“Girl Lowell!” Ames barked as the teams trudged into a clearing to make camp during the last hour of sunlight. He’d taken to calling Gabi and Mathew “Girl Lowell” and “Boy Lowell,” given the problem of singling them out without using their first names. Ames didn’t even call Sykes by her first name, and he wasn’t likely to do so with his two least favorite subordinates. Gabi had barely dropped her pack before Ames issued a command for her to search the surrounding woods for dry kindling to make one of the sheltered fires they used to cook their food. Fires were risky given that they might alert enemy patrols to their presence, but since the trek was taking longer than expected, white gas for the cookstoves was running low. The fires would be just big enough to warm the food but extinguished before they could provide any relief from the chill.
“I’ll help!” Bradley shouted, scurrying to grab two of the durable nylon slings they used for collecting wood and tossing one directly at Gabi’s head. “Come on, Girl Lowell,” he taunted. “Though who knows how Ames can tell the difference. I’ve seen eight-year-old boys with bigger boobs.”
His words would have embarrassed her to cinders just a few months ago, but Gabi had become so single-minded in order to keep moving that the taunt glanced off her like a tossed pebble. She picked up the sling and followed Bradley into the woods as Ames ordered “Boy Lowell” to set up the tents and the dishwashing station.
Bradley seemed more interested in gathering enough kindling to please Ames than tormenting Gabi, but she was careful to keep far enough behind him that she had a chance of escape if he gave chase. The trees were massive, their shade discouraging undergrowth so that Gabi’s feet shuffled through nothing but patches of snow and soft brown pine needles. She threw a few halfhearted handfuls of the pine needles into her sling. Nothing she did would be good enough for Ames anyway, so she figured she might as well enjoy a few quiet moments to herself while she could. It still didn’t seem real how radically her life had changed in just a few short months. Being almost alone in the woods felt like it slowed everything down so that for the first time in months, she felt calm.
All it took was a moment of closing her eyes to lose sight of Bradley and notice that they only had another twenty minutes or so of sunlight before darkness fell in the woods. She could hear him thrashing somewhere off to her right in the opposite direction of camp, but a dense copse of tree trunks kept him from view. The thought of becoming lost in the forest mere yards from camp was more than her ego could endure. She could simply go back and leave Bradley to grope his way out of the woods, except that Ames speechified at least once a day about the cardinal rule of Witness work. Never ever leave a man behind. With a sigh Gabi followed the sound of Bradley’s footfalls as they retreated away from her.
“Bradley! Bradley, you’re going too far! It’s almost dark, and we have to get back. We don’t need that much wood.” All sounds of Bradley’s progress faded, and a musical note floated toward her as Gabi pursued him. Finally she reached an opening in the woods, the waning sunlight reflecting off the snow to reveal a wide white path running downhill. She could feel Bradley nearby. More than him, actually. Colors and smells had grown more vivid for her since the beginning of the trek, as though each day someone turned up a dial in her brain. Smells infused the glade that she couldn’t account for by nature, Bradley’s presence, or the Witness teams nearby. The little clearing felt distinctly crowded.
“Braaahh!” Bradley screamed, springing out from behind a tree with his burden of kindling. Gabi shrieked and stumbled backward, landing hard on a crust of snow. “Ha!” Bradley crowed. “Classic, reject. You would be completely useless in an attack. I’d be doing the whole mission a favor if I just left you here to die.”
Gabi tried to scramble to her feet, but the brittle covering of snow concealed a bubbled sheet of ice, and she couldn’t get her footing. Bradley stalked toward her, days’ worth of suppressed malice sparking in his eyes. “Like a pitiful, starved deer that needs to be put out of its misery,” he taunted, rubbing at the acne stubbling his chin.
Gabi’s bare hands grew numb from scrabbling on the ice. She crammed them under her armpits, as stuck on that slippery sheet as if she’d been glued to it. The musical sound flowed just under Bradley’s taunts and her labored breathing as she tried to calm herself. Bradley wouldn’t dare leave her for dead—he knew the “no man left behind” rule as well as she did—but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t make her suffer before heading back to camp.
