Stolen (3 page)

“Always knew I could count on you.”

And then he ruffled her hair, gave her a teasing shove. Like she was a sibling. Like the little sister he couldn’t live without.

Stupid, stupid, stupid,
Bree thought, and followed him back into town.

They finished the patch job with only a fraction of summer light remaining, but stayed on the roof far longer.

Chelsea had brought them fish from the town center, and they’d eaten while working. Now, with the heat of the day finally fading, they were too exhausted to move. Lying side by side on the roof, they watched the stars emerge between the breaks in the trees. The sky was midnight blue.

“Are you worried?” she asked Lock.

“About?”

“You know what.”

He bit his bottom lip as though it were edible, like breaking the skin might make words come more easily.

“How come you don’t talk to the stars anymore, Bree?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

Bree scowled at the pinpricks of light overhead. That’s all they were—light. Her ma had once said that her father was up there. That anyone you lost was. That to be near them again, to speak to them, all you had to do was talk to the stars. But Bree had screamed at them after her mother’s passing—she’d yelled for her to come back, to not leave her alone, to show that she loved her by returning—and it hadn’t done a damn thing. That’s how Chelsea had found Bree the night she offered the girl a new home: Heath was bundled in the woman’s arms, Lock at her side wearing a too-big sweater and even larger eyes, and Bree had been hollering at the stars. But Bree’s mother hadn’t listened, so she’d reluctantly gone with Chelsea, wondering if perhaps she’d been too harsh on her mother.

Bree whispered after that, spoke softly, politely. But by the time she’d turned twelve it was obvious her mother—if she could even hear the pleas—didn’t care. Bree never spoke to the sky again.

“Stars are stars, not people,” she said to Lock.

“But we bury our dead in the ground, and they become dirt, which springs new grass, which feeds animals, that end up in the ground in turn. And if we burn the deceased, they become air and ash. If we send them to sea, they dissolve in salt. It’s like we’re all one and the same—like there’s a bit of us in everything. Why not the stars, too?”

Bree frowned. “For the same reason I destroyed that trap today: Some things are real, and some are in our minds. Sometimes we make ourselves believe because we are desperate. Or weak.”

“I don’t think you’re weak,” he said.

She angled her head toward him. She couldn’t tell if he was being honest or just trying to make her feel better.

“Are you worried?” Bree repeated.

“What’s to worry about? I know what will happen. As surely as each wave will break.”

“And you’re not scared?”

“No.”

Liar
.

But she never said it out loud. Maybe she was the one who was scared. To lose him. To say good-bye. To face her own birthday and all the unknowns attached to it.

WHEN SHE WOKE, LOCK’S BED was already empty. Heath was in his, though, and he didn’t look well. Not even in sleep.

There was a sheen of sweat on the boy’s brow, and his breathing seemed labored. Bree glanced at his leg. The bandage was heavy with a discerning amount of liquid—tinged pink and mucus yellow. Pus. Blood was one thing, but pus . . . Bree was no healer, but she knew it wasn’t good.

“Heath?” she whispered, touching his wrist. His skin was clammy and cold.

In the front of the hut, Chelsea sat at the table, weaving.

“Is Lock fishing already?” Bree asked. The woman nodded, her eyes barely leaving the half-finished basket. “Heath’s bandages . . . They’re dirty. They need to be changed.” Another nod. “Is Sparrow coming soon? It doesn’t look right, and his fever’s climbing.”

“I didn’t realize you were a healer, Bree.” There was no smile, no hint of a joke. “Please go worry about what you’re good at—fish, food. I’ve already talked to Sparrow. She’ll stop by later.”

Bree frowned, but picked up her spear. Halfway to the shore, she turned around. Lock hadn’t blamed her for the accident, but she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if Heath fell to the fever. Sparrow could only do so much for the boy. Most of it was already done. But Lock . . . he’d been sick once. Deathly sick.
On the bridge between realms,
Sparrow had called it. Desperation led Chelsea to allow Mad Mia a chance. And it had made all the difference.

Maybe it would again.

A failing driftwood fence surrounded Mad Mia’s ramshackle hut. Every few paces a post was erected, bone wind chimes hanging from them. They clinked in the morning’s tired breeze. Within the fence a small garden of wildflowers was wilting, and the charred fish that had been cooking over her fire yesterday was now gone. Likely stolen by some scavenging animal during the night, or perhaps burned right off the stakes in Mad Mia’s negligence. The woman’s door was propped open, but a dense curtain of vines hung in the frame.

