Warchild: Pawn (The Warchild Series) (9 page)

Grandfather’s words echo in my head.
“
Strength…she gave it to you for a reason.
”

CHAPTER ● TWELVE

I’m amazed at how easily I’m able to
drag the soldier out of my home.

What’s happening to me? First I can hear
Finn’s thoughts, and now this. I’m dragging a man that easily weighs a hundred
pounds more than me like he’s a pillow. I don’t know. I simply don’t know
what’s going on.

The beating of the drums grows
louder, and I don’t have time to think about it.

Boom, boom, ba-boom.

I grunt, growl, and heave the
soldier, slinging his body, watching it slide ten feet across the mud. I stare
down at my hands, shake my head, and then dart inside.

There’s no time for a long goodbye. I
kneel over Grandfather and push his white, stringy hair away from his forehead
and then kiss him there. Before, his skin was burning hot. Now it’s cold and
dry. No more tears, I think, and then grab the blanket from his bed. I pause
and take one last look, knowing I’ll never see him again.

My grandfather. The man that fed me
and clothed me, cared for me when those who should’ve had left me behind. I
promise myself that if I ever find my parents, if they’re still alive, that I
won’t scream at them. All I want to know is why.

Grandfather. The man who taught me
how to hunt and fish, how to find the most perfect rocks for my slingshot, and
how to sneak so quietly through the woods that I could slip up behind a
squirrel and grab its tail.

“I’ll make you proud,” I say, and
then drape the blanket over him, covering his body from head to toe.

That’s it. I leave him here,
realizing that when one world ends, another begins.

My past is gone.

Back in The Center, I see that Finn
and the Republicons are at the south end of the encampment, patiently waiting
on me. Slung across their backs, each of them carries his own sack, along with
another they’ve taken from one of the fallen. When I approach, Finn hands me a
bag.

I recognize the family markings on
it. Two connecting circles with a line through the middle, which tells me the
sack belonged to Brandon’s father. I hold it, stare at it for a moment, and
then say, “Trade.”

He does without question, and then
we’re moving.

I don’t look back. I’ll never look
back.

The only things I can hear are our
boots slapping against the sopping earth and Hawkins’s remorseful wail.

***

I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming,
but it feels so real, like I’m actually back at the encampment. I’m in my shack
with Grandfather and Grandmother. Mother and Father are there, too, along with
someone that looks like Ellery—no, it’s definitely her, but she’s much, much
younger. Younger than an Elder. Her hair is brown and curly on her head. Her
skin is tight and flush with pink. She’s smiling, and I see a row of beautiful
white teeth. I say something, but they don’t hear me. I don’t think they know
that I’m here.

Everyone is happy. Talking and
laughing, excited about something that they’re looking at in the middle of the
room. I nudge past Grandmother’s shoulder; she doesn’t feel me. I ask what’s
going on, and no one responds.

I see what they’re looking at. It’s
a crib and inside, a small baby sleeps, wrapped tightly in a white swaddle. It’s
me. It has to be me.

Grandmother says, “She’s beautiful,
isn’t she?”

“More than beautiful,” Grandfather
adds.

“She takes after you both,” my
mother says to her parents. From what I was told, Father’s parents were lost in
a flood, years before he and Mother met.

The baby—I—begin waking up, squawking
and struggling against the swaddle. It’s hard to believe that I was ever that
small. I’m not big now, but the baby me is so
tiny
.

Ellery bends over the crib and
strokes the baby’s cheek. “She’s hungry. I think it’s time.”

Time for what, I ask, and again, my
words go unheard.

Mother turns to Father. She looks
concerned. “Are we sure about this?”

Father sighs. “Ellery says she’s the
one, Meredith. I believe her.”

“But what if you’re wrong, Ellery? Our
baby…”

Ellery’s smile is warm and
comforting. “Am I ever wrong?”

“No, but—it’s just that—”

“She’s your child. You and Anson
have the final say—but I’ve seen it. You’ll say yes, whether it’s today or a
year from now. What I see does not lie.”

Mother twists a button on her dress and
asks, “What do you think?”

Grandfather and Grandmother exchange
swift glances and take each other’s hand, looking down at the child in the crib.
I want to question what’s happening, what they’re talking about, why Mother is
so concerned, but it’s a waste of time. I’m invisible to them. I’m a bystander
to a seemingly important moment in my life.

Is this a dream? Or am I really
seeing the past?

Grandfather says, “I don’t need
Ellery to tell me she’s special. Look at her. Look at that face. Can’t you feel
it?”

I can. I can feel the love inside
him for his only grandchild, the one he would eventually raise.

Everyone waits while Mother twists,
twists, twists the button.

I survey the room. It’s warm inside
the shack. A fire burns in the stove. Everything is the same, but different. There
is one bed, big enough for both my grandparents to sleep in instead of the two
smaller ones we owned. The shelves that we built aren’t there. Of course they
aren’t. This is years and years before that summer. Grandmother wears the dress
that hung on our wall for so long.

Finally, Mother lets go of the
button and covers her face. From behind her hands, she says, “Go ahead. No—wait—it
won’t hurt, will it?”

Ellery assures her that it won’t,
that I won’t feel a thing.

“What did you mean when you said, ‘a
girl will lead them’?”

“It’s not my place to question the
future, nor to prevent it from developing how it should, Meredith. It’s better
that I don’t say. You must trust me.” She finishes speaking and looks directly
at me. At
me
, the invisible one. I’m the only entity on this side of the
room. Ellery says, “I was wondering when you would arrive.”

Not a single one of them reacts to
her words. It’s as if we’re alone together.

“I’m here,” I say.

