I look back to the Forum. Inside, Mustang will be attempting to repair the damage done. But with Copper lost, she won’t have the votes to protect me. There’s nothing more I can do here. This isn’t my world. I knew it before, and Dancer just reminded me. The man says all I know is war. And he is right. In my heart, I know my enemy. I know his mettle. I know his cruelty. And I know this war will not end with politicians smiling at each other from across a table.
It will only end as it began: with blood.
“No, Sevro. Summon the Howlers.”
I FLEE THE GUNFIRE THAT killed my brother.
My baby brother, who I helped raise, who I made a notch in the doorframe for every time he sprouted a bit taller. Used to joke he was a weed so tall his head would one day touch the sky. Now I leave him in the mud.
Each heartbeat is a sledgehammer. Tears stream so thick I can barely see. Mud cakes my burning calves. The plastic homes flash past. There’s more sounds now. More gunshots and the warbling of energy weapons. They’ve come by land too. I hear the squealing of hovertrack sleds. A fire’s started near the southern fence. I see four-wheeled land vehicles there and men with floodlights and torches. They carry guns and slingBlades.
Our lane is still quiet as I make it home. As if in denial about what the night brings. I burst in through the front door. My sister still sits at the table, wearing her new shoes. “What happened? Were those gunshots?”
“It’s the Red Hand,” I say just as the monsoon siren begins to wail from the antenna array behind our home. They didn’t make a siren for the Red Hand.
“No…” she whispers. “Where is Tiran?”
“He’s—” My throat constricts. “Gone.”
“Gone?” She tilts her head as if she doesn’t understand the word. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“They shot him.”
“What?”
I feel myself shuddering. Losing control of my own body. “They shot him.” I’m sobbing. My chest heaves. I feel my sister’s arms around me. Holding me. “He’s dead. Tiran is dead.”
Not just dead. Mutilated.
“Get Da,” my older sister says, ghostly pale. She grips my head. “Lyria, get Da up. We have to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. But we can’t stay here.” I nod, still dazed. She shakes me. “Lyria, do it now!” How can she be so calm? She didn’t have to see Tiran’s head dissolve into fragments. She pushes me toward the bunkroom.
I find Da awake and staring at me, as if he already knows. Did he hear about Tiran?
“You know what’s happening?” I ask. He barely nods. “I need you to help me with your arms.” Tiran usually lifts him from his bed into his wheelchair. I’m not as strong.
I slip my hands under my father’s armpits. “One…two…three…” For the first time since Mum was buried in the deeptunnels, Da says something.
“No.” It’s more of a moan than a word, but it is unmistakable. His eyes are wide and emphatic. Shakes his head and repeats it, “No.” His eyes glance down at his body, then shoot toward his chair. He’s right. There’s no way we’ll escape the Red Hand with him on our backs. Or that chair in the mud. Not without Tiran.
His milky eyes watch me. They see me now. That’s what breaks my heart. He could have seen me sooner. He could have looked at me instead of draining his life away into the HC. Why now? Why when we have so few seconds left? I wrap my arms around him. I kiss him on the forehead, staying there, smelling the musk of his skin and greasy hair, remembering what he was.
With a heave, I hoist the old man from the bed toward his chair. I sag under his weight, nearly falling to the floor. The muscles of my lower back seize up, but I manage to twist my body and lever him into his chair. He lands roughly on his hip. More groans. “Hold on, Da. We have to say goodbye.” I push him into the front room, where my sister and her children are readying to leave.
Through the doorway, my sister has gathered her little ones. “I need you all to hold hands,” my sister is saying. “And don’t let go of each other no matter what. That’s very important. Stay together.” She looks at me. “Lyria…Liam’s still at the infirmary.”
“Dammit.” How could I forget him? Conn starts crying.
“It’s all right, love. It’s all right,” Ava says. Ella is silent and pinned tight to her breast, swaddled in blankets. My sister won’t be able to make it to the center of the camp and back, not with her children.
“I’ll fetch Liam,” I say. “You make for the jungle. We’ll meet you there.”
“The jungle?” she asks. “You’ll never find us in there. The east guard tower…”
“There’s trucks there,” I say. “The north looked quiet.”
“Then meet us there, at the north. Then we’ll go together to the fishing boats. We can go downriver.” A distant explosion rattles the plastic home.
“What about Da?” she asks. He sits in his chair watching us impassively.
I shake my head once.
“We can carry him…” my sister says.
But we both know we can’t. We wouldn’t make it twenty meters dragging him and the children. I look at the terrified children, then at my sister.
“Children,” I say hollowly, “come kiss Dada for luck.”
Ava understands. Her calm cracks. In the tears, I see the scared little girl who wept in her bed when our mother passed. The one I’d have to sing to sleep even though she was older.
“I don’t want to leave Dada,” Conn cries.
“I’ll bring him,” I say. “You all just have to go on ahead. Now kiss him.” Believing me, the children rush to kiss my father on the cheek. His eyes brim with tears as they dart back and forth. My sister bends and kisses him on the brow. She stays there, trembling, before stumbling back. Conn holds on to him, not letting go till his mother rips him violently away and moves them toward the door. “The north watchtower,” she says. “Be there soon.”
“I will.”
“Lyria.”
“Yes?”
“Bring me my boy.” We hold each other’s hands, a life full of wedding skirts, births, and love reduced now to a single second of fear. And then our hands are parting and the door closes and she’s swallowed by the nightmare outside. Through a crack in the plastic, I watch her run, clutching Ella to her breast and dragging her two boys along into the dark. I stay behind with my father in the hut, listening to the world ending beyond the thin walls. Some part of me thinks that if we stay here, the storm will pass us by. The plastic will somehow keep the Red Hand and their guns and slingBlades out. I want to tell Da it will be well. That I’ll see him soon. It’s the most present he’s been in a year, looking at me, knowing this is the last time he’ll see me. I kneel so that we are eye to eye, and clutch his face in my hands. This is the man who tucked me in at night. Who would sit me on his knee at Laureltide and tell stories of mining glories and pitvipers and fights. He was as vast as the sky itself. But now, he is a broken man watching helplessly as the world swallows his children.
“I will see you in the Vale,” I whisper to him, our foreheads together. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Then I throw myself away from him. In three steps I am out the door.