The Renegades (The Superiors)

by Lena Hillbrand

  “I don’t think they disappeared,” the second tracker said slowly. As they began to raise their eyes, Leo emitted a gurgling squeal and shook his fists and legs as if in the clutches of some mad anticipation.

  One of the trackers met Draven’s eyes a split second before Draven launched himself from the branch. He fell upon the man, and together they tumbled to the ground. Although unarmed, Draven knew how to kill a man without a weapon if he could gain the exact angle and summon the strength. The tracker had eaten more than once every few days, though. He’d eaten his five rations per day, as any normal person would, for the past twenty days, while Draven had nearly gone into starvation mode.

  The tracker wrestled Draven to the ground and pushed a weapon, a gun like the one Byron had once used to paralyze him, against his head. Since when had trackers been issued Deactivators? When Draven had been a tracker, he’d never even heard of that weapon.

  This man did not aim with Byron’s precision, though. Perhaps it wouldn’t paralyze Draven. Perhaps the steel spike would pierce a different area of his brain, and render him speechless, or take his memories or his vision. Or perhaps it would make him lose his mind altogether.

  While still locked in the grip of the tracker, Draven heard bodies hit the ground. Leo began to howl in such earnest that the spaces between cries seemed to stretch towards eternity while he caught his breath. Draven could not afford to look away from his own fight, though. Thus far, he’d only managed to hold off his attacker by continually struggling, though he knew the shot would come any moment.

  Suddenly the man pinning him screamed, the most anguished sound Draven had ever heard, and leapt from him. Draven sprang to his feet. The tracker, scream still tearing from his lips, flew at his companion and dragged his body from Cali. Draven leapt at his back, but the tracker threw his arm out, flinging Draven backwards into the woods.

  Draven slammed into a tree. A branch broke under the force of his flying body, the jagged wood tearing into his flesh. He yanked free and slipped to the ground, the roar of pain deafening inside his head. Paralyzed by the shock of pain, he knelt for a moment, intensely aware of his vulnerability in the time it took him to recover. Forcing the pain from the forefront of his awareness, he scrambled to his feet, still struggling to shine his mind.

  The tracker with the gun sprawled across Cali, still uttering that hideous scream. Draven dove at him and wrenched him from Cali. The man fell backwards, choking, a handle protruding from his middle. An almost uncontrollable blaze of hunger flared inside Draven when he savored Cali’s sap, freshly spilled and steaming in the cold night.

  Draven lunged for the dagger at the same moment the man’s hand closed around it. Before Draven could wrest it from him, the man drew it from himself, and the unmistakable scent of Superior blood wafted from him, clinging to the man and the dagger and the chill air. He jabbed the dagger at Draven, but Draven saw the blow coming and avoided all but the blade’s tip. The aspen point pierced the muscles between his ribs and his hipbone. Before the pain could register, Draven snatched the man’s extended wrist and twisted. A slight hesitation indicated when the ligaments reached the end of their range. They gave way with a sickening grinding sensation that traveled up the length of Draven’s arm and lodged in his shoulder. The dagger clattered to the stony ground between them.

  The tracker shrieked and sank his teeth into Draven’s forearm. Unable to twist away, Draven sank to the ground and swiped at the dagger. After several attempts, he gained purchase on the handle. He clubbed the man’s head with the blunt end of the dagger, but the tracker’s teeth only clenched tighter. Only after several ineffective blows did Draven realize the man had not bitten him out of rage, but to draw from him in a very messy and painful manner. With dawning horror, Draven felt the pull of his blood flowing from him, the measurable weakness setting in with each drag. Though the dagger felt unwieldy in his left hand, he lifted it high and took a moment to aim carefully despite his mounting panic. Bringing it down in an arc, he buried it in the man with every bit of his remaining strength.

  He had only to strike once.

  Chapter 32

  For a long time, Cali’s Superior rocked her on his lap, licking at her scalp wound and moaning low in his throat. An urgency tugged at the edges of her mind but never made itself completely known. What did she need to do? Something, something important. But what? Every time she turned her mind to the nagging question, it darted from her reach.

