Ice Country

  Just before we reach the final stretch to the palace gates, Abe veers off to the right. “Where are you going?” I say, breaking the no-question rule and floating the very last sliver of my luck across the night sky.

  “Gotta go the long way. Safer.” Safer for who? Not for the dead-on-their-feet kids. Not for anyone but the king, who’s worried about the general public finding out about his secrets. The Cure. His penchant for stealing children in the dark of the night.

  “These kids have to rest soon,” I say.

  Abe stops, glances at the kids, as if he’s forgotten they’re here, that they’re people, capable of weariness. Perhaps that’s the only way he can manage his guilt. Then, to my surprise, he shrugs. “I’ll probably catch it from the king, but I’m ready for bed too.”

  He heads straight for the palace gate and we follow. Before the gate, he says, “I’ll take it from here.”

  “I’ll help you get them to bed,” I say.

  “Not a chance,” Abe says. “They won’t let anyone in but me. Take a hike.”

  Going home is the last thing I want to do. Thoughts of charging through the gates, fighting off sword- and bow-wielding guards with my bare fists, barging my way into the king’s quarters, knocking him senseless, and taking my sister back cycle through my head.

  Then I turn and walk away, Buff by my side.

  Over my shoulder, Abe’s voice carries on the wind. “Remember, don’t tell anyone what you saw tonight. Yer bein’ watched. Always.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Knowing and not being able to do anything is almost worse than not knowing at all.

  Every day Buff and I think up a dozen hare-brained plans to infiltrate the palace and rescue Joles and all the other kids, Heaters and Icers alike, but every day we shoot so many holes in our ideas that they cross the line from impossible to no-way-in-chill-buddy.

  At night I literally pull my hair out trying to bully my brain into being smarter. In the morning I find strands of black on my pillow. I want to tell Wes everything, but I’m afraid they’ll know if I do, and then I’ll end up like Nebo. And because Wes’ll know, he’ll have to be taken out too.

  It’s a problem without a solution. The only thing I have going for me is the job, which at least allows me to see what’s going on at the border, what the king is up to. But then, one day, the Heaters don’t show up.

  “Whaddya make of it?” Brock says, cracking his knuckles and staring off into fire country. It’s a question, but I guess not one that’s against the rules.

  Abe scratches his chin. “They were s’posed to have supplies for us today. Something musta happened.”

  “Like what?” Buff says.

  “Who knows?” Abe says, grabbing a handful of sand and letting it drift through his fingertips. It’s hotter down here than I’ve ever felt before in my life, like sitting in a roaring fire. Even the light breeze is full of heat. Not even a wisp of a yellow cloud mars the great red sky. And the sun? Chill! It feels so close and big I have to shield my eyes with my hand.

  I remember everything Roan said the night he failed to deliver the next batch of children. Shiv about being attacked from all sides, by something called Killers, and the pasty-skinned Glassies, and something about the Wildes stealing their girls, or some such rot. When all the time he’s been giving away his children to King Goff anyway, so who is he to complain? Whatever the case, though, something’s gone wrong, which means we have no choice but to trudge back up the mountain empty handed.

  At the palace gates, I say, “I want to be the one to deliver the news to Goff.”

  “Forget it,” Abe says.

  Feeling restless and tired, I say, “Try to stop me,” and march right for the gates, which start to open to let Abe in.

  Abe grabs at my arm, but I shrug it off. He makes another grab, so I turn and push him, hard enough to get him to back off, but not as hard as the last time. To my surprise, he raises his hands in peace and lets me go.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, kid,” he says.

  Surprisingly, Brock and Hightower just watch me go, as if I’m their entertainment for the day. I reach the gates, which stretch higher than ten men on each other’s shoulders, an arched entranceway that’s normally barred by a heavy metal gate that’s cranked open from below. The gate’s more than halfway up now.

  Two burly guards block my path, heavy battleaxes in their hands, crisscrossed between them. “I’m here to see the king in place of Abe,” I say, hard-like, as if I really belong there.