“Heeyah!” Bradley screamed as he faked a lunge toward her. “Hah! Hah! Hah!” He jumped and swung at her repeatedly, drawing closer with each feint. Every time Bradley jumped, Gabi heard a deep groan that she first thought was coming from her throat. But as he made another lunge, a fracture opened in the ice under Bradley and he began to slide. The split widened into a chasm, and the ice shifted under Gabi, revealing strata of frozen water marbled like uncut bacon. The music had been the sound of water rushing beneath the ice. The groans were the complaints of that ice as Bradley’s jumps caved it in from above.
“Help me!” Bradley screamed as he crashed to his hands and knees on the now-tilted slab. His feet plunged into the water, kicking against the weight of his waterlogged boots. Gabi rolled onto her belly and inched toward Bradley, using the points of her elbows as blunt picks to drag herself forward. Bradley fought to keep hold on the up-thrust edge of the slab as she inched along to get within arm’s reach. The expanding pool where Bradley’s feet thrashed, which was sucking him in like a drain, was bordered downstream by a featureless field of ice. If Bradley lost his grip on the slab, he would be sucked under the ice sheet and carried away beneath it, maybe for miles.
“Help us!” Gabi screamed into the treetops. “Somebody!” She shook her hand, trying to restore sensation before reaching over the ruptured ice and clamping Bradley’s wrist. The velocity and volume of the thundering water were so loud that Gabi could barely hear Bradley’s pleas, though their faces were only a foot apart. The whites of his eyes were enormous, his pupils shrunk to terrified pinpricks as tears and snot streamed down his face. “I’ve got you, Bradley,” Gabi yelled, but she didn’t, and they both knew it. There was nothing for her other hand to grab on to so that she could pull both of them back from the hole. She tried using both hands to tug at his wrists, but that only brought her closer to the rushing water, adding her weight to his on the collapsing ice.
“Don’t let go,” Bradley pleaded, his lips cooling to a hue that Gabi recognized all too well. “Please don’t let me go.”
“I won’t, I promise, but I can’t pull you in by myself. Can you kick your feet harder and try to pull with your hands while I pull on your wrist?” Gabi was crying now too.
“Okay,” Bradley shouted, “but you have to really pull. One, two—”
“Wait!” Gabi shouted, swiping one hand and then the other on her legs to dry them. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“One, two, three!”
The spray from Bradley’s flailing feet rained down on their heads. Gabi’s body slid toward the edge of the slab as she pulled with all her might, her own feet kicking on the ice behind her. Bradley’s arms bent as he raised himself a few inches across the inclined ice, but as he kicked, Gabi saw the ice under his hips tilting deeper into water. The kicking and Bradley’s pulling were causing the floe to separate totally from the surrounding sheet, raising it to an eighty-degree angle and threatening to overturn.
“Stop!” Gabi screamed. “Bradley, stop kicking!” But the boy was a wild animal, thrashing his legs as the ice rose. She felt the familiar sensation of his relentless hold on her wrists and knew from experience that Bradley would not let her go, no matter what. “Bradley, you have to let go of me so I can find something in the woods that I can pull you out with. Or I can hold on to you until someone comes, but you have to stop kicking!” The edge of the ice dug into Gabi’s ribs as Bradley’s weight reeled her toward him, and the slab rose higher. She was completely off the ground from hips to knees, her fe
et dragging as Bradley tried to climb her arms to safety.
“Fucking try!” Bradley screamed. His hands clawed at her shoulders, gripping until he and Gabi were cheek to cheek. The edge of the ice scraped across her belly, catching on her protruding hipbones before grinding past them to scour down her thighs. Hands free, she tried to reach backward and grab on to the edge of the slab, but when she tried to pull away, Bradley gripped the back of her neck with both hands.
As they began their unchecked slide toward the sucking hole, Gabi heard a voice screaming her name. Mathew, she thought, the water rushing up toward her. Mathew was coming, but would he reach them in time? Maybe she and Bradley could hold their breath until the water carried them to another break in the ice? The stream was roaring down toward the valley where it was warmer. If she could just hold on to Bradley and ration her breath, they might make it. Bradley’s grip loosened on her neck as the frigid water paralyzed him. He began to slip away. Gabi drew the deepest breath of her life, thrust her hands at Bradley’s chest, and twisted the fabric of his uniform around her fists. Like a dropped anchor, his weight towed her after him as the black water closed over their heads.
