paces behind her. She yelped and tried to escape that one as well. But it was no use. The patterns were everywhere. She was surrounded.
“So … ,” she stammered. “So these are all … There are cavs under the ground?”
Brigitte looked somewhat amused by Chatine’s reaction. “Are you afraid of the dead?”
“No,” Chatine asserted. But they both knew it was a lie. She was terrified of the dead. She’d spent far too much time sneaking around Third Estate morgues. She’d seen enough cavs to last a lifetime.
“The dead can’t hurt you.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Chatine muttered under her breath. The dead most definitely could hurt you. They could hurt you a lot.
Brigitte stared at her for so long, Chatine began to squirm.
“These stones don’t mark actual graves,” the woman went on. “At least not all of them. During the roundups, we were forced to leave many of our graveyards behind. We placed these stones as a reminder of those we lost.” Brigitte ran her fingertip across a stone by her feet, and for a moment Chatine could swear she saw something that looked like longing cross Brigitte’s face.
The wind swept over the great, barren landscape and bit at Chatine’s ears and the tip of her nose. She shivered and stared down at the pattern next to Brigitte. “Whose memory is that?” she asked, although her voice was so small, she was surprised that Brigitte even heard her over all that wind.
“Etienne’s father.” She didn’t look up as she spoke. “He died in the last roundup.”
Chatine’s stomach turned. “I’m … ,” she started to speak, but she quickly realized she didn’t know what to say. The polite way to finish that sentence was to say “I’m sorry.” But sorry wasn’t enough. If anyone understood that, it was her.
Sorry wasn’t enough for Azelle.
It wasn’t enough for Henri, the first time he left her.
And now—if, Sols forbid, he was gone again—she knew, with the certainty of the clouds in the Laterrian sky, that it would never, ever be enough.
Chatine swallowed, finding her voice again. It was no longer small and uncertain. It was strong and tempestuous. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you angrier? Why didn’t you fight back against the Ministère? They took your people. They killed your people. Why do you act like it’s all some magical gift from the Sols?”
“I was angry,” Brigitte admitted. “Very angry. At first. But I—like the rest of our community—chose to confront the anger instead of the Ministère.”
Chatine scowled at her. “What?”
“Life is full of monsters, Chatine. We can’t fight them all. We have to choose. Some monsters are not worth confronting. Some we are better off stepping away from. We choose to step away from the Ministère. From the Regime. By not engaging in their battles and their politics and their wars, by not participating, we are making a silent stand against them. Our lives out here,” she gestured to the wild, rugged terrain around her, “away from their power cells and technology and food source and rules, is an opposition in and of itself. So you see, sometimes not fighting is fighting. Do you understand?”
Chatine balanced precariously on her crutches, trying to wrap her mind around what this woman was saying. But her rage was blinding her and turning her vision red. “Are you telling me to run away?”
“Well,” Brigitte replied with a mysterious smile, “that all depends on what you’re running away from.”
Chatine shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Some monsters are not worth confronting,” Brigitte repeated. “But some—” she placed a hand to her chest— “like the ones that live in here, must be confronted. Because those are the ones that can truly destroy us, by turning us into our own worst villains. The challenge is knowing which is which.” Brigitte reached out again and touched one of the tiny pebbles on the ground in front of her. “It’s harder for some.”
Chatine snorted. “You mean, you? I find that hard to believe.”
Brigitte shook her head, momentarily lost in her thoughts. “Not me.”
She stood up but kept her gaze locked on the ground. On the stones. On the memory of who those stones represented. “The dead can only hurt you when you try to forget them.”
At these words, Chatine felt something pulse inside of her. A deep, bitter wound that she thought she’d closed long ago. But that had recently been ripped open again, and was now bleeding from the inside.
“So that’s why you brought me out here?”