She fell asleep on Wes’s shoulder, when she heard a soft voice call her name in the darkness.
“Nat? Nat? Can you hear me?”
“Liannan!” Nat said.
“I can’t talk long, the iron is too strong, but I can project my voice a little. I’m scared, Nat.”
“Don’t be. Wes will get us out of here. He will, I know he will.”
“It’s all this iron,” Liannan said softly. “If only there was a way to get out of this cage.”
“Maybe there is,” Wes said, piping up, “if I know these guys. By tomorrow they’ll be bored and they might let us out of here. Which is good and bad.”
“Bad how?”
“Because when slavers are bored, they make the slaves put on a show.”
39
WES WAS RIGHT. A FEW DAYS LATER THE slavers let them out into the open. Nat was glad to feel some warmth on her face, glad to be out of that small container. Her eyes had not seen daylight in nearly a week. Though the sky was its usual foggy gray, it burned for a moment like an ancient summer sun when they opened the cage.
The pirates singled out the marked prisoners. Nat was separated from Wes and made to stand with the others in the middle of a circle. The slavers kept iron spears, crudely forged from scrap metal, pointed at their backs in case the prisoners attempted to use their powers against them, although there was little chance of that happening, as the hunger and despair had sapped every ounce of hope from the captives’ spirits. They performed as dutifully as trained monkeys.
Nat watched as fellow marked slaves levitated boxes, made the sails ripple, and knocked glasses around the deck.
“This is what they’re for, right? Stupid parlor tricks,” sneered a crew member holding an iron spear.
“You there—do one,” another said, pointing to Nat. For a moment she was caught off guard. “Me?” she mumbled, and the slaver nodded, his mouth opening to reveal jagged set of yellowed teeth.
She didn’t move. He poked the sharpened piece of metal at her, and Nat shivered. Her mind was empty. She felt less than human and knew immediately that was the slavers’ intent.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do anything.”
The slaver’s jagged smile disappeared. He narrowed his eyes, his face contorted horribly. He made to bash her with the stick, and Nat cowered, ready for the blow, but none came.
She looked up to see the slaver turning red, his collar contracting around his neck, choking him.
She looked around—and a fellow marked prisoner was staring at the slaver with a focused anger.
The slaver began to sputter as the fabric continued to tighten, cutting off the blood. The man fell backward, his head crashing on the hard metal deck.
The slavers laughed at their fallen comrade. A second pirate—tall, burly, and stripped to the waist to show off his ugly tattoos—kicked the downed brute aside. “You’ve got to take charge of these animals!” he snarled. “If you give them half a chance they’ll toss you in the ocean. Go belowdecks and make yourself useful.” He walked past the row of marked prisoners. “It’s my turn to have some fun.”
“You like to play, huh?” he asked, pointing to the young boy who had choked his comrade. He gestured to a row of cages. “Hold those up for me!”
The boy seemed uncertain what to do next.
“DO IT! OR I’LL STICK THIS THROUGH YOUR ROTTING NECK!”
The marked slave closed his eyes. He had a dotted patch of raised skin on his temple, the most common mark, which meant he had the power of telekinesis—he could move things with his mind. Slowly, ever so slowly, the row of cargo containers rose from the ground. They floated a few inches, then a foot, then three feet, but the effort was too much and the slave collapsed on the ground, along with the cages, crashing on the deck.
“OY! WAKE UP!” the pirate yelled, kicking at him.
“He’s dead. You killed another one. Slob will be pissed. Traders are coming. You know they pay more for the marked ones.”
“What they want with ice trash is beyond me. In a month they’ll all be thrillers.”
“Besides, he’s not dead,” the other one said, throwing a bucket of black water on the poor boy’s face. “But I’m sure he wishes he was.”
* * *
They were marched back to their cages, Nat too weak and too scared to talk, even as Wes tried to console her by rubbing her back. So that was what Avo wanted the marked for—to use them for amusement—for sport until they could sell them. The slavers would toy with them, a form of torture, like pulling wings from a fly, until they were sold.
That night Nat heard a faint fluttering sound outside her cage.
“What is it?” she asked Wes, who moved toward the door, looking through the tiny hole.
“Don’t worry, it’s not the guards,” he said. “Look.”
Nat peered through the slit. A flock of multicolored creatures surrounded their cage—they looked like large butterflies or birds, but were not either—they were flitting and flying, as their marvelous blue, pink, purple, gold, and silver feathers lit the night like a rainbow.
“Can you hear them?” Liannan asked, her melodious voice echoing through the darkness.
“Yes—I can—I can even understand what they’re saying!” said Nat in wonder.
“What are they saying?” Wes wanted to know.
Nat tried to explain—it wasn’t so much that she could hear them speak words or sentences, it was that she was filled with their emotion, their spirit.
“They’re saying . . . they’re saying . . . there’s hope. There’s hope for us. Hope and welcome.”
There was a noise from the food slot. Nat cried out in surprise as small nuts, seeds, and fruit began to fall through the hole. She took Wes’s handkerchief to catch them.
Hope, she thought. We will survive this.
Thank you, she sent to the birds. Thank you. Please, we are not the only ones here. Bring food to all.
