by Shade Owens
The voice belonged to a brown-skinned woman who was as tall as Biggie, only slimmer. She had puffy black hair, soft eyes, and a small pointed nose. Upon first glance, I’d have assumed her to be the gentle-giant type, but the way she eyed Fisher proved otherwise.
“What makes you our leader?” she went on.
Fisher scoffed and faced her, shoulders slouched and eyelids low. She was either in too much pain to care or simply too tired. Only then did I realize how many women had followed us. I counted nine of them—Hammer; the three women, including the injured one, who were all sitting underneath the shelter tree; and four others who were standing behind the dark-skinned woman, cautiously observing Fisher’s reaction.
“Do whatever the hell you want,” Fisher said. “But whatever it is, I suggest you do it fast because that right there”—she pointed at the oncoming darkness—“ain’t a regular storm.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed on Fisher and then at the dreary sky. “And where are you taking us?”
“I’m aiming for the Working Grounds,” Fisher said. “We’ll be safe inside the waterfall.”
A cold droplet of water exploded on the bridge of my nose, and then another and another.
“We have to move, now!” I shouted, my voice fading behind the sound of massive rainfall.
The power-struggle was set aside, and the women followed closely behind as Fisher ran in the opposite direction of the storm.
“Keep your bow in hand.” Fisher eyed me sideways as we splashed through a shallow stream that had already begun to flood over.
I glanced at her but didn’t respond. The risk of being attacked by Northers still existed—even in a storm. Had their attack backfired on them? Literally speaking? Had the fire spread to their territory? I clenched my jaw, hoping it had. They all deserved to die.
I had no idea in which direction we were moving. Everything was either black, brown, or gray. This wasn’t the Kormace Island I knew. Despite the hidden dangers and lurking enemies, the jungle I’d known prior to the attack was one of untellable beauty and magnificence. Now, as I looked around, I saw nothing but death and gloom. There were no birds chirping; no monkeys playing; no insects singing.
The Northers had taken away the little bit of goodness left in a nightmare filled with cruelty and savagery. How was anyone supposed to survive that? It would have been less torturous to die.
The sound of wood bark being hacked off a tree trunk shook me from my thoughts.
“Get down!” Fisher shouted. Another arrow whistled past her waving arm.
The women did as told and dropped to their bellies. Fisher pushed me hard behind a barren tree.
“Right there,” she said, pointing straight ahead. The Norther stood alone with a bow in her hands and a skull mask over her face. She wore padded clothing, or fur, over her shoulders and chest.
She took aim at our women, who’d dropped for cover, and released. The arrow flew straight, before snapping in half against a tree.
“I’ll distract. You fire,” Fisher said.
I didn’t have time to object. Fisher bolted perpendicular to our attacker with her knife in hand. I watched as the Norther’s masked face turned slightly, following Fisher’s movements. She raised her bow and pulled back.
I wiped my wet hands against the leather of my top and drew an arrow. I could sense the women’s eyes on me, pleading me to save them. I’d killed animals at this distance before, but I’d never fired an arrow at a human being.
But there was no time to think.
Fisher was risking her life, and the Norther was preparing for a clear shot. I swung around the tree and raised my bow, arrow aimed at her chest, and quickly released. But the sound that followed next made my stomach sink.
Crack.
The arrow had landed at the base of the trees, most likely the result of the rain weighing down on my arrow. The Norther’s eyes turned on me, as did her aim. I swung back around the tree just in time for her arrow to stab into bark at the height of my head.
Fisher must have noticed what happened, because she quickly altered her path, beelining straight for the Norther.
What the hell was she thinking?
The Norther pulled back and hid behind two trees attached at their base, their trunks separated only by a narrow gap, before drawing another arrow and pointing it at Fisher.
My clear shot was gone, and Fisher was being completely idiotic. She was going to get herself killed.
Without a second thought, I set my arrow and drew back, eyes fixed on the narrow gap between the trees so intently that everything around me seemed to fade. I envisioned my arrow sliding through the crack and through the Norther’s neck.
