“No. I know your daughter and I know you. You will take me to her cave,” Harper demanded. She walked forward a few paces and squatted near Orin’s face. “The Fathers are going house to house to explain our current dilemma and I’m sure they’ll help watch the rest of your children while you help me. And, it should go without saying, but if we don’t return with a runaway in a specific amount of time…” She stood and pointed at Octavia. “You. Don’t leave this house.”
“I can be with my family,” Octavia said and she crossed her arms and prepared for a verbal battle. “I’m no danger to you.”
“No real Child of the Lake would betray the oath to help my sister,” Harper said with as much menace as she could muster. “Treat everything with suspicion.”
“She was injured. Dehydrated. Barely gave us anything…”
“And all that time she couldn’t be tracked?” Harper stomped her foot with a childish burst. “Orin, let’s go.”
Lark trembled. Orin was still on the ground, panting, struggling to get up, and Octavia stood with a look of pure disgust at Harper. She had never heard her aunt speak with such force, and even though she recognized it as fear, she couldn’t help but wonder how long that version of Harper stayed inside, bottled up, bubbling to show itself.
“Fine. I’ll take you,” Orin drawled as he crawled up off the ground and limped his way toward the front door.
“You have this all wrong,” Lucy tried again, but everyone in the room could tell it was useless.
“You don’t get to make these choices in isolation,” Harper replied. “You must follow the oath or you don’t get the benefits of their protection. It’s simple and it always has been. Why do you always think you know better than anyone else? This is not just your family at stake. Can’t you understand that? Or are you too singularly focused on her…” Harper trailed off but whatever she was about to say stuck to Lucy, freezing her in fury.
Her aunt didn’t wait for her mom to respond. Harper pushed Orin outside, his strength weakened by the weapon her aunt wielded, and into the yard, where they disappeared into the growing dark, their solar flashlights on and growing fainter until the crunch of the snow disappeared.
No one wanted to move.
Only Lark seemed afraid and tentative, her heart still pounding from witnessing her aunt’s burst of violence.
After an appropriate amount of time to pause, Lucy turned to her daughter and tilted her head to the ceiling. She paused, unclear what to say, and Lark didn’t know what to say either. Everything spun inside her like a jumble of mixed up pieces—so much thinking, rethinking, processing. She gave her mother time to start the conversation and counted in her head: one, two, three, four…
“Mom—” Lark started.
But before Lucy could rush forward and envelop Lark in her arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, Octavia stepped forward and waved her hands to call attention.
“We don’t have much time…” the girl said in a frantic whisper.
“We anticipated they’d drive most of the way so we’re good on time…” Lucy tried, but Octavia shook her off.
“My father left me clear instructions for me,” Octavia said with clipped resistance. She didn’t look at Lark or anyone else, only Lucy. “I’m not supposed to put the plan into motion until I know my siblings are safe—”
“We didn’t anticipate they’d call for an immediate escape from the area. It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Lucy continued to apologize, and Lark knew she was missing a key understanding of what was going to happen next.
“They listened to Elijah talk about the empty camp. The missing and dead people. Our orders are clear…and I will not go until they’re safe at the Lodge like we planned,” Octavia said.
Grant and Lucy exchanged a tense glance noticed only by Lark.
“No doubt they have someone watching the cabin to see if you leave,” Lucy said. “It’s impossible.”
“Octavia, we will go and do what we can. But we don’t have a lot of time for you to make an escape,” Grant apologized, reaching out. “The Fathers might already be on their way and we can’t afford losing you, too. I can’t risk it. They capture you and our whole plan is lost.”
“The whole plan is lost if I can’t go back for my siblings.”
Again, her parents stopped and stared at each other—lost in a conversation between just the two of them. Her mom closed her eyes and put her hands up in surrender. “I understand, Octavia, I do, but—”
“Then I won’t go.”
Lucy’s shoulders fell and she brought her hands to cover her eyes.
