by Sam Ryder
I don’t know what time I woke up, but darkness was creeping around the edges of the Ends, the shadows lengthening, dark apparitions stretching their unnaturally long limbs. I felt eyes on me and blinked to find Gehn watching me.
“Hi,” I said. “Everything okay? How’s Belenie?”
“Still sleeping,” she said.
I nodded. That was good. She needed rest after all she’d done for me. I shifted and a shot of pain lanced through my leg. She would need her energy to finish fixing my leg. “You should sleep, too,” I said. “I can keep watch for a while.”
“Hannah is keeping watch,” Gehn said.
I cocked my head to the side. “Then why…”
“Am I creepily watching you sleep?” she said, laughing. It was a sound I wasn’t accustomed to hearing from the Ender. She’d generally been the serious sort since I met her; well, except for when we were doing certain activities, then she was a tigress.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I was sort of wondering that.”
“This might sound weird, but I was memorizing your face.”
“Come again?”
“I want to be able to remember you if anything…happens.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” I said, which I knew was a false promise but which felt like the right thing to say.
“Oh really? Am I wrong or did you nearly just die?”
It was a fair point, not that I would admit it. “You mean that little ol’ Yippin? I had her right where I wanted her the entire time.”
“Of course you did.” The humor had leached from her tone, and she was serious Gehn again. “I don’t mind you taking risks for us, it’s part of why we hired you, why we…care for you.”
Her use of the word “we” sent warmth through me. “Then what are you saying, Gehn?” I asked.
“Nothing. I don’t expect you to be more careful. That’s not who you are. You are experienced and have the skills to do things other men could not. But that doesn’t mean I will forget you. Ever.”
“Why would you?”
She shook her head, as if she was frustrated she couldn’t properly explain herself. “My mom…my dad…their faces are starting to fade from my memory.”
Ohhh. That’s what she’s talking about.
“I—I’m sorry. Do you have any pictures?”
Another shake. “They were destroyed during the Blast.”
“What about your memories of time spent with them?”
“I still have a lot of those,” she said. “But their faces are blurry in my memories. There’s Hannah and me, clear as day, but my parents are becoming ghosts.”
There were so many things I could say, but they all felt like meaningless niceties and I wouldn’t patronize a woman like Gehn who’d suffered—and survived—so much in her short life. Instead, I opened my arms. She came to me, melting against me like we were two parts of one greater whole. She laid her head on my chest and then slowly shifted to look at me. I looked right back, no awkwardness between us, even in the silence. I let her study my face—“memorize” it, as she had said—for a while, until she was satisfied. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep.
I wasn’t tired, so I listened to the night as it swept down on us with dark wings. The occasional rustling of some mutated critter in the undergrowth. The soft exhalations of Belenie, who continued to sleep nearby. Hannah, humming a song that felt familiar but which I couldn’t identify. Despite being injured and on a mission where all the odds were stacked against me, I was happy in those stolen moments, resting under the star-speckled sky.
After what felt like hours, Belenie awoke, blinking several times and then turning her head to look at me. “Wha-what happened?” she said, a shiver running through her though the night was quite warm.
“You pushed yourself too far,” I said.
“I needed…I needed to fix you,” she said, an urgency in her tone that spoke of something more than my broken leg.
“Hard to do if you’re passed out,” I pointed out.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It wasn’t a rebuke. You’ll need to learn real fast about my dry sense of humor. You did everything you can and I respect that, but I’m serious when I say I want you to take care of yourself first, put your own health and safety above mine and everyone else’s. You understand?”
She nodded. “I’ll try.”
“You should eat something,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’ll only throw it up. After…healing, my stomach is unsettled.”
I didn’t know that because the last time she’d healed me she hadn’t said anything. Idiot, I thought. You should’ve noticed she didn’t eat much in the day after the healing. I vowed to pay more attention to the newest member of our group, get to know her the way I’d gotten to know Hannah and Gehn.
“I’m ready to finish the job,” she said.
“Bel…”
She froze. “My name’s Belenie,” she said, a coldness in her tone.
“Sorry,” I said. “It just sounded right.”
“It’s not. It’s wrong. All wrong.”
“Okay, I meant nothing by it,” I said, wondering what had gotten her all worked up. “Anyway, Belenie, it’s too soon for you to try again.”
She crawled over to Gehn and I. Gehn shifted slightly in my arms, hugging me tighter. Belenie put her hand on my arm and squeezed. “Let me do this,” she said. “I know I can do this.”
I didn’t want to upset her again and there was such fervor in her tone… I nodded. “Fine. But you must promise me you won’t push it too far this time. Be patient. If it takes more than one more session, that’s fine too. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said, finally smiling again. Her full lips and emerald eyes were a sight to behold for an injured man.
“Should I move Gehn away?” I asked. What I really meant was: Will it hurt like hell again?
She placed a hand on my injured leg and I felt a bit of pressure and that warm sensation. After a moment, she said, “The worst is over. You can hold Gehn while I finish the job. It will take a while.”
