Reaping (3 page)

“He would,” Soren growls under his breath.

Vale ignores him. “They’re small, light, but fast. Disperse mode with your Bolts messes with their telemetry, confuses them.”

“The tiny fuckers shot us,” Eli continues, “and we crashed hard. That old piece of junk took quite the beating.”

“We were lucky to get out,” I add. “Eli almost got stuck inside.”

“Good to know that disperse setting is good for something,” Eli says, fatigue in his voice. “I wondered if it was a design flaw no one had ever bothered to correct.”

Kenzie smiles at Vale, and it occurs to me that, slowly but surely, Vale’s winning over everyone in our group.

Except Soren. And me.

I still don’t know what to think of him. He’s on our side, yes. For now. But for how long? And why the sudden change of heart? Every time I look at him, I first see the man at the podium on graduation day, announcing his placement, telling the world he had set out to destroy the Resistance and everything we stand for. And then I see him in the interrogation room, uncertain, as he confronted Soren and I as hostages and accused us of treason. But what I remember most is the sadness, the guilt deep in his voice as if he’d been breathing it, choking on it, when he held out my grandfather’s compass to me. I remember the way he offered his life to me as repayment for everything he’d done.

Two lives I owe you now, 
he said.

Which Vale is the real one?

“We’re splitting up,” Eli announces suddenly, bringing me back to the scene at hand. “Firestone, you take one group—”

“What?” I demand. “No way. We’re not splitting up again.”

“We have to, Little Bird,” Eli says. “Look how easily the drones found us this time. How easy will it be if we’re traveling in a group of ten? Our odds of making it to one of the other bases are better if we split up.”

“Or half of us could die,” I counter, “and the rest of us would never know.”

“Or we could 
all
 die when the drones call a squadron of Black Ops down on our heads, which is about to happen, right now,” Eli shoots back. I stare at him. Eli and I 
never
 disagree. And on the rare occasion when we do, he listens to me, instead of spitting back retorts. But I don’t have a good counterpoint, so I bite my tongue, and Eli turns his gaze back to the rest of the group.

“Firestone, you take half the group. Remy’s coming with me. Pick your team.”

“I want Vale,” Firestone says immediately, and I look up at him, startled. “What?” he shrugs. “He’s got military training, he’s taken down Sector airships, and he knew how to disable the recon drones, so I figure if he’s with me and the Black Ops find us, I’ve got a damn sight better chance of staying alive than with you losers.”

He’s got a point.

“Okay, Soren,” Eli starts.

“I’m going with Soren,” Bear pipes up. I smile at him. Bear’s become Soren’s little shadow, and Soren doesn’t seem to mind.

“Kenzie and Jahnu,” Firestone says. “I want a medic.”

Kenzie laughs. “I’m hardly a medic.”

“Better than anyone else. Oh, except Vale. Two medics. I win.”

“Miah’s with us, then.” I can feel Soren’s voice reverberate through my side. I look over and see Miah and Vale exchange glances. I don’t know how Miah does it, being caught in the middle of Soren and Vale.

“Good,” Eli says. “Pack up. We leave in ten.” Everyone starts to pull themselves to their feet but Eli, who hasn’t moved from his spot. “Firestone, you stay.”

Within minutes, the place looks as desolate as it did on the night we arrived—and more, because we’ve cleaned out all the food stores. We’ve been half-settled this whole time, prepared to leave with little warning. All our bags are mostly packed, ready to move. When I haul my pack outside, Firestone and Eli are still sitting huddled together, poring over my plasma, which has some decent maps of the area and the Resistance bases scattered around the Wilds. Finally, when everyone’s ready to go, Eli stands and announces the plan.

“My group is going directly to Normandy. It’s about one hundred and fifty kilometers, almost due north, so it should take between five to eight days, depending on the weather and how much ground we cover per day. Firestone’s group is taking a more roundabout way. They’re going to stop in at Waterloo, an outpost about a hundred kilometers northeast, and it’s another sixty or so to get to Normandy.”

“What if Normandy isn’t safe?” Kenzie asks. “How will we find you if you can’t stay there?”

I feel Eli tense. He meets Firestone’s eyes and then looks around the group.

