Page 16

King

It had been a week since we landed in the U.S. We moved slowly due to changing the original plan. We now avoided towns that might still be inhabited, fearing that outlying humans would attack. There was no time to negotiate with the towns, even if they were willing to try. We didn’t want to kill anyone but Federation.

From what we’d seen, the Federation targeted smaller groups of civilians. We came across three destroyed towns, while mid-sized towns were left untouched. It looked like they were playing it safe, going after people in smaller areas. But why?

The closer we got to Boyce, Virginia, our rendezvous point, the more hellhounds we encountered. Their numbers increased steadily, making sleep difficult, which put us more on edge. If everything went according to plan, we’d reach our destination tomorrow, with the other groups of Shadow Warriors arriving within a few days.

Boyce was seventy-one miles from the Capitol and, according to earlier reconnaissance reports, deserted. The major abandoned railroad there would provide metal sleeping quarters, safe from hellhounds. Between the rations we’d brought and what we’d scavenged along the way, we could hold out for months if necessary. But months wouldn’t work for me or Beast. Knowing nothing about Marinah was killing us slowly.

I switched mental gears trying to keep thoughts of her in the background.

The America we were walking through now was a scarred wasteland, blasted by bombs in the early days of the war. After the initial waves of electromagnetic pulses and areas with nuclear fallout, the U.S. had tried to stop the hellhounds by bombing its own cities. If you survived the hellhounds, the military became your next threat. Civilians had been forced to clear their homes and move closer to Washington when the evacuation orders came. If they didn’t leave, they became just another casualty of war.

Greystone had known from the beginning that the longer the war dragged on, the greater the chance that young Warriors would be forced into military service disguised as humans. That would have been catastrophic. The stress of fighting would’ve exposed us, revealing our secrets. It was one of the reasons the older farmers, like my father, volunteered first. They weren’t as volatile as the younger group Greystone had been training for years. He wanted our class of Warriors under his command, not the government’s.

My father’s sacrifice still didn’t sit well with me. Most of the Warrior farmers died early on. At that time, the Federation didn’t exist, and the military was in chaos after many of their commanders also died. With little communication and a crumbling chain of command, the situation grew worse by the day. It wasn’t until angry citizens demanded the use of the underground tunnel networks that the government changed. Unfortunately, the new government that emerged to form the Federation turned out to be worse than the old one.

With so many reported dead, the Federation had gone into survival mode. That much I could understand. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was the systematic killing of humans now, or the initial decision to hide the true number of survivors.

When it looked like the hellhounds would win and our elders were nearly annihilated, Greystone brought us into the fight as Shadow Warriors. We went to war, stood beside humans, and saved the Federation. Marinah’s father had tried to help us. He shared some of the government’s inner workings with Greystone and found ways to protect the Warriors. That became even clearer after his death.

Now, we were hoping to gather humans willing to fight alongside us against the Federation, but that would need to wait. It was a slippery slope, and the time wasn’t right. Beck and Nokita’s teams might have better luck with their observations. Here, in Federation-controlled territory, the risk was too great to attempt contact.

Everything seemed to ride on Marinah.