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“You’re just a wimp! You’re just an emaciated, emollient fake! You couldn’t blow the pods off a daffodil if your life depended on it.”
Bring the hepers back.
“Tell us what’s going on!” he yells.
I spit blood out on the ground. It splatters the dirt, splintered, like a pigeon’s footprint. I close my eyes: everything’s still a washed-out white.
“They’re coming,” I say.
“Who’s coming?!”
“The hunters!”
There is a long silence. I can’t lift my head to meet their eyes.
Then we hear it again. This time not just a solitary howl, but a chorus of them.
My blood. They’ve picked up the scent already.
“Now you’ve done it, you idiot,” I say. “Now you’ve made it easier for them to find us.”
“No. To find you, not us.” Epap turns to the others. “I say we leave this guy here. We take off in the carriage. That will—”
“No,” Sissy says.
“But Sissy, we—”
“No, Epap! You’re right: we can’t trust him. There’s more going on than he’s letting on. But that’s exactly why we can’t leave him. We need what he knows.” She walks over, dirt kicking onto me. “He’s a survivor,” she says. “We know that much. If he can survive, then sticking around him will only increase our own chances of survival.” Her eyes blaze into mine. “So start speaking. What do we do?”
I stand up, my crestfallen heart suddenly galvanising. “We go toe-to-toe with them and fight.” I dust off sand from my clothes. “We surprise them by not fleeing. Because that would be the very last thing they’d expect from you. They think you’re weak, cowardly, disorganised. But to stand toe-to-toe with them, go blow for blow. That would catch them by surprise.”
Epap starts to interrupt: “We don’t stand a chance—”
“Yes, we do! Look, I’ve seen the way you handle the flying daggers and spears. You could inflict real damage. They never expected you to become so adept – those weapons were only supposed to serve a cosmetic purpose. And look at us. We’ve got numbers on them. There’s only three hunters left. And there’s six of us. And we’ve got five freakin’ FLUNs between us. We can do this. We can take them down. And then there’ll be nothing between us and safety, the Dome.”
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Epap shouts. “You have no idea what they’re capable of. One of them has the power and speed of ten of us. So we’re actually outnumbered, you idiot, thirty to six. Outnumbered, outpowered, outsped. Fighting them is pure suicide.”
Epap is right; I know that. There’s not a chance of defeating the hunters. But the only hope I have of rescuing Ashley June is if the hepers and I can somehow pummel past the hunters and make it to the Institute. And for that to happen, I first need to convince the hepers to dig in their heels and fight rather than flee. We flee, Ashley June dies. It’s as simple as that. But as long as we stay and fight, there’s still a glimmer of hope for her, no matter how small.
Epap spins around to Sissy. “We need to run. Right now. We leave this guy behind, he’ll buy us the time we need to get some distance between us and them.”
I’m already shaking my head. “You just don’t get it, do you? Running will buy you maybe twenty minutes, if that. Less. The horse is tired, it’s been running all day. They’ll overtake us, sooner than later.”
They grow quiet at that. They know I’m right. On the carriage, Ben starts to cry. Even the horse, gazing at the cloud, starts to whinny.
Sissy takes two steps towards me. “What about the map?” she asks. I’m surprised by the softness in her voice, how quiet she is despite the situation.
“What about it?”
“It shows a boat to the north of us. Tied to a dock. If we can get there in time, there might be a chance.”
“Are you nuts? You can’t trust that map. The Scientist was crazy.”
“Not to us. He seemed reasonable.”
I stare north, in the direction of where the boat would be. “If the boat is real, why didn’t he ever tell you about it?”
A frown creases her brow. “I don’t know. But what I do know is that everything else in the map is accurate. The ridges, the mountains, everything is where it’s depicted on the map. Even the boulders over there,” she says, pointing at them. “And so why not the boat?”
I shake my head. “Look, even if it exists – and it doesn’t – you’ll never get to it in time.”
“I’d rather die trying.”
We can’t flee, we must stay and fight, I remind myself. The only chance of saving Ashley June is to fight back against the hunters. I raise my voice: “And I’m telling you the only option for survival is to fight them head-on.”
Epap lurches forward. “C’mon, Sissy. Let’s go. Leave him here, already.”
The hepers aren’t stupid. They know a doomed fight when they see one, they know their chances are better if they flee. I need to come up with a plan. One that will convince them to stay and fight. I stare at the hepers. Fear has shrivelled their faces; they look tiny and vulnerable out here in the Vast, without the protection of the Dome around them. And then a thought occurs to me. The hunters don’t even know I’m with the hepers. They must think I’m alone, separated from the hepers, a solo fugitive, and there’s no reason for them to believe otherwise. And the smell of my blood, even across the miles of the Vast, now overpowers any trail of the hepers’ odour.
I look at the hepers, their weapons, the FLUNs. And at the boulders toppled atop one another, high and encaving. I blink. And there it is. A plan.
Sissy steps forward, stands right in front of me with a look of curiosity. “What is it? You look like you thought of something.”
I look at them in turn, locking in on each pair of eyes for a few seconds. “Tuck tail, run away if you’re too scared. But if you want to join me and fight back, I have a plan,” I finally say.
The night merges with black. Not a speck of light in the skies, the stars hidden by gargantuan dark clouds shifting above, bloated continents of brooding darkness. The eastern mountains are gone, their once silhouetted borders breached by blackness.
I am alone. Sitting on the ground, leaning back on a boulder. In my hand is a spear that Sissy gave me right before she disappeared into the darkness. I place the tip of the spear against the palm of my hand and pause. It is all emptiness before me, the Vast stretched in an endless grey that is not quite black yet. Only the boulder I lean back on keeps me company. Its surface is cold and brittle against my back, but in this endless sea of aqueous darkness, its solidity is strangely consoling.
I press the spear tip into my flesh and slice downward.
It leaves a small slash, and only a dribble of blood trickles out. But for the hunters chasing me down, that is more than enough; it is a lighthouse flashing in a sea of darkness.
And only a few seconds later, the cry of hunger slices across the Vast. Already so close, so much louder, the intonations of desire heightened. They will be here soon, in less than a minute.
I fist my hand and squeeze. More blood sluices out. Enough now to overwhelm their olfactory senses; not a chance they will be distracted by any faint heper odour. I feel the pulse of blood against the cut, a push-push of seepage, oddly unsynchronised with the rapid, frightful beating of my heart.
The hepers left me with this spear and nothing else.
A skittering sound, sand tossed harshly across the ground, whispery hisses lisp into my ears.
The hunters have arrived.
I stand up, my knees buckling.
A hazy flush of movement, darting from left to right. Then another in the opposite direction, just outside my cone of vision. Three shapes emerge from the darkness, faintly at first, then attaining definition.
Abs.
Crimson Lips.
Gaunt Man.
And then, solidifying out of the milky grey, two more shapes emerge, phantom-like at first, then all too horrifyingly real
.
