Survival Colony 9 (8 page)

My face burned. For the first time ever, her beautiful features seemed to twist under an ugly mask.

Then she shook her head, and her face softened. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes returning to their usual blue, the way they say the sky used to clear after a rainstorm. “But you don’t need to worry about me and Wali. If he is angry with me, it has nothing to do with you. And he’s certainly not dumb enough to take his anger out on me by running to Yov.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. If those crystal blue eyes could see through me, they’d have known in a second I was lying.

“This is nothing new,” she said. “Every time something goes wrong, some jerk starts whining about the camp’s leadership. But they always stop. You know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because no one
really
wants to take Laman’s place,” she said. “They want to make it difficult for him, but they don’t want the difficulty themselves. You’ll see. A couple of days from now, when things are back to normal, Yov will shut his fat trap and everyone will realize he was full of it all along.”

She reached out and laid a hand on my arm. Her fingers slid down to my wrist, leaving an electric trail the whole way. I stood there unable to convince myself, unable to believe her. But for the sake of feeling her touch and looking in her eyes a second longer, I pretended I did.

“Korah,” I said. “Has my dad ever ordered quarantine?”

She showed no surprise at the question. “Twice. The day of my father’s funeral. In case the Skaldi had jumped bodies before Petra burned it. And the day after the attack that left you . . .”

She didn’t need to finish the thought.

“So you’ve been tested?”

She nodded.

“And me.”

“Everyone,” she said. “Except the little ones.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Everyone was just”—she smiled—“who they are.”

And who was that?
I thought, but didn’t say.

“I don’t blame Laman for what happened to my father,” she said, giving my hand a last squeeze before letting go. “Those things just happen, you know? We have to be stronger than them if we want to win.” She smiled and walked off, her black hair swinging. “See you later, Querry.”

*    *    *

Evening had fallen.

The work of sorting was finally done. People had muttered under their breath the whole time, their hands trembling as they moved their most prized possessions to the pile marked for oblivion. They’d wrestled with themselves, and they’d lost. And when their stash of personal belongings had dwindled to practically nothing, they stared at what was left with a dazed expression, as if they’d been meaning to say something but couldn’t quite call it back. Their lips quivered, their eyes darted over the wreckage. When they finally rose to prepare for the night, their legs wobbled like someone walking a tightrope for the first time. Someone who wasn’t sure they had the strength or the courage to make it to the other side.

All this time, Yov and Wali circulated among the grown-ups, Yov making his usual snide comments, Wali tagging along behind. Whenever one of the officers showed up, the two of them stopped making the rounds and went back to pretending they were packing their own stuff, but as soon as the officer left they went right back at it. Wali laughed louder than anyone as Yov tested his latest one-liners.

“That is certainly a priceless work of art,” Yov said to the light tower man, holding up his painting and tilting it to catch the reddish rays of the setting sun. “Tell you what, I’ll trade you a moldy button for it.”

At that point Korah sidled up to him and whispered something so low all I heard was the menacing vibration in her voice.

“Well, excuse me,” he said loudly. “If the artist here can’t handle the truth, that’s not my problem.”

People froze at their tasks, anger and betrayal suffusing their features. Wali stifled a laugh. Korah looked ready to slug him, but she merely stamped off. When she was gone, Yov spread his hands and addressed his audience.

“Now that the princess has retired . . .” He pointed to the miniscule pile of salvageable items. “Not there, people!” he bellowed. “On the trash heap! Move, move, move!”

His taunting laugh and the copycat laugh of his newest disciple echoed in the quiet dusk.

I watched for as long as I could stand, then slunk away from the sleeping area and looked out over the semidarkness. The dusty air seized my throat like always. The buildings seemed brittle as bones. I felt like I was floating above the ground as I made my way to headquarters. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Korah had followed, but she was nowhere to be seen.

I found my dad alone outside the command building, seated on a hunk of fallen stone, his bad leg held out straight. He seemed to be preoccupied with something in his hands. When I neared I saw it was his gun. He’d opened the chamber to inspect it closely, but as soon as he saw me he snapped it shut and stashed it in its holster.