She wasn’t lying. It felt like hours passed as her warmth flowed into me, the crimson glow of her horns limning Gehn’s body as if she was garbed in a cloak of fire. I felt things happening inside me, bones shifting, stitching together. Finally, after what must’ve been an eternity or two, Belenie opened her eyes and stood up. “It’s done.” She wiped droplet of sweat from her brow.
“Thank you,” I said. “How do you feel?”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said.
She needed to learn something about me real quick. “That’s never how this relationship is going to work,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
She pursed her lips, and I could tell she was holding back and wanting to argue the point further. Finally, her body relaxed. “I’m okay, I swear it. I need food but my stomach will reject it. I can try water. Just as soon as you test out your new leg.”
Clever, I thought. She might’ve been a First if she wasn’t an Ender. She’d turned the conversation back around to a point where I needed to comply with her wishes in order to get her to do what I wanted her to do. There was nothing for it. I gently turned to the side and laid Gehn down. She stayed asleep. Then I stood up and bent my legs a few times to check out my mobility. I leaned forward to touch my toes, then backward to extend out my stomach. No matter which way I moved, my ribs felt great, and my leg was as strong as iron again.
“Unbelievable,” I said, which made her smile. “I’m hoping you’re going to stick around for a while. And not just because of your badass healing ability.”
She winked. “I’m all yours,” she said, offering her own subtle innuendo.
“Now grab a drink,” I said. “I’m going to start carving up the big bird that almost killed me.”
Hannah’s voice echoed across the terrain. “Gehn already took care of that. We might’ve already eaten some too.”
That was good, so good.
I finally noticed the slightly charred smell of cooked meat in the air and my stomach growled. I walked over on my new leg in the direction Hannah’s voice had come from. She was sitting on a log atop a small ridge, giving her a great vantage point of the surrounding area. Bathed in moonlight, she looked stunning, the rips in her tight-fitting jeans revealing pristine thighs and a portion of her hips. “Eating without me? Shameless,” I said.
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same,” she said, not backing down. “There’s plenty to go around. Belenie?”
“She’s just going to have some water for now,” I said, answering for her so she didn’t have to explain things again.
Hannah’s gaze flitted between me and the healer, but then she shrugged. “Suit yourself. Food’s over there.” She gestured to a small fire that had mostly died down, leaving on the glow of the coals illuminating the roasting meat hanging over them. Slow cooked, I thought. Just the way I like it.
I cleaned the Yippin blood from my dagger and then used it to slice off some of the meat. It burned my hands a little but I didn’t care. The smell was intoxicating. The juices were hot in my mouth as I bit into the meat. Eating that meat was an otherworldly experience—it was that good. Too bad I almost had to die to procure it.
When I’d polished off one portion and gone back for another, a sudden sense of urgency hit me. It felt like we were lingering here too long, feeling safe when safety was a thing of the past. I didn’t know if Atticus was having us tracked, or if he’d raised a mob, or if the Wanderer’s Guild would continue to operate without their dead leader... all I knew was we needed to get to Paris and figure out whether we had any support there.
It was our only chance of survival, and that window was closing a little more every day.
I bit into another piece of meat and sighed. I hated to wake Gehn but knew we needed to leave as soon as possible.
Chapter 2
Belenie
I wasn’t I such a hurry that I didn’t let the women eat one more time before we moved on. We would all need our energy. I was most worried about Belenie, who couldn’t even sit near the food because of her unsettled stomach. Would she faint again if we pushed our progress too hard?
She seemed okay for now, but it was hard to tell. Once we got back on the road under the cover of night, I sidled up next to her. She was staring off at some unknown point in the distance, her brow furrowed as if deep in thought.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked, bumping my shoulder against hers.
She glanced at me, surprised, though I hadn’t tried to sneak up on her. “I—nothing much. Just thinking about how I got to this point.”
That was the universal refrain of everyone who’d survived the Blast. If you had memories of life before the Blast, quiet moments lent themselves to reflection. Whether you were sitting at a bar or staring at a fire or hiking across the wilderness, a little silence shifted your brain to how you wound up where you were at that moment.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I don’t think any of us thought life would be like this. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting giant birds to try to make a meal out of me for their young.”
She managed a laugh that wasn’t forced, which I considered a small victory, roping an arm around my back and cupping it at my side, slipping under my shirt and caressing my abdomen. I smiled. Though she could be somewhat volatile, a real firecracker, there was a warmth to her that was rare out in the Ends. Most people these days were cold and suspicious of strangers.
But Belenie was different. She wasn’t afraid to show a little affection.
“What’s your story?” I asked. “How did you wind up as an Ender, and how did you get out alive?” I immediately backtracked, remembering how difficult the memories were for Gehn. “Sorry, I don’t mean to pry. I’m just interested in what circumstances made you so awesome.”
She laughed again. “I don’t mind,” she said. “Well, you know how I became an Ender—suddenly and without warning, just like everybody else. It happened about two years after the Blast.”
