The Renegades (The Superiors)

by Lena Hillbrand

  “No.”

  “Promise?”

  “You know we are both growing weaker and hungrier, and he contributes nothing. There is no use for him at all.”

  “You’re evil,” she said. She held Leo close to her chest. “I’m not giving him to you. You’ll probably drop him on purpose.”

  “Very well, carry him yourself. I’ve plenty to carry.”

  They walked in silence most of the night. After a few hours, Cali lagged behind, and when Draven offered to take Leo, she made no protest. The boy lay limp in Draven’s arms, breathing hard and with great effort. Though Draven wanted to speak further to Cali, she refused to look at him, so he remained silent and they continued onwards. Midway through the night, they began to hear the occasional yips and howls of wolves. As the lonesome sounds drew nearer, Cali no longer lagged behind but walked close on Draven’s heels.

  When a howl sounded to their left, so near it sent a shiver through Draven, he stopped and turned to Cali. Without a word, he gathered her in his arms and began to climb a nearby tree. The tree’s branches grew high above the ground, and Draven had to struggle to hold onto Cali as he made his way up the rough trunk. He could no longer leap into trees as he had when his journey began.

  Cali’s body shivered against his, and she clutched his neck as he climbed. The wind’s chill had stolen so much of her heat that he could scarcely detect it through her many layers of clothing. When he reached the first branches that could support his weight, he hoisted Cali onto them. She scrambled up, took Leo from him, and waited while he leapt from the tree to gather their remaining belongings. While recovering the bags, he glimpsed several pairs of eyes in the trees, lurking, watching. With a shudder, he grasped the tree trunk and began his ascent, acutely aware that he had turned his back on a hungry wolf pack. Climbing as quickly as he could manage, he scaled the tree and joined his humans, his hands shaking. A glance at Cali’s stricken face settled him a bit. Her own fear had blinded her to his.

  Her fear gave him purpose, and he pushed his own discomfort aside and busied himself settling them in the tree. He secured the bags, removing the sleep sacks for the humans as he did so. He steadied Cali while she slid into one, then handed her the child and began to tether the entire bundle to the tree with rope.

  “What are you doing?” Cali asked, her voice sharp with alarm.

  “Binding you to the tree,” Draven said. “This way, you cannot slip from the branch and fall.”

  “No,” she said, twisting back and forth so wildly he had to pounce to catch her when she lurched off the branch. Draven hauled her back onto the creaking limb, cursing under his breath.

  “Are you so intent upon a quick death?” he asked, pushing her back against the tree. “Because you nearly got one.”

  “No,” she said, her voice sullen even as her eyes betrayed her guilt.

  “Then be still, you foolish thing.”

  “No, no, no…” As he began to wind the rope around her once more, her hands resisted him but she did not lurch about so wildly as before. “Please,” she begged, sounding close to tears. “Please don’t tie me. I’ll be totally still, I swear. Please, master. Don’t chain me like he did. Please?”

  Draven sighed and sat back on his heel.

  “I’ll stay right here, and I’m leaning on the trunk,” Cali said. “I won’t fall. I promise.”

  Against his better judgment, Draven withdrew the rope from around her and coiled it beside him on the branch. He sat guarding them, looking for any sign of movement on Cali’s part, but she sat as still as a human could, shifting slightly now and then when a rustle sounded in the woods nearby. Only Draven could hear the other noises of the forest—the snow packing beneath the pad of the wolves’ footfalls, the soft huff of their breath, the constant thrum of many heartbeats, the whisper of their movements beneath the lower branches. He monitored Cali for a reaction, but her heartbeat had returned to normal, and he knew she could no longer detect the presence of the other creatures.

  For some time they remained in the tree, silent and motionless. The moon shone on the white world around them, illuminating the snow-laden branches of the neighboring fir trees and the stark black of the aspens silhouetted sharply against the muted backdrop. Nothing moved but for an occasional blistering breeze that penetrated to the very bones.

