“Where are the crews?” Simon said. “Hobb and the others?”
“Tanked,” said the General. She tossed the syllable down, as casual and dismissive as a cough. “But not before we got information out of them,” she added. “We know what they were looking for.”
Zach came forward, stepping carelessly over the fallen figureheads, to stand right in front of me. “You made the mistake of thinking we wouldn’t find you on the island. You’ve seen what we did to the children. See this, now, and remember. There is nowhere, not in the farthest oceans, where we won’t track you down. There is no place on this earth where you will be free of us.”
The General looked down at him and gave him a slight nod. He walked back to where the soldiers waited and swung himself into the saddle.
“Did you think I was going to come here, cowed,” the General said, “just because you’ve managed to claw back this hole of a town? Did you think I was going to apologize, and we were going to have a nice chat about how we’re going to do things your way from now on?”
She turned her horse. “You can’t stop us. You can’t even begin to know what we can do.” She began to ride away.
I started my own horse forward. Piper grabbed at my reins, jerking my mount backward. As my horse skittered on the spot, I called after Zach. The General and the soldiers turned, too, but I looked only at Zach.
“What you just said: There’s no place on this earth where you will be free of us. The same goes for you,” I said. “All of this—the violence, the scheming. It’s all because you and your kind are so afraid to acknowledge that we’re the same as you. More than that: we’re part of you.”
The General raised an eyebrow. “You’re a side effect of us. Nothing more.”
She rode off. Zach stared at me for a moment, then wheeled his horse around and followed the General down the road. The trunk was left open and empty on the ground, the figureheads abandoned where they lay as the snow began to fall once more.
Ω
Once we had handed our horses over to the soldiers at the gate, I went straight to Elsa’s.
“We should’ve gone back with the others,” Zoe said as she followed me up the street toward the holding house. “We need to talk about what the Council’s next move will be—and where we go from here. And it’s not safe for you to wander around alone.”
“Go back if you want,” I said. “But there’s nothing to say. Zach and the General want us frightened and bickering. They want to scare us off searching for Elsewhere, and for the Ark papers. They want to make us doubt ourselves. I won’t do it.”
We turned the corner into Elsa’s street. There were footprints in the snow, but we saw nobody. A shutter slammed closed as we passed a narrow house on the left.
The holding house, the largest building on the street, was still standing, but the front door was gone, and the shutters smashed. Zoe waited by the door, keeping watch as I stepped inside.
I walked down the corridor, calling Elsa’s name. I found her in the kitchen, on her hands and knees, sorting fragments of crockery.
“They smashed the place up, when we tried to stop them taking the kids,” Elsa said. “I haven’t had a chance to clean up yet, what with everything that’s happened.”
Beyond her I could see the courtyard, a boneyard of broken wood: slats of shutters, and crippled chairs and tables. On one side, furniture had been thrown into a pile and set alight, leaving a mound of blackened wood spars, topped with snow. A fire had etched blackness up one wall and across half the ceiling.
“You’ve done enough today,” I said to Elsa. “Leave this.” I waved my hand at the wreckage of the kitchen. “You need to rest.”
“Better to be busy,” she said, not looking at me.
I thought of what she’d said to me a few hours ago, about lies: there’s no time for it anymore. I didn’t waste time with preliminaries.
“Your husband—you never told me how he died.”
She stood, slowly, her hands pressing the small of her back like a pregnant woman.
“It was too dangerous to talk about,” she said. “I had the children to think of.”
Still avoiding my eyes, she began sweeping the smashed crockery into a pile. The pottery pieces scratched loudly