I bend to pick up my Switch, and then say, “You’ve clearly been well trained.”
He remains silent.
I meet his eyes, feeling raw inside at the way he watches me. “You’re more than qualified to choose which trainee should carry which weapon. I have something else I have to do.”
Without waiting for a response, I walk away. Across the clearing. Through the eastern edge of camp and deep into the shadowy depths of the Wasteland with its scrubby ferns and spongy moss, its reverent stillness and its well-kept secrets. I keep my head held high and my shoulders straight, though there’s no one left to see it. I won’t look weak and broken again. Not for Quinn. Not for anyone.
Chapter Sixteen
LOGAN
It’s been four days since we left Baalboden behind, and there’s still no sign of the Commander and his army. My steps feel lighter with every day that passes, even though whoever sabotaged the machine is still playing stupid pranks around camp. A bag of grain sliced open and spilled. A wagon canvas slashed. Petty things. I even found another note lying on my bedroll when I entered my tent one night. It said, “Justice requires sacrifice.” I refuse to allow some disgruntled prankster with a penchant for drama to get to me. Not when we’re still enjoying the triumph of outwitting the Commander and breaking his control over us.
We’ve traveled northeast, following the broken outline of a road from the previous civilization. Thick weeds and clumps of grass shove their way through the faded gray stone, and monstrous tree roots reduce entire portions of the road to crumbled pieces. In some sections, the path disappears completely, overtaken by the ever-encroaching vegetation of the Wasteland.
Rachel walks beside me, twenty yards ahead of the group, her cloak billowing in the stiff wind that plunges through the trees. Skinny maples and scattered evergreens creak beneath the onslaught.
While every step we take away from Baalboden and the Commander buoys me with a sense of freedom, the opposite seems to be true for Rachel. She grows more and more withdrawn—turned inward toward whatever thoughts haunt her until she realizes I’m watching her. Then she’ll smile and talk and focus on the task at hand, but it’s a thin mask that barely covers the truth.
I don’t know what to do about it when she refuses to tell me what’s bothering her.
Ian walks a few yards behind us, a girl on each arm. He talks to them as they walk, and the girls blush and giggle like he just offered to Claim them. I don’t know how he does it. I have a hard enough time figuring out what to say to Rachel, and I’ve known her most of my life. The thought of carrying on a flirtatious conversation with two girls at once makes my stomach feel like I ingested an unstable element.
The rest of the group lags behind Ian and his girls by a good ten yards. I’ve asked Quinn and Willow to hunt for tonight’s meal, and they’ve promised to catch up to us again by sundown. If I had my way, we’d travel without stopping until twilight, but most of the survivors won’t make it another two hundred yards without a rest.
“We’ll stop for lunch soon,” I say to Rachel as another gust of wind slaps me in the face. “Jeremiah’s map shows a large clearing of some sort about fifty yards after an old sign.”
Rachel glances around us. “What old sign? There’s nothing out here but broken-down road and Wasteland.”
As if to prove her wrong, several yards ahead something gleams copper and brown beneath the thick carpet of moss that covers the forest floor. I stride forward and crouch to pull moss and vines away from what looks like a narrow road made of two parallel metal bars nailed into rotting planks of wood. The corroded metal is rough beneath my fingers as I run my hand along it. The road bisects the path and disappears into the Wasteland, where vines and tree roots hide it from sight.
“It’s a railroad track,” Rachel says, shoving the toe of her boot against the metal bar I’m touching. “Dad showed me one on a trip once. He said the earlier civilization had giant wagons called trains that hitched together and ran on fuel instead of horses and donkeys. This was the road the trains used.”
I stand slowly, my eyes still on the track. “Can you imagine being able to travel from city-state to city-state without walking? Of course, we’d have to build better roads. And we’d have to figure out a way to build trains that are quiet enough to escape the Cursed One’s notice—or maybe equip the trains with the same sonic pulse that repels the beast. I bet I could—”
“Hey!” Rachel snaps her fingers in front of my face, and I realize the rest of the group has nearly caught up to us. “Before you decide to invent super-quiet trains with sonic weapons mounted on the front, maybe we should find that old sign and stop for lunch.”
