I stand there, stunned. I hate slings. They take years of practice to master, plus an ungodly amount of patience, and even after carrying one for most of my childhood, I brought down only a few quail with the weapon. Swinging a sling alerts your target of your presence, and aiming accurately is virtually impossible. If you don’t hit your mark on the first try, you’ve lost your advantage, usually your prey, too. When we were kids, Asher was even worse with a sling than I was, and now he’s struck down this Loyalist as easily as blinking.
I’m still staring as he rushes forward and checks the man. “Knocked out,” he whispers, then hooks an arm beneath the blanket hanging against the rock face and draws it aside. A gaping dark hole waits behind the material. I shuffle nearer, and a breeze touches my cheeks.
“There are iron mines to the northwest,” Asher explains. “The tunnels were dug for easy transport.”
I glance down at the Loyalist. His brow is bleeding, his chest rises and falls shallowly. I peer back into the tunnel. “Shouldn’t it be guarded by more men?”
“Everyone’s been pulled off to sweep the Barrel.”
I hesitate. The tunnel is wide, but I wonder what will happen when we get deeper. Will we be hunched to half height? How will we see? How long will we be stuck in the darkness, and what will we eat once we are? It’s not like I had the opportunity to pack supplies before I ran.
“I know someone who can help you,” Asher insists. “Someone who can help them.” His eyes flit in the direction of Bedrock.
I picture Bay in that tiny cradle. Brooke, Wren, Pewter. Alder. Vee. All of them. I picture the dam and the knife that was drawn across my mother’s neck.
“Who?” I ask.
“She’s called Kara the Prime. She runs Powder Town.”
“The last free place in the wastes?”
He nods. “I know the way there. I can get you to her safely.”
Just paces away, Loyalists are shouting. It’s only a matter of time before their search brings them toward these tunnels.
I nod at the entrance. “Lead.”
Chapter Eighteen
We gag the guard, tie his hands behind his back, then lug him into the tunnel—far enough from the entrance that a Loyalist peering behind the blanket won’t see him, but not so far that we break a sweat.
It’s cool inside the mesa, and dark.
Asher swipes a flint and candle from the unconscious guard and gets a flame going. I follow his flickering form deeper into the tunnel.
“If we move fast, we’ll be out the other side by nightfall. We have to be out by nightfall.”
The tunnel will be searched eventually, and if Loyalists flood it while we’re still in here, there will be no escaping. Suddenly, this feels like the true barrel, not the town we’re leaving behind.
“You’ve been through this way before?”
He nods. “When I escaped Bedrock. The Oracle told me about it.”
“He’s dead now.”
Asher’s head ticks to the side. “I worried that might be the case. Don’t know why he helped me.”
“His daughter mentioned that he was executed for it.”
“Isla,” he says at a whisper.
He knew her before she was the Oracle, when she was her own person, with a name and dreams and wishes. Now she’s just another of the General’s tools.
It’s not such a mystery anymore why her father helped Asher. Freedom exists only if we can make our own choices.
“How’d you escape?” I ask. “During the fire.”
He doesn’t ask how I know about the fire, doesn’t even slow his step. “Those aqueducts that bring water to the crops? There’s similar piping that brings waste out of Bedrock. The Oracle told me how to access them.” He shudders slightly, as though the ghost of sewage still lingers on his skin. And it did linger, I’m sure. Water isn’t easy to come by once out of Bedrock. “The Oracle set the fire on midwinter night, so getting into the Barrel wasn’t too difficult. All of Bedrock was celebrating, and there was a festival in the Barrel’s market. I was probably through this tunnel before they realized I was missing. On the other side, I headed west. Made my way to Powder Town.”
He glances over his shoulder at me. I nod, as if this explains everything, even though I want to ask about Bain and Cree and how he ever managed to fall in with those rusted asses. How he went from the boy I once knew to one who would help con people into wagon cages.
Asher pauses. “I should have told you about the sewers, but there was so little time, and if you drank the water, you’d have forgotten my advice within a day.” He bites his lip. Shadows dance over the creases in his forehead. “You’re smart, Delta. Always have been. I knew that if you just kept your wits, you’d figure a way out.”
A day.
A single day.
I shudder, thinking how close I was to losing my memories, to having my life fog up before my eyes.
I don’t tell him that I nearly broke. Instead I say, “It smelled sweet, like a syrup. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Ilkcorolla seed, also known as sleeping ilk. The plant grows right there in Bedrock. The orange flowers drop white seeds that can be ground into a powder. And the powder is . . . potent. Makes folks numb and forgetful.”
I think of the vine plant I didn’t recognize that day I followed Reed through the fields. I’d thought it was beautiful, those massive flowers, their long, delicate petals.
“Do the memories come back if someone’s not”—I search for the term I’d heard in Bedrock—“ilked-up?”
Asher shrugs. “They did for me. The Oracle told me to stop drinking the water, started bringing me his own.” He pauses. “It was hard at first. My body craved the drug, but eventually I was clean. But then I could remember what the Loyalists did to me . . . The torture, the abuse. In some ways it was easier to be lost in my own mind.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve spent so long focused on the con he pulled on me that I’ve failed to truly consider what he’s endured these past years.
He lowers the candle a little, peering at my face. “Did they hurt you, Delta? Gods, I could kill myself for watching you go there. It was supposed to end in the Barrel. If they hadn’t found the map . . . If you’d just been placed in a home . . .” His thumb grazes my cheek, and I flinch away from him.
“We’re wasting time. We should be walking.”
His face does that thing where it flickers between the boy I once knew and the stranger who let Bain and Cree put me in a cage.
“Asher, we don’t have time for this,” I insist. I snatch the candle and shove past him, taking the lead.
“I’m so sorry, Delta. Truly.”
His tone, honest and vulnerable, brings me back to when we were kids. When I glance back at him, his eyes are pleading. I feel bad for him. Worse, I feel guilty, as if his pain is somehow my fault. Asher always had this power over me. Like that day when the Loyalists spotted his scar from across Alkali Lake. He was the idiot who took his rusted shirt off, yet for months after—years, even—I felt like it was my fault. If only I’d made him put it back on sooner, if only I’d never let him take it off, the pack wouldn’t have split. Those men never would have come. Everyone would have lived.