“Something waterborne, they think. We’ve been seeing a lot of it.”
The companion filled a cup from a water pitcher near the bed, then slipped her hand beneath my neck to lift me up so I could drink. I was lying in a large canvas tent that was packed with cots just like mine. Companions and medics glided through the room, ministering to the sick. Outside were the familiar sounds of a Path base, helicopters, Humvee engines far off near the command center, voices giving crisp orders.
I ran through the flashes of my memory — the truck, voices, sounds of engines and helicopters.
“We’re at the front,” I said.
“A few miles south of it,” she said. “Near Richmond. Everyone they take is being brought here now. Getting ready for the big fight, I guess.”
“Have they taken Philadelphia?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But Oregon and Nevada fell. Everyone says Philadelphia is next.”
The companion dipped a cloth into her bowl and mopped the sweat from my forehead. Cool water ran down the side of my face, loosening knots that seemed to run through my entire body.
“So it’s almost over,” I said, dreamy, my eyelids drooping. The companion moved on to wash my neck and my chest.
“Mara!” the shepherd called from across the room.
“Rest,” the companion said, laying a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
When she was gone, a lonely stillness fell over me. Somehow the bustle of bodies moving around me only made it worse. I reached under the sheets to my pockets but my clothes had been traded for Path-issued pajamas. The jeans I had been wearing were in a neat stack by the bed. I leaned over and rifled through them, digging one hand into my pants pocket until I felt a bit of metal. I drew out Bear’s collar and held it under the sheets, both hands pressing into the tough fabric. I felt an empty place inside me, but I imagined him in that cabin sitting by a fire, safe, and the gnaw of it eased a bit. I closed my fist around the collar and held it tight, wishing he were here, thankful that he wasn’t.
There was a gap in the tent flap across from my cot. Through it I could see a thin trail leading away from the tent and out into the camp. Bodies dressed in forest camo passed and a black helicopter streaked across the sky and disappeared. Despite the ache and the exhaustion, I could already feel a drumbeat starting up inside of me. Get up. Get dressed. Keep moving. I drew the blanket off my legs but stopped when I saw another companion standing across the aisle.
She was watching me, ignoring the rush of medics and orderlies around her. Blurred beneath the veil, her face was visible only as shadows and worried lines. I could tell she was new just by the way she stood, her body drawn in tight like she was trying to collapse in on herself and disappear.
The other companions were being led in prayer by their shepherd at the far end of the tent.
“You just got here,” I said.
The companion nodded. I waved her over and she drifted across the aisle, stopping at the foot of my cot.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “Just do what they tell you and you’ll be fine.”
“Is that what you did?”
I sat up slightly. There was something familiar in her rasp of a voice. “What do you mean?”
The companion checked the far end of the infirmary and then drew closer, coming up along the side of the cot.
“Don’t,” I whispered urgently. “If they see you they’ll—”
Her hand grasped the side of the cot and she leaned down by my ear.
“Looks like I was wrong, Cal,” she said. “I guess
I peered through her veil until the lines of her face resolved into a sharp jaw and amber-colored eyes.
I reached for her arm but she jerked it away from me. The shepherd called out to her across the infirmary.
“I guess we both do now,” Nat said. Then she backed into the aisle, sweeping across the infirmary and melting into the white sea of her sisters.
I sank into the cot, any scrap of energy I had gone, my head buzzing with a flat hiss of static. If they got Nat, then what chance did I have? What chance did any of us have? Beyond the tent flap, soldiers marched back and forth and engines revved. I held on to Bear’s collar and searched for the drumbeat that would urge me on, but there was nothing there. We were all lost.
Two days later I was put on my first work detail.
A young corporal showed up with a pair of standard-issue novice fatigues and led me out of the infirmary to where I would be helping to dig latrines.
I covered my eyes from the blast of sunlight that came when we stepped out of the gloom of the infirmary tent. My body was still weak, loose limbed, from days on my back. I kept my eyes on the corporal’s back and tried to keep up as he led me through the base.
Kestrel sat in what had once been a grassy clearing before it was trampled into muddy ruts by thousands of Path boots and Humvees. It seemed to be laid out in a mirror image of Cormorant, only bigger and more hastily put together. One quick walk through it and I had picked out the novices’ and citizens’ barracks and the sequestered ops center. A canvas-walled Lighthouse towered over everything in the center of camp.
The base was surrounded by a high fence topped with rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire. Plywood guardhouses, stacked with sandbags and bristling with heavy weapons, sat at every turn. The camp had clearly been constructed with a typical Path focus on security, but it was new and partially unfinished. I told myself there had to be a hole somewhere, that all I had to do was find it, but then I remembered all the years that James and I spent in Cormorant thinking the exact same thing.
I scanned passing groups of companions, looking for Nat, but I didn’t see any trace of her. She hadn’t come back to the infirmary since the day we spoke and part of me wanted to believe I had imagined the whole thing, that she had been some kind of fever dream. The idea that Nat could have been taken, and that she would have submitted to the Choice if she had been, seemed too impossible to be real. Of course, I knew it was. The Path had swept across the whole of the country, and now controlled nearly two-thirds of it. Anyone could be taken, and once they were, no one was immune to wanting to live.
The corporal led me up a hill at the southern edge of the camp and gave instructions to me and a group of ten or fifteen other novices. Since I still had my cast, I was on gofer duty, ferrying supplies and water, while the rest of them dug in the noonday sun. It took us till nearly sundown to finish the pit and construct the latrine housing. The group was almost ready to drop when the corporal led us to the novices’ barracks, where we were allowed a tepid shower before being shuffled off to dinner and prayers.
The Kestrel Lighthouse was nowhere near as impressive as Cormorant’s had been — it was simply a large tent full of chairs facing a makeshift altar. Drained from the sun and the day’s work, it was actually a relief to find my place among the others and rest on the flat pew. I helped a bewildered young novice find the right page in the book of prayers and then Beacon Radcliffe emerged and began the service.
“I am the Way and the Path…”
The voices around me fell into a tentative unison. The beacons stalked the aisles, their eyes hardest on the newest of us. Luckily, the service was still deep in my bones and I followed along easily, making myself nearly invisible in the cadence of the prayers and the flow of kneeling and standing. The rhythm of it was so familiar that I felt myself dissolving into it.
After prayers I followed the men to the novices’ barracks and found an open bunk, falling into it without even bothering to turn back the thin blanket. The men talked for a while and then one by one the lanterns were blown out and the tent fell quiet.
I was tired, but sleep seemed impossible. One look at the bunk above me and for a second I felt sure that all I had to do was stand up and James would be there, reading
I slipped out of my bunk and stepped into my boots. A private was supposed to be keeping an eye on us but