GABI WAS on fire. The backs of her eyelids glowed red, and sweat drenched the shroud that enveloped her. Bound up like a trapped housefly in a web, the heat felt as though it were about to peel the skin from Gabi’s face. Her tortured body tethered her, refusing to release her back into unconsciousness. Gabi’s first thought was that she had died and gone to hell. Her second was that surely Bradley was there with her, as if being in hell weren’t bad enough. Her third thought, spurred by the memory of slipping beneath the ice curled around Bradley like twin embryos in a womb, consisted of just three words. I am dead.
Being dead hurt. Was it supposed to? Why couldn’t she move? Had she been mummified? Self-pity consumed her as she assessed the implications of being dead. She would never see Mathew again, or Marnie or Jordan. She would never again feel giddy warmth unfolding like petals inside her when Marnie smiled at her or crushed her in a hug. Was she here because of her “unnatural” feelings for Marnie, or because the two of them had questioned the existence of God? Or was it all the lies she had told since Gram died or her failure to honor Gram’s dying wish? It turned out there was whole a laundry list of explanations for why her afterlife migration had been down rather than up.
Gabi turned her face away from the stifling heat with a whimper, surprised to find the warmth dispersed in cool night air. The whipcrack sound of a fire was layered with the saw of wind in the trees and that seductive water music that had consumed her and Bradley. There was another kind of music woven through that—melodic voices chanting in a strange tongue. The act of turning her head activated the bruised area on the back of her neck where Bradley had clung to her, and the sides as well, which felt as if someone had attached cinderblocks to her ankles and strung her up from a tree branch. Gabi forced her eyes open and was met with a vista of stars so brilliant that for a moment she thought she’d been mistaken and that she was actually in heaven. But no, heaven was up there, and she was very much down here.
“It’s about time,” a blunt voice said from the direction of the flames. “Your friends should be here any minute.” Gabi turned back toward the heat, noticing that she was wrapped in some kind of shaggy pelt. The chanting stopped, followed by sounds of shuffling in the dirt. On the other side of the fire, three or four shadowy figures knelt, all facing the same direction, except for one. This woman was staring straight at Gabi with her wide, tilted eyes. Gabi gasped as she blinked to clear her vision. The face harboring those high-beam cat eyes belonged to none other than Apostle Cleo Walker. Lines bracketed her mouth, and Walker’s woolly salt-and-pepper hair was shorn close rather than braided to her scalp the way it was in the images that memorialized her. A swirled mass of pink scar tissue webbed from her right jaw down into the collar of her uniform, but there was no mistaking Unitas’s greatest legend.
“Damn if you aren’t the spitting image,” Apostle Walker said, rising to a towering height and gliding toward Gabi. Dozens of other dark figures crouched around the clearing, faces blackened and eyes gleaming back at Gabi like wet river stones. As Apostle Walker crouched down before Gabi, Gabi realized that this couldn’t be hell. If anyone had earned their place in heaven, it was Cleo Walker. But who were those dark demons beyond the light?
“Here,” Walker said, extending a canteen toward Gabi. “You’ve been cooking by that fire long enough.” She leaned in close, cradling Gabi under her shoulders and lifting her to a seated position before helping her work her arms free of the animal skin. Cleo’s touch was gentle, though supple black leather molded to a body that looked as deadly as any of the weapons strapped across her torso and hips.
Gabi accepted the canteen and glugged down sweet water unlike any she had ever tasted. It was like drinking pure sunlight. After slaking her thirst, Gabi felt better as her throat cooled. Smells bombarded her as she revived, telling her without a doubt that she was still very much alive. The pain in Gabi’s neck as she moved her head to look around made her eyes water. There were even more dark figures than she’d originally thought, also heavily armed. The glint of scoped rifles, knives, extra ammunition, and handguns pierced the murk of the forest, suggesting that for every crouched figure she saw, there were ten more she didn’t. Gabi looked Cleo Walker in the eyes for the first time, struck by their butterscotch hue.
