Render

by K A Riley

  So we’re left up on the plateau with semi-sunken tombs, half-graves that are nothing more than shallow ditches with stones and unsalvageable building materials piled on top. It’s a strange and creepy mess of rocks and clutter laid out in neat rows like heaps of well cared-for garbage covering our dear friends.

  It’s the middle of the night by the time we’re done digging and burying.

  “Does someone want to say the final farewells?” Cardyn asks quietly.

  I look at Rain, Brohn and Manthy. It seems too cruel to ask Brohn to muster the strength to speak. Manthy is still a mess. And I suspect Rain is, too, though she hides it well.

  “Why don’t you go ahead, Card?” I ask.

  “Okay,” he replies. He shoots a glance at Chace and Trax, who are standing by, watching curiously. “I…I wanted to tell all of you I’m sorry,” he begins, looking around at the rest of us for a second before continuing. “I’m sorry we weren’t here for you. We all are. We’re sorry we didn’t get here faster, so we could warn you what was happening out in the world. We’re sorry to the Sixteens who never got to see their next November first. We hope you’re in a nicer place now. But most of all…” Card presses a hand to his chest, “we want to say goodbye.”

  Twenty-six times he says goodbye, each time naming one person we left behind.

  As he speaks, the rest of us let our emotions go. With the grim awareness that we’re now the last of our town, every choke, sob, and tremble is allowed to come out. I move over to stand close to Brohn, knowing that even if he’s not asking for support, he needs it. We hold hands and hug each other, hoping this will be the final time we bury someone we know and love, but knowing deep down that it won’t be.

  Our own personal war has only just begun.

  When I’ve managed to gather myself enough to speak, I rub my eyes and promise out loud to set things right for our fellow Valtans, to honor the memories of our time together, and to help us get our revenge.

  “Revenge won’t make any of us feel better, you know,” Manthy says.

  “I know,” I tell her with a glance toward twenty-six new piles of rocks and scraps laid out in orderly rows among the black weeds and dry grass. “But I’m not out to feel better. I’m going to feel bad for a very long time. I’m okay with that. Because I’m not out for revenge for my sake. I’m doing this for our friends.”

  Manthy sighs and offers me an almost imperceptible nod. She’s not exactly a pacifist. She’ll bicker, argue, and even engage in combat when necessary. She can be brutally efficient in a fight when it’s called for. But she has a strange relationship with violence. It’s like she thinks every act of aggression, no matter how minor or how justified, might lead to full-scale war. So she keeps her feelings in check and refuses to see anyone as an enemy until they don’t give her any choice but to take a stand. I don’t think she agrees with me about getting revenge, but, in the grimness of the moment, she seems willing to let it slide.

  “It’s too late to head back to the camp now,” Rain says as she drags a dirty sleeve across her sweaty forehead. “We need to get a fire going. See if we can keep warm. Maybe find something to eat.”

  Brohn looks around at all the scrub-brush and crisp vegetation. “Better not do it here,” he says. “We’ll head down to the beach. It’ll be safer there.”

  When Chace and Trax hesitate, Rain tells them it’s okay. “We used to eat down there all the time.”

  With Rain in the lead, we turn toward the decimated woods and to the path leading down to the beach. Brohn lags behind, so I tell the others to go on without us. “We’ll catch up,” I promise.

  As they continue on their way, I hear Manthy as she starts crying again. Cardyn puts his arm around her shoulders. I watch them for a minute as they disappear into the gloom of the black woods. I’m glad Manthy has someone to watch out for her when I’m not there, and I’m especially glad it’s Cardyn.

  I turn back to Brohn, who’s still standing in the dark, looking out through the dim moonlight at the field of graves.

  “She might not have been one of them,” I say with a nod toward our homemade cemetery. “Maybe she got away somehow.”

  “I’d love to think so,” Brohn says. “But I need to go back into the school. Or, what’s left of it. I can’t leave here without her, without knowing.”

