“Ava,” I whisper again. The feet are closer. I pull Liam to the side and scramble into the shadows of the rubbish heap. I dive to the ground at the top of a mound and slide halfway down the other side. I tell Liam to be quiet and crawl a little back up the mound to look at the path I fled. A tide of Gammas from my township rush through the gate toward the jungle. I know all of them. I don’t see my sister among them, so I stay silent and hunkered down in the shadow of the rubbish. But as the sounds of their footfalls fade into the night, a terrible fear of being left behind fills me. I’m about to rush from my place to join them, when I see the glimmer of something near the treeline. I want to shout at my kinsmen. Save them. But it’s too late. The glimmer becomes a hundred. Like the jungle itself is grinning and baring its pale teeth. My kinsmen scream as the men in the jungle come out to murder them in the dark with slingBlades.
I flee the screams, push deep into the dumpsite. Metal scratches my thigh as I run up a mound. I lose my balance and pitch sideways, tumbling down. Crash hard into the refuse, barely shielding Liam. He’s crying against my chest. The sweet scent of rot makes our eyes water something awful. A rat skitters across my arm. I push myself up and gain my feet, cradling my little nephew, leg stinging from the wound. Insects throb around my bare calves in thick clouds, biting and crawling. Heat from decomposition pulses up from the garbage. I find a hiding spot and huddle low underneath the remains of a broken industrial washer. Liam’s shuddering in fear, small body racked by silent sobs. I set him down. My arms are numb from carrying him. Men rove near the path now, close to where we entered the dump. Their flashlights slash at the darkness.
I flatten myself to the garbage and push a dirty finger to Liam’s lips. A light beam goes overhead. The mosquitoes buzz around his face, casting shadows. I tighten his jumper so only his nose and mouth are showing out of the hood. Water from the rain slithers and drips through the garbage as the men speak to each other. The voices are like my father?
??s, like my mother’s, like my sister’s and brothers’. But now their tongues sound cruel, all hard and dark and sharp-edged. How can Reds do this to their own kind? One comes close enough for me to see his painted hands. It’s not paint that covers them, but blood, dried and cracking.
The flashlights move on, men speaking amongst themselves. I’m left with fear. Where is my sister? Was she found? I pray she pressed on to the boats. I don’t know what to do, where to go, so I hunch there and peer out at the dark shadows moving along the path. With the flashing of flames from inside the camp, I catch their faces. They’re boys. Some no older than fourteen, with fledgling scraps of beard on chins. Lean and gleaming with sweat. Shouting to each other, they peer into trash heaps, bent like hungry wild dogs.
Liam’s small hands clutch together. In permanent darkness, he can only hear the wounds these angry young men have carved into the night. He trembles. I brush rainwater from his face, wishing I had the power to take him from here, to stop this.
“You’re so brave, Liam,” I whisper. “Goblin brave, you are.”
“Where is Ma?”
“We’re going to meet her. She’ll be at the boats, I reckon. Since you’ve been so brave, I’ve got something for you.” I reach into my pocket and find the chocolate that I kept from dinner to give to him. I press it into his hand.
“Thank you,” he says. As he eats, I hear whispers in the darkness near to us. I ease up and see several sets of eyes catching moonlight from beneath discarded water containers. A family in hiding. A little girl raises her hand to wave to me. I wave back.
We’re not alone.
We can survive this. Somewhere out there Ava is waiting for us. We’ll go to her soon, I just need a breath. But then I smell the fire.
IT BEGINS AT THE EDGE of the dumpsite near the watchtower and soon spreads as more Red Hands light small blazes till a wall of fire rolls toward our hiding place. The air dances and writhes as tongues of smoke slither through the garbage, licking at my feet and legs. Liam screams in fear. I haul him up and clamber from our hiding spot. I run from the flames, but I’m hacking. Can barely breathe. Can’t see, eyes streaming with tears. I stumble over mounds of garbage. Legs sliced by metal and glass and feet sinking in mire up to the knee.
