Mort(e) said nothing.
“Don’t fight me on this,” she added. “Please. Grieve and Harrek are on my side. They say you can go with them. You are still the Ten-ki.”
“Tekni,” Mort(e) corrected.
She crouched before him and rested both hands on his knees.
“I love you, Old Man. I want to introduce you to my son one day.”
Mort(e) would never see her son. He knew that now. She would bring the pup to a grave, a mound of dirt with a stone on top, and tell him whatever stories she still remembered. In his time left, Mort(e) needed to find meaning in that.
Before he could say something, the taste of salt water flooded his mouth. No, not now, he thought. Not here, please.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Let me sit here for a bit.”
“We’ll be in the war room,” she said. “Falkirk and I leave in the morning.”
“I’ll see you off.”
She patted his shoulder. “Don’t just see me off. The Mamas are serving dinner tonight. Our last good one for a while. Come talk to me.”
“Okay.”
Mort(e) nodded, his gaze on the ground. The frozen earth softened to the muddy ocean floor before changing back. The hallucinations mocked him at this point.
When he looked up again, D’Arc was gone.
Chapter 16
The Traitor
The pup would not stop crying. Maybe because he knew the truth.
Walking upright like a human, Mercy tried jamming one of her sore, dry nipples into his mouth. The pup coughed out the first one, then bit hard on the second. Out of frustration, he grasped for her tooth necklace and tugged on it. She pulled it free from his grasp and flipped the tooth over her shoulder, where he could not reach it.
The other wolves, who had marched beside her all day on this trail, closed ranks around her. Her head poking over their shoulders negated their camouflage, which made them nervous, especially Carsa. The older wolf brushed against Mercy’s leg a few times, but would not demand that Mercy travel like a wolf. Mercy had already snapped at Carsa when she suggested letting the pup walk. This was not the time to train him. The young one would walk when he was ready. Not before.
The sound of the river trickled through the trees, carrying a wet smell. After going uphill for so long, the trail at last eased downward again. The pup did not seem to care and continued screaming. Helplessly, Mercy scanned the forest once more for the wet nurse, the mongrel dog from Hosanna. The pup behaved when the nurse suckled him. But in the two days since the attack, the young one howled constantly. Each cry condemned Mercy for finding him on that beach, for taking him, for passing him off as her own. She imagined her own children, Rove and Herc, sniffing the baby’s head, wrinkling their noses at the scent. They never would have accepted this pup as their brother.
The scouts had gathered at the edge of the river. The group split apart to make room for Mercy when she arrived. She lowered to her front paws and slid the pouch to her shoulders, where the baby continued protesting in her ear. She dipped her front paw into the water, to feel the familiar icy shock.
The rear guard of the humans arrived last, their boots squishing in the mud. Augur acknowledged Mercy with a bob of his chin. Crossing would be her decision. They had barely said a word to each other since the attack, when she forded this same river in the dead of night while on the run from the Mournful, the pup screaming in her ear the entire time. Today, after receiving word that the battle had ended, they returned to the scene of the ken-ra. There, they would seal their alliance with the newly joined wolf packs before pressing on to Hosanna. Augur no longer needed to see the future. Instead, the future came barreling toward them, an avalanche that uprooted everything and carried it along.
Urna pushed her way past the others. She, too, had barely spoken to Mercy while they took refuge in the hills. But now, faced with the river again, Urna pawed in the mud, drawing a line that pointed downstream. Carsa and Creek mimicked her. They wanted to find a bridge somewhere, or at least a narrower bottleneck.
Finding another way would take too long, and Mercy wanted to rest. She wanted time to think—and to remember.
To make her intentions clear, Mercy splashed the water three times. They would not merely cross the river. They would swim with the current. It would shave hours off their journey. The cold would sap their strength, and the pup would cry louder. But they would move faster.
Mag barked in protest, and then the pack drowned him out with angry barks of their own. The humans remained quiet. Perhaps Augur told them to give the wolves their space after all they had endured these last few days.
Carsa barked at something in the water. Mercy turned to see the carcass of a marauder floating downstream. Another Bounty wolf, judging from the faded green stripe painted on his spine. The body collided with a rock and spun in a shallow whirlpool before continuing its journey.
Mercy would not wait for the others. After listening to the pup’s mewling, she could not bear to debate with them. So she trundled into the water. The chill numbed her. Once her feet lost contact with the riverbed, she could no longer feel her tail. Her anger kept her warm.
The others followed. The pup turned his head to Carsa, no doubt begging for her to get him out of here. The little one had learned how to give orders before he could speak.
Mercy focused on the body floating far in the distance. After a few seconds, the pup faced straight ahead and saw it. At last, he was quiet, either out of fascination or terror. She may not have been his real mother, but Mercy would teach him about the real world, about the real future that awaited. The cruelty that no language could describe. The emptiness that no glory in battle could fill. He would see it all firsthand, and it would make him one of her people whether or not his heart pumped their blood. Cry now, she thought. While you still can.