  “Those are not our orders,” Burly Guard A says.

  “Turn around and keep on walking,” says Burly Guard B.

  An important decision. To fight or not to fight? Why is it that I constantly have to make this decision over and over again? My standard answer used to be to fight, which I preferred, but now it’s like my brain’s taken over everything, and I don’t know up from down. If I fight a couple of palace guards, maybe I break through, get as far as the next group of guards, but eventually I get stopped. Lose my job if I’m lucky; get dead or chucked in prison if I’m not.

  But Jolie’s in there! Argh! I know where my sister is—or at least I’m pretty icin’ sure—and yet I can’t do a freezin’ thing about it.

  “I said, move on,” Burly Guard B says. Or is it A? I can’t remember, but all I know is I’ve been standing there for way too long, drawing all kinds of attention from the wall guards, who are peeking over the edge at me, bows steady, arrow nocked and ready to fly.

  Not fight.

  The decision burns me up inside like I ate something rancy. It’s not a natural decision for me, but I know it’s the right one.

  I walk away, expecting the guards to grab me and pull me inside at any second, to do to me what they did to Nebo.

  But they don’t, leaving me wondering why I seem to be able to get away with so much more than everyone else.

  ~~~

  Something’s gone down in fire country. Rumors are flying around like snowflakes in a winter’s snowstorm. Or even like a summer snowstorm, like the one we’ve got now.

  It’s the warmest part of the year, but you wouldn’t know by looking out your window at the blanket of cold white coating everything, and the blurry, snowflake-filled air.

  Buff and I are camped out at my place, riding out the storm, drinking warm ’quiddy and speaking in hushed tones. I don’t know why we’re whispering, because Wes has gone out, still looking for a job, even in a snowstorm, and Mother, well, she’s even more gone, although she’s sitting not two steps away.

  “People are saying the Heaters have been destroyed,” Buff says.

  I shake my head. “There’s no way…” I say, although I know anything’s possible around here. Like selling kids for cures.

  “It would mean…”

  “No job,” I finish.

  “We were so close,” Buff says, groaning.

  “Who gives a shiv about that,” I say. “Yo’ll probably let the last two payments go anyway.” From what we were able to save, we handed a whole bundle of silver over to Yo, nearly paying for the damage we caused in the fight.

  “You think?” Buff says optimistically.

  “Yah, but like I said, who cares?” I regret saying it right away, because I see the hurt in Buff’s eyes. “Look, I know Fro-Yo’s is like home to you—it is to me too—but I’m just worried about how I’ll ever get Jolie back without that job. It was my only connection to the palace.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Buff says.

  I shake my head. “I don’t see how.”

  “We’ll start by going to the border.”

  ~~~

  So that’s what we do. Every day, we wake up, grab our nice, shiny King-provided sliders, and slide/hike our way down to the borderlands, hoping to see something, to get some news of the Heaters. Why? Because if we can be the ones to bring news of what’s happened in fire country to Goff, maybe he’ll agree to see us.

  And if I can just get behind those palace walls…
>
  Then what? I break out dozens, maybe hundreds of children?

  That’s the plan.

  The first few days we see nothing at the border. Just empty flatlands, hotter than chill, stretching off in the distance farther than the human eye can see. So we venture a little further in. Each day, we go a little farther. We strip off clothes as we go, until we’re down to nothing but our skivvies.

  And yet it’s still hot. Amazing! I still don’t get how it can be so cold and full of snow up the mountain, and fire-hot down here, in the desert. To my smallish brain, it don’t make no logical sense.

  One day, when we’re trudging back into ice country after a long morning in the desert, I see something. A flash of movement in the trees. There and then gone. A bird maybe? Or a rabbit? I don’t know why, but it felt bigger than that. Not bear-size, but much bigger than some woodland critter.

  I stick a hand out to stop Buff. We’re both wearing just our skivvies, having left our clothes hanging on a tree branch a little further into the woods. He raises an eyebrow questioningly, opens his lips to speak, but I raise a finger to my mouth, quieting him. I point in the direction I saw the movement.

