“You’ve seen them,” Piper said. “They’re surrounded by the soldiers all day. There’s no chance of getting close enough to speak to them.”
It was true enough. Only two days earlier, we’d watched the workers filing through the gate. Most of the harvesting was complete, and the remainder was overdue. The workers had been digging with bare hands in the frozen ground. It made for slow work. The soldiers had looked relaxed enough, chewing tobacco and chatting among themselves as they patrolled the perimeter of the fields, but at one point they’d converged with their whips on the slowest of the Omegas digging potatoes.
“The fields are only guarded in the day, though,” I said.
“What are you getting at?” Sally asked.
“We could sneak into the fields at night and leave them a message. Tell them to be ready to fight.”
“Fight with what?” said Piper. “The Council will have long since taken any weapons from them. They’ve not even given them scythes for harvesting. And we can’t spare weapons, even if we could smuggle them in.”
“There are still ways they could be helpful, if we could warn them about the attack. Maiming the soldiers’ horses, creating diversions. Starting fires at the wall. Arming themselves with whatever clubs and kitchen knives they can muster. They’ll help, if we can find a way to leave them a message in the fields.”
“On the off chance that someone sees it?” It was Simon’s turn to sound skeptical. “Hell on earth, Cass. A lot of them can’t even read.”
“True enough,” I said. “But if they see a message, they’ll find a way to show someone who can.”
“And what if it’s a soldier who finds it, instead of one of the Omegas?”
“We watched the soldiers for days. Did you ever see them getting their hands dirty out there? If we hid it well enough, nobody would find it but the workers.”
“We don’t know who those workers are. What if they turn us in?” Simon shook his head. “It only takes one of them to tell the soldiers, and it’s all over. Just one of the workers has to be too scared—or someone angling for favor from the soldiers.”
“Before they took the children, I’d have agreed,” Sally said. “But not now. Cass is right. They’ve seen the children taken. They must know by now how desperate their situation is.”
“It’s still a risk,” Piper said.
I met his gaze. “Is there anything we’ve done lately that hasn’t been a risk?”
Ω
We reached the edge of the charred forest as night fell. In the plains beyond, outside the town’s walls, only a few of the vegetable fields remained to be harvested. Rows of pumpkins were topped with a thin layer of snow.
Simon had found paper and ink for us, but we’d feared that any words we tucked among the crops would bleed away in the snow. In the end, we decided to be even more direct. And so we found ourselves squatting in the dark, only a few hundred yards from the sentries on the walls, carving our message into the underside of the pumpkins.
We’d crawled on our bellies through the snow, moving so slowly that the cold began to feel like a more acute threat than the sentries. The clouds were thick, covering the waning moon. In all our days of watching New Hobart, we’d never been this close to the town. My clothes were soaked, chafing my chilled skin as I crawled. I gave up trying to repress the shaking. We edged forward, only a yard at a time. When a patrol passed the eastern section of the walls, we stopped entirely, faces pressed to the ground while the soldiers made their way around the wall’s perimeter. The sound of hoofs on the iced ground, the heavy jangling weapons, seemed very close. When they rode past the eastern gate, we could hear the calls of greeting from the watchtower.
By the time we arrived in the pumpkin field, my hands were so cold that I dropped my knife twice as I began carving.
We’d agreed on the exact wording—the priority was to make the message short and clear. Each of us had a sentence to write, as many times as we could. Piper’s: Soon they’ll take you all, like the children. Zoe’s: To a prison, worse than death. We’d decided against trying to explain the tanks—they were hard enough to describe at the best of times, let alone to inscribe on the underside of a pumpkin in the freezing dark.