  Her head throbbed, not just on the surface but deep down in the very core. Draven’s cold tongue slid along her wound over and over, soothing the broken skin but doing nothing for the deeper ache. Soon she began drifting away to the unthinking place she’d been when Draven came to her.

  She hadn’t known which of the Superiors survived when he pulled her onto his lap. Even when the distant, half-formed thought that he would finish her off entered her mind, her body refused to react. But then his hands had arranged her with care on his lap, and one arm had gone around her middle, the other clearing her hair from the wound, and she’d known it was him. The others would have killed her before eating, or made her suffer while they fed. They wouldn’t have handled her in Draven’s now familiar way, commanding yet undeniably comforting.

  She let herself relax between his legs while she focused on the coldness of his mouth on her hot scalp. For once it felt good—her head was on fire.

  With no choice but to trust him, she closed her eyes and drifted off. She came to herself with a start some time later. The movement sent a volley of pain crashing through her head. She lay back, groping at the warm weight on her belly. Leo. Leo lay on her, alive. The urgency of last night flickered through her mind. That’s what she’d been trying to remember. When the Superior had yanked her out of the tree, she’d dropped Leo. She’d wanted to check on him, but she’d had to kill the Superior first, and…

  Had she killed him?

  She couldn’t seem to focus her thoughts. It had all happened so fast, and in the dark so she couldn’t see. At first, she’d thought she killed him, but he’d come at her again, and she’d stabbed him again, and he’d hit her with something… And Draven had pulled him off her, at least she thought he had. Maybe he really did mean to protect her. He must, if he’d let her kill one of his people, a Superior, and not killed her for it. It didn’t seem possible that he could betray his entire race for her, just one human. But he’d given her the dagger, aspen for Aspen, and told her to use it, and she had, and he hadn’t killed her. He’d licked her to sleep, had healed her, even after she’d killed one of his own people.

  In a sudden panic, she scanned the nearby woods with her eyes, not wanting to sit upright and wake Leo. Had he left her? What if another Superior had followed the trackers and killed him? But no…if another Superior had killed Draven, he would have taken Cali, too. After a full minute of searching, she spotted Draven. He sat on a boulder near the river, his knees pulled up and his arms around them. His head rested on his knees.

  For a second she felt a surge of pity for him, which was silly, of course. She couldn’t pity someone better than her, a Superior of all people. Why pity one of them? They had the world. As long as he didn’t die, she had nothing to worry about, and though he didn’t move, he looked plenty alive.

  She lay back and touched Leo, grateful that Draven had covered her and the baby with the blanket. He hated Leo. He could have left Leo out to die and told Cali that he’d died from the fall. She couldn’t have argued.

  Wrapping her arms around the baby, she noticed, not for the first time, how ragged his breath sounded. She wished again she’d had the sense to listen to Draven, to leave the baby with Shelly. He would have been better off. Now she couldn’t say if she expected him to live until…

  She couldn’t even complete the thought. Until what? She didn’t know where they were going. She didn’t even think Draven knew. He was supposed to be smart, and she had to admit he knew a lot about survival, and even more about human survival than she did
. But did he know anything else?

  Would they keep running, just barely surviving, forever? Sooner or later, their luck would run out. What if one of them got hurt? If she got hurt, even badly, now she knew for certain that he’d take care of her. But what if something happened to him? Or what if she got sick, or infected from a cut? She shuddered at the memory of the infection that had almost killed her. She couldn’t live like this forever, always running from something and never to anything. Never with a goal or destination in mind, never with an end in sight. To run endlessly until exhaustion finally broke her…

  Cali slept.

  When she woke again, the sun blazed in the sky, cold and white as frost. The second she sat up, Leo began to scream. With each agonized wail, the noise pounded a wedge of pain further into the center of Cali’s brain. She held him loosely, not offering much comfort. She wished he’d stop his mouth so her head wouldn’t split in two. After a quick scan of the area, she found Draven standing on the gravel bank near the edge of the water. He’d cleared away some of the surrounding limbs to make an open area and made a huge fire in it. He stood beside it, wearing the hat and sunshades he wore every day.