I grin. She smiles back, and the shadows momentarily lift from her eyes.
“You’re right. Besides, I have enough inventions to worry about at the moment without adding another one to the mix.”
“How’s that going? Are we still going to be able to drop these people off at Lankenshire and then go hunt down the Commander?” She steps across the tracks, and I follow as the broken road beneath us curves through a sparse clump of trees.
“If Lankenshire makes an alliance with us—”
“Of course they will.” She kicks a chunk of crumbled stone off the trail before it can snag a wagon wheel or trip an unwary traveler. “You’ll have a replica of Rowansmark’s device to offer them. They’d have to be pretty stupid to turn that down.”
The Rowansmark tech is easy to use, but hard to duplicate. The internal wiring is a braided copper wire, sixteen gauge. The mechanisms that make up the levers are obviously handcrafted out of paper-thin silver. I don’t have anything in our salvage wagon, or in the bag of tech supplies I recovered from the abandoned armory in Lower Market where I’d stashed a few backup plans, that’s comparable to either the braided wire or the silver. And everything else I’ve tried has failed. Without the ability to duplicate the device, and with the worry that it will somehow malfunction when I need it most, I’ve settled for increasing the power in the booster I built for it, even though it now uses all but two of my remaining batteries. I may not be able to replicate Rowansmark’s tech yet, but I can improve it.
All of which does nothing to help me broker an alliance with Lankenshire, because I have no intention of handing over the only working model.
“I still have some issues with the Rowansmark design,” I say as we pass an evergreen whose top half has snapped off and balances haphazardly on the thin arms of the tree beside it. Placing my hand on the small of Rachel’s back, I guide us both away from the tree and shout a warning back to the others as well. In wind like this, we don’t want to take any chances.
“What about the device you’re building to find the Commander?” she asks, and it’s clear from the impatience in her voice that this is the only invention she truly cares about.
“It’s coming along.” Something else gleams beneath the thick greenery of the Wasteland. Something just off the path, about fifteen yards ahead of us.
“How can you be sure it works? Don’t you need his individual wristmark signature? Not that we couldn’t just search for the bright red Carrington uniforms, I guess.”
“I have his signature.” I quicken my pace as I see rusted metal poles, laced with vines, stabbing the ground like twin legs braced several yards apart. “I traded six fully functioning cloaking devices once to get it because I thought I might need it someday.”
“And you just happened to have stashed it with your extra tech at the armory?”
I turn to face her as we reach the metal poles. Something large is bolted to the rods, about halfway up, but the vines obscure it.
“Memorized it.” I tap my temple with my finger. “I didn’t want to write it down and get caught with it in case the Commander ever had cause to search my house. Plus, I couldn’t risk misplacing something so important.”
She smiles, but her eyes are fierce. “I love that you always think five steps ahead.”
“I seem to reca
ll you once comparing my plans to an overly cautious grandmother crossing Central Square.”
“Well, I was still mad at you for everything when I said that.”
“And by ‘everything’ you mean my clumsy use of logic and reason to turn you down when you told me you loved me on your fifteenth birthday?”
She winces. “Don’t remind me. It’s still humiliating.”
I frown. “Why? You did nothing wrong.”
A pink glow suffuses her cheeks. “I embarrassed myself. Throwing myself at my father’s apprentice because I was so sure you felt the same. What an idiot.” She refuses to look at me.
I wrap my arm around her waist and lean down until my lips are right beside her ear. Quietly, I say, “I used to feel like someone sucked all the oxygen out of the room whenever you came near me. I would sit at your father’s dinner table, eating his food and discussing my job requirements, and I would have to force myself not to study the way the lamplight turned your hair into flames.” My voice lowers. “You reminded me of fire—brilliant, warm, and strong. And every time you brushed against me, I felt like I’d swallowed some of that fire, and that if your father looked at me then he’d know it.”