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

“Querry,” he said. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news on the home front.”

His eyes seemed to twinkle in the near dark.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Actually, I’m glad you showed up,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to give you this.”

At first I thought he meant the gun, but then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small object. I took it and saw that it was a red-handled pocketknife, the kind with folding blades. It had rusted with age, but all the different gadgets seemed to be intact. On the plastic handle someone had etched a single word in sloppy letters, as if they’d been carved with another knife. It read “Matay.”

I looked at him. “What happened to getting rid of personal possessions?”

He met my gaze, unsmiling. “Possessions essential to the survival of the colony are exempted, remember?”

“Who’s Matay?”

“One of the lost,” he said. “I thought it was time you had it.”

He held out a hand, and I helped him clamber to his feet. I saw him wince as his bad hip took his weight.

“Got a minute?” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

I tucked the knife into my jacket and followed him.

We made our way across the compound to the tallest building, the one he’d pointed out to me the evening before. It looked over the eastern slope of the hillside, perfect for scouting the plain below. When I glanced at the top-story window, though, I saw that it stood empty. “Shouldn’t the sentry be posted by now?”

“Change of plans,” he said, and we entered the building together.

The front hallway glowed dimly from the light of a huge arched window, its glass long gone. I followed as he heaved himself awkwardly up the stairs to the second floor. It seemed like it took all his effort to step up with his good left leg, pull himself by the banister to plant his right foot beside it, then repeat the process. I found myself itching to move faster, but I kept myself in check. At the second-floor landing we turned down a hallway that still had a carpet underneath the coating of dust. Countless footsteps going in both directions had stirred the red-brown film, showing glimpses of light blue beneath.

At the end of the hall, two of the officers stood guard beside a wooden door, their hands on their holsters. They nodded at my dad as he opened the door and started up another, narrower flight of stairs. It was practically pitch-black in the stairwell, and there was no railing. I had to help him on his way up.

We emerged into a room that had been turned into an arsenal.

The room was small and square, with windows facing in three directions and some form of patterned paper peeling in long strips off the walls. The paper, a faded pink, had probably been rusty red at one time. The corners of the room nearest the door had been piled with more weapons than I’d realized the camp possessed: pistols, knives, bayonets, even a couple bows and quivers full of arrows. Boxes of ammunition were stacked neatly beside the firearms, and a canvas folding chair had been placed where you could see out all three windows. The only weapons I didn’t see were the flamethrowers, which I knew remained below.

“You preparing for a war?” I said.

His eyes were impossible to read in the dim light leaking through the windows. “I’m preparing for any contingency that might arise.”

“Who’s the enemy?”

“You tell me.”

“Guns don’t work against Skaldi,” I said. “Neither do arrows, so far as I know.”

“No,” he said. “They don’t.”

He walked to the east-facing window, gestured for me to join him. I looked out over a darkened plain. It could have been swarming with a hundred Skaldi or the ranks of an approaching force, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell. The north- and south-facing windows, I realized, provided sightlines not to the plain but to the compound below.

“There was a time,” he said softly, “when we thought we might find some place not infested by Skaldi. Some island, some fortress they couldn’t penetrate. But we had to give up that dream. All the supposedly safe places would last a week before we’d wake up and discover our closest friends were strangers.”

He spoke not to me but to the night, as if he was still looking for that place.

“Then there was the plan of combining all the survival colonies into one,” he said. “Something that could resist the Skaldi, even defeat them for good. You want to guess what happened to that one?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “It made us more vulnerable, not less. We had to give up the dream of saving the species to save ourselves.”

“Didn’t people realize they’d be stronger if they worked together?” It sounded incredibly lame the moment I said it.

“You don’t remember,” he said, “but there was a time we joined another colony. Took them in, actually. Maybe twenty people. And within days everyone was at everyone else’s throat. The ones we took in were the worst of all.” He sighed. “People don’t change, Querry. We’re the descendants of the madmen who destroyed the planet. Why should we be any different?”

