Women. My sister could barely call herself a part of the group the council blamed for most of the world’s problems. Barely fifteen, yet in some ways she had seen and felt more of what it meant to be a woman than I had at eighteen.
My father would fix it. As he had always done during my childhood.
As he began to walk away from me, he stopped and held out his hand. “Come, Tessie. It isn’t safe here.”
Hand and hand, we trekked to where the others waited. A rag-tag team of outcasts and survivors, and sitting amongst them, her knees cradled to her chest as she leaned against a tree, was my doomed sister. Seeing her, my father’s grip tightened painfully around my fingers.
And then his hand was gone. With no words of affection or encouragement, he walked ahead of us, and I knew we were supposed to follow.
“Are you taking us to the resistance?” I called out to him as I helped my sister to her feet.
“I am the resistance,” he replied without looking back.
Chapter 2
“You’re out of your damn mind!” Eric screamed at my father.
I clutched onto Louisa’s hand, loosening my grip when she whimpered in pain. I hadn’t realized I had been holding onto her so tightly. We sat on the ground, leaning against a tree deep in the forest that was becoming a larger part of my life as time went on—uncivilized, unsafe, unpredictable. I reached up a hand, tucking Louisa’s bright blond hair behind her ear. She refused to meet my eyes, only sat silently next to me, her arms wrapped protectively around her swollen abdomen.
I tried to keep from staring down at it. I was definitely no expert on babies, but I guessed she was about four months along. There was no mistaking that she was carrying a child. Her thin, frail, sickly frame announced it to the world, almost defiantly.
“We need to move out, and we need to move out now,” my father replied sternly, ignoring Eric’s protest.
“Are you okay?” a voice asked softly. I turned my head from the brewing confrontation in front of me to find Henry crouching down to my right.
All I could do was nod. I didn’t know if I was okay. I didn’t know if anything was okay. Every time I seemed to get a grip on the world, it moved and changed beneath my hands, becoming a place I had no hope of navigating. Only moments before I had gotten my father back. The same man who taught me the beauty of music and the endless opportunities hope offered, but this man wasn’t him. It was as if the moment he saw Louisa, truly saw her, that man disappeared.
Nothing ever stayed. Nothing was permanent.
I looked over the crowd surrounding me—a collection of my past and present. My father and sister were relics of a family nearly destroyed by the council’s brutality. Henry, my best friend, a symbol of my life in the compound. Lockwood and Eric, men from my life in the Isolationists’ camp, men who sought freedom at any cost. Now, we were all together in the woods. Worlds colliding with unknown consequences.
Eric marched up to my father, pushing right into his face. “I don’t know you, which means I don’t answer to you. So, excuse me if I don’t give a crap about what you have to say. I’m not going anywhere until we bury him.”
History had a strange way of repeating itself. After I went on the run from the council, McNair and Eric had escorted me, Henry, and Robert through these very woods. Early in our journey, I had argued with McNair, begging him to help us go back and rescue my sister, but he always refused. He only worried about safely delivering me to his people. I was special, and it was his duty to make sure I made it back to the Isolationist community. I could do what the other women couldn’t—the thing I prayed my little sister could do, too. If I chose to, I’d give birth without dying. Whatever affliction affected the women didn’t affect me.
Eric didn’t wait for my father to respond. Throwing his hands in the air, he stalked over to where McNair’s body lay. He crumpled to his knees next to his fallen leader and began to dig with his hands.
I got Eric’s need to bury his friend, but even I could partially understand my father’s hesitation at staying put. We needed to move. We had already spent too much time standing in the woods, discussing our next move, less than a mile away from where I had lost James, the boy I loved. But all the warnings in the world wouldn’t matter in the end. Eric didn’t have any loved ones waiting for him back in the community. The closest thing he had to family was now dead, his neck effortlessly snapped by George.
George was a chosen one I had met during my days of servitude at the council’s compound, Templeton. But he was nothing like the chosen one I loved. He thrived on torturing the naturals he thought were below him, and he had lured me into the woods to save my sister.