She can hear my voice. Ellery puts
her finger to her lips. “Watch,” she whispers, then pulls a knife from a pocket
and pricks the tip of the same finger, which she then holds down to the open,
crying mouth of the infant. I watch the baby suckle and taste blood on my
tongue. Ellery allows the baby to squeeze her pinky, and I feel the warmth of
her skin on my palm.

I watch, and I wait, like everyone
else. The baby drinks from Ellery’s finger, and I feel a fullness in my
stomach. I want to tell her to stop, that it’s too peculiar, and when I can pry
my eyes away from the crib, Ellery appears as the woman I’ve always known. The
pink is gone from her pale, wrinkled skin and her hair is white and fluffy. She
looks drained. Empty.

The baby stops crying, makes a
subtle noise of contentment that I can barely hear, and then falls asleep
again.

“It’s done,” Ellery croaks in her
familiar voice.

Mother cries softly. Father puts an
arm around her shoulder. My grandparents hug each other from the side. They’re
beaming. They’re proud.

“What did you do to me?”

She strains and struggles to move
her frail body around so she can face me, looking up like her neck is stiff and
nailed to her shoulders. “I have given you the greatest gift. On the morning of
your fifteenth year, you will become…become…become…”

Her words trail off in hollow
repetition, and I never get to hear the rest of her sentence. What will I
become? I feel hands on my shoulders—real hands—and they’re shaking me, not
roughly but enough to wake me from my dream.

I open my eyes halfway, groggy and
frustrated that I was pulled from Ellery’s words of revelation. It’s not quite
dark, maybe an hour or so before sunrise, but it takes me a moment to remember
where I am. I smell leaves and rain—the ever-pouring rain—and figure out that
I’m somewhere in the forest.

Kneeling above me, Finn shakes my
shoulders again, “Caroline? Wake up.”

I nudge him away and sit up, rubbing
the sleep from my eyes. I’m tired, still, because a couple hours of rest wasn’t
enough.

We ran and ran through the woods all
day and well into the night, putting miles between us and the DAV vanguard. We
ran until our lungs ached and our legs gave out from exhaustion. We passed a
number of families from my encampment and told them to hurry, to keep going,
but they were weak—unused to the exertion over unfamiliar terrain as they
carried children on their backs and trudged up hillsides.

They had cowered at the sight of the
Republicons with me but begged to come with us for protection. It was hard to
say no—difficult decisions are never easy—because they would surely slow us
down, and at times, I felt like I had put them in the DAV’s slavery chains
myself.

James and his followers kept up
easily, and it was me who eventually gave out and ordered the time to rest.

And now, here we are, on a new
morning, but dawn does not bring fresh hope.

Finn says, “Marla thinks she saw a
few DAV soldiers a couple of miles back. They must be sending runners ahead of
the vanguard.”

The thought of immediate danger
wakes me up fully, and I climb out from underneath the layer of limbs and leaves
I’d erected to protect myself from the rain. “And you’re just now waking me
up?”

“She got back a couple of minutes
ago.”

“Are the others ready?”

“Most of them. Rawley’s not here
yet.”

Before we slept, I’d asked for
volunteers to stay on watch. Four Republicons raised their hands. It was
unexpected, but appreciated.

Marla went north, back toward the
advancing army. Little Blake went east, Big Blake went west, and Rawley went
south.

I tell Finn, “We have to go. We’ll
find him on the way.”

“James won’t go without him.”

“Then we go without
them
,
understood?”

Finn studies me, chews his bottom
lip and opens his mouth to speak, but stops. He knows I won’t change my mind.

We find the rest congregating
underneath the limbs of a tall pine tree, out of the rain. Every set of eyes is
on me, waiting. I had told James that I was in charge, yet it’s an awkward
feeling having them be so dependent on what I say next. If they want their
reward, so be it. “No Rawley?” I ask.

James shakes his head.

“We can’t wait on him, not if Marla
saw them coming.”

James hefts his two packs higher
onto his shoulders and rocks back and forth, anxiously looking back in the
direction we came from.

“We’ll find him on the way, okay? I
promise.”

But it’s a false promise, because I
have no way of knowing if we will. I instructed him not to go too far, and
Rawley’s definition of “too far” might be completely different than mine. It’s
a small valley, maybe a mile across, and he could be anywhere.

James says, “Suppose he comes back
and we’re not here. What then? What if those blackcoats spot him?”

It’s a valid point, and I try to
think of something to convince him otherwise. “Maybe he decided to wait on us. That’s
possible, right? Before we went to sleep, you told me he could be lazy
sometimes, didn’t you? He probably fell asleep, or maybe he figures he can wait
on us to come to him instead of hiking all the way back. He knows where we’re
going.”

“It’s not like him. He’s lazy, but
he’s not stupid.”

“James, we can’t—Marla, how close
were they?”

“Too close.”

“How long do we have?”

“Not long. They weren’t moving fast,
but they weren’t taking their time either.”

“How far?”

“By now? Less than a half a mile, if
that.”

It occurs to me that if they’re that
close, then they’ve captured the families from my encampment that we passed
yesterday, the ones we left behind. They belong to the DAV now, and who knows
what they’ll be forced to do. My cheeks go numb.

I’m a horrible leader.

Yet if we don’t do something, if we
don’t move now, there’ll be thousands upon thousands, instead of dozens.

I can’t risk the freedom of so many
to wait on a single man. Rawley helped save us, and I’d become familiar with
him during our escape yesterday, but he’s still a Republicon. It’s a horrible
thought, but his life isn’t worth the multitude of others.

Is it? Is the single life of someone
that saved mine worth risking the freedom of my people?

They’re all staring at me, waiting
on me to make a decision. Dirty, uneasy faces, begging me with their eyes to
wait on the man they consider a brother.