  There it is again, something creeping amongst the creepers. But whatever it is, it’s almost blending in with the brown of the tree trunks, the earthy colors of the forest. Barely discernible, unless you happen to be looking right at it.

  A twig snaps.

  I charge toward the sound, feeling Buff right behind me. If it’s a Heater, I gotta catch him, make him talk to me about what’s going on in fire country. This might be my only chance.

  I barge through a tangled thicket, getting scraped and poked by a half-dozen jaggedy branches, barely noticing the flashes of red on my skin.

  More twigs are snapping in front of me, as my quarry realizes he’s being chased, and has chosen haste over stealth. I follow the sound, grabbing tree trunks and swinging around them to increase my momentum. I can see him now, definitely a Heater, wearing brown skins that cover his arms and legs, as if he’s expecting it to get cold real soon. He’s fast too, cutting amongst the trees and bushes like a deer.

  But he don’t got nothing on me. I grew up in the forest, I know how it moves, how it breathes, where to expect the roots to jump out at you.

  I close in.

  His head bobs, his short dark hair ducking around trees, picking a path through the forest.

  Almost close enough to grab.

  I’m about to dive when—

  He whirls around, stopping so quickly I almost bash into him. Except…

  The him’s a her.

  I look the Heater woman over from head to toe in an instant, and I can’t stop my eyes from stopping on her chest, which pushes her coat outward in a feminine curve. “You’ve got…but those are…I thought you were…” I say eloquently.

  She looks at me with dark, mesmerizing eyes, her lips turned up in a fierce grin. “Yeah, and I got one of these too.” Before I have a chance to even think about ducking, she decks me in the head with a fist that I swear is made of stone.

  My last thought before my vision goes black: she hits harder than me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I wake up beaten by a girl. But she was a Heater, so I don’t mind so much. I don’t even mind the headache, which pounds like an angry drummer on my skull.

  A leaf rests on my lips, which I blow off.

  Wow! I think. Who was that? A Heater, obviously. But ice, was she ever—

  “Urrrr,” someone moans nearby.

  “Buff?” I say.

  “Yah.”

  “You breathin’?” I ask, sitting up, holding my head to stop the forest from spinning.

  “Nay,” Buff says, lying flat on his back next to a large tree.

  “What happened to you?” I ask, wondering if the Heater girl took him down too. I’m kind of hoping she did, because that would be even more impressive. I mean, we’re not the best fighters in the world or anything, but I like to think we’re better than most. Although that might just be my pride talking.

  “Not sure,” Buff says, trying to lift his head up, but thinking better of it and resting it back on the ground. He looks funny wearing just his underwear.

  “Was it the girl?” I ask.

  “Girl?” Buff says. “What girl?” He’s speaking to the tops of the trees.

  I drag myself over to him, so I can see his face. There’s dried blood in a line from his split lip to his chin, and one of his eyes is purple and puffy. I wonder how it compares to my face.

  “You look like chill,” I say.

  “What girl?” Buff repeats.

  “The one I was chasing. I thought she was a guy, but then she turned, all short-haired and fierce. That’s when she hit me.”

  “You got hit by a girl?” Buff says incredulously.

  “Not hit, Buff. Knocked out. She hits harder than you do!”

  Buff looks at me with the one eye he’s able to open. Then he starts to laugh. “You got beat up by a girl?”

  I shake my head. “She’s probably the one who got you, too. She’s crazy-tough. Unlike any Icer woman, that much I can tell you.”

  “She’s not the one who got me,” Buff says, squinting his one eye, like he’s trying to remember something. “I was right on your tail, doing my iciest to keep up with the manic pace you were plowing through the woods, when something dark dropped from over my head, leaping from the trees. This wasn’t no girl, Dazz, no one so easy to beat as that.”

  “She wasn’t easy to beat,” I interrupt.

