The kind of sadness that made you or broke you.
I looked over at the man who had once shared a toast with me, a toast to our dead mothers. His face was beyond pale and his eyes watered. His jaw was set. He wasn’t going anywhere till he buried his friend, and so I wasn’t, either.
Strength meant doing what was right even when what was right felt foolish.
Henry, who was on his knees across from me, reached forward and lifted my chin. Our eyes echoed each other’s sadness. We were all connected, everyone who shared the woods with me, by loss.
I opened my mouth to speak when I was suddenly yanked off the ground by my arms. I spun around, coming face-to-face with my father.
“Enough,” he gritted out. “You will stop this second. We will go back to the community. I know Al. He’s a weak man who stands behind a gun and calls it power. Trust me when I tell you this—they’ll let us in. Now. Let’s. Go.”
My mouth fell open, and despite how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the tremble that ran through me.
“Take your hands off her,” Henry snarled, next to me in only a matter of seconds.
“I suggest you mind your business. This is a family matter,” replied my father, dragging me toward my sister. Louisa’s hands moved to her ears and she began to cry.
“Family?” Henry yelled after him. “Last time I checked, you’ve been dead. Usually dead means, you know, not walking around and attempting to manipulate your daughters through fear and ridiculous displays of testosterone. Now, if she wants to stay here and bury her friend, that’s what she’ll do.”
“Maybe we should all just calm down and talk about this,” Lockwood suggested. “Take a deep breath. Everyone is an adult here.” He shot a worried glance toward my sister, who had seemed to curl in on herself, an attempt to protect herself from the only people she had left.
I twisted out of my father’s grasp. “He’s right. We all need to settle down and talk about our next move. Sitting here and yelling—”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence. Eric charged at my father, knocking me to the ground in the process. My side stung, sending pain up and down my body with the blood that flowed in my veins. There wasn’t a part of me the pain didn’t touch. I gasped, a layer of sweat covering my forehead. When Henry helped me to my knees, I watched as my father pulled Eric off him. He lay panting on his back as my father got up on his feet.
“I understand you lost someone, boy, and that comes with a pain that can make you crazy, hateful. But if you touch me again, I promise it will be the last thing you do,” he warned, towering over a fuming Eric.
My father had always protected our family, and I knew he carried a strength in him that I had never wanted to see tested, but the man before me, once caring and loving, now seemed so cold and distant.
Seeing the look on my face, his shoulders slumped. “He attacked me,” he said. He had never seemed so tired or so old as he did in that moment.
“I know. He’s in pain. He’s really a good—”
The slump of his shoulders vanished as he pulled his back straight, stalking over to me. He took my chin in his hand. “In case you haven’t noticed, everyone’s in pain,” he replied, speaking to me just like he did in the days of our piano lessons—soft but authoritative. Strong but understanding. “That doesn’t mean they stop. They won’t ever stop. The council will keep coming and coming until they kill every last one of us,” he continued, raising his voice so every last one of us could hear. “So, we move. We keep going. We don’t stop and bury the dead because soon there’ll be too many dead to bury. The war isn’t coming, Tess, it’s here. And there’s no time to waste. No place to hide. We fight or we die.”
Chapter 3
“You have to sleep sometime, Tess.”
I looked over at Louisa. She slept so peacefully on the ground next to me that I could almost pretend her life wasn’t ruined. If I covered her with enough blankets, I could even hide the fact that she was carrying a baby that would most likely kill her. She was too young to have gone in for inspection, so there was no way of knowing if she was like Emma or me. “I could but I won’t,” I whispered to Lockwood.
“I’ll watch after her,” he replied, plopping down on the ground next to me.
“You will, huh?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. We had been walking for two days, mostly silently. Our group was trudging back to the community I prayed would let us in. When Henry had dared to ask my father if we could return to whatever makeshift, backwoods camp he came from, he dismissed the idea with a grunt, continuing to stalk through the woods. Without the community, we had no home. No place to go. And looking at Louisa, it had become clear that we needed a home desperately.