He pointed to the wall beside the south-facing window. I squinted in the darkness and saw hatch marks scratched into the wallpaper, sets of four upright slashes crossed by a fifth diagonal. They’d been carved with a blade, and the pale wall showed through the tattered pink paper like teeth. I realized the marks stretched halfway around the room. I lost count at two hundred.

“It’s what gave me the idea to transfer the weapons here,” he said. “Whoever made their last stand in this room had a pretty good run of luck, wouldn’t you say?”

“Until their luck ran out,” I added.

“True enough,” he said. “But at least they went down swinging.”

He touched his fingers to the wall, pressing a strip of paper back in place. It dropped the instant he let go.

I knew what I had to do. If Yov meant to undermine or overthrow him, I had to tell him everything. I couldn’t waste time. If Wali was part of it, if suspicion of what me and Korah had been doing last night had driven him to Yov’s camp, I couldn’t spare him, either. Even if it was a false alarm, even if I’d somehow misunderstood, it was better to risk the laughter of Yov and his gang, the scorn and anger of Korah, than to take a chance. If I didn’t act now and something terrible happened, I’d be the one responsible.

“Dad,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

His night-black eyes gleamed as he turned to me.

“Yov and Wali,” I said. “The two of them are—plotting, planning something. And not just them. Kelmen’s involved too, I think. . . .”

His eyebrows lifted, barely distinguishable in the dark. “Kelmen?”

I felt my face flush. “Well, maybe not Kelmen. But others—more of the teens. Maybe some grown-ups too. Araz. Kin. I don’t know how many.”

“You’re sure of this.” It wasn’t a question.

“Pretty sure.”

“And your evidence?”

I thought over what I could say, what I could tell him. All the things that didn’t sit right. Yov’s performance at the sorting, the powwow he’d held after the rainstorm. Wali spying on me and Korah one day, hanging on Yov’s every word the next. The grown-ups’ anger at the things my dad was forcing them to let go, the dry tinder that could easily be lit by the spark of Yov’s deceit. The maybe-sabotaged truck. The footprints by the shelter. The quarantine that hadn’t happened, should have happened, needed to happen. The Skaldi that had driven us here in the first place, that had come from a direction they never came from, pushing us into territory we’d never traveled before . . .

Then I looked at him. He didn’t smile, but the corners of his lips pinched in something like amusement or pity. I glanced around at the armory he’d built for himself. And I knew he already knew.

“Your time is coming, Querry,” he said. “But for now, let’s let me handle things.”

“Yes sir.”

“And keep the knife close,” he said. “For luck.”

He made one last review of the room, then led me back down the stairs, along the dusty corridor to the front hall. He nodded a good night and disappeared across the compound, limping toward headquarters.

The camp lay silent around me. Yov and his supporters had vanished like a bad dream. I took the knife out, turned it in my hands. The name had faded with the dark, but I could feel the gashes when I ran my fingertips over the smooth plastic. I opened one of the blades and imagined myself using it against . . . what? Knives don’t work against Skaldi any better than guns.

Focus
, I told myself.
Focus
. My dad was on top of things. He’d caught wind of the camp’s unrest and he’d moved the weapons someplace safe. The compound had been secured, the Skaldi thrown off our trail. If he’d decided not to impose quarantine, that was because he was confident there’d been no infection. Wali and Korah would make up. The grown-ups would come around. All I had to do was follow orders.

I snapped the blade back into its handle, stashed the knife in my pocket, and walked off to begin my preparations for bed.

7

Test

Petra came back the next day.

We were out working when we saw her. We’d woken once more to find dust piled to our doorstep, and my dad had gotten fed up and decided there were better things we could do than shovel ourselves out of a hole day after day. So he had us in the yard before the sun got high, tying tents to fence posts in what I sensed was a last-ditch effort to keep us from getting swallowed by the desert.

