The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,57

when you come back to me, I intend to show you that you are mine as much as you are theirs. Plus, you have distracted me from forcing you into the tunnels. Okay. You can come with me. The battles are almost over. Just the stragglers left, and it seems you have bloodied your sword. With our young men, we call that first blood. I’m not sure, other than Dreama, that any other women do that here.”

He pulled a rag from his pocket. “Cover your mouth and nose. You’re not as used to the dust as we are. I don’t want you to have a coughing fit night. They’re awful.”

Tingles still ran up my body as I took the rag from him, but before I covered up my face, I had some questions. “Is everyone okay? Torrin? Astor?”

“We’ve lost some people. Torrin was fine when I left him minutes ago. He goes stone-cold efficient in battle, and that’s what he’s doing. But he seems perfectly fine, as unaffected as he ever is. Astor came through with some new devices that blew up just in time. And we’re all wondering what triggered the Reamers to do this in the first place.”

He took my hand, and I brought the rag to my face as we walked together toward the crowd in the center of a square. I hadn’t been here before today when I rushed through and encountered Dreama. I supposed there would have been little reason for me to have been here.

Torrin stood in the center, talking to three other men while dead bodies were being hauled into one pile on the left. Fewer ones were being gently placed on a cart on the other side of the square. Our dead versus their dead.

“What do they do with them?”

Mattis put his arm around me. “They’ll be burned. We won’t waste space on their dead. Also, they carry a lot of diseases we don’t want spreading. Ours will have a warrior’s burial later today.”

How had all of this come to be? And the rest of the planet, was it like this, too? Factions of people fighting each other for space to grow anything? Resorting to cannibalism? And how much of it had stemmed from their beginnings? And did they even know about them at all?

Tonight, when things were settled, I was going to tell them what I knew. What I’d read. The prison ships that carried their ancestors here.

Were these men the descendants of the political uprisers now used as cautionary tales to suppress upheaval in the government? Or were they murders and other horrible criminals? I didn’t suppose it mattered. We weren’t responsible for our ancestors, had no say in where we came from, we were what we became.

Someone must have lit the pyre of Reamers, because the too-sweet stench of burning flesh curled over the square. In the center, Torrin’s group had grown, and they appeared to be having a serious conversation, right there in the aftermath of murder. Right there with blood still on their clothes. I suspected that the woman I’d been just weeks ago would have cringed at the barbarity of it all, but what I took from that gathering was protection. These people were taking an unthinkably bad situation and doing their best to maintain civilization.

Mattis must have noticed where my attention had drifted, and he tightened his arm around my shoulder.

“Torrin’s not even human. He can just switch it on and off, the ability to kill.”

“Maybe we all have that ability,” I said, thinking of the Reamer who had crumpled after receiving blows from both Nox and me. Had I been the one to deliver a fatal wound?

“Sometimes, warriors can focus tight on the moment, and it’s hard to turn it off, to return to thinking like a person instead of a killer,” Mattis said. Beside me, wrapped around me, he felt so solid and sounded so wise. “How are you, beautiful?”

“Oh, I’m fi—”

He cut me off by lifting my face-scarf and planting a kiss that effectively wrested my attention. “Don’t lie to me. I don’t mean your body—not at the moment, anyway. I mean your spirit. I’ll ask you again, how are you?”

Why were there tears in my eyes? It didn’t make sense. I wasn’t sad. I was… “Elated. Proud.”

“And you’re worried because you don’t think you ought to be proud of fighting or killing?”

“How did you—?” I shook my head, clearing the words. “No, not that. I was out there today, with my