minions at the Ministère had been rounding up Défecteurs all over the planet. Those who resisted the raids were either killed or sent to Bastille, while those who cooperated were Skinned and assimilated into society.
And others, it would seem, had somehow managed to escape. To live here.
“We are the last of the communities,” Brigitte continued. “After the most recent roundups, there were so few of us left, we decided to join together and create this camp. It was a challenging adjustment. Not all the communities operated the same way. We’ve had to make many compromises, but all in all it seems to work.”
Brigitte paused to point to a chalet to their left. “This is the lodge. When you feel well enough, you can join us there for meals, if you’d like.”
Chatine peered through the window at a room filled with large, round tables and a kitchen at the far end. It was evidently mealtime right now, because each table was crammed full of people. Everyone talked and laughed as they ate from plates bursting with food. And at one of the tables, she spotted Etienne. He was seated between two younger girls. Both looked no older than seven. He was pretending not to notice while they each snuck pieces of meat from his plate. Then he glanced down and acted astonished to find the food gone. The girls giggled in delight at the charade.
Chatine felt something harden inside of her, and she tore her gaze away.
“Is this the trip?” she asked sharply. “Did you trick me into going on a tour of your camp so you could give me a Défecteur history lesson?” Chatine immediately felt guilty for the edge in her voice. Brigitte had been nothing but kind to her since she’d arrived. And she was, admittedly, somewhat interested in what Brigitte was saying. Chatine had always considered the Défecteurs to be backward and ignorant. But walking around this camp, she could see they were just the opposite.
Despite Chatine’s venom, Brigitte still offered her a smile. “Maybe,” she admitted. “But what I really wanted to show you is up here.”
Balancing on her crutches, Chatine followed after her, surprised when the woman reached the end of the covered walkway and kept going, straight out from under the protective shields of the roofs and into the wild, frozen tundra of the Terrain Perdu. Chatine could see nothing in front of her for kilomètres except the ice, the frozen grass, a few scraggly bushes, and rocks that made up this endless landscape. With no roofs or chalets out here, the wind was brutal and relentless. It stung Chatine’s cheeks and eyes, but the giant padded coat Brigitte had given her miraculously still kept out most of the cold.
“This is what you wanted to show me?” Chatine asked, confused. “The Terrain Perdu?”
“It’s beautiful isn’t it?”
Chatine shot Brigitte a strange look. Was the woman on goldenroot? “Sure, yeah. It’s also very cold. So …” She dug her crutches into the ground and started to turn back toward the camp, but her foot snagged over something, drawing her attention to the pile of rocks she’d nearly tripped over.
She silently cursed the stones and prepared to maneuver around them when she noticed the rocks weren’t arranged in a pile, as they’d first appeared. They were arranged in a shape.
Chatine tilted her head to the side to get a better look.
Is that a …
“It’s a star,” Brigitte said, evidently reading her mind. She did that far too often for Chatine’s liking. “It represents hope.” Brigitte pointed to another cluster of stones a few mètres away. “And that one is a circle, which to us represents the interconnectedness of all things.”
Chatine glanced around her, suddenly seeing the landscape with new eyes and new wonderment. There were hundreds of them. Tiny clusters of stones arranged in so many different shapes. Squares, triangles, crosses, parallel lines, and several more that Chatine couldn’t even begin to identify.
“What are they?” she asked, jutting her chin toward the mètres and mètres of stone patterns that surrounded them.
“They’re memories.”
“Memories?” Chatine was certain she’d misheard.
“Of those we’ve lost.”
“I don’t understand.”
Brigitte walked over to one of the clusters. It was a simple design. Just eight tiny pebbles in the shape of an arrow. She knelt down reverently in front of it. “We bury our dead.”
Horrified, Chatine tried to leap back, but the crutches made it impossible. Instead she found herself hobbling away from the stone cluster by her feet. But another cluster was only a few