They ate their meal, and Nat could hear cries of delight murmuring through the slave quarters.
Nat picked several berries and shared them with Wes, their lips turning red from the juice.
Afterward, Nat found she still had her deck of cards that she always kept in her pocket, and they played card games, using seeds as chips. “Fold,” Wes said disgustedly as he threw his cards down. “Where did you learn how to play?”
“It’s one of the first things they teach us at MacArthur. How to play cards. They size up our abilities that way. See who can use their powers to predict things, read minds, stuff like that,” Nat said, shuffling the cards and dealing the next hand.
“So that’s how you win,” he said with a wry grin. “Not fair.”
She looked at him and shook her head. “Not at all. I can’t do anything like that, I’m just good at it,” she said, a little annoyed. “Is that so hard to believe?”
Wes grunted. He assessed his hand. “Fold!”
She laughed.
He pushed a cup of seeds her way and she knew he would have given them to her anyway. “So, card sharking is just part of the training?” he asked.
“We move on from the poker table to number games, patterns . . . like the one at the fence.” She picked up a card from the stack. “What about you? You never told me how you ended up a mercenary or why you left the military. I know you said you didn’t want to go career, but still, wasn’t it easier being a soldier than having to do this sort of thing? I mean, look where we are.”
“Truthfully, being a hired gun is a more honest life than one in the military,” Wes said, as he studied his hand.
“How’s that?” she asked, putting a pair of cards facedown on the floor.
“You were never in the service—so you don’t know half the things they ask us to do, in Lower Pangaea, New Rhodes, Olympia. It’s their way of guaranteeing the soldiers’ loyalty. They make us all complicit in their crimes. Once you’ve done it, you don’t think twice about saying yes the next time, since you’ve already c
rossed the line.” He discarded a few cards, picked up two more.
She was silent for a moment. “Is that what happened . . . in Texas?”
He brooded on that. “Yeah.” He didn’t look her in the eye. “The rebels wouldn’t surrender, we had them cornered, but they wouldn’t wave the white flag. The town was empty; no one knew where the Texans were hiding their people. I found out by accident. I got caught on a run, hauled in, and tortured. That’s how I got this scar. Avo too. But we didn’t break. They thought we were dead. We managed to escape, and we even caught one of their people . . . he was marked . . .” Wes sucked in his breath.
“You don’t have to tell the story if it’s too hard.”
“I didn’t want to do it, I wanted no part of it . . . but I couldn’t stop him either. Avo, he . . .” Wes looked agonized.
“He tortured him.”
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes. “He had a mark on his cheek, a brand . . . like a serpent. Avo figured out he could . . . he could . . .”
“Hurt him by touching it,” Nat said softly.
“Yeah.”
“He would push on it, and it would glow . . . and the guy just kept screaming . . . and finally, he broke. The Texans were hiding their people a few miles inland. Hidden in the snow. They’d moved them into one of those old arenas. I thought we’d surround them, you know, like a siege. But the orders came. Bomb the entire place. Kill their kids, their wives, everyone. Get them to surrender.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do it. You didn’t torture him and you didn’t give the order.”
“But I couldn’t stop him either. Their blood is on my hands and I’ll never be able to wash it off.” He took a shaky breath. “I left the service after that . . . I didn’t want to be any part of that . . .”
“Wes—you’re not a bad person,” she said, putting her cards down, the game forgotten.
Wes did the same. He shook his head. “It was war—but it wasn’t right. We were no better than the slavers. Worse, maybe.”
40
THE NEXT MORNING, THE SLAVERS WERE intent on discovering why their prisoners were not starving and listless as they had been. A team of guards searched every cage and stripped down every captive but found nothing. The cages were empty. Every crumb and every seed had been eaten.
Nat was worried the pirates would punish their captives, but the arrival of a new batch of pilgrims focused their attention elsewhere.
That was the routine: Every day the slavers scoured the surrounding area in a small black inflatable. Some days they returned with captives, some days, none. Nat, Wes, and the rest of the prisoners were on deck, watching as the next batch of victims arrived. From afar, the captives—a group of smallmen—looked strangely peaceful, hopeful even, but as the boat neared the slave ship, they began to react violently. One drew a dagger from his pocket, while two others attacked the slavers, kicking and punching.
The pirates quelled the little rebellion soon enough, throwing one of the smallmen overboard to drown so the rest fell into line, the sight of their sinking comrade taking the fight out of them.
Nat learned how the slavers worked; in the morning they filled the inflatable boat with food and supplies. They sent out their better-looking men, clean-shaven and decently attired. They would circle the dark ocean until they caught sight of a pilgrim boat.
The slavers would coast alongside the pilgrims, greeting them warmly, offering aid and guidance. More often than not, the pilgrims had been lost for days and were likely starving. The slavers would tell them they were from the Blue, and were there to offer them safe passage through the strait; all the pilgrims had to do was ditch their boat and climb on board theirs. The doorway was not far, they told them.
It was only when they reached the hulking slave ship that the pilgrims realized they had been lied to, and that far from finding the refuge of the Blue, they had been turned into prisoners, and enslaved. Hence the sudden violence.
