The Cull
TALIA
The first decade produced three schools of thought on the fluxborn. The Pentarchy funded eradication. The Lyceum funded research. The prospectors buried their dead quietly and kept digging.
Talia was up before anyone came for her. She was dressed and ready in time to help break camp, and Dawn noted it with a nod and a smile. That was her version of praise.
“We’re being followed, right?” Talia asked. She met Dawn’s eyes.
“Since Pickler’s Junction. Five riders, maybe six.”
Talia bit back the rest of her questions. Now that Dawn knew she was paying attention, maybe she would include Talia next time. Lore had called survival a language, which implied there were rules. Patterns. She could learn a language. She was determined to be a better student today.
The landscape grew drier as they rode. The dusty ground was peppered with rubble where homes and roadways once stood: collapsed arches, broken pavers.
She saw flashes of Starscript etched into stone, faded, nearly lost to time.
When she paused to check foundations, all the fluxlines had gone dark.
The crystals she did find had all been shattered, just like a flux lamp after a power surge.
Her research seemed frivolous now compared with the pressure of staying alive. Soon they’d run out of flux crystals and food, and then what? So they rode on, and the relics she might have studied were ground to powder under Jonquil’s hooves.
It was near midday when they topped a low rise and Dawn slowed, hand raised to stop the others. When Talia saw the circle of wagons in the valley, she let out a sigh of relief. But nothing was moving down below, just a thin curl of smoke off an old campfire. No people. No horses.
Something glinted from one of the wagons, blue flux light. It fluttered quick and erratic, like a dying heart.
A strange smell met them halfway down the incline—the tang of copper and wet fur with something sour behind it, like vinegar. A wall of flies rose off the nearest wagon in a black cloud.
Closer up, the wreckage came into focus. A wagon lay on its side, axles broken. Another wagon had its canvas slashed and hanging like a fallen flag.
The first body she saw lay face down near the wagon wheel. A man. Older. His hand reached for something. Blood pooled black beneath him. Her stomach lurched, and she looked away.
This was the language she needed to learn. She made herself keep going.
A second body. Then a third. Talia’s breath came shorter. She counted because she didn’t know what else to do. Four bodies. Then five.
Holloway swung down from his saddle and walked in. Dawn followed on foot, a revolver in each hand.
Six, seven. Some in sleeping shirts. Some half dressed, caught unaware. Eight, nine, ten. She made herself keep looking, keep counting, until she couldn’t anymore. It was a horrific scene, but there was something strange about it. Something missing.
“Where are the horses?” Talia asked, looking around.
Holloway stepped up beside her and grimaced. “No horses, no way to escape. Whoever did this must’ve driven them off first.”
Her stomach clenched. Bile surged up her throat, and she spat into the dust.
“No looting either,” Dawn noted. “All the coin is still on them.”
Dawn checked another body. The man’s chest had been opened, ribs cracked down the middle, but not like an animal mauling. It was neat, almost surgical.
She frowned, then shook her head once, sharply, as if ruling out a thought she didn’t want.
“This wasn’t a raid,” Dawn said. “This was a cull.”
The word lodged under Talia’s skin.
Cull. Like thinning a herd. Choosing who lived and who didn’t.
Something scraped under the nearest overturned wagon. A whisper of movement, then a low groan.
Dawn’s guns came up. “Show yourself.”
A man crawled into view, dragging himself with his hands. His left leg was bound in bloody cloth.
“Don’t shoot,” he gasped. “Name’s Sorrel. I’m the cook.”
Holloway was already there, crouching to take the man under the arms. “Easy. You’re all right.”
“‘All right’ is generous,” Sorrel rasped. “You got water?”
Dawn passed her canteen, her eyes scanning the ridges around them.
“What happened here?” Holloway asked.
Sorrel swallowed hard. “Wolves,” he said. “But not like any I ever saw. Bigger, with blue eyes.”
“Fluxborn direwolves,” Dawn muttered under her breath. “A pack of ’em, I’d wager.”
Talia edged closer. Her empathy twisted awake, humming behind her ribs.
“Enforcers were checking papers at the Junction, so we aimed to cut around.” Sorrel’s hands shook. “The wolves followed. Thought they were just scavengers, waiting for scraps. Then I saw they were…counting us.”
Talia swallowed. “How could you tell?”
“They shifted when we did,” he said. “Every time we moved a wagon, two of them traded places. We had five guards, there’d be five wolves. Six, then six.”
Talia knelt beside him. “I can help,” she said, reaching instinctively with her empathy.
Dawn caught her wrist. “Don’t. You don’t know this man.”
She did know he was suffering. After days of feeling like a burden, she wanted to help more than she needed to stay safe. She reached into Sorrel’s mind, projecting calm.
His trauma hit her in a series of sharp bursts.
Terror.
Horror.
Searing pain.
The emotions slammed into her chest, too vivid, too fast. A barrage of feelings, each hitting sharp and separate. Her vision flashed red, starbursts of silver, then black. She tried to pull back, but her gift didn’t listen.
“Talent,” someone said from far away. “Let go.”
She couldn’t. Sorrel’s fear wrapped around her like barbed wire.
Then she was falling, and hands were catching her. A cool touch brushed her temple; someone braced the back of her neck.
