Burnt (10 page)

“I’ll do the same for them,” Luna agreed.

His best friend’s life ended with the quiet snap of the Lunin’s catch.

Air whistled in past his teeth. Every breath filled his mouth with a taste so foul it made him gag. But the alternative was worse. Breathing through his nose coated his whole throat with the noxious odor of the thirty odd bodies pressed up against him. That made him well and truly sick. Twice so far. It didn’t make the smell any better.

The wagon lurched and rumbled over some rut in the road, sending everyone in the back stumbling. Kaie winced as his head smacked against the wooden side. It took a lot of luck and hard work to get himself a spot there, but he was starting to regret it. Having some
thing to press his back against other than the milling children clinging to him wasn’t worth cracking his head against the wood with every bump.

Sojun wasn’t exaggerating. Wh
en he was shoved into the wagon not an hour after watching Jun leave, Kaie was struck by how very young everyone was. In the corner opposite him, furthest from the back, he thought he saw the hunched shoulders of someone close to his age but all the ones around him were at least two years his junior. It didn’t make any sense. Even if the Finders chose to leave the adults he couldn’t understand how they could so accurately target an age range in a population close to six hundred. There were plenty in his family near adulthood or only just entering it like him. And why bother anyway? Surely adults were better suited to hard labor than six-year-old children.

No answers were coming. Not from the boy gripping his hand hard enough to cut off circulation, not from the soldiers who slammed the back of the wagon shut just after shoving him inside. Kaie was no more enlightened about what was waiting for him at the other end of this wagon ride then he was when he first woke in the tent.

He hated it, all of it. The puzzles that wouldn’t be solved, the blindly following a path set by someone else, the wagon, the children looking up at him as though he was going to be their salvation… He knew he was supposed to care. They were his family too, just as much as Jun. They were here and needed him while his best friend was out of reach. But the stench and the crying was too much to bear. It made his head throb even without the occasional smack. And there was so much of it that he couldn’t tease loose one heartbroken child from the masses. They were his people, his family, and all he wanted was for every one of them to disappear and leave him to his own misery.

Planning was impossible. There was nothing to plan for. Control over his existence was gone. The only things left to him now were how often he was beaten and telling Amorette what they lost. Both of them made him want nothing more than to start hitting the needy children sucking at what life was left in him.

Instead, he muttered platitudes. He told them not to be afraid, promised that things would be alright, somehow. That Mother Lemme would not let her children suffer more than they could survive. Filled his mouth with lies tasting worse than the vomit and whispered them as loudly as his damaged throat would allow. They pressed in closer, more of them each time he opened his lips, and for a while some of the crying would stop. But the lessening of the din never lasted long enough to be worthwhile. He was as useless at comforting frightened kids as he was at saving his heart’s brother.

There was no accounting for time in the wagon. The way it faltered and stretched since first waking in that tent was a new experience. Time always seemed so solid. Ordered. Constant. Now it was fickle and chaotic. He was exhausted and hungry and sore, but he started that way. With only the occasional flicker of sunlight penetrating the mobile pri
son since they first shut it up his body was his only gauge. And it was worthless. So, when the wagon lurched again – causing the inevitable crack against his much abused skull – and slowed to a stop, Kaie couldn’t guess if it was a few hours or several days later.

He hoped the latter. He prayed to every god that might listen that he was as far from what was left of his hope as possible. He was going to face life knowing what Sojun did for him. He would vomit up his lies for the remnants of his family, knowing that it was supposed to be Jun giving them hope. He couldn’t face the ghosts of their home, see the ruin of their lives. Platit
udes wouldn’t work there. There everyone would see in an instant what a coward and failure he was. He couldn’t even save his best friend when the way was centimeters from his fingertips.

There were people waiting outside the door when the wagon opened. Of course
they were. He was a prisoner now. Kaie was one of the closest to the door, by luck and design, so he was among the first ones the heavy men grabbed when they reached into the blindly blinking mass.

Their hands were hard and unforgiving as they jerked him forward, ripping him away from the clinging children. The boy holding his hand refused to be removed for a moment. He tried to shout something, he wasn’t even sure what, to make the kid let go. The hoarse cry wasn’t enough. One of the men caught the boy’s head in a backhand that echoed in Kaie’s teeth. The boy fell backward and was swallowed by the mass of bodies. He couldn’t eve
n remember the kid’s name. William? It didn’t matter. Not anymore. He was sick with certainty that he would never see those terrified eyes staring up at him again.

Free of his anchor, Kaie was jerked out of the wagon. Before his own eyes could adjust to the change in illumination, the instant his feet touched earth, more hands grabbed and tugged, propelling him onward. Shapes and blurred colo
rs flowed past through the haze but Kaie was in no hurry to see clearly. Nothing good was coming.

The sound of cloth ripping and shock of air against his bare body nudged his instincts out of their stupor. Despite his resolution to cling t
o blindness as long as he could Kaie rubbed at his eyes.

He was in a room. It was huge – easily four times the size of his house back home – and built from some
wood he didn’t know. Pure white with no seams he could see. The floor felt like stone to his bare feet but it was a solid slab and impossibly smooth. It slanted slightly toward the center of the room but the incline was subtle. He wouldn’t even notice if it weren’t for a hole in the stone there that drew his eyes like a magnet. Part of him, the part still trying to fit all the pieces of his puzzles together, longed to run his hands along this stone and the white walls; figure out what they were and how they existed. But there was no time for indulging that curiosity.

There were nine other children with him. He didn’
t recognize any of them by name but all were part of his family. In a calmer time he would likely recall each of them and their parents as well. Now he just watched numbly as they were each stripped of their clothing while a bone-thin woman frowned and scratched a paper with a piece of charcoal. Most tried to cover themselves from her harsh gaze but a couple were like him – simply too numb to respond.

