CHAPTER 43
MEADOW
The fire blazes hot and high. The crowd chants.
I wish now, more than ever, that my father were here.
Find a way out. Find a weakness in your enemy, and crush them.
My mother’s voice takes his place. You can’t win, Meadow. You will never survive out there.
Peri’s screams drown them both out.
I bite my tongue hard enough to taste blood, to force myself back to reality. I have to think. I have to find a way to escape.
They took my dagger. There is nothing sharp to cut my bindings with, and even if there were, Sketch and Zephyr and I are in the middle of the crowd. They watch us all with hunger in their eyes, stomachs growling.
It makes me want to retch.
To take a human life is one thing. But to devour one, crave the taste of one . . . It is far more evil than anything I ever experienced in the Shallows.
And suddenly I miss it. I miss knowing that the darkness was my greatest enemy, that the ocean would keep me safe, that I knew every street and alley so well I could run with my eyes closed and make it back home.
The man who captured us, the one with the trident, approaches. “We’re ready for the blonde one,” he hisses.
His eyes fall on me.
He stoops down, runs the blades of his trident across my neck. It touches the Regulator, makes a screeching noise. “Medin wants the black box first.”
I spit up at him, and he cackles. The crowd joins in as the man lifts me by my bound wrists, then starts to drag me across the sand.
“I’m sorry!” I say to Zephyr and Sketch, but I can’t see them anymore. I can only hear commotion from behind me.
Zephyr’s voice, screaming, “Take me! Take me instead of her!”
The man dragging me stops for a second.
“Quit it, Zephyr!” I yell back. He needs to shut his mouth. He needs to stay alive, and let me die, because he is too good for death.
“Yes, let them take him, Meadow!” Sketch yells, as they drag me farther away. “Take the boy! He tastes way better!”
“Sketch!” I glare at her. “What the hell?”
The three of us start arguing, yelling at each other, and the crowd is rising with their cackles and chants.
But it all goes silent when an arrow comes from the sky.
And lands itself right in the middle of my captor’s forehead. He drops me. I watch from the ground as he staggers for a second. It almost looks fake, as if there were a target right in the center of his head. He gasps, and deep-red blood trickles from the wound, down his cheek, then splatters onto the sand.
He falls.
The crowd’s chanting turns to screams, as more arrows come, one after the other, taking out every man, woman, and child. The people who aren’t hit scatter, sprinting across the beach, chasing the train tracks into the distance.
By the time the sand is stained red from blood, Zephyr and Sketch and I are alone.
And then, from the trees, comes a monster.
CHAPTER 44
ZEPHYR
I don’t know what the thing is.
It looks like a walking mass of plants.
“What the hell is that?” Sketch growls. She rolls across the sand, trying to get closer to Meadow and me.
“Just shut up for a second, Sketch!” Meadow hisses.
She’s able to sit, hands still bound behind her back.
The creature comes closer, walking on two thick legs. It steps into the sunlight, and I almost laugh. Because it’s not a creature at all. It’s a person covered in palm fronds, overgrowth, ripped branches.
They could have been there the entire time, hiding in the tree line, and no one ever would’ve noticed.
Stars, it’s amazing.
It’s also totally creepy.
Meadow scoots backward and puts her wrists against the dead man’s trident. She’s able to cut her bindings, grab her dagger lying forgotten on the sand. She sprints right for the person.
They’re holding a bow, and when they whirl it around and nock an arrow into place, Meadow dives. The arrow barely misses her. She flings the dagger. The person reaches up.
And catches it. By the blade. Blood drips from their skin. They drop the dagger to the sand.
“That was a warning shot!” It’s a man’s voice. Deep, rumbling. Probably someone old. “And now Martha’s gonna rip me a new one for this hand.”
Meadow freezes, kneeling in the sand. “Who are you?”
The man reaches up, takes off a mask of palm fronds. We see his face.
He’s old. Wrinkled, tan, his face covered in sunspots. And he’s smiling.
“You’re from the Shallows,” he says, still standing over Meadow. He’s the first person to actually know the name. He nods at her barcode tattoo. “You have Catalogue Numbers. All three of you. Only reason I’d stick my neck out to save a bunch of idiots that fell into the Eaters’ hands.”
“You know about the Shallows?” Meadow tightens her fists like she’s about to snap.
“What’s it to you if I do?”
Meadow stands up, brushes sand from her thighs. “What do you want?”
“For you to trust me.” The man laughs when Meadow snarls and backs away a step. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be long dead.”
He shoulders past her, toward Sketch and me. When he gets close, he pulls out a hand-carved knife.
“Touch us and die, old man!” Sketch screams. She tries to stand up, but she wobbles, then falls to the sand again.
The man sighs and leans down to Sketch’s level. She spits in his face, and that only makes him laugh. “Oh, Martha’s gonna love you,” he says. He flips his knife around and points it at her.
He cuts her bindings loose.
He moves to me and cuts mine off, too.
“Strange group, you three,” he says, over his shoulder to us. He puts his face mask back on, then heads up the beach, toward the trees, passing Meadow as he goes. “You’re lucky the Initiative ain’t come by yet today. You’d already be right back to where you came from.”
“You know about the Initiative?” Meadow asks.
The man shrugs. “’Course I do. They got outposts, too. Closest one’s ’bout a hundred miles down the tracks.” He sighs. “They’ll find you, if you ain’t got a place to hide. You may as well come with me. Eat some real food. Get some rest. The three of you look like hell.”
He stoops down and picks up Meadow’s dagger. That’s when I see behind his ear, a small tattoo.
It’s an eagle, with outspread wings. The same kind of bird on a coin that Talan once found.
“An eagle,” I whisper. “What does that mark mean?”
The man smiles. The first real smile he’s given us. “You can decide that for yourself, once we get to where we’re goin.”
He flips Meadow’s dagger around, handle out. “Name’s Ray,” he says. “You?”
Meadow doesn’t answer. Instead she takes the dagger, her eyes on him the entire time.
“Suit yourself. There’s more Eaters out here, too. This is their territory, and I ain’t gonna save you twice. And keep up. It’s a long way home.”
He disappears into the trees.
It might be a death wish. But we follow.