year left myself. I have one year until I’m eighteen and no one to even share it with.
In Claysoot I am a spectacle. People give me sympathetic looks and halfhearted smiles, as if they mean to say, “Oh, Gray, it’s all right.” I find peace in the woods. Amid the tree limbs and pinecones, I am free; no eyes follow me, no thoughts flood my mind. There, I feel like myself.
On the bright side, at least I was able to say good-bye to Blaine. I read a scroll in the library when I was younger that documented the phenomenon of the Heist. The people of Claysoot didn’t always know what it was. In fact, when the very first Heist took place, no one even realized until the following morning. It was Maude’s older brother, Bo Chilton, who mysteriously went missing. After a thorough search of the town and woods, he was declared dead even though a body was never found. It was odd, Bo disappearing like that, completely out of character. He was the eldest of the original children, their main leader. Calm. Smart. Responsible.
The day the originals opened their eyes to find their town in ruins, they panicked. They suspected a strong storm had been the culprit, knocking them unconscious in the process, but they couldn’t remember the bad weather rolling in. They couldn’t remember anything from before the disaster, and with the exception of siblings, they couldn’t even remember each other. In the blink of an eye, neighbors had become strangers.
Before the group could fall into chaos, it was Bo who rounded up tools and started rebuilding the community. He shook sense into the others, assigning each person a specific task. In a matter of months, the town was well on its way to recovering. The crops were nursed back to life. The fences around the livestock fields were refortified and the animals, which had wandered off into the woods, were corralled and brought back to town. Bo set up the Council, comprised of five heads elected by the community, and since no one could recall the name of their home, he even rechristened the place, slapping two words together that all too accurately described the makeup of most of the town’s earth. Clay-rusted roads, and a film of soot-like dirt so persistent it could only be avoided by escaping into the woods.
When the Wall was discovered, Bo volunteered to go over first and scout things out, but he was unable to see what lay on the other side. The view from a large oak tree in the northern portion of the woods yielded nothing but pitch blackness beyond the Wall, and he deemed it unsafe. He tried to talk others out of climbing, claiming the Wall was likely built to keep something at bay, but a few tried. Their bodies came back a charcoaled mess, burned and lifeless, and Bo’s assumptions were proven right.
Bo was the reason that the original children, wild and panic-stricken, were transformed into a united team capable of rebuilding their community. But there was still no explanation for his disappearance. A few months later, another boy went missing, and a week after that another. Eventually Maude noticed that the disappearances seemed to be happening to boys of a certain age. It was always the oldest one, and then, finally, she realized it was always the boy turning eighteen.
They ran the first experiment on Ryder Phoenix. He sat in the center of town on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, everyone else around him, and they waited. That was the first night they all witnessed it, felt the ground shake and saw the sky light up. That was the night they had proof.
Maude convinced the group to repeat the experiment. For the next several birthdays, the same thing happened. Boys disappeared, swiped from the town in a matter of seconds, and always on the morn of their eighteenth year. Each one was taken, stolen, lost to a consistent and time-specific Heist.
Once they understood this, some boys began to panic. A few tried to escape before their eighteenth birthday. They climbed the tree in the northern portion of the woods that grew close enough to the Wall to aid in their crossing, but they always reappeared. Dead. Most of the boys came to accept that the Heist was unavoidable. Maude took over for her brother as Head of the Council, and arranged the first-ever ceremony. While the Heist was inescapable, a preparation for it was