Uprising_A Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Novel

by Kate L. Mary

  “I know.” I gave my sister’s hand a squeeze, and the pain throbbing through me distorted the next words. “It is okay. You did a good job.”

  “Where is everyone?” Mira asked her.

  “Still hiding. They are terrified. They refuse to come back here, Indra.”

  “They must.” I turned away, still holding my sister’s hand, and looked at our ruined village. “We must put our people to rest and gather as many supplies as we can. And soon. We should get out of here before the Fortis decide to make a second sweep.”

  “Where will we go?” Anja asked, the tremor in her voice matching the one in my legs.

  “The caves.”

  I turned back to face my sister and my closest friend, my gaze moving over them slowly. Taking stock. We had not lost everything. Not yet. It would not be an easy adjustment, not for a group of Winta women, but we could make it if we were strong.

  “But first,” I said, “we must gather the bodies.”

  None of the men survived the massacre on our village, meaning twenty-three women and children were all that remained of the Winta people. Even that small number was a miracle I could only attribute to Anja’s quick thinking. I had not realized my little sister could be so strong, but as she led the remaining women back into the village, I saw right away that she was holding up better than most of the others.

  I expected Xandra to greet me with bitterness, but when she stumbled from the woods, there were tears streaming down her cheeks but no malice in her eyes. She threw her arms around me just as Anja had.

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  “You did what you thought was right, just as I did when I led Bodhi into the city,” she replied. “You were right, Indra. We cannot stand by and watch our people suffer like this. Not anymore.”

  I looked around at the other women and children of the Winta tribe. “I am not sure we have much of a choice. There are so few of us left now.”

  “The strong have survived,” Xandra assured me.

  “I hope you are right,” I said.

  We worked together to gather the dead. Isa was not the only surviving member of her family. Emori had made it out as well, thanks to Anja, her baby—Lysander’s baby—with her. Together, Emori and Isa gathered the remaining members of their family, their mother and two younger sisters, and burned them right on top of the ashes of their family hut. We did the same with anyone we could identify, burning families side by side so they could travel into the afterlife together, and those we could not identify we gathered in the center of the village and burned together.

  Anja found Jax among the men, a spear still in his hand and a wound through his heart, and I helped her carry him to his own hut. That my sister had been so close to becoming the wife of this boy cut me in a way none of the other deaths had, not even my mother’s, because it made me think of Bodhi and everything I had lost since the day he was ripped from my life.

  Once we had finished burning the bodies, we searched the wreckage of our village for anything that might prove useful to us. Bowls, furs, knives, and herbs, as well as clothes or weapons. The only cart our village had was gone, along with the few horses, meaning we would be forced to carry everything ourselves. No one complained or said they could not do it, though, and to me it seemed like a sign that Xandra had been right. The strong had survived.

  Before leaving for the forest, we assembled in the center of our ruined village, the twenty-three remaining members of the Winta tribe, and performed the remembrance ceremony. I wielded the tebori tool while Anja sat at my side, holding the bowl of dye. One by one the survivors knelt in front of me, the fire blazing at their backs as I marked them in the symbols of the people they had lost. After the devastation of the attack, most of them looked like different people when they stood, and I had to wipe enough tears and blood from their faces to fill all of Sovereign Lake.

  When it was my turn, Xandra took the tebori. I had too many marks on my cheeks already. For the parents I had never known, the father I had lost too young, the husband who had come and gone faster than he should have, and now for my mother. Had I been a different person, I would have thought it unfair, but I was an Outlier, and for me life had never been fair.

  I did not feel the pain when Xandra tapped the points into my skin, or when she rubbed dye into the dots she had marked me with, but when I had to repeat the process on my sister’s face, it seemed like every press of the tebori against her skin was marking me all over. Her blood was my blood, her tears were my tears, and her pain was my pain.

  10

  The group was worn and dejected by the time we arrived at the cave, but having the comfort of the stone walls surrounding us seemed to lift our spirits. We had all spent the previous night without shelter, Mira and I in the wastelands, Xandra and the women she had saved from the city in the Lygan Cliffs, Anja and the rest of our group huddled together in the wilds. The cave was not home, but being surrounded by stone helped everyone relax, and thanks to the things I had stolen from the Fortis over the last several months, we had supplies in addition to the ones we had managed to find in the ruins of our village.

  I made a fire while Xandra and Mira distributed furs and clothes. People settled in, and the food I had hidden in the cave was passed out, and I began to think we might be okay. We had lost a lot, but I knew from my own time in the caves that it had fresh water and animals for food, and even the warm pool in the very far cave that we could use to get clean. All hope was not lost. The women with me were scared, but I could show them we were capable of surviving without men. We were strong.

  “The food we have will only last tonight,” Xandra told me.

  “I know,” I said as I looked the group of women over. “We will have to hunt.”

  “But none of us has ever hunted,” Emori replied.

