began to sob. “You are a wicked girl, and you had best hope I do not find you when I am in there, or I shall teach you a lesson.”
“Come,” his wife whispered. “While the child cries. It will soften their hearts.”
Nothing I could say would stop them. They were determined to make a better life for their child, which only made me all the more angry, because it made me feel pity. That love of parent for child was nothing I’d ever known. My mother had cared for me, in her way, but thought more of what I could do for her, the credits I could bring if my looks blossomed while hers faded.
When she’d died three years ago, she’d been pregnant. For that, she was executed. Those in the fortress were allowed only one child, and in trying to secretly have a second, she’d committed high treason. She’d begged for mercy, pleaded and wept that she had been blinded by maternal instinct, which would have been much more touching if I hadn’t known the truth—she’d promised the child to the doctor for an outrageous sum. His wife was barren, and the new population rules did not allow adoption. They’d conspired to pretend the doctor’s wife was pregnant, while hiding my mother’s condition. It failed. She died. A community that would kill one of its own for the crime of attempting to bear a second child was not about to admit three strangers.
I stayed where I was and strained to listen. They hadn’t even reached the gate before a patrolling guard tramped over, platform boards shuddering.
“Who goes there?” the guard called.
I could hear the parents prompting the child to speak, but she was too distraught, crying loudly now.
“I asked who goes there!”
“We . . . we are refugees,” the woman said. “Our tribe was raided by the Branded. We are the only survivors. We throw ourselves on your mercy and—”
The child cut in, finding her voice. “I am hungry and cold, sir. I do not eat very much, but I am a good worker, like my mother and my father.” She snuffled loudly.
“There is no room for refugees here,” the guard said. “Begone.”
“Where?” the woman said. “There is no place for us to go.”
“Find a place. Now leave.”
“We’ll leave,” the woman said. “Just take our child. She’s strong and she’s healthy and she’ll be no bother at all. She’ll prove her worth. Just take—”
“We have more than enough children of our own. We need no extra mouths to feed. Now, begone!”
He cocked his gun, the metal clank ringing out in the silence. The woman started to wail as her husband begged the guard to take their daughter. Another guard joined the first and ordered them to leave.
“Yes, all right,” the man said. “We are going, but we will leave the child.”
“You will not—”
“Stay there, child,” he said. “Just stay there.” To his wife: “Come. We will leave. They will take her.”
“No, we will not,” the guard said, his voice growing louder as the parents’ footsteps trampled over the hard earth. “Come back and get the child or you are leaving her for the hybrids.”
The girl wailed. I heard her try to run, but her father caught her and forced her back, whispering, loud enough for the guards to hear, “You will be fine. No one would be so cruel.” His voice rose another octave. “No one would be so cruel.”
His footsteps retreated.
“Come back for the girl!” the guard shouted.
“You would not—”
“If I open this gate to your child, my own life is forfeit. If you do not take her, there is only one way for me to show mercy: kill her before the hybrids do.”
“You would not—”
“I would! Now get back here and take your child and begone before—”
“You will not. I know you will not.”
“I must! Are you a fool? A monster who would sacrifice his own child?”
The guard continued to rant, his voice growing louder, his partner joining in, entreating the parents to come back, do not do this, come back. Inside the fortress, people began to stir, doors opening, then closing quickly as they realized what was happening. Stopping up their ears because they knew what was coming. What had to come.
A shot.
A single shot, barely audible over the guard’s voice, choked with rage and grief as he cursed the parents to deaths in a thousand hells. The father shrieked and raged, and his wife wailed, and they raced back to their dead child, and the guards told them no, they must go, leave her, she was gone, and the scent of the blood . . .
The parents didn’t listen. I could hear them still sobbing and cursing as they carried their child’s body into the wasteland.
Then, reverberating through the night air, a growl. Joined by a second. I opened the peephole to see eyes reflecting in the darkness.
“Drop the child!” the one guard shouted, his voice raw. “Drop her and run!”
The guard continued to shout as his partner tried to quiet him, to tell him it did no good. The growls continued, seeming to come from every direction. And then, as if answering some unknown signal, feet and paws thundered across the baked earth, coming from the left, from the right, too many to count.
The woman screamed. She didn’t scream for long.
Growls. Snarls. Roars. The wet sound of ripping flesh.
I stumbled from the peephole, fumbled open the door, and raced back to my quarters.
For two nights, I scarcely slept, racked by nightmares of the child at the gate, the creatures beyond, those eyes, those snarls, that horrible ripping sound. I thought of that, and I thought of Braeden. Out there. Alone.
“It’s the smell of blood that draws them out, Rayne,” he’d said.
“But the branding. There will be blood—”
“The soot does more than mark the brand. It covers the blood. As long as I take shelter at night, the only hybrids who will attack are the ones who are starving. Easily fended off with a blade.”
He was right. The hybrids hadn’t attacked until the child was killed. They must have heard and smelled the three refugees, but they were still human enough to have learned lessons about attacking healthy targets.
At least ones who were in groups.
Braeden was alone.
And if he wasn’t? This fate had been chasing him from the day he began his first transformation. He couldn’t have hidden that forever. Either way, he would have been cast out, and all we could do was take control of the situation. Make plans.
Plans.
The morning after Braeden was cast out, Priscilla had come to the livestock barns, where I was tending to the chickens. Except for civics class, most children stopped school as soon as they were old enough to work. My true “job” might be six months away, but that didn’t mean I could laze around until then. I had chores that paid for my room and board, and I worked extra tasks for credits that could be bartered for everything from shoes to rations. These days, for most people, credits went to rations, which only drove the price higher, until it was a rare night you went to bed with a full stomach.
Priscilla had asked me to lunch in the dining hall of the Six, and I’d come away sated for the first time in memory. There’d been extra tasks I’d planned to do that afternoon, but she had wanted to spend the time with me, and I knew that was more valuable than any paper token in my pocket.
