“I’ll see you later,” I said, pulling away from Trevor and waving at the others. “I need to get some sleep.”
I headed back towards my tent, my head spinning, stumbling in the darkness. I blinked up at the pitch black canopy of trees, so dark the falling ash looked like snow flakes.
The sky is still there. Just hidden.
Yesterday, my plan was to find a cure for the elixir, a way to weaken king Richard and end his tyranny. I thought maybe I could fix the system from the inside. Live together or die apart; the founding principle that had been hammered into me since birth. I’d left the compound, but I’d never really given up on the rhetoric, or the elite. I cared about Damien and Tobias, and now Penelope. Being an elite didn’t make you evil. It was about the choices you made. But I realized now how naive I’d been. Getting rid of king Richard wouldn’t fix everything, it couldn’t.
I lifted the flap of my tent and ducked inside. I lay down against the furs and blankets, and closed my eyes, feeling the world spin beneath me. Somehow that only made my fears and anxieties sharper.
Did Damien know?
The question was always on the tip of my mind, every time I tried to lay still. I wanted to push it away, but now that there were no distractions, it came rushing back with a vengeance, blocking out everything else.
Every moment we’d shared. When he saved me from Nigel and his buddies. When he chose me off that stage.
He must have thought I was a fool. No wonder he felt guilty about his father’s system, about the weight of the lies. He was poisoning everyone, the polluting the whole world, to force humans to remain in his blood factories, and be grateful for the opportunity.
The camp was quiet at night, despite its size. There were predators out there in the dark woods, and we all knew it. Still, there was something comforting about not being shut in, buried beneath the ruins of a fallen civilization. The open-aired tents let in a cool breeze that smelled like smoke and pine needles and freedom.
It wasn’t like Algrave, when we could literally sleep outside with no fear, but it was something. More than I expected.
Luke slept in the cabin with his uncle. I was supposed to be sharing my tent with Jazmine and Camina, but they hadn’t returned yet. Muffled conversations and the slight twang of a guitar kept me from dozing off, as well as the occasional moan from one of the tents next to me.
For a moment I yearned for my big soft bed and large room in Damien’s apartment. But then I remembered, someone had attacked me there with a slagpaw. Inside the utopian citadel of lights. It might have been more comfortable, but it wasn’t any less dangerous.
Despite Sam’s good intentions, I didn’t trust these people. I knew Penelope wasn’t safe here. We couldn’t afford to overstay our welcome, which meant, I had to figure out what our next move was.
Part of me didn’t want to. Why put ourselves in more danger? Why was this my responsibility at all? I’d been resisting making a choice, or speaking the truth out loud. I knew when I did, everything would change. Right now, the elite were tentative allies. Our plan was to prevent a war, prevent thousands of innocent deaths. I knew whatever stunts the rebels pulled, it was the compounds that would suffer most.
They hadn’t seen Quandom, like I had, or experienced the three-day ‘punishment’ when King Richard turned off the citadel’s purification engines. Sure, it could be survived for a few days, as long as we were well supplied. But it was unnatural to be shut in like that, for too long.
The worst of it was, I liked it here. Even living in the ash. I liked it more than I had any right to. It let me dream of a future, a life, that I’d never even been able to envision before.
I slept for a few hours, but got up before dawn and took a walk, wrapping my blanket around me. The path through the tall trees led to a rocky outcropping, not more than a cliff’s edge, framed by burning lanterns that illuminated the low boughs of the large pine trees. Messages written in paper were tied to forking branches with twine. Half of them had been burned away, leaving only blackened bits of