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I walk alone, having left Liam with the medics. My arm’s slung up; the shoulder throbs despite the meds they’ve given me, and the skin tickles at the resFlesh bandage holding the wound together. More support ships cut across the midday sky, banking around the columns of thinning black smoke.
I found Tiran where they shot him, facedown in the mud. Bootprints chewed the ground around him. I couldn’t even hold him to my heart one last time. His body was a ruin I could not bear. I sicked up and fled, gathering just enough courage to return to our house to see if my father somehow managed to hide.
He did not. I have no parents left.
Now I look for my sister in the killing field.
With every body I pass, I feel the window of hope closing. Knowing there’s only so many left. So many steps more till my world falls apart. But I hold on to the stubborn little voice in my head that says maybe she escaped. I pray before I look at each new face, and feel sick as I breathe sighs of relief when it is someone else’s mother, someone else’s sister dead on the ground.
I’m reaching the end of the last row. She’s not here. I don’t see the bright blue of her new shoes. Fifteen bodies left. Ten. And then I slow. Heels sinking into the mud. Stomach raveling into knots. The frantic wingbeat of the flies fills my ears and I’m swallowed by horror.
“No. No.”
A thin body lies on the ground. Its throat has been hacked through to the spine. Red hair encircles her head in a filthy halo. It’s not her. It can’t be her. But her children lie beside her, their pieces twisted like broken toys. And one of her shoes hangs loosely on her foot, covered in mud. The other foot is bare. Her lifeless eyes stare at the sky. Eyes that saw my mother birth me. That used to look down at me with perfect love as we lay in bed together under the covers, whispering of boys and the lives we would have. Eyes that fell in love, that watched four children come from her flesh into the world, made cloudless and empty by some angry young man with a hunk of metal in his hand.
I feel the mud on my knees. My hands.
I claw at my sister’s body.
Someone shrieks in the distance like they’re on fire. And it’s long after the medics pull me away from my dead sister and her dead children, long after they stick a tranquilizer into my shoulder, that I realize the screams are my own.
—
“You must avoid any undue exertion, citizen,” the Yellow is saying. “You’re lucky to be alive. Keep the wound clean. I’ll put your information in the system so the medics at your next stop know to recheck it for infection.” I stare through her, watching an iridescent beetle the size of a thumbnail settle on my exposed knee, several inches below where the paper medical smock ends. Its pigment darkens to match my skin.
“Next stop?” I ask, looking up at the medic. She’s hard into her forties. Sulfur eyes peer out from a mess of freckles. A white-filtered medical mask covers the rest of her face. Despite the sweat on her brow, she’s clean. From a city. Do we disgust her?
“They’re taking you and your nephew to a regional medical center,” she says. “You’ll be safe there.”
“Safe,” I echo.
She squeezes my good shoulder and then Liam’s. “There was a doctor,” I say. “Janis.”
“I’m sorry. None of the medical staff survived.”
She leaves and I lean back in the bed and look down the row of cots. Hundreds of us are clustered beneath the awnings. My pants and the tattered remnants of my shirt are crumpled in a bag at the end of my bed. Liam adjusts his hold on my hand. He hasn’t let go since I woke up. I don’t know what to say to him.
I’m spared the choice when we’re both eclipsed by a shadow. It blocks out the light from the nearby doorway. A man comes through the mosquito netting, drawing the eyes of the doctors, one of whom rushes to him and scoldingly points at some animal that follows him in. The man pushes the animal b
ack out with his foot and then closes the netting. But man isn’t the right word. No bloody way. On the riverbank, he looked like a statue. Moving, upright, he looks like a god. The Gold’s thighs are broader than my da’s chest. His hairy hands hang at his sides like giant, swollen mallets. And his head is bald and shiny with sweat and looks made for knocking down doors. Liam hears his footsteps and begins to shake in fear.
“Are you the one known as Lyria?” His voice soothes like the distant rumble of a clawDrill.
“Yes,” I manage with a dry tongue. “Who are you?”
His eyes, a dark gold, are small and close together. They glitter in a friendly way as he smiles and pushes himself awkwardly through the cramped confines of the medical tent till he’s at my bedside. “I am a man who owes you a great debt, little one. Yes indeed. A great debt. You saved my life.”
“Wasn’t just me.”
“Oh, but it was. I spoke to the Reds at the riverbank, and they told me what you did, despite your wounds. How you swam to the depths for a stranger.” He kneels. “I have many that I love who I will now see again, because of you. So I thank you, child, with all my heart.” His hands swallow mine. He kisses my knuckles.
“Who are you?” I ask again.
He frowns. “You do not know me?”
“That a crime?” He’s taken aback by my tone.
“Telemanus,” he announces grandly. He leans back, pleased at the recognition in my eyes. “I am Kavax au Telemanus. Eaglebreaker. Praetor of the Republic.”