The wolves at the train station gave the Mudfoot a decidedly different welcome this time. Bounty wolves, painted green. Mournfuls in blue stripes, bedecked in jewels. Opa with their spiked collars. They howled, stamped their feet, danced about. The few with rifles fired them into the air. The movement of bodies warmed Mercy’s fur, still dripping from the river.
Something sharp pierced the bottom of her foot. When she flinched, the pup let out a worried sound, and she soothed him by rubbing her nose against his. She lifted her foot from the ground to find something white lodged into the skin. She pulled it loose. It was a tooth, a wolf fang, sharp enough to draw a small bead of blood. Mercy stopped and noticed droplets of red spattered on the walls, along with a few shiny pools of it gathering at various spots throughout the station. A few patches of grass were stained red or white where the painted warriors fell in the skirmish. The bodies were all gone. She stopped wondering and instead chose to be grateful for it.
It was at this point that Augur felt comfortable enough to walk beside Mercy as they followed the train tracks into the station. His deerskin tunic and pants were still dripping from the river, but his boots were dry, as he had tied them around his neck when he swam. In all, he acted as if he had simply taken a bath. If all humans could adapt like this, they would have won the war.
More wolves streamed in, so many that they made space by climbing onto the roof of the station. When Mercy reached the train tracks, her eyes followed the metal beams all the way to the forest. There, a train engine, painted bright orange, emerged from the tree line, gliding along the metal slats, pulling more cars behind it. Many of the wolves broke ranks so they could reach out and touch the metal. The pack leaders let them do it, knowing full well that most of them had never seen anything like it.
On top of the engine sat a troupe of humans with pale skin, almost pink in the sun. Despite the cold weather, they wore no shirts, only deerskin pants and thick leather boots. While one of them appeared to be operating the train from the inside, their apparent leader—a bald m
an with broad, sculpted shoulders—straddled the front of the engine like a Mournful riding a horse.
This astonishing machine, far larger than the piece of the airship that landed in wolf country, represented the Bounty pack’s tribute to Mercy the Merciful. It was the reason they met here—the wolves and the humans.
As the train pulled into the station, its wheels screeching, Urna counted the cars out loud. Four silver cars followed the engine. Mercy could see the cushioned passenger seats through the windows. Near the end was a wheeled metal platform carrying an enormous truck on top, the largest Mercy had ever seen. With its round shape, it resembled a beetle curling into a ball to protect itself. By then, Urna had lost count and needed to start over.
A Toqwa woman emerged from the train station. Fresh blood glistened on her tunic, though it appeared to belong to someone else. As the screeching changed pitch, she covered her ears with her hands and whined like a dog, something that would always sound strange to Mercy. The woman waved Augur over. She gave a hand signal, wrapping her two index fingers around each other. It meant friends.
“They’re here already,” Augur said. He took Mercy’s hand in his and led her to the station. The woman bowed her head as Mercy passed.
Inside, shafts of light pierced through the holes in the roof. Posters with smiling humans peeled from the stone walls, and a billboard with plastic numbers attached to it showed the last scheduled trains to arrive and depart from over a decade before. In the middle of the floor, the Toqwa warriors gathered around a wooden table. Another human lay on it—a man. His scuffed boots stuck out from between the bodies. He wore the same outfit as the humans who rode on the train. A ragged wound opened his torso from his hipbone to his armpit. Despite the human physiology, Mercy recognized the cut—definitely from a Mournful scimitar.
A pair of humans tried to stanch the bleeding with pieces of cloth. The fabric turned red each time they applied it, layer after layer. Wolves entered the room, carrying steaming buckets with boiled rags, the most sanitary bandages they could find.
While they tried to patch the man’s side, a Toqwa woman stood over him, holding a quill in one hand, a rag in the other. A clay bowl of black ink sat next to the man’s head. The woman dipped the quill into it and dabbed it on his cheek, producing a blob of ink and blood with each little poke. With the rag, she wiped the fluid away and started again. An image formed around his eyes and mouth—a wolf mask, given only to the elite Toqwa warriors.
Though dazed, the man gave Augur an enormous smile when he saw him. The tattoo artist continued her work.
By exposing his belly, the man showed deference to the higher-ranking member of the pack. In his condition, he could do little else. With a gentleness of a pup, Augur traced his other finger around the growing tattoo.
“We brought it,” the man said. “The mission was a success.”
Augur took the man’s hand, lifted it to his own chest, and squeezed it.
The man weakly motioned to his face. “I told them that I needed to get a Toqwa mask before I die.”
The woman glanced at Augur and nodded.
“Please see to it—” A sudden wave of pain overtook the man. He bit his lip to get through it. “Please see to it that my men . . . receive the same honor.”
“The honor is ours,” Augur said.
The woman pierced the skin right above the eyebrow, tapping again and again as the blood rose. Rather than show any pain, the man shifted his gaze to Mercy and her pup. His face softened. No matter how old they became, these humans could sometimes resemble children.
“This is our future,” the man said. “The little prince.”
Mercy hesitated to get any closer. Augur gave her a look that said it was all right. She slid the pup from her back and cradled him. Fully awake now, the little dog remained still as the man reached out and rubbed his index finger under his chin. A dog knew when another creature was suffering. The man’s eyes drooped shut as the woman dabbed another blob of ink into his skin. He may have died in that exact moment. The woman continued with her task anyway.
