by C. A. Gray
“I’m willing to make that sacrifice,” Molly whispered, loud enough that we could all hear. “If you are, I am.”
For a moment it felt to me like we were all intruding on Nick and his wife. Abruptly, Nick tore his gaze away from her, and looked around at the rest of us. “I had assumed, when we all left together, that every one of you made a similar commitment. But I see now that I cannot assume. So, do each and every one of you pledge to do whatever you can to help our cause—donating your labor, sacrificing personal comforts, and even laying down your life, if it comes to that?”
“I do,” said Kate, releasing Will’s hand with a fierce look in her eyes.
Will clenched his jaw and crossed his arms over his chest, but he too said through gritted teeth, “I do.”
Nick slowly turned, pointing at each member of our party as they, willingly or not, pronounced their agreement. Rachel, Brian, and Violet mumbled, I noticed, but most of the others were enthusiastic, or at least spoke loudly and clearly. He came to me last.
“Absolutely,” I told him.
“Good. We keep moving for another hour, back into the thicket,” Nick said, pointing into the forest. “As Molly said, I seriously doubt anyone from the Crone’s party will keep looking for us after they come upon the instructions, but on the off chance that they might, we don’t want to be vulnerable or easy to spot.”
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, the only sound was the crunch of our feet upon the soft earth and fallen twigs. We made a racket, but it didn’t matter, because we weren’t hunting and we weren’t being tracked, not yet. I could tell that much.
I felt eyes upon me at last and turned. Kate had fallen into step beside me. It was the first time since the explosions in the caves that I’d seen her close-up, and hadn’t realized how haggard she really looked.
“That was a great speech you gave back there,” she said.
I gave her a half-smile. “I didn’t get the impression Will liked it much.”
“Yeah, well.” She fell silent and looked away, which told me she had more to say on that subject but chose to hold her tongue. “I wanted to ask you—since Nick said those who stay behind are likely to die of starvation… I don’t know the exact timeline, but Will and Jean think it’ll take them a few days to a week to figure out how to redeploy the code he wrote. It successfully interrupted the control center broadcasts during his short test but he’s not sure how to repeat it. Will said he expects security to be tighter now.” She lowered her eyes. “But while we wait on them, maybe you can teach me how to—um, well, to hunt?”
Something about this request felt disingenuous. I glanced at her and narrowed my eyes. “So you can help feed those who stay behind?”
She nodded, but continued to avoid my gaze.
I heard Grandfather’s voice in my head.“My son, if you want to find out if a person is lying, watch very closely for the first few seconds of his answer. If he stutters, if he refuses to meet your gaze, or if he over-stares when he does not do so as a rule, be on your guard.”
“That’s what you want to use it for?” I pressed.
“It seems logical to me,” said Kate, with growing confidence. “Also, Jacob told me how you started training him to do what you do, tuning into the little cues around you. He said that’s how you hunt as well as you do. Maybe you could teach me that too?”
Now I understood. She may want to hunt—but really she wanted to learn to resist the control centers, and to shoot. Probably not animals, either.
“What does Will think of this?” I asked carefully.
“Will doesn’t have to approve of my every move,” she snapped.
I pursed my lips and lowered my voice. “What are you planning, Kate?”
“I just want to learn how to protect and feed myself, that’s all!” With a huff, she added, “Are you going to tell me I’m not allowed to do that, either?”
I laughed. If I said yes, I automatically became a controlling jerk, and if I said no, then I’d be obligated to acquiesce to her request. She’s good, I thought.
But, it wasn’t a bad idea. Of those remaining behind, not one of them knew how to hunt, and if for any reason they did need to go back on the grid, they’d be sitting ducks for the agents’ Internal Damage guns. Knowing they were not real was not enough to overcome the evidence of their senses. They had to believe it, and that took training. Kate may have ulterior motives for learning these skills, but that didn’t make the skills themselves bad. I did want her to be able to survive, if anything should happen to us.
“All right,” I told her. “We can begin training when we get time. But it would take months, perhaps years, to train you completely. A week won’t be near enough.”
She beamed. “Thank you. I’ll take every opportunity I can get!”
I nodded, and added, “But do me a favor, all right? Explain to your fiancé what we’re doing so he doesn’t think I’m taking you out into the forest in an attempt to seduce you.”
Even in the moonlight, I could see her blush. “He’s not going to like it no matter how I spin it.”
“Because he doesn’t want you learning to hunt and shoot, or because he doesn’t want you learning with me?”
“Both. I mean, neither.” She opened her mouth, almost said something, and walked back to Will’s side without another word.
Chapter 7: Kate
My brother Charlie was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was happy—but his face looked like that of a skeleton.
Behind his back, one of the Crone’s bodyguards, the one Nick had killed, entered the room. He pulled a gun on Charlie, but Charlie grinned on, oblivious and emaciated, as the guard clicked the safety off of his weapon.
I woke with a start, gasping.
Would the nightmares never stop?
Through the trees, the sunrise streaked pink clouds and orange rays across the sky. It was the most magnificent sunrise I think I’d ever seen in my life. I overheard Sam tell Violet that this could be due to the residual radiation as we approached Beckenshire.