Whoa. She’d been an Ender for a long time. “Were you living in Rome at the time?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah, but not for long,” she said. “I was alone, so I didn’t have roots set down anywhere. The Blast orphaned me at fifteen years old. I was an only child, and my mom and dad didn’t make it. Or at least, I don’t think they did. I never found their bodies, but our paths haven’t crossed since the bomb dropped.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay, thanks,” she continued. “Honestly, I’ve made my peace with it. For one thing, now that I’m an Ender, I know my parents would likely have gone through a similar transformation. I wouldn’t want that for them. The Rising might’ve killed them—or at least tried to. I wouldn’t want to see them suffer like that. So if that means they get to avoid the suffering of living in the Ends, then I’m okay with them being gone, even if it still hurts sometimes.”
“What about you?” I said. “Weren’t you crippled by them being gone at such a young age?”
Belenie continued to stroke my side, her fingers delicate and warm, even when she wasn’t doing her healing thing. “I mean, I was a teenager. I knew the basics of living independently. So I’ve just lived alone this whole time, or at least most of the time. Not having anyone here to take care of also means I have no one I need to worry about, you know?”
I nodded. I knew. I had responsibilities in the old world. In this new world, before Hannah and Gehn came calling, I was basically responsible for myself and Chuck. The thought of dog sent a pang through me but I swallowed it away. It was a lonely life, but a simple one to follow.
“Anyway, I became adept at fending for myself,” she said. “I know when to cut deals with people and when to run for the hills. I’m not exactly a fighter given my skillset, but I still know how to survive.”
Hell of a girl. “Whatever winds up working for you, right?” I said.
She laughed. “Exactly. If I can cut a deal that helps me, that’s what matters. So I bounced around from place to place, outpost to outpost, until landing in Rome for a while. And during my stay in Rome, that’s when I sprouted these bad boys.” She pointed to the horns just poking out of her dark, curly hair. Their glow was gone completely now, making them appear as dark and hard as obsidian. It was weird, I didn’t really notice them much anymore. “It’s hard to hide in Rome, especially when you have no one. That was when being orphaned worked against me.”
“How so?” I asked.
“After the radiation transforms you and you officially become an Ender, you risk being outed as soon as you step out into public. So you do your best to minimize the time you spend out there. When you have a family, you can trade off who goes to the market, who runs errands, and so on. You can spread out the risk. But when you’re alone...”
“...you have to go out among the people every time you need anything,” I interrupted.
“Exactly,” she said. “Hiding just isn’t an option for very long. So I skipped town and became something of a nomad. I figured it was for the best. I stayed in the outposts, mainly, where I could have a drink without worrying too much. People didn’t really ask questions.”
“You didn’t move to Paris with the other Enders?” I asked.
“No,” Belenie said. “And I did that on purpose. If I moved in with Enders, then I would’ve been publicly announcing myself as one. I wasn’t ready to do that.”
“When I met you, though, they had captured you,” I said. “How did they finally get you? Did you come across the wrong crowd at an outpost?”
“No, I went back to Rome,” she admitted. “I was struggling to get enough food. I couldn’t eat as well as I used to. The Rising controls all the food production, so I had to go to Rome to survive. It was a calculated risk. The plan was to slip into the city and grab whatever I could. I didn’t expect the place to have become so suspicious of outsiders. Apparently your lot had caused quite a stir the
last time you visited.”
I cringed. “Sorry about that.” I’d never considered the ripples our time in Rome would cause to other Enders trying to remain hidden.
“Not your fault,” she said. “No one to blame but myself for being overconfident. I’d survived for so long I thought I was untouchable.”
“Why didn’t they kill you right away?” I asked. It was a blunt question, but that was the way people talked these days.
She shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “I was as surprised as you. For some reason they took me before Atticus. He asked me a bunch of questions about what I ‘could do.’ It seemed he was well-aware that some Enders, females in particular, had certain abilities.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Not a damn thing. I played dumb. He was skeptical at first, but then finally seemed to believe me. That’s when he tried to rape me.”
“What?” My question came out a growl, anger rising in my throat.
“It was horrible. He tried to rip my clothes off. I bit his hand. He lost his mind, called his guards and ordered them to haul me to the Killing Field. Thus our meeting was just random coincidence. I was about to be executed at the same time as Hannah and Belenie were being used as bait.”
“Nothing is random,” I said.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” she said. “But I’m glad we did meet.” She cupped my ass and squeezed. I chuckled and returned the favor. She had a nice ass, taut and round. The memory of when I’d been with her at the same time as the other two women came to the front for a second and I was tempted to take another break. Unfortunately, we’d barely gone two miles.
Gehn and Hannah surrounded us on either side. “Getting frisky without us, I see,” Hannah said, offering a sly smile.
“Don’t tempt me,” I said. “We need to cover as much ground as possible so we can reach Paris tomorrow.”
“Suit yourself,” Hannah said, reaching over to touch my already hard dick through my pants.
I thought of cold showers and exceedingly unattractive female gym teachers.
“Your restraint is impressive,” Hannah said. “Makes me want you even more.”