Untamed Series, #1

by Madeline Dyer

The footsteps are getting nearer still. I should move. Need to move. Move now! But I can’t. The mud is holding onto me. It’s trying to protect me. I lie down in it. Mud slides over me.

  “She won’t. Not now she’s tasted our life. It’s too sweet a reminder for her. She will come back to us. She’ll give in to temptation. They always do. Whether it’s now or later, Shania will be ours again.”

  “No!” The scream escapes my lips before I even realize I’m going to speak. The mud disappears. My body powers up. I scrabble forward.

  The men come. Four of them—why are there always four?

  Raleigh beams at me.

  “My dear, Shania, darling.” He kneels next to me, and I feel the cold touch of his hand on my forearm. But it doesn’t stay cold. Heat sears between us, and his eyes arrest mine in blinding flashes. “Do not fear. We never leave one of our own.”

  I want to scream, but screaming doesn’t feel right…it’s Raleigh. He…he’ll help me. He will. He knows me. He wouldn’t leave me…he came for me.

  You’re not one of them. Remember what Corin said. You don’t belong with the Enhanced. You’re an Untamed.

  I sit up straighter, push myself backward. Something sharp digs into my back. Pointy and hard.

  “Do not fear, Shania,” Raleigh whispers. His voice is dangerously soft.

  My foot twitches, jittering up and down. He produces a tiny bottle from his pocket. I lean back farther, my back pressing into the sharpness. I feel pain, delirium. My heart races. My ears buzz.

  “No…” I mutter. But my voice is weak. Too weak.

  “This will calm you.” He lowers the bottle toward me. The liquid is black. As black as the night should be…except the sky’s not black. It’s purple and orange and cream and blue and mauve and peach and a thousand other swirling colors. “It will help you a lot.”

  I scream, pulling my elbow back in one swift movement. Then I punch Raleigh in the nose.

  And I don’t care. He hurt me. I remember the torture and pain—the waterboarding—and I suddenly don’t know how I could’ve forgotten what he did. How could I believe the Enhanced were good people, when they tortured me into thinking that?

  Raleigh shouts something, then spits blood at me. I crawl sideways, find my feet, and leap at him, hands out and ready. I’m like a cat. My nails are claws, and they rip at his skin. He screams, his face contorting. Blood spurts over us both. Flaps of his skin hang from my nails.

  I lunge for him again, but the other three Enhanced are on me. Why did they wait so long? I cry and I shriek. I kick and I punch and—

  “Seven! It’s okay! Stop it! You’re safe!”

  I jerk awake, breathing hard. My eyes sting. The sharp rocks are still around me, I can feel them abrading my hands. I blink into the darkness, willing the burn beneath my eyelids to subside and bring reality into a clearer focus. The Enhanced are not here. Yet, I know it wasn’t simply a dream. It wasn’t…wasn’t…couldn’t have been…felt too real.

  My father stares down at me, and Five’s arms are around me. I cry as I cling to her. My fingers curl into her dark hair. Three stands behind her.

  “It was just a dream,” Five whispers.

  I shake my head. “It wasn’t—”

  “Go back to sleep,” Three grunts.

  I glimpse his face in the half-light. Deep bags under his eyes, accentuated by the shadows, hang from his sockets like meat hanging off a bone. But they’re here. They’re all here, safe. My family. But my mother isn’t here…

  “No,” my father says. “Don’t go to sleep.”

  I look toward him; in the dim light, there is a strange look in his eyes. A look I cannot quite fathom. A look that suggests something hugely important. His eyes are narrowed, but wide at the same time. His head’s at a slight angle, tilted toward me, but he’s leaning away from me at the same time.

  “Tell us about it,” he says. It is a command, not an option. Three looks annoyed. Five looks like she thinks talking about it is a very bad idea.

  I tell them. They listen, although Three looks like he’s half asleep. Five shakes her head as I finish. My father’s expression is stern and hard.

  “The sky? What was it like?”

  Three groans. “Does it really matter what the sky looked like?” He throws his hands in the air. “You’re not going to paint a picture of it.”

  “Seven, what was the sky like?” This time, my father’s voice has a different edge to it. An edge that makes my stomach roll.

