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They look strong, scared, determined…but also famished.
As the two taller kids stand back and the rest close in around us, Card and I hold our hands up higher. I nudge Kella to follow suit, but she’s too far gone to care and barely registers any of this is happening. Still, she puts her hands up in half-hearted surrender as if to say, Kill me or capture me or whatever. Just do it fast and get it over with.
One of the smaller boys lowers his meager twig of a spear at us and takes another step forward. He’s as frail-looking as Kella, and his voice breaks with the in-betweenness of boy and man.
“Who are you?” he croaks.
“They’re the Eastern Order!” one of the other boys barks out from behind him.
I manage to suppress an eye roll. “Do we look like the Order to you?”
The kids look puzzled. Like us, they probably just know the Order from the grainy images on the viz-screens in whatever town they came from. Also like us, they’ve probably never thought much about what the Order actually looks like in person. They were always an out-of-focus, faceless enemy that had to be destroyed at all costs. A foe without features. That was what we were all taught from the day the war began.
I call out over the heads of the ten smaller boys and girls. “We’re not the Order, in case that wasn’t clear,” I assure the tall boy, who, along with the tall girl, must be the leaders of this little faction. “In fact, we escaped from them. Kind of.”
“That’s a lie!” one of the smaller girls shouts out.
I shrug my shoulders. Technically, she’s right. I am lying.
Kind of.
“It’s a trick,” the tall girl grumbles. “They couldn’t find us with their drones, so they sent a scouting party out to track us down.”
“Who couldn’t find you?” I ask.
“You. If you’re not the Order, you’re Recruiters, right?” She furrows her brow and glares at me like she’s daring me to contradict her.
“You told us Recruiters never come out here,” one of the younger kids calls out in a shaky voice. “You said we were safe here. You said they’d never find us!”
“So you know about the Recruiters?” Card asks the tall girl.
“Don’t try to trick us.”
“We’re not tricking you.”
“It’s almost May 1st. We know why you’re here.”
“Wait—what happens on May 1st?” I ask, even though I know in my gut what she’s about to say.
“That’s when you take away the new Seventeens,” one of the girls chirps.
The boy next to her glowers at us. “Thought you could sneak up on us this time.” His bark is more of a yip, and I try not to laugh at how thoroughly unintimidating he is.
“We weren’t trying to sneak up on you,” I assure him with what I hope is my sweetest smile. “We’re not the Order, and we’re not Recruiters. We were recruited, too. Only ours was always on November 1st. We were recruited just like you. Every year.”
The kids are clearly agitated and confused. They set their little trap with the fire and their weak attempt at an ambush, but now they can’t figure out what it is exactly they captured. They may have known we were coming and prepared themselves for our arrival, but now that they have us, they don’t seem to know what to do with us. Classic case of the dog that caught the car. At least, back when there were cars actually moving along the now abandoned roads.
“We’ve been on the run for a long time,” I tell them. “We saw your fire from a distance and thought we might find some friendly faces who could maybe help us out.”
“Sorry. No help here,” the tall boy says, his voice laced with suspicion. “If you move along, we’ll let you go in peace.”
“We’re not moving along,” I tell him. “So you may as well forget it.”
The tall boy looks around, flustered, at his group of friends. After a few seconds, he says, “What are you waiting for?” and the Juvens move toward us, their twig-spears and rocks in hand.
With our training, I suspect that Card and I could probably take down every one of the kids before they knew what hit them.
Thanks to Render and his intel, I won’t need to find out.
“Listen,” I reply. “I wouldn’t try anything if I were you.”
Coming from three different directions and making barely a sound, Brohn, Rain, and Manthy slip out from the woods and slide up behind the group of nervous and distracted Neos and Juvens.
Silently easing his way forward, Brohn slips his arm around the tall boy’s neck and drags him backwards, away from the stunned crowd of kids. In the same instant, Rain snaps a side blade kick to the back of the tall girl’s knee and sends her crumpling to the ground. Even as she falls, Manthy snatches her by the collar of her jacket and drags her aside, dropping to one knee beside her and locking her in an immobilizing chokehold. In the flurry of action, and with their two leaders incapacitated, the rest of the startled kids whip around and lose their focus on me, Kella, and Cardyn.
In a synchronous offensive, Cardyn and I melt into the jostling and disoriented crowd. Even Kella gets in on the action, unleashing a straight punch to the nose of one of the kids, whose eyes tear up as he drops heavily to the ground. Cardyn slings two of the kids into each other and then uses them as bludgeons, knocking down three more of their disheveled crew like pins in a bowling alley. With a roundhouse kick and three sharp elbows to three young jaws, I pick up the spare, and, just like that, every one of the twelve kids is down with the six of us standing over them.
Of course, it’s kind of an unsatisfying victory. These are just Neos and Juvens, after all. Even the two leaders, on their knees and at the mercy of Brohn and Manthy, are probably just Fifteens, maybe Sixteens, themselves. Weakened and inexperienced ones at that. Still, as far as counter-assaults go, we’ve managed to dispatch the twelve kids with a blur of efficiency and with perfect control. Other than a few watery eyes and a bunch of bruises and nose-bleeds, they’re all down with no major damage done.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” Rain says as we stand triumphant over the angry but helpless bunch.
