Dustborn, page 10
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. They’re not another letter?”
She shakes her head. “No. Aside from the two Es, nothing on this entire map is a letter—at least not one that I know. There was a time when our ancestors spoke multiple languages. Maybe the map is written in one of those.”
“There must be someone else who can help, someone who knows these other languages.”
“No one here can read as I do, let alone read a second language. I am not allowed to teach letters, and neither was my father. He taught me when I was a child, long before we came to Bedrock and the General began overseeing our lives. Even the children in our nursery, who represent a better future, are not permitted to learn from me. If they one day wake up able to read, or to prophesize the weather, or to handle Old World tech without instruction, that will be proof that the gods have blessed a mortal again.”
“This nursery,” I say, my voice almost cracking. “Where is it?”
“You care for one of them?”
I blink rapidly, silently cursing the water that builds in my eyes. “I was brought here with her. She’s just a baby.”
“The pups receive some of the best care in Bedrock,” she says reassuringly. “They could be our future gods touched, after all. I visit them with each full moon, speak with the older ones and administer tests. If they aren’t showing signs of being gods touched, I sort them into the working staff or Loyalist army, but not until they turn seven. Yours will be fine for many years, so long as you don’t let him see your fondness for the girl. He will use it against you.”
I let out a gasp that is part relief, part agony. Seven years in this place. Seven years of a childhood that isn’t a childhood before Bay is sorted like a piece of Old World tech at market. “She’s not mine,” I manage.
“Oh,” the Oracle says, her eyes heavy with sadness. “I think she is.”
I glance away. If I look at her a moment longer, I will lose all my composure. I still don’t know how it came to this. Life at Dead River was hard, but fine. I didn’t realize how ideal it was, even with the storms and the drying lake and the backbreaking work. I didn’t know I’d miss it until it was wrenched away.
I stare at the map. Each dash and curve, every line and symbol. If the Oracle can’t read it, how in the scorched skies am I supposed to?
“I don’t know how to fix this,” I mutter. “If I don’t tell him how to read it by tomorrow, he’s going to kill my ma.”
“I will try to find something—anything—to buy you time before then, but I’m not hopeful.”
She’s honest, at least. That’s more than many can say.
I nod my thanks. “Do you think you could take a message to the nursery for me? Tell Bay I will make everything all right. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way. I promise.”
“I’ll tell her . . .”
“But?” I ask, sensing the Oracle’s hesitation.
“A promise you can’t uphold is a dangerous thing. The General, for all his faults, upholds his. If your mother is the first target in his quest to get answers from you, he will eventually turn his sights to Bay. Seven years may sound long now, but it is merely an exhale in the cosmos.”
She stands quickly, her gaze fixed on something over my shoulder. I turn to find Reed in the doorway. It hasn’t been several hours, let alone one.
“Time’s up,” he says.
I’ve taken just one step toward him when the Oracle’s hand closes over my wrist. “Tread carefully, Delta of Dead River. If there is something you’re keeping from me—if you think of anything that might help me decode this map—I urge you to speak before it is too late.”
Chapter Thirteen
That night, beneath a blanket of gods-forsaken stars, I sip a fresh cup of water and stare at the dam that surrounds Bedrock. I study the Loyalists, learning the pattern of changing guards by watching torches shift. They patrol between the massive wooden contraptions I noticed while in the General's meeting chambers—objects that I assume can help defend the settlement, though I've never seen anything like them before. I consider the dizzying descent down the Backbone and wonder if I could make it with nothing but my bare hands. There are plenty of windows, but very few with stone awnings, and even fewer balconies. I would likely fall to my death, just as Reed warned on my first night.
And even if I made it to the fields, what do I truly expect? That I can waltz into the workers’ quarters, round up my pack, and slip into the wastes unseen? Ma will probably fight me, tell me to be loyal to the cause. The guards will see me enter the shanties, and if they don’t, they’ll certainly catch us trying to cross the dam. And if by some gods-granted luck we make it out, bullets will find our backs within minutes. Sentry posts overlook the land beyond Bedrock, which is unsheltered and sprawling, with nowhere to go but south through the Barrel. Through a bottleneck. Through hell.
We’d be caught.
We’d never make it.
But still I run through scenarios. I plot and plan, because I know that tomorrow my time is up. I even comb through every childhood memory I can recall, wondering if the Oracle may be correct. Perhaps I know something that unlocks the map—a cipher or a key, as she called it. I start with the day I was branded, a suffocatingly hot summer day, and move through the days that followed. Nothing stands out. Our pack was so concerned with keeping the map hidden, so eager to please the gods with blind faith and trust, that we rarely spoke of the brands Asher and I wore. There’s nothing. Nothing outside the rule we lived by.
Show it to no one. Unless you trust them with your own life, keep it hidden. Always.
When the sun rises, I am still at the window, still staring at the dam, still at a loss for how I will possibly spare Ma from her fate.
* * *
At first light I request a visit with the Oracle. Reed escorts me, the ram-skull mask resting on his forehead. His falcon is not with him today.
