t—she’s never been shot, she’s never fought, she’s just a tooth-girl who hides behind a desk while the real work is done by circles, while the real danger is faced by circle-stars.