The Forsaken (7 page)

She raises the gun to her shoulder, taking aim again. “You and your friend better be fast runners,” she whispers to me, sounding worried for the first time. “Or you’re gonna get us all killed!”

GADYA

A SPLIT SECOND LATER,
the boy at the bottom of the hill pivots toward us and tears off his mask. Underneath, I see an acne-scarred face with a wide nose, contorted into a grotesque scowl. “In the beloved name of the Monk, we’re claiming this girl and this boy as our slaves!” He storms forward up the hill, followed by the others.

Gadya raises her gun. For a second, I think she’s going to fire. Instead, she flings the weapon as hard as she can at the scowling boy’s face. The butt connects with his nose with a sharp crack. He flails and careens backward down the hill, losing his balance.

Gadya jerks me sideways, pulling me into the forest. “This way!” she yells as David grabs for my other hand.

Another robed figure reaches the top of the hill, faster than I expected. I turn around, and he’s almost on me and David. Gadya has let go of my arm. She’s a few feet ahead, and she can’t turn back in time. The figure lunges forward, and I scream in terror.

Then, suddenly, he gets knocked right out of the way, and crashes forward onto his face. It takes me a second to realize what happened. It’s David. He’s thrown himself at the figure, tackling him by the legs and bringing him down.

“Run!” he screams at me. “I can’t make it anyway, ’cause of my foot! If you survive, come back for me!”

“David!” I yell, hesitating. I can’t believe he’d sacrifice himself like this for me. These are not the actions of an Unanchored Soul.

I hear other boys rushing up the hill and through the trees, calling out violent threats. If I wait one second longer, I’m going to get taken. “I’ll come back and rescue you!” I call out to him. “I swear it!”

As other figures reach him, I start running as fast as I can, chasing after Gadya. She’s barely visible in the forest ahead. “Gadya—wait!”

“Pick up the pace!” she screams back at me. “Or you’ll end up like your friend.” She takes a hard left onto a narrow dirt trail. I follow. She moves with incredible grace and speed.

“Please—” I gasp, but she doesn’t slow down. I’m terrified of losing her among the trees. She’s just a faint flash ahead of me. I keep running.

We’re putting space between ourselves and the boys. Maybe their bulky robes are slowing them down. And obviously a lot of them have surrounded David already.
But what will happen if we stop running?

Then, suddenly—horrifyingly—I realize that I’ve lost Gadya. I didn’t even look away. She was directly ahead of me one second, then gone the next. How could she disappear like that?

“Help!” I yell wildly, not caring that the boys might hear. “Gadya!” I keep plunging forward out of sheer momentum.

Then the earth gives way under my feet.

For a second, I’m suspended in air, running through space. The ground is disintegrating beneath me like I’ve leapt off a cliff.

My shins collide with something hard, and I cry out in pain. Rough hands drag me down into some kind of earthen hole. An object slides over the top of my head. It’s a woven blanket of leaves and twigs.

I look around and see Gadya sitting there, staring back at me. I’m panting like crazy, completely disoriented. I slowly realize that I’ve fallen into a deep hole dug in the trail, now masked by the leaf blanket above us. It’s like a grave, but square. It smells like bamboo.

Gadya shoves her hand against my mouth and pushes me hard against one side of the hole.

“I didn’t know you’d cause me so much trouble!” she whispers angrily. “I didn’t think they’d chase us this far!”

I can’t respond because her hand is covering my mouth. In the distance, I hear boys’ voices.

“Don’t worry. No one will find us.” Gadya finally lets me go and starts digging around in the dirt. “But if they do, I’ve got a nice surprise for ’em.” She pulls up a knife in a leather sheath, and tugs it out with her teeth.

I swallow hard, gasping for air. “What is this place?”

She stares at me as she plays with her knife. “A spider hole. I helped dig it three months ago. We’ve dug them all over this sector.”

