Carrington.
Remko took off toward his tent, ignoring the carnage on either side of him as he ran. “Carrington!” he yelled. The panic in his chest pulsed like electric shocks. “Carrington!”
The tent was still standing, barely, its left side caved in. He pushed his way inside to find his and Carrington’s bed torn apart. It had been ripped nearly in half. The misshapen crib that had cradled Elise while she slept was scattered in pieces. Anything that had made this humble room a home had been violated. Remko dropped to his knees and searched through the wreckage, looking for clues, begging to find them. His desperation made his hands shake. She wasn’t here.
He flew out of the tent and into the ones around him. “Carrington!”
Tent after tent pulled apart like cotton, bits strewn about in chaos.
Tent after tent, empty.
A shrill scream of terror echoed across the stone ceiling.
Remko ignored it in his urgency to find Carrington even though he knew she wasn’t here. Nobody was here.
“Remko,” Jesse yelled.
He swept around and saw Eleanor trembling, her eyes fixed on something near her feet. Remko rushed over and nearly collapsed to his knees when he caught sight of them. Bodies. A row of them, cold, still, left lying on the ground like garbage.
Remko swallowed the bile rising in his throat and stepped forward. The beat of his heart slowed as he searched each face. Sorrow and relief barraged his skull. None of the faces were Carrington’s, but each one belonged to someone he knew.
Selena Carson lay among them, her graying lips slightly parted, her eyes closed.
There were only six bodies here, which meant everyone else had been taken. Remko looked around. The mutilation surrounding him was personal and had been done with cruel intent. Intended, just like the row of bodies, to serve as a message.
Only the Authority could have done this, which meant they had his wife and daughter. The weight of it pulled Remko to his knees. He couldn’t register anything through the fog collecting in his mind. He struggled to breathe as the air around his face thinned, his head pounding and nausea rolling through his stomach.
They were all gone, all taken, which would probably soon mean all dead.
Carrington pulled Elise closer to her chest to block the strong wind blowing through the trees. The sun was gone, the stars and moon out overhead, and the temperature had dropped significantly.
They had run for hours, maneuvering through the forest, dodging groupings of nearly destroyed homes, trying to stay hidden, stopping to let people rest for only a minute in an old school building, the name Whitmore Middle School still etched into the stone sign standing several feet from the front entrance. They tried to be mindful of their tracks, tried to stay clustered as a group, tried to stay silent. They considered circling back to see if anyone else had been left behind, but it was too much of a risk. What if the CityWatch was still there, or what if they had left someone behind to wait for others? With all the children and only two men, they couldn’t possibly fight. If they were caught by soldiers they would all be lost.
Terror wreaked havoc on her mind as she imagined Remko returning to camp without any idea of what he would find. Was he there now, collapsed under the weight of the idea that she and Elise were dead? Or had he been captured the second he walked into camp? Had he even made it back to camp at all? Would they ever find each other again? How could they?
She worked to keep herself together. To search for the light at the end of the tunnel, to see through the impending fear. To stay strong for Elise and for Selena’s girls. After Lucy had stopped crying a few hours ago, she had fallen completely quiet. She hadn’t said a word to anyone. Carrington’s heart ached for the pain she must be facing, for all the pain she would face. Girls her age were supposed to be dreaming of dances and dresses, enjoying their practicing lessons and giggling with their friends. Not watching their sisters die and their fathers be imprisoned and their mothers ripped away from them forever.
Larkin had told her that everything that was supposed to happen would happen. Carrington didn’t understand how this was supposed to happen. How could it be that these two girls were supposed to be in such pain? Why was their camp supposed to be violated? How were they now supposed to survive out here without supplies and with the weight of the world on their shoulders?
“Understanding is a tricky thing,” a voice said.
Carrington turned and saw Aaron move out from behind a nearby tree. The spike of fear that had shot through her chest eased and she resisted the urge to collapse into his arms. The sight of him released a wave of sealed emotion. The sorrow and pain and panic she’d been holding at bay rushed through her like water, drenching every cell. Tears burst from her eyes and poured down her cheeks. She felt her knees tremble, and before she could stop herself, she sank down into the cold dirt.
She could feel the moisture from the ground seeping through the fabric of her pants and chilling the bones in her kneecaps. The wind raked through her hair and swept it wildly across her face, spirals of air targeting her bare neck and making every inch of her body shiver. The elements themselves attacked, just as the world did, just as her emotions and her mind could.
All at once she lost every ounce of strength she had ever possessed. All the power she’d felt, the love and confidence from being self-assured in truth and faith, vanished. It was just her alone against the darkness with the wind threatening to crush what little remained of her spirit. She wept because she couldn’t remember how to stand or how to face her fear. She wept because day after day the world spit at her and called her names and tricked her into thinking she could handle it. She wept because she felt lied to. She had been so sure following Aaron would lead her to freedom, but all she had known was pain and loss. She wept for Arianna, and Selena, and Dodson, and Helms, and Larkin. Most of all, she wept for herself.