“Sending you is not an option,” Grant said to the Child of the Lake with the same parental authority he used to make a decision with Lark and she turned to watch him—stricken to hear him use that tone with someone else.
“What about her?”
Octavia lifted her hand and pointed at Lark.
It was the first time anyone in that room verbally acknowledged she was there, and Lark pointed a finger at herself, shocked by attention.
At Octavia’s suggestion, Lucy and Grant turned to examine Lark slowly and they stared, agape, as they pondered her existence in that room as if it were novel and new.
Lark’s body flooded with pure adrenaline. They’d never looked at her like that before—with contemplation and pride. They were considering it.
“Could she—” Grant started, keeping eye contact with Lark who looked between both her parents with nervousness.
Could she what? What could she do? Lark wondered.
“She could,” Lucy said with a cough. “She can. We can’t risk sending Octavia back…couldn’t be us…”
Lark was unhinged from reality: who were these people who just trusted her with a real job? Her whole life she’d crawled through the ambiguity of spying, feeling ashamed for questioning the status quo, and as if it hadn’t left an indelible mark on her personhood, and her parents now shrugged it all away—of course, we were lying: of course, you had a reason to feel this way.
But there was no time to unpack the layers of their deception and secrets—that would come later. Now, they considered her for a task.
And now, now they said the other girl’s name with ease and looked to her for a favor. That was not the world she’d inhabited that morning.
“Okay, I need you to listen to me. Carefully. I’m not repeating directions.” Lucy spun and walked to Lark, hands on hips, her authority clear. “Your dad and I are sending you outside the border. You need to go into the Father’s territory and bring back Octavia’s brothers and sisters. At any moment, they could be taken by the Fathers and kept or stolen from Orin.”
“Stolen?” Lark started, but Lucy was serious about her rules. She walked closer and held up her hand to cover Lark’s mouth.
“Enough. You trust me. And you’ve waited for something you could do…this is it. You need to leave now,” Lucy instructed. Her mother swept into motion, burying herself into a seldom-used closet to produce a beige backpack. “Your emergency bag.”
“That’s my bag…” Lark repeated slowly with the dawning realization that they really were going to send her outside the border. Now. They were sending her out of the border at that very moment. “My monster bag? From when I was a kid? Only taken if I need to run. Why would I need to run? Where am I going?”
Lucy rolled her eyes and this time Lark knew she had to keep quiet. Listen. She gritted her teeth and turned, jaw clenched, her attention full.
“She needs to go now.” It was Octavia, speaking with intensity. “I will go prepare her for travel, but I’m not leaving until I received the code,” the girl said with a careful stare. “The Fathers will use them as leverage. If my family is—”
“Our goals are the same,” Grant said, short and clipped, but he was looking at Lucy.
Lark dipped her head and knew she didn’t have time to be afraid. But she was still afraid. If she needed to walk into land she’d been forbidden to go into for he
r entire life, she would. She would do anything for her family, too. The action of leaving, the pack heavy on her back, didn’t feel real.
Lucy walked up to her daughter and cupped her face in her hands. “I know you’re ready for this,” she said.
The affirmation gave her goosebumps and she dipped her head, flushed.
“Mom—” Lark said when she lifted her face, and Lucy acknowledged her worry for a brief moment with a long kiss on her forehead. “This isn’t how I imagined it…”
“You thought you’d be sneaking out the first time?” Lucy asked with a small laugh.
Lark laughed, too, but also tried not to cry. Yes, she nodded, that was exactly how he pictured it. All her life she’d waited to stumble upon a secret—she plundered through drawers and rifled through long-forgotten stories, she’d waited at borders and listened under doorways. She had journals of conversation snippets for everything she heard when no one else was listening; she recognized the small signals of despair in someone’s life, but she understood it gained her nothing but threads of larger stories.