“Your gun—” I begin, curious why she’d trade such a powerful weapon for a simple knife. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

“No bullets. We haven’t had them for months.” She pauses. “And most of the guns don’t work either. The Monk’s drones don’t know that yet.” She cocks her head to listen. The voices outside are fading as the boys move on. “Besides, it’s not our way to kill. Unless we have to.”

I try to make my legs more comfortable. My ankles are throbbing. “What’s going to happen to David?”

“Why do you care?” Her eyes narrow suspiciously. “Do you know him from back home or something?”

“No, I just met him. But we’re both from New Providence, and he saved my life.”

“Don’t worry about him. Just worry about yourself.”

“I told him we’d come back and rescue him.”

“Then you lied. Accept his fate and move on.”

I can’t accept it, but I don’t want to argue with her. “So are we trapped here?” I whisper. “In this little hole?”

“This little hole,”
Gadya repeats mockingly. “You’d be dead without it.”

“I’m not criticizing it. I’m grateful.” We sit in awkward silence. I keep sneaking glances at her. Beneath the piercings and tattoos, and the mane of blue hair, I can see a regular teenage girl. Not too different from me. She catches me looking at her, so I glance away. Now I hear only the cries of tropical birds above us. The robed boys have completely passed us by. “So, your name’s Gadya?” I finally ask.

She nods sharply. Doesn’t offer a last name.

“I’m Alenna.”

She nods again, less sharply. So I finally dare to ask the question that’s on my mind. “No one’s coming to rescue me, are they? I mean, no one from back home.”

Gadya shakes her head. “Nope.”

“Then why did I get sent here? And why are kids like you and David here? I thought everyone on this island was supposed to be an Unanchored Soul. But David and you seem so—”

“Normal?” she interrupts. “Of course we are. Just like you. Nothing they told us in the UNA is true. Not about Island Alpha or anything else.”

“Then tell me what’s really going on. Why were those boys chasing us?”

She glares at me. “Doling out reality checks isn’t part of my job. Our leader will explain everything to you when we get back to the village. My job was just to find any new arrivals and bring you in.” She runs a hand through her blue hair. “Guess I only did the job half right, seeing as your friend didn’t make it. But it doesn’t matter much. Kids always turn up around here, so we take turns searching the area every day.” She sheathes her knife and hides it in the dirt floor of the spider hole, presumably for the next person who needs it.

Then she lifts the roof of our enclosure and peers out. “All clear,” she declares, pushing back the roof the rest of the way, letting light filter in. “I need to get you to the village right away. Get you vaccinated.”

I look at her, startled. “Vaccinated?”

“I bet you only have another hour. After that, it’ll be too late.” She puts her hands on the edge of the hole and pushes herself up and out, in a smooth, practiced gesture. Then she brushes herself off and extends a hand. I take it and struggle my way out, feeling awkward and oafish. I crawl onto the trail and stand there on wobbly, aching legs. Gadya kicks the roof back over the hole.

“You’re scaring me,” I tell her. “Vaccinated against what?”

“You talk too much. You ask too many questions. That’s not a good trait to have here.” Gadya starts heading down the trail again. I start jogging along behind her.

“Then give me some answers. Don’t treat me like I’m a moron.”

“I don’t think you’re a moron. You’re just green.” She lets out a frustrated sigh. “Being green can get people killed.” She lifts up a vine as thick as my wrist, and we pass underneath it.

“At least tell me about the vaccine.”

Gadya looks back at me. “It prevents disease. Trust me, you need it.”

We reach a wider path, lined with magnolia trees. Gadya pauses for a second, listening. All is silent. We start moving again, wading rapidly through the tangled underbrush.

“And the island?” I press, trying to gather as much information as possible. “Where are we exactly? The Atlantic? The Pacific?”

“First of all, no one calls this place ‘the island.’ We call it ‘the wheel,’ because it’s divided into misshapen triangular sectors. Like pie slices. There are six of them. Don’t ask me why—I didn’t make the rules. The UNA did. The Monk controls four sectors—orange, purple, yellow, and red. Our tribe controls one—the blue sector. The sixth one’s called the gray zone. Bad things happen in there.”

