by Kate L. Mary
We settled into a routine after that. It was different from our old ways, but comforting because we were working to make it on our own. We took turns hunting, as well as scavenging the forest for any edible plants—a time-consuming and often pointless venture, but one that was necessary since all our crops had been destroyed when our village was burned to the ground. At night we gathered around the fire to eat, and then retired to our alcoves. As the weeks passed, the number of furs we had grew, and we slowly became more comfortable. With that comfort came the knowledge that we were going to be okay. Our wounds had not healed, but we were surviving, and for the time being that was enough.
All of that changed the day Xandra returned to the caves wearing a Fortis jacket.
It was the first thing I noticed when she stepped into the large chamber. I was sitting with Anja, using the tall grass that grew in the clearing near our pond to weave a basket, and at the sight of Xandra, my fingers stopped moving. The jacket was long, going down to her thighs, and black, and made of a thick material we had no access to, but one I was familiar with because I had worked in the city.
“Where did you get that?” I asked after a moment of stunned silence.
She looked down, her gaze moving over the too-large jacket. It had clearly belonged to a Fortis hunter, and even though there could be no other explanation, for a moment I found it impossible to wrap my brain around what I was seeing.
“I took it off the man I killed,” she said simply as she tossed her bow to the floor. “I have become a hunter of men. Just like you.”
The light from the little bugs flickered over Xandra’s face as she looked down at me. Her expression was fierce, and standing there, wearing the jacket of the man she had killed, it occurred to me for the first time just how many more of the Fortis hunters we could kill if we worked together. Until that moment, I had thought very little about having the other women join me in hunting the Fortis. Not only had I been too focused on our survival, on making sure the others knew how to hunt animals so we had enough food, but it had also seemed too risky. Almost like I would be dragging them to the underworld with me. But Xandra had made this decision all on her own, just as I had that first day I took a life, and I realized some of the others may actually want to hunt the men and women who had tried to wipe us out.
“What have you done?” Emori asked, her outrage ringing through the cave and making everyone else freeze in their tasks.
“I have stood up for myself. For my people,” Xandra said, her gaze moving over us. “And I know I am not alone in wanting to do that.”
“What are you saying?” I asked even though it was written all over her face.
“I want to hunt the Fortis,” Xandra said calmly.
Murmurs filled the air, but no one joined in the conversation. Some of the women, like Emori and Tris, looked at Xandra as if she had left her mind behind in the forest. She ignored them and focused on me, her gaze holding mine, and even though she said nothing, I knew what she was asking.
I nodded, and a smile spread across her face.
Xandra and I went into the woods together the next day, heading away from the caves and toward the river leading into Fortis territory. It had been weeks since the last time I went looking for a hunting party, but nothing about their habits had changed, and it took only a few hours in the forest for Xandra and me to cross paths with a group.
There were three of them, a woman and two men. We spotted them from a distance, hidden by the thick brush the wilds provided, while we waited for them to get closer. At my side, Xandra’s body seemed to hum with anticipation.
When they were in range, we lifted our bows, firing at exactly the same time, and the men hit the ground within a beat of one another.
The third hunter, a Fortis woman, had her sword out before either of us could fire again. The woman reeled her horse around, her gaze searching the forest for her attackers, but the surrounding bushes were too thick and concealed us too well.
“Come out!” she bellowed. “Show yourself!”
My bow was up, arrow notched, and without really thinking it through, I stepped through the brush.
The woman’s eyes narrowed to points as sharp as her sword. “You will pay with your life, Outlier.”
“No,” I said calmly. “You will. For my village, which you burned to the ground, for my mother, who you killed, for my husband, who died at your hands, and for my people who have been violated by you over and over again. It is time for you to pay. ”
The woman let out a growl and banged her heels against her horse’s flank, but it was too late. My arrow was already on its way. It found a home in her skull and her entire body jerked back, and then she fell from the horse, slamming into the ground beside her friends.
Xandra stepped from the cover of the forest and stood at my side, and together we stared down at the bodies. It had been weeks since my last kill, and the knowledge that we had taken three more Fortis from this earth was more rewarding than I had anticipated. I turned to look at Xandra, expecting a look of satisfaction, but she was frowning.
“This is not enough,” she said.
“There will be more.”
Thinking of the time Asa had discovered me in the woods and how I had been surprised by other Fortis hunters, I headed for the bodies. The sooner we searched them, the sooner we could be on our way.
“It will still not be enough,” Xandra mumbled.
I remained where I was, kneeling beside the dead Fortis, but turned her way, unsure of what she was trying to say to me. “What would you have us do?”
“There should be more of us.” Xandra turned her gaze on me. “All the women in the caves have suffered at the hands of the Fortis. They should all be here as well.”
I stood, the bodies and their belongings forgotten. “You will have a hard time convincing some of them.”
“So you think we should not try?”