  One leg of his jeans was stained dark with blood, and one side of his shirt, too. When he turned to get more branches to add to the fire, she saw that blood covered most of the front of him. Her blood? His? As she watched him work, she thought he looked up at her, but with the strange mask covering his face, she couldn’t tell.

  Leo screamed and screamed. Cali tried in earnest to comfort him but failed. Hoping he was just hungry, she looked around for the backpack, but she couldn’t find it. Maybe Draven had taken it with him. But when she looked for it down near the fire, she didn’t see it there, either.

  She tried bouncing the baby, but he only cried harder. The last thing she wanted to deal with on top of her own pain was Leo’s inconsolable howling. She struggled to her feet and staggered back and forth in the crunchy leaves, holding Leo to her chest. Draven must have worked awfully hard while she slept. Several areas had been scraped bare of leaves and rocks and branches, leaving the dark soil beneath exposed. She wondered if Draven had buried the bodies under those spots. The thought turned her stomach, and she avoided walking over those places.

  Leo screamed on and on, until Cali gave up comforting him and let herself collapse onto a rock, lightheaded. How much blood had Draven taken from her? Her legs wobbled and threatened to collapse when she walked, and she had trouble concentrating on more than one thought at a time. Even those slipped from her mind, and she couldn’t seem to retrieve them once they’d passed.

  While Cali rested, Leo wore himself out crying before he gave up and fell asleep again. Finally Draven got done with whatever he was doing down near the fire and trudged up the slope, soaking wet and dripping all over. Cali could not believe anyone, even a Superior, would bathe in water so cold it had ice at the edges, no matter how filthy he was. But Draven obviously had. His wet clothes, still blood-stained, clung to his lean body. His pants were brown now, and red splotches stained his shirt, now torn in several places.

  He dropped the backpack with a thud next to Cali. “Feed yourself,” he said.

  “When are we leaving again?” Cali asked, discovering a new pain in her jaw when she spoke.

  “I’ve a place we can rest a few days.”

  A few days. The words sounded like heaven in Cali’s ears. She watched Draven shuffle slowly back down the hill, walking like a very old man might. How he’d managed to get so much done, moving as slow as he did, she couldn’t imagine. She looked at the bare spots on the ground again. Had he really dug two graves while she slept? And at that pace, too...it didn’t seem possible. Besides that, he’d killed one or two Superiors last night, and saved her life, and then scouted out a place to stay, lit a fire, and buried bodies. All that without having to eat or sleep.

  Maybe he didn’t plan as well as she’d expected. Still, he was determined and tough. She had to give him that. Funny, too, because he didn’t look at all intimidating for a Superior. He was so mild and insignificant. But he was obviously stronger and more capable than even the strongest human—and far from harmless.

  But she thought he might be sick. Once, he’d given her Leo and stumbled off into the trees, and she’d seen him bending over, holding onto a tree trunk for support, a black string trailing from his mouth to the ground. After that, she’d seen him a few times bending to release the strings that puddled before him, black stains in the white snow.

  Pushing the thought away, Cali opened the bag and found some dried meat Draven had packed for her. She ate it slowly, favoring the side of her jaw that didn’t hurt, watching Draven tend his fire and thinking how powerful Superiors were compared to her, and how hopeless her chance of survival compared to his.

  When he’d finished adding fuel to his fire, he plodded back up the hill with the same slow steps, and seated himself on a small log near one of the possible gravesites. He leaned forward like he might topple into the dirt with exhaustion, but instead, he rested his forehead in his palm and sat still for so long Cali wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “No,” he said quietly. “You?”

  “My head hurts awfully bad, but other than that, I think I’m okay,” Cali said. “What happened last night?”

  “Do you not remember?” he asked, lifting his head. He looked like some kind of giant insect with his shades protruding from his masked face.

