“You taking a break?” she said.
I shrugged.
“Don’t worry about Yov,” she said. “He talks a good game, but he’s too afraid of Laman to pull anything.”
“It’s not just him,” I said.
She looked at me sharply. “Who is it, then?”
“It’s—” I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came into my mind. “What did you tell Wali?”
She didn’t answer right away, but her eyes narrowed. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I told him you and I talked. I am allowed to talk to people, aren’t I?”
“That’s not it.” It was hard enough getting my thoughts straight with her near, much less with her near to anger. “I have to tell my dad.”
“About Yov?” she said. “Or about Wali?”
“About both of them.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she said, the same softly threatening tone she’d used with Yov tingeing her voice.
“Wali’s angry at you,” I said. “Because of me. Because of what he saw last night.”
She laughed, but not the thrilling laugh from our poolside talk. This time it was a scornful laugh that made my stomach clench with fear.
“Wali and I can take care of ourselves, thank you,” she said. “And I think he’d know if he had to worry about competition.”
My face burned. For the first time ever, her beautiful features seemed to twist under an ugly mask.
Then she shook her head, and her face softened. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes returning to their usual blue, the way they say the sky used to clear after a rainstorm. “But you don’t need to worry about me and Wali. If he is angry with me, it has nothing to do with you. And he’s certainly not dumb enough to take his anger out on me by running to Yov.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. If those crystal blue eyes could see through me, they’d have known in a second I was lying.
“This is nothing new,” she said. “Every time something goes wrong, some jerk starts whining about the camp’s leadership. But they always stop. You know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because no one really wants to take Laman’s place,” she said. “They want to make it difficult for him, but they don’t want the difficulty themselves. You’ll see. A couple of days from now, when things are back to normal, Yov will shut his fat trap and everyone will realize he was full of it all along.”
She reached out and laid a hand on my arm. Her fingers slid down to my wrist, leaving an electric trail the whole way. I stood there unable to convince myself, unable to believe her. But for the sake of feeling her touch and looking in her eyes a second longer, I pretended I did.
“Korah,” I said. “Has my dad ever ordered quarantine?”
She showed no surprise at the question. “Twice. The day of my father’s funeral. In case the Skaldi had jumped bodies before Petra burned it. And the day after the attack that left you . . .”
She didn’t need to finish the thought.
“So you’ve been tested?”
She nodded.
“And me.”
“Everyone,” she said. “Except the little ones.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Everyone was just”—she smiled—“who they are.”
And who was that? I thought, but didn’t say.
“I don’t blame Laman for what happened to my father,” she said, giving my hand a last squeeze before letting go. “Those things just happen, you know? We have to be stronger than them if we want to win.” She smiled and walked off, her black hair swinging. “See you later, Querry.”
* * *
Evening had fallen.
The work of sorting was finally done. People had muttered under their breath the whole time, their hands trembling as they moved their most prized possessions to the pile marked for oblivion. They’d wrestled with themselves, and they’d lost. And when their stash of personal belongings had dwindled to practically nothing, they stared at what was left with a dazed expression, as if they’d been meaning to say something but couldn’t quite call it back. Their lips quivered, their eyes darted over the wreckage. When they finally rose to prepare for the night, their legs wobbled like someone walking a tightrope for the first time. Someone who wasn’t sure they had the strength or the courage to make it to the other side.
All this time, Yov and Wali circulated among the grown-ups, Yov making his usual snide comments, Wali tagging along behind. Whenever one of the officers showed up, the two of them stopped making the rounds and went back to pretending they were packing their own stuff, but as soon as the officer left they went right back at it. Wali laughed louder than anyone as Yov tested his latest one-liners.
“That is certainly a priceless work of art,” Yov said to the light tower man, holding up his painting and tilting it to catch the reddish rays of the setting sun. “Tell you what, I’ll trade you a moldy button for it.”
At that point Korah sidled up to him and whispered something so low all I heard was the menacing vibration in her voice.
“Well, excuse me,” he said loudly. “If the artist here can’t handle the truth, that’s not my problem.”
People froze at their tasks, anger and betrayal suffusing their features. Wali stifled a laugh. Korah looked ready to slug him, but she merely stamped off. When she was gone, Yov spread his hands and addressed his audience.
“Now that the princess has retired . . .” He pointed to the miniscule pile of salvageable items. “Not there, people!” he bellowed. “On the trash heap! Move, move, move!”
His taunting laugh and the copycat laugh of his newest disciple echoed in the quiet dusk.
I watched for as long as I could stand, then slunk away from the sleeping area and looked out over the semidarkness. The dusty air seized my throat like always. The buildings seemed brittle as bones. I felt like I was floating above the ground as I made my way to headquarters. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Korah had followed, but she was nowhere to be seen.