Like most last-ditch efforts, it didn’t work very well. The wind whipped the tents out of our hands, the twine split and left itchy fibers in our fingertips. The dust didn’t seem to think much of our barrier, finding any opening it could to sneak through. People grumbled even more than usual. The ones I was most worried about, Yov and Wali and Araz, kept their thoughts to themselves, probably because my dad supervised the whole operation. And Korah I didn’t see. I overheard Mika say she wasn’t feeling well.

We’d finished tying the first tent to the posts and stepped back to inspect our work when the sentry on the western outskirts of camp gave a whistle. Everyone froze, then ran in a body to look out over the plain. Way off in the distance, indistinct through the heat, a small figure inched across the desert. My dad lifted his binoculars and scrutinized the figure for a minute, his brow lowered behind the lenses. Then he dropped the binoculars and said to Aleka, “Get the others.”

In ten minutes I could tell that the figure trudging up the hill was Petra: short and stocky, with nearly black skin and shaved head. Sleeves rolled past her elbows, as always. Businesslike. She moved like the Petra I remembered, setting each foot down sturdily, nothing like the drifting intruder from five nights ago. My dad watched her approach without saying another word.

She cleared the crest of the hill and marched straight toward him. Though she kept up a steady pace, her shoulders slumped and her head bobbed with each step. Of all the people in camp, Petra went the furthest to hide her trail, further even than the collection jar crazies. No eyebrows, no eyelashes even. I didn’t want to think about how she’d gotten rid of those. As a result, she was constantly blinking to keep the dust and grit out of her eyes.

Aleka stepped in front of her before she reached my dad. Two of the officers flanked her. One held a flamethrower at the ready. Petra glared at him, blinking furiously. Her round face was plastered with dust, another of her camouflage techniques. She said it kept her scent down.

“This is as far as you go, Petra,” Aleka said.

Petra’s bloodshot eyes shone through her dusty mask. “Do you think I’d just stroll into camp,” she said, “if I was one of them?”

“I’m taking no chances,” my dad said. “Hold her.”

The officer with the flamethrower kept it trained on her, while the other stepped behind her and locked her arms. Her muscles tightened, and I sensed the people around her bracing for a fight. Without thinking, my hand went to the knife in my pocket, feeling its solid shape through the cloth.

But then, to my surprise, Petra relaxed and let the officers lead her away. As they walked her off, my dad turned and said to Araz, “Get them back to work.” His gaze shifted to me for a second. Then he and Aleka followed the officers and their captive.

I started across camp with the work group, keeping an eye on Araz. The big man was dizzy with the heat, his steps slow and sloppy, and I knew there was no way he was paying attention to his crew. When we passed by a truck-size chunk of wall that had somehow withstood the collapse of the house it had once belonged to, I ducked out of sight, peering around the edge to see if I’d been missed. But our new supervisor’s head drooped nearly to his chest while he walked, and everyone else trailed mechanically after him. I glanced over my shoulder one last time as I angled toward headquarters, but even Yov seemed too focused on putting one foot in front of the other to notice I was gone.

Picking my way around the debris of broken buildings, I sidled up to the shell my dad had chosen as headquarters. It stood back from the crest of the hill, surrounded by other buildings, which I guess made it more secure than most. But it was a wreck like the rest. Its top story had been sliced in half, leaving jagged shards of brick and wood in a diagonal like a crooked smile. The front door frame stood empty, and canvas draperies hung over the three side windows to shield the interior from sun and wind. My heart hammered in my throat, but it was easy enough to hook a finger under the canvas that covered the middle window and lift it just enough to peek inside.

The room lay in shadow. It took my eyes a second to adjust, and while they did, swirls and motes of dust danced in front of me.

Then I saw my dad and Aleka standing before Petra. She rested on a slab that might have been a table once, except its legs were missing. The officers crouched at her sides, holding her wrists. The flamethrower leaned against the far wall. The rest of the room was empty of furniture or supplies, but the ground next to the tabletop held a collection of metal objects I couldn’t remember ever having seen. Petra breathed steadily through her nose and stared straight at my dad, her dark eyes like bloodstains in her dust-caked face.

