attacking supply convoys. More than a century ago, as rumor had it, the Council crushed an Omega uprising in the east. Since then, the only large-scale battle I’d heard of had been on the island, and few enough of our fighters had survived that.
Others who came to the camp were resistance contacts rather than troops. They were untrained in combat, and sometimes unsuited for it. They were loyal to the resistance, and we were thankful that they’d come—but often, at night, I thought of the limbless and the crippled who had shuffled their way to the encampment, and I wondered what we were leading them in to.
Ω
That night I dreamed I was inside Elsa’s holding house again. I walked the long dormitory where the children’s beds were pressed up against the wall. Everything was silent. At first I thought the children must be sleeping. But when I bent down to one of the beds, I saw that it was empty. That’s when I noticed the thickness of the silence. In all my weeks in the holding house, it had never been silent. In the daytime, the children were noisy in the courtyard or the dining room. Nina was usually banging pots in the kitchen, and Elsa’s voice could be heard around a corner, chiding a child about this or that misbehavior. Even at night, the building hummed with the sound of forty sleeping children. The light snores and openmouthed breathing; the odd cry of one of the younger ones, half-wakened from a dream. There was none of that now. Only a single noise, a dripping sound, a plink plink plink coming with eerie regularity from the far end of the dormitory. I moved through the darkness, trailing my hand along the rail of each empty bed. Perhaps there’s a leak in the roof, I thought, or a crack in one of the pitchers laid out for the children to wash with each morning. But when I reached the far wall, I could find no puddle on the floor. The noise seemed to be coming from above. I tipped my head back and looked up. I could see it now, the drip, falling from the ceiling. It hadn’t far to fall. Each drop landed only a foot below the ceiling, on the surface of the liquid that filled the whole room. From where I stood, looking up, I could see the concentric circles, spreading on the surface with each drop. I opened my mouth to scream, but in the thick fluid the sound was muted, even to my own ears.
When I woke, Piper’s hand was on my arm, shaking me. I hadn’t been screaming, but the rolled jacket that I used as a pillow was wet with sweat, my blanket rucked around my knees from my flailing.
“They’re going to tank the children first,” I said.
“When?”
I shook my head. “Today. Tomorrow, maybe. I don’t know. Soon.” There’d been no mistaking the urgency of the vision. “We need to attack now.”
“There’s sixty troops from the western ranges due any day,” Piper said. “More still to come from the east, too, if the messengers got through in time.”
“It’ll be too late,” I said. “The kids are being tanked any day now.”
“We won’t save them, or anyone else, by leading our troops into a massacre,” said Zoe. “We only get one go at this. We need whatever the Council’s looking for in there. And we need enough troops to give us a chance.”
“What about the children’s chance?” I said to Piper. “You saw what the tank did to Kip, and he was an Alpha. Even if we can free the town eventually, and get them out, they’ll never be the same. Don’t you want to save them?”
“This has never been about what I want,” he said, and looked away. “It’s about what the resistance needs.”
All morning, as I watched the troops at their training, I could taste the tank liquid at the back of my throat. To distract myself, I asked Zoe to help me to practice the fighting again. We didn’t speak much while we sparred, except for her instructions: Lower. You’re leaving yourself wide open. When you’re in close like that, use your elbow, not your fist. I was getting faster now, the gap between thought and movement narrowing. The punches and jabs that she’d taught me had grown closer to habit, and while I could never best her, I was able to dodge some of her strikes. Even in the cold, we’d