“I’m sorry, Sefi. Rebel needs you asleep to help you.”
A pinch to my neck makes consciousness slip away again, leaving me roiling with desperation to wake.
Not Menace. Not him. Please!
I trust him least of all the Titans.
Sleep grips me hard, and I forget the world.
Light blazes over the backs of my eyelids in red hues. A new sensation invades like rocks tapping inside my skull. Pain soars like hot fingers crawling through my head, into my brain, and heating my face down to my chest. I hear a scream. It sounds like mine, but it is so…so far away. And suddenly, the pangs vanish. The pressure that’s lived in my head for a decade is gone.
I float among clouds in my mind like when I was a child on Earth Minor. A memory flits through my thoughts of chasing my older siblings, the neighbor kids, and others from our village. Their laughter echoes in an odd way, sharply as if we chased one another in a tunnel.But we always played in the fireweed meadow near the lake.
“Sefi?”
The deep, thunderous voice stirs up the memory. I’m shaken from my dream world of peace and roused in a dark cavern. Voices whisper around me. A hand adjusts something cold against my head.
When I try to sit up, I find myself dizzy and locked in someone’s arms.
“Be still,” he whispers.
I blink and squint up at the voice. Menace gives me a serious look with a finger over his lips.
“Get your ha…”
He covers my mouth with a hand. “Welvirs. Stay still and quiet. You are in no condition to fight. Rebel just removed a chunk of metal from your head.”
“What?” I ask from behind his warm, callused hand.
Menace glowers at me, then slips himself from under my body, sets me down, and slinks into the darkness of the tunnel.
In the shadows, I watch his silhouette stalk toward three others that sneak closer on four legs, growing bigger by the second.
I crawl toward them, not because I can help but because I’m in shock that I canseethem. I’ve always sensed them or had blurry blobs. Not this crisp outline with facial features and defined claws.
Menace doesn’t use a gun, just a blade. His pulsing shape slams into a welvir’s shimmering mass with impressive power and throws it into the second. He jumps over the third, stabs it in the back, then tumbles below a fourth, where he punches his blade vertically through its head.
Menace gets up and stalks toward me but stops halfway to stack up boulders in a wall so no creature can slip through. I can’t help but stare in shock as he moves the large rocks like they weigh nothing.
Behind me, the camp of women and Titans is uneasy. A few others are covered in welvir stains. Some women cry and hold each other.
I should be guarding them with the Titans.
Menace returns and leans over me. Blood drips from his hands and elongated teeth. “What are you doing?”
His muscles flex as he collects me and checks the back of my head. I push against him with everything I’ve got, afraid of what he’ll do to me next. But I’m embarrassingly weak.
“You must be carried. No one else is available,” he snarls. “Don’t fight me. I am trying to help you.”
Menace props me up, hands me a canteen of water, and pulls a dried fruit bar out of his pack.
Thirst surges. I drink heavily and eat the entire ration, feeling guilty the whole time, knowing the women in the main cavern don’t get as much.
Menace squats beside me. “You’ve been out for half a day. We must move camp again.”
“Why are we not with them?”
“I am guarding and trying to give you a quiet place to rest,” he remarks as he squats and balances his forearms on his knees.