Bree slipped inside the fence.

“You’re not going to find any fish in that hut,” a voice said.

Bree turned to see Maggie eying her. Ness stood nearby, a load of laundry braced against her hip.

“Who said I’m after fish?” Bree retorted.

“Leave her at it,” Ness said to Maggie. “It’s her own hide if Keeva catches her ditching work.”

The vines of Mad Mia’s house were drawn aside. “Is sleep precious to no one?” the woman asked, a glare directed at the three girls.

“The sun’s been up for hours,” Maggie called out.

“As was I, dancing for rain beneath the moon.”

“Can I speak with you?” Bree said to Mia. “It’s important.”

The woman grumbled, but pulled the vine curtain back farther. Bree ducked inside, not wanting to see the look on Maggie’s or Ness’s face.

“Sparrow is a talented healer, but everyone has to die eventually,” Mad Mia said.

“Not him,” Bree said. “Not Heath. He’s barely ten!”

“The earth calls for some sooner than others.”

Bree fumed. Here was Mia, old, ancient, and acting like it was perfectly fair for a young boy to have his life end before it truly began. Like children being Snatched was just as natural. Lock claimed it was merely the cycle of life, but Bree wasn’t convinced. If only the boys were lost, then maybe. But the girls—how it took only some of them . . . It was like a conscious choice was being made.

There was Fallyn, Snatched well before Bree’s time, but still a legend recounted around the bonfire. Stubborn. Bold. So brave she’d jumped off the jetty in a raging storm to save a child who’d lost his footing.

Keeva’s daughter, Cora, a natural leader destined to take over for her mother until she’d been stolen when Bree was still a toddler.

Wren, the island’s most recent female loss, who had been Bree’s biggest competition when it came to hunting and fishing.

And so many other girls, gone. All gone. Plucked from Saltwater like the ripest crop during a season’s harvest.

“Keeva’s just as bold as some of the Snatched, and she’s still here,” Lock once pointed out. “There’s no logic to it, Bree. It’s a random cast into the ocean.”

A cast that someone has to reel in
, she’d thought.

Mia was burning some sort of herb in the cramped hut, and the scent was making Bree light-headed. Dried plants and grasses hung from the rafters, dangling so low she’d had to duck around a few when entering the hut. Symbols and numbers were carved into Mia’s table. Animal bones and small clay containers lined every shelf. A few more mobiles and wind chimes hung at the edges of the room. Being in the hut was like swimming through seaweed. And bones. An underwater graveyard.

“You made something for Lock once,” Bree said. “‘Lucky Lock,’ they call him now—that’s how amazing whatever you made was. It did the impossible.”

Mad Mia flashed a toothy smile and Bree tried not to cringe.

“I remember that,” Mia said. “I got lucky. Perhaps as lucky as the boy.”

“Could you get lucky again?”

“If you bring me something, maybe.”

“Bring you what?” Anything. Bree would bring her anything if it meant saving Heath.

“A heron.”

The hope in Bree’s stomach disintegrated. “I haven’t seen a heron on the island in weeks.”

“Just yesterday, at dusk, one flew toward the freshwater as I prayed for rain.”

Convenient
, Bree thought, and perhaps a lie. Though what did the woman have to gain? Heron or not, it made no difference to Mia.

“They’re flighty as anything,” Bree said of the bird. “Scare at the sound of a snapping twig.”

“Then you ought to be quiet when you hunt the thing, no?” Mad Mia’s smile thinned to a doubtful pout. “I heard you’re a stealthy one. Is that not true?”

“I can catch anything,” Bree insisted. Even a heron. It didn’t matter that the bird was her favorite, that she thought it beautiful and pure. For Heath, she’d spill its blood.

“Then scram,” Mia said.

Bree didn’t like the woman—not her tactless nature, nor unkempt home, nor mindless rain dances—but she bit her tongue now. It was only at the mouth of the hut that Bree paused.

“Why a heron?” she asked over her shoulder.

“You’re the storyteller’s daughter. You know the importance of that bird—the power, the magic. It accompanies the impossible.”