“If Normandy isn’t safe, we’ll head back toward Waterloo. If Waterloo isn’t safe, you’ll continue on to Normandy. If neither is safe, we move to plan B and try to make our way on to the next closest known base. Each team has the encrypted coordinates of all the bases, so we’ll find each other eventually.” He pauses, and then looks back at Kenzie. “We have to operate on that assumption. We'll reconnect. We have to believe that.”

There’s a dull silence for several moments. I find myself watching Vale's mannerisms, the way he casts his eyes around on the ground as though he’s looking for something. The way he meets my eyes for only a half-second and stands straighter when he does, as though he has something to prove.

“So that’s the plan,” Eli says. “Good luck, everyone.” He pulls Firestone in for a bear hug and thumps him on the back as if trying to dislodge something from his throat. Firestone laughs and coughs and pushes him away. We exchange fraught farewells, all of us aware there’s a distinct possibility this is the last time we’ll see each other. I hug Firestone and Kenzie, and cling to Jahnu a little too tightly before I let them all go.

I turn to Vale. I know I should say something, but my mind draws a blank.

“Be safe,” he whispers, for my ears only.

Soren comes up beside me and points his knife at Vale’s throat. “Don’t fuck this up, Vale.”

Vale's jaw clenches and his shoulders tense, but he doesn’t respond. Soren, apparently satisfied he's had the last word, shoulders his pack and stalks off.

I keep my eyes on Vale until the moment I turn to follow the others. My hand, tucked into my jacket pocket, clutches my grandfather’s compass, the heirloom Vale returned to me not a month ago. 
A compass is more than a navigational tool,
 my grandfather Kanaan told Tai and I all those years ago. 
It represents the search for truth. It’s a symbol of finding true north.

What’s your truth, Vale?

Lying flat on my back, I watch the treetops quiver as birds alight and flit off, squirrels jump from branch to branch, and the wind teases bare branches, making them sway and bend like they’re dancing to a song only they can hear. It’s almost as if the trees themselves are waking from an evening’s rest. They probably got more sleep than I did. Curling up between the gnarled roots of an old hemlock, pinned between Eli on one side and Soren on the other, isn’t the best way to get a solid eight hours. Like usual, I woke early and wandered a few meters off to find a solitary place to await the dawn.

Today is our seventh day on the trail. The days pass in an empty blur, a haze of shivering cold nights and unseasonable warmth during the day. We sweat in the sun, soak our clothes through, and then freeze at night. Three days ago it rained: cold, sharp, ugly droplets, and, by the harvest, that was miserable. We froze, all of us huddled together in the same tent, trying desperately to recover the body heat lost during the day. But the rest of the journey has been uneventful. We watch for drones in the sky, but there are none, and Eli’s drone detector never lights up.

Breathe in, breathe out. 
I close my eyes and let dawn’s crisp pink light wash over me. One more step forward, and another, and another, and then we’ll be there. Normandy draws closer every day. Dry clothes. Warmth. Beds. Food we didn’t have to kill, skin, and cook over a meager fire. And a shower. 
A shower!

The breathing exercises were Soren’s idea. He says they helped him after his own parents were, well, he won’t really say what exactly happened to them. He doesn’t even know the full extent of it. But he encouraged me to start meditating after the attack on Thermopylae. Soft as the lilting wind, he was the quietest I’d ever heard him when we first sat together and practiced. I replay his words in my mind now:
Imagine that each thought is a little messenger bird carrying a slip of paper. Open the thought, examine it, accept it, and then tear it up. Watch the pieces of your thought disappear in the wind. Exhale, watch the bird fly away on the wind. Feel yourself become lighter. Let your breath center and ground you. Release. Breathe.

It helps. A little.

Every night has been the same since the attack that drove us from our base. The nightmares. My mother’s face, pale like the flesh of a crisp apple, her stillness, the exhale that never came. I thought I’d never get over Tai’s death. And now my mom’s gone, too. I am running on empty. 
I am empty.

After so many nights of feeling as cavernous as the black, starlit universe around me, the sleeplessness began to take hold of me. So I started the breathing exercises.

What helps the most, though, is watching the bruised, deep blue and purple sky fade into lilac, fierce orange, and rose pink. It reminds me that behind every black night is a rising sun, behind every cold hurt is a fiery healing, a new beginning. That thought keeps me going, even when Tai’s face swims in front of me. Even when my mother’s eyes close, over and over again, behind my own eyelids.