“Next,” he said.

At his command, one of the officers held onto both of Petra’s wrists while the other took one of the metal implements from the floor. He clamped it onto the tip of her right index finger and tugged. Hard, hard enough to make her grit her teeth. He did the same to all the fingers on both hands, then nodded at my dad. When I looked closely at Petra’s hands, I saw the blood that had leaked from her torn fingertips.

“Now the teeth,” my dad said.

Petra shut her mouth in a firm line.

Aleka said, “Petra.” My dad gave her a sharp look.

“I swear I’ll bite them off,” Petra growled through closed lips.

“Which will only prove you’re one of them,” my dad said. “So be my guest.”

“Petra . . .” Aleka repeated. Her face showed nothing, but her voice sounded uncharacteristically soft, even pleading.

Petra let out a breath. She looked at my dad with a hard expression, whether of disgust or respect I couldn’t tell.

“Seems you won’t be satisfied till you’ve taken your share of blood, Laman.” Then she tilted her head back. “Just the teeth,” she said. “And be careful.” She opened her mouth wide.

The officer holding her arms leaned his full weight on her. The other squatted by her head, picked up another of the metal instruments, and reached into her mouth. I couldn’t see well with all the bodies in the way, but it seemed he was wiggling and pulling her teeth. Once or twice Petra’s eyes tightened with pain, but she kept her mouth open, breathing sharply through her nose. The officer did the top row, then the bottom, then stood and nodded at my dad.

“She’s clean,” he said.

The other officer let go of Petra. She sat, rubbing her wrists where she’d been held. Blood coated her teeth and lips. “As if this proves anything,” she said.

“There are other tests,” my dad said softly.

“So I’m supposed to be grateful?” She held her fingers in her mouth, sucked hard until the blood stopped welling. Aleka held a hand out to her, but Petra shrugged it away, threw her legs over the side of the tabletop, and stood on her own.

“You can poke and pry into my flesh all you want, Laman,” she said. “But that won’t stop them from coming.”

“I’ll do what’s necessary to keep my camp safe,” he said.

Petra snorted. “You have no idea. Living large up here in Hilltop Manor, spying on us mere mortals from the clouds. You think they’re playing by our rules? They don’t play by any rules but their own.”

“Let me get you some water, Petra,” Aleka said.

Petra ignored her. “We were jumped,” she said to my dad. “Danis and me. It came out of nowhere. By the time I knew what was happening it had already taken him.”

“Even superwomen sleep.”

Petra’s eyes smoldered. “I don’t sleep,” she said acidly. “But you keep believing that if it makes you feel like the big man. If it makes you feel like you’re in control.”

“I’ve already gotten an earful of that from Aleka,” my dad said. “So why don’t you spare me the analysis.”

“Fine,” Petra said. “I’ll make it real simple for you.” She took a step toward my dad, and I saw the officers tense. But she didn’t threaten him, kept her hands at her sides. Her bloody teeth flashed, her anger seeming to have changed into something else, something harsh and cold as a blade.

“It’s no accident we’re here,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “The one you ran from was a messenger. A scout. I searched as far west as I could go, and they’ve left us only one way to run. They’re herding us, Laman. Putting us exactly where they want us, so they can recover what they lost.”

“Ridiculous,” he said. But she didn’t stop.

“I’ve been in the field all my life, and this is the first time I’ve seen them moving like this. Focused, targeted. Not like they’re just taking anyone they can. More like they’re on a mission.” Her eyes held his without blinking. “They’re closing in on us, Laman. They know.”

Something about the way she said
know
made my blood run cold.

“You have no proof of that,” my dad said. But for the first time ever, I thought I heard a note of doubt in his voice.

“I have all the proof I need,” Petra said. “I have eyes. I had a partner.”

“We’ve got a few tricks of our own,” he said, still in that falsely confident voice.

