saw the silhouette of the long, low building, blocking out the stars. At the back of one of the wagons I saw the small hands clinging to the gaps between the boards. The cries coming from within weren’t loud anymore, as they’d been when the vision first woke me. This wasn’t the sound of children calling out expecting to be heard, let alone helped. This was a crying of voices in the dark, of children who knew that nobody would come. And they were right.
chapter 16
The first snow began at dawn, and by the afternoon the tents were already sagging under the weight of it. The swamp made for awkward camping at the best of times. Now, it was a morass of ice and mud, overcrowded and with a chill wind slapping the loose tent flaps. Waste pits had been dug at the eastern edge, but their smell crept across the whole camp.
There were nearly five hundred soldiers gathered here, Simon estimated. It was more than I’d feared, but fewer than we needed.
“It’s not enough,” Simon said quietly. “You’ve seen our tallies of the Council’s soldiers. There’s fifteen hundred in New Hobart, at least, and heavily armed.”
“There are divisions within the Council,” I said. “We should be exploiting that.”
“What are you talking about?” Sally said.
“The Ringmaster.”
From the way they reacted, my words might as well have been one of Xander’s incoherent outbursts—Zoe was rolling her eyes, while Simon shook his head. But I pushed on.
“We know he’s watching New Hobart. We know he’s against the tanks.”
“He’s a member of the Council,” said Zoe. “That’s all we need to know.”
“What if we asked him to help us?” I said.
“He wouldn’t,” said Piper. “And we couldn’t even ask him without giving away our plans. He might be at odds with Zach and the General, but his loyalty’s still with the Alphas, and the Council. He’d warn them, and ruin whatever chance we have.”
I shook my head. “If he took a stand against Zach and the General, other Alphas would follow him.”
“The General has pretty much the whole Council in her pocket,” Sally said. “They’re not going to follow the Ringmaster into some kind of revolt.”
“I’m not talking about the Council,” I said. “I meant ordinary Alphas. The soldiers, for one thing. Some of them would follow him. You heard what he said, about how a few of Zach’s soldiers had come to him already, scared by the machines they’d witnessed.”
“Why do you think the machines horrify people so much?” said Piper. “Because of us. Of all the blast’s abominations, we’re the one they fear most. You think those soldiers would go to battle for us?”
“I think they’d follow the Ringmaster, if he asked them to.” I remembered how he’d stood, undaunted, before Piper’s and Zoe’s raised knives. He was a man who was used to being obeyed.
So was Piper. He cocked an eyebrow at me now. “You want to ally yourself to somebody who doesn’t see a fundamental problem with tanking, except for the machines they’re using to do it? Somebody who’d be thrilled to get rid of us altogether, if he could only do it without using technology? The Ringmaster’s not on our side.”
“We need help—we don’t get to be fussy about where it comes from,” I said. “Do you have any better ideas? I know the Ringmaster’s motives are hardly pure. But you said it to me only last night: it’s not about what we want. It’s about what the resistance needs. He could help us to keep the people of New Hobart out of the tanks.”
But Piper talked over me. “He could, perhaps. But he wouldn’t. He’d never go that far. He came to us to exchange information—nothing more. We can’t risk blowing the whole attack by trusting him.”
He turned back to the maps, and the conversation continued around me.
“We attack at midnight in five days, at the turn of the moon,” Piper said. “It’ll give us the greatest cover as we approach the town.”
I closed my eyes, and saw nothing but swords and blood.
Ω
“There aren’t enough,” was Simon’s constant refrain, whenever we gathered with him in his tent and tallied the daily arrivals.
“There are thousands in New Hobart who would fight along with us,” I said, “if only we could warn them to be ready.”
“If you’ve got a bright idea for getting inside those walls, do share,” said Zoe.
“What about the ones who aren’t inside the walls?” I said, thinking of the workers we’d seen filing out