  The baby Lysander had forced upon her fussed, drawing my attention her way. The child’s eyes were wide, and she had the face of her mother, but her eyes were those of her father. Big and gray despite her dark skin. Those eyes did not make her the monster her father had been. She was innocent of those sins, but I still could not find anything but disgust in my heart when I looked at her.

  I looked away from the baby and focused on Emori instead. “I have hunted, and I will teach you.”

  “You expect us to go out into the woods and hunt for animals?” Tris asked.

  The girl was young, only in her nineteenth year, and she had always had someone to look after her. Her parents at first, and then her husband, but after yesterday she was a widow, like me. If she wanted to survive, she would have to learn to take care of herself, something the women in my village had never done before.

  “I know it can be scary,” I said as I leaned down to scoop a couple knives up off the floor, “but it is necessary. Tonight we will not leave the cave. There are plenty of rats in the next chamber, and there is also water, as well as other creatures that will help us survive. But eventually, we will need the animals and vegetation the wilds provide if we want to survive. We no longer have our husbands and fathers to depend on. We must take care of ourselves.”

  No one spoke, and the wide eyes of Tris told me she was not yet ready to accept how much things had changed. She would do it, though, because if she did not, she would die. This was not the same as when I went into the forest to hunt. I had used hunting as a distraction, and so I could feel closer to Bodhi. Now, though, if we did not hunt, we did not live.

  Still, they were in shock and needed time to register what had happened, so I chose not to press the issue. Instead, I grabbed a torch and lit it. “I will hunt by myself tonight.”

  No one moved except Mira, who grabbed a couple bowls off the ground and said, “If you show me where the water is, I can bring some back for us to drink.”

  I gave her a grateful smile before turning toward the tunnel leading into the larger chamber, and Mira followed behind.

  I held the torch out in front of me to light the way. Weeks had passed since the night I ve
ntured deeper into the caves, and I was not sure if the little bugs I had led from the furthest cavern would still be around. When I emerged from the tunnel, though, I was pleased to find dozens of the creatures. In fact, it seemed to me that there were even more present than the last time I had been here, and the light from their glowing bodies lit up nearly every corner of the room.

  “What are they?” Mira asked when she stepped out of the tunnel behind me.

  “They live here,” I said.

  Then, while she stood at my side staring at them in wonder, I told her about my first trip through the tunnels and how I had fallen in the water, and how I could have easily gotten lost forever without the little creatures.

  “They are amazing,” Mira said when I had finished.

  “They will help us.” I snuffed out the torch and set it aside. “There are tunnels everywhere, and the bugs will help us see so we can explore them. We could live here.”

  Mira moved deeper into the cave, toward the opening of a tunnel I had never ventured into. “There could be rooms. We could each have our own space.”

  “We will need lots of fur to keep us warm, but it could work.”

  She turned to face me, smiling for the first time since we left Sovereign City. “We could have a home here, Indra. We could start over and be safe from the Fortis.”

  “It will take a lot of effort,” I said. “But you are right. We can make it work.”

  I turned from Mira and headed to the back of the cave where the sound of little feet scratching against rock was the loudest. The rodents living here were smaller versions of the ones in the wastelands, although not hairless. These were covered in black fur, which helped them blend into the darkness of the cave—almost as if they had evolved that way over time—but the scratching of their claws made them easy to find if you knew what you were looking for. They must have survived by eating the small bugs living in the crevices of the rocks, because they always seemed to be digging, and tonight was no exception.

  Unaccustomed to people, the rodent I came upon did not try to run when I approached, but instead only paused to glance my way before going back to its digging. I speared it easily and then sliced the animal open and gutted it, tossing the entrails on the ground for the little bugs in hopes that the promise of food would keep them in the large chamber. Just like before, they swarmed the guts. One rodent was not large enough to feed all of us, so I speared three more and repeated the process as I quietly recited the prayer reserved for animals.

  “May your death provide life to our people and sustain us through hard times.”

  The meat from four of the rodents would only make a dent in our hungry stomachs, but we had other food for tonight, and I was too exhausted to think about trying to rustle up more of the creatures.

  When I turned to face Mira, I found her standing in the same place, watching me in silent awe.

  “What is it?”

  “You are so proficient in everything you do.”

  “I have had a lot of practice over the last few months,” I said.

  “You really believe we all have this strength in us? That the men in our village have been wrong to tell us we are too weak to take care of ourselves?”

  “I do,” I told her. “The men I have killed are proof of that.”

  “It will be hard to convince the other women.”

  “Then I will have to show them.”

  Mira and I went back to the main chamber where the women cowered, huddled together and totally silent, as if terrified to make even the smallest sound. Once there, I speared the dead rodents with sticks and passed them out to be cooked, talking the entire time about how I had killed them. Then I told them about the marsoapian in the wastelands, and the other animals I had hunted in the wilds over the last few months, before finally moving on to the men who had died at my hands.

  I started slowly, easing the others into the idea that I had taken human life. No matter how I broached the subject, I knew I would be met with both shock and resistance. And I was right.