“Breathe.” Lore’s voice. “You’re here, Talent. This is not your fear. It belongs to someone else. Let it pass.”
His calm reassurance cut through her panic. The emotions pressed on her eyelids like an impending headache, but she breathed slowly, in and out, and the pressure eased. Lore held her until the world stopped spinning.
When her vision came back, she was on the ground with her back against a wagon wheel. Lore knelt beside her, hands gently cradling her face.
“That,” Dawn said tightly from somewhere behind him, “is what I said not to do.”
Talia’s cheeks burned. “I’m fine.”
Lore lowered his hands to her knees but didn’t break contact. His emotions came across as a pool of confidence, and she was grateful to draw from it.
“You keep saying that.” He looked straight into her eyes. “You’re not fine now. But you will be.”
That’s when a new sound cut across the wreckage. A dragging, scraping sound. Everyone froze, then Dawn was on her feet. Holloway pulled his rifle off his back.
“Tally, stay here,” Holloway said as a huge wolf dragged itself from behind a wagon.
Gray fur matted dark around its hindquarters. One back leg hung uselessly, bone glinting white. Its head lifted. Blue eyes scanned the scene. Not wild and rolling but focused. Assessing. Her empathy hooked on the wolf before she processed what she was doing.
Pain. Deep and constant. Fatigue. A thin, taut thread of fear, not animal panic but cold flat certainty.
The wolf knew it was dying. Talia wasn’t touching it, wasn’t touching anyone.
The connection shouldn’t work like this, untethered from anything physical.
It was just like before, with the gryphon.
The wolf’s gaze found Talia. The wreckage and bodies seemed to fade around her. Just two crystal blue eyes. Curiosity flickered through the pain. Recognition.
Talia took a step forward.
“Tally.” Holloway’s voice was tight with warning. “Stop.”
“I can ease its pain,” she whispered. “We don’t have to—”
A gunshot cracked, and the wolf’s body jerked. The connection snapped. The shock of the severing hit like a physical blow. One second the wolf’s mind had been merged with hers, curious and aware. The next, a hollow space.
Her knees buckled and hit the ground. The air left her lungs with a small involuntary sound.
She looked up, dazed, to see Dawn with one revolver raised, smoke curling from the barrel.
“You didn’t have to kill it.” Tears blurred her vision. The horror of the wolf, the bodies, Riven, all of it tangled together until she couldn’t separate which loss hurt the most.
“It killed these people,” Dawn said.
“I know.” She did know. But the wolf’s pain had felt so familiar. “It couldn’t even stand up—”
“Even worse. Wounded animals are unpredictable. The smart ones hold grudges. You want that thing crawling back to its pack?”
Talia stared at the wolf’s corpse. Blood pooled around its body, soaking into the dust.
“There had to be another way.”
Dawn shook her head once. “Not out here.”
Was that the secret to survival, then? Dawn just drew a line and killed everything on the other side of it. Yes, the wolf had been dangerous, but it was intelligent too.
Talia held her questions in, but they burned in her fingertips. She wanted to write all this down, to unspool the threads that were tangling and reforming in her mind.
But there was too much work to do. Dawn and Holloway dragged the bodies under the cover of an intact wagon. Lore and Talia gathered what they could find—waterskins, dried food, flux shards pulled from broken lanterns. It wasn’t enough, but it was more than they’d had.
Talia had stopped seeing the bodies by the end of it. She pressed a cloth to her nose to keep out the worst of the smell and focused on working methodically, one wagon at a time, so she didn’t miss anything. She was sifting through a pile of mostly ruptured waterskins when Lore approached her.
“You touched the fluxborn’s mind,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to. It just kind of pulled me in.” She focused on the task in front of her, trying not to spill the water.
She could feel him drawing closer. “It’s the flux in the air here. It makes your affinity stronger, less predictable. It will destroy you if you don’t learn to shape it.”
“I don’t know how.” Her voice came out small.
“I do.” He took her hands and squeezed them, tugging her attention to his face. “Control is a skill. It comes with practice.”
Control. She hated how much she wanted that.
“Can you teach me?”
“Yes. I can.” His smile barely touched his mouth. She was struck again by his beauty. The grime of the road didn’t touch him the way it clung to everyone else.
A howl broke the air. It carried, sad and long and low, from a ridge to the north.
Every muscle in Talia’s body went rigid. Sorrel whimpered. Dawn’s head snapped up, eyes locking onto the ridgeline. Another howl answered the first, from the east. Then a third, between the two. Calling and responding, like a conversation.
“They’re still out there,” Sorrel said hoarsely. “They never left.”
“We’ve gotta move,” Dawn said. “Now.”
“It’ll be dark in a few hours,” Holloway warned.
“Then we use those hours,” she snapped. “I am not sleeping in this valley.”
No one argued. They mounted quickly, taking what they could carry. A fourth howl rose, closer, and Talia’s empathy brushed something vast and angry before she yanked herself back.
Dawn set their course into a cluster of low mountains to the northwest, and the wolves paced them from the ridges, one wolf per person, just like Sorrel had described.
“They’re herding us,” Dawn said quietly.
Talia looked ahead at the mountain pass narrowing ahead. No way through but forward.