“Are you a Barrel gunner or a Bedrock guard?” I ask him. “I can’t figure it out.”
“I’m a Loyalist,” he says dryly. “And the General’s fourth.”
“Fourth?”
“It means I’m just unimportant enough to get stationed in the Barrel for a moon, but important enough to get dragged back to my regular duties when you showed up. Some reward for locating a map to the Verdant.”
“Maybe you should have kept your mouth shut. Might have been better for both of us.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he grumbles. He actually sounds like he means it.
As we walk, I consider what his number might mean. That Reed is one of General’s most trusted advisers? That he is fourth in a line of succession? By blood or by chance? Reed is sweeping aside the curtain to the library before I can settle on a theory.
I step through to find the Oracle where I left her yesterday. Her pale hair is still knotted atop her head, but her clothes are different. Today she wears a faded top tucked into a skirt of many layers, some so sheer that lower sections of fabric bleed through like a sunset.
“Delta of Dead River. You’ve thought of something?”
“Show it to no one,” I recite. “Unless you trust them with your own life, keep it hidden. Always. That was the only rule of the map, the full rule. I thought maybe the exact wording might help.”
“Sit.” She nods at the chair. “Let’s break this down together.”
Reed leaves us to the task. I lose track of time as the Oracle scribbles in her dirt tray and wipes it clear and scribbles again. She mumbles and studies and asks me to repeat the rule multiple times, but throughout it all, her brow remains creased. Eventually she adds a few drops of water to her tray to keep the dirt from drying out. I watch the soil suck up the liquid, my mouth watering. I almost ask the Oracle for a drink—it seems unlikely that water she uses in this manner would be drugged—but I am afraid the question will look suspicious. I don’t want her to mention anything to Reed, so I bite my lip and try to ignore the scratching in my throat.
“Why do you help him—the General?” I ask, finally breaking the silence.
She glances at me sternly. She can’t be far into her twenties, but I feel like a child under her scrutinizing gaze. “Know this, Delta: we are all prisoners here in Bedrock. It is not lost on me that my imprisonment brings more privilege and comfort than those who work the fields. But everyone who was brought to Bedrock has been robbed of their choices. I was brought here as a child. My father stayed because he saw shelter and water and food.”
“And you?”
She glances at the curtained door and drops her voice to a whisper. “I stay because I see that the General’s resources are fading. I am provided with less water than I was years ago. The rations have grown smaller. Most may not have noticed, but I see the truth, especially in the water that flows over the Backbone. It was wider in my childhood, the falls broad and beautiful. Now its volume has lessened, and not merely because of the upper dam. His paradise is truly on borrowed time. If I cannot read this map, if the gods are not timely in their return and we do not find the Verdant soon, we will all perish. Everyone within Bedrock. And only a few men here deserve that fate. I refuse to doom everyone for the sins of a handful.”
It makes sense, finally—the General’s obsession with the map. I don’t doubt that he believes in the gods, but he is worried they won’t return in time, and the Verdant is his backup plan. I hate that I have something in common with him, that I can understand how he is torn between faith and practicality. I have always felt that same tug, self-preservation telling me to move the pack to Powder Town, gods be damned.
“Does anyone else know? Or at least suspect?”
She shakes her head. “Not outside the General and his Four. They are his closest advisers. They wear masks to mark themselves as such, and they communicate by falcon. Not with the Old Language, but with a short code they’ve developed.”
That solves one mystery about Reed. I picture the leather pouch he’d passed to his falcon that day in the Barrel, how the bird had flown ahead to Bedrock, surely carrying some type of message to the General. It makes me consider what the Oracle said the other day about forgotten languages. These short codes used by the General and his Four are a language, in a way. Could something similar mark my back? A code that my pack doesn’t know how to read, but someone, somewhere on the wastes, does?
“How can you sit on this secret about the water?” I ask the Oracle.
“Do not shame me. And keep your voice low. If I were to speak of this openly, the General would execute me for blasphemy.”
I wonder briefly why she’s being so honest with me—a complete stranger. Maybe it’s a calculated risk; she shares secrets with me in hopes that I’ll share a secret about my brand.
“If he executes you, he’d have no one to read the map,” I point out.
“I can’t seem to read it as it is.” She sighs heavily. “And the truth is, he’d rather maintain the illusion that he is all-knowing, all-powerful—and that the gods are returning because of what he’s done for this land—than admit that Bedrock is failing and the gods are as absent as ever.” She wipes her dirt clean and stares again at the map. “He needs me, but only because I’m convenient. If I betray him, if I make him look weak, he will dispose of me swiftly, just as he did my father. Besides, his Loyalist army is substantial. He’d send them into the wastes in search of another Oracle. The skill to read is rare, but they’d find someone. Just as he found you.”
Or Asher. Taken at nine, his world shattered.
“Your father helped a map-bearer like me once. Didn’t he?”
