Jagger and Cass take the first bedroom, while Naomi takes the one next to it. Quin decides to sleep on the couch. I walk towards the far bedroom, listening as the floorboards creak under my feet. I close my eyes and remember the warm glow of the light radiating from the fixture above even though it isn’t presently on
The hallway echoes, even though there’s no one in the hall but me. I hear my mother talking to me, telling me it’s all going to be all right. She says the man who is carrying me is a friend who’s going to take me someplace to be safe. I open my eyes, the soft light vanishes, and I see a closed door in front of me. The doorknob turns easily in my hand and I let the door swing open of its own accord.
The purple flowered wallpaper is just how I left it.
Crude sketches hang waist-high along two of the walls. I bend down and recognize the images in the drawings from the nightmares I had as a child. They match the ones on the tablet that Devlan left me all those months ago: a bright white campus of large buildings, some seemingly flowing into one another. Several other drawings show those same buildings on fire or in some stage of collapse - horrifying drawings, that shouldn’t be made by a child.
I don’t know what to feel.
My emotions are so mixed up that I can’t tell what the right one is. Meg wants to sit in the corner and cry, while Trea wants to become violent. If only I could get these two merged somehow, with a common goal or feeling, something to rid myself of this constant turmoil rolling around my head.
I want to go back outside and confront the woman about the lie she told, and to ask her why she placed us into this specific house, especially considering there are at least a dozen others that are empty, but sleep draws me in. I pick up a discarded blanket from the floor. It too is familiar. It’s the one that fell off after Devlan picked me up from my bed. No one has been in this room since that night.
More mysteries.
I shake the dust off of my pillow, wrap myself up in the blanket, which still smells of lilac, my mother’s favorite flower, and promptly fall asleep after lying down on the familiar lumpy mattress.
Breakfast is waiting for me when I arise.
Cass is busy cooking while Naomi is cleaning cobwebs from the table and chairs. I go into the bathroom to wash my face and run wet fingers through my hair, noticing that I’ve seemingly aged ten years in only a few days. I join the others and thoroughly enjoy the hot meal. Naomi takes it upon herself to clean the entire house, while Jagger and Quin work on fixing the wiring in some of the fixtures. Cass has met Henry and the two of them have gone off to the small farm and garden that sits in the far north corner of the village, to tend to the animals.
I go off on my own, knocking on the door to the stone building, waiting for the woman inside to answer.
“She’s not there,” a soft wispy voice says behind me. “She’s gone off to collect fire wood.”
The woman standing behind me has aged gracefully since the last time I saw her. Tears fill my eyes, then slowly run down my cheeks.
“Hello, Meg,” she says to me, hugging me tightly.
I soak her shoulder with tears of joy.
“How did you know?”
She holds my face in the palm of her hands, wiping away my tears with the tips of her fingers.
“Hannah told me. She woke me up in the middle of the night and said some strangers had stumbled into the village. She recognized you immediately, even with your odd hair.”
I smile as she tousles a few strands at the back of my neck.
“I was wondering if you’d ever find your way back here.” She takes my hand and walks me into the stone building. We both sit down on Hannah’s cot next to the fire. “Where’s Devlan? Is he with you?”
“No,” I answer, as my voice chokes back a lump.
She puts her arm around my shoulder to comfort me.
“He was a good man,” she says.
“Where are the others?” I ask, turning my face to look into hers.
Pain seeps into the corners of her mouth as she squeezes my hand tightly.
“Devlan was right,” she begins. “They did find out about you.” She lets go of my hand and stares into the fire. “It was only a few days after Devlan came and took you away that they showed up.”
“Who are they?”
“Soldiers from Nuceira. They’re called the Morrigan. Somehow they learned that children had survived the devastation at the Dormitories, and went looking for them. How they found out, I don’t know.” She shudders at the memory, but continues to talk. “They came in the middle of the night, dressed in black armor of some kind. We could hear the engines of their vehicles off in the distance, but only after they came into the village did we know what they were looking for. They pulled everyone out of bed and held us in front of this building while they collected the children. The Morrigan took a small blade and pierced every child on the back of the hand, looking for the one that would self-heal. Some of the children became ill from the injury and died months later. It was rumored that the blade had been impregnated with some kind of poison, so that when they did find the right child, that child would self-heal, leaving the poison inside their system causing them pain and eventually death.” Tears begin to stream down her face.
It’s my turn