With that thought in mind, I released.
At first, nothing happened. But then, the darkness behind the two conjoined trees was replaced by open space. I watched as the Norther fell to her knees, and then flat onto the ground. The women around me slowly stood, eyeing the wounded Norther from a distance like a bunch of beaten dogs.
“She’s down,” I said.
I was shocked by my hit, but I was more frustrated by the fact that these women had done nothing to try to help. But then I realized that not all of Murk’s people had been trained for battle. For all I knew, these women were Farmers, Builders, or Needlewomen. Maybe they’d never held a real weapon in their lives.
Fisher approached the Norther’s body. She reached down, but I couldn’t see what she was doing. She then stood and waved at us, confirming that passage was safe.
“Let’s move,” I said.
Although satisfied and overwhelmingly proud of my shot, my stomach churned.
My first kill on the island, I thought. I’d taken a life. A real, human life. I swallowed hard and avoided eye contact with Fisher as we caught up. My legs were shaking, although not nearly as much as they did when I’d witnessed an attack for the first time.
“Nice shot, kid!” Fisher said, throwing an arm around my neck. She handed me a handful of arrows—one bloody, and the others clean. “Salvage these.”
It was obvious most belonged to our attacker. I slid the arrows into my quiver, nodded, and forced a smile. What had I done? Although I wished the Northers nothing but death, I’d never actually imagined that I’d be the one to grant it.
“Hey.” Fisher loosely swung her knife in front of us. There was a swirly streak of dark blood along its sharp edge, and she slid the flat side of the blade against her thigh to clean it. “You didn’t kill her. I did.”
I caught a glimpse of the body. The Norther was lying on her side, her mask removed, revealing a multitude of straight scars carved in her chin and across her lips. Her neck was slit at the base—Fisher’s doing, I knew—but my arrow wasn’t there anymore.
“Where’d I hit her?” I asked.
Fisher grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled my attention away from the body. “Does it matter? You saved me.”
I stared at her, noting the urgency in her voice. What was she protecting me from?
“Check it out,” Fisher said.
I nearly fell onto my back when she swung back around, her black eyes hovering above a skull-carved mask.
CHAPTER 7
“Why should she get to wear it?”
“Nyla, stop it.”
“Yo, I’m just sayin’. You guys need to start speaking up. You can’t have one person dictate your life.”
“She’s not dictating…”
“They did save us, you know.”
“Yeah, so? She’d be the first to kill you if you ev—”
“Would you guys shut the fuck up?” Fisher tore the mask off her face and swung around. “I’m leading the way, so I’m wearin’ the gear.” She patted the brown fur on her shoulders, which was all wet, bloody, and uncombed. “If we run into another Norther, I’m the first one they’re gonna see.”
No one spoke.
“Glad we’re clear,” she said, before repositioning the mask.
“You know what the worst part is in all of this?
” Fisher asked me, her voice muffled behind the mask.
I cocked an eyebrow.
“All the wasted weed.”
I tried to smile, but I had nothing left in me. I also knew that behind Fisher’s attempt at making a joke, she was tormented inside. She’d lost everyone she cared about. There was no telling whether they were even still alive.
“Jay needs a break,” someone said.
“Who’s Jay?” Fisher said, whipping around so fast a trail of water slapped me across the face.
I watched as the young injured woman—Jay, apparently—hopped through the forest’s muck, then dropped down onto a fallen tree.
“Just a few minutes,” said the woman who’d been helping her.
Fisher stared at her. “You have one minute.”
I leaned back against a giant, ash-stained tree root, which would have normally been covered in moss, and tilted my head back. I hadn’t paid much attention to my body, but the moment I relaxed, I realized that my feet, my legs, and my back were throbbing. My stomach felt like it had shriveled to the size of a raisin, and my chapped lips remained intact only due to the water dripping down my face.