Something pained graces the Oracle’s features. Regret, perhaps. “I didn’t understand at the time. He helped that boy escape when he never once tried to save me from this prison. My father couldn’t read the map, and he believed all his work to be in vain. He set that fire as a diversion while the boy fled.” She glances at me briefly, hurt in her eyes. “But I can’t help you, Delta, not the way he did for that boy. The map is too important now. I must protect it in order to protect Bedrock’s people. At least I must try.”
The curtain parts, and Reed enters. His mouth is thin, his expression unreadable. “The General would like to see you.”
Dread coils in my stomach. He wants an answer I still don’t have.
“Be strong, Delta of Dead River,” the Oracle says. “Even knowing what comes next will not lessen the pain.”
* * *
Reed brings me to the nursery, where light shines through the room’s three windows.
Babies sleep in cradles, toddlers play with wooden blocks on the floor, and young children scurry between them, chasing and laughing and being children. The space feels separate from the rest of Bedrock, a room filled with hope and innocence and purity. Several caregivers drift around, handing out snacks of cornbread and honey. Another stoops over a cradle to comfort a crying babe.
Bay must be here. My heart beats faster just knowing it. I can speak to her in person, not rely on the Oracle to deliver a message.
Even still, I don’t look for her among the children. I can’t seem to look anywhere but at the General once I spot him. He stands before the room’s central window, his posture rigid and his eyes unfeeling. Two men flank him. Like Reed, they both wear ram-skull masks. Advisers. Two more of his Four.
“Delta of Dead River,” the General says, motioning for me to join him. Reed has to nudge between my shoulder blades to get my feet moving. Once I’m at the window, the General’s two guards step back, giving us space. “It’s beautiful, yes? The only room with a better view is my own, a floor above us.”
The General’s falcon screeches outside the window. Shadows move on the sill when she flaps her wings, but I can’t bring myself to look anywhere but at him, afraid of what I might find outside.
“Go on. Look.” He pinches my chin and angles my head. I can see all of Bedrock, but my eyes find her immediately, as if they don’t know where else to settle. She’s been forced to her knees atop the dam, arms bound behind her back. Several Loyalists surround her, but only one holds a blade to my mother’s throat. It glints in the afternoon sun.
I hadn’t understood what the Oracle meant about knowing not lessening the pain. I do now.
“You said I had three days,” I gasp. “It hasn’t been three days.”
“You were brought to Bedrock in the morning. By noon the brand had been copied, and three evenings have passed since then. I was very clear with my words. Three days. Not three and a half. Now tell me what I want to hear.”
“But a day doesn’t end until sunset. This is still the third day.”
“And will another few hours make a difference?”
“Maybe. I told the Oracle everything I know. She could discover something.”
He bats a hand. “She is as useless as her father. If she could read it, she would have done so on the day you arrived. Now, tell me the brand’s secret or your mother’s blood will paint the side of the dam.”
The guards must have told her where to look, because her face is turned toward the window, as though she expected to find me standing in its frame. Her hair hangs limp around her face. I imagine her expression as pleading, though she’s too far away to be certain.
“I don’t know how to read it. If you give me more time, I can figure it out.”
“You are out of time.” The General pulls a square of red cloth from his vest pocket and raises it above his head. I’m trying to think of a lie—something, anything that might spare her—when he brings the cloth down and the Loyalist on the dam draws his blade across my mother’s neck.
She goes slack, crumples to the ground. I make a noise I don’t recognize, something guttural and wild. The guard grabs her at the shoulders while a second Loyalist gathers her feet. With a single heave and swing, they throw her from the dam, and she disappears as a ripple of cloth and hair.
I stare, heart in my throat. He said it would come to this. Promised it. And still I’d thought there’d be another way, a reasonable compromise. Surely if I didn’t waver, the General would trust that I was being honest, that I had no clue how to read the map. But she’s gone.
I turn on him. His guards have me by the wrists before I can strike. I could tear that glinting star chain from his neck. I could gouge the star pendants into his eyes. “I needed more time!” I scream. “I could have solved it with more time.”
“It’s quite possible,” the General says calmly.
“Then why did you kill her?”
“So you understand how serious I am.” A glance at his guards. “Bring her to the baby.”
Not Bay. Not Bay, you monster. I’m dragged from the window, shoved toward one of the cradles.
She’s swaddled in a pale cloth, sleeping soundly. It doesn’t seem possible that she could have changed in just three days, but her cheeks seem fuller, her eyelids a bit less translucent.
“This child represents the future of your pack,” he says.
It is not a question, but I nod, fear gripping me. I don’t know how to unlock the map. I can’t give him what he wants, and he’s going to kill Bay for it. I’ll have to lie. There has to be something I can say, something I can do . . .
“You want more time?”
“Yes, please,” I gasp. I’m on my knees beside the cradle now, begging with a devil. “Please, I just need more time.”
“Then you will have more—three days for each of your pack-members. At noon every third day we will convene in this nursery. You will look across the dam at the oldest surviving member of your pack, and if I do not hear what I want, they will fly like your mother. I’ll work my way down to this child”—he nods at the cradle—“and if, by the time her blood is spilled, you still haven’t come clean, perhaps I will believe that you’ve been honest. That you do not know how to read it.”
