Bray pulled Cullen to his feet, but not before guards swarmed them. They congregated behind Avery, awaiting an order.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Avery barked, sweat rolling down his cheeks and over his freckled face.
“He fell,” Bray said. “I was helping him.”
Avery didn’t buy the weak explanation. “Escape,” he spat, as if the word were akin to murder.
“It was a fall,” Bray said, “nothing more.”
Avery looked from Cullen’s still-terrified face, to the people in line around them, who stared. He directed his next question at everyone. “What was he doing?” No one met his eyes. No one wanted to risk defending a stranger. Avery’s eyes focused on the skinny man Bray had talked to earlier. “You. Tell me what you saw.”
The man was quiet for a moment, until Avery drilled him with a stare.
“He ran,” the skinny man said finally, looking away before Bray or Cullen could meet his eyes. “I’m not sure why.”
Avery’s anger seethed.
Before he could say anything, Bray interrupted. “He was afraid.” Bray pointed down the path, where Rudyard and The Clickers stared, disrupted from their trade. The man between them writhed. “He saw some of the people who took him away from the forests. He wanted to get away from them. That was all.”
Avery looked from Bray to the people in the distance. Rudyard waved an angry arm, making it clear he wasn’t to be interrupted any longer. Perhaps fearing Rudyard’s wrath more than anything else, Avery stabbed the air with a finger and said, “Dung duty this afternoon! Both of you!”
Chapter 58: Kirby
“You look as if something is wrong,” Esmeralda said, watching Kirby with concern. She held a squirming Fiona on her lap, trying to placate her.
“It is nothing,” Kirby said, eating her lunch.
“I can always tell when something is amiss,” Esmeralda said, giving her a sympathetic glance. “Call it a mother’s intuition.”
Kirby sighed as she ate from the bowl in her lap. She kept glancing at the doorway, as if she might see either Bray or Cullen outside, even though she knew they were in their own houses, probably eating. But that wouldn’t be the case for long.
“My friends were punished this morning,” she said, figuring Esmeralda would hear about the incident regardless.
“Dung duty?” Esmeralda asked with a knowing glance, wrinkling her nose.
“Have you had it before?”
“Not in a while. It is not a pleasant job, but they will survive, like all the others who have had it,” Esmeralda said. “After a few days, the guards will let them out of it. Someone else will earn their anger, and they will assign it elsewhere.”
“I hope so.”
“Did the guards beat them?”
“No.” Kirby scraped the last of her food from her bowl. “Rudyard was trading with some people when it happened. I believe the guards were distracted. Otherwise, they might have received worse.”
“What did your friends do to anger them?”
Keeping the information vague, Kirby said, “One of my friends tripped and fell. My other friend tried helping him.”
Esmeralda sighed as she fed Fiona some more food. “Perhaps your friend was exhausted from the heat. In some ways, your friends are lucky. I would rather pick up dung for a few days than receive a beating that takes weeks to heal.”
Kirby nodded. She still felt the bumps and bruises she’d suffered when she’d been in the cell, and after she’d been let out.
“They will appreciate it when the task is over,” Esmeralda said. “The fields will seem like pleasant work.”
Chapter 59: William
“William?”
William looked up from the book at which he was staring, even though he wasn’t concentrating.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m just tired,” he said, hoping too many yawns hadn’t aroused suspicion.
“You seem distracted.”
William looked away, trying to hide his eyes. Too few hours of sleep had worn through his attention span. He was still afraid about the pin. Just in case, he had left it in his room, underneath the dresser. He didn’t want evidence of his indiscretions on him.
“Perhaps you need a break from learning,” Amelia suggested. “We will have plenty of time to resume later.”
“Okay,” he said, closing the book.
“I have something to show you,” she said, bringing him over to a desk by the window. Amelia reached up, patting some of the misshapen lumps on her forehead. She labored through a weighty sigh. “They say the human brain holds a hundred billion neurons, with even more connections.” Seeing William’s confused face, she explained, “Neurons and connections are the parts of our brain that make up memories.”
“Interesting,” William said, although he was too tired for another lesson.
“Humans can store an extremely large number of memories.” Amelia massaged her lumps. “It makes me wonder if we can store more, with our mutation.”
“So we will never forget things?” William asked, wondering how that could be true.
“We store the memories, but I believe we still prioritize them. Some are buried so deep they are hard to access. I believe we are still like humans in that regard, but most of that is just speculation.” Amelia looked out the window, seemingly bothered. “Most thought the human brain could never run out of the capacity to store memories. But that was based on a human lifetime. Will our brains start erasing some of our earliest memories as we Gifted age? I do not know. I worry that with all our knowledge, we might forget things eventually. And that makes the objects we keep even more important.”
Amelia reached down to the desk, opening a drawer.
Surprise hit William as she retrieved a piece of metal in a familiar shape.
Not a piece of metal.
A gun.
William’s heart hammered, certain that his time on this earth had ended as Amelia closed the drawer.
“Are you nervous?” she asked with a smile, noticing his expression.