I found my dad alone outside the command building, seated on a hunk of fallen stone, his bad leg held out straight. He seemed to be preoccupied with something in his hands. When I neared I saw it was his gun. He’d opened the chamber to inspect it closely, but as soon as he saw me he snapped it shut and stashed it in its holster.
“Hey, Dad,” I said.
“Querry,” he said. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news on the home front.”
His eyes seemed to twinkle in the near dark.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Actually, I’m glad you showed up,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to give you this.”
At first I thought he meant the gun, but then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small object. I took it and saw that it was a red-handled pocketknife, the kind with folding blades. It had rusted with age, but all the different gadgets seemed to be intact. On the plastic handle someone had etched a single word in sloppy letters, as if they’d been carved with another knife. It read “Matay.”
I looked at him. “What happened to getting rid of personal possessions?”
He met my gaze, unsmiling. “Possessions essential to the survival of the colony are exempted, remember?”
“Who’s Matay?”
“One of the lost,” he said. “I thought it was time you had it.”
He held out a hand, and I helped him clamber to his feet. I saw him wince as his bad hip took his weight.
“Got a minute?” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”
I tucked the knife into my jacket and followed him.
We made our way across the compound to the tallest building, the one he’d pointed out to me the evening before. It looked over the eastern slope of the hillside, perfect for scouting the plain below. When I gla
nced at the top-story window, though, I saw that it stood empty. “Shouldn’t the sentry be posted by now?”
“Change of plans,” he said, and we entered the building together.
The front hallway glowed dimly from the light of a huge arched window, its glass long gone. I followed as he heaved himself awkwardly up the stairs to the second floor. It seemed like it took all his effort to step up with his good left leg, pull himself by the banister to plant his right foot beside it, then repeat the process. I found myself itching to move faster, but I kept myself in check. At the second-floor landing we turned down a hallway that still had a carpet underneath the coating of dust. Countless footsteps going in both directions had stirred the red-brown film, showing glimpses of light blue beneath.
At the end of the hall, two of the officers stood guard beside a wooden door, their hands on their holsters. They nodded at my dad as he opened the door and started up another, narrower flight of stairs. It was practically pitch-black in the stairwell, and there was no railing. I had to help him on his way up.
We emerged into a room that had been turned into an arsenal.
The room was small and square, with windows facing in three directions and some form of patterned paper peeling in long strips off the walls. The paper, a faded pink, had probably been rusty red at one time. The corners of the room nearest the door had been piled with more weapons than I’d realized the camp possessed: pistols, knives, bayonets, even a couple bows and quivers full of arrows. Boxes of ammunition were stacked neatly beside the firearms, and a canvas folding chair had been placed where you could see out all three windows. The only weapons I didn’t see were the flamethrowers, which I knew remained below.
“You preparing for a war?” I said.
His eyes were impossible to read in the dim light leaking through the windows. “I’m preparing for any contingency that might arise.”
“Who’s the enemy?”
“You tell me.”
“Guns don’t work against Skaldi,” I said. “Neither do arrows, so far as I know.”
“No,” he said. “They don’t.”
He walked to the east-facing window, gestured for me to join him. I looked out over a darkened plain. It could have been swarming with a hundred Skaldi or the ranks of an approaching force, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell. The north- and south-facing windows, I realized, provided sightlines not to the plain but to the compound below.
“There was a time,” he said softly, “when we thought we might find some place not infested by Skaldi. Some island, some fortress they couldn’t penetrate. But we had to give up that dream. All the supposedly safe places would last a week before we’d wake up and discover our closest friends were strangers.”
He spoke not to me but to the night, as if he was still looking for that place.
“Then there was the plan of combining all the survival colonies into one,” he said. “Something that could resist the Skaldi, even defeat them for good. You want to guess what happened to that one?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“That’s right.” He nodded. “It made us more vulnerable, not less. We had to give up the dream of saving the species to save ourselves.”
“Didn’t people realize they’d be stronger if they worked together?” It sounded incredibly lame the moment I said it.
“You don’t remember,” he said, “but there was a time we joined another colony. Took them in, actually. Maybe twenty people. And within days everyone was at everyone else’s throat. The ones we took in were the worst of all.” He sighed. “People don’t change, Querry. We’re the descendants of the madmen who destroyed the planet. Why should we be any different?”
He pointed to the wall beside the south-facing window. I squinted in the darkness and saw hatch marks scratched into the wallpaper, sets of four upright slashes crossed by a fifth diagonal. They’d been carved with a blade, and the pale wall showed through the tattered pink paper like teeth. I realized the marks stretched halfway around the room. I lost count at two hundred.
“It’s what gave me the idea to transfer the weapons here,” he said. “Whoever made their last stand in this room had a pretty good run of luck, wouldn’t you say?”
“Until their luck ran out,” I added.
“True enough,” he said. “But at least they went down swinging.”
