Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

Elsie gave her sister a withering look. “C’mon, Rach. He just wants to be nice.”

“Suit yourself, grump,” said Carl, unaffected. He shoveled more breakfast into his wide mouth.

It was true: Any kind of celebration they threw in their new home would have to be a fairly scanty one. In the two months since they’d been there, a few of the orphans’ birthdays passed by uncounted save for a few cheers from their fellows and an extra ration of bread for the birthday boy or girl at dinner. Anything beyond that was deemed an extravagance. And so most of the kids kept their celebrations to themselves, not wishing to somehow highlight their destitute circumstances just when they were all trying to get their feet under them. They still had faith in Martha Song’s clear vision for their future: They would build their own insulated world here, free of the strictures of either the Periphery, their previous prison within the boundary of the Impassable Wilderness, or the world of the adults, which loomed beyond the Industrial Wastes like a disapproving parent. Here, they were Living Free. So far, they had the freedom part down pretty well; the “living” side of the equation was proving to be a challenge.

Food was scarce; every day, a scavenging party set out into the occupied areas of the Wastes, pulling half-eaten apples and sandwich scraps from Dumpsters and trash barrels. The stevedores, the maroon-beanie-wearing hulks who populated the silos and warehouses of this industrial zone, congregated for lunch on the stoops and staircases of their factories after the noon whistle; whatever they left behind was quarry for the orphans. While modest, it was enough to eke out a subsistence.

Protection was another matter; not only did they have to thwart the occasional stevedore sentry, still bitter from the hiding they’d received during the Unthank Home uprising, but packs of wild dogs were known to inhabit this reach of the Wastes, putting the children’s lives, if not just their food stores, at risk. Hence the nightly vigil at the perch in the warehouse’s bombed-out stairwell. They all took turns, trading shifts. They’d established a simple system: One whistle meant stevedores. Two meant dogs. They’d gotten it down to a science: In the case of the stevedores, they’d send out a decoy party to lure the sentries farther away from the warehouse. At the sound of a second whistle, they knew to batten down the hatches, secure all the doors, and wait for the marauding dogs to find some other place to terrorize. The rusty machete, which the kids had taken to calling Excalibur, seemed to serve only as a bravery totem: They were all emboldened by it but were a little afraid of what it would mean to actually use it. But with every invasion scare, with every drill, they became more and more proud of the home they were defending. The home that Martha Song had envisioned; just without Martha herself.

That was the thing that still stuck in Elsie’s craw: the fact that two of their family—Martha and Carol Grod—were still, as far as they knew, in the grip of the stevedores. They’d been captured by the stevedores during the orphanage rebellion; their whereabouts were anyone’s guess. This fact had become even more important to Rachel, something she was keen to remind the rest of the kids anytime they felt like they’d become more acclimated to their new situation.

And so, that evening, when the nightly meeting was called to order, Rachel was poised for confrontation. Michael, holding the machete, hushed the crowd: Seventy-three children, varying in age from eight to eighteen, sat around the burning steel drum fire and squirmed to attention. “Unadoptables,” he said. “Gather round.” Even though most of the kids hadn’t earned the title of Unadoptable, they’d all taken it on as a show of solidarity to those who’d been sent off by Joffrey Unthank to molder in the Periphery.

“First off,” said Michael, “we should all wish one of our family a happy birthday. Rachel Mehlberg is—what—fifteen today?”

The crowd murmured their congratulations.

Rachel seized the opportunity. “Thanks. So what about Martha and Carol?”

Michael gave her a weary smile. “We’re going to get to that.”

“When?” challenged Rachel. “We’ve been ‘going to get to that’ for two months now.”

“Well, it will take time. . . .”

“Time enough. We’ve been sitting here like a bunch of, I don’t know, whatevers while our friends—our family!—are out there, being who-knows-whated by those clods. I think it’s pretty simple: We just—” She was interrupted by Michael, who was waving the machete, Excalibur.

“I’ve got the sword,” said Michael. “So you’re talking out of turn.”

“It’s not technically a sword,” one of the boys at Michael’s feet said. “It’s more like a machete.”

“Whatever,” Michael shot back. “Whoever has it does the talking.”

This seemed to quiet the room. Michael cleared his throat and continued.

“Carol and Martha, believe me, are really important to me. Martha was a good friend. She was one of the

first people I met at the Unthank Home.” Here he turned to Rachel. “And I remember it was me who introduced you to Carol, Rachel.” He paused, soaking in the silence of the dead room. “You might even say we wouldn’t be in this situation if I’d had my way. We’d still be happy and safe, all of us, in the cottage in the Periphery.”

“And I wouldn’t be having a birthday,” pointed out Rachel. A few of the other kids nodded sagely; time was literally stopped in the Periphery, the protective boundary around the Impassable Wilderness, and none of the children aged while they lived there. It was part of Martha’s pitch to leave: She, astutely, questioned the benefits of not growing old.

“We’re still getting on our feet here,” said Michael, ignoring Rachel’s riposte. “It’s going to take some time. As soon as we’re strong, that’s when we’ll act.”

“We’re strong now,” said Rachel. “We’ve waited long enough as it is.”

Michael began to interject, to insist to the girl that he was still the one holding the machete, when the rest of group began to howl in support of Rachel: “Give her Excalibur!” “Give it up, Michael!” “Give her a chance!” With a begrudging grimace, Michael walked over to Rachel and handed her the machete, hilt first.

Elsie watched as her sister took the grip of the blade in her hand, weighing it, and walked to the front of the assembly. Change comes over people slowly, gradually, Elsie reasoned. But ever since their exit from the Periphery, along with the revelation that the Mehlberg sisters were able to walk through the boundary itself unaffected, Rachel had become a new person, a stronger person. Gone was the cross-armed girl who seemed to vanish beneath her long, straight hair, her chin burrowing ever farther into her threadbare black T-shirt. The fact that it was Rachel’s birthday today only seemed to underscore how much Elsie’s sister was in the process of some grand transformation that she, Elsie, could barely comprehend.

“Listen up,” said Rachel as she arrived in front of the group. “We’ve got a good thing here, we’ve got a system down. But as far as I’m concerned, the longer we wait to go after Martha and Carol, the more we’re seriously letting them down. The stevedores have them. Who knows what they’re doing to them right now. We owe it to them to be devoting every waking hour to finding where they are and rescuing them. It’s super simple. We’ve been here two months. We can’t afford to wait another two.”

Several of the kids in the audience nodded. Michael stood with his hands in his pockets, alternately watching the girl as she spoke and surveying the crowd.

“I say we do a show of hands. Who wants to start organizing a search-and-rescue party now? Huh? No more waiting.” Rachel’s head was held high as she spoke, the machete sitting comfortably in her hand as if she’d been born to wield it.

Elsie was about to raise her hand in agreement—she had the sense that she would be in the majority, weighing in—when the alarm was sounded: a single, shrill whistle from the perch above the warehouse. It was the unmistakable whistle of Cynthia Schmidt, who was a practiced whistler; it came like a wren’s call. The room was seized with a sudden, palpable fear.

The stevedores were coming.