A hand rested against her shoulder and warmth spread out across her skin. She looked up through tear-filled eyes and saw Aaron kneeling beside her, his face illuminated against the darkness of the sky. Tears rolled down his cheeks, but love filled his eyes. He was recognizing her pain, sharing in it, but it didn’t cause his body to ache or his brightness to falter.
“Let it go,” he said.
“I don’t know how,” Carrington said.
“Yes, you do. You have done this before. In the field with your Father, with our Father.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing this war and losing everyone fighting it with me.”
“You forget who you are.”
“I can’t hear my song anymore. All I hear and see is covered in fear and doubt.”
“Do you have faith?”
“Yes.”
“In what?”
Carrington didn’t know what to say. What had she placed her faith in? Remko? Herself? Their ability to fight an opposition that was larger, stronger, and faster than they were? Was that what this was about—winning? Finally triumphing over the Authority for all the years they’d made her feel worthless? Taking up her sword that had been forged from all the pain, fear, worry, and anger she’d held on to because it was her right? Then, once the enemy was bleeding out on the floor before her, would she find peace and freedom?
Carrington knew the answers; she had been down this dark road before. She heard the voices of those who’d come before her, of Arianna and Larkin, telling her freedom wasn’t something you fought for. True freedom, freedom from the pain that latched itself to your memories, was only obtained by surrender.
“Yes—surrender,” Aaron said. “Let it go.”
Carrington recalled Larkin’s words. “By trusting. By having faith in perfect love, in my Father.”
Aaron smiled. “You can’t lose this war, because your Father has already won. This isn’t a battle of skin and bones, flesh and blood. This is about your faith, about your identity. When you discover who you truly are, you discover there is no wa
r left to fight at all.”
Tears filled her eyes again and she sniffed. “I’ll just keep forgetting.”
Aaron smiled sadly. “Maybe, but some people never see at all. Help them see, Carrington; help them surrender.”
She nodded and Aaron leaned forward and placed a kiss on her forehead.
Her eyes snapped open. She was sitting at the base of a thick tree. The darkness was quiet; bodies were scattered around her in slumber, smoke rising from small pits where fires had been lit an hour earlier. Elise was breathing steadily against her chest, completely asleep.
They had stopped for the night, and she had fallen asleep. There was no Aaron; she had only dreamed of him. Fear rained down over her but she laid her head back, replaying Aaron’s words over and over in her head.
“When you know who you truly are, you realize there is no war left to fight at all,” she whispered.
Then she let it go.
She pictured the field, recalled the identity that was hers, and let it go. The rain of dread eased and after several minutes Carrington was surprised to feel no fear at all.
24
Remko wasn’t sure how long he had been kneeling. Time passed slowly through fog. It could have been only a couple of minutes, but the torment playing inside his brain made it feel like an eternity.
The others moved about; he heard Wire asking Jesse for help with Kate, heard Eleanor comforting her baby brother, but Remko didn’t move. He knew he needed to. He should be racing after the CityWatch, tracking their tire marks, trying to catch up with them, doing something—anything but kneeling. Yet he stayed in place. Maybe it was the weight of it, the certainty that he felt in his gut that no matter how quickly he moved or how perfectly he tracked, there wasn’t any possible way he could reach them in time.
He had lost them. The only things of value in his life, the two people who kept him striving, fighting, hoping, wishing for more; he had lost them. They’d slipped through his fingers, been taken out from underneath him when he wasn’t looking. By monsters.
The longer Remko knelt there beside the row of stiffening corpses that he used to call friends, the stronger his anger grew. It acted as a shield, protecting him from the fear of being utterly alone. Because that’s what he would become without them. Alone. He’d learned earlier on in life to be good on his own. Much like Jesse. Then Carrington had changed his reality, offering the idea of not having to face life by himself. So they had been two, and then they’d become three, and Remko had become so engrossed and attached to the idea of being more than one that he’d forgotten how to be alone.
He blinked and exhaled. He hadn’t even realized he was holding his breath. He looked around and stood. He couldn’t be alone. He needed Carrington, needed his daughter, to make him whole. He refused to go back. Then all of this would have been for nothing. He started in the direction of their transportation, half a mile outside the camp’s borders.
“Remko,” Wire called.
“We have to go after them,” Remko said.
“Go after them? Go after who?” Wire asked.
Remko kept walking as he shouted over his shoulder. “They took my family.”
“Remko, stop!” Wire yelled. “We can’t just go after them.”
Remko spun around. “Of course we can. We go after everyone else.”
“Yes, as a full team, but Kate can’t walk, and we have a child now,” Wire said, pointing to Willis, who was hiding halfway behind his sister’s dress.
Remko glanced around. Wire was right. “Then we split up,” he said. “Jesse, you—”
“No, Remko, we can’t afford to split up anymore,” Wire said.
“That’s funny; this morning you had no problem splitting up,” Remko barked.
Wire looked taken aback. “Are you blaming me for this?”
“I would have been here!” Remko shouted.
The tunnel fell silent. Remko’s face burned with anger and the heat spread down his back. He stormed toward Wire. “I would have been here to protect them, but I was chasing after the two of you because you thought abandoning the group to go after your family was the better move. Looks like you were right.”
