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“Bravo.”
“When did you arrive?”
“This evening. Can you help me? I came with a child, a boy. They wouldn’t tell me what would happen to him—”
“You should be more worried about your own fate, girl,” she said. “Not even a full night inside and you’re already courting death.”
I raised my chin. “No one did anything to help that prisoner.”
“That prisoner’s name was Joe. He was chosen because he was caught stealing bread.” The woman’s mouth lifted on one side in a mockery of a smile. “Would intervening have saved him?”
I opened my mouth to argue, but the grave expressions on every face in that room gave me pause. How many times had they seen their friends and family fall under the fang? How many times had they felt helpless to stop it? Was I a fool to think I could save anyone when I was just as trapped as the rest of them? “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t have saved him, but doing nothing damns us all.”
The woman’s right brow flicked. “Interesting.”
“Who are you?”
“They call me Matri now.”
“Can you help me find out where the children are kept?” I didn’t bother to hide the desperation in my tone.
“There’s no mystery there. All youngs come to me.”
My heartbeat picked up pace. “Can you—would you give them a message for me?”
The woman tilted her head. “What’s in it for me?”
If she’d punched me in the face I wouldn’t have been more surprised. But it was time for me to stop being shocked and start getting smart. “If you tell them that I’ll get them out of here, then I promise to take you with me when we go.”
A laugh exploded from her thin frame. The other women laughed too, although with less gusto. I let their pitying humor pelt me like rocks. It wasn’t the first time I’d been laughed at that day, but I was beyond caring. I needed to keep myself focused on my goal: Stay alive long enough for Mica and me to get away from this place. Nothing else mattered.
“You’ll get me out? Sure, doll. You’ll be lucky if you’re alive come sunrise.” Shaking her head as she walked, she headed for the door. “Rachel?”
A woman whose rail-thin body swam in her uniform shuffled forward. She refused to look me in the eye, as if the contact would somehow curse her.
“Show her the ropes,” Matri said to Rachel before turning to me. “And you, try not to do anything stupid.” She disappeared through the door, but her laughter lingered like a ghost.
Four
Meridian Six
Rabbit ran into the cave. He waved something in the air. “Six! Six!”
I was sitting in front of the fire listening to Icarus and Dare argue over who should take the blame for how low our food stores had gotten. Happy for the excuse to escape their bickering, I rose from my spot to meet the kid. He thrust a rock into my hands. It was heavy and roughly the size of a grapefruit.
Grapefruit? What a strange thing. When was the last time I’d had one of those? Sometimes when I was young, Mom would bring pink ones home from the neighborhood farmers’ market and we’d share one together on the fire escape outside the
window of our impossibly small kitchen. My mouth watered now, thinking about how the fruit had tasted like sunshine and sugar—sweeter still, because of the company.
“Six?” Rabbit’s voice pulled me out of the tunnels of memory and back to the present.
The meager light from the fire gave the air a reddish tinge and each breath was thick with wood smoke. A far cry from the memory of the bright morning with the taste of sunshine on my tongue. “What’s this?”
“I found it in the story cave.”
The story cave was a spot a few miles away where some of the local rebel troops sometimes left messages for each other. Usually the messages took the form of symbolic graffiti on the rock walls, but the rock he’d handed me was obviously a message as well. On the surface of the rock—it obviously hadn’t originated in a cave, because it was tumbled smooth, as if it had spent a good time in water—there was a six-pointed star painted on the surface. Under the star someone had written ASAP.
“Saga,” I whispered. He was the unofficial leader of the squads of rebels who hid all over the Badlands, trying to evade capture. I hadn’t seen him for several months. After the factory explosion we’d pulled off the previous October, we’d all agreed to go to ground for the winter. Our little squad had spent most of the last couple of months in the network of abandoned caves about twenty miles from Saga’s bunker, which we called Book Mountain. We could have spent a comfortable winter in there with him, but with the Troika hunting us down, we didn’t want to risk all of us being captured together.
