“So?”
“So keep this in mind. You are of age, with a job in the city. Tomorrow you will get a Cred Orb. It will track your work hours, the rations you earn, and the Initiative will be watching you now, closer than they ever have. Things will change. You must always, always be ready to defend yourself.”
He’s not making any sense. I feel like I’ve just been smacked in the head with a two-by-four, and everything is confusing, buzzing around me like a horsefly. Why would they want to watch me? I am no one. My mother was no one. We are all no one, but I don’t have time to think it through, because suddenly a flash of silver catches my eye. My father lunges at me with his knife, silent and deadly. Faster than I’ve ever seen anyone move before.
I stand and leap high and sideways, over the edge of the boat. The barbed wire clips me as I go.
I hit the water and it sprays into my nostrils. I kick toward the surface, and burst through the waves in time to see my father shaking his head in the moonlight.
“Damn it!” I scream, furious he caught me off guard. “What was that for?”
“It was a lesson,” he calls down to me. “Swim to shore and come back tomorrow. You need practice surviving the Dark Time alone.”
He turns and disappears into the cabin.
An hour later I drag my aching body onto shore. The warm sand has never felt better than it does now, pressed up against my cheek. I allow myself a moment to catch my breath, then head for the trees. I pick the tallest one and start to climb. And as I make my way up silently, branch by branch, I can’t help but wonder if my father’s words were true. I loved my mother. But did I really know her? I think of the way she was always on guard, always alert, almost like a predator.
Like me.
My bracelet catches on a tree branch, and I stop for a moment. The moonlight illuminates the smooth silver. A strange, swirling pattern is etched onto the back of the charm, lines overlapping each other in all directions. My mother never told me what the pattern meant. I think of the countless hours she spent in the closet beside the engine room of our boat, behind a locked door. It was the one place we could never go, the one part of our home that was off-limits. I remember the way her eyes were always glazed over when she emerged. The way she would paddle away from the houseboat and disappear for hours. When she returned in the middle of the night, she would kiss us all and sing to us, but tears would leak from the corners of her eyes.
My mother had secrets of her own. Like everyone does in the Shallows.
“You can’t escape destiny, Meadow,” she whispered into my ear the last night I saw her.
I look at the swirling pattern etched on the charm bracelet she gave to me.
The wind blows, and I shiver, even though it is full of summery warmth.
I’ll find out what my father was talking about.
I’ll find out who killed my mother.
And when I do, slowly, painfully, I will take them from the earth.
CHAPTER 10
ZEPHYR
The cracked concrete and run-down buildings of the city are nothing like the salt marshes, where everything is rumored to drip blood, and the nights are filled with the moans of the dying Wards it’s reserved for. Of course none of that’s true.
But we like to keep people thinking it is. There are colors in the marshes. Browns and greens, and sounds that aren’t born of mankind. No one bothers us there. It’s the only bit of freedom we get from the Leeches.
Work on Mondays starts early, before dawn. Talan walks beside me, and together, we push a second large cart full of mangled bodies and twisted, blackened limbs into the Leech building. Our footsteps echo eerily. Only the security lights remain on.
“I could eat five bags of rations right now.” Talan is chattering away, as usual, completely ignoring the corpses flopping around as our cart hits a bump on the floor. “Actually, I could eat one of these guys!” She flicks the corner of the tarp and I get a whiff of death. That guy died only hours before he was collected.
“Flux, Talan. That’s disgusting. Just shut up and push.”
We reach the door of the Furnace Room, and I can already feel the heat. Sometimes I feel like I’m just going to sweat forever. Just an eternal drip, drip, dripping down my back. I lean my forehead against the scanner, a long black rectangle that stretches from the floor to the ceiling. The door click-whirrs open, and Talan and I push the cart inside.
The roar of the furnace is like rushing water, or the engine of a Leech boat starting up. After years of working together, Talan and I have a routine. I scan the foreheads of the dead with a portable scanner, attached by a cord to the wall. Talan holds back her puke as we lift the bodies, together, and throw them into the furnace. It’s loud, and I can’t hear what Talan is babbling on about. Thank the stars. Because I’m not in the mood to listen to her anyway.
All I want to do is think about her. The girl in my dreams.
It sounds stupid, like a fairy tale, or some sort of romantic sob story Talan would pick up if she had the Creds. But every night, the girl is there, silver hair hanging in waves to her waist like liquid moonlight, gray eyes the color of the ocean when a storm is about to roll in.
She isn’t beautiful. She’s different, rigid and untouchable, sort of like she’s carved out of stone. She keeps me sane when nothing else can. It’s like she holds me to the ground, like gravity, except much stronger. She protects me from the faceless people who haunt me each night and every waking moment.
There’s twelve of them. Twelve numbers. Twelve human beings.