George wanted to make a trade. James for the sister he’d defiled. When James came after me, seeing my illness in one of his visions, George figured out his gift. He realized he could use James, return James to the council, and get back in with the people who created him. He had been almost excommunicated by the council, sentenced to stand guard over naturals in a compound. But now that he had James, now that he discovered James’s own gift, he could gain what he had always thought was his right—power.
George. The boy who whispered in my ear that I would help him bring down the council.
Looking at Eric, the despair I felt in the deepest, darkest parts of my soul echoed in his eyes, and I knew I had to help him. Crazy or not, I simply had to.
I took a deep, shaky breath and looked for Robert. Meeting my eye, he nodded, answering my unspoken question. He moved so he was sitting on the other side of Louisa. Robert understood this was something I needed to do, that maybe I needed to bury McNair just as much as Eric did. And if I was going to step away from Louisa, I wanted the strongest person in our group next to her.
I pried my hand from Louisa’s and pulled myself to my feet using the tree for support, suppressing the groan that wanted to escape my lips. My side still smarted.
“Don’t even think about it,” my father commanded.
I slowly dragged my eyes from the scene of Eric furiously clawing at the ground beneath him to find my father staring me down. His eyes carried a depth, an anger, an authority that was never present during my childhood. I staggered back. The transformation of the man I called father, the quick change from the affectionate man he had shown me earlier, left me dizzy.
I swallowed. I had never stood up to him before. At least not in any important way. I had never had the chance. The council had seen to that.
I took a deep breath. This was the same man who’d checked my wound and touched my cheek. I didn’t need to fear him. “It’s the right thing to do. I owe him that,” I said, my voice strong. Firm.
“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no point in this. We need to go back to the community,” he answered. Just like that, I was dismissed.
“The community?” Lockwood scoffed. Scoffing was second nature to the boy who had first befriended me in the community. Somewhere between teaching me how to milk a cow and teasing me nonstop, he’d become one of the people I trusted most in the world, and I was eternally grateful to have him at my side. “They won’t let us back in,” he continued. “We left. We defied Al. So we won’t be welcomed back by anyone there. Not when our leaving could have led the council back to them. Not when our leaving got McNair killed.” Lockwood had been unusually quiet since the encounter with George. He mostly just stood silently, watching over my sister, a girl he didn’t even know.
“Lockwood’s right,” I said. “We all left knowing we wouldn’t be able to return. So, unless you have some safe haven we can travel to, we need to come up with a new plan. And that means we have time to bury McNair,” I explained, hoping to make my father see some sense. He had always been a reasonable man.
“I agree with Tess. There’s no point wandering around aimlessly,” my childhood friend Henry argued. “Not with Tess wounded and Louisa…” His voice trailed off.
I swallowed the bile that wanted to crawl up my throat at the thought of what my sister was facing. I had watched our older sister, Emma, die during childbirth. I wouldn’t be able to do it again.
I still hadn’t discovered the truth behind why so many of our women died while bringing life into the world; all I knew was that it kept happening, plaguing our species with little rhyme or reason. A sickness that appeared to have no hope for a cure. A sickness I was, somehow, immune to.
I turned my back on my father and made my way toward Eric, where I knelt down and began to help him dig. I kept my eyes focused on the earth, the many layers that would cover the body before me. It would hide another death I was responsible for. If McNair had just stayed in the community, refused to help me on my quest to save Louisa, he wouldn’t have died. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
There would be time to mourn, but it wasn’t today. I needed to help Eric. He had been there when I needed him, and he was my friend. I didn’t have many of those. As I lifted my head to look at the people who surrounded me—Henry, Lockwood, Robert, and Eric—I knew I would do anything for them.
Months ago, I never would have imagined that Eric was capable of feeling anything close to devastation, but back then I had been so narrow-minded. I wanted to hate the world and everyone in it. I didn’t see his thirst for vengeance against the deformed chosen one for what it really was—debilitating sadness.