  “I’ll support you in whatever you do. I know she meant the world to you. All I ask is that you also take into account what you mean to the rest of us.” Pointing back to what used to be our home, I remind Brohn how dangerous it is in there. “If that rubble collapses, if it even shifts, you’ll join Wisp in a way you don’t want to—a way she wouldn’t want you to. And Brohn, just like you can’t imagine going on without her, I don’t see us getting very far without you.” I’m trying to be strong for him, like he’s been so many times for the rest of us. Trying to be rational, reasonable, even though pain and sadness are eating away at me from the inside out.

  Brohn shakes his head and tips his chin toward the woods where Rain, Cardyn, Manthy, Chace, and Trax have now passed through the tree line, down the path, and out of sight. “They have you, Kress. They don’t need me.”

  “They need you,” I assure him. “More important, I need you.”

  Brohn finally looks me in the eye. “I need you, too,” he says. He lays his hand on the side of my face and tilts my head up so my eyes are on his. Even in this dim light, I can tell how hard he’s fighting to hold things together. “I need you.”

  A moment later he leans down and kisses me. It’s a warm, soft kiss. Part apology, part gratitude, and all love. I can taste the salt from his tears. I want to savor the moment, but knowing how broken his heart is only makes me start crying again. It’s a kiss I’ve wanted for days, even weeks. But not like this. Not with all the sorrow in the universe pulling us both down like gravity.

  Eventually the realization that we’re simultaneously weeping and kissing seems to strike us both at once, and we pull back from each other just a little, only to start laughing.

  Brohn gazes into my eyes, clasping his hands on top of each other against my lower back. He’s smiling through his tears, probably relieved to have allowed himself a moment of levity. “We’ve been through a lot, haven’t we?”

  “I’ve got a feeling we have a lot more to get through,” I say. “And it probably won’t be fun.”

  “Or easy.”

  “True. But it’s what we need to do. Not just for everyone we’ve lost, but for everyone still suffering under this great big lie. We need to find out the truth and expose it.”

  I drape my hands over his shoulders and play with his hair for a minute, then press my head against his chest. We hold each other for a long time. But it still doesn’t feel like long enough.

  After a brief silence, Brohn kisses the top of my head and steps back.

  “We should catch up with the others,” he says. “We need to figure out what we’re doing next.”

  I agree reluctantly, and we head through the woods and down to the beach. Render is flying somewhere overhead, no doubt craving sleep.

  The path is dark and overgrown, but it’s a trail we know well. Brohn and I have walked it a thousand times, but never like this. Never together. Never holding hands amid the cyclone of fear, grief, and purpose our lives have become.

  When we arrive at the beach, I remind myself that it’s the same place where we celebrated Final Feast just a few months ago. That night seems a dozen years ago and a million miles away. It’s a ghostly feeling, seeing how little has changed out here, but knowing how much all of us have changed inside.

  Rain is working with Chance and Trax to start a fire in the same pit we used to roast the deer Brohn caught on our last day before Recruitment. The river bed is, as always, dark and dry, with creepy shadows from the thin strips of moonlight slipping past the charcoal-colored clouds overhead. The old log where Brohn and I planted the first seeds of our relationship is still sitting undisturbed, exactly how we left it. Off in
the distance, a series of mountain tops, every one of them as familiar as a best friend, rises up under a field of winking white stars. Every inch of it—the sand, the rocks, the dead leaves, and the broken branches that litter the beach are a familiar sight—is something I hoped I’d see again.

  But not like this. If I knew then that I’d be sitting here with the last of the Valta burned beyond recognition, I would never have let those men put us on their truck. I would have fought with every last ounce of strength I had to keep myself at home. To keep myself and the others safe.

  On the beach, the mood is somber. We sit in a circle around the fire that Chace and Trax made. Some of us sit cross-legged. Manthy has her knees pulled tight to her chest, her arms around her shins like she’s trying to make herself as small and as invisible as possible. Card puts his arm around her shoulders, but she shakes her head and says, “Don’t. I’m okay. Really.”