“That is not what I said. But, Xandra, you are strong. You have been defying the Sovereign for a long time. Not everyone is as brave as you are. Not everyone is willing to risk their lives. Not even to take out the Fortis.”
“You were. I had the other women in the underground to show me the way, but you did this all on your own, Indra. How? How did you find the courage?”
I thought about it for a moment, remembering the first day I shot a Fortis hunter. How I had done it on impulse, and how I held felt, both before and after I had taken that first life.
“I felt like I had nothing left to lose,” I said. “I had been through the worst they could do to me already, and no matter what happened, the pain could not get any worse than it already was.”
“Do you not think some of the other women feel the same? Do you not think they can be as strong as you are?”
“I know they can,” I told her. “The problem will be convincing them.”
“Then we must do everything we can to show them.”
Xandra moved toward the bodies just as I knelt again, this time to say a prayer. It was something I had always done with my kills, whether they were animals or Fortis hunters, but when she stopped and looked at me with horrified eyes, I found myself questioning it for the first time.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Praying.”
She took one step toward me, her hand outstretched as if wanting to pull me away, but stopped short of touching me. “You cannot be serious. You would pray for these people?”
“I would.” Her gaze burned into me when I bowed my head, but I said the words out loud anyway. “May your death provide life to our people and sustain us through hard times.”
When I lifted my head, I found Xandra still watching me, but her expression was less outraged than it had been. “That is the prayer for animals.”
“It is.” I stood. “Are they not animals? Will their death not provide our people with the sustenance we need?”
Slowly, as if getting a joke, Xandra’s lips turned up into a smile. “Before our villag
e was wiped out, we never had the opportunity to get to know one another, Indra, but I believe you and I view the world in a very similar way.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking about how we had both killed Fortis hunters with little thought despite being raised to believe human life was precious. “I think that is probably true.”
This time, Xandra and I did not bother trying to cover our tracks. We took our arrows, but also as many belongings as we could carry. The way the bodies had been stripped clean would signal to the Fortis that their people were once again being hunted, but I no longer cared. I could not. Xandra was right. Three dead Fortis hunters were not enough. Not after they had burned our entire village and tried to wipe our people off the planet. We needed to do more.
There was some outrage when we returned to the caves with the stolen items. We were Winta, after all, and old habits died hard. Life was sacred. It was to be honored. Or so we had always been told. It was a noble idea, but one I could no longer cling to. There was nothing sacred about the lives most of the people in the Fortis village were living, nothing that was deserving of reverence. They were a black spot on the earth, and they needed to be wiped out.
“What have you done?” Tris asked.
Her eyes seemed to have grown in size over the last few weeks, but the expression in them changed from day to day. The fear that had at first lived in their brown depths had faded, but there was still a good deal of uncertainty in them. She had learned to shoot, had even gone hunting with Xandra and gotten a few forest rodents, but upon returning to the cave, she always acted like she had done something wrong. A battle raged inside her, and it was the same battle that raged in most of the women sitting in front of Xandra and me. They wanted to believe they could be strong and survive on their own, but they were fighting against a lifetime of being told they were weak. Without men to fall back on, it would only be a matter of time before they would have to give in to one of the arguments. Either join the fight I had started months ago, or join the rest of our tribe in the ashes of our village.
Xandra dropped the supplies she had stolen at Tris’s feet. “I have done what I must, just as I always have. In the city I worked for the underground, as many of you know, and I am used to betraying the Sovereign. I know for most of you it is a scary thought, but I am here to tell you if we work together, we can do this.”
“Do what?” Emori asked, outrage ringing in her voice. “What would you have us do?”
The child in her arms was asleep, its face serene and pretty, but I still could not look at her without feeling hatred in my heart.
“Finish what Indra has started,” Xandra said.
“You mean kill the Fortis?” Mira sat on the floor with one of the children on her lap, a boy of six whose entire family had been killed when our village was attacked.
“That is what I mean,” Xandra replied.
There was silence for a moment, but the lack of noise seemed to me a lack of argument as well, as if everyone wanted to agree but could not. As if all they needed was a little push. I looked around and found something in the eyes of the other women that had not been there before. Determination. These women were ready to fight, ready to stand up to the men who had tried to wipe us out.
All they needed was encouragement.
“The first time I killed two men, I was alone,” I said slowly, my gaze moving around the room. “I did not think before I shot them, and when the reality of what I had done hit me, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt.” The silence grew heavier as everyone stared at me, waiting to hear what I could possibly say to justify the things I had done. “But then I saw the face of the man who killed my husband staring back at me. It was not him lying on the ground, not physically, but the man in front of me was no different. If he had been handed the sword that day, he would have cut Bodhi’s head off without a second thought.”
Mira closed her eyes as if whispering a silent prayer, and tears burned at my throat.
