by Kate L. Mary
“I have been waiting for you,” she said when I stopped in front of her.
“I had a very busy day.” I held up the rodents I had taken from the Fortis hunters.
Mira did not look at the dead animals, but instead kept her blue eyes focused on my face as she said, “Saffron asked me to talk to you.”
I froze, the rodents still in the air. More than six months had gone by since my husband’s death, four months since I had started hunting. The discussions that Mira and I had about the city had lessened with each passing week until she no longer brought it up at all, and the change had been a relief. She knew I had no desire to return to the city, and while I had felt obligated to listen to what was going on at first, and to make sure that Asa was still watching out for my friend, it had hurt. When she had finally stopped bringing it up, I had been relieved. I had not expected Mira to mention Sovereign City ever again, and it had never once occurred to me that Saffron would send word to me through my friend.
It could only be about one thing, but I still found myself whispering, “Why?”
“She wants you to come back to work.” Mira gave me a smile that I was sure she intended to be sympathetic, but it ended up just being heartbreaking. “You always were her favorite.”
“I do not know why.” I finally lowered the rodents, but I was too stunned to say anything else.
Never. That was what I wanted to say. I would never return to Sovereign City. But I knew what saying no to this request could mean for Mira. If I disappointed Saffron, she might take it out on my friend, and based on the last reports Mira had given me about the happenings inside the walls, things were bad enough without adding to it. How could I do that to my friend? How could I add more trouble to her already burdened life?
“You can say no,” Mira said as if she could read my thoughts.
“Can I? I do not want to be responsible for anyone else’s pain, Mira. I already have Ronan and Bodhi’s blood on my hands, I cannot add you to the list.”
“You are not responsible for what happened to them,” Mira said. “You are not responsible for what happens to any of us. The Sovereign make the rules and the Fortis carry them out, we are just pawns to them.”
She was right, but the pain I felt over everything that had happened remained just as intense, and my worry over what else could happen remained as well.
I thought of my hours in the forest and the game I had brought back and what it meant for my family. It had helped, but not as much as the rations we used to get from Sovereign City. Then there was the medicine. My mother was fading away before my eyes, and I knew the medicine they had in the city would prolong her life, as well as ease her discomfort. How could I say no when it would help her so much?
“I need to think on it.” I turned toward my hut, and Mira said nothing to try and stop me. “I will have a decision by morning.”
Inside, my mother was lying in bed with fur piled up on top of her despite the warm day. My sister was nowhere in sight.
“Where is Anja?” I asked after setting the rodents on the table.
“She has been here all day looking after me. I told her to go out for a bit.” When I frowned disapprovingly, my mother smiled. “She is too young to be cooped up, Indra.”
“She only wants to see Jax,” I said, the statement coming out angry even though I was happy that my sister was finally able to move on. I wanted her to be happy, I was just hurt and angry, and I needed someone to direct it at.
“Is that so bad? I remember you doing the same thing when you were her age.”
With Bodhi.
She left it unsaid, but I knew she was thinking of my husband. He was the only boy I had ever run around with, the only one I had ever wanted to run around with, and even though it was no longer possible, that had not changed. The ache in my chest at the memory of him was less sharp than it had been, but it was still there. It probably always would be.
“That is true,” I whispered as I turned back to the rodents.
My mother was quiet at first, letting me recover, and I focused on the animals in front of me, working to free them of their fur, cutting their feet off, and then preparing them to be cooked. By the time all three were done, I had relaxed a little, but my mind was still troubled. Even if my mother had not brought my dead husband up it would have been this way, because I still had a decision to make. A big one.
“What is troubling you?” she said from behind me.
“How do you know something is troubling me?” I asked, looking back at her.
My mother ran her finger over the passage markings on her forehead, and then down between her eyes. “Your skin wrinkles right here when you are thinking something through.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
She patted the bed at her side. “I am a good listener.”
I cleaned my hands before going over to the bed. When I sat down at her side, she took my hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. She said nothing, though. That had always been her way, quiet and patient, waiting for her girls to be ready to talk instead of trying to beat it out of us.
As usual, it worked. “Saffron sent word with Mira. She wants me to return to my position.”
“That is unexpected,” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
My mother waited a moment to see if I was going to say more before asking, “What are you going to do?”
“I do not know.”
I looked at her, really looked at her, and I could see how little time she had left. It was written in the lines of her face, in the circles under her eyes, and the loose skin that hung at her neck. My mother had always been a thin woman, but now she was skeletal. Her collarbones threatened to poke through her skin and her face was gaunt. Her skin was no longer brown but ashy from the sickness ravaging her body. Soon she would be gone from this world, but if I went back I might be able to prolong the time she had with me. If we had more food, if we once again got the medicine the Sovereign provided us with when I was working in the city, my mother could live longer.
