by Shade Owens
I tilted my head back and searched the trees overhead. At this point, I’d have accepted the help of chimpanzees, a tiger, an elephant—anything. Maybe if I made some noise, I could draw attention.
“Something interesting?” the leader asked, her crystal-like eyes hovering over her mask like two glow-in-the-dark balls.
A knot formed in my stomach.
Who was this woman? The spawn of Satan? Or maybe his wife—if he had one. There was something intimidating about her.
I shook my head. “Stretching my neck.”
Her eyes turned into little slits. “Lie to me again and I’ll gouge those eyes out with my fingers.”
I swallowed hard.
Jesus Christ.
She was utterly barbaric—a feral woman capable of harming one in ways most people would never even consider. What had she done to get here? Murdered a bunch of people? Was she a sociopath? A serial killer? She looked like a goddamn sociopath.
She pulled a bone shiv out from her belt, rolled up her sleeve, and glared up at me with her shadowed eyes, but all I could look at was her arm. Pink scars and half-healed wounds covered it. They looked like knife cuts, but I couldn’t say for sure. Some of them were flat, and others, either bumpy or elevated like leftover glue found inside a dresser drawer.
She pressed the point of her knife into a white spot—a patch of skin without any scar—and slowly pulled back, leaving behind a narrow line of bright red blood. She glanced at me again. “That’s for your frizzy-haired leader.”
She had to be a lunatic. Who in their right mind would self-inflict a wound on a remote island? Had she never considered the risk of infection? What a moron.
But something else hit me. I realized what she’d done, and what she’d been doing, most likely for years. She was marking every life taken, and by the looks of it, there were dozens.
She slowly straightened her hunched posture and with the tip of her knife, raised her skull mask so that it sat on her forehead. I almost stepped back at the sight of her. She was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen—uglier than the choppy-haired brunette who’d been pulling the rope earlier.
Scars ran horizontally across her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose. She didn’t have any eyebrows left, because the area was covered in lumpy scars, too. Even her lips had been slit several times horizontally, giving them a zebra-like pattern.
She must have noticed my reaction, because she smirked, revealing a short canine tooth, and said, “This is why they call me Z—”
“Zsasz!” the choppy-haired Norther hissed.
Zsasz swung around, her hairless eyebrows lowering on her face.
“Didn’t you hear that?” the brunette whispered. Her big eyes danced all around behind that mask of hers, and she held on to her bow with a tight fist.
I stared at it, wishing I wasn’t tied up. If only I could get my hands on that thing…
“I didn’t hear anything,” Zsasz said, but I could tell she was on high alert.
“Footsteps,” the brunette said.
Zsasz raised her arm up and licked the blood from her wound, her pasty tongue dragging across her skin like a dry cloth. “Keep your eyes open and let’s keep moving.”
CHAPTER 2
Where’s Penguin? I should have said. Or maybe, How’s Gotham? Zsasz… What kind of a person chooses that name? But a few measly insults weren’t worth losing my life.
I could hear Zsasz’s goons walking stealthily at the back of the line. I call them goons because the other three women carrying bows were nothing more than obedient dogs. There was nothing remotely memorable about them—no unusual feature, no colored marking that made them stand out. They followed Zsasz, and sometimes even Rebel when she gave an order, without ever questioning their decision.
Zsasz could have asked them to walk the entire path backward, and they would have done it. What had she done to get them like this? Was this Rainer’s doing? Had she brainwashed them into becoming so complacent? And what about Zsasz? Had she always been this psychotic? Or had Rainer trained her to be exactly as she’d wanted?
I swallowed hard, realizing that if Rainer was to blame, it meant she was worse. I couldn’t imagine anyone worse than Zsasz.
“I’m telling you,” Rebel went on, “something’s following us.”
Zsasz swung around, tugging on our rope at the same time. “I said keep moving.”
Rebel grumbled something but kept walking, pointing her arrow at every little sound she heard.
“Anyone who follows us onto Northern territory is suicidal,” Zsasz said, but her voice barely carried, because she was facing straight ahead, her shoulders drawn back.
I noticed loose animal skin hanging from her shoulder blades and down her back. Its fur was light brown with a hint of red. What was it, anyway? Why did the Northers feel the need to carry body parts on them? Most of them were wearing sharp-tooth necklaces, and the leader wore dark gray fur around her neck.
An image flashed through my mind: a woman with long dark hair, a long cape made of either cotton or suede that dragged behind her, and a thick layer of fur atop her shoulders. She’d been walking through the Village smoke, her dark silhouette highlighted by the orange glow emitted from the fire’s devastating flames. She’d also held on to two battle axes as she moved forward, her tall boots stepping over carcasses in search of something specific.
I knew exactly who Rainer had been looking for—Murk.
Had she found her? Was Murk still alive? If Zsasz had killed Trim for believing she was the leader of our little crew, there was no doubt in my mind that if Murk had been found, she was now dead.
Zsasz led us through a shallow stream of water that looked more like mud than anything else. I stepped in it, cringing at the thought of my crocodile leather boots getting wet. Hammer had worked hard on these, and I remembered her round face in front of mine when she’d warned me about their nonexistent water-resistant functionality. I’d thought it weird being that they were crocodile boots, but she’d explained to me that over time, moisture would damage the skin.