“Why should we believe you?” one of the girls snaps from her seat on the ground.
“You shouldn’t,” Card says. “But you should at least hear us out. You escaped Recruitment, which means you have excellent instincts and great survival skills. So you’re smart. You’re resourceful. Heck, you would’ve even gotten the drop on us if we didn’t have our flying set of eyes up there.”
Card points to a low tree branch just a few feet away where Render is perched. “Between him and Kress here, we can see everything for miles.”
Looking over, the kids jump a little at the sight of the glistening black bird peering at them through his eerily lifeless eyes.
Cardyn snaps his fingers to draw the kids’ attention back to him. “We’re all just a bunch of kids who’ve been through too much and don’t know what to do or who to trust. This can play out in a big stupid fight that’ll probably leave a lot of us hurt or worse. Or it can end with us on the same side fighting the only enemies we know are out there for sure: fear and uncertainty.”
As Card talks to the disheveled dozen, it slowly occurs to me what he’s doing. He’s humanizing us, calming the kids down, painting a picture of the situation, and giving them a solution, all at once. Giving us all a way out of this impasse.
It’s an impressive feat of manipulation, and it seems be working. I can feel the kids let go of the breaths they’ve been holding in.
“Now, there are more of you than there are of us,” Card says with a chuckle and a long look around at the rag-tag gang of orphans. “And frankly, I don’t know which one of you to talk to.”
“Me,” the tall girl says with a frown. “Celia.”
“And me,” the tall boy adds with a raised hand. “Adric.”
They’re both still on their knees in front of Brohn and Manthy, who are standing behind them on high alert, ready to put them down again if they try to make
a move.
“I’m Cardyn. The big guy there is Brohn. Our quiet friend next to him is Amaranthine. We call her Manthy. This little lady here is Rain. You’ve already met Kress, Kella, and, of course, Render: the eyes, ears, and wings, of our little band of stragglers.”
“Where are the three adults?” Celia asks, her voice laced with suspicion as her eyes dart around to look at the trees surrounding us.
“Adults?” Card asks, turning to shoot me a look.
“Asha and the others,” I remind him softly. I turn to Celia. “You saw them.”
Celia nods.
“They’re not with us,” I tell her. “We didn’t even know them. Not really. Anyway, they’re gone.”
She locks her eyes on mine for a few seconds before finally offering me a nod that tells me she believes me.
“Where are you all from?” Rain asks her.
Celia glances over her shoulder at Manthy, who nods approval for her to speak. Celia points up and out past the trees surrounding the small clearing. “We’re from Miner. It’s over on the other side of the mountain. Like you guessed, we escaped Recruitment.”
“Then you’re like us. We were recruited—like they were going to do to you. They put us on the truck, took us through the whole training program, and everything. But it’s not what you think. None of it is. We still don’t quite know what it is, ourselves.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The Seventeens aren’t being recruited to fight the Order. The Recruiters are weeding us out, using anyone they can, and killing anyone they can’t use so that we don’t fight back against them or try to expose the truth about what they’re up to.”
“What truth?”
“The entire Recruitment process…it’s is a sham. A lie.”
“But why? I mean, if they’re not recruiting us to fight the Order, why train us at all?”
The million-dollar question. I glance over at Brohn and swallow hard. Much as I want to avoid the subject, I don’t have a choice. “They said they found something special in some of us. Something they wanted to use.”
The kids look at each other before Celia asks, “How many are there?”
“How many what?”
“Whatever you called the place where they took you.”
“Processors? They said dozens, maybe hundreds, but we don’t really know.”
“We saw just the one,” Rain adds. “But there was something else, too—we saw kids from another—”
I shoot her a glare, and she stops talking. The last thing I want is to totally destroy any shreds of innocence these kids’ might still have by mentioning the thirteen bodies we saw before our final escape.
“How come people on the outside aren’t fighting back?” Celia asks. “Why are the Recruiters still allowed to go to the towns?”
“I don’t think most people know.” I can’t help thinking about the three adults we met in the desert. They seemed utterly oblivious to the whole Recruitment system. But even if they had known, I wasn’t sure they could have done anything. “People don’t know who to fight back against,” I continue. “Think about it. All we really know is what we’re told. We thought we were being taken away to fight for our country. We didn’t know it was all a lie.”
“So the Eastern Order…?”
“From what the woman in charge of the Processor told us, the Eastern Order is a made-up enemy. We don’t know how much of what she told us is true, though.”
“So they could be our own government,” Adric says, a look of dread passing over his face.
“We’ve been on the run for a long time now,” I reply, trying to change the subject away from needless speculation about a truth that’s beyond our reach. “We’ve seen mostly mountains and woods. When we did find highways, we saw a couple of military convoys, but no one else. We hid from them, of course. We passed a few small towns that looked like they’d been nuked. Otherwise, there’s not a lot out there at the moment. So there’s not much to fight for anymore, to tell you the truth.”