Augur released the man’s hand. “Let’s see what they brought us.”
Outside, the stench of blood nearly overpowered Mercy. Near the entrance, on the concrete platform, two humans and two wolves pulled apart a fresh deer carcass with their teeth. With no fangs, the humans used their hands to peel away the flesh, while the wolves could simply thrash the pieces away. Urna instinctively reached for a morsel that had landed a few feet away, leaving a wet streak.
Augur led them along the platform, past the train cars, each one an impossibility. Enormous, shiny machines, larger than any tree trunk and smoother than the most weather-beaten rocks. Standing atop the engine, the bald man signed a greeting to Augur. The other wolves who crowded the platform stepped aside as they headed toward the rear of the train.
Augur pointed to the large vehicle sitting on the flatbed car. “It’s a trash truck,” he said. “That’s how much garbage they used to have,” he added. “They needed huge vehicles to move it from their homes to ours.”
Mercy noticed that the rear of the truck could seal itself with a steel bar that pressed the hatch closed. She turned to Urna to get her reaction, but her sister refused to go any farther.
A few feet closer, Mercy realized why. The greasy, fishy smell of the rahvek returned, more potent than before. It leaked from the rear of the truck. The great door, with its cylindrical metal arm, sealed in a new supply of the potion. Mercy inhaled so deeply that the cartilage in her ribcage popped. Suddenly a blast of wind sucked away all the sounds around her, leaving her in a vacuum. She saw Augur as a child again, surrounded by his wolf family, wearing the hide of a skinned deer to keep him warm in the snow. In a hazy blur, her mind traveled far into the future, where the forest hummed with life again, and the song of the wolves rang out at dusk. She flew above the trees, carried on the wind. Her tongue fell from her mouth and instantly dried out in the breeze.
Just as quickly, she crashed into the present, and all the sounds of the platform returned with a whoosh. The force of it made her rock to the side a bit, but the pup’s whimper reminded her to steady herself. Augur was in the middle of speaking—something about this being the last of the rahvek.
“But we don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he said. “The future we have been building will be here soon enough.”
Mercy glanced at her sister, who stood obediently along with the other wolves, like a pet dog.
“Are you all right?” Augur asked.
She wagged her tail.
“You felt it, didn’t you?” he said. “You stepped outside of time.”
“Yes.”
“It calls to us now. We are all connected. No one else can understand. But they will.”
The pup stirred against her chest. He did not care about stepping outside of time and all of that. He simply wanted more milk.
“Wet nurse,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The one we brought with us—I had to get rid of her.”
“Why?”
He stroked his chin. “I couldn’t see what would become of her. It was a blank space, nothing more. Which means I couldn’t trust her. Better to get rid of her now, rather than regret it later.”
Mercy remembered the first time she took the rahvek, and how it twisted Augur’s mind, incapacitated him. Any deviation from the future he expected made him nervous.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s gone now. And my people are looking for another wet nurse.”
Mercy realized that everyone on the platform waited silently for her to speak to them. They had come so far. She needed to say something.
“Need rest,” she said to Augur. She turned and headed for the station. Augur followed. He knew not to push her after so long a journey. As Mercy passed the crowd, she expected Urna to follow, or to call to her.
Instead, her sister kept her gaze on the truck, as if it contained everything she feared. Wex could jump out at any second. Or opening it could release the Damnable to this place and reduce everything to ash and dust and decay. But Augur was right. No one could truly understand. They simply needed to obey for a little longer. After that, they could all be wolves again.
The engineers tinkered with the train late into the night. Mercy fell asleep to the noise with the pup cuddled in her arms. Augur spooned with her from the other side, his muscular triceps squeezed around her ribs. The guards formed a perimeter around them, and the breeze carried their scent to her nostrils, making her feel safe.
Some time later, a grinding noise woke her, like a giant screwdriver eating its way through steel. Her heart jumped. Still half-asleep, Augur held her tighter.
“They’re fitting the engine with some armor,” Augur breathed into her ear.
Though it taxed her mind, she decided to speak in the human language. Any wolflike gestures would wake the baby.
“Tell me what you see,” she said. “In days to come.”
“I’ll fill one more canister. The last one. The truck will remain on the train. Everything should be—”
“No,” she said. “Tell me what it will be like. When all this over.”
He had told her enough times. Under the night sky, it would sound like a lullaby.
“I see green where there was once gray,” he said. “I hear singing where there was once silence. I smell fur, and mud, and hot breath. Like I do now. Only it’s everywhere. And the smell of our packs, human and canine, mingle in the air forever.”
He asked her what she would do once Hosanna fell.
“When we go back,” she said, “I show the child the hook.”
“The hook?”
She held out her paw and bent the fingers. “Where the river bends. My brothers and sisters hunt there.”
“I see.”
“We run there as pups. To become wolves.”
Mercy was the slowest in those days. Her older brother picked on her, told her she would be an omega. Urna was still whole then. She would defend her sister, sometimes with a growl, often with her teeth and claws.
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