I’d slept on the forest floor as usual, using Will’s arm as a blanket. It was our third day on the trek to Beckenshire, which was still another week or two away. Nobody knew for sure how long it would take to get there, nor how much longer we’d have forest cover. We weren’t moving constantly either—sometimes we had to stop and rest, mostly for Violet, who was very pregnant and her ankles swollen. Rachel complained a lot, too. I almost hated Rachel for what she’d tried to do to Jackson anyway, so I had no patience for this. Neither did anyone else, it seemed.
Will was already gone, and when I stretched and looked around, I saw that Jean and several of the hunters had also risen early. About a hundred yards away, I knew I’d find Molly at our little campfire, cooking bits of deer meat on a stick over a fire. This and some assorted nuts and berries served as our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I got up and went to see if I could offer her any help. She smiled as she saw me approach, and the smile was genuine—not terse like it had been for days.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Morning. Where is everybody?”
“Nick, Will, Jean, and most of the hunters are off strategizing,” she told me. “They keep arguing about how to safely get back on the grid, and what to do when they get there.”
“I know, Will was telling me.”
“How did you sleep?” Molly asked.
“Fitfully,” I confessed, rubbing the back of my neck where it had rested on the concrete.
“Nightmares?”
I nodded. “You too?”
She nodded back, her smile vanishing as she focused intently on her cooking. “But you’re the only one of us who’s had any good news lately. Will found you.” She looked up again, and gave me a weak smile. “Most of us lost those we loved to death that day. But you got someone back from the dead.”
I nodded, looking away. “I know. I’m
very fortunate.”
Molly gave me a queer look, probing me.
“I’ve been dreaming about my family,” I confessed. “My parents, but especially my brother.”
She looked sympathetic. “It’s hard, knowing they’re stuck in captivity, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “The last time I saw them was weeks before I even came to the caves, before I knew anything was wrong. I thought they were fine then, but were they? Or were they on the brink of death, and I just didn’t know any better? And even if they’re not, they're slaves. I was never close to them or anything, but still. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
Molly nodded again, still stirring.
“Will and my brother Charlie got on really well,” I went on, staring off at the sunrise. “My brother is kind of geeky, like Will. He doesn’t program as much as Will, but he’s into building electronics and circuits and things. He’d probably be useful to Will and Jean if he were here.”
There didn’t seem to be much to say to this. “I wish he was here, too,” Molly said.
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked, just making conversation.
She didn’t answer for a long time. Then, her lower lip trembling, she murmured, “Nick and I had a daughter.”
Oh. She didn’t even have to tell me the rest of the story.
“She was fourteen. As we fled from the riots, a piece of debris slashed her leg open. Before the Crash it would have been a minor wound. But we had no access to antibiotics anymore, and the wound got infected.”
“I’m so sorry, Molly,” I whispered.
Molly waved off my sympathy, and took a deep breath before continuing, “My parents and my sister died of what I now know was starvation, in the early days after the Potentate took power. If anyone in my extended family or Nick’s survived beyond them, we don’t know about it. So,” she continued, “if you know you have relatives on the grid who are still alive, I can understand your fixation.”
I couldn’t speak. Fortunately Molly changed the subject for me.
“Jackson isn’t with the others. He said he doesn’t know anything about computers anyway, so he wouldn’t be of much help. He’s off fishing for us in the stream a mile thataway,” she pointed north, “and told me to send you to find him when you woke up.”
“Fishing?” I repeated, perplexed. I hadn’t even known there was any water nearby. Nobody had mentioned it. “With what? We don’t have any equipment…”
Molly shrugged. “That’s Jackson’s profession in Iceland—he’s a fisherman, remember? I’m sure he figured out something.”
I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to find the stream exactly. If Jackson thought all I needed was Molly’s general “thataway,” then I figured it must be hard to miss.
Just when I started to get concerned that I was really lost, though, I heard the distant sound of flowing water. I quickened my pace, shouting, “Jackson?”
“Over here!” he called back.
I spotted him crouching over the stream with one arm extended across the water. He looked over his shoulder and waved. He held a hoop of some kind, attached to a net.
“Where did you get that?”
“Made it,” he said. “You know the rope I used from tying up the Council members? I took the extra length of it with me, and just unraveled it into thinner threads. Then I wove it into a net, and attached it to some tree branches. The pine here is pretty flexible, it bends well.” The clear water flowed over the rocks beneath the bottom of his net, along with several slippery silver fish. “What can I say, I was getting sick of deer.” He grinned, standing up and lifting his catch out of the water. “What I don’t have is a container to transport them back to camp alive, so we’ll have to just catch a few at a time. This will be our lunch. I don’t want them to suffocate to death, though—that’s a bad way to go. Come here, I’ll show you how to kill them. Then I figured we could have our first hunting lesson.”
I swallowed my gag reflex at the idea of killing a fish, and let him hand me a knife. He found a flat rock, grabbed one of the wriggly creatures, and flipped his knife backwards. Then he aimed the butt of the knife at the top of its head, and prepared to deliver a blow.