  “You have killed Fortis hunters?” Xandra was the first to break the silence, and even in the shadows of the cave it looked as if her dark skin paled a little at the thought.

  “I have.” I did not look down, but instead held her gaze to show her I was not ashamed. “You must have heard the rumors in the city, about the Fortis men who have gone missing in the wilds. That was me. They died at my hands, from my bow and my knife. I have killed dozens of them, both men and women, and I do not plan to stop.”

  She said nothing, and I looked around, my gaze sweeping over what remained of my tribe. Their expressions ranged from shock to awe, and even a little fear, but I saw something else there, too. Hope. I saw it shimmering in Emori’s eyes as she looked up at me, her baby in her arms and her sister at her side, the three of them the only remaining members of a family that just yesterday had numbered six. Xandra recovered from her shock quickly, and her expression was the same, only her eyes had more fire in them.

  Anja, my little sister, was crying, but she stood tall and held her head high when she said, “Our mother told me you were stronger than the men gave you credit for. After you started hunting and the Head told her that you were putting yourself in danger, she would not listen. She said you could look after yourself. She said you were brave. She was right.”

  “It is not just me,” I said, looking around again.

  I took my sister’s hand and focused on her. She was much younger than I was, and at times I found it difficult to imagine her as anything but a child. However, standing next to her now, I saw a fire in her that had not been there before. One that had sparked when our mother stood up to the Head, but had grown into an inferno when she led that group of women to safety. She was as strong as I was. They all were.

  “We can do this together,” I said, my voice rising, echoing off the walls of the cave. “I know none of this feels real right now. I know you are tired and hurting. But this is possible. All we have to do is work together.”

  I met Mira’s gaze as the words she had spoken to me only the night before echoed through the room. Together we could do this.

  11

  Over the next few days, as the shock wore off and the women grew more accustomed to our new surroundings, as well as more sure of themselves, we moved deeper into the caves. We used the glowing bugs to explore different passages, finding that Mira had been right. There were dozens of little alcoves throughout the caverns, many of which were ideal for living spaces.

  The first chamber was the only one vented for smoke, and we continued to use it for cooking, but otherwise we spent most of our time deeper in the recesses of the cave. It allowed people to not only relax, but it also helped them feel more secure. As if the caves would protect us from the Fortis or anything else the Sovereign might throw our way.

  People began to claim their own spaces in the caves, and the fur we did have was split up, but it would not be enough to keep us comfortable on the rocky floor. We needed more, either through trading or hunting, and I was anxious to get out into the woods and teach the other women how to shoot.

  “It is time to go out and hunt,” I said to the group on our third morning in the caves.

  Up until that point, I had stayed inside, killing the rats living in the shadows, but it could not last. They had become wise to us and were getting more and more scarce as the days passed. Plus, it took too many of the tiny creatures to feed our group. If we wanted to thrive, we needed the bigger game living in the wilds.

  Most of the women stared up at me like they did not understand the words I had just uttered, so I said, “We need the fur and the meat.”

  Mira was the first to stand. “I want to learn.”

  “Good.” I gave her a grateful look.

  Anja, my baby sister, who until three days ago had still seemed so young in my eyes, stood next. “Me, too.”

  Around the room other women nodded, and it almost seemed as if they were slowly starting to wake up. T
he change filled me with more than relief. It filled me with hope and pride. We were strong, and even though getting the other women to acknowledge it would be difficult, this was a step in the right direction.

  The first few groups to go out with me were small, consisting of only Mira, Emori, Anja, and Xandra. Despite the obvious desire in the other women’s eyes, most of them were still too afraid. Or perhaps it was shock.

  Whatever it was, they were used to being taken care of, and with no men around, it did not miss my attention that their gazes had turned to me. It was a burden I allowed for now, knowing it would take time for them to realize they were strong enough to take care of themselves, but also because I felt responsible. No matter what anyone said or who we cast the blame on, a part of me could not let myself off the hook for what had happened. It was my blade that had drawn Lysander’s blood and sent the Fortis to our village. The deaths of our people were on my head, and I had no doubt it would follow me into the afterlife and drag me down to the underworld. But until then, I would do everything I could to save what was left of my people, even if it cursed me.

  So I focused all my efforts on Mira, Anja, Emori, and Xandra, teaching them to shoot the bow the way Bodhi had taught me. Xandra was a natural who took to it quickly. Within a week she was able to go into the woods to hunt on her own while I worked to teach the others. It took longer for Mira, Anja, and Emori to pick it up, but in no time they, too, were able to hit the targets I had set up for them.

  The rest of the women came around gradually, joining us one by one as their shock wore off and was replaced by anger. By the time the snow had melted and green had returned to the forest, every woman in the village was learning to shoot. Like me, they wanted not only to stop this from happening again, but also to find justice and make the Fortis pay. To make them feel the same pain we had felt when our village was burned to the ground.