by Tarah Benner
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he continued, looking at his hands. “And I . . . I really want you to come with me.”
Lark’s mouth fell open. The last time they’d talked, Soren had dropped some hints, but he hadn’t expressly asked her to come.
“When?”
“Soon.” Soren cast a wary glance around as if the trees might be listening. “I’m on Hudson Peters’s shit list right now, and he threatened my friends. We’re leaving as soon as we can. Some of the drug dealers have noticed the guards are gone, and once people start catching on, there are gonna be a lot of people who try to leave.”
Lark hadn’t thought of that. Until now, she’d foolishly assumed that Soren was the only person who’d noticed the guards’ disappearances. But she’d been at San Judas long enough to know that the walls were like a sieve. It wasn’t terribly difficult to get contraband items inside if you had the right connections.
“Where would we go?” she asked quietly.
“Mexico.”
Lark raised both eyebrows. She’d never been to Mexico.
“I need to make a pitstop in Texas,” he said. “But after that, it’s street food, lucha libre, and the best tequila you’ve ever tasted.”
Lark fought back a laugh. She’d never been to Mexico, which was ridiculous, considering the border was less than six hours from Santa Fe. But then again, Soren could have told her they’d be hiding out in Kansas and she’d still want to go along with his crazy plan.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, trying to keep her voice light.
Soren’s face brightened visibly. A slight flush crept up his cheeks, and he looked around as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
“Good,” he said, unable to hold back a smile. “But just so you know, the next big storm we have . . . That’ll be our best chance. We need at least three days of cloudy weather to get the fence powered down.”
As if on cue, the light plink, plink of rain on water drew Lark back to the present. It was only sprinkling, but it gave her a nervous chill.
Soren breathed in deeply, and Lark looked over. He was staring at her with a deep, naked hunger that made her heart beat a little faster. Tiny rain droplets were clinging to Soren’s lashes, sliding down his sharp cheekbones and coming to rest on his beautiful lips.
In that moment, Lark wanted nothing more than to reach through the fence and touch him, but she didn’t. It was crazy to feel this magnetic pull toward someone she’d just met, but by the looks of it, Soren was experiencing something similar.
“Lark . . .”
She swallowed, and in an instant, she remembered what Portia had said about seeing her in the woods. She thought about her time down in the pit, and a choking, all-consuming dread clamped down on her lungs.
Soren was clouding her judgment. She had to be more careful.
“I should go,” she managed. “I’ll see you soon.”
Soren looked slightly taken aback but nodded. “Okay.”
Lark felt a little wobbly as her legs carried her up the bank. By the time she reached the top of the hill, Soren had already disappeared.
Lark wasn’t as quiet as she should have been as she cleared a path through the forest. She was anxious to get back to the shanty to tell Bernie what Soren had proposed. And she was so wrapped up in thoughts of escaping to Mexico that she didn’t hear the footsteps until they were only a few feet away.
Lark froze, half-hidden between two large trees. She lowered herself into a crouch to hide in a clump of mountain brome, but as she moved, there was a deafening crack of a breaking branch, and the intruder let out a gasp.
Lark waited, heart pounding in her throat. She heard a soft rustle of something hitting the forest floor, and the intruder scuttled off in the opposite direction.
Lark rose into a standing position, curiosity trampling her fear, and squinted into the shadows.
In the patches of moonlight shining through the canopy, she caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette. Portia.
Once the sound of frantic footsteps had faded into the distance, Lark stepped out from between the trees to retrieve whatever Portia had dropped.
It was difficult to find in the dead branches and debris carpeting the forest floor, but after a moment, her fingers found a clump of leaves bundled together with strips of yucca. She held the cuttings up to the light, examining the leaves with curiosity.
The plant was American mistletoe, but it didn’t make sense for Portia to have it. Mistletoe was poisonous to humans.
As Lark fingered the tear-drop-shaped leaves, something horrible floated to the surface of her mind. Portia may have been the one who’d lured Zachariah over that fence, but that wasn’t all she’d been up to.
fifteen
Soren
Waiting for a storm to disable the electric fence was pure torture. Every day, Soren felt as though someone was cranking his insides tighter and tighter. He was certain that if this continued, he would snap under the pressure.
Things in the men’s colony had gone from bad to worse. With no work to occupy the field hands and no prospect of a seed delivery, Hudson had ordered dozens of men into the forest to hunt.
But rather than doubling the colony’s supply of meat, the sudden influx of men traipsing through the woods on a daily basis had the opposite effect. The animals scattered, the treetops fell silent, and every day Soren’s snares came up empty.
The hunters’ lack of progress combined with their relentless hunger ratcheted up the tension and made already short fuses even shorter. Sudden fistfights and mess-line scuffles became an almost hourly event, and Hudson seemed to be using the surge in violence for his own sick enjoyment.
He’d begun plucking inmates at random from the lowest echelons of the prison — usually timid, scrawny guys who’d already been made someone’s bitch — and forcing them to fight until one was hurt too badly to continue. He hurled a rock at Simjay when his laundry was late, and, a day later, somebody attacked Shep on his way to the showers.
