“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.”