Only, I had no desire to set foot back inside those walls. Ever.
“I am a selfish person,” I said.
She laughed and shook her head. “You? No, my girl, you are anything but selfish.”
“I could help more if I went back, but the thought scares me.”
“Fear is normal, Indra, it is what you do with that fear that determines if you are strong or weak.” She paused and gave me a weak smile. “The Head came to see me today.”
My eyebrows lifted in surprise, not just at the visit, but at my mother changing the subject when we were discussing something so important. “What did he want?”
“He wanted to talk to me about you going into the woods alone to hunt. He wanted me to put a stop to it.”
“But I am bringing in meat for the village. I am helping.”
“You are, but he is stuck in his ways and he is afraid you will get hurt. He believes you are too weak to take care of yourself. Even if you do bring in more game than any of the men in the village.”
The way her eyebrow quirked caused me to sit up straighter. She was silent for a moment, watching me, and I had the strange feeling that she knew where I was getting the game. That she knew I was killing men. That she was proud of me for it.
I looked away and swallowed. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him that you are stronger than he thinks. Stronger than anyone else in the village.” She grasped my chin with her free hand and tilted my head up so I was looking her in the eye. “You are, you know. If you decide not to go into the city that is fine. We will be fine. But if you feel like this is something you need to do, either to help or to heal, you will be able to get through it. You can do it, Indra. I know it because you have the courage to go out into the woods every day even though you have always been told you should not.”
“That is easy, though,” I said. “In the forest it is peaceful. I do not have to look over my shoulder every second of the day
, I no longer have to worry that someone will sneak up on me and if they do I can fight back.” My mother’s eyebrows lifted again, but I went on. “In there though, I am powerless. How can I return to that?”
“You will never be powerless, Indra. You have a strength in you that you do not see, but it is there. Bodhi saw it right away. That was why he chased you, why he took you into the woods and taught you to hunt, because he saw that you have the potential to be great. To do great things.” My mother gave my hand a squeeze and then she said, “You know that you did not come from me.”
I looked down at my hand in hers, at the contrasting colors of our skin. Hers as dark as fertile soil and mine tanned from my time outside, but still pale.
“It is something that does not have to be said,” she continued, “but something that we should talk about while I am still alive to tell you the story.”
“What story?”
“The story of how you came to be mine.”
It was something I had wondered about often, but in the village it was common for children to be raised by other people. Women died in childbirth, fathers met with an accident in the forest, parents got sick and children were orphaned. Our life was hard, and things happened, so I had always accepted my mother’s explanation when I had asked her about my origins.
“You have always told me that my parents were unable to take care of me, so you became my parents.”
“That is true,” she said, “but it is not the whole truth.” She took a deep breath, and then began her story. “Like my mother and her mother before her, I was working in the House of Saffron when you were born. But I had another position in the city too, one that has also been passed down, only not from mother to daughter, but to people who can be trusted. People who are strong and willing to risk their own lives. It is a position that Xandra has now taken over.”
Thinking of the woman who led Bodhi into the city made my stomach turn, but it also caused my mind to spin. He had gone to her for help because she knew about the secret tunnel, and we had known about that because she had brought a baby out of the city. A baby who had been born Sovereign, but whose parents had broken the law. A baby that would now be raised as an Outlier.
“Was I born in the city?” I asked, shocked.
My mother nodded. “You were born to parents who already had a child, people who were on the one child rotation. The law said they were supposed to turn you out, which usually meant putting you outside to die. Not everyone obeys the law though, and when they need a way to get a baby out of the city, they contact a member of the underground. On the day you were born that was me, and it was also me who snuck you out of the city and brought you back here to live.
“I was not an old woman, but your father and I had been married for many years and had not yet had any children of our own. We had tried, but had failed each and every time.” Her free hand went to her face, to the passage markings on her cheekbones. She had more than anyone I knew, so many that the designs now took up most of her cheeks. Swirls and dots and lines and half circles, each of them representing a child that had not made it past her womb. “I was afraid that it might never happen for me, and when you came into my life, I felt like it was a gift from God. With no other children, the Head agreed that your father and I should keep you and raise you as our own.”
Her voice faded away, but I found it impossible to utter even a word. My mind was a web of questions, none of which would come out. It had never occurred to me that I might have been born in the city, and to learn about it now, after all these years, was a shock. I was an Outlier, a member of the Winta tribe, but at the same time I was not. Not completely. I had been born Sovereign.
And who was my mother? Who in the city had defied the laws and not only given birth to me, but had sent me away so I would survive? Saffron? Was she my mother? The thought sickened me, thinking about Lysander and the things he had done not just to me, but to dozens of other women as well. Living with the memories was bad enough. If it turned out that he was actually my brother, it would make the whole thing worse. Only, I could not think about the emotionless way Saffron looked at the world and believe that she would have cared about anyone, not even her own baby, enough to defy the laws. No, it could not be her.