“Bradley?” Gabi croaked.
Cleo settled back on her heels and braced her hands on her muscled thighs. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “It was already too late when we pulled the two of you out.” Gabi was bombarded with the image of how young and terrified Bradley had looked in those last moments.
“It’s my fault,” Gabi said, tears rolling down her cheeks as aftershocks of hypothermia shook her.
“No, it’s not,” Cleo countered. “You were wrapped around that boy like a life jacket. We had to pry you off, even though you were unconscious. If you hadn’t hung on to him, there wouldn’t have even been a body to recover. No one but you could have survived for that long under the ice, so don’t waste another minute agonizing about it.”
Dead. Dead dead dead. The word wouldn’t let her go. Gabi had never known someone her own age who had died, though the bulletins reported such things happening frequently along the frontier. It was only a matter of time before death came for her too. But what was it that Apostle Walker had said? No one but she could have survived?
“What do you mean?” Gabi asked. “What do you mean no one else could have survived?”
Cleo placed a hand on Gabi’s shoulder and opened her mouth to speak just as one of the dark figures separated from the trees and cleared his throat.
“General Walker? They’ve been spotted in the fifth quadrant.”
Gabi looked up at the man, whose face was obscured by black paint from hairline to the collar of his uniform. Unlike Walker’s, his body didn’t strain against the supple material. His weapons hung on him like ornaments on a straggly tree. And those eyes. There was something about his eyes.
“Okay,” Cleo said, her voice steady with command. “Deploy the troops to their posts.”
“Yes, General,” the man said with a stiff salute, then turned back toward the woods. As he disappeared into the trees, the other figures rose and followed him without stirring so much as a pine needle. When they were alone, Cleo gripped Gabi’s shoulders, giving her a gentle shake.
“Listen to me. I need you to trust me. Ames is on his way with the other Witnesses, and in order for us to manage the situation without casualties, I need you to trust me. We’ve been tracking you all since you left Spruce, so I know that your brother and friends are on those teams. We weren’t in time to help Spruce, or your friend Bradley, but no one else needs to die. You don’t want anything else bad to happen, do you?”
“Why would anyone get hurt?” Gabi said, her head in a muddle. “Apostle Ames is on your side. He can rescue bot
h of us!”
Cleo’s upper lip curled as though someone had wafted a dirty diaper beneath her nose. “No, Burton Ames is definitely not on my side. He is a power-hungry murderer who would stab his own brother in the back if it got him what he wanted. Trust me on this. You don’t know me, Gabi, but I know you. I knew your mother.”
“Therese?” Gabi whispered.
Cleo shook her head, pressing her lips into a firm line. “No, your real mother. The woman who gave birth to you at the Care Center in Alder.”
“You knew her?” Gabi’s voice was a strangled squeak.
Cleo looked startled. “Wait, you know about her?”
Could Gabi trust her? Was she the ally Gabi had been hoping to find? Why did Cleo consider Burton Ames an enemy, and what was she doing out here with a bunch of gun-toting demons when she was supposed to be a pile of ash?
“I found a letter she wrote me,” Gabi said finally. “My Gram had it.”
“Well, that saves us a lot of time,” Cleo said, her gaze roving the perimeter of the clearing. “I was worried how you would take it, and I’m not very good at playing therapist.”
“Well, I don’t need one,” Gabi bristled. Nothing made sense, and she didn’t have a clue what was going to happen once the Witnesses found them, but she was tired of being underestimated. She’d been through more trauma in the last three months than most people experienced in a lifetime. Walker had no idea how much she could take.
“Good,” Cleo replied. “You’re strong, then, like your mother. I was with her when she died and promised her that as soon as we were able to liberate the interior, I would find you.” The familiar way Cleo spoke of her birth mother caused Gabi’s heart to leap into her throat. She was terrified that the opportunity to learn more might slip away, given that Apostle Walker was clearly preoccupied with confronting Ames.
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