“Depart unseen…get back as fast as possible…Octavia, Octavia?” She turned to face the young and blank-faced girl. “Get her there.”
“A map,” Octavia nodded and walked toward Lark, one hand extended, the other fishing in her pocket. “When you get there…my brother will ask for verification. Tell him the code word is Kansas Rose. When he’s safe, he’ll tell you a code word. And you bring that code to me…”
“Where? Here?” Lark asked in a small voice. Her determination was growing but she didn’t want to admit how afraid she was.
Octavia rolled her eyes.
Lucy nodded. “Yes, back here. Octavia won’t proceed without you and—”
“We need you, Larkspur. Come on,” Grant added.
Before she could fully understand, Octavia brought out an old pen, black and thick, and grabbed Lark’s arm. On her wrist and up her arm, she made a crude and semi-permanent drawing. In a scrawling script, Octavia wrote ‘TWC’ and Lark knew what she meant: The Witch’s Castle. It was a physical monument that separated their land. Octavia circled the spot and drew an arrow traveling down and to the left.
“Underneath the castle, you’ll find a tunnel. Take it to the end. You’ll be at the lake.” She drew something resembling a puddle on her bicep. “My house is the third from the left of the dock.” A line and a star. “Come back the way you came.”
“Under the Witch’s Castle?” Lark repeated. She swallowed. All her life, she knew about the hollowed out shell of a brick home on the edge of the property between the Colony and the Children of the Lake. It was the biggest symbol of their shared perimeter.
“No light. Hide from all interactions with others. Bring the kids here and then I’ll move them to the safe room.”
Lark took a breath and cleared her throat. She was going to say something profound about her life building up to this day, but before she could, her mother grabbed her black hooded coat and shoved it into her hands, and without another word, she directed her out into the snow and shut the door.
For a moment, Lark hesitated, but then she took a deep breath and started to move in the direction of the Witch’s Castle. Once her eyes adjusted to the dark, she slipped into a steady jogging pace. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. With each step, her body seemed to say: Danger, danger, danger, danger. But Lark tried to turn it to: Hurry, hurry.
She’d never been outside the perimeter.
And that alone was too much to handle in one day.
Add to that all the other things she’d learned and she was a mental zombie. It was too much. All of it was too much. In the moment, of course, she’d gone along with her parents’ plan and the intensity of the situation, but in the moonlight outside the approaching Witch’s Castle and the hidden tunnels, the reality of her situation hit her like a sickening cement block to the chest.
Lie after lie, everything she knew about her world was crashing down.
Chapter Eleven
Aboard the Mama Maxine 14
The Atlantic Ocean,
off the coast of the former island
of Dominica
KOZO
His back was sore from Ainsley’s crude surgery, but after he learned she’d help amputate Ethan’s leg, he felt like he’d been left in better shape. The tiny sting of pain was nothing compared to the heartache he felt over Megumi and he prayed to his jiji to send his sister a message of forgiveness somehow.
They used to do that together, too. Pray over the ocean for messages to reach the people who needed them, and even though he knew it might be too late to save his sister, he knew he had to try—no matter what Ethan said.
It was morning and the boat made its way into the winds, charting a course to islands…land islands. Kozo found himself anxious and exhilarated as the bell rang on the deck and Ainsley called them up to each take a position to safely see the boat into port.
Kozo’s heart kept leaping as the land came closer and they sailed into the southern bay of the island. An extended archipelago of sand greeted them, as did a few anchored boats in the crystal blue waves. The water in the eastern and northern Atlantic never turned that shade of blue—a turquoise ring around a rocky coast.
They ran the boat on land and took turns climbing down off the bow to the beach below. Kozo hesitated but then stepped down. He felt his feet sink into the wet earth and he bent and picked up a handful of sand, his eyes adjusting to the green skyline of trees and abandoned weather-beaten buildings.
He was on land.