Still, I found that I did not care who in the city had given birth to me, because what mattered was that I was Sovereign by birth. Bodhi had been right all along: I was different. Asa too had seen this thing inside me, whatever it was, and after my husband’s death I had begun to feel it too. The moment I killed that first Fortis hunter, I had allowed it to come out, the power that had been living dormant inside me for my entire life.
I thought about the Sovereign, about how they lived and the things they did, comparing it to the life I had been given, and I was suddenly more grateful than ever that the woman sitting next to me was my mother. I could have been like those people, selfish and spoiled, but I had been brought here where struggle and hard work was the only way to survive. It made no sense that I was grateful for that, but I was, because I felt as if I had been given the best of both worlds. Sovereign women were strong; I had seen it with my own eyes. Inside the walls, the women ruled. Saffron had never cowered before a man, not even the Fortis. It was something I needed to learn to emulate, to learn to be strong and unyielding to any man. But I was an Outlier too, and I knew what it meant to suffer and struggle, something no Sovereign could claim. It would take much more than what had already happened to break me, much more than anything Saffron could throw my way. I was here for a reason, thrust from luxury into poverty so I could save these people, and that was what I was going to do. How I was not yet sure, but I knew that I had the strength inside me to do it. The fact that I had been hunting the Fortis for months proved it. How many other women could say they had hunted down and killed dozens of grown men? Men more than twice their size? None that I knew of. Not even the Fortis women who worked inside the walls of the city. No, I was different, I was special, and I would return to the city and work because I was strong enough to do it. I would use my position to form a plan, because it was not enough to kill Fortis hunters when I came across them in the wilds. I needed to take the Sovereign out as well, to make sure they were not allowed to continue their reign of oppression. I would go back to work inside Sovereign City and look for cracks, and I would figure out a way to take the whole system down. Somehow.
Coming May 2018
Uprising
Outliers Saga Book Two
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed Outliers, please consider taking the time to leave a review on Amazon.
Acknowledgments
The idea for Outliers began as a Robin Hood retelling, but quickly evolved into something much, much bigger. One day last fall when I wasn’t feeling great, I decided to take a day off and watch The 100 on Netflix. I’d tried watching it once a year or more before, but the first episode was so cheesy that I gave up without going any further. Since then I’d heard a lot of good things about the show, but had still been on the fence about giving it another shot until my sister-in-law, Rebekah, mentioned it to me. Thanks to her insistence that it was a show I would love, I decided to give it another chance and was immediately hooked. The world created for the show is complex and amazing, and it went a long way toward inspiring the world that I’ve created for this book. I wanted three different groups of people who seemed like they belonged in three different worlds even though they had been living side by side for a long time, and I wanted it to be dark and raw. Outliers is the result, and I think it’s pretty damn amazing.
So who gets credit for helping this whole thing come together? A thank you has to go out to Netflix for making The 100 available to me. Then there are the show’s creators, who came up with an utterly amazing world, as well as a whole list of unique names that I was able to borrow from—Indra especially. Thank you also to the creators of the TV show Outsiders for giving me the name Asa, and Point Break for allowing me to think of the name Bodhi (Patrick Swayze!!).
Thank you also to the members of the BOD Only Facebook group who helped me tweak my blurb when my brain felt too fried to concentrate on it.
A very special thank you goes out to my author bestie, Diana Gardin, for allowing me to borrow the term passage markings, which she used in her own novel, The Lilac Sky. When I thought about the tattoos on my characters’ faces, this was the only term I could think of, and I appreciate her willingness to share it with me. But the biggest thank you of all goes out to my SIL, Rebekah, who suggested that I watch The 100 to begin with, and who also helped me come up with the name for my city guards, the Fortis.
Jan Strohecker, thanks for being that first critical eye after I finished writing the novel, and for helping pick out any holes in the world building and plot. Thanks to my first readers and typo hunters: Courtnee McGrew, Laura Johnsen, Rebekah Caillouet, Cheer Stephenson-Papworth, Erin Rose, and Karen Atkinson. Thanks also to Lori Whitwam, who answered some of my editing questions when the person I hired dropped the ball, and the BOD Authors Only group for chiming in. It’s great to have a supportive community when you need some help. And last but not least, a big thank you goes out to, Amber Garcia, my PR Goddess, for setting everything up last minute.
As always, I am forced to acknowledge my husband and kids and how amazing they are. Whenever I’m really into a project they get neglected, and I appreciate not only what good sports they are, but also how supportive they are. My husband especially has no problem picking up the slack, doing laundry and running the kids to events, so I can get just a little more done, and I couldn’t ask for a better support system!