Wire didn’t respond and sheepishly kept his eyes on the ground.
“He’s right,” Kate said. She was sitting on an overturned bin beside Wire. “We did abandon the group. So go ahead—leave. Everyone here is used to being left.”
A twinge of guilt slivered into Remko’s gut but his anger crushed it to dust. Nothing mattered as much as getting Carrington and Elise back. He wouldn’t be held responsible for Wire or Kate’s emotional baggage or the pain they’d suffered before.
“What are you going to do?” Kate asked. “Take on the entire CityWatch alone?”
“He won’t be alone,” Jesse said. He was standing behind Remko, his arms crossed over his chest. He gave Remko a single nod and Remko turned to leave again.
“You’re really going to leave us here?” Wire asked. “After everything?”
“My family needs me,” Remko said without slowing his pace.
“I thought we were your family!”
Remko slowed and Jesse looked at him for direction.
Wire continued, “That’s what this was, right? A family. Become a Seer, become part of the group. Standing against the Authority, following Aaron’s way.”
At the sound of Aaron’s name something boiled over in Remko’s stomach. “And where is he now?” he exploded, spinning back around. His words echoed off the stone. “Our great and powerful leader, who is always conveniently absent when we actually need him.” Remko turned away from anyone specifically and just started yelling at the darkness. “Such a mighty and noble call to be a Seer; you’d think you could be bothered to show up sometimes!”
Remko could feel the monster inside him taking over. “Where are you, Aaron, follower of the Father’s way? Where are you? Where is He? We’re yelling about abandoning one another, but the truth is we’ve all been abandoned by you!” Remko spit the words out like acid into the open air. “How are you any good to us now? Where is your power? All I see is death and destruction for the purpose of a call that has only brought us suffering, and for what? You aren’t even here! You are never here!”
Something snapped behind them, and they all turned to see Aaron walking from the shadows. His face held the same expression of peace that it always did, as if he hadn’t just been the subject of Remko’s rant. For a second Remko felt a stab of shame. He should have kept his mouth shut, but his anger monster felt differently. This was the man who had been the source of all his suffering, who had caused all his pain. The man who paraded around telling stories to children and letting Remko fight all his battles. The man who had won Remko’s wife’s loyalty so deeply that he had to wonder if she would follow her own husband.
A violent shudder streaked through his body and he balled his fists at his sides. Aaron stood there with his smug contentment as if their world and everyone they loved hadn’t just been ripped away from them. Remko fought the urge to rush toward the man, his better sense still controlling his actions. But the monster was strong, inching its way over his control.
Aaron held Remko’s gaze and no one said anything. Remko hardened his look, letting his fury leak through his expression. He wanted Aaron to see, to know that this suffering around them was his doing.
Aaron didn’t flinch or pull away. He just met Remko’s eyes with understanding, his mind tricks in full effect so that Remko began to recoil, began to defuse.
Remko dropped his eyes first, and the monster screeched in agony and shame. What kind of man was he, if he couldn’t even stand against one enemy?
No wonder you are failing to measure up.
No.
No wonder your family would willingly follow another.
Stop it.
No wonder you are shrouded in shame and guilt.
Shut up.
You called yourself a soldier once, but you’ve turned in your honor and stren
gth for submissive weakness.
No.
You aren’t a man anymore; you’re just a puppet.
No, I’m not.
Prove it.
Something snapped in Remko’s mind. The last drop of right and wrong evaporated and all he could feel was his ego. His sense of pride, the warrior strength that he had sacrificed in the name of peace, the anger he had kept at bay in order to appear in control. One by one the cage doors flew open and dark, violent intention filled every corner of his being.
His feet were moving. As if his body had become a single unit acting out of pure instinct, disconnected from his conscience. Swiftly he covered the distance between himself and Aaron, only dimly aware of the scream tearing from his throat.
“Remko,” people yelled, but he blocked them out. Jesse tried to move between him and the target, but Remko sidestepped him enough to have a clear shot at Aaron. He reached the man, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and ripped the gun from where it was tucked into the back of his pants. He placed the end of it against Aaron’s temple.
“Remko! Remko, stop!” Kate screamed. Willis cried at his sister’s side while Wire and Jesse moved to rip Remko away.
Still holding on to Aaron, Remko turned and waved his gun for them to back off. He aimed it at both of their heads, and each one slowly stepped away. “Stay back,” he warned.
“Come on, man, you don’t want to do this,” Jesse said.
“Remko, think about what you’re doing,” Wire pleaded.
They’re just trying to prove you’re weak. Are you weak, little boy?
“I said stay back!” Remko yelled.
Aaron raised his hand slightly to motion toward Wire and Jesse. “It’s all right.”
Remko snapped his head back toward his prisoner, blood pounding in his ears. Anger pulsed from every pore. He drilled Aaron with a hateful stare and waited for the man to respond.
Nothing. His eyes remained filled with a startling calmness. As if he weren’t afraid of the gun aimed at his forehead. As if he believed the bullets loaded inside weren’t even a threat.
The Calling Page 24