I feel a pang of guilt as I see the faces in front of me. Expressions of sadness, disillusionment, lost hope.
I step forward and suggest that we might be more comfortable talking somewhere other than this clearing. “Since it looks like we’re not going to kill each other, we might as well go the whole way. Maybe we could have this conversation as friends.”
“You have a camp set up, yes?” Rain asks.
Adric gives a small flip of his head. “About a hundred yards that way. Just past the tree-line.”
“It’s not much,” Celia admits. “Really just a collection of makeshift tents and assorted shelters we arranged into a mini-neighborhood back there.”
Adric nods and looks up at me as if asking for permission to stand up. I tell him it’s okay, and he and Celia rise slowly to their feet, their eyes focused on me with laser intensity. When they realize it’s not a trick and that we’re not going to summarily execute them all right here in the middle of the clearing, they relax and invite the others to stand up as well.
Still a bit skittish but with their guards mostly down, Adric and Celia instruct the younger kids to follow them across the clearing. Flanked by Brohn and me, Adric and Celia lead us over to a small opening in a cluster of bushes and brambles. They crouch down and walk through, with everyone else following close behind.
We hike a short distance through more clusters of low-hanging vines and half-dead vegetation until we arrive at a small semi-circle of the crude tents and shelters Celia described.
Three of the kids duck into one of the tents and drag sleeping pallets and smoothed-down logs out into the small clearing. They set up the logs as seats for us. We sit down with the ten younger kids gathered in a cluster in front of us, Adric and Celia standing just behind them.
“This isn’t a bad set-up you have here,” Brohn says, glancing around at the tents, the mesh canopy, and the surprisingly intricate system of wood and stone supports that hold everything together. “Concealed. Cool. Stable. Decent shelters. I’m assuming you have food and other supplies?”
“Not as much as we’d like,” Celia says with a sad shake of her head. “Or as much as we need.”
“Still,” Cardyn says, “you’re way better off tucked up in here than we were out there.”
“We’ve been too afraid to stray too far from camp,” Adric says. “Too afraid of running into Recruiters if we got too close to the roads. We knew the fire was a risk, but we knew our best hope was to attract someone. We just weren’t sure if we’d catch friends or enemies.”
“Don’t worry,” Cardyn announces with a toothy smile, probably for the benefit of the younger kids still staring at us wide-eyed. “We’re definitely friends. And, if you have anything around to eat, we can even be best friends.”
The ten Neos and Juvens in front of us giggle as Manthy rolls her eyes.
“We’re not sure what all is out there,” Brohn says to Adric, gesturing with a flick of his head up the mountain. “Right now, I’m focusing on what we have left up there.”
“Where are you from originally? I mean before the Recruitment.”
“We’re from a small town called the Valta,” Rain says.
“We need to get back there,” Brohn adds. “To find out if Wisp—I mean, if everyone—is okay.” As I listen to his voice, I can hear the emotion in it. He hasn’t talked about his sister in a long time, but I know he thinks of her every minute of every day. Wondering if she’s still alive, just as I wonder about my dad and Micah. “The Recruiters,” he says, “or whatever they’re calling themselves, might try to go back there. We’d like to get there first.”
“We may know where your home is from here,” Adric says, gesturing to two Juvens who are sitting close by. “These two can probably get you there.”
The two Juvens each raise a hand. They can’t be more than about eleven or twelve years old. Both are small, but there’s a strange alertness and intelligence dancing behind their eyes.
“They’ve got a better instinct for direction and terrain than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Adric boasts. He steps forward and puts a hand on each twin’s head and musses their hair. “They’re great artists, too.” They push his hands off but don’t seem overly irritated by the gesture.
Brohn leans toward me and whispers, “You should tell them more about Render. He can get us home just as easily.”
From my other side, Card, who’s overheard, shakes his head. “They need to be able to trust us. Let them help.”
“Card’s right,” I say under my breath to Brohn. “They need affirmation right now. Besides, we can protect the twins better than their group can.”
Brohn gives me a slow, respectful nod before turning to Adric and Celia. “Okay. We’ll take you up on your offer.”
“Wait—what about Kella?” I say, turning to him with a sudden twinge of guilt. Instinctively I grab his hand as I tend to do when moments of intense emotion hit. I hate the idea of leaving Kella behind. But we all know that dragging her across miles of mountains to the Valta would be a cruel and unusual punishment.
Brohn squints like he’s thinking hard and motions Adric over. “We won’t be able to take our friend with us,” he tells him with a half-nod in Kella’s direction. He’s whispering, but he doesn’t need to. Kella is so out of it right now—staring off blankly into the woods—he could shout it in her ear, and I don’t think it would register.
Adric gives us a nod. “I understand,” he says, turning to Celia. “Can you see to her for now?” he asks. “I think you’d be better company for her than I would.”
Celia smiles, pulling her eyes first to Brohn, then to me. “Don’t worry. She’s in good hands,” she says. Her voice is soothing as a snowfall and makes me want to curl up under a warm blanket somewhere and drift off to sleep. “We’ll take good care of her while you’re gone.”