“Those won’t help you,” Petra said. “They won’t help any of us. Danis was lucky. He went quick.”

She reached for something at her belt, a small bag or purse I hadn’t noticed before. She untied it, dropped it at my dad’s feet.

“I found this,” she said. “Better start planning the burial.”

“Dear God,” Aleka breathed.

“That won’t help you either,” Petra said, her voice breaking. She blinked, licked blood from her dry, peeling lips. “There’s not much left,” she said. “Like I told you, he went quick.”

All of them stared at the bag on the floor. No one moved to pick it up.

“You all enjoy your party,” Petra said. “Now where’s the mess in this hellhole? I’m getting something to eat.”

Without waiting for an answer, she stamped toward the vacant doorway and left.

I flattened myself against the wall as she stormed out, her head lowered and her lips moving without a word I could hear. Once she got clear of the house her posture broke down, her shoulders slumping once again and her steps dragging. I waited until she wandered out of sight, then lifted the canvas to peer inside.

No one had budged. It seemed no one had spoken. Aleka and the two officers stood facing my dad, the bag that contained all that was left of the lost scout lying untouched at his feet. He wasn’t looking at it, though. Or at them. His head was turned to the side, his eyes veiled.

“What if it’s true?” Aleka broke the silence. “What if the one that attacked our camp was—a decoy? A scout? What if they’re looking for . . . ?”

My dad said nothing.

“Laman?”

Slowly, like someone waking from sleep, he raised his eyes to hers. “The one that attacked our camp did nothing we haven’t seen before. If Petra’s report was true, we would have observed a difference in its behavior. The Skaldi don’t scout, Aleka.”

“The evidence is beginning to suggest they do.”

“The evidence,” he said, “suggests that what happened to Danis was either a fluke or a mistake on his part. Or on Petra’s.”

“Petra’s a good soldier.”

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Except you?”

“Don’t start, Aleka,” he warned.

“We should have been under quarantine from the day we arrived,” she said. “And I don’t see how we have any option but to do so now. If there’s one of them among us—”

“I’d know it.”

“I don’t understand, Laman,” she said, and again the pleading note troubled her voice. “What is it about this place that makes you go against everything you know, every instinct you’ve ever had? What more evidence will it take for you to
do
something?”

Her hands had formed into fists as she spoke. Now her eyes strayed to the flamethrower against the wall. His eyes followed. When they met again, I knew what both of them were thinking.

“I could have you locked up for insubordination,” he said quietly.

“If you’ll submit to the trials,” she said, “you’ll hear no more from me.”

“I’m the one who orders the trials,” he said. “On any member of my camp I choose.”

She faced him squarely, her expression showing neither apology nor fear.

“I know what I am,” he said. “And I know what it takes to win this war. If we start turning on each other at every whisper and rumor, we’ll never make it. We fight the only way we know how. We fight with our courage, our will, our faith in the colony and each other. We fight until we find—” He stopped abruptly and pivoted to the window.

I ducked out of sight, but not before his fierce eyes locked on mine.

I flung myself against the wall, heart pounding so hard I thought it would explode from my chest. I had no idea what I’d done to give myself away, unless Aleka’s suggestion that my dad was the thing we were fleeing from had forced a gasp from my lips. My first impulse was to run, but then I thought, what was the point? Where would I go? I had put myself here. Maybe, without knowing it, I had wanted this all along.

I pushed myself from the building and turned to face him.

My dad rounded the corner, Aleka right at his back. His eyes blazed, and he swung his bad hip so violently it looked like it was about to tear off. Aleka’s face was composed, but not compassionate. If he was a meteor, she was a stone.

If either of them was Skaldi, they were playing their parts to perfection.

They stopped right in front of me. I opened my mouth to get the first word in, but his voice trampled mine into the dust.

“You see enough?” he said furiously. “Feel like you’re up on the latest news?”

“Hold on,” I began, but he kept right on going.

“I told you to stay out of this,” he fumed. “But you never listen. You never learn.”