Page 18

THIRTEEN

“ Stop! ” Kel screamed.

She jumped up and slammed her hand against the emergency button on the wall. The train lurched to a halt. Bekn fell to his knees and Coup cursed.

“ Flames , Kel!” Dira barked.

Savita’s distant screech vibrated their carriage.

Kel pressed her face to the misted window. She tried to peer to the left, where she’d seen a sharp splash of red, before hurrying to the carriage’s doors. She thumped the EXIT button over and over. The glass doors refused to budge.

“What’s going on?” Bekn demanded.

Kel ignored him and tried to pry apart the heavy doors. A moment later, a pair of calloused hands joined hers.

Together, she and Coup strained to part the glass. Bekn and Dira stood behind them, no longer shouting. Their curiosity fell against her back like a shadow.

Alchemists! She hoped she was wrong.

The doors shuddered open.

Kel leaped to the ground and stumbled over the train tracks, stubbing her toe. The rest of the Howlers followed close behind.

A few meters back, in a small forest clearing, lay a circle of boulders. Streaks of red smudged two rocks, scarlet veins glowing against the stone.

It was so out of place in the sea of green and brown. She’d hoped it was a dead animal. A deer or a bird. But a labyrinthine pit had formed in her stomach at the amount of blood she’d seen.

So much. Too much.

Beneath the red smears lay two bodies. A mother and a small child, tangled together.

From the dried blood trailing down their fingernails, their nose, their every orifice, it was clear what had killed them.

AB.

“Call for help,” Kel whispered, so softly she wasn’t sure anyone heard.

Dira didn’t hesitate. She turned away and began shouting into her tele-comm.

Kel struggled to look away from the corpses. She couldn’t see much of the mother’s features. Her face was covered by dark, matted hair. But the child’s face—a young boy—was perfectly clear.

Bekn stood back, eyes averted. A moment later, he marched off toward the train’s steering carriage.

Coup, however, stepped closer. His focus remained on the mother’s hidden face.

“They can’t have died more than a day ago,” he said softly. “We need to move their bodies before something else in the forest finds them.”

Kel nodded slowly. No matter her feelings toward him, Coup’s voice—barely a croak—made her wish she hadn’t stopped the train. She wished she’d just called the council to investigate. She wouldn’t wish AB on anyone.

Coup and Bekn’s mother had been taken by the same plague that had killed this mother and child, and from the rasp in Coup’s voice, Kel knew this was an all-too-familiar sight for him.

The thick, silent pain in the air reminded her of their perch on top of the darkened hill, after her aviary had burned to ashes.

Kel’s attention drifted back to the bodies. She noticed a lump of fabric to the left of the mother.

“They both have packs,” Kel realized. The bags had fallen open, rotten food and bottled water spilling free. “They must have been heading to Vohre.”

This far gone to the blight, they wouldn’t have been permitted on a government train.

No one knew how AB spread. It wasn’t contagious—but fear was.

Their only choices would have been to wait for a torturous death in Fieror, or brave the trek to Vohre’s advanced medical facilities in the hopes of greeting death painlessly.

It was rare to see two AB patients in close vicinity; the symptoms of those who had it often flared up when near one another. But this mother, buried beneath a blanket of her own blood, had refused to abandon her son.

Like any Saltan, Kel knew the warning signs of AB. Confusion, memory loss, insomnia, tremors. AB struck the brain and caused rapid tissue deterioration. It killed within months of onset. The lucky few had symptoms; time to say their goodbyes.

She wondered how Coup’s mother had looked. Had she passed peacefully, in her sleep? Or had her symptoms stripped her away, layer by layer?

A strange impulse itched her fingers. She wanted to reach out, to comfort Coup in some small way.

But the urge itself kept her still. Her hands twitched, waging a silent war until a council van appeared beside the train tracks.

She led Coup back toward the train as the mother and child were placed on stretchers and covered with white sheets.

The train driver quickly restarted their journey. Coup returned to his chair, silent.

The forest passed once more in a blur. Kel tried to count the trees, but her eyes kept focusing on the glass window. The reflection staring back at her. Not her face, but that of the mother’s and son’s.

Dira and Bekn nestled in chairs at the other end of the carriage. Awkwardly, with her chair’s leather cushion groaning, Kel leaned toward Coup. “Are you… are you all right?”

Her words snapped Coup from his reverie. He spun to face her, hands clawed into the chair’s arms. “Now’s not the time for you to grow a heart, Varra. I’d rather your hate than your pity.”

Kel’s mouth closed. If Bekn and Dira had heard their exchange, they said nothing. Stiffly, Kel rose from her seat.

The memory of her father’s body, torn apart like a rag doll in a storm, always lingered at the edges of her thoughts. She knew what it was like to be flooded with unexpected reminders of death.

Kel moved to the next carriage. She unlocked Savita’s enormous trailer, pulled on the leather gloves always stashed in her pocket, and sat cross-legged in a corner as Sav cleaned her wings.

When her phoenix moved and laid beside her, Kel thought Savita might be the only creature in the world who would never truly leave her.