I uncurled my fingers and looked down at the red disk with a black lotus in the center—the symbol of the Sisterhood.
“For luck,” she whispered with a flash of a dimple.
I watched her walk away with a sense of dread and shock. How had all this happened so fast?
"Well?" Icarus said. He held his good hand toward the door. "You coming in?"
I looked at the red door and remembered the last words my mother said to me as the Troika army closed in. Never stop fighting, Carmina. Red means life.
She'd whispered them to me two seconds before the bullet slammed into her chest.
Her eyes had gone wide. "RUN!"
At the time, she'd been warning me to find one of the Sister of Crimson's convents before the Troika found me. But it had been too late for both of us back then. My mother died on her way to the Fortress for questioning, and I'd been captured before I'd stumbled tear-blinded and terrified from the burnt out shell of a building in Old New York.
In the seventeen years since that bloody night, my mother's face, her scent had blurred and disappeared from my memory. But not her voice.
I'd been raised by my mother's enemies. Trained to serve vampires. To be the model human. To spread the Troika's gospel of blood and glory. To be their whore.
Icarus raised his eyebrow in challenge when I hesitated on the threshold. I blew out a breath, placed the Chatelaine’s good luck totem around my neck, and put one foot in front of the other. Dare closed the red door behind me. My heart hammered in time with the bolts slamming home.
Red means life.
Four.
Dawn. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a sunrise. After years living among the vampires, I'd forgotten the sting to the corneas, the warmth on my face, the way sunlight made the world explode in a riot of color.
Streaks of pink and yellow slashed across the horizon. But closer to our small band, the colors were deep purples and blues. Branches arched like charred bones overhead. Occasionally a puff of white steam emerged from one of our yawning mouths.
I huddled into the threadbare cloak I'd been issued. The shoes the Chatelaine had given me the night before weren't so comfortable when tested by the rocks and crags of what remained of the old highway. Back in the day, the highway had been the main artery into the city, but now it was nothing more than rubble overgrown with thick vines and the carcasses of dead trees.
This was our second day on the road. I'd spent the first day trying to keep my head down and listen to the hushed conversations of my companions. No one spoke to me, but they accepted my presence--almost like I was a dog they tolerated instead of a person.
That suited me just fine. Gave me time to think about what had happened and plan for what was coming. According to the stories Dare told Rabbit to keep him entertained, Saga was a legend among the rebels. In the before times, back when humans ran things, there had been these buildings called "libraries," which were filled with books people could borrow for free. Apparently Saga used to be in charge of one of these libraries.
Now he led an army of starving children.
"Yo, Six," Rabbit called.
I looked behind me to see him jogging to catch up with me. My steps slowed to accommodate him.
When he reached me, his breath puffed out in small clouds of white. A voice cleared nearby and I looked up to see Dare glaring at the boy for speaking to me. I ignored her and smiled at the kid.
"Is it true you're AB neg?"
I tripped over my feet as much from the shock as the thick vine that seemed to come out of nowhere. "Who told you that?"
Rabbit jerked his head toward Dare, who was suddenly very interested in her shoes.
"So what if I am?" I said, evading.
His dirty face morphed into mask of disbelief. "You're kidding, right? There's people give their right arm to be in that blood group."
And many had given their arms. Their heads and lives, too. The caste system set up by the Troika based on blood types had given humans an excuse to turn on each other in all sorts of horrible ways.
"No, Rabbit," I lied. "I'm not AB neg. The Troika made that up as part of their propaganda campaign." I wasn't lying out of some urge to be humble. I lied to save my life. Dare wasn’t a Troika vamp, but I didn't trust anyone who craved blood with the knowledge that the rarest of all blood types flowed through my veins.
His face fell. "Well what are ya?"
I briefly considered saying something else, like O positive. No vampire would even think about helping themselves to my blood, then. But it also would have sent up warning bells. O positive people were the lowest of the low in the blood caste system. No doubt it would have marked me as untouchable, but it also would have raised questions since the Troika would never keep such a low-ranking human in such a public role.
"B positive," I said instead. Middle of the road. Neither coveted, nor disdained.
The kid screwed up his lips. "That's boring."
"Sorry." I shrugged. "So, is Icarus your dad or something?"
He shot me a look that said he doubted my intelligence.
I frowned at him. "Where's your family, then?"
"Mom and dad were rebels but died of the thirst when I was tiny. Dare found me and took me in." He turned and motioned at the prickly vampire who stalked down the road like she was looking for a fight.