I parted my lips, feeling cool droplets fall into my pasty mouth.
Water.
The other women must have noticed me drinking because everyone tilted their heads back as if they’d only now realized it was raining. Fisher brushed her wet hair back and stuck out her tongue.
And then something incredibly strange happened—someone laughed. I wasn’t sure who it had come from, but then, another laugh followed.
Had I missed something?
Hammer threw her head back and joined in on the laughter. I eyed Fisher curiously, but I couldn’t help smile. What was so funny?
Hammer walked out into the open and threw her arms out like a four-year-old girl caught in the rain without an umbrella. She spun around in circles, allowing the water to soak her beaten face.
Several other women joined in, their glistening faces smiling up at the sky. It was like watching starved animals who were given food for the first time in days. Emotion radiated from their bodies—so much so that my smile stretched into a grin.
But the celebration was short-lived. The eldest of the women—a gray-featured, flabby-armed woman—was the first to drop to her knees, causing mud to splatter in all directions. She threw both hands over her eyes and began to sob.
Hammer pulled at her hair, her face reddening and pudgy knuckles tightening, then let out a deep bellow.
The laughter developed into a low-pitch lament, followed by wailing and crying. Fisher avoided eye contact altogether, crossing her arms over her chest and swallowing hard. I stood there, my eyes clouded by a mixture of tears and rainwater, witnessing one of the most mortifying moments in my life—the aftermath of the attack.
It was almost as if reality had finally set in. The wildfire had stopped, and for a single moment, there was nothing to fear, nothing to run from. It made room for reality to slip in.
These grown women were on their knees, covered in dirt and blood, mourning all they’d lost. It was sickening to think that all this pain had been inflicted by one group of individuals—and for what? What did they get out of killing our people? It couldn’t have been territory because they’d burned half the island, if not all of it, to the ground.
I thought of the Norther I’d fired my arrow at—the one Fisher had assured me I didn’t actually kill—and suddenly, the idea that Fisher may have lied satisfied me. I hoped I’d taken that Norther’s life for all that her people had done to mine.
And then, out of nowhere, my mother’s face popped into my head.
What would Mom think if she knew I was having these thoughts? If she knew I was happy about killing someone? I should be ashamed.
But I shook the guilt away by convincing myself that my mother’s opinion had no relevance. She’d never understand what it was like to live on Kormace Island.
Kill or be killed, I repeated to myself.
“This is because of you,” I heard.
Nyla—the dominant, dark-skinned woman—stepped forward, her head tilted forward, her ebony eyes filled with contempt. She was staring at Fisher with such hatred that I feared for her life.
“What was that?” Fisher said, tearing her knife from her holster.
Nyla pointed a stiff finger at her, eyes round and nostrils flared. “Your job was to protect us! To protect these women!” Her voice hoarsened. She aimed her finger at the women on their knees who stared in silence. “So tell me—why the fuck are you here? Why aren’t you dead, like the rest of your precious Hunters?” Saliva came spewing out of her mouth, and her shoulders bounced up and down as she breathed.
Fisher’s grip tightened around her weapon.
My surroundings blurred. Was it true? Were the rest of the Hunters dead? I swallowed hard and held onto the notion that Nyla was lying, that she didn’t know what she was talking about. They couldn’t be dead. They just couldn’t be.
The next thing I knew, Nyla had pinned Fisher up against a tree and the women around us were shouting and roaring a bunch of nonsense. She’d somehow managed to grab Fisher’s hands and was now forcing Fisher to hold her blade against her own neck.
Fisher grunted something, but her throat was being crushed and I couldn’t make it out. I moved in to help her, but two of Nyla’s followers stepped forward, prepared to take me on.
I couldn’t believe it. They were turning on us.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse, the storm finally caught up, a torrential downpour blinding us almost instantly. Nyla’s feet slipped, as did Fisher’s, but her grip didn’t loosen. Instead, she used this momentum and pulled Fisher down into the mud, then pressed a knee into her chest.