  “Well, I remember some of it… I remember getting up in the tree, but I couldn’t see or hear anything. Then I heard them walking in the leaves, and you jumped on one of them, and one of them jumped on me, and I dropped Leo…” Cali paused and looked at the baby.

  “What more?”

  She swallowed hard, which made the backs of her eyes ache. “A little… The tracker grabbed me and jumped back on the ground, and I stabbed him…I thought I killed him, but then he jumped on me again and was screaming like…” She broke off and shuddered. “My lord and master, like nothing I’ve ever heard. I stabbed him again, and he hit my head…maybe on a rock? And I think you pulled him off me, or he fell off…? And then I don’t remember anything until you started licking the blood off me, and I think I fell asleep…”

  “Then you remember all.”

  “I do? Oh. Okay.” She tucked the blanket around Leo’s chin. “Did I kill one?”

  Draven hesitated. She wished she could see his face, his eyes. But he was just a bug face studying her when she couldn’t study him back. “No,” he said after a long pause. He sat upright and squared his shoulders. “No, I killed them both.”

  “Oh.” Cali fussed with Leo again, wrapped in the blanket at her feet. “I wish I could do something to help for once.”

  “You imagine you’d like to have killed someone?”

  She shrugged. “I guess. You always do everything, and you don’t even eat or sleep, and I just sit here doing nothing and getting us in trouble. I guess I thought when I had the knife I could help defend us. I even held on and didn’t let go of it when I stabbed him, just like you said…”

  “You did help, Cali. More than you can imagine.”

  “Really? Or are you just saying that to be nice?”

  “We would have died if not for your bravery.”

  She looked up at him hopefully. “Really?”

  “Yes.” She thought he’d stop at that, but he looked at her face and then sighed and continued, speaking as if explaining were a huge burden. “If you had not injured the tracker, I would not have been able to take advantage of his surprise and overpower him. You saved us both.”

  “Oh,” she said, still not sure if she believed it. How could she, a measly little human, have saved him? “Did he get you at all?” she asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “Only a bit. I’ll heal.” He got to his feet and bent slowly to retrieve the backpack. “It is nearby. If you can bring Leo…if not, I’ll return for him.”

  �
��Sure, of course I can,” Cali said. She gathered Leo in a bundle and followed Draven, trying not to put too much meaning in the fact that he’d just asked her to carry something for the first time ever. If he couldn’t even carry a backpack and a baby… But maybe he’d only asked her so she’d feel better, like she was contributing, after what she’d said. That must be it. He was being nice, so she wouldn’t feel like a burden who never did anything useful in return.

  When they got to the place he’d found for them to stay, though, she started worrying again. If he couldn’t find anything better than that, he must have felt awfully bad. The place was nothing but a narrow gap between two rocks. The back end was narrow enough that she could have squeezed through it sideways had he not blocked the opening with an unfamiliar pack, similar to Draven’s but smaller. A tarp she’d never seen covered the top of the space like a roof.

  “Is this where the trackers were staying?” she asked.

  “No. I must tend the fire, and then I’ll return to you. Will you be alright here alone?”

  “Well, of course. But why don’t you let me do it? You can rest and I’ll tend the fire for a while. I know you haven’t slept.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Rest here. I’ll return before too long. If you need me, call out. I will hear you.”

  He stooped and ducked out of the shelter, and Cali heard the leaves crunching under his feet as he walked away. Though she couldn’t see the spot where they’d spent the night before, if she leaned to the right and pressed her cheek against the wall of the shelter, she could just see the fire, between the boulder where Draven had sat that morning and a big tree. For a while, she sat watching, waiting to see what important things he had to do. But all he did was dump a tarp full of leaves and sticks and pine needles into the fire.

  Then Leo woke up and started screaming again, and again she cursed herself for bringing the baby. Each cry sent a stab of pain into her brain. For a long time, she couldn’t think of anything but her headache and stopping Leo’s mouth. It seemed an impossible task. Finally she got him to take some milk powder and a little water, but immediately afterwards, he started screaming again.