by Kelli Kimble
“So, back to that guy,” he continued. “He was from the mountain, yeah? The guy who ran away with a city-damaged woman?”
I didn’t answer. I knew what he was going to say: He’d killed Silver. A part of me hoped if I didn’t let him say it, then it wouldn’t be true. I let my anger go, and air rushed away from me in every direction in an audible pulse. What was left of the fire was extinguished. Dirt, leaves, branches, and even the trees themselves pushed away, leaving nothing surrounding me.
Nothing except for him.
He was still standing in the exact same spot, completely unscathed.
My rage redoubled, and I slashed at him through the air. The deadly blades of molecules should have cut him to ribbons, but he just stood there, smiling. “That all you got?”
I screamed and launched my body up, imagined my feet stomping him into the ground, pulverizing his bones. But everything I did went right through him. It was like he was a ghost.
Wait. Was he even there?
I dropped back to the ground, only an arm’s length away from him.
“You think you’ve got it figured out?” He tapped a finger to his forehead. “I’m not a projection. I’m real, baby.” Something shoved me from behind, and I lurched forward. He grabbed me by my upper arms and squeezed just hard enough to hurt. He leaned in close, his eyes roaming over me in a too-intimate way. “They never told us you were pretty.”
“Let go of me,” I said through clenched teeth. I jerked against his hold, but he didn’t release me. I mentally picked up a rock from the ground and raised it to drop it onto his head, but it shattered into dust.
“I told you,” he said. “You’re no match for me. I’ve got your power a thousand times over.” He dipped his head and sniffed my neck and hair.
I cringed and imagined electrical surges bursting away from me, but it had no impact on him at all.
He laughed, then coughed and spit again. “I wanted this power. Asked for it. I suffered.” His hands tightened on my arms, and against my will, a tiny whimper escaped me. “I suffered for so long, and so much. They said you were in their facility for nearly a year. I was in there for ten – and I’m going to take back every. Single. Second. From you.”
I reared back my head and bashed my forehead into his nose as hard as I could. Blood burst from his face, soaking both our chests. He screamed and released me.
I jumped into the air. It was faster than running, and I had to get away from him, from what he was, what he wanted, what he made me want to do . . . and what I’d already done.
Chapter 3
I arrived back at the settlement, breathless. First, I went home, hoping to find Silver there. Tabby looked up from preparing a deer skin. She grabbed my hands in hers, and I looked down at them. They were raw and red, rough against my own skin. I forced myself to look into her eyes.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You left him?”
“I’m pretty sure they killed him,” I said. My face felt warm, and I reached up, expecting to wipe away blood. It was water. Tears. I hadn’t realized I was crying, and a sob choked my throat.
Tabby stumbled backwards, looking for something to sit on. Not finding anything handy, she plunked to the floor. “You left him.” Her eyes were flicking around the room, looking for something. Maybe for Silver. “Who is it?”
“They’re from the city, but they say they’re not searchers. They’re–”
She cut me off. “You talked to them? What happened out there?”
“I’m trying to tell you–”
The door slammed open, cutting me off. It was Red. He took two huge steps and folded me into his arms. “Whose blood is all over you?” he asked. His arms tightened on me.
My stomach did a flip-flop, thinking of how I’d killed those two men without a thought, how I’d tried to kill the fourth man, and how I’d realized my only choice was to turn tail and run. “You told him,” I said to Tabby.
“No, I didn’t,” she argued. “Nimisila. I just need you to tell me what’s going on and what happened.”
“Someone must have told him,” I said. Latching onto the argument gave me a moment of reprieve. I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Tikka told me,” Red said. “Can we forget about that right now? Tabby’s right. We need to know what’s going on.” He released me and guided me to sit on the floor beside Tabby. He sat beside me so that we were facing each other in a little circle. He gave me a smile and an encouraging nod.
“Okay,” I began. “We went into the woods. We saw their fire, and I went ahead to see who was there. There were three strangers around the fire, and they were talking about coming here and getting rid of us. I tried to surprise them, only another of them – a fourth – found my body and knocked me over the head. When I came to, they had me tied up. I killed two of them, and there was only one left, but I knew there was another. I was trying to get him to tell me about the fourth when he showed up.”
“Weren’t you feeling for them? He just surprised you like that?” Tabby asked.
“I can’t feel him. He’s . . . different. He’s got abilities.” I held up my hands helplessly. “He’s way more powerful than me. I’m lucky I got away.”
“How’d you get away?” Red asked. He reached for my hand and stroked the back of it with his thumb.
I recounted how the fourth man had grabbed me after I’d tried to cut him down. Desperate to get away, I’d used an old-fashioned headbutt – something he apparently hadn’t expected from someone like me.
“Did he follow you?” Red asked.
“I – I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t feel him. It’s like he isn’t even alive.”
Tabby closed her eyes. “We don’t know where Silver is, or if he is alive, and we don’t know where this monster man is, either. We know he still has at least one other person with him, too, and we know they want to get rid of us.” She ticked the things off on her fingers as she said them. Each tick made me feel smaller. Her eyes popped open. “Do I have it right?”
