Snow Like Ashes(80)

It’s morning.

I jump up, back scraping along the rough wall. Will Angra send for me? Will he let Herod torture me into submission, until everything about the past sixteen years comes tumbling out of my mouth? My chest fills with lead-hot pressure, pinching off air.

“I’m Meira,” I manage around a tongue that feels more sand than anything, my eyes darting between Nessa and the door, waiting for soldiers to burst inside and drag me out.

“If they were going to take you so soon, they never would have brought you here to begin with,” the younger one, Garrigan, offers. He holds some of Conall’s distrust, but his face softens, offering me the smallest bit of kindness.

“How can you know that?” Conall snaps, watching the door.

“The same way I do,” Nessa declares proudly, taking my hand. “She’s here for a reason.”

Conall turns a glare to me, like I’m the one who made her say that. I don’t have the strength to pull away from her hand though, needing her small bit of comfort, and I just stare at him until he swings his gaze back to the door.

“Where did you come from?” Nessa asks, the question popping out of her mouth like she’s been holding it in since I got here. “Winter? No, of course not—they say no one lives there anymore. One of the other Seasons?”

“Cordell,” I say. Conall’s glare makes me feel guilty for talking to her, like any word I say will only strengthen her slowly growing hope. Nessa still looks at me with a hint of caution, but the brightness in her eyes is … beautiful. It’s hard not to want to make her happy, and just that word lights up her whole face.

“Cordell,” she echoes, and releases my hand to face Garrigan. “That’s a Rhythm, right?”

Garrigan’s mouth twitches in a smile, cracking his face like he doesn’t do it often. “Our Nessa’s going to be a world traveler one day,” he says, and I can’t miss the pride that swells in him. Pride in his little sister, in her ability to still dream beyond these bars.

“Or a seamstress,” she amends, her face flushing red. Whatever blip of happiness she managed to hold on to vanishes, and she looks at me with a sad shrug. “Like our mother.”

“Quiet,” Conall growls, a bite of warning as keys rattle in our door.

I pin my body to the back wall. No matter how Nessa and Garrigan tried to reassure me, or how uncaring I was last night at the thought of Angra coming for me, dread still churns in my stomach, a flicker of survival that’s impossible to snuff out entirely. They can’t take me. Not until I figure out … something. Some way to escape a long, slow death at Angra’s hands, a way to help the others around me escape the same fate.

The door swings open. Conall and Garrigan march into the sun and Nessa grabs my arm. “Don’t worry,” she whispers, and guides me forward. “It’ll be all right. It’ll be—”

“You.” A soldier turns from shouting at Conall and Garrigan to watch me emerge from the cage, his eyes a dark sort of greedy, and my stomach turns.

But the soldier nods toward the end of the road where the uncaged Winterians have gathered. “With the rest for now.”

Relief surges through me. Angra hasn’t called for me today.

Nessa pulls me forward and shock fills me up like it’d been waiting outside the cage for me all night.

This is the first time I’ve seen the Winterians of the Abril work camp. Of any work camp.

More Winterians join us from the second layer of cages, gathering into a haphazard cluster to march down the road, dust swirling around our shuffling feet. Dozens of people crowd around, frail bodies in tattered rags, clothing brown from years of sweat and dirt. Children too. If Angra had wanted to simply slaughter all Winterians, he would have done so long ago—it would have been a kinder fate. But instead he keeps them locked up, letting families grow and generations spawn under his control. It’s a cruel victory to show dominance over another by destroying them—but it’s crueler still to do so by destroying their families.

Winterian children watch me as they stand stoically beside their parents. Their faces say they’ve learned not to show weakness. Weaknesses get used until all you can do is scream at the unfairness of a life like this, a life of living in cages stacked atop one another, of growing up in a place where you aren’t even seen as a person. A life of waiting in torment for the twenty-five mythical survivors to set everyone free.

I meet a woman’s eyes. She’s Dendera’s age, her top lip curling at me, and I flinch back. A man beside her echoes her grimace, and another beside them, so many looks of derision that I feel no safer here than in Angra’s palace.