"How did you two end up with him?" Icarus wasn’t around or I wouldn’t have asked. He'd spent most of the last day walking ahead to make sure the path was clear, which was fine with me.
Rabbit looked around, like he was afraid of being overheard, too. "We found him a couple years ago. Just after he escaped a labor camp,"
My brows shot up. Most humans who weren't kept as pets by the Troika were divided into labor camps and blood camps, depending on their blood types.
As far as I knew, no one escaped the camps. Ever. Of course, I got all my information from the Troika, who wouldn't be too eager to share that humans were slipping past their security on a regular basis. Still, I assumed that if Rabbit was telling the truth, Icarus had managed a feat few other humans had managed.
The boy leaned in to share secrets. "That's why he's the way he is." The boy waved a small hand over his arm to indicate Icarus's wounds. "He fell from the wall and broke his arm in five places."
"How did he get the burns?" I asked, unable to resist my curiosity.
"Oh, that was different--"
"Enough talking," Dare snapped. "We need to keep an eye out for rovers."
Rabbit shot me an apologetic look and broke away to continue his patrol of the brush around the road. As the smallest of the group, it was easiest for him to roam in the high grasses.
I glanced at Dare as the kid disappeared. She glared at me like I’d committed some huge sin of impropriety.
"Until Saga clears you, keep to yourself. I won't have you poisoning the kid with your lies."
I clenched my teeth together to keep from taking her bait. Part of me wondered if she wanted me to lose my temper and fight her. What was the point? We both knew she'd win. While I'd had some training and could hold my own, I couldn't begin to compete with the battle-honed reflexes of a vampire who'd spent most of her life scraping an existence out of the shit mountain the world had become.
"Maybe you should be telling that to the kid, then."
"You're smart, huh? We'll see what Saga says about that."
After that, we fell into silence and I focused on putting one foot in front of the other. My brain wanted to worry about what this mysterious scribe had in store for me, but I refused to indulge it. I was living on borrowed time as it was, no sense wasting precious minutes guessing at outcomes I couldn't predict. Besides, even if this mysterious scribe didn't buy my story, I still had a few trump cards up my sleeve.
Trouble arrived two hours later.
Icarus had returned from one of his scouting trips and was softly talking to Dare somewhere behind me when the vibration hit us. A low hum from the horizon, lost at first under the crunch of our feet on the gravel and the howls of the cold winds. Rabbit recognized the danger first. His small body stiffened and his head lifted to the sky, like an animal's scenting the air.
"Bats," he whispered.
That little word was like a match igniting under a bundle of dried kindling. One second everyone froze, the next we scattered like roaches. I wasn't so used to disappearing at a moment's notice, so it took me a few additional, very precious seconds to catch on to the fact they were all suddenly climbing trees. Icarus grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me toward the nearest trunk.
"Climb. Quickly!"
Something in his voice told me not to argue. The tree he pushed me toward had a trunk covered with thorns and tiny, sharp twigs. Scrapes and cuts welled along my inner arms and face, but I ignored them in my urgency to scramble up into the canopy. Icarus's pants and soft curses reached me as he climbed beneath me. Finally, I reached a large branch well-camouflaged by leaves. Icarus took a large branch a level below mine. "Hang on and try not to move."
Not a problem, I thought, looking down. From that height, a fall would result in multiple broken bones or possibly death. And that would be before the bats got a hold of your flesh.
The black cloud broke the horizon and the sun flashed off thousands of leathery black wings. Closer now, the hum turned into a high-pitched whirr. The vibrations shook me so hard my teeth rattled. I placed my hands over my ears to help muffle the sounds, but it didn't help much.
Bats were essentially robotic drones that patrolled the Bad Lands. If they detected any movement or noises indicating life, they would corner the potential prey and report back to the closest Troika substation, which would send out vampires after dark to investigate any anomalies.
All we had to do was stay still and quiet and the swarm would fly right past us. At least that was the ideal scenario.
But just before the black mass reached us, a loud crack sounded nearby. I lifted my head up and searched for the source. Time slowed. Not fifteen seconds later, a louder second crack exploded. A split second later, a child's shout. One second Rabbit had been clinging to his own branch in a tree several yards from the one Icarus and I perched on. The next, gravity pulled the kid toward the earth. He crashed through three smaller branches on his way down before finally grabbing onto one about ten feet from the ground.