Notes: Hey, darlins. I meant to have more Tank for you today, but tonight has been the headache-y culmination of a day of professional letdowns, and I just don't have the energy for more creativity on top of a heap of "thanks but no thanks." So, I'm revisiting Luckless, because one of those no's concerned this story. Having it professionally published just doesn't look like it's meant to be, but I own the amazing cover art and can do it my own damn self, so I