I cringed at the hostility in her voice. “Yes,” I said.
“Oh, and you can’t sense the monster man, so you don’t know if he followed you, and yet, you came straight home.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I was recently hit in the head, you know.”
“We need a plan,” Red said. “I thought Silver had a protocol for dealing with searchers.”
“They’re not searchers,” I said.
Red’s eyes brightened. “So, maybe they don’t want to kill us. Maybe they aren’t from the city.”
“They’re from the city,” I said, “and they never said they were here to kill us, but I don’t think their intentions are good, judging by what I just encountered.”
“He sounds strangely interested in you,” Tabby said.
“He was surprised to find me here. He said he thought I was dead.”
“But now that he’s found you, it sounds like you are who he wants.”
Red held up his hands. “Let’s not rush into anything,” he said. “Maybe she is who he wants, but we’re not going to just give her up, are we?”
Tabby’s eye twitched slightly. “She left Silver out there.”
“Tabby,” I said. “I didn’t want to. He forced me to separate from him.”
She turned a hard eye on me. “After all this time – after he protected you, kept you here when he thought you were dangerous, gave you food and shelter, and treated you as if you were his very own daughter – you left him there.”
“That’s enough,” Red said. “We need to plan what to do when they get here. Now, think, Nim. What exactly are they here for, if they weren’t expecting to find you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I recalled the conversation around the fire. “They were planning to come to the settlement tomorrow. One of them didn’t like the idea. He said we’d been out here on our own for so long, we weren’t a threat.”
“W
hat else?” Red prompted. He smiled and leaned forward, as if I were telling him about a surprise party.
“They aren’t searchers. The one told me that they’re called ‘Horsemen’. Only, their horses died in the mountains on the way here. It was too cold for them, I guess.”
“The weather,” Tabby said. Her face was pale. “The city is doing it. Just like they did before.”
Red’s nose scrunched up. Normally, when he made that face, I thought it was cute, but today, it made my heart hurt. “Doing what?”
Tabby didn’t seem to hear him. “What did you say they called themselves? The ‘horse-people’?”
“No, the Horsemen,” I said.
She grabbed my arm. “And there’s four of them?” she asked. “You’re sure?”
“There were four of them. Now, there’s two.”
Tabby got up and began pacing around us in a circle. “This is worse than I thought. I thought these were just going to be searchers, but . . . the Four Horsemen. Damn. That’s way more than I was prepared for.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I never heard of the Horsemen before.”
She grabbed my tablet from my bed and turned it on. She manipulated it and passed it to me. Red scooched closer to me so that we could read it together. It was a description of a biblical prophecy from thousands of years ago. It featured Four Horsemen, who were supposed to be the forewarning of the coming apocalypse. They each symbolized a different type of catastrophe that would kill off much of the world before the last judgement of God over His people.
“I don’t understand,” I said, handing the tablet to Red as he bent to study it closer. “They’re here to signal the end of the world?”
“Right,” Tabby said. “In this story, the judgement has always been performed by God. Over the ages, man has interpreted this story to mean God is an omnipotent Being, but in the city . . . in the city, the mayor is God – or might as well be, anyway.”
“Then, they’re here to kill us?” Red asked.
Tabby shrugged. “They’re here to tell us of the coming apocalypse. Maybe that includes killing us; maybe it means being taken back to the city; maybe it’s just a warning. It depends how they’re interpreting the story.” She stopped and steepled her hands together. “It explains the weather, though. They’re bringing about another winter.”
Red threw up his hands. “What are you even talking about? We have winter every year. You mean they’re making a second winter?”
“Our winters are mild, Red,” Tabby said. She bowed her head. “It was a mistake to hide all this history from you kids; I knew we should’ve been passing it down.”
Red met my eyes. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
I nodded.
“You kept me in the dark on this?” he asked.
“No, I just assumed you knew. Kids in the city learn the history of man in school. Don’t you teach them about where we came from and all that?” I asked Tabby.
“We’re wasting time,” Tabby said. “We need to get a plan together so that when they get here, we’ll be able to protect ourselves.”
“Tabby,” I said. I felt like knives were twisting in my gut. “We’re at their mercy.”
“We’re not giving up,” she said.
“I’m not suggesting we do,” I said, “but we can’t possibly fight them and win. He can kill us all with a single thought.”
“I understand that, but we have advantages.”
“We do?” Red asked.
“Of course,” she said. “This is all unfamiliar territory for them. We know the best hiding spots and the best places for a trap. We have Nimisila’s talents, and they don’t know what other talents we might possess.”
“I don’t follow,” Red said. “We don’t have any other talents.”
“They don’t know that,” Tabby said. “They know Nimisila was experimented on, and she learned how to do things as a result. Who’s to say she didn’t share those experiments with us and develop the same kinds of talents around here?”