Her grim tone gives me a momentary chill.

“We used to control the orange sector,” she continues, “but the Monk’s been expanding his territory. More and more kids keep joining his gang, or religion, or whatever he calls it. You picked a hell of a time to turn up here. We’re in the middle of a war. And we’re losing.”

My head is buzzing as we walk, filled with a million more questions. “A war against the Monk? Who is he?”

“An old man who’s been here longer than anyone else. He claims he has supernatural powers. He tells everyone that the wheel is a test, and if they do what he says, they’ll get off it one day—or find their reward in the afterlife. Crazy, desperate kids turn to him, looking for meaning.” She lowers her voice. “We call him the Cannibal Monk.”

I stop in my tracks, horrified. “
Cannibal?
As in, like, he eats people?”

Gadya chuckles. “Not flesh. Souls. That’s what he’s after.” She glances back and sees the stricken look on my face. “It’s a figure of speech.” She increases her pace. “C’mon.”

The path is wide enough to walk shoulder to shoulder, although it’s hard keeping up with Gadya. “So how long have you been here?”

“Fourteen months,” she replies, like that’s nothing. Then she points up ahead. “Look, we’re almost at the village. We’re rebuilding from a nighttime raid. If we build huts, eventually the Monk’s drones burn ’em down.” The trees thin as we crest a ridge and approach a grassy clearing the size of a baseball diamond. “This island is allergic to civilization. The Monk makes sure of that.”

I don’t fully understand, but I’m too dazed and distracted to ask any more questions. We’ve reached the edge of the trees and I’m gazing out at the clearing. I see about a hundred teenagers, my age or older, hammering and assembling makeshift shacks around the edges of the clearing. Hammocks hang between crooked palm trees.
So this is how exiles live.

Most of the kids are dirty and unkempt, with ragged hair. A few even have wispy beards. But none look particularly crazy or dangerous, not like the boys in robes. These kids are mostly wearing T-shirts and jeans, or shorts. I wonder if the blue-eyed boy will be among them, if he’s still alive, and if this is his village. I look for him, hoping to see him, but don’t find his face anywhere.

A huge stone fire pit sits in the center of the clearing, about twelve feet in diameter. It holds only ashes at the moment, but the odor of smoke and greasy barbecued meat hovers in the air.

As Gadya and I emerge, some of the villagers stare in our direction.

“Took you long enough!” a boy yells at Gadya. He’s got muscular shoulders, and he’s lugging a large sheet of warped plywood. Gadya flicks him off with a callused middle finger. He laughs. I barely know Gadya, but I already wish I could be as confident and brash as she is. Especially here on this island.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people at the village. The island is supposed to hold tens of thousands of Unanchored Souls. So where is everyone? Maybe they’ve joined forces with the Monk already. Despite Gadya’s advice to forget about David, I’m worried about what’s happening to him right now. He probably needs the same vaccine that I’m about to get.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Gadya murmurs. “This village is small, and it looks like crap, right?”

I don’t reply.

“There’s more of us in the blue sector than just these kids,” Gadya elaborates. “But it’s safest to keep each village small and spread out. Easier to mobilize, and easier to move and rebuild. There’s another village thirty miles east. Another thirty miles south. There are fifteen villages total in our sector, but we don’t communicate with them much unless we need to. Each village is pretty self-sufficient.”

I’m half-listening, distracted by thoughts of the vaccine, and also by the sight of a boy and a girl fast approaching across the clearing. Both are fair-haired, slender and attractive. A few years older than me. The girl is wearing a white sundress, and the boy is wearing a white T-shirt and slacks.

The boy waves at Gadya as he nears. “Trouble?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle. Just some drones. I set ’em straight and—”

“Where’s your gun?” the girl interrupts, frowning.

Gadya glares at her. “Up a drone’s ass. Why?”

The boy laughs, but the girl keeps frowning. I want to speak up for Gadya and explain that if she hadn’t thrown the gun, we wouldn’t be here right now. But I stay quiet.