I… might’ve closed my eyes before impact. I heard him chuckle.
“Helps if you watch,” he said. “That’s the worst part. He’s not dead yet, just unconscious. This way he won’t feel the rest. Next you just bleed him out, cutting along the gill rakers, see?”
He traced the gills with his knife, and I forced myself to watch. Then he gestured at me. “Your turn.”
“Uh.”
“You want to hunt, right?” he pressed. “This is a lot less disgusting than cleaning big game, I promise you.”
I reached into the net, swallowed hard, and grabbed the first slippery creature I could get my hand around. It fought against me, and almost wriggled away, but I clamped down with my other hand.
“Get him on the rock. There you go,” Jackson coached. “Now clamp him with one hand so his head can’t move, and get your knife ready…”
I pulled out my knife as instructed, turned it butt first and held it from just above the blade, and positioned the rounded bottom of the knife at the fish’s head. I gave it a few practice swings without actually making contact, as if making sure the trajectory would land where I intended. I felt a little lightheaded.
You can do this, Kate.
I struck. I flinched, but I struck, and the fish went limp.
I felt terrible. I just bludgeoned a living creature… look at the little guy…
“Perfect,” said Jackson, not noticing my inner conflict. “Now, bleed him out…”
I hesitated. I can’t do this. I can’t.
“You don’t want to wait for him to wake up,” Jackson warned. “It’s more humane to do it while he’s out.”
We have to eat, I reminded myself. Besides, I was a hypocrite anyway: I was fine eating fish when someone else killed it…
I flipped my knife around and poised the tip at the gill rakers, feeling another wave of lightheadedness. But then I imagined what Will would say if he were here.
She doesn’t do this kind of thing. She can’t stomach it. Here, Kate, give me the knife, I’ll do it for you…
I gritted my teeth and sliced, gasping when I saw how much blood ran out.
“Nice job!” Jackson said, grabbing another fish himself, and handing me another as we tossed the carcasses in his satchel. “We’ll gut them when we get back to camp.”
It got easier after the first two. Although I still felt nauseous and guilty, I was also just a tiny bit pleased with myself.
When we finished with the fish, Jackson rinsed his hands off in the stream. I followed him, wincing when I felt how cold the water was.
“Okay,” he turned to me. “Before anything else, I have to at least start to teach you the fundamentals, of getting in tune with the world around you. Let’s have you sit here”—he gestured to a small log on the bank, and I obeyed—“and sit up straight—comfortable yet alert is the goal. Close your eyes, and just breathe. Focus on the contact of your feet on the ground, the log beneath you… the way the wind feels on your skin, and as it blows through your hair. The sound of the rushing water. Feel the way your abdomen, or your chest, rises and falls with your breath.”
I tried, but it was hard to focus on all those things at once. I kept thinking about the way all the blood looked rushing out of the fish. And about Charlie. I wondered what Charlie would think of Jackson? I imagined he’d simultaneously admire and despise him—he’d admire the self-sufficiency, but he’d despise this stuff, all the meditation and mind control and what not. Come to think of it, Will would probably despise that about him too. I didn’t think Will and Jackson had really had much of a conversation yet, at least not that I’d seen. I knew Will resented Jackson because he perceived that something had been going on between Jackson and myself. But of course all of that changed wh
en I found out Will was alive.
“Relax your face,” Jackson’s voice cut in, and I jumped. He went on, “It’s normal for your thoughts to wander—just gently bring them back to your breath, every time you notice that they’re somewhere else.”
My breath. My breath. I started just counting my inhales and my exhales, listening to the sound of the water.
I wondered when I’d get a shower next. Theoretically I could rinse off in the stream now that I knew it was here, but it was pretty shallow and painfully cold even to just my fingers. I couldn’t imagine my whole body in there… but maybe I just wasn’t desperate enough yet. Then again, we’d be moving on later today, and who knew if we’d have another stream near our next camp site—maybe I should take advantage of the opportunity now that it was here. I was sure if I asked Jackson to leave me alone for a bit and keep watch, he’d be too much of a gentleman to—
“Tune in to the sounds around you,” Jackson cut in. “Begin to recognize the baseline: the stream, but also the wind in the trees, and the chatter of the birds. That way it will become much easier to pick out anomalies when they occur.”
I sighed, frustrated, but didn’t open my eyes. I was terrible at this.
“Gently bring your thoughts back to your breath and the sensations in your body whenever your mind wanders,” Jackson reminded me. “No judgment. This takes a lot of practice.”
I started to wonder if we were ever going to hunt today, or if he was just going to make me sit here until lunchtime. I started to shiver. Did I really want to hunt yet though, if even killing a fish made me queasy?
You have to get over that if you’re ever going to be useful, I told myself.
My breath. Back to my breath.
Was Jackson even still here? I couldn’t hear him at all, nor did I feel his eyes on me, in that strange sixth-sense way when you know someone is watching you.
Huh, I thought, I guess that’s the sort of thing he means—tuning in to the world around you. Why can I feel it when people are watching me, anyway? There’s nothing tangible about that…