“Asher was careless with the map, not you,” Ma told me the night we learned of the massacre. “Is it awful? Yes. Do we wish it didn’t happen? Of course. But do not carry the mistakes of others as though they are your own. Life is hard enough already.”
He’s still staring at me now, as though I can somehow relieve whatever pain he bears. As if I can change the past.
“I know,” I say finally. “And if you get us to Powder Town, maybe I’ll forgive you completely. But right now, every minute I waste is a minute closer to one of my pack dying. So no more talk till we’re at the iron mines.”
He nods, and we carry on in silence.
* * *
The tunnel gets smaller, but not by much. Shallow ruts on the ground show where modest cargo wagons have been pushed through this space over and over, carrying iron from the mines to the Barrel. For about a click I have to walk with my head ducked down, but otherwise I can move upright.
When my legs are aching and the lack of sleep from the night in the corpse wagon is catching up with me, Asher’s hand closes over my wrist. He puts a finger to his lips, nods ahead.
Squinting, I can see it—a faint glow.
He blows out the candle, and the tunnel is swallowed in darkness. After a few breaths, our eyes have adjusted and we creep forward ever so slowly. By the time we reach the tunnel exit, I’m squinting fiercely even though the sky has bruised into a deep shade of purple. It’s dusk, and I’m glad for it. Were it midday, my eyes would be burning from the brightness.
The tunnel opens onto a ledge where two Loyalist guards sit with their backs to us, eating dinner. My stomach rumbles so loudly I’m shocked they don’t hear it. Beyond them, the ledge tumbles and rolls away like an awkward sloping staircase. At the bottom, tents and shanties speckle a valley, and wisps of campfire smoke dance toward the darkening sky. A few tools clank, metal hitting rock, but the bulk of the day’s work appears to be over.
Asher pulls out his sling, and in a flash, the two Loyalist guards are unconscious.
“When the hell did you get so good with that thing?” I mutter.
He flashes a grin, then runs forward and pockets the guards’ dinner.
“This way,” he whispers, and scurries to the left, watching his footing on the rugged terrain. I grab a set of binos from the knocked-out Loyalists and follow.
If word of my escape hasn’t made it to the mine yet, it will as soon as these guards wake up. Outrunning them will be near impossible once we make it back to the wastes. The General’s men will be well rested, well fed. They’ll have horses. I try not to dwell on it, instead focusing on following Asher in the fading daylight.
We make our way west until it’s so dark that continuing on in only the moonlight would be dangerous. Too afraid to make a fire, we sit with our backs against a boulder and share the Loyalists’ jerky. There’s a bit of hard cheese also, which Asher asks me to cut.
“Cut how?”
His hand disappears inside his jacket and reemerges with my knives—the Old World one from Astra’s hut and my trusty bone blade, too. “Bartered them off Bain. Told him he could have the goat, but I was owed these—that I wanted something to remember you by. ’Course, I always intended to give them back to you.”
The hilt of my bone knife fits my hand like a memory. It makes me miss Bay—how her body in the sling was just starting to feel familiar when she was taken from me.
“Thank you . . .” I manage.
He nods, then lays out the waterskins—his, along with the one I stole before riding for the Barrel, plus a third we lifted off the Loyalist guards. It’s a downright feast.
I drink eagerly, savoring each drop.
“Easy,” Asher says, pushing my waterskin aside. “Long way to go still.” He’s right. I wipe water from my chin, grumbling. “Just being honest,” he chides. “And smart.” He gives me the smuggest grin I’ve ever seen grace his features.
I grab the jar of jerky he’s eating from and screw on the lid. “Better save this too.”
Asher’s grin tilts sidewise. “You trifling with me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. We need to ration food just as carefully as we ration the water.” I turn around, wanting to stash the jar, only to realize I have nowhere to put it. Asher holds his jacket open, showing me a spacious pocket stitched into the inside of the garment—probably where my knives had been stowed. I hand the jar over begrudgingly.
He’s still smiling. I turn my head to the stars because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’s almost made me smile, too.
“You can see Ation this time of year,” he says, nodding up at the sky.
The constellation seems brighter than usual, or maybe it’s just that I rarely see her without a fire or a torch glowing nearby. The goddess’s head tips down to watch us, her dress sweeping behind her like a flowing river.
“She’s beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Are you serious?” I glance at Asher. His cheeks are awash with starlight, his eyes wonderstruck. “She deserted us. They all did.”
“The blue and green stars appeared last summer, though,” he says. “Signs of fertility. They both passed by Feder—straight through his armor. And this spring I heard someone say there was a yellow comet over the North Star. And a star shower over Ation.”
“So?”
“Comets are sparks of life, and a star shower means rain.”
“And Ation is the goddess of earth and a shower fell above her. I know what it means.”
“But you’re not hopeful,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question.
I shrug.
“Delta, the signs couldn’t be clearer. This means a rebirth is coming.”
I stare at him incredulously. “You really believe that?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“Teleios is the goddess of water, and a comet or star shower hasn’t touched her in Old Fang’s lifetime,” I point out. It’s the same argument I made when Ma grew excited about the signs Asher mentioned, but she also said that a sign of rain over the goddess of water meant nothing. It was like saying that the sun is hot or water is wet. It was a sign of rain over earth that we needed, and when it appeared, stars streaked above Ation’s bowed head for nearly two days. A week earlier we had seen a comet flying by the North Star, and a week before that, the blue and green stars—unnamed gods that always appear without warning, often with decades of absence in between—had lit up the sky.
Their message was clear: hope, a rebirth, the return of the gods.
I wonder, sometimes, if I could have convinced Ma to move to Powder Town that winter, had those colored stars not passed through Feder’s shield. We were getting desperate, but once she saw those signs burning in the night sky, any doubt she had when it came to her faith had vanished.
I sneak a glance at Asher. He’s had it worse than anyone I know. After all he’s been through, after the Loyalists raided Alkali Lake and killed his family, after the General had him tortured, after a lifetime of failing crops and dust storms, of sand squalls and baked-out earth, I’d have thought his faith would be shattered. Weakened, at the very least. But no, he’s sitting here beside me, still speaking of salvation coming, as though it’s a guarantee.