The smallmen were hustled onto the ship, their faces pale and frightened, noses broken as well as their spirit. Two of them were placed in the cage on the other side of Nat and Wes’s.
Later that night, Nat knocked on the wall. There was a tentative knock back.
They knew the Layman’s Code! Just like Brendon and Roark did.
Where did you come from? she knocked.
—We are from Upper Pangaea. There were more of us.
—Yes. We know. We picked them up. Brendon Rimmel and Roark Goderson.
There was a long pause and then:
—Brendon is our son. Is he safe?
—He is alive. As for safe, we do not know. He is on a different slave ship. We were separated upon capture.
—Thank you.
With new captives to torture for their entertainment, the slavers didn’t bother with the rest. “How do you think they’re doing—Donnie and Roark and Shakes?” she asked.
“Shakes will take care of them as best he can,” Wes said. “He won’t leave them.”
Nat nodded. That sounded about right.
“Another game?” He yawned.
“Sure.”
They played poker for a while, Nat beating him easily. “Your scar moves when you have a good hand,” she told him. “That’s your tell.”
He wiggled his eyebrows. “Tell me more.”
“Wes, I do have something to tell you,” she said. “I just . . . I haven’t been honest with you.” She had to do it. She had to tell him, even if it meant he would hate her, even if it meant they could never be friends again.
He rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, what is it?”
“The night your sister was taken . . .” She couldn’t do it, she thought she could, but she couldn’t tell him.
Wes raised his eyebrow. “The night my sister was taken . . . ?”
“When I worked for Bradley, I . . . I was part of a repatriate team . . . we would take things . . . without anyone knowing . . . secrets, weapons . . . but our specialty was people.”
He clenched his jaw and tossed his cards to the floor. “No. No. Don’t tell me that. You had nothing to do with Eliza!”
“I’m a monster . . . I . . . hurt people . . . your sister . . .”
He shook his head, tears coming to his eyes.
“Your sister is dead, Wes. Because of me. I killed her.”
“No!”
“The night you described, the fire that came from nowhere, the fact that there were no remains . . . Oh god, Wes, the things I used to do . . . the things they made me do . . . the things I can do . . .”
“NO, NAT, NO! You had nothing to do with that!” He took her hands in his fists. “Look at me. Listen to me! It wasn’t you. You had nothing to do with that!”
Nat was sobbing now, and Wes was holding her so tightly. “They would send us out—to do exactly what you described—to take children! When people wouldn’t give them up to the repo men, we would take them, to keep everyone in line. To remind people they couldn’t break the rules. If that guy hadn’t dropped Shakes like he had . . . they would have sent a team for him. I did it! I know it was me who took Eliza. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I didn’t know. But when you talked about it—it all came back . . . everything . . . we would destroy things . . . bomb things . . . the fires . . .”
“No,” he said miserably, releasing her from his grip. “No. Listen to me. It wasn’t you, Nat. You might . . . you might have done those sorts of things in the past . . . but you didn’t kill Eliza.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I know what really happened that night.” He leaned against the wall of the cage and closed his eyes. “Because the fire was Eliza’s idea. She was behind it all along,” he said quietly. “Eliza was marked. She had blue eyes, and a spiral on her arm.”
“A weaver.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“She could create illusions, couldn’t she?”
“Yeah. She . . . made this fire . . . I still don’t re
member what was real and what wasn’t. But here’s the thing about Eliza . . . she wasn’t . . . she wasn’t . . .” He sighed. “She wasn’t very nice. She was . . . scary sometimes. I don’t know where she is or what happened to her, but I need to find her, Nat. So I can save her . . . from herself.”
Nat stared at Wes.
“It wasn’t you, okay? I know. Because . . . I know my sister. And all those things you did . . . they’re in the past . . . you couldn’t help it . . . you were just a kid. They used you. They use all of us,” he said.
She didn’t know what to feel then. Relief?
It didn’t seem like enough. She just felt empty. Even if she hadn’t been the cause of Eliza’s disappearance, she still felt guilty.
“Hey, come on now, don’t look like that,” he said. “Come here.”
She leaned against him and he folded her in his arms.
“So your sister was a monster,” Nat whispered, feeling safe as she leaned against him, their bodies creating a small space of warmth in the cold room.
“I didn’t say that,” he said, his nose almost in her hair, his soft breath on her ear.
“She’s a monster . . . like me.”
“You’re not a monster.”
“There’s a voice in my head, and it’s the voice of a monster.”
“You mean like the way you understand animals?” he asked, and she could feel him smiling.
“No, it’s different.”
“Do you know what it is?”
She shook her head. “All I know is that it was the voice that told me to escape, to go to New Vegas, and go to the Blue. And it sends me dreams. Dreams of fire and devastation, dreams of flying, like it’s preparing me somehow.”
“What’s it saying now?”
“Actually, it’s been quiet for a while.” Since the white bird was killed, she realized. There was something more. Since she had fallen for Wes, it had been silent, angry somehow. She remembered the anguish of the wailer, and its large shadow on the water, its anger as it tore their ship apart.
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