with ice.
“You can’t change what happened to your wife and your children,” I said. “But you can change what happens now. Whether you sit back and let the tanks come, and let Zach and the General find what they’re looking for in New Hobart. Or whether you make a change.”
He stood outside the tent, watching as I began to walk up the gully, ignoring the soldiers who turned to watch me go.
“I can’t help you,” he called after me.
“Midnight, on the new moon,” I said again. It felt just as futile and absurd as our carving of the messages on the pumpkins. If the Ringmaster warned the Council, our attack was doomed before it began. But it was all I could do, and so I did it. I’d seen the blood and the tanks that were New Hobart’s future. I gave the Ringmaster those five words, because they were all that I had to offer. And because if I wanted the Alphas to recognize our humanity, I had to take a gamble that somewhere within the Ringmaster was some humanity, too.
At the head of the gully, a sentry led my horse to me. He wouldn’t give me my knife until I was mounted, and then he handed it to me carefully, holding it by the blade, so that our hands didn’t touch.
By the time I led the horse along the tangle of paths through the swamp, it was nearly dawn. I was exhausted, and the horse was quivering with cold as we waded through the iced water to avoid Simon’s sentries in the outer marshes. When I reached the final path to the camp, the water deep on each side, Sally was waiting.
“Will he help us?” she said.
I shook my head. “We had to try,” I said as I handed her the reins.
She said nothing, but as I slunk back into the tent where the others slept, oblivious, I was glad that Sally knew what I had done. If I’d just betrayed the resistance, at least Sally and I were bound together in this. My betrayal was her betrayal, my hope her hope.
chapter 18
For those final three days, my mind was with the Ringmaster. While weapons were sharpened and distributed in the snowbound camp, I was picturing him, in his comfortable tent, and wondering whether he would betray our plans to the Council. While Simon and Piper drilled the troops, and Sally went over the plan of attack with them, I waited and waited for some sign from the Ringmaster. If he’d moved quickly enough, there might be time for him to bring soldiers to us before we marched on the town. I watched the horizon to the north and the west. Sally kept her distance from me, but on the last day she caught me alone, staring beyond the ring of reeds that encircled the camp.
“No messengers? Nothing?” she said.
“Nothing.” I could feel no hint of reinforcements, or of the Ringmaster’s presence. Nothing was visible on the horizon but the charred bones of what had been the forest. Tomorrow we would attack, and we would be doing it alone.
I had seen the blast scorch the world, a thousand times or more, but the battle scenes in my recent visions were so intimate that they affected me differently. I saw a sword hilt breaking a jawbone. An arrow striking a chest with such force that the tip emerged at the back. A death was a personal thing—it felt indecent to have seen what I had. In the camp, as I watched our troops adjusting their bows, and fixing their improvised shields, I had trouble meeting their eyes. I wanted to allow them the privacy of their own blood.
Piper and Simon kept them busy. They ran drills at night now, as well as in the day, to prepare for the midnight attack. The troops responded efficiently to Piper’s and Simon’s shouted orders, and when I watched them practice they were grim but focused. But we couldn’t keep them occupied every moment, and among the rows of leaking tents, unease was growing. I overheard complaints about the rations, and the allocation of weapons. Fear had infested the camp like lice. I’d heard what they were muttering, as they clustered around the fires with their hands tucked into their armpits for warmth, and their shoulders hunched against the wind. A fool’s errand. The same words that the Ringmaster had used.
“We can’t win like this,” said Simon, the night before the attack, when we