“Forgive me, and thank you for your patience as I struggle to deal with this rather sudden and tragic news. As I was trying to say earlier, I do not believe our Western guests knew there was to be an ambush. However, Ember believes she may have been used by Lupine to achieve such an act of violence. She is prepared to take full responsibility for these recent events, but I see no need to punish her specifically. Because of this, I ask that none of you harm her or her mate.”
Ember breathed a silent sigh of relief. Her gaze wandered around the gathering, then landed on Boreal. She wasn’t crying, and she didn’t look angry, but Ember couldn’t decipher anything beyond that.
“Now this marks the third time Westerners have attacked us unprovoked,” Jade said. “We’ve tried all reasonable methods of working this out. The longer we wait to take action, the stronger we allow them to get. It’s only a matter of time before they decide to come to us. I’ve gathered you here to ask one important question: should we fortify the Rift or launch an attack of our own?”
A nervous lump formed in Ember’s chest. ‘No. Please no. Don’t attack. Just leave them alone. They aren’t coming here; I can almost guarantee it. Lupine’s not a strategic mastermind. He can’t be doing this intentionally. Someone else in the West had this happen. It has to be. If we could just find out—’
“Launch an attack!” one called.
“This is our best position of defense. If we want to win this war, staying here is our best chance. Here we have the advantage,” another said.
“If we stay here, it’ll only be the Battle of Stone Ridge all over again,” the cat beside him snapped.
“We have to take action! We’ve remained passive for too long. They’ve pawed at our nest one time too m—”
“The West has to pay!”
Jade closed her eyes and controlled her breathing. “Those who wish to stay, gather by the nearest fire pit. Those who would like to fight, remain where you are.”
Several of the cats got up and walked away to the fire pit, but not many compared to the size of the colony. Boreal walked away with them, but the lump in Ember’s chest kept extending into her neck and constricted it until she couldn’t breathe.
Jade looked down at the remaining cats. “It is enough. You all have the day off from your regular duties to prepare. Those of you who work night shift, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stay awake longer today. To compensate, we will all get our meals and go to sleep sooner. In order for this to work, we must all be on the same schedule. We will leave shortly before dawn. On the day following, you may take the vengeance you desire.”
The remaining cats cheered, then began chanting an Eastern battle cry. The noise stabbed Ember’s ears. She sank to her stomach and wrapped her paws around her head, shivering all over. ‘I didn’t save them. Oh, no, you’ve just made everything so much worse. What am I supposed to do now? What do I do? What do I do? My family.’
One of the cats from the fire pit walked up to Jade’s rock. “Listen, I know I can’t change your decision, but please believe me when I say it’s a mistake,” she said. “Nothing good will come out of this.”
Jade sighed. “Maybe, but if they don’t go at my command, these cats will only run off and do it themselves, then cast me out when they return, if they return at all. The least I can do is give them the structure they need to be successful.”
“Then I ask that you be careful. Something about this feels very wrong,” the cat said.
Echo jumped onto the stones. She lowered her head. “I’m with you, Mum, but Shard stays.”
“I wasn’t planning on bringing him,” Jade replied. “He doesn’t belong on the battlefield. Though I will admit I’m surprised you would want to go.”
“You would be surprised by a lot of things about me, if you’d just care enough to pay attention.” Without waiting for a response, Echo jumped back down, then walked away.
“Echo,” Jade said, “come back here. Now.”
Echo stopped but made no moves to return. “What?”
“I want you to stay here and keep watch over Ember. Make sure she doesn’t try to escape. I would prefer she stays alive, but if it comes down to it, you may kill her. I’d rather have her dead than have her warn her colony.”
“Can’t you make someone else watch her? I need to go.”
“Echo.” Jade jumped down and walked over to her daughter. “If I die, you will become the next commander. The colony needs you alive. I need you alive. Take care of your brother and do as you are told.”
Echo glared at her for a few moments. “Fine. Come along, prisoner.”
Ember’s mind locked up. ‘Is she talking to me?’