  Card slides his arm off of her, but he gives her arm a squeeze as he does. Without looking up, Manthy smiles a little and thanks him.

  “We lost a lot of people, too,” Chace says, her young voice breaking the stillness. “At home, I mean. We’re sorry for what you’re going through.”

  “We never had to come back to find them gone like this,” Trax adds. “The pain must be beyond...anything.”

  “I don’t recommend it,” Rain says bitterly. She’s sitting across the fire from me, her face a flickering palette of emotion. I’ve seen her sad, determined, focused, and furious to the core. Right now, she looks like she’s somehow all of those rolled into one. “We need to find out who did this,” she says at last through gritted teeth.

  Cardyn smirks. “What do you mean ‘who?’ We know perfectly well who. It’s that psycho Hiller’s gang of fake military.”

  “We don’t know how fake those men were, or how deep this thing really goes,” Brohn interjects.

  Chace sits up straight and sweeps her long hair back behind her ears. “Wait—I don’t understand. Back at our camp, you told Adric and Celia that the Eastern Order isn’t real. I thought you said it’s just our own government.”

  “That’s true,” Brohn says. “That’s what Hiller told us. And at that point she didn’t have any reason to lie to us. But she killed herself before we could get the whole story out of her. According to her, the government fabricated the entire thing.”

  “That’s not exactly what she said,” I correct him. “She said, and I quote, ‘the Eastern Order was an invention created nearly fifteen years ago as a way to keep us at war, so everyone stayed scared and no one asked too many questions.’”

  Rain turns to Chace and Trax and brags to them about how amazing my memory is. “You may know your way around a map, but Kress here has apparently memorized everything in the world anyone has ever written or said since the beginning of time. The girl’s a walking bio-mainframe.”

  “I’m nothing of the sort,” I scoff. “I’ve just been oddly clear-headed about certain things lately. Like about what Hiller said. She said the Order was created. She didn’t necessarily say it was created by our government. For all we know, it could’ve been made up by some splinter faction or a gang of rogue geneticists. Who knows, really?”

  “It could have even been real,” Card says. “At the start anyway.”

  “Either way,” I say, gesturing back up the path to the town, “we need to avenge our friends, and we can’t do that unless we know exactly who we’re going after.”

  Brohn scratches his head and sighs. “And how are we going to figure that out?”

  “We’re going to follow Render to San Francisco and get some answers.”

  Trax looks over at me out of the corner of his eye, like he wants to ask me something but is too scared to do it. When he catches me looking at him, he turns away.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “You can ask me anything.”

  “I was just wondering about Render.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, birds have an excellent sense of direction. They have a mineral called ‘magnetite’ in their upper beaks that helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic fields. It’s called ‘magnetoreception.’ The ability, I mean.”

  I chuckle to myself at Trax’s funny, kind of robotic way of talking. It’s like someone combined an eleven-year-old boy with a digital encyclopedia.

  “Plus,” he continues, “birds have a type of protein called cryptochromes in their eyes that enables them to see the Earth’s magnetic fields just like we might see waves in the air above the ground on a hot day.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Oh, yes. They use two systems—a compass system and a map system—to orient themselves and to get from one place to another. They can migrate for thousands of miles and find their way to the exact nesting spot where they were born even though they’ve never been back there in their lives.”

  “And they do it all without studying maps like we do,” Chace jokes, giving her brother a light slap on his knee.

  Trax flinches but otherwise ignores his sister. “And you have a connection with him, right?” he asks me.

  “I do.”

  “So can you tell him to lead you to San Francisco, and he’ll do it?”

  “She doesn’t ‘tell’ Render anything,” Rain interjects, turning to me. “Do you?” She gives me a playful push, and I put my hand down into the sand to stop myself from falling over.