Fisher squirmed and kicked, but Nyla was too heavy.
Without thinking, I pulled an arrow out of my quiver and lunged at Nyla, stabbing the arrow’s pointed tip into her thigh. She threw her head back and screamed—a sound almost unheard amid the pouring rain—and immediately let go of Fisher.
I sadistically twisted the arrow as best as I could, my grip slipping, then tore it out of her muscle. If she was going to turn on us, I’d make sure she couldn’t follow us. Nyla swung her long arm backward, hitting me hard across the face. I was propelled into the air and landed on my back in a pool of brown mush.
One of her followers came charging at me with a massive rock above her head, her mouth wide open and her eyes bulging. She must have been yelling, but I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t have the time or ability to move—it was too slippery. She was aiming right for my face. I raised both hands and squinted, convincing myself that two shattered forearms were better than a disfigured face.
But nothing happened.
I peeked through the gaps of my interlocked arms and immediately sat upright. Fisher was standing face-to-face with my attacker, almost as if on the verge of kissing her. I tilted my head, not quite understanding what was going on.
But the moment Fisher took a step back, I noticed her blade slide out of the woman’s belly. She dropped the rock and collapsed to her knees, brown muck splattering into the air.
“If you’re with us, you’re not against us!” Fisher shouted, her mouth nearly filling with water at every word. “We keep moving. Now!”
CHAPTER 8
“It was my sister’s,” Fisher said, playing with her bone-constructed shiv. The rope attaching the blade to the wood was completely frayed, but it did its job. There was a diamond-shaped emerald, or stone, woven into the rope as some sort of decorative piece. Small groves were evenly spread across one side of the yellow-stained blade, and that’s when I realized it wasn’t a bone at all—it was a tooth.
“She was killed before I got here. I found her body near shore when we went looking for a drop. She was stabbed to death.” Fisher pressed her thumb into the blade’s grooves, scanned the dead forest, then shook her head and forced a smile. “She had twenty-two stab wounds. What kind of a p
erson stabs someone twenty-two times?”
I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the shiv, envisioning someone with similar attributes to those of Fisher’s—only pale and chalky-looking—lying there in her own blood.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I considered reaching to touch her shoulder, but I wasn’t great at providing consolation and I presumed Fisher wasn’t any better at receiving it.
She shrugged, still working to keep a fake smile on her face. “It’s my fault. I was her big sister. I was supposed to protect her…” She eyed the women who’d followed us to shelter, seemingly affected by Nyla’s angry words: Your job was to protect us!
“But instead,” she scoffed, “I’m the one who got her involved with dealing in the first place.”
I stared at the ground. I couldn’t imagine the amount of guilt she was feeling. No wonder Fisher was so cold all the time—she’d lost everything.
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand in the toughest way possible, then stood. “Anyways, what’s done is done. Can’t be livin’ with regrets.” She turned her attention to one of our followers, who was keeping guard at the entrance of our shelter. “Yo, Franklin, how’s it looking out there?”
The woman—Franklin—solemnly shook her head.
“Fuck,” Fisher growled, then hugged herself and rubbed her upper arms. “Too damn wet to make a fire, too.”
Several eyes looked up at her as if she’d spat venom at their faces.
“Fire isn’t the reason for all this,” I said, glaring at them. “The Northers are.”
“Brone’s right,” Fisher said. “We still need to survive. And if we’re going to do that, we need food, water, and shelter—and that includes warmth.”
Up until now, I’d forgotten what it was like to be cold. It didn’t help that my suede attire was damp and heavy, causing goose bumps to spread across my arms and back. I’d grown so accustomed to the island’s hot, steamy air that the idea of temperature didn’t faze me.
When I first arrived on Kormace, it felt as though I’d walked into a sauna. But within weeks, my nights spent tossing and turning in a pool of sweat came to an end due to thermal adaptation—something I was quite familiar with having been raised in a country with winters so cold that ice cream cake could be left in your backyard all season.
