that they’ll follow her. They’d never believe that she’d go into a battle that she didn’t know we were going to win.”
“I have to be there,” I said. “Right at the front, where they can see me.”
So it was decided. I’m glad, I told myself, and it was true. But my lungs strained at each breath, a pair of creaking bellows, and sweat itched where my woolen sweater touched the back of my neck. It wasn’t just the fear of battle, though there was plenty of that. It was the knowledge, hard and certain in my stomach, that my presence at the battle was to be a lure. A false assurance to our troops that victory was possible.
Ω
At sunset on the night of the battle, Sally and Xander sat alone amid what was left of the dismantled camp. We were leaving them there, along with the handful of troops who were unable to fight.
“Where will you go, if we don’t free the town?” I said.
“Will it make any difference where we go?” she said. “I’ll do my best to keep Xander safe. Maybe we’ll make it as far as the Sunken Shore. But you and I both know there’s not much chance for any of us if we don’t win. You heard what Piper said to me, when we were in my house: the soldiers will come for me there, eventually.”
I knelt next to Xander, but he wouldn’t look at me. He sat with his knees drawn up before him. One of his hands tapped out a silent message on his shoe.
“We’re going to try to find the papers,” I said to him. “The papers that you told us about, from the maze of bones.”
He nodded, and then the nod spread to his whole body, until he was rocking backward and forward. “Find the papers. Find the papers,” he said. There was no way of knowing whether it was an order, or an echo. When I walked away he was still rocking.
In the last few weeks, time had seemed to run away from us. Not enough time to gather troops, or to drill them; not enough time to warn the people of New Hobart; and always the fear that we might be too late, and that the tanks would consume them before we could free them. That the Ark papers would be found before we could enter the town. Now, as we waited in the darkness, time was a landslide on a scree slope, gathering speed, and taking us all with it.
I knew I would fight and not turn back. But as I stood next to Piper and Zoe, the troops gathered behind us, my body was undergoing its own quiet revolt. A shaking had begun in my damp feet, and now spread through me, my whole body resonating like a struck bell.
The armorers had given me a short sword and a wooden shield. I clutched the sword now in my sweaty hand. I would have been more comfortable with my knife, its leather-wrapped handle that had molded to my own grip, but Piper had insisted. “By the time anyone gets close enough for you to use that, you’ll be dead,” he said. “You need range and heft.”
“I don’t know how to fight with this,” I said.
“It’s not as if you’re an expert with the knife,” Zoe said. “Anyway, you’re not going to be trying to fight. All you need to do is be seen, and not get killed. Keep your shield above you in the charge—that’s when they’ll use their archers. And stay close.”
I kept my old knife with me as well. In the hours of walking from the camp to the edge of the forest, the silent troops massed behind us, I’d been comforted to feel its familiar weight at my belt.
Zoe and Piper had been given swords, too. I picked up Zoe’s to test its weight—it was so heavy that I needed both hands to hold it.
“This isn’t a game,” she said, snatching it back from me and turning away.
She stood at my left, now, her eyes fixed on the blade as she passed the sword from hand to hand. Piper was at my right. He, too, carried a long sword, but he also wore his usual row of throwing knives in the back of his belt. Behind us, the soldiers were gathered—more than five hundred, at the final tally. Leaving the camp had, alone, taken hours; the swampland didn’t permit an orderly march, and instead the