“Wait. Before you bring her anywhere, Ember, you should know that if you try to escape and get caught, I will kill Hyrees and you; Hyrees first. If you do manage to escape and try to warn your colony, I will take extra care to make sure your family is killed in battle. I would tell you, if you stayed, that I would instruct my cats to spare your family’s lives, but I’m afraid I can’t promise or even ask of such a thing when it comes to large-scale warfare. Hopefully the things I can promise will give you all the incentive you need to keep you in your place.”
Ember lowered her head and nodded once. She swallowed the mixture of blood and bile building up in her mouth.
Echo grimaced. “Alright, now that Mum is done intimidating you, come along, my prisoner.”
Ember pressed her teeth against her tongue and followed. All throughout the day, cats worked. They gathered medical supplies and smoked bits of food to carry with them in clay bowls with handles. Making everyone hunt along the way would only prolong their journey, and Jade insisted on being as fast as possible. Before sunset, but after noon, most the colony had eaten their second meal and was trying to sleep. Ember tossed and turned in her quarters. She let her mind wander and managed to drift off, but a breaking branch woke her up an hour later.
Outside, Echo snored and mumbled to herself, making sleep even less attainable. Despite being together all day, Echo hadn’t said much, but she’d kept her vow of tolerance. She hadn’t once used the words ‘freak’ or ‘weirdo,’ yet Ember found herself unable to appreciate it through all the fear of what might become.
Ember tried moving deeper into the tunnel, but even darkness couldn’t choke out the anxieties that came with her two colonies going to war. Beside her, Hyrees’s breathing was shallow and slow. Any time she thought she couldn’t hear it, she had a tiny anxiety attack. She sighed and sat up. The sunset behind her illuminated parts of the tunnel.
‘What do I do?’ The thought had been on loop in her mind almost all day. ‘What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just sit back and let my family die, then live with and protect the ones who killed them? That doesn’t seem right. Not right at all.’
She rolled onto her side. ‘Just like it doesn’t make sense that Eclan survived when two of the most well-trained, elite border guards did not. Just like it doesn’t seem right that even an informed colony would be waiting at the exact location they were passing through. Not unless the place had been agreed upon before. This isn’t their fault.’ She stood, then paced in a tight circle. ‘I can’t let this happen. But there are so many risks if I try to do anything about it. If I step wrong just once, me and Hyrees could die, along with everyone else I love.’
She looked down at her mate. He looked so calm and peaceful—almost happy. ‘What will they do to you if I go? But then again, you may never wake up and you did try to abandon me, so there’s that. If I go, and you wake up, will you want to die over again? And if you wake up and I don’t go, then what?’ She growled. ‘I feel like any path I take with you at this point only leads to the same place. We’re going nowhere. This is going nowhere. Tahg, even I’m going nowhere. What am I supposed to do?’
Ember walked farther into the tunnel. A faint breath of cool air hit her face. ‘Wait. Thai, turn on flashlight.’
She closed her eyes as her flashlight switched
on. She turned it away from the hole connecting her quarters to Boreal’s and squinted to look forward through the sudden glare. “Oh.”
A large tree root had broken through the side of the tunnel, creating a cave-in of dirt and small rocks. Only a small space in the upper left edge of the tunnel remained unblocked. Out of curiosity, and for the sake of taking her mind off of the impending doom and despair, she started to dig. She let her work absorb her. Everything else faded into the background. Everything except the anxious lump in her chest. Once she’d made a big enough hole, she shone her flashlight through it. The tunnel seemed to end abruptly in a wall of blackness. Ember kept digging until she made the hole big enough for her to squeeze through. On the other side, the smell of damp air comforted her nervous body, so she walked to the end of the tunnel.
“Wow,” she whispered.
Instead of ending, the tunnel merged with several other quarters and became a megachamber—a huge cavern she couldn’t see the end of. ‘I wonder. Thai, could you show me some stars? Some really pretty orange ones?’
