“Damned Antonia,” I say.
Cassius laughs and shakes his golden head as we bound east along the highlands in search of more hidden caches of supplies. My long legs can easily cover a kilometer in under a minute.
“Oh, you come to expect these things from her. If our families hadn’t spent holidays together when we were little things, I might have called her out as a demokrat on the first day. But she’s hardly that. More like Caesar or … what did they call them, Presidents?—a tyrant in necessity’s clothing.”
“She’s a turd in the swillbowl,” I say.
“What the gory slag does that mean?” Cassius laughs.
Uncle Narol could have told him.
“Sorry? Oh. Heard it in Yorkton once from a highRed. Means she’s a fly in the wine.”
“A highRed?” Cassius snorts. “One of my nannies was a highRed. I know. Odd. Should have been a Brown. But the woman would tell me stories as I tried to go to sleep.”
“That’s nice,” I say.
“I thought her an uppity bugger. Tried to tell Mother to make her shut up and leave me alone, because all she wanted to do was talk about vales and dreary romances that always end in some sort of sadness. Depressing creature.”
“What did your mother do when you complained?”
“Mother? Ha! She clapped me on the head and said there’s always something to learn from anybody. Even a highRed. Her and Father like to pretend they’re progressives. Confuses me.” He shakes his head. “But Yorkton. Julian couldn’t believe you were from Yorkton.”
The darkness returns in me. Even thinking of Eo doesn’t dispel it. Even thinking of my noble mission and all the license it gives me doesn’t banish the guilt. I’m the only one who shouldn’t feel guilty for the Passage, yet besides Roque, I think I am the only one who does. I look at my hands and remember Julian’s blood.
Cassius points up suddenly to the sky southwest of us. “What the gory hell?”
Dozens of blinking medBots pour from floating Olympus’s castle. We hear their distant whine. Proctors flicker after them like flaming arrows toward the distant southern mountains. Whatever has happened, one thing is certain: chaos reigns in the South.
Although my tribe continues to sleep in the castle, we’ve moved from the high tower to the gatehouse so we don’t have to rub shoulders with Titus’s lot. To keep safe, we leave our cooking as a secret.
We meet our tribe for supper by a loch in the northern highlands. They are not all highDrafts. We have some—Cassius and Roque. But then no one above seventeenth pick. We’ve some midDrafts—Quinn and Lea—but the rest are the dregs, the lowDrafts—Clown, Screwface, Weed, Pebble, and Thistle. This bothers Cassius even though the dregs of the Institute are still certifiably superhuman compared with the rest of the Colors. They are athletic. They are resilient. They never ask you to repeat yourself unless they are making a point. And they accept my orders, even anticipating what next I’ll ask them to do. I credit their less privileged upbringings.
Most are smarter than me. But I have that unique thing they call slangsmarts, proven by my high score in the extrapolational intelligence test. Not that it matters, I have sulfur matches and that makes me the god Prometheus. Neither Antonia nor Titus have fire as far as I know. So I’m the only one who can fill bellies. I make each of my tribe kill goats or sheep. No one is allowed to freeload, even though Screwface tries his best. They don’t notice my hands trembling when I cut my first goat’s throat with a knife. There’s so much trust in the beast’s eyes, followed by confusion as it dies, still thinking me its friend. The blood is warm, like Julian’s. The neck muscle tough. I have to saw with the dull knife, just as Lea does when she kills her first sheep, squealing as she does it. I make her skin it too with Thistle’s help. And when she cannot, I take her hands into my own and guide her along, giving her my strength.
“Daddy gonna have to cut up your meat for you too?” Thistle taunts.
“Shut it,” Roque says.
“She can fight her own battles, Roque. Lea, Thistle asked you a question.” Lea blinks over at me, wide eyes confused. “Ask her another, Thistle.”
“What’s gonna happen when we get in a tight spot with Titus, will you squeal then too? Child.” Thistle knows what I want her to do. I asked her to do it thirty minutes ago, before I brought the goat to Lea.
I motion my head at Lea to Thistle.
“You going to cry?” Thistle asks. “Wipe your eyes in—”
Lea screams and jumps at her. The two roll around punching each other in the face. It’s not long before Thistle’s got Lea in a chokehold. Roque stirs beside me. Quinn pulls him back down. Lea’s face goes purple. Her hands slap at Thistle’s. Then she passes out. I give Thistle a nod of thanks. The darkfaced girl gives a slow nod.
But Lea’s shoulders are squarer the next morning. She even musters enough courage to hold Roque’s hand. She also claimed to be a good cook; she isn’t. Roque tries his hand but he’s hardly any better. Eating their grub is like taking down stringy, dry sponges. Even Quinn, with all her stories, can’t muster up a recipe.
We cook goat and deer meat over our camp kitchen six kilometers from the castle, and we do it at night in the gulches so the light and smoke cannot be seen. We do not kill the sheep; instead we collect and deposit them in a northern fort for safekeeping. I could bring more over to my tribe with the food, but the food is as big a danger as it is a boon. What Titus and his killers would do if he found that we had fire, food, clean water …
I am returning to the castle with Roque from a scouting trip to the south when we hear noises coming from a small grove of trees. Creeping closer, we hear grunts and hacking sounds. Expecting to see a wolfpack ravaging a goat, we peer through the brush and find four of Titus’s soldiers squatting around a corpse. Their faces are bloody, eyes dark and ravenous as they tear strips out of the dead deer with their knives. Five days without fire, five days of bad berries, and they have already turned into savages.
“We have to give them matches,” Roque tells me afterwards.
“No. If we give them matches, then Titus will have even more power.”
“Does it matter at this point? They are going to get sick if they keep eating raw meat. They already are sick!”
“So they shit their pants,” I grunt. “There are worse things.”