Ethan limped with difficulty through the sand, but soon they hit the pavement of an old road. If he was in pain or desired a different source of mobility, he never said. Malcolm, Monroe, Ainsley, Ethan, and Kozo created a motley crew—Kozo still in his kimono.
“It’s a three-hour walk to the gardens,” Ethan announced. “Maybe we go halfway today. Camp. Talk.”
“Then this is where I part from you,” Kozo announced. He stepped forward and took Ethan’s hand and shook it with forced bravery. “I can get to Bermuda from here.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Ethan tried again, but his arguments were worthless.
“Two minutes on land and he’s bailing,” Ainsley teased with good humor, helping to bypass the fight brewing between the man and the child. “Maybe walking on flat ground makes you feel a bit queasy?” She handed him a container of water but he declined.
“I don’t mean to be ungrateful for you saving me…”
“But you’re gonna waste it. Go off into the fray without any idea of what you’re up against? Dying before you ever get to that island is a possible blessing, but even then…what purpose would your death have? That’s not being a hero.”
“Dying valiantly saving my sister,” Kozo tried but already he felt the weight of Ethan’s remarks. The sting of undoing his nobility and belittling his intentions. “I admit it might seem rushed—”
“Two days,” Ethan said. “Give me two days before you take a boat and go die. Look, kid, I don’t have a vested interest in you specifically, but I got a lot to lose by you running off and drawing attention to my little rescue scheme out there…let alone the fact that I hate seeing people die. If they don’t need to.”
“Do some people need to die?” Kozo asked to be cheeky but he already knew the answer and he could tell by Ethan’s face that he wasn’t amused.
“You’re annoying him by asking unimportant questions,” Malcolm interjected with a snide smile. Kozo learned a way to tell the two-fair-headed boys apart. One was taller and had a mole on his neck. The other shorter, no mole, and a jagged scar on his hand. “He’s been known to let people die who annoy him.”
“I’ll answer it. Leave him alone. If I can save a person’s life…spare death…I choose that one-hundred percent of the time. But killing…” he trailed off, shook his head. “I think killing is complicated.”
“He’s a scholar, too,” Ainsley teased his rambling explan
ation.
Ethan scratched his head and ignored her. “Give me two days,” Ethan repeated to Kozo. “We’ll swap stories, introduce you to the hot springs, and I’ll tell you all I know.”
“Then I go to Bermuda,” Kozo repeated. He knew he was a broken record, but it felt wrong not to go after Megumi. Death or no death—it felt immoral.
“Sure,” Ethan conceded and he scratched his forehead. “I can’t stop stupid.”
Malcolm and Monroe chuckled and began to march north on the hot pavement. The entire island grew quieter and quieter the further inland they walked, and soon Kozo became disoriented by the eeriness of a world away from the water. The roar of the sea was still out there, barely audible, but his body couldn’t reconcile the differences. Deep down, he wanted to weep—trees popped up around them in glorious shades of green and a bird unlike anything he’d ever seen squawked through the sky. Land. Earth and dirt and trees. Everything smelled fresh and clean, so different from the smell of death and rot he’d become accustomed to.
Did the whole earth look like this magical place? Was it all beautiful and imposing? Kozo tried to reconcile Jiji’s stories of Japan, the forests there that poured down lush green from the heaven. Mt. Fuji, a rock bigger than his imagination, grew up out of the earth somewhere beyond the fragile Trash Islands.
Ainsley appeared by his side.
“I know this is a lot to process in a short amount of time,” she apologized with an empathetic smile. “Ethan just wants to save your life. He isn’t giving up on your sister.”
“I understand,” Kozo bowed slightly and looked away.
“You must’ve seen a lot out there on the sea,” she prodded.
They walked side-by-side, heads down, not looking at each other. Kozo shuffled and paid attention to the stretch of road beneath his feet. How far had he ever walked in a straight line without stopping and turning around? From boat to boat and around and around, but never straight, all this land, all this room.
The Bedrock Page 15