William felt a second of embarrassment as he realized she held up the gun as if it was an artifact, rather than a weapon that could punch an acorn-sized hole in a person. William looked around, but none of the other Gifted seemed particularly interested.
“Don’t worry, William. The gun is not loaded. It is extremely old.”
William nodded as he allowed his eyes to linger on the gun’s smooth, metal surface, which was much more weathered than the guns Kirby owned. In fact, it looked as if the gun possessed greater age than some of the other devices around them in the Library Room. His pulse subsided, but he was certainly awake.
“An object is a powerful way to bring back the past. I received this gun as a gift from a man several centuries ago, a few years after The Collapse,” Amelia explained. “I kept it safe. In fact, I have owned it longer than I have owned most possessions. Would you like to hold it?”
“Yes.” William swallowed as he took the gun, already getting ideas. He knew Amelia wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t give him a weapon with which he could free himself, or hurt The Gifted.
“It is an 1860 Model Colt Army,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It is the name of the gun,” she explained.
“Does it still work?”
“It should,” Amelia said. “I keep it clean, even though I no longer have the need to use it.”
“It is fascinating.” William continued inspecting it.
“This gun holds special meaning to me.” Amelia’s face grew nostalgic. “It reminds me of the man who gave it to me.”
“Who was he?”
“A human I met many centuries ago, when I had only been afflicted with the spore a few years.” Amelia’s voice took on a reflective tone. “Those were the early days of my infection, after The Collapse. The majority of my family was gone, but this man convinced me to talk with him.”
“What did he say?”
“He persuaded me that he meant no harm. We spent time together. We weren’t always on good terms, but I do not regret meeting him. The man has a special place in my memory. Of course, he is no longer here, and the gun remains.” A look of sadness crossed her face. “At least I will never suffer a painful loss like that again.”
“What do you mean?” William asked.
Amelia said, “We Gifted will never leave each other’s side. We won’t need trinkets, or glass windows, to remember each other, William. Once we accept that humans die, and we will not, we are free.” She nodded at the gun. “And we will always have objects like this to trigger memories, should we need them.”
William nodded again, but he couldn’t help his eyes from drifting to the window. He couldn’t accept what she was saying. Her words were lies.
His friends weren’t free.
And neither was he.
They would never be, until they escaped this place.
Chapter 60: Amelia
“I do not think I am reaching him,” Amelia said gravely, looking at Tolstoy as she stood in his quarters. “I think he is pretending to understand things. He is a smart boy. He is savvy. After days of working with him, I still cannot tell his true thoughts.”
“I feared as much.” Tolstoy looked grave, as he looked over at Rudyard, who also joined them. “Rudyard has news, as well.”
“A few of William’s friends gave the guards some trouble while I met with the Semposi this morning,” Rudyard said. “They were assigned to dung duty.”
“Trouble on all sides.” Tolstoy’s face was grave.
“Perhaps this is a lesson in our laps,” Rudyard said with a shrug as he looked upstairs, toward the floor that held William.
Amelia nodded, knowing that was true.
Chapter 61: William
“Where are we going?” William asked, as Amelia led him downstairs.
“You’ll see,” she said, her infected head bobbing as she walked next to him.
William bit his lip as he noticed a new pin in her hair. It seemed as if she had come earlier than usual to get him. Maybe she was going to accuse him. Or maybe he had made a horrible mistake in taking the pin, and she had known all along.
He thought of the tired look on her face when they spoke by the window, and the gun she’d shown him. Maybe that demonstration was a warning. Maybe she’d heard him sneaking about last night.
He followed her downstairs, his breath heaving from fear. With nothing else he could think to do, he counted the flights of stairs as they descended. Ninth, eighth, seventh… Where were they going? When they reached the third floor, Amelia stopped. The door he’d picked the night before was cracked open.
He must not have relocked the door the right way.
They’ve caught me.
Conversation echoed from somewhere inside the room.
William’s heart felt as if it might explode out of his chest. He sucked in a breath as Amelia opened the door the rest of the way. The room was empty, save the drafting table with the lone set of blueprints. Across the room, however, the door to the southern balcony was open, filled with The Gifted. A few nodded as they saw Amelia and William. Amelia shut the door behind them, locking it.
“This way,” she beckoned, as if William had a choice, as if he had ever had one.
His heart continued thundering as he crossed the room.
They’re going to pitch me from the balcony.
Amelia entered the balcony first, greeting the other Gifted. They shuffled, ensuring there was room for everyone. William stood behind Amelia, Tolstoy, and some others, unable to see around their tall bodies, not wanting to for fear of getting close to the edge. He watched the backs of their flowing robes for several moments before Tolstoy turned, reached out a guiding hand, and ushered him forward.
“Join us,” Tolstoy said.
Tolstoy placed him in a spot between him and Barron. Barron clasped a wart-covered hand over William’s arm, tight. Too tight.
William swallowed as he looked off the balcony, over the city. A few of The Gifted looked over at him, solemn smiles on their faces.
“What are we doing?” William asked.
Amelia answered from behind him. “We are watching the feeding.”