When
she was done with her appraisal she gestured to the big man stealing their clothes. He tossed his armful into a huge pile in the far corner and grabbed the small boy at the end of their line, dragging him out the door directly across from Kaie. The woman followed on their heels.

E
ight of them stood in their line. The kid beside him, maybe eight years old, whimpered and turned toward the pile. Kaie dropped a hand on his shoulder before the boy could step out of line.

The boy looked up at him, his wide, terrified eyes almost indistinguishable from the ones
Kaie watched fall back into the wagon. Kaie wanted to do nothing. Let things unfold how they would. It was easier. But he just couldn’t. This was his family and that was supposed to mean something. Those eyes demanded he care.

The memory came back to him in a rush. T
his was the little boy running down the village road chasing a chicken. It was the boy who leapt for the bird and missed horribly, landed in a mud puddle and instead of crying like many children would, burst into loud and contagious laughter. Kaie tried to summon up a smile for that boy. “Sorley, right?”

The boy nodded.

Fourteen eyes were on him now. He didn’t even try to hide the blush. How could he? His brain scrambled for words, any words. A moment ago he was satisfied simply remembering the kid’s name. Now they were all expecting something great, something to steel their spines and make all of this humiliation and horror better.

“This sucks, right?” And there it was.
His great moment of leadership. Even Sorley stopped his whimpering and gave him an incredulous look. Kaie laughed nervously.

“Yeah. I’m brilliant. Look, I can’t say anything to make it better. No one can. But we get through this, then the next thing, and the next. Somewhere down the road, somewhere we can
’t see just now, it gets better because that’s how life works and because Mother Lemme never forgets her children. But you have to be strong. Just like she was when Kosa came for our blood.” The words were heavy on his tongue.

“Let them take whatever they want from you, do whatever they want to you. We are Zetowan. We don’t act out of violence or fear. We know our goddess is guiding
everything. We know she’ll be at our side when we need her. That they can never touch. So long as you believe it.”

Sorley’s lower lip trembled. Kaie sighed and turned back to face the door. How did he expect any of them to believe what he knew were lies? Where was
Mother Lemme when her people were attacked? When her voice was dying in the vault? When Sojun was getting the Lunin latched around his neck? The gods didn’t care what happened to them.

The indrawn breath was slight. Kaie expected another whimper. When it didn’t come, he glanced to his left.

Sorley was standing there again. Back straight, shoulders back. Past him, the other boys held themselves the same way. They didn’t look like vulnerable little boys anymore. They looked like men, like Zetowan, waiting for their goddess to guide their paths and shape the world. Kaie didn’t know what to think. His words weren’t inspiring. They were the same things their parents told them every day, rehashed and cheapened. But there they were, proud and brave. What else changed?

The man came back into the strange room carrying another armful of cloth
. The small boy wasn’t with him and neither was the skinny woman. There were four others though. Three more men and a woman followed him in, all of them lugging large metal buckets sloshing with liquid in either hand.

The first man’s dark eyebrows rose when he looked at them. Kaie suspected it was for the same reason his own did a moment before. But the only comment made was a grunt.

A second later a splash of cold water struck him with a force that made him stumble backward. Kaie gasped. Then he shouted. It wasn’t just water rolling down his face and shoulders. His head itched, like insects were crawling all over it. The same sensation rolled over his entire body. Dark red hair spilled out across his feet.

In just a few
moments every bit of his hair was on the ground, rolling toward the middle of the room. It joined browns of all shades, mixing and vanishing down the hole waiting there.

All eight of them were now completely hairless. The grunting man tossed them each some of the cloth in his arms as the bucket carriers left. Kaie caught his. Sorley didn’t, and had to scramble to pull it off the damp floor.

They were pants, sort of. Not the comfortable hide ones he wore every day of his life. These were made of some different material, something soft, thin and useless for walking through woods or staying warm. Kaie and the others put them on anyway. They were better than nothing.

The man grabbed Kaie’s arm and jerked him out of line, gesturing for the others to follow. He was pulled out of the room and dragged down a hallway to another strange room. It was identical to the last one. Except this one didn’t have a pile of clothes.
Instead, there was a fire pit built into the wall itself. Made out of red and brown stones, it held a fire hotter than any his family would consider keeping in their homes, sucking the chill from his body in an instant. The smoke rolled up through a tunnel of the same stone leading right through the roof.

There were dark stains on the strange floor. But those didn’t bear thinking on.

The thin woman was waiting for them there. She scuttled right to him, her sharp black eyes narrowing as she drew close. “You are the one called Kaie?”

He swallowed hard, trying to so
rt out what was going on. “Err…yes?”

She pursed her lips and nodded. Then she pressed her stick of charcoal against the top of his hairless head and drew a big X. Kaie lifted his hand to touch it, but she slap
ped it down. He got the message but couldn’t begin to guess at the purpose. Once she was satisfied that he wasn’t going to try again, she nodded to the man holding him and left.

His captor released him and followed. Again, all eight boys were alone and clueless as to what
was expected of them. This time there was no whimpering. So that was an improvement. They were all looking at him again though. Waiting to be fed more garbage about the benevolent gods. Or just wondering about the X on his head. He couldn’t tell. Either way, before he could think of anything to say someone else joined them.

This time it was a woman, though she was no smaller than their last captor. She wasn’t alone. Two other meaty men trailed in her wake as she headed straight for the fire pit. She was thick and unimpressive, the scowl she sent in their direction falling short of intimidatin
g; it just seemed a part of her, like it was her natural expression. But the long metal bar in her hand, that was intimidating. She shoved it into the fire, leaving it there until the tip turned bright orange. When she pulled it out he couldn’t look away from the odd shape at the end of it.