  “Ouch,” I say before turning back to Trax and Chace. “Rain’s right. I’m not Render’s boss. I’m his friend and partner, and we’re all part of his Conspiracy.”

  Chace’s eyebrow goes up. “Conspiracy?”

  “It’s what you call a group of ravens,” Brohn says.

  “To answer your question, I can’t ask Render to help us get to a place I’ve never been,” I add. “It doesn’t seem to work like that. Sometimes he can sense what’s in my head, but since there’s nothing in my head about San Francisco, he’d just wind up as lost as I’d be.”

  Trax grins. “Then you really do need us?”

  “Yeah, we really do.”

  That seems to make him and Chace doubly happy, and I’m grateful. Their smiles in the flickering halo of the campfire inspire me to think fondly of our lost friends, instead of angrily about our enigmatic enemy…or fearfully about our upcoming journey.

  Brohn stretches his arms above his head and yawns before turning to Trax and Chace. “We should try to get some sleep. We have a long hike back to your camp.”

  “At least this time it’ll be downhill,” Card points out.

  It’s a simple observation, but it’s one that makes me feel slightly more hopeful about the future.

  I fall asleep telling myself that at least tomorrow, we don’t have to face another uphill climb.

  We all wake as the first glow of morning begins to push back against the grim murkiness of night. After ensuring the last embers of our fire have been safely snuffed out, we follow Chace and Trax along the beach, through the woods, and down the mountain.

  It takes us another two days, but we manage to get to Adric and Celia’s camp without any real problems. Rain has to help Cardyn at one point along the way, after he slips and gets his boot stuck under a protruding tree root. And Brohn asks Chace and Trax a couple of times if they’re sure this is the right way back. They assure him each time that it is. I have no idea how they know their way around so well, maps or no maps. The twins seem to have an uncanny sense of direction beyond anything I could ever imagine.

  Maybe it’s their gift. Their super power, much as I hate the thought of using that word. Apparently, Brohn shares my theory, because he expresses amazement at their gifts on the second day of our march.

  “Maybe they’re like you and Manthy,” he tells me with a nudge.

  “Or you,” I reply. We may not yet know his supposed special ability, but according to Hiller he definitely has one.

  “Whatever it is the twins have,” Rain says, “they can probably rival Render when it comes to having a g
reat sense of direction.”

  “Who knows?” Cardyn jokes from behind me. “Maybe they have some magnetite of their own in their upper beaks.”

  I laugh and agree. “Maybe they do, Card. Maybe they do.”

  Actually, I think, maybe they really do.

  11

  When we arrive back at the camp in the middle of the night, we’re greeted by Adric and Celia.

  “The others are asleep in their tents,” Celia tells us quietly.

  As if sensing we’d like to be alone with their leaders, Trax and Chace announce they’re tired, too. I watch as they slip off to their tent, where they pull back the tattered pink and yellow polka-dotted sheet that serves as a door and disappear from view.

  Adric invites us over to crouch down and file in to his tent. Exhausted physically from the trip and emotionally from its outcome, we plop down heavily on the mats of cloth and leaves that line the floor.

  Adric sits down cross-legged on the edge of the palette of folded canvas sheets and cloth that serves as his bed. “Did you find…?” he starts to ask, before stopping himself. No doubt he’s read our faces by now.

  “Nothing,” Brohn answers, his voice numb. “We didn’t find anything.” He bows his head to convey he has nothing more to add.

  Adric looks over to me, and I somehow summon the courage to describe the devastation and death that greeted us. “It was pointless and cruel,” I say, fighting off a lump in my throat. “Just kids. It was all just kids. They were barely surviving day to day as it was. We’d already lost so much. Our parents. Our town. To die like that. Afraid. Helpless. The government was supposed to protect them. Why couldn’t they just leave us alone? Why couldn’t…?” I shake my head, unable to go on. When I look down at the ground, Brohn slings his arm across my shoulders. The tremble wracking my body slows as he gives me a gentle squeeze.

  I can all but feel his voice inside my head. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.