One of Zsasz’s goons made a piglike snorting sound, and I turned my head around.
“Keep movin’, pork chop,” one of them said.
Hammer shook her fat face, which was now the shade of a ripe tomato. It was obvious she wanted to kill them, probably as much as I did. She didn’t deserve to be treated like a piece of shit because of her weight. Even though I’d once wanted to kill her myself, I’d come to see the true Hammer—she was a decent human being who was maybe a little rough around the edges, but I’d come to think of her as a friend.
Poor Hammer.
She was breathing hard and the dark hair on her head stuck to her slimy forehead. It was curly, and although less than an inch long, it was the longest I’d ever seen on her. She’d always had it shaved short on her scalp.
She looked at me, but one of Zsasz’s goons gave me the stink eye from behind her mask, and I turned away.
How long had we been walking, anyway? It seemed like an eternity. Ten, maybe eleven hours? That was my guess. I’d never been so exhausted in my life. My muscles burned, and my stomach felt like it was eating itself from the inside out.
But what shocked me the most was how far the Northers had traveled to attack us.
A heavy weight suddenly fell on my back, and my boots dug into the jungle floor, helping me maintain my balance.
“Coin!” Franklin said.
I swung around and caught Coin on my chest. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head, and her lips were cracked and pasty white.
“She needs water,” I said, my tone a bit harsher than I’d intended. I nudged her with my shoulder, attempting to keep her on her feet. “Coin, come on.”
If she went down, we were all going down. I needed her to stand.
“Rebel,” Zsasz said with a flick of the wrist. “Give her a sip. We’re too close to cut her loose.”
Too close to cut her loose? Would Zsasz have killed her for being d
ehydrated? For slowing down the group?
Rebel grunted something and plucked a red and brown water bladder from her hip. She grabbed Coin by the face and forced the water bladder into her mouth, nearly knocking out her front teeth, including her golden one.
“There, you fuckin’ little bitch.”
“Back off!” I spat, lunging forward and yanking Johnson along with me.
Rebel flinched back, then glared at me when she realized I had my hands tied behind my back. The whole line went out of balance, and everyone danced back and forth to stay on their feet, creating a wavelike motion.
“Hey!” Zsasz shouted in a deep voice, her oversized figure marching toward us.
How big was she underneath all of that gear? She was much taller than me—probably reaching six feet tall—and her hands were the size of a man’s. I could understand why her goons feared her.
“I said give her water,” she said slowly, enunciating every syllable. “Did you give her water?”
“Yeah,” Rebel said, shifting her weight from side to side.
Zsasz stomped her way over. “I shouldn’t need to fuckin’ babysit you.” She snatched the water bladder out of Rebel’s hand and brought it to Coin’s lips. Coin latched onto it like a baby on a nursing bottle.
“All right, that’s enough,” Zsasz said, pulling the bladder away from Coin’s moist, light brown lips.
She slammed the bladder against Rebel’s chest and droplets spat out into the air. “Everyone gets a sip. Rainer asked to have them alive, so make sure they stay alive.”
Rebel nodded, her beady eyes lingering on me a little longer than necessary. She knew I hated her as much as she hated me, and I was happy about that. I wanted her to know, because one day soon, I’d be hovering over her with a knife dug into her chest and she’d look up at me, on the verge of death, realizing how stupid she’d been for having thought she had the upper hand.
That image was the one thing keeping me alive—that, and Ellie.
Hatred and love.
Revenge and desire.
I hoped to God Ellie was okay. Had she survived the waterfall? It destroyed me to picture her falling several hundred feet into a pool of water, her body gliding through the air like a rag doll. What if there were rocks at the bottom… What if…
I shook these thoughts away because all they did was make me sick to my stomach.
What about Fisher? Had she survived it? Were they on their way to the Cove? Was Rocket still alive? Because they needed her. She was the only one who knew how to find the Cove. And they also needed Proxy, because she was the one chance Fisher had at surviving her wounds.
“Open up,” Rebel said, pointing the bladder toward my face.
I nearly turned away, but I couldn’t let my ego get in the way of my survival. I swallowed hard as the warm water slipped into my crisp, dry mouth, moistening my gums and unsticking the back of my throat.
I realized I’d bitten down on the bladder when Rebel gave it a hard yank and my teeth made a clicking sound. “You heard Zsasz,” she said. “A sip.”
She moved on to Johnson who was lunging forward like a dog on a chain.
“Relax,” Rebel said. “It’s comin’.”
Johnson gripped on so hard to the bladder that water splashed all over her face, and after a few seconds of heavy gulping, Rebel had to push her away with her hand. She went on to the back of the line to hydrate Franklin and Hammer when I heard it.
At first, it had brought me back several years when I’d gone to my first rock concert with Melody after a work shift. It was the sound of people yelling—cheering, really. Hundreds of people, if not thousands.
Had we finally reached Northern territory?
As Hammer finished what was left in the water bladder, Zsasz yanked on the rope and led us to the edge of the forest.