I started to say that was ridiculous, but then I remembered the fourth man’s teeth, and how he felt like empty space to me. “That’s not half-bad,” I said. “I think we can work with that.”
“We can?” Red asked. “How are we going to convince them of something like that? We can’t just pretend to be telepathic.”
“You won’t pretend to be anything. We’ll just give them that impression,” I said.
“That sounds like the same thing,” he said.
“What other choice do we have?” Tabby said. “We’re going to round everybody up and move them down to the seal rocks. Then, I’ll return with Nim. We’ll convince them I have telepathic talents, too, and so does everyone else. They’ll leave, and everything will return to normal.”
“They’re not going to just leave,” I said.
“Sure, if that was their objective. They were likely sent to give us an ultimatum: Perish out here as the cold weather gets worse or return to the city as their servants. It’s what they’ve always done.”
My instinct said she was wrong about that. Even if that was their original objective, the fourth man clearly had a different agenda now. The thought of his teeth and his shapeshifting appearance sent a chill down my spine. Red put an arm around me, apparently thinking I was cold. “All right,” I said. “Red, find Tikka and get everyone else down to the rocks. Tabby and I will build up the fire pit, and hopefully, the smoke will attract them here, regardless of what he senses.”
Red hugged me a little too fiercely and kissed me. It made my toes curl – not just because I loved him, but because I had doubts about my ability to protect him and everyone else. Since I’d discovered the breadth of my ability to destroy things, I’d never been worried I couldn’t overcome danger; rather, I’d always doubted whether I should overcome it. It felt wrong to wield death so easily.
When the fourth man arrived, I would be on the other side of that conundrum, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Chapter 4
The fire was bigger than it had been in months. With the declining health of virtually everyone, there hadn’t been a reason to build a large fire as of late. Most of them stayed in their huts, allowing the young people – like Tikka, Red, and me – to take care of things around the settlement. Anyway, they were all quite rattled by the cold weather; being outside was harder on them.
I threw another load of wood onto the fire. The others had been clear of the settlement for an hour or more now. I occasionally reached out to sense them, off by the seal rocks. They seemed safe for now, but the cold of the waterfront and the lack of fire would soon be a problem.
A piercing wind blew through the settlement, dampening the fire and buffeting me. I didn’t like the sensation, and I held up a hand to block it, but the wind only increased. I turned to look in the direction the wind was coming from.
It was him.
I swallowed the huge chunk of fear that had lodged itself in my throat when I saw him. He smiled, his teeth normal for a moment, then sharpening to a point, then bloodied.
I blinked, and the vision interrupted.
He nodded and moved towards me. “You’re already adapting. I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed in your talents if I ever had the privilege of meeting you.”
“What do you want?”
He cleared his throat. “Why do you insist on communicating in such a barbaric manner?”
“It’s how I grew up,” I said. “Before people in the city tried to change me.”
“You should embrace your gifts.” He was close enough to touch me if he wanted, but he kept back.
“You have a chip, don’t you?”
“I do. Everyone of any worth has one.” He coughed out a laugh. “You were poor. Easy prey. I understand. But now, they recruit the best of the best. The elite sign up for the abuse. Can you believe that? They give up years of life on purpose. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“What a foolish thing
to do,” I said.
He grabbed my neck and pulled me to him. “Only a true fool would think so,” he hissed.
“You’re just their puppet. You think you’re going to get somewhere? Be something more? No. You’re a thing. A weapon. Expendable.”
His grip tightened on my throat, and I forced myself to remain calm. Over his shoulder, I saw Tabby emerge from our hut. She started to take a step towards us, but I shook my head.
“You think you were smart, then,” he said. “Escaping and killing all those people – people with families and children, I might add.” He seemed to lose his train of thought. “My own father was Head of Security in your facility. You killed him without a thought. Crushed him inside the building, while he tried to help others escape.”
“I’m sorry.” I was forced to say it mentally because I could no longer form words through the pressure on my neck. “I was young and afraid. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and I certainly didn’t understand there was any other way. I just wanted it to stop. I needed it to stop.”
He lifted me off my feet and shook me, then dropped me onto the ground.
I heaved in a ragged breath. I let my hair fall over my face and glanced over at the hut. Tabby was no longer in sight.
“Let me tell you about what happened to me,” he began. “They starved me, then force-fed me. Drowned me and revived me. Branded me. Performed surgeries while I was awake and could feel it. Pulled out my fingernails and toenails. Have you ever heard of waterboarding? They did that to me, too.” He pulled his leg back and kicked me in the stomach. It seemed like a weak kick; it didn’t even hurt. But then, he grabbed me by the back of the neck and lifted me up. That hurt. He set me on my feet again so that he could lean down towards my face. “And I wanted those things to happen. I volunteered,” he said. His eyes glittered.
“You’re sick,” I said. “Or crazy.” I pushed his hand away.
“If it’s crazy to want power, then sign me up.” He walked around me in a tight circle, so close that I had to lean away. “This is where you ran off to? This dump?”
“I’m happy here, and the people are good to me.”