He touched his fingers to the wall, pressing a strip of paper back in place. It dropped the instant he let go.
I knew what I had to do. If Yov meant to undermine or overthrow him, I had to tell him everything. I couldn’t waste time. If Wali was part of it, if suspicion of what me and Korah had been doing last night had driven him to Yov’s camp, I couldn’t spare him, either. Even if it was a false alarm, even if I’d somehow misunderstood, it was better to risk the laughter of Yov and his gang, the scorn and anger of Korah, than to take a chance. If I didn’t act now and something terrible happened, I’d be the one responsible.
“Dad,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
His night-black eyes gleamed as he turned to me.
“Yov and Wali,” I said. “The two of them are—plotting, planning something. And not just them. Kelmen’s involved too, I think. . . .”
His eyebrows lifted, barely distinguishable in the dark. “Kelmen?”
I felt my face flush. “Well, maybe not Kelmen. But others—more of the teens. Maybe some grown-ups too. Araz. Kin. I don’t know how many.”
“You’re sure of this.” It wasn’t a question.
“Pretty sure.”
“And your evidence?”
I thought over what I could say, what I could tell him. All the things that didn’t sit right. Yov’s performance at the sorting, the powwow he’d held after the rainstorm. Wali spying on me and Korah one day, hanging on Yov’s every word the next. The grown-ups’ anger at the things my dad was forcing them to let go, the dry tinder that could easily be lit by the spark of Yov’s deceit. The maybe-sabotaged truck. The footprints by the shelter. The quarantine that hadn’t happened, should have happened, needed to happen. The Skaldi that had driven us here in the first place, that had come from a direction they never came from, pushing us into territory we’d never traveled before . . .
Then I looked at him. He didn’t smile, but the corners of his lips pinched in something like amusement or pity. I glanced around at the armory he’d built for himself. And I knew he already knew.
“Your time is coming, Querry,” he said. “But for now, let’s let me handle things.”
“Yes sir.”
“And keep the knife close,” he said. “For luck.”
He made one last review of the room, then led me back down the stairs, along the dusty corridor to the front hall. He nodded a good night and disappeared across the compound, limping toward headquarters.
The camp lay silent around me. Yov and his supporters had vanished like a bad dream. I took the knife out, turned it in my hands. The name had faded with the dark, but I could feel the gashes when I ran my fingertips over the smooth plastic. I opened one of the blades and imagined myself using it against . . . what? Knives don’t work against Skaldi any better than guns.
Focus, I told myself. Focus. My dad was on top of things. He’d caught wind of the camp’s unrest and he’d moved the weapons someplace safe. The compound had been secured, the Skaldi thrown off our trail. If he’d decided not to impose quarantine, that was because he was confident there’d been no infection. Wali and Korah would make up. The grown-ups would come around. All I had to do was follow orders.
I snapped the blade back into its handle, stashed the knife in my pocket, and walked off to begin my preparations for bed.
7
Test
Petra came back the next day.
We were out working when we saw her. We’d woken once more to find dust piled to our doorstep, and my dad
had gotten fed up and decided there were better things we could do than shovel ourselves out of a hole day after day. So he had us in the yard before the sun got high, tying tents to fence posts in what I sensed was a last-ditch effort to keep us from getting swallowed by the desert.
Like most last-ditch efforts, it didn’t work very well. The wind whipped the tents out of our hands, the twine split and left itchy fibers in our fingertips. The dust didn’t seem to think much of our barrier, finding any opening it could to sneak through. People grumbled even more than usual. The ones I was most worried about, Yov and Wali and Araz, kept their thoughts to themselves, probably because my dad supervised the whole operation. And Korah I didn’t see. I overheard Mika say she wasn’t feeling well.
We’d finished tying the first tent to the posts and stepped back to inspect our work when the sentry on the western outskirts of camp gave a whistle. Everyone froze, then ran in a body to look out over the plain. Way off in the distance, indistinct through the heat, a small figure inched across the desert. My dad lifted his binoculars and scrutinized the figure for a minute, his brow lowered behind the lenses. Then he dropped the binoculars and said to Aleka, “Get the others.”
In ten minutes I could tell that the figure trudging up the hill was Petra: short and stocky, with nearly black skin and shaved head. Sleeves rolled past her elbows, as always. Businesslike. She moved like the Petra I remembered, setting each foot down sturdily, nothing like the drifting intruder from five nights ago. My dad watched her approach without saying another word.
She cleared the crest of the hill and marched straight toward him. Though she kept up a steady pace, her shoulders slumped and her head bobbed with each step. Of all the people in camp, Petra went the furthest to hide her trail, further even than the collection jar crazies. No eyebrows, no eyelashes even. I didn’t want to think about how she’d gotten rid of those. As a result, she was constantly blinking to keep the dust and grit out of her eyes.
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