Thai obliged and projected orange spots of light into the darkness. They hit the near-invisible wall and illuminated the cavern: little flecks of light that were too large to really look like stars, but Ember didn’t care. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, stalactites and limestone columns took shape within her artificial starfield, making the cavern even more beautiful. She sat down to stare at the otherworldly scene until the lump in her chest almost disappeared.
“Ember, are you in there?” Shard’s voice asked, making her jump.
“Yes, I’ll be out soon,” she called. The lump came back with reinforcements. Despite the niceness of the cavern air and the kindness of Shard’s familiar voice, her fur rose. “Thai, turn the lights off.”
Thai obeyed and Ember squeezed back through the hole. When she reached the opening where her quarters met the Rift, Shard stood to greet her. The sun had gone down while she’d watched her light show and now the valley was dark.
“Oh, brilliant, there you are,” he said. “I was beginning to worry you’d run off after all.”
Ember stepped over Hyrees and into the Rift. “Your sister is sleeping right there. We should probably find somewhere else to talk,” she said.
“Wait. Let me try something.” Shard lifted one of his paws, unsheathed a claw, then poked Hyrees in the nose. He waited in silence. Nothing happened. “Sorry. Believe it or not, that sometimes works. But yes, we-we probably should go somewhere else. Oh! Oh! That reminds me why I came here. I couldn’t sleep either, you see, and I was thinking about how you might be in an absolute state of disaster after Mum’s announcement, because, let’s be honest, I know I am, but I looked outside, and, well, just follow me.”
She obeyed, mind too numb to protest as Shard led her to the edge of the Rift. As she drew closer and closer to the open clearing, she could see more and more turquoise in her mind. It pushed the grey aside and sent her flecks of indigo. The forest below seemed like it was covered with something more than moonlight. Ember stepped out from beneath the Rift’s protective shadow. She looked up.
“Oh. Oh, wow,” she whispered, eyes wide with awe.
White appeared alongside the turquoise, and color filled the sky. It was as if partial rainbows had become waves of cloud: bands of color and light, with faded pink on the top, turquoise in the middle, and green on the bottom.
“I know; it’s beautiful, isn’t it? I call it a night rainbow. I’ve only seen one once before. Echo saw it sometime two winters ago when we were kittens. She woke me up and we watched it until it faded. It was a very happy moment in the middle of a lot of unhappy ones. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so different from how it is now. Maybe it only comes when things get bad to help things start to get better.” He shuffled his paws against the dirt. “Probably not, but I am grateful for it. I wish Hyrees could see it. I’d wake Echo, but she usually doesn’t get to sleep this easily, so it would be better for her if she slept. Especially with everything set to happen tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Ember said. She sighed quietly and let the lights become her only focus. She considered asking Thai what they really were or how they worked but decided she was too tired to absorb any information she might hear.
“Hey, you know how, in the summer, there are always a bunch of lightbugs going around, flashing and flickering everywhere?”
Ember flattened her ears and looked at him. “Er . . . yes?”
“Well, one time, this past summer, I found a human container—one of those clear ones—up near Gale Springs. I guess you can already see where this is going, but I managed to figure out how to catch them in it without killing them. I spent an entire evening working on my lightbug collection, and by the time I was done, they were flashing everywhere and crawling all over with their weird little legs. And I bet you can guess what I did with them.”
She smiled. The mental image of Shard chasing and jumping after lightbugs made her feel happy, warm, and orange inside. “You either put them in Jade’s den or the healing cave? Cave of healing. Whatever you Easterners call it.”
“The cave of healing. Tha-that’s where I put it. It was really pretty, and everyone who went there thought so too. I was fairly proud of it. After all, I’d finally done something everyone liked. Guess what happened after that. Go on, guess.”
“You let them out? Accidentally?”
He laughed. “Knocked the bloody thing over. The top fell off and lightbugs were everywhere. Crow didn’t think it was funny, but imagine the place sparkling with lights all around. It was my best mistake ever.”