When Shep returned to their shanty bruised and bloody, Soren felt his desperation magnify. Hudson was making good on his threat.
Soren knew he had to act, but he had no idea what to do. Hudson had more men behind him than anyone else, and if Soren confronted him directly, he was sure to come at his friends with renewed fury.
Killing Hudson was out of the question. They’d still have Clarence to contend with, and even if Soren managed to kill both brothers, the Peterses had an army of ruthless thugs waiting in the wings.
Conspiracies to overthrow the brothers flitted half-formed through Soren’s mind as he made his way down the steep, rocky gorge.
At the moment, the one bright spot in his hellish existence was Lark. He thought of her the entire time he hunted and whenever he lay awake in his bunk at night. But with all the men hunting in the woods, it had become impossible to sneak down to the river to see her during the day.
Their solution was to meet at the river just after curfew. Unlike Zachariah and the men before him, Soren had never attempted to climb down the Seam. From the top, the Seam looked like the safest way down, but the rocky trail was far more dangerous than it appeared. Without climbing equipment, you had to jump ten or twelve feet onto narrow rock ledges. If you lost your footing, you’d plummet two hundred feet through the air and crash onto the jagged rocks below.
Thanks to the buck, Soren had discovered a comparatively safer path down. His trail — if you could call it a trail — cut across the steepest section of the gorge in short, rocky switchbacks.
During the day, it was easy to tell which rocks would offer solid footing, but in the inky darkness, each step was a gamble. Loose rocks slipped and slid underfoot, and one misstep could have dire consequences.
That night, the moon was just a ghostly sliver in the sky, and Soren didn’t spot Lark until his face was nearly pressed against the fence. She emerged from the shadows like a ghost, the starlight giving her a silvery pallor.
“You’re late,” she said, taking another step closer and cracking a grin. Her tone was soft and without a trace of irritation, and he took her comment to mean that she was glad to see him.
“Sorry,” he said, curling his fingers through the fence. “It’s hard to get down here in the dark.”
Lark’s smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
Soren’s weariness must have shown on his face, but he shook his head. “It’s just Hudson. Things are getting bad up there . . . He’s targeting my friends now, and I just —” He broke off, fighting the surge of emotion that was threatening to overwhelm him. “I just . . . don’t know what to do.”
A million tiny expressions flitted across Lark’s face. Soren knew he didn’t have to explain his dilemma to her. From what he’d heard, Mercy ran the women’s colony with the same iron fist, and she had just as many loyal soldiers behind her.
“We have to get out of here,” he muttered, more to himself than to Lark.
“Actually . . . I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said quietly.
Soren looked up. Lark seemed conflicted, as if she’d thought about whatever it was a great deal. And based on the torn look in her eyes, she still wasn’t sure if she’d made the right decision.
“I want to come with you,” she said in a rush.
That had been possibly the last thing he’d expected her to say. An overwhelming rush of joy welled up inside of him, and Soren had the sudden bizarre urge to liquefy his bones and squeeze through the fence to be with her.
“Really?” he said.
Lark glanced down at her feet, looking nervous in a very endearing way. “If . . . If it’s all right with you.”
She looked up, and Soren realized she was waiting for his answer.
“Of course it’s all right with me!” he said quickly. “You know I wanted you to come . . . I just didn’t think you would.”
“I do,” said Lark. “On one condition.”
“Name it.”
Lark took a deep breath. “I get to bring Denali and my friend Bernie. I can’t leave them here.”
Soren hesitated. A dog and another person definitely made their escape riskier. He already knew they needed a second grappling hook to speed up the operation, but he wanted Lark to come so badly that he couldn’t say no.
“You got it,” he said. “We’ll meet here after curfew and climb over on our side. You think you can climb with Denali?”
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Okay,” said Soren, feeling stressed.
“What is it?” asked Lark.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve . . . I’ve got it all worked out. Well, mostly . . .”
“Mostly?”
Soren let out a sigh. “I have a plan to get us over the outer wall. I just need to make another grappling hook.”
“A grappling hook?” Lark repeated.
“Yeah . . . I already have one that I made out of an old pitchfork, but with six people and a dog, that’s gonna take forever.”
“So you need another pitchfork?”
“Yeah,” said Soren, running an agitated hand through his hair. “It shouldn’t be that tough, but we’ve had problems with people stealing tools to use as weapons. Now Hudson keeps everything locked up and guarded twenty-four/seven.”
Lark stared at him for a moment as if she were considering his predicament.
“I’m working on it,” he added, as much to reassure himself as her.
Lark inhaled deeply, fixing Soren with a look nobody had given him in a long while. It was as though she were trying to shoulder some of his troubles — making them her own to relieve his worry.
“I might be able to help you with that,” she said finally.
Soren didn’t speak right away. What she was telling him seemed too good to be true. He didn’t want Lark to get involved, but he was feeling desperate.
“I work in ag,” she said. “My supervisor is in charge of all the tools, but I might be able to get my hands on a pitchfork.”
“Really?” Soren shook his head, torn between his admiration for Lark and the fear that she would get caught. “No. You’re in enough trouble with Mercy as it is.”
“I can handle Mercy,” said Lark. “You just focus on staying out of Hudson’s way.”