Chapter 62: Bray
“This part isn’t so bad,” Bray said to Cullen with a grin as they wheeled full wagons of corn into the Feeding Pen. “Better than prying up dung, that’s for sure.”
Cullen looked over nervously, but he didn’t laugh.
“Hurry up,” one of the guards yelled inside the pen, spurring them on. A few Head Guards craned their necks into the pen, watching them work with smiles that Bray would like to wipe from their faces.
After cleaning out the pen’s scraps from the first feeding, they’d been instructed to bring in more fresh corn for the second and final group. More guards gathered outside the gate, carrying their bells.
Bray surveyed the pen.
All around them, the large planks that comprised the wooden fence rose ten feet into the air. Several areas of the fence were scraped and scratched, probably from where the demons battled each other for the corn. Bray didn’t see any way out, other than the one gate through which they’d entered, which guards watched.
The smell of dung and stale urine stung Bray’s nose as he wheeled his load to the center of the pen, where they’d already dumped several full loads. The pile of yellow corn might be considered appetizing, if it wasn’t meant for the stomachs of snarling beasts. A few pieces of corn rolled off the mound as Bray dumped his last batch. He nearly tripped on an errant piece, but managed to keep his footing.
Good enough. Bray didn’t give a demon’s ass about his duty. He wanted to get out of this filthy, horrid place that reminded him of the creatures he’d spent most of his life killing.
“Let’s get moving,” he muttered to Cullen.
As they wheeled their empty wagons across the pen, Cullen surprised him by slowing his wagon. To Bray, he said quietly, “I am sorry for what I did this morning in the fields. I put you in danger. It was a stupid mistake.”
Bray nodded, surprised to hear him speaking with more clarity than he’d heard in days. Perhaps the smell of urine had shocked him awake. “I know it wasn’t your intention to run like that.”
“Too many days of hiding from those men brought out an instinct I couldn’t control.” Cullen blew a breath. “The Clickers bring a fright I will never be rid of.”
“You do not need to have guilt over it,” Bray said.
The truth was, he didn’t blame Cullen for anything. Cullen might’ve told the final lie that had sealed their fate, but they had all taken risks. There was no use in giving him unnecessary blame.
They continued wheeling their empty wagons across the pen, speed in their steps. Bray envisioned the hissing demons that would soon fill the place, clawing for scraps of their meager meal. Hopefully, he’d be halfway through the alley next to the shops by the time any of them were in the city.
They were almost at the entrance when Cullen slowed. He glanced up.
“What is it?” Bray asked, following his gaze above the tall, wooden walls of the pen, toward the shimmering building.
Through the sideways glare of the sun, Bray saw a group of figures standing on the building’s balcony, three floors up. Like that first day he’d entered the city, he noticed a handful of dark, flowing robes. But among them was someone new—a smaller figure, leaning over the railing and looking out from behind a sea of dark fabric. William.
Bray’s heart seized as he laid eyes on the boy. He wanted to run from the pen and out into the courtyard, climb up the side of that building, and get to him. He wanted to shout William’s name and verify he was all right. It took him a moment to realize something else. All of the figures—including William—were staring at him and Cullen.
Footsteps pounded the dirt.
Guards raced into the pen.
“What are you doing?” Bray shouted as six
burly men surrounded him.
Someone grabbed him from behind.
An unexpected fist slugged Bray in the stomach. He doubled over, robbed of breath.
More guards surrounded Cullen, who shouted in fright as they started beating him.
Bray struggled to get free of a handful of sneering Head Guards, who pinned him while others kicked and punched. His body stung with the pain of the blows. They struck him several more times as the bells started ringing. From somewhere above him on the balcony, he heard a shout that might be William’s.
An awful reality hit Bray as Cullen shouted, “This is the end! This is the end!”
Bray fought frantically, managing to get one arm free, just in time to block a blow, until a fist socked him in the face, knocking away the last of his fight.
Bray’s head sagged.
He fell into a daze.
His boots slid over the ground as men dragged him.
He could barely see in which direction he was headed, or what was happening.
Through his haze, he saw the hooded figures on the balcony, holding back William as he screamed. He saw the people in the doorways of the first row of houses, their pale faces filled with the same fright. And he saw Teddy, his mouth hung open in horror. More bells ripped Bray’s attention to the front gate, where several guards incited the vicious snarls of demons from over the wall as others continued dragging him.
Where was he?
He blinked hard, finding enough clarity to see that he was out of the Feeding Pen, on the other side of the open gate. Next to him, guards rang bells. Past them, through the open gate and in the middle of the Feeding Pen, Cullen lay, beaten and bloody, next to the piles of corn they’d dumped moments earlier.
Cullen!
Cullen’s legs wobbled as he tried to stand. His face twisted with bloodied fear as he realized what was coming.
The front gate opened.
The horde entered the courtyard.
A streaming mass of wart-covered flesh, open mouths, and cracked teeth spilled in Bray’s direction. Feet stomped the ground. Yowls filled the air. The demons got close enough that Bray could smell their sour breath and the fetid dung on their bodies, but they weren’t coming for him.
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