“Really?” Her voice is low and breathless.
“Really.”
“You told me you didn’t love me,” she says, and there’s a tiny note of hurt in her voice.
“I told you the truth. I didn’t love you, then.” My arm tightens around her waist. “But being near you was like waving my hand through a lit torch, hoping I might get burned just a little. I thought that was just the way a boy feels when he’s near a girl. I didn’t realize the feeling was specific to you.”
She laughs and leans into me. “You also told me I’d get over you.”
“I’ve been known to be wrong,” I say, and kiss her before she can say anything else. She rolls her eyes, but kisses me back until Ian whistles appreciatively behind us.
Laughing, I step back from Rachel and turn to the vine-clad rectangle that looms above us. Grabbing a handful of thick, rubbery kudzu, I tug sharply and the entire curtain of vegetation begins slowly sliding to the left. Rachel wraps a few more vines around her hands and helps. In a few seconds, we can see most of the sign. White letters against a faded blue background say Best Races in Town. Just above the words, a brown horse with a rider on its back is pictured running like his life depends on it.
“This is it!” Jeremiah comes up beside us, his bent fingers clamped on his head to keep his hat securely in place. “This is the sign. The clearing is just past those trees.” He points north, where the road beneath us wraps around a thick copse of black cherry trees whose white blossoms flutter in the wind.
“We’ll stop there for lunch and sparring practice,” I say as I let go of the kudzu and join Rachel in leading the group toward the clearing. We round the curve and find a large metal wheel, mounted upright as if trying to spin into the sky, resting near the center of a field of wildflowers, spring grass, and scrubby bushes with tiny berries clustered against their leaves. Kudzu climbs the wheel, wraps around its spindles and gears, and then plunges down the other side in a curtain of green.
I’ve never seen anything so strange and beautiful.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s a Ferris wheel,” Jeremiah says. “Folks used to ride them.”
“Ride them where?” I look around the field for the rest of what must have been an enormous vehicle.
Jeremiah laughs a little. “It doesn’t go anywhere. It spins. You’d sit in one of the seats”—he points to large buckets in sun-faded colors that dangle from the inner edge of the circle—“and take a ride, round and round, until the ride operator stopped your cart at the top. Felt like you could see the whole world.”
“Seems like a waste of time,” Rachel says.
“Seems like a technological marvel.” I walk closer to the wheel, skirting a thorny bush before it snags my cloak. Behind us, the wagons reach the field and Nola supervises the task of setting up for lunch.
“It was just something fun we did whenever a carnival came to town,” Jeremiah says.
“What’s a carnival?” Rachel asks.
“Well, now, used to be we’d have sort of a community holiday once a year.” He twists his hat in his hands. “The folks that ran the carnival would bring rides, like the Ferris wheel, and cook kettle corn and funnel cakes and pies—celebratory food like we’d have on Claiming Day.”
“Where did the Claimings take place?” I ask as I glance around the field, looking for a fancy stage.
Jeremiah coughs. “No marriages at the carnival. No Claimings, period. Not in the old civilization. Men and women asked the person they loved to marry them, and then picked a date and a fancy location, and did it themselves. Claiming is something the Commander came up with.”
Before I can reply to him, a shout goes up behind me. I spin on my heel and nearly get knocked flat on my back as Adam and Ian crash against me. Adam’s face is flushed with rage, and he throws a punch straight for Ian’s nose.
Ian blocks the blow and delivers one of his own, slamming his fist into Adam’s shoulder and spinning him directly into me. We hit the ground hard, and the thorny bush I’d been so careful to avoid earlier pierces my thigh with needle-sharp spindles.
I swear and push Adam off of me. Ian lunges forward, grabs Adam’s tunic, and hauls him to his feet. Ian’s eyes are murderous as he reaches for his sword.
“Hey! Stop!” I scramble to my feet, but Rachel is already shoving her way between them.
“What are you two idiots doing?” she snaps.