  Draven shifted positions, trying to diffuse the ache that crept into his extremities, growing ever more intense as the flesh of his fingertips began to freeze. He must remain mobile, for Cali. If she fell, neither she nor Leo would not survive this time.

  Shortly after ice solidified Draven’s toes, he noticed Cali’s eyes beginning to close for longer and longer periods each time she blinked.

  “Cali, if you fall asleep…” he said.

  She jerked her head up. “I’m okay.”

  But a few minutes later, she nodded off again. Draven stood and made his way along the branch to her, his feet clumsy and stiff with frostbite. He dropped into a sitting position. “Let me hold onto you. Or at least the boy.”

  For a moment, he thought she’d protest. Instead, she nodded. Draven slid behind her on the branch and seated himself, drawing the girl and the baby close against him. When he touched her icy cheek with his own, she turned her head and rested it on his shoulder. Moments later, her breathing settled as she drifted into sleep. Though only a trace of her heat seeped through the sleep sack, he was grateful for even a hint of warmth. He sat holding her until light began leaking from beneath the horizon in the east. The wolves circled below the tree. A few errant snowflakes drifted past.

  The wolves slunk further from the tree, although they remained nearby, lurking just inside Draven’s range of hearing. One let out a long, bone-chilling howl that echoed into the flatlands below. Cali’s head jerked up. A shudder wracked her body, and she nestled back against Draven. He tightened his arms around her and pressed his nose into the curve of her neck.

  They waited for the howl to come again, but it did not repeat.

  After several minutes of silence, Cali said, “I have to pee.”

  “Of course,” Draven said, trying to remember the last time she’d stopped to relieve herself. “You cannot wait?”

  “I’ve been waiting all night.”

  “Right. I forget sometimes that you do that.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  Draven pondered a moment, and then said, “You’ll have to do it from here.”

  “How?”

  “How am I to know? I don’t do that.”

  “But…I don’t see how I can get my pants down.”

  “If you need assistance, I will provide it.”

  “Great,” she said drily. “That’s just what I need.” Despite her obvious misgivings, she let him help her from the sleep sack and take her baby. She then began to inch along the branch. After a few feet she stopped. “I can’t go any further.”

  “That should do.”

  “But you’re right near me. It’s…oddball.”

  “Haven’t you done that near others all your life? You had public toilets as well as showers at the Confinement.”

  “Yeah but…those were other people. They peed, too.”

  “Honestly, Cali. It matters little to me.”

  “Are you sure? Because I would think it was rotty if someone went right next to me.”

  “If I’m to have a sapien, I should adjust to your needs and habits, yes? You’ve adjusted to mine.”

  “I have?”

  “Somewhat. Here, take ahold of my hand.”

  “But you’ll…see stuff.”

  He chuckled at her ridiculous notions, but sobered when he noticed her narrowed eyes. “I’ll not look. Honor of Thirds.”

  “What’s honor of Thirds?”

  “It’s…nothing. It only means a promise.”

  “Then why don’t you just say, ‘I promise’?”

  “Very well. I promise.”

  She hesitated, but seeing she had little choice, sh
e held tightly to his hand while he turned his face into the biting wind. It took her some time to go about her business, and he wondered what she could be doing the whole time. He could feel her moving around, but he kept his face pointed in the other direction, even when the scent of her bare skin reached him and a wave of hunger swept over him. With nothing covering her, nothing diluting and muffling her scent, it hit him hard enough to rock him back against the tree trunk. He could barely contain the sounds fighting to escape his throat, the moan of pleasure or the growl of hunger.

  After a bit more movement, she relieved herself, and the ammonia scent overwhelmed her other scents. Again she rustled about for what seemed a long while before scooting back to him. He caught that same embarrassed look on her face that had once surprised him so much, before he’d known humans expressed that emotion.

  Now he knew they had many emotions, like Superiors. Perhaps more, for they were needy and weak and had many shades of fear and vulnerability that perhaps Superiors had eliminated. Humans had endless fears, and endless needs, many of which he’d not imagined before he’d had one so constantly near.

