His words land like a stone—I am a prize, something to be snared and caged. A thing to wield power over.
He presses his hair flat against the nape of his neck, then spins around, walking down the center of the schoolhouse, and when he reaches the door, it swings wide, as if someone outside had been waiting for him.
Without another word, he slips out into the faint, dusty light—becoming only a shadow.
The door slams shut, and I sink to the floor. Temples pulsing. Feeling like I might cry. Might vomit.
When he returns… I know pain will be coming with him.
Dust spills in through cracks in the windows, making patterns on the floorboards.
Wind tears against the roof, clapping the wood shingles, and I wonder if it’s another dust storm sweeping over the town, turning the sunlight a dirty gray.
I wake to the sound of latches being slid free, and the door swinging open. I scramble to my feet.
But no one enters. Instead something is pushed inside.
They’ve left me a plate of beans and a single wheat cake, along with a cup of water. Starving, I drop to the floor: the cake is gone in one bite, the water in a single gulp.
I know it’s only a matter of time until Holt returns. He’ll come back, and he won’t be so nice.
Voices echo beyond the walls of the schoolhouse. Horses stamp their hooves for hay and grain. But no one comes to the door. Holt doesn’t return.
And the waiting, the not knowing, is the worst part. Time stretches out as the sun makes slats of light across the schoolhouse floor, a rough measure of day and night. I keep the plate they gave me, tuck it behind the broad desk to use as a weapon, while a nervous ache grows in my chest. I feel like a bird trapped in a box: injured, frightened, knowing my captors have no intention of setting me free.
I lift my hand into the air, imagining the constellations spinning above me, tracing them on the ceiling of the schoolhouse: Orion with its jagged band of bright stars, Rigel glimmering a blue white, Betelgeuse glowing a fiery red—a luminous supergiant that one day will turn supernova.
I rest my head against the wall, the bruise still a pulsing heat at the back of my skull. I need to sleep, but I’m too afraid to close my eyes in case Holt returns. I think about Cricket and Noah—when they woke in the morning beside the lake, the fire burnt low, and found me gone—did they think I slipped away on purpose, heading out on my own? Did they think I left them behind? Or did Holt and his men discover our camp beside the lake—have Noah and Cricket been captured just like me?
Are we all trapped? And no one is coming to save us.
The door swings wide suddenly, bringing with it a gust of sand and ruby sunlight, and a shadowed figure steps into the room.
Holt is back.
He strides up the center of the schoolhouse, hands looped around his wide belt—just as before, there are no guns in his holsters. Yet I suspect he has other ways of inflicting pain… and even death.
Pale streaks of evening light pour through the slatted boards, and he walks to one of the windows, light ricocheting off his face, his scar, the milky hue of his one gray eye. “You’ve eaten?” he asks, speaking to the sunlight. “They brought you breakfast?”
It’s a simple question, one without repercussions. So I say “yes” from my place behind the large wood desk—the only barricade I have. Letting him know that I’m willing to talk.
He cranes his head to me and grins, pleased. He thinks we’re getting somewhere.
Gray eye twitching, he brushes a hand down his dark, oiled hair. “Most of the people in this town are dead,” he says, flicking his eyes back to me, like he’s about to tell me a bedtime story, a tale to help me sleep—about the sick and the blind and the dying. “The rest,” he continues, “fled because of the consumption. And now it’s abandoned, a relic, useless really. Unless you need a place to hide out, to lock someone up until you get answers.”
I think about the dust storm, and the night we spent in the old man’s house. He’d warned us about the nearby town, how it had been quarantined because of sickness.
“Is this Mill City?” I ask.
Holt’s eyes light up. “It is.” And he releases his hand from his scalp, looking relaxed, easy, like we are both swapping stories now.The brand on his forearm is just visible beneath his shirtsleeve, and I nod to it, thinking of the same mark on Noah’s skin.
“Do you make all your men get that?”
At first he looks confused, but then his eyes drop to the red, fleshy mark—a starburst that’s been scorched into his arm. “It ensures their loyalty,” he says, running his thumb over it. “Once they’ve been branded a Theorist, they can never be anything else.”
Unless you’re Noah. Unless you escape and become the Architect—someone who protects me, instead of hunts me. Does Holt even know that Noah is still alive—the young boy who escaped that night into the woods, who nearly killed Holt when he ran a knife along his throat?
His jaw seems to be chewing over something, and his eyes drag from the brand on his forearm back up to me. “They’re loyal,” he goes on, “because they know I’m trying to save them.”