“It’s just a bird,” Bree said.

“A bird with blood that might save the boy.”

Maybe it was another fable, another sliver of hope that was bound to disappoint, but Bree couldn’t risk idleness. She went not to the shore, but home, where she dropped off her spear in favor of different equipment—a pack, water, her slingshot. Then she made for Crest.

TO HIKE THE MOUNTAIN TOOK half the day.

By the time Bree pulled herself onto Crest’s small plateau by way of a scraggly tree, the heat and humidity was unbearable. She’d sweat through her shirt, and she was pretty certain she had a blister from her sandal, right where the leather straps tied around her ankle, but didn’t bother looking. What would it matter? She’d still have to climb down with that same blister. Acknowledging its existence would only be like letting it win.

No longer obscured by rock or brush, a blissful breeze whipped over Bree’s limbs. She found her typical resting place—an area where the rock was more smooth than sharp, almost like the weather had worn out a bench for view-hungry climbers. Mad Mia claimed she saw the heron flying toward the lake, but it was just as likely the bird had simply flown over the island after hunting along the shore. From this vantage point Bree could keep an eye on both water sources.

She’d sat here with Lock many times over, and with her mother only once. With Lock, it was always a thing to do to kill time. After fishing and hunting, and before someone could saddle another chore onto their backs, they’d sneak into the woods and climb Crest, then sit and stare at the endless stretch of ocean beyond Saltwater in complete silence. They didn’t need words, Lock and Bree.

The first and only time she’d hiked Crest with her mother, it had been an anniversary of her father’s Snatching. They’d both needed a distraction, and so Bree showed her mother the rough path she’d carved out with Lock. She was only eight back then, so the passes weren’t as clearly marked and worn as they were now, but her mother had managed better than expected. Who knew a storyteller could have such nimble limbs?

When they reached the summit, Bree’s mother had stood dangerously close to the edge, one hand gripping the tree that grew from the rock, the other held out at her side.

“Look at that lake,” she’d said. “It almost looks close enough to dive into.”

It was not.

“Maybe I could fly there, like a bird.”

The woman let go of the tree and spread both arms like she had wings. Her toes flirted with the edge.

“Ma?” Bree had said, voice cracking.

“I’m tired, Brianna. I’m tired of feeling empty and tired of living without him.”

“Without Pa?”

She’d nodded. “I’m no one alone. He carried so much of me. He
was
me.”

Bree didn’t understand. Her mother was her mother. Her father was her father. They were two people.

“I really feel like I could fly today.”

Bree watched her mother lift a foot.

“What about me?” Bree asked.

“What
about
you?”

Bree’s bottom lip quivered. “You can’t fly. You’re not a bird. And then what about me?”

“You’re stubborn as a weed, Brianna. You don’t need anyone.”

“You’re my mother!” Bree had shouted. “It doesn’t matter if I need you or not; you’re supposed to be here. You’re not supposed to fly away.”

Her mother looked in a trance, though. Her fingers moved with the wind, her chin careened forward. Bree felt her heart breaking—a crack in the center of her chest, a split that seemed to grow, screaming,
You’re not enough, you’re not the person who makes her days worth living
.

She grabbed her mother’s wrist and pulled her away from the edge. She might have called the woman selfish. Bree couldn’t remember now. Whatever she’d said, the words had jolted her mother to reality, or maybe she was suddenly too scared or ashamed. Maybe she would have done it at a later date. But that day, at Bree’s touch, the woman’s eyes cleared. She looked at Bree like she was seeing her for the first time and collapsed at her knees, pulling the girl into her arms.

“I’m sorry, I’m here,” she whispered into Bree’s hair.

About a month later she caught a chill and never got better. As Bree watched her mother die, the fight drawn out for weeks, she wondered if she should have let her try to fly. She’d lost her in the end, and it hadn’t even been quick. The thought plagued her during those first months alone, and even after Chelsea took her in that fall.

Bree relished a long drink from her waterskin, scanned the water, and waited.

The lake was visited by a few women hauling freshwater into town and a pair of boys who stripped down to their shorts to cool off. Maggie and Ness—at least, Bree assumed it was them—left the stream that fed the lake with clean laundry. The shoreline numbers slowly thinned, men and women coming in for the day, clearing out like the tide, Lock probably among them.