I knew it was the edge because a burst of sunlight unexpectedly lit up the jungle floor around our feet, warming the cool, moist air around us.
With her hand, she pulled aside as many banana leaves as she could, revealing a sight that led me to believe I was dreaming.
She slid her mask up again, allowing it to float over her forehead, and her deformed zebra lips curved into a malicious smile.
“Welcome home.”
CHAPTER 3
There was too much to take in.
First, I saw the elephants. There were four, from what I could tell, walking through the massive crowd of women. On their backs sat their keepers—women sitting in basketlike saddles—swaying from side to side as they moved forward.
One of the elephants threw its head back and let out a trumpetlike sound through its massive wrinkled trunk before its keeper raised a stick over her shoulder and jabbed it in the back. It shook its head—a huge heart-shaped mass of clay gray—and its ears waved from side to side.
What was she doing? Hurting it? Is that how they’d tamed these wild animals? Had they stolen them from their mothers? I’d read the articles—I knew that for elephants to allow people on their backs, they had to go through a “training crush” process which basically involved inhumane beatings at a very young age. The purpose was to “break their spirit” so that they could begin interaction with human beings.
I’d learned this after visiting one of the biggest zoos near my hometown. Melody had been the one to refuse to get onto an elephant’s back. She’d said it was disgusting that they even offered rides to children. I didn’t understand why until I did my research afterward. I also remembered reading that in countries where elephant rides were a big thing for tourists, the captors often killed the mother elephant because she was too protective of her baby, making her dangerous.
I stood stiffly beside Zsasz, my eyes scanning the crowd. A large mass of multicolored specks moved about chaotically in what appeared to be a market you’d find in a third world country.
Everyone spoke over one another, either trying to sell or buy something.
Outside of the market-like space were huts lined up along the edge of this village, or city, or whatever it was they called it. Their home, or land, was a massive clearing against the side of a mountain and around it were palmlike trees forming a barrier, the same as there’d been in the Village. Maybe Rainer had learned a few tricks from Murk, after all.
The base of the mountain—a rocky surface with patches of greenery every few feet—caught my eye because of what lay around it: a tall wooden barrier, at least ten feet tall, that formed an enclosure. I couldn’t see anything inside, though, because the brown pickets stood side by side almost as if glued together, their carved tips pointing up. It reminded me of something from a medieval movie.
Why was this entire section blocked off to the general population?
The only explanation I could think of was Rainer.
An elephant’s foot stomped down, the sound resonating across the merchant huts. The woman on top of it was shouting something, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She looked like a toy from this distance—a black silhouette with waving hands and a long spear pointed at the sky. With her spear, she reached over the wooden gate and must have unclipped a latch on the other side.
What was Rainer trying to protect? Why did she need a ten-foot fence to block out her people? A fence that couldn’t be opened by anyone from the outside unless they were elevated in the air.
The gate creaked open and the woman atop the elephant disappeared inside, before slamming the door shut again and locking the latch.
I wanted to take it all in—to see where it was these mysterious Northers lived—but Zsasz let go of the wall of leaves with a swoosh and everything disappeared.
“Well, let’s go,” she said, turning to her side and leading us through a path of broken branches that had likely been stepped over thousands of times.
We moved on an angle down a small slope, careful not to catch a patch of mud or slimy rock. The last thing we needed was for one of us to fall—if that happened, we’d all look like a set of dominos.
&
nbsp; “Did you see that?” Coin muttered in my ear, her voice sounding like dry leaves crumpling.
I was glad to know she was a bit more lucid than earlier. I didn’t turn around or answer her because I didn’t want to draw any attention our way. I had seen it, or at least, some of it, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was afraid to enter the actual city because I had no idea what I was in for. Was the crowd going to tear us to shreds? Cook our body parts and eat them?
When we reached the bottom of the slope, the sound of the city amplified, becoming a cacophonic mess. There were women lamenting, some yelling, and others grunting amid the sound of swords, or sticks, clashing together.
But the moment we stepped out of the jungle and into the open, everything went quiet as if a volume knob had been turned all the way down.
But it wasn’t the sound—or lack of it—that took me aback. It was what I was looking at.
Women were everywhere: filthy, sweat-stained women who stared at us like vultures around a fresh carcass. Their eyes looked translucent in comparison to their dark, dirty faces, and I couldn’t tell if they were intrigued by us or thirsty for blood.
One of them, a frail old woman with elbows bigger than her arms, waved a crooked finger and opened her toothless mouth. “Heeeeeeere,” she said. “Aye bala mayun!”
I turned sideways and cocked an eyebrow at Coin. For God’s sake, did they speak a different language?
“Move aside, you crazy old hag!” someone shouted, nudging the old lady in her bony ribs.
She fell to her knees and threw her head back, revealing a big black hole for a mouth, and started moaning at the sky.
Everyone moved closer to us, and she disappeared behind dozens of limbs.
“Don’t mind her,” someone from the crowd whispered. “She’s fuckin’ crazy.”
“Are these the Southerners?”
“Who the fuck calls them Southerners?”
“The traitors!”
“You don’t even know them!”