“He hit me.” Adam spits blood onto the grass and glares at Ian while his fingers bunch into fists. He takes a step toward Ian, and Rachel smacks his chest with her Switch.
“Unless you want me to make you cry in front of everyone, you’d better calm down,” she says.
“I hit you because you deserved it,” Ian says, and every ounce of the charm he wears like a second skin is submerged beneath the cold brutality in his voice. “And if I ever hear you say something like that again, I’ll take my sword to you.”
“No one is going to take a sword to anyone unless we’re facing Carrington or highwaymen,” I say. “Both of you take a step back and calm down.”
“Not before he apologizes,” Ian says without once breaking eye contact with Adam.
“You owe me an apology,” Adam says, and shoves against Rachel’s restraining hand.
She braces herself. “Adam, I’m warning you—”
“No, you owe Logan an apology. You and that silent little creep.” A vein in Ian’s forehead throbs as he points behind me. I turn to see Elias standing a few yards away. When he meets my gaze, his blue eyes widen like he’s just been caught pickpocketing a guard in Lower Market.
“I owe Logan nothing.” Adam spits the words at Ian as if I’m not standing right beside him.
“You owe him your life,” Rachel says, removing her hand from his chest and glaring at him like she’s about to team up with Ian and take Adam down for the sake of my honor.
“Let’s all just take a moment and calm down,” I say, waving discreetly to Drake as he heads our way. He understands my request and changes course, gathering up those who hover near us with eager ears and shepherding all of them toward the canteen wagon parked at the edge of the field.
“He said you weren’t worth following. That we should wait for the Commander to catch up to us and rejoin our true leader,” Ian says, his fist still wrapped around the hilt of his sword, though he’s made no move to pull it from its sheath.
“I said I didn’t sign on to wander endlessly through the Wasteland at the whim of someone the Commander declared unfit for society.”
“I declare you unfit for society.” Ian raises his fists. “Every time I turn around, you’re huddled with Elias discussing the good old days when the Commander used to tell you how to wipe your nose and how to use a fork and how to—”
“He’s a
great man!” Adam’s voice rings out across the field, and I push a hand against his shoulder when he moves toward Ian again.
“He was a monster who deserved to lose his city and everyone in it.”
“My family died that day.” Adam lunges forward, shoving past my restraining arm, and slams into Ian.
They hit the grass in a tangle of fists, feet, and limbs. Adam grabs the silver chain Ian wears around his neck and jerks it free, leaving a long red welt on the side of Ian’s neck. Ian howls with fury and pounds his fists into Adam’s face, shoulders, and back. I bend down, grab Adam’s shoulders, and pull him off of Ian. Rachel crouches beside Ian as he rolls over and slaps the thick tufts of grass with his hand.
“I’ve got it,” Rachel says as she hands Ian the chain, its little copper charm undamaged.
He takes it from her and rubs his thumb across the charm’s surface.
“Nice piece of jewelry,” Adam sneers, and I give his arms a sharp little shake.
Ian looks up, the sun gleaming off a thin trail of blood that leaks from a split in the corner of his lip. “My father made it. It’s all I have left of him. The Commander saw to that.”
The fight slowly drains from Adam, and I release his shoulders as I feel them slump. Rachel meets my gaze, and I nod as I read her expression. I can’t let this situation with Adam go unaddressed any longer.
“I understand that you don’t want me as your leader,” I say quietly as a faint rumbling echoes out of the Wasteland to the south of us.
“You’re nineteen! The same age as me. What qualifies you to tell me what to do?” Adam glares at me through eyes already starting to swell, courtesy of Ian’s fists.
“The fact that I have a plan, I know how to put it into action, and the majority of those who survived Baalboden voted to put me in charge,” I say, and Adam looks at the ground. “Why didn’t you leave with the others who headed east to find the Commander? Why stay with me if you despise me so much?”
“Because I couldn’t bear to leave my family behind.” His voice is raw with grief and the kind of unspent rage that sometimes lashes out of Rachel. “How was I supposed to know you weren’t planning to stay in Baalboden?”