I swallowed them down so I could keep talking. “The truth is that most of the men and women in that village would have done it. We are nothing to them, and that will never change. Just as the Sovereign will never let us go. As long as they are in charge, we will be slaves. We cannot let the guilt of what we must do hold us back, because doing that is the same as sentencing our people to an eternity of slavery. We can stop it.” I looked around, amazed at the change in the expressions of the women in front of me. Awed by their strength and determination. “Xandra and I were able to take three Fortis hunters out today with no problem. Imagine what we could do if we worked together. Imagine how much we could accomplish if there were ten of us. Fifteen. We could send the Fortis running. I know it.”
My voice bounced off the stone walls for a beat after I stopped talking, but the echo had barely faded away before people were standing. Mira and Anja. Even Emori—who handed her child off to Isa—and then Tris. Others, too, each of them with expressions on their faces that said they were ready to fight. Like me, they no longer wanted to stand back and do nothing.
Xandra put her hand on my back, and I turned to find her smiling. “We are ready to follow you, Indra.”
It was not until she said those words that I realized I had become the leader of an uprising. One that would either end with the freedom of my people, or with their total annihilation.
12
Xandra and I took one extra person out to hunt with us at a time. Mira first, and then Anja and Emori. Others came later, and slowly our hunting parties grew until we had a group of ten or more. Sometimes we stayed together and searched the woods for large groups of Fortis hunters, but other times we split up in hopes of taking more than one hunting party by surprise. It was a successful venture, and even though the other women were all scared and timid in the beginning, we were able to ease them into it, and it was not long until, like Xandra, their fear began to slip away.
We had the advantage. Even if the Fortis spotted one of us before we saw them, they never thought of us as a threat. Not only were we Outliers, we were also women, and therefore no match for the men and women who had trained since birth. At least that was what they thought. We proved them wrong time and time again when we overtook them, and more than one Fortis hunter slipped into the afterlife with an expression of utter shock on their face.
For me, the time I spent in the woods became less relaxing than it had been. Where once the forest had been a tranquil place, a place where I was able to feel Bodhi’s presence despite how much time had passed since he was taken from me, it seemed more like a battlefield now. Having people at my side helped, especially Anja or Mira, but it still felt as if my husband slipped away a little more with each day.
One of the few places left where I could still feel his presence was the cliff overlooking the ruined city, and I often found myself there when I had a little bit of free time. Being there, looking out over the wastelands, my mind often wandered to the first day Bodhi had brought me into the woods. How we had stood in that very spot, staring into the distance, and how he had asked me to leave with him. There was no way of knowing if things would have turned out differently if we had left together, but I liked to imagine they would have. Liked to think that Bodhi and I had made it across the wastelands, with Mira, Anja, his family, and my mother in tow, and found a new place. Another forest like the wilds, perhaps, where we could be happy and the Sovereign could not touch us. Where we would still be living. It was a silly dream, but one I could not push away no matter how hard I tried.
That was where I sat, watching the sun rise over the wastelands, when Xandra found me. She lowered herself to the ground at my side, saying nothing at first, and together we watched in silence as the sun climbed higher in the sky.
“Bodhi brought me here once,” I said, not taking my eyes off the ruins. “He wanted to run away, but I would not. If I had gone with him, maybe he would have lived.”
“You loved Bodhi very much,” Xandra said with a sigh, “and there will always be a part of me that
blames myself for how things turned out. For not thinking of a better way.”
“There was no other way,” I replied, tearing my gaze off the horizon so I could look at her. “When it first happened, I could not see that, but I know that now. Bodhi made his choices, and I now understand that he did what he felt he had to. He could not have lived with himself if he had done nothing.”
Speaking the words out loud brought Asa to mind, and even though my thoughts were still focused on my husband, no guilt came. Weeks had passed since I had last thought about the man who had risked so much to help me, and I suddenly found myself wondering where he was and how he was doing. Wondering if he still thought of me from time to time. Wondering if I would ever see him again, and when I did, how it would feel.
“Why did you not marry?” I asked Xandra, and then immediately shook my head. “I am sorry. I should not have asked.”
“It is okay, really.” There was sadness in her dark eyes when she looked away from me, out over the ruins in the distance. “I have never found men desirable, not in the way you do, so I chose to stay with my mother.” She did not turn her gaze on me, and the expression of sadness did not fade, but she smiled slightly before saying, “I had a friend in the village. Gaia. Do you know her?”
I remembered the woman, but only because she was also one of the few in our village who had not married. She was also quite a bit older than Xandra, ten years, perhaps.
“I know of her,” I said. “I do not think we have ever spoken, though. She was much older than me.”
“And me as well,” Xandra said and then exhaled. “She worked in the city, and after leading you and Mira to the tunnel, I went to find her. She was not at her house, though, but was instead running errands for the mistress. I searched for her, but I did not have much time. I had to do everything I could to get more people out.” Xandra shook her head and turned her gaze from the ruins to the ground beneath us. “If I had not searched for her for so long, I might have been able to save more people.”