  Despite his frequent attempts to recall his own weaknesses as a human, Cali’s shortcomings continually frustrated him. All the human inadequacies he’d spent the past hundred years trying to forget manifested themselves in Cali—she stumbled over everything, blisters sprang up on her feet faster than he could lick them away, branches were forever finding new ways to puncture her skin and mark her trail for followers, and each injury took a maddening amount of time to heal. The incline of the terrain had caused several of her toenails to blacken and come loose. Her muscles tired easily and remained sore for days, insects found their way into her clothing and left welts that she could not resist scratching into raw sores, and she became unbearably cold when the temperature had not yet begun to near the freezing point. She grew weak without copious amounts of food. Though she ate constantly, her body did not absorb half the food, but had to produce waste, which she had to stop and eliminate often. In addition, her body excreted sweat and oils that produced odors she objected to and insisted on washing off every few days. When she couldn’t, she complained of them instead.

  Draven had simple needs—sleep, food, avoiding sunlight. All that he ingested, his body converted into energy. Superiors wasted nothing.

  Except emotion, he thought as he sat cradling Cali’s body against his. Certainly he had begun to waste an inordinate amount of concern on her behalf.

  After ascertaining that the wolves had retreated some distance, Draven scouted the area for confirmation. Confident that neither wolf nor Superior lurked nearby, he fetched his humans, and they continued walking in an attempt to make up for some of the time they’d spent treed by wolves.

  By midday, they had reached a point where the land no longer tilted downwards ahead of them. The mountains did not diminish to smaller ones and then rolling hills, but rather, ended abruptly. One moment they were descending the face of a mountain, and the next, they had reached the foot of the mountain and an endless stretch of flatlands lay open before them. A moment of inertia unsettled Draven. After months of crossing terrain that rose and fell, the level surface looked wrong somehow.

  “We should make camp,” Draven said.

  “Okay,” Cali said. “Can we build a fire? I think my toes are about to fall off. Or at least my toenails.”

  “Perhaps…”

  “Where are we, anyway?”

  “We’re close to a highway,” he said. For the past hour, he’d begun to hear traffic noises, something he hadn’t heard in over a month. “Perhaps tonight we will reach the city.”

  “What city?” Cali asked. “Can we get medicine for Leo?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Draven said. “I’ll look at the map later.” As always, the exposure to daylight had put him in a foul mood. The added brightness the snow had leant the sunlight nearly blinded him, and left his head throbbing with agonizing intensity.

  “What about Leo?” Cali asked.

  Draven began erecting the tent without answering, not wishing to point out the obvious, that medicine was not likely to save her baby at this point, if it ever would have. A doctor needed to examine the sapling, and going to a doctor would guarantee Draven’s arrest. The baby had likely passed the point where his life could be saved by a doctor anyhow.

  Draven rolled out the two mummy bags inside the tent and climbed into his, too relieved by the darkness it offered to notice his growing hunger. “What is it?” he asked upon seeing Cali’s hesitation.

  “I have to…you know. Use the…go to the…”

  “You just went.”

  She hung back, her face expectant but patient. Draven didn’t care for her patronizing expression, but he took Leo from her with a sigh. He waited for her return, leaving the tent open for her. When she finished, she climbed in and zipped the doorway. Complete and heavenly blackness filled the tent. Draven sighed again, this time in contentment, and then stopped himself mid-breath. As if he hadn’t endured enough this day, Cali’s bleeding had begun again. Now he noticed his hunger, a need so fierce he did not know if he could resist now that the pain in his head had abated and he had nothing to occupy his mind but ravenous hunger. Though her scent always tantalized him when he’d gone so long without eating, now it tortured and teased.

  He turned his back to her and zipped his bag over his head, grateful for the foil layer inside that blocked her scent. He could hear her moving about, and then the zipper of her bag closing. Seconds later, her breath deepened into that of sleep.