“Remy?” Eli’s voice calls. I open my eyes, the dawn blooming full and welcoming. “You okay, Little Bird?”

Still hazy with sleep, he stares down at me through bleary eyes. Weeks ago, Eli would have had a conniption when he woke up and found me missing. But I’ve made it such a habit that it doesn’t bother him anymore.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t sleep these days, either,” he says, sitting down next to me and laying back, his hands behind his head. “There’s too much in my head.”

“Strange,” I say, forcing a smile. “It feels like mine is too empty.”

“Empty?” He turns to look at me. “After everything that’s happened?”

I shrug.

“I guess it’s not that my head is empty, but that I am. I can’t figure out where I’m going, what I’m doing. All I want is to make them suffer.”

There’s a silence. I don’t have to say who 
them
 is. Eli knows. With anyone else, the silence might be awkward. But with Eli, it’s just calm. There’s never any judgment.

“We share that goal, Little Bird. But it’s not enough to build a life.”

“I don’t need a life,” I bite back. “I need revenge.”

Eli is quiet. When he speaks, his voice is low and calm, but there’s an intensity to it I haven’t heard in a long time.

“You know better than that. I know you do. You might not be able to see beyond that horizon, yet, and I don’t blame you. But you’ll walk that path and crest that mountain and you’ll find yourself wondering what’s on the other side.”

I nod. “One day, maybe. Not today.”

“Maybe not. Maybe today, we just find Normandy, get some real food and half-decent beds. Let’s go. We’re almost there.”

Eli stands and offers me a hand. I let him pull me up. Together we walk a little ways back to where we’d pitched our tents for the night. Soren, his blond hair sticking up in every direction, is boiling some water for oatmeal and tea, and Bear and Miah are packing up our gear. We’re silent as we go through the now-familiar ritual, the packing, cleaning, and cooking.

“Gotta get moving,” Soren mutters eventually, betraying our shared reluctance to begin yet another long day of walking. As much as I don’t want to walk twenty kilometers today, I’m anxious to reach Normandy. We're going a bit slower than we'd like because of Miah, but we’re still making good time. We’ve done a little over thirty kilometers a day, by my estimates, which should put us into Normandy tonight, after five days on the trail.

“We should be there before dark,” Eli says, pausing as we crowd around the plasma examining the map of the surrounding woods that the Resistance had hacked from the Sector a few years back. Because my plasma can recharge on sunlight, we’ve been able to use the most recently downloaded terrain map of the region, and, while I’m sure it’s not as detailed as the latest Sector version, it has reasonable zoom capacity and an exceptional one meter raster size.

“It looks like we’ve got a river to cross.”

“I could certainly use a rinse. I’ve almost definitely never smelled worse.” Miah mutters. Soren laughs; he’s been noticeably happier since Miah arrived from Okaria. When he turns his gaze on me, the flash of heat takes me by surprise, and I remember our time together on The Zephyr, journeying downriver in our escape from the Sector. The time I almost lost myself in my hunger for him, for closeness, warmth.

I take the plasma from Eli’s hands and examine it more closely. “We should head south for about five miles, and then cut through this old highway to the west. The dominant tree species will shift, and we’ll know to turn toward the river. Then we can bypass the rapids and cross at the narrowest point. Right here. We’ll be closer to Normandy anyway because then we can follow this old roadway here,” I use my fingers to zoom in on the map, “straight to the base.”

“Great. Let’s go.” Eli stands abruptly. Without another word he shoulders his pack and starts down the trail.

“Eli,” I call to him. “Not that way. This way.” I point down a different path, a sharper cut to the East.

He stares at me for a moment, his eyes narrow in concentration. But then he relaxes, his face settling into a grin, and he laughs at himself.

“Right. I knew that.”

I shake my head. “It’s a good thing you made me your navigator.”

Eli winks at me as he walks by. “Birds are the best navigators,” he says. “Especially if you navigate us to a river so we won’t have to smell those oafs anymore.”

I lean in, wrinkling my nose and fan the air.

“Better not exclude yourself.”

Eli chuckles, cinches his pack tighter, and we set off.