Chapter 6
SIX
Pure blackness blankets this world, and even after all the time I have spent in it, it never gets easier.
The chunk of a year.
That’s how long the blackout has darkened our world.
In all that time, all those months, the urge to look up at the sky and see the moon is still there.
The itch to lift my wrist and check the time on my smartwatch lingers, as if I’ll see an early morning hour glaring back at me, assuring me that the sun will rise soon, that I just woke up that bit too early, like I always did on the camping trips, but never did at home.
Even the instincts born of darkness are tempting me—to reach for my hip where my flashlight should dangle from my belt, or dig into my backpack for my head torch, that bright, glaring white light that straps to my head, but gives me one hell of a headache.
And all of that is made so much worse by walking blind in the blackout.
One foot in front of the other, hoping there’s no hole under the slushy snow, praying I don’t trip over a body, and putting all my faith into that warrior, the one on the other side of the tether, just a step to my side.
I can’t see him, can’t hear him, but I do occasionally lose my footing, my balance, and stumble into his solid arm, and it’s exactly how I imagine staggering into a stone statue would feel.
Like I needed anymore bruises to add to my collection.
I’m smeared in them.
Don’t need light or a moment’s rest to peel back my clothes and have a peek to know I am black and blue and purple all over.
Against the constant ache, I hold my tethered wrists out in front of me, a beat ahead of my steps, because even with the warrior’s guidance, I just can’t soften my instincts, my fear that I’ll walk right into a wall or fall off a cliff.
This walk goes on forever, and I’m blind for it. My eyes never stop straining, as though I’ll magically develop the ability to see in a blackout if I try hard enough, and the early buds of a headache are springing along my creased brow.
This has got to be more than just hours.
Maybe a day, a night, or even both combined.
I’m not exactly drowning in ways of keeping time, and maybe I’m just feeling the strength bleeding out of me, or maybe it’s all about time relativity, but I really do think we’re reaching the twelve-hour mark at least when light starts to grow.
It starts at the head of the unit, about fifty or so warriors ahead of me, then ripples its way down.
The torches that were lowered, then carried upside-down, are lifted… just lifted… and the flames reignite with that, and that alone.
Those flames are unnatural.
Another thing in this unit not of our world.
The flames don’t look different, but the upside-down angle extinguishing them, then reignited by being raised back up again, that’s not exactly normal.
But that’s what happens, all around me.
A dozen of those torches lift, and their flames explode crimson light all through the unit—
I instantly recoil.
I throw my pinned hands up to my face and shield my eyes from the angry red glare attacking me from all angles.
The slender rope bound around my wrists digs that bit deeper into my skin, silky ribbons cutting apart my flesh, but it’s an afterthought, just another ache and pain and sore to add to my collection.
Slowly, I lower my shield against the light and squint around the burning gleams of crimson.
The red starts to soften against the darkness, starts to blend, and I see where we are, where the unit has paused.
Huddled by trees.
Nothing more than trees.
Trees and trees and trees just yawning on—until I crane my neck to peer around the solid muscle of the warrior, and I can make out a winding road that splinters into a tiny town.
Burrowed away in the depths of the forest, this town is like those ones that are only a few streets big.
Back home, we would call it a village.
Here, I think it’s just a settlement. Looks like it came out off the screen of an old western, only it’s powdered in winter, not scorched under the sun.
The other town, the one we left behind and trekked away from for so long, the one that is a city compared to this small outline in the distance, was left untouched.
This dark unit snubbed that town.
They didn’t attack anyone in it, didn’t burn it down, and now that I think about it, now that I let that niggle in my mind blossom, I realise that this unit never entered the town.
Only the cold one did.
The others stayed camped beyond the highway, over the barriers, on the woodland outskirts, but never went in.
So that town wasn’t theirs to burn.
It was just a place to stop and camp out.
There is order here.
Conformity. Obedience.
Other units will take down the town we left behind—but this unit has come for this town.
A handful of streets and a few rows of buildings.
With the torches upright, and the gleam of the unit’s advance, the fae push into step again.
An unease uncoils through me.
From the lenses of binoculars, I have watched the dark fae from afar, carrying their burning torches into cities—before destroying them.