In that moment, Soren felt a surge of affection so powerful that it took his breath away. It was different than the admiration he’d felt watching Lark from afar and the great soaring sensation he got in his stomach whenever they were together. It was so strong and visceral that it made his heart hurt.
It wasn’t until the wind kicked up and he got a chill that he realized how close he’d come to her. Both of their faces were inches from the fence, and he had to fight the impulse to climb up and flay himself on the razor wire to get to her.
Lark seemed to sense what he was feeling, because she raised her hand and brought it to rest against the fence. Her fingers curled over the cool wire and brushed against his palm, and it felt almost as though they were holding hands.
“Are we really doing this?” she whispered, so close that he could feel her breath on his face.
It took Soren several tries to get the words out, his throat clogged with emotion. “We’re doing this.”
Soren’s buoyant mood carried him back up the gorge and lasted him most of the next day.
Breakfast was a dollop of mushy rice that left him hungrier than before, but he was so busy reliving his conversation with Lark that he hardly noticed. He had to endure Hudson’s threatening stare when he went to retrieve his bow and found the well blocked by a crowd of angry men, but he didn’t lose his temper until a couple of rowdy ex-bikers scared off a pheasant he’d been hunting.
He didn’t bother showing up for midday mess. He knew that lunch would be even more pitiful than breakfast, and he thought he might explode if he had to fight through another crowd of surly, unwashed men. Instead, he gathered wild berries in the woods and ate them slowly as he checked his snares.
By late afternoon, not even thoughts of Lark could alleviate his worry. He hadn’t seen anything larger than a chipmunk for hours, and his traps were empty except for two sickly-looking squirrels.
He braced himself for the worst as he made his way through the woods, wondering if this would be the thing that pushed Hudson over the edge.
But when Soren reached the outskirts of the colony, he heard a sound that jangled his nerves: hundreds of voices yelling, whistling, and booing.
A surge of anxiety welled up inside him. Soren broke into a feverish sprint, the dead squirrels trailing from his game bag like furry flags. His blood was pumping hard and fast, surging to his extremities as his body prepared for a fight. He didn’t know why the others were making such a ruckus, but he knew it couldn’t be good.
Soren was sweaty and out of breath by the time he reached the square. Bodies were crammed together between every shanty, forming a solid wall of flesh.
People were pushing and shoving, toppling the men in front of them to get a better look at the spectacle.
Without thinking, Soren threw himself into the fray, pulling men aside by their shirts and elbowing them in the ribs.
Finally, he reached the front of the pack, where the noise was absolutely deafening. The men around him were chanting something he couldn’t quite understand, and he realized the crowd had formed a ring.
Standing in the center was Finn. He looked more terrified than Soren had ever seen him, and he was literally backed into a corner. He was standing beside the crude adobe structure that housed the colony’s goats, his undersized fists raised for a fight.
Soren fought the urge to throw up. The crowd was chanting for Finn, he realized. They were calling him Goat Boy and making loud, cruel behhh! sounds.
There was another guy standing opposite Finn — a lanky, terrified-looking black kid named Isaiah who worked in the library. Soren could tell that he didn’t want to be there any more than Finn did, but the crowd was hurling hand
fuls of chicken shit at the back of his head, egging him on.
As he scanned the crowd, Soren spotted Simjay, Shep, and Wolfe being restrained by Big Jim and five or six of Hudson’s heavies. Axel was nowhere in sight. It was all up to him.
“Stop it!” Soren yelled, shoving back two guys who were laughing at Finn. “Get the fuck back!”
But it was no use. Two enormous skinheads with demon wings tattooed across their faces grabbed Finn by the arms and began to drag him toward Isaiah.
Finn was looking around desperately, as if he hoped that someone would tell him it had all been a big joke and he didn’t have to fight. But no one was coming to his rescue.
Instead, the crowd behind Isaiah gave him a shove, and he took a step toward Finn with a look of grim resolve.
“Hey!” Soren yelled, trying to elbow his way through the men that were closing in on the fighters. “Stop!”
But he might as well have been shouting from the bottom of the river. Nobody took notice of him at all.
Before Soren could get within three yards of Finn, Isaiah threw out a clumsy punch. The crowd roared in approval and stamped their feet.
Blood gushed from Finn’s nose, and he clapped both hands over his face to hide his tears.
The crowd cheered Isaiah on, and the tattooed men shoved Finn back toward the middle of the ring. This time, Finn stumbled and fell forward onto his hands and knees. The crowd booed, and one of the skinhead’s boots flew out and collided with Finn’s stomach.
“Get up!” the man growled.
“Hey!” Soren yelled, blood pounding in his ears.
Finn was curled up on all fours, and the skinheads were circling like a pack of hungry wolves.
Soren lunged forward with one mighty shove, breaking through the ring of onlookers and capturing half a dozen angry looks. As he did, he saw Axel out of the corner of his eye, and they both threw themselves at the tattooed twins.
As Soren decked the man who’d kicked Finn, Axel came at his buddy with a wild haymaker. Soren’s guy returned the punch with a nasty left hook, but Axel’s skinhead hit the ground cold.