Half Lost (The Half Bad Trilogy #3) - Sally Green Page 0,18

camp is being broken up around me. Trainees bustle about and I’m sitting on the ground eating porridge, or at least I think that’s what the almost-solid gray mass of lumps is that I’ve scraped out of a dented saucepan.

“We’re moving out soon,” Gabriel says, joining me. It’s barely past dawn but I know Greatorex will think we’re dilly-dallying.

I hold the pan out to him and say, “Want some? It’s disgusting.”

He shakes his head. “I had some earlier.”

“Where’ve you been?” I try to sound curious, not childish. But he said he’d stay with me, and yet when I woke he wasn’t there, though Greatorex was.

“Greatorex asked me to talk to Donna.”

“And you asked Greatorex to do what in return?” I have a sick feeling he asked her to sit with me, to watch over me like a child.

He doesn’t reply at first, only keeps eye contact. “I told her you have bad dreams and to kick you if you started screaming and crying.”

I swear at him but he leans closer to me and says, “I just asked her to get me if you woke up.”

I throw the saucepan into the fire—all very mature. I did have a dream, not a really bad wake-up-blubbering one, but he wasn’t to know that.

“Are you going to tell me what happened when you left our camp, after you drew your knife on me?”

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No.”

“I was . . . I’d found two Hunters a couple of days before. I killed them.” And I tell him everything about that and the trap and finding Donna. I don’t tell him much about the fight, no details; he’ll know it was bad.

Gabriel says, “Greatorex wanted me to see if I can work Donna out.”

“And?”

“She seems genuine enough. Do you think she’s a spy?”

I shrug. “You were the one who told me they don’t go around with big signs over their heads.”

“Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? Very wise.”

“So what did Donna say, O wise one?”

“That she ran away from England a few weeks ago, when things got bad. Her mother was arrested. Her dad died years ago. She made her way to France and then here.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s the short version. She’s quite chatty. Didn’t hold back. She talked about you quite a bit too. She likes you.”

“I saved her life . . . rescued her from the clutches of evil.”

We sit in silence again and then Gabriel says, “She said there were eight of them. Some kind of elite Hunters, two with strong Gifts.”

“Not that strong, evidently.”

Gabriel sounds sad and worried when he says, “You could have been killed.”

“I could have been killed walking back into camp last night.”

But I know he’s right. The one with the Gift for projecting pain was a problem. I think her Gift was weak or maybe she couldn’t control it in the heat of battle but there’ll be more like her to come. I think I got lucky and the other one with the Gift for making you blind must have been one of the guards I killed at the start.

Greatorex shouts, “We’re leaving in two minutes. Get your packs ready.”

Gabriel starts to get up but I need to tell him something. “They were all women. Some of them were still sleeping when I killed them. One tried to flee and I slit her throat. Some I killed by ripping their guts open and two burned to death from the lightning I hit them with.”

Gabriel sits back closer to me, his hand on my leg. “We’re in a war.”

“So I’m a war hero, not a psychopathic murderer?”

“You’re not a psychopath and you’re not a murderer. You’re not bad. You’re not remotely evil. You’re someone caught up in a bloody war and it’s eating you up—and that just proves how sane you are.”

Against Anyone Normal They’d Be Lethal

Greatorex leads us out of the camp. There must be about twenty of us. Everyone is helping carry a load. Even Donna has a large rucksack on her back, though I notice her hands are zip-tied in front of her. We troop out in a line. The idea is to go through a cut, which has already been set up, and once through it we close it behind us, leaving this camp with no cuts, no links to any of the other camps. As Greatorex says, “It’s served its purpose.”

I like Greatorex. Some people would blame me and say, “We’d not have to move if it wasn’t for Nathan,” but Greatorex doesn’t