  If only he could draw from the sapling. Though it would be unpleasant having to draw from a doomed child, he hated to see sap go to waste, even the thin, bland sap of such a young one. Soon the boy would die and its energy could no longer be harvested. But Draven knew that if he drew from the boy and it died, Cali would never forgive him. Although his concern with her forgiveness was ludicrous, perhaps he could not have brought himself to draw from such a pitiful, sickly human even if he’d had her blessing.

  Finally, he fell into sleep beside Cali. When they awoke, Leo did not.

  Chapter 37

  If she hadn’t caught Draven watching her in the most pitying way, Cali couldn’t have stopped herself from crying. But she had caught him with that look on his face, and more than once. She couldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting he’d been right, too. Of course, deep down she’d known that he’d been right all along, about everything, but she hadn’t let herself believe. Believe that she should never have taken Leo, or that he’d die after he fell.

  I won’t cry, she told herself. I won’t cry in front of him.

  “We should bury him,” she said. “So the animals don’t get him.” She could be as cold and remote as him, like she’d never loved Leo at all, or anything else in her whole life. “And so that no one will find him and know we’ve been here.” She could be rational, just like him. It wasn’t so difficult.

  “We can do that,” Draven said in this soft voice, giving her this soft look.

  “Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Or not. As you like.” She wanted to be hard and cold all the way though, but even when she kept her voice steady and her chin raised, it didn’t erase the painful knot in her throat or the stinging ache behind her eyes. She sat cradling the body, somehow unable to let him go. She’d already held his face over her water as she poured it from the bottle to release his spirit, but he didn’t look very thankful, and she couldn’t blame him.

  His eyes had closed for the last time, but he didn’t look peaceful, the way some mothers insisted their babies looked at death. He looked drawn and pinched, like he had died with a frown on his face and a cry brewing on his tongue that hadn’t had the chance to escape before death came to take that last crying breath from his throat.

  It was her fault. All of it. If only she hadn’t done so many humanoid things. When she’d agreed to run away with Draven, she had thought he’d take her to another apartment, wouldn’t beat
her, and wouldn’t make her into his own personal baby factory. She hadn’t known they were coming to this, scrambling to survive in the woods, half freezing all the while. Still, she couldn’t blame Draven for everything. The moment she saw that he lived in a car, she should have known better than to bring an innocent baby into her scheme. But she’d ignored all that and insisted on having Leo with her. He’d barely seen a year of life, and now he’d never see more.

  “Do you want me to do it?” Draven asked quietly.

  Lost in her own thoughts, she’d almost forgotten he was there. She pulled the baby tighter to her chest and regarded Draven, trying to decide if she could trust him. “Are you going to take him where I can’t see and do something awful, like eat him?”

  Draven turned his dark, serious eyes to meet hers, the rest of him completely still. “No.”

  She wanted to tell him no, to look away, but she couldn’t make herself do it. “Swear?” she asked in a small voice. She remembered saying that with her sisters in the Confinement when they’d been kids. Leo would never say that to anyone now. “Honor of Thirds?” she asked, using Draven’s phrase so maybe he’d keep his promise.

  “Yes.” Draven held out his arms.

  Cali hesitated, but then she leaned forward and placed the bundle gently in his arms. Something in her wanted to stop him, but she couldn’t hold back her tears much longer, and she was afraid if she started talking, her voice would get all choked and he’d know.

  She bent to kiss the baby’s cold, chapped cheek. “Goodbye, Leo.”

  She turned away quickly and took a deep breath to steady herself. When she heard Draven’s footsteps crunching through the snow, she turned back to watch him, blinking hard to dry the icy tears gathering on her eyelashes. As Draven carried the body away, she jumped up, overcome by the urge to run after him and grab at his clothes in desperation, to ask if he was sure the baby was dead, if he could do something to help Leo even now. After a few steps, she stopped herself and crumpled to the frozen scabby ground at her feet. She knew the answer already.

  Still, to hold him one more time, kiss him just once more...