Then, faintly, I hear the voice of a young girl calling to me through the smoke. It drifts to me like nursery song. So small and gentle. And then I see her in the chaos of ash, waving her arm frantically for me to find my feet.
I stumble up and follow her voice to find a seam in the smoke where I can gulp down clean air. There’s others running ahead of us. Twenty, forty manic souls stumbling through the garbage, away from the flames, all bound for the river, where the fishing boats are moored. I clear the smoke and heave for air on the edge of the dumpsite. Other refugees stream ahead of us through the brush, going toward the boats.
Cradling Liam, I join them and spare a look back. A pillar of smoke rises from the burning dump, a smear against the orange dawn. The sun rises over the camp that was once my home.
Ahead, mothers run with children and tattered scarves flowing behind them. Young men stumble on, all earthly possessions left behind, carrying elders or wounded friends. It’s not just Gamma. Not just the collaborator clan. I rush with the masses through the green underbrush toward the flowing river. Weeds slap my shins. Mud clings to my feet. We’re so near the river. Almost free of the night when I hear a scream ahead of us. Then a second.
In the muddy plain beyond the brush, a woman has fallen to her knees. Her children behind her. Her hands outstretched, begging for mercy. The refugees have stopped, making a staggered line. I can’t see past them. Before me, an old man falls to his haunches and sits in the mud, staring emptily ahead.
In Lagalos, when the headTalks wanted to clear a tunnel of a pitviper infestation, they would light fires and force the pitvipers from their hiding places among the gears and nooks and crevasses. Now we’re the snakes. The Red Hand lit fires to force us from our refuge in the dump to bring us here. Barring our way to the boats is a staggered line of twenty young men covered with soot and sweat and carrying automatic weapons. Their hands are covered in red to the elbows. A lone woman stands with them. The same I saw kill Tiran at the shuttle. Her rusty hair is streaked with white. Half her face marred with terrible scars. The other half is worn beauty. She wears an armored vest and carries a slingBlade brown with blood. She says something to a man, who lifts his gun.
Time is stuck with us in the mud.
I push Liam behind me. There’s a crack. Something hot and salty sprays my face. I wipe my eyes, hands coming away red. I see the old man sitting in the mud wobbling now. His head strangely lopsided. His body shudders again. Only in the back of my mind do I realize metal is doing this to him. Another bullet rips through him and he pitches sideways, howling. The children shriek and try to run. Metal shreds them, kicking their heads back, contorting their bodies into a manic dance. I push Liam down. Something hot and hard punches me in the shoulder. I’m off my feet and sprawled in the mud. Cool veins of shock trickle through my arm as I suck mud through my nose.
This is not real.
This is happening to someone else. I roll onto my back.
The sounds of the guns fade as I stare up at the blue sky.
I’m rising into it like I did the first time I saw it with my own eyes. Up. Up. Toward a single silver teardrop.
Flying closer.
Closer.
The teardrop glimmers hopefully. Is it the Old Man who watches the Vale? Has he come to take me home to be with my father? My mother? Tiran?
The teardrop divides, becoming three. Or maybe it was always three. And maybe I’m not sinking into the sky. Maybe the sky is falling down on me. I hear in the distance the whisper of angry metal. It’s a ship. Three ships. They leave vapor trails in the sky. One fat. Two thin and quick. “The Republic!” someone shouts a million kilometers away. “The Republic!”
Heartbeat concussions ripple through the earth as missiles fall. Whump. Whump. Whump. The fat ship litters the sky with little sparkling seeds. The seeds begin to fall. Faster. Faster. Coming together like a flight of swallows, then splintering apart a thousand meters above us. One roars straight toward me, a hot stream of metal and vapor. It slams into the mud. A demon of metal in the shape of a man. His armor is orange. His helmet shaped like the face of a snarling canine. He lifts his left fist and points it toward the raider firing line. Sound and fury erupt. Currents of distorted air shriek over the mud. Men run for cover or melt. Then he’s gone, back into the sky, trailing a war howl through an electronic speaker. “—elemanus!”