She chuckled but stopped herself. “Wait, why are you telling me this?”
He pawed at the dirt again. “Mostly to take my mind off of the impending doom and despair. The night rainbows and lightbugs are attached to some of my nicest memories. When I’m having a rough day, or night, or such, I try to think about one of those two things and I start to feel better. Doesn’t always work though. Like tonight. I’m bloody terrified.”
Ember looked at him again. She realized he was shivering. The fur along his back and tail stood on end. All the events of the day came back in an instant.
“That makes two of us, I guess.” She lifted a bionic paw in front of her face. It wavered around, doing some mechanical equivalent of trembling. Her lower jaw quivered and her vision blurred. It felt like a giant paw had reached into her chest and was crushing her heart. ‘This is just a distraction. There are real problems right now, and real decisions I have to make, and I have to make them soon or I won’t be able to do anything. Why do I keep distracting myself. I’m running out of time. They’re running out of time. What do I do?’
“Ember? Ember, are you alright?” Shard’s voice asked. It sounded distant, even though his tail rested on top of hers.
‘No. No, I’m not. I don’t know what to do. If I stay, my colony gets destroyed. If I go, they might have time to prepare, but Jade said she’s going to try to kill my family. Maybe I can get them out somehow. Help them escape the war altogether. Then, well, I’d have to leave Hyrees here, and I’d be an outsider the rest of my life because none of the colonies will trust me; never trust me ever again, ever.’
“Hello? What’s going on?”
She stared at the bramble bushes ahead, unable to even look at the sky as tears dripped into her fur. ‘Boreal? Why is everyone coming out here now? I can’t talk right now. I don’t know why, but I can’t. If I go, I’ll never see Hyrees again, even if he does survive, but if I stay, I’d be leaving my family to die in a war they never wanted to be part of. I can’t be in the valley alone, though. I’m broken. ETAg or not, I can’t function on my own. I won’t make it. I’ll die. I can’t . . .’
“We were talking about lightbugs, then I told her how scared I am of tomorrow, and she kind of . . . froze. I-I don’t know what to do. You know her better. Maybe you can talk to her?” Shard said.
‘I don’t want to be talked to. I have to think. Leave me alone. Pl
ease.’
“Ember?” Boreal asked.
‘He might not make it. Might not make it. A lot of berries.’ Ember blinked a few times and shook her head. More tears seeped into her fur, making her face cold. ‘You can’t keep doing this, Ember. You can’t keep running. Not anymore. Not now, when you’re the only one who can change this.’
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s, ah, I guess it’s not exactly okay, is it?” Boreal said.
“No, no, I have to go. I have to get my family out of there. Please, let me go. Don’t stop me.”
Shard stood up, eyes wide. “Wait, Ember, no, you heard Mum. She’ll kill you if she finds out. You can’t go.”
“But I have to. I have to get them out of there.”
Boreal sat down beside her and looked up at the sky. Ember gazed up with her, remembering the night rainbows. They’d shifted positions since she’d last looked. Boreal sighed. “Are you sure that’s what you need to do? It might be selfish of me, but now that Father is gone, if you leave too, I’ll never see you again. I’ll have no one.”
“You’ll have Hyrees.” She closed her eyes. ‘Do you think I want to do this? Do you think I haven’t thought this through? I’m terrified! I want to run and hide in my quarters and not come out again until everything is over. It would be easier, and safer, and selfish. It was hard enough even telling you this. Stop trying to talk me out of it. I’m tired of being a coward. I can’t do this anymore. Just let me leave!’
“He may never wake up,” Boreal mewed quietly.
“You’ll have me too,” Shard said, “but please don’t go. I don’t want you to die. And if he does wake up, what are we supposed to tell him? That you ran off without him and will never see him again? He already tried to die once. How do you think he’ll react to that? Ember, you . . . you can’t leave him like this.”
“Let her go,” a voice behind them said. Ember spun around to find Echo standing in the shadows of the Rift. She watched them with piercing blue-green eyes.
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