So I know what’s about to happen here, in this little town whose decrepit, faded welcome sign arches up the side of the road, before it’s touched with the flames of a torch, and erupts in an immediate, consuming blaze.
I hold my pinned wrists to my chest, a lame attempt at a shield, as I’m led up the road.
We breach the edge of the town.
Bordering me are the old, lovely faces of buildings built some hundred years ago, architecture lost to greed and concrete.
Soon to be ash and rubble.
The unit marches on, until it’s a spiralling rope of dark warriors spilling down the main road, beginning to end, and only then does the cold warrior remember my existence.
Without a look at me, he unfastens the rope from his belt before he drags me down to the tail-end of the unit, where the captured humans are encircled by armed guards.
My boots scuff over the road, an unwillingness tensing in me the closer we get to the humans.
It’s not their gaunt faces that warn me off, or their washed-out pallor, their torn and dirty clothes, or even the way they cringe back from the guards.
It’s that some stare at me—directly at me with more curiosity than I’m comfortable with, with more frowns and dark looks than I want to get close to.
I throw a look at the cold warrior, a silent and dumb question, but I hardly land my gaze on him before the shove of his hand smacks into the small of my back.
That one push propels me past a guard, right into the huddle of captives.
The pain that shoots up my spine is instant, and it fucking chokes me.
My legs tremble under me as I throw a stunned glare over my shoulder—
But the cold warrior is already gone.
He’s moving up the unit, back to his position.
My face crumples as I bend my arm back for my sore spine, as if I can reach it, rub it, soothe it.
I give up when my elbow starts to scream at the bone—and a guard curls his upper lip at me.
“In with kuris,” he barks, sharp. “Sit!”
I stagger back with the gasp, the fright bolting through me, until the heel of my boot knocks into something firm.
The guard turns his cheek to me, looking up at the rest of his unit, and just as his attention is drawn away, there’s a rustle of movement behind me.
I look down at the ground—at the Converse that my boot knocked into and is now pressed against. I trace the shoe up a pair of jeans, then a winter parka, cheap and so obviously polyester, until I find myself face to face with a woman.
Maybe around my age, maybe younger.
Sort of pretty, sort of not.
Average, like me.
And like me, she just stares.
Her hazel eyes are too doe-like, they annoy me, and there’s a bushiness to her brows that would’ve been plucked to death in the 90s.
Her rosy lips part—and then nothing. Like she wants to speak to me, maybe ask me something, but thinks better of it.
I frown at her, not a kind look, before she huffs a drawn-out breath then drops to the road.
The others do the same.
In this enclosed circle, captives start the slow, lethargic dance of lowering themselves to the poorly kept asphalt.
Faces are slack with fatigue, muscles sagged with exhaustion, and almost every set of eyes that shifts to me, curious, but looks away fast, is defeated.
Slowly, achingly, I lower myself to the road with them—beside the woman in Converse.
I give her a name.
Connie.
Connie is my silent companion in the bunched captives.
She sits at my side, only ever looking at me for a moment here or there, and not flinching when I stare back.
I notice her clothes aren’t as distressed as some of the others.
They might be cheap, grabbed at random on the run in this world, but they aren’t torn and ragged.
That’s not why I give her a name.
I give it because of her sadness.
The sorrow in how she looks at me.
I don’t know what it means, what she’s trying to say, what she wanted to ask. And truth be told, I’m too up my own ass of pain to really give a shit.
I lean my weight onto my side, pinned on my aching arm, and my face twisted, because no matter how I shift or turn or move, I find no comfortable way to sit, no way to rest that doesn’t spring pain up some part of my body.
The urge to lie down on my side is strong.
But under the sweeping glares of the guards who eye us up, closely, much too closely, I get the sense I’m not allowed.
So I sit.
The edge of what feels like a can is digging into the small of my back. I shift the bag away from my spine, but the straps are firm around my shoulders, and with my wrists tied, I can’t exactly take the backpack off.
The breath I release puffs out my cheeks.
I consider the unit ahead, standing motionless, as the fae on steeds seem to patrol the edge of the town.
I cut a glance down at my belt, the CB radio fastened there, untouched, unnoticed, and I feel it suddenly burning into my skin.
Shifting my knee, I use my thigh to shield the radio from any lingering glances from the guards.