Somehow sleep found me. I only woke once when Henry and Stephanie returned to the campsite. They held hands as they walked, and I watched as Henry placed a gentle kiss on her cheek. He was different with her than he was with me, and I wondered if it was because he sensed the fire in her was stronger than his. That he would be the one to calm it.
Did we draw people to ourselves to fill in our missing parts, or did we seek out those missing parts ourselves?
…
The next morning, as we trudged closer and closer to the place Henry and I called home for so many years, Stephanie and my best friend tried unsuccessfully to keep their hands off each other. That didn’t mean she wasn’t focused entirely on the task at hand. Their touches were small and quick. A gentle hair tug. A playful kick in the heel here and there. Looking at the two of them, I realized Henry had found his partner in war. Something I had never wanted to be. Something he had searched out in Julia Norris, the girl who had helped him murder the incubating chosen ones back at Templeton. He had wanted a warrior, someone committed to the cause as much as he was, but I wasn’t that girl. I would choose love over war any day.
But maybe in Stephanie he had found both. I couldn’t help but smile as I walked behind them. Lost in my own musings, I barely noticed when everyone stopped. Thomas, one of the men my father assigned to our group, held up his hand and scrunched his nose. “Do you smell that?”
I sniffed. A pungent and familiar odor crept up my nose and traveled down to my stomach, where it painfully churned. Stephanie and Henry stopped whispering to each other and tried to identify the stench as well.
My eyes darted to Henry’s. “I know what that is,” I said. Without wasting another second, I bolted toward where the compound stood. It couldn’t have been half a mile from our current location. My heart beat hard against my chest and not just from running.
If I was right…
I couldn’t be right.
“Tess! Wait!” Henry yelled. I could hear the others running after me, but I didn’t slow down. What was the worst that could happen? We would get caught? That was all part of the plan anyway.
I skidded to a stop and Henry crashed into me from behind. We both toppled to the ground. “Holy shit,” Stephanie breathed.
Home was a strange concept to most naturals. Forced to leave the shantytowns that we grew up in, we had nothing but cement walls and communal living quarters for most of our lives. A place to wait for the end—but never a home. But as we stared at what was left of the compound, I realized the building was more than a collection of walls—it was the people who lived inside. A people destroyed.
Henry and I lifted our heads to find the compound burned to the ground. Piled high in front were bodies upon bodies. Everyone we knew. Everyone we shared meals with and passed in the hall. Everyone the council promised to protect.
Eradicated.
I vomited into the dirt. Stephanie fell next to me and pulled my hair back, saving what wasn’t already soiled the first time from my second round of throwing up.
“God damn them!” Henry screamed into the sky. I reached up a shaky hand and clutched onto his shirt, attempting to hold him in place. Hold him together. He pushed my hand away and brought himself to his feet. “Damn them,” he sobbed. He paced back and forth, pulling at tufts of his hair.
“What do you think happened?” Thomas asked our fifth traveling companion, a solider named Daniel.
“Charlie said this sort of thing’s been happening,” Stephanie said. “The war isn’t going so well, so they’ve been getting rid of the compounds. That way they can use the chosen ones to focus on the front. What do they need naturals for anymore?” She ran her free hand up and down my back.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and sat on my backside, pulling my knees to my chest. “Henry and I came across another compound like this one before. Everyone had been taken out and shot, and then they burned it to the ground. Didn’t want to leave anything that the Isolationists could salvage. But I never thought it would happen here.”
Henry rounded on me. “Then you’re naïve.”
“Calm down,” Stephanie pleaded with him.
“Calm down? That’s our whole species’ problem. We’ve just been sitting back and letting this happen. Over and over again we let them get the best of us. We should have—”
Stephanie got to her feet and walked over to Henry, placing both of her hands on his face. She pressed her forehead against his. “We’re going to get them. I swear it. We’ll make every last one of them pay.”
“Going to make us pay? How do you plan on doing that?”