  He shakes his head again. “Anyway, this was definitely a guy, but not like the Heaters we’ve seen. He was cut like stone, brown-skinned, but covered in dark markings, like some kind of wild man. He was shirtless, but had a mess of skins over his shoulder. And he hit harder than some sissy-eyed Heater girl. He knocked me flat into tomorrow with a left and a right.”

  “Two hits?” I say. “Like I said, the sissy-eyed Heater girl knocked me out with one punch.”

  “I guess I can just take a hit better than you,” Buff says, laughing. But then he grabs his head like he just got hit by an iceball.

  I sigh. “We can argue about it later. What do you think they’re doing here in ice country?”

  “How the chill should I know? They’re supposed to be destroyed.”

  “Maybe most of them are,” I say. “Maybe they’re coming here looking for help, someone to take them in.”

  “Funny way of asking for it,” Buff grumbles.

  “Well, we were chasing them.”

  Buff’s eyes narrow. “Hey, describe this Heater girl again, will ya? You know, the girl who beat you up.”

  I punch him on the shoulder, but then I describe her.

  “The short hair thing’s kinda weird, isn’t it?”

  I shrug. “I guess so, but it sort of worked for her. She wasn’t bad looking.”

  Buff says, “You know, I felt like there were more of them, too.”

  “More of who?”

  “The Heaters, or Marked, or whoever they are. Although I only saw the guy with the markings, it felt like there were others watching the whole thing.”

  “How many?” I ask.

  “I dunno. Like I said, it’s just a feeling I had.”

  We both stare off into the forest for a few minutes, thinking about everything. Finally, Buff says, “What are we going to do?”

  “Find them,” I say.

  ~~~

  It’s dark by the time we get back to the Brown District. We agree to meet in the morning, to start looking for the mysterious invaders who gave us the quickest beating of our lives.

  When I push through the door, I can’t help the smile on my face. It quickly fades though when reality sets in. Mother’s in front of the fire, rocking slightly, using her hands to drum out an uneven rhythm on the floor. Wes is off to the side on the floor too, back against the wall, hand against his head, a half-eaten bowl of soup beside him. And, of course, there’s no Jolie. It’s like los
ing her sucked all the life out of our already lifeless family. We may have only gotten to see her once or twice a day, but that was enough to make things different, to fill in a bit of the emptiness.

  I can’t. As hard as I try to think of the Heaters in ice country, I can’t. Images of my broken family flood my mind and my lips stay flatter than the floor.

  “Wes,” I say.

  He doesn’t move.

  “This has to stop,” I say.

  No response.

  “I know where Jolie is.”

  His head snaps up and a pair of red-veined eyes stares at me. His face is moist. He’s been crying. “That’s not funny,” he says.

  “She’s in the palace somewhere,” I say.

  “Cut it out.”

  “I’m being serious. I’ve got a lot to tell you. I should’ve told you sooner.”

  Over two fresh bowls of soup, both for me, and to the erratic sound of my mother’s ceaseless drumming, I tell him everything. What the job really was, about the Cure, how we found Nebo dead and frozen, about the “special cargo”, how I felt ill being a part of it. I wrap things up with our trips to fire country and “meeting” the Heaters.

  Wes’s eyes widen at parts, narrow at others, but mostly just pay rapt attention to every word I speak in between slurps of soup. When I finish, his eyes finally leave mine, drifting to watch Mother and her incessant drumming.

  “You don’t know for sure Jolie’s in there,” he says.

  “I know,” I say.

  He nods, like he understands. It’s a brother-sister thing. He knows, too.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ve been dying more and more every day.” The way he says it sounds so weary-like, as if he might die right here, right now, on the spot, if he doesn’t like my answer.

  “Like I told you, they’re watching me. Or at least they were when I worked for the king. I expect they’re still watching, on account of what I know, although maybe they’re not being quite as attentive now that the trade agreement seems to be on hold, or over, or whatever. I thought if they knew I told you, they’d kill us both.” It’s the honest to Mountain Heart truth.