  I look at him; his eyes are lighter than usual. They make me squirm, and I wonder whether my own eyes look Enhanced or Untamed. I think about what Rosemary told me, how the mirrors can last for days.

  “It was the Turning. It was dark purple, and then there were streaks of navy too. And orange. And other colors. They were all mixing together.”

  “Only the Turning?” my father questions. I nod, and he looks relieved. “Good.”

  “Good?” Five repeats. She doesn’t look as though she thinks it is good. “Seven was outside, unprotected during the Turning.” Her eyes get wider, and her mouth drops into an O shape.

  “For the Gods’ sake!” my brother growls. “It was a dream. It wasn’t real. Seven wasn’t really outside in the Turning. Now, can we go back to sleep?”

  Ignoring Three, my father turns toward Five, then back to me. “It wasn’t real,” he echoes my brother’s words, as though he is the first to think of it. “Let’s go back to sleep. We’ll think about what this dream could mean in the morning—”

  “It’s obvious what it means,” Three says. “Seven’s scared they’re going to come after her. We don’t need to have a whole I-wonder-what-this-could-possibly-mean session.” He makes an exasperated noise. “It’s not surprising she’s having bad dreams.”

  My father doesn’t say anything. There’s a movement to the side of our shack, and the small terrier our family has had for years nears me. He noses my feet then whines. I pick him up and cuddle him. He’s shaking. His eyes are dark—but not as dark as the bison’s eyes were.

  “There was a bison,” I say as I stroke the terrier. I don’t know why I say it.

  My father’s head snaps toward me. He breathes heavily. “A bison?”

  Five’s eyes widen.

  “This is ridiculous,” Three moans. He’s already getting back into his bed, pulling the blanket up around him and over his head.

  “A bison is most definitely not ridiculous.” My father looks at me sternly. “Where was this bison?”

  “In the sky.”

  “Most definitely ridiculous.”

  “Shut up, Three.” My father grips my shoulders. He wrinkles his nose, and there’s a long pause before he says anything to me. “It was the time of the Turning and you saw a bison in the sky, in this vision?” There is something strange, something odd, about his voice, as though this is the most important question he has ever asked.

  I nod.

  My father looks at me for a few seconds, his whole expression narrowing, as if someone is pinching the center of his face, drawing everything together, twisting it all into one fine point. He starts to open his mouth, but pauses. Then he looks at me severely.

  “The Gods and the spirits have forgiven you.”

  A strange kind of relief floods through me. I’m not lost, not stuck in the middle of the void anymore. And it’s good. It’s what I want. I think. I try not to picture my room at the Enhanced Ones’ compound. The bed, the wardrobe. My teddy bear, John.

  My father turns toward Five and Three. “Go and wake everyone. She’s a Seer.” He looks back at me. “And we’re about to be attacked.”

  “Let’s hope that’s the only way you’re like your mother.”

  “What?” I look at my father, and I can’t believe what he’s implying. “You—you can’t believe—”

  “Rahn told me the facts. I can forgive you because you were kidnapped, but she chose them.”

  I throw my hands in the air. “That can’t be what happened. Rahn and
Corin and Finn, they planned it. She wouldn’t—”

  “Don’t talk against out leader,” my father snaps. “Help me with this. We ain’t got time for this talking.”

  He holds out a big sack with the neck open, and I squash another blanket and a bowl into it. I can hear more sounds now, from outside. Raised voices and scraping noises. It won’t take long for Three and Five to wake everyone else, for us all to prepare for our departure—we’ve had enough practice, over the years.

  The terrier whines at my feet.

  I let out a long sigh. A Seer. Me? It felt wrong, especially when I can still feel how desperate I was for those augmenters…the two feelings shouldn’t go together. But if I am a Seer, if my father’s right…have the Gods and Goddesses really forgiven me that quickly? And the spirits, too?

  My mother often talked to me about her being a Seer. She told me all about their powers, how she could distinguish normal dreams from Seeing ones. She told me about the Dream Land, an altered state of spiritual reality, that gives warnings of conversion attacks to Untamed Seers through revealing potential versions of the future. Seers reach the Dream Land through sleep, but sometimes traumatic accidents can throw a Seer into the Dream Land, to show them something when they wouldn’t normally be sleeping. That had happened to my mother once. We were ambushed, and the spirits made her faint so they could take her to the Dream Land. She’d awoken with the knowledge that had saved us that day.

  I swallow hard. I’d never really paid attention to my mother’s talk of the Dream Land. Well, I had, but not to the extent that I’d listened to Rahn’s survival lessons. I’d known his information would apply to me, and I’d thought my mother’s wouldn’t.

  I close my eyes for a second, trying to remember her voice, her words, anything that could help me. I know Seer dreams are linear, and vivid, usually starting from the current position that the Seer’s in. They’re different to normal dreams, which are more fragmentary, weird and…dreamy. I frown. My mother had said something about it being difficult to distinguish the Dream Land from real life, when you’re having a Seeing dream—and that made sense, didn’t it? It had felt realistic.

  Apart from the bison in the sky—and that was the clue. Why didn’t I realize?

  “She was a good Seer, your mother.” My father looks at me sternly, his whole face pinching slightly. His eyebrows are beginning to gray, and his dark hair looks even more wiry than usual in the strange light. “This is a gift from her,” he says. “I never thought more than one of you would inherit the gift…” My father’s expression darkens. “Two was a good man. He only got the vision five minutes before the attack—we weren’t hasty enough. You were young. You won’t remember.”

  He’s right, I don’t. I was five years old. But I’ve been told countless times how Two had been drinking, that the liquor had clouded his mind, limiting his Seer powers in the time they were needed most. My mother’s powers were clouded by grief; Four and Six had just died from the fever. Although I can’t remember that particular attack, I can still picture how weak Four had been at the end, how he’d been foaming at the mouth, glassy eyes rolling back in his head, delirious. It’s just a snippet of a memory, but it’s all I have of him. And it’s the only way I can remember him. It’s weird how memories work. But at least I can remember Four. When I try to picture Six, my mind’s just blank. No particular face comes to mind, just a generic, sick nine-year-old who splutters into the New World.

  It’s the same with One. He was killed during an attack before I was even born; he’s a faceless older brother who I’ll never meet.

  “We have to be quick,” my father says. “The Turning is in a few hours’ time. We have to leave here and find shelter before it strikes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Seven.” My father stops me as I pick up the last bowl from the floor. He looks at me carefully, evenly. We’re the same height—or maybe I’m a little taller now—but his frame is wider and more worn. “Whenever the bison speaks to you, you pay attention,” he says. “You’ve been chosen as a Seer for a reason. The future speaks to you. You must not ignore it.”

  It sounds like another lesson. Another rule.

  One that I can’t afford to ignore.

  “I don’t believe this.” Rahn folds his arms over his chest and glares across at me. Then he jabs the usual finger toward me, but my father intersects it.

  “We ain’t got time for this! Everyone, get in the trucks now!”

  Rahn tenses. “I am the leader. I say if we go or not, and this sounds like a trap.”

  “Yeah.” Corin steps forward from the crowd around us. His eyes find mine. “I saw what you were like. You’re barely Untamed now, as it is. There’s no way you’re a real Seer.”

  “She saw the bison.”

  “So she says.” Rahn coughs. Behind him, Marouska jerks one of the dogs back to her.

  “I did see it!” I cry, but my voice isn’t strong. What if it was just a dream—that happened to have a bison in it?

  My brother appears by my side. “She saw the Turning too. Look at the sky now. See, purple’s creeping into it already.”

  “If there’s a Turnin’ comin’ then we need to stay here, in the huts, under cover.”

  “And let the Enhanced come and get us?” My father snorts. “Look, my daughter’s the only Seer we’ve got. I’m listening to her. Three, get the keys for the red L200 from Corin. We’re leaving, whether you give us permission or not.”

  Three pushes past Rahn toward Corin. “Give them over, Eriksen.”

  Corin doesn’t move.

  “If we split up, survival will be harder. Safety in numbers,” Rahn growls. “You know that. And I ain’t havin’ a mutiny here.”

  I pull my shawl tighter around my shoulders. “We all need to leave,” I whisper. Then I say it louder. “We need to leave now. They’re coming for us.”

  It’s almost like I can hear a thousand tiny footsteps pounding the ground, coming for us now. I squint, focusing on the horizon behind the huts. It’s still darkish, but I can distinguish the land from the sky, just about. Can’t see anything else though.

  “You could be workin’ with them,” Rahn says.

  “She’s not! The Gods have forgiven her—”

  “If this is true, yeah. But I still think it’s a trap. Can’t trust her, she could be one of them.”

  I shake my head. The pounding’s getting louder. “I’m not one of them!” And it’s true, isn’t it? “If I was, I’d tell you where I want us all to go, wouldn’t I? But I’m not! I don’t care where we go, that’s up to you, Rahn. You’re the leader.”

  “Yeah, you’d still be in charge of us all. It’s not like you’d be taking orders from a seventeen-year-old girl. Just taking Seer advice.” My father’s voice is odd.

  Rahn shakes his head. He presses his lips into a fine line.

  “This is stupid. We’re going now.” My brother steps forward and plucks the keys straight from Corin’s clenched hand. “Rahn, if it was anyone else who was a Seer, you wouldn’t be questioning what we should do. You’d have made sure we all left as soon as we knew about it. No, it’s because it’s one of us, one of the Sarrs, and it’s because Seven was Enhanced. But she isn’t anymore, is she? And the Gods have forgiven her if they’ve made her a Seer. She’s obviously Untamed again, on our side, and I’m not risking my life because of your petty little grudge.”

  Behind us, the others talk in quiet murmurs. I catch some words: Maybe she’s right, and Better to be safe than sorry.

  “Fine,” Rahn snaps. “Everyone, load the trucks.” He nods briefly, but I see the look he shoots me and the way his teeth flash in the cold light.

  As soon as he’s said the words, everyone starts moving. Sacks are hauled into the L200s, blankets are piled in, along with food and water.

  Esther’s in front of me, carrying tins of dog food, when I notice something in her hand. My blood goes cold. It’s my mother’s pendant. The one that stops her from getting stuck in the D
ream Land. Every Seer needs one. My mother told me that only a few weeks ago; told me that if a Seer didn’t have one on at all times the malignant spirits could trap them.

  “Why’ve you got it?” I shout.

  Esther turns back, and I snatch it from her, clenching the crystal to my chest. It feels cold and lost in my hands.

  “She gave it to me for safe-keeping. For you.” Esther’s whole face pinches inward.

  “No.” I shake my head. “You stole it.” My lip curls with disgust. “She’d never give it away.”

  Esther’s eyes narrow. “She gave it to me before she left to join the Enhanced.”

  Everyone around us has stopped moving. I know they’re watching us. A few feet away, I’m sure my father’s giving me a warning look.

  Esther looks at me. I can’t see much of her face in the dim light, only her sharp angles and the slight glint of her eyes as she turns on me. “Believe what you want, but I didn’t steal her stupid pendant. And the fact that she gave it to me shows she planned to leave us, okay? You can take your mother off that pedestal you’ve got her on because she isn’t as wonderful as you think. She wanted to join the Enhanced.”

  I clench my jaws together. Esther moves away. I stare at my mother’s crystal in my hand. It feels strange, odd, wrong. I shouldn’t have it, she should.

  “Put it on,” Corin hisses as he walks past me. “If you’re a Seer, we don’t want you getting stuck in the Dream Land.” But his voice says the opposite.

  I gulp, then lift the old sinew around my neck, testing the strength. The crystal feels heavy as I tie it securely.

  “We’re low on fuel.” Rahn looks at me accusingly. Above his dark glasses, his brows dip.

  I try not to show any emotion, but it’s impossible.

  Corin and Kayden climb into the bed of the second truck, the red one, just as Rahn jumps down. The two younger men exchange a few words, their figures silhouetted. Corin’s broader, but Kayden’s taller. Then they look down at me; I think they’re frowning.

  “Right, everyone in! I want the usual drivers and formations, radios in each cab.” Rahn pushes his dark glasses higher up his nose, even though I’m sure they hadn’t slipped down at all. He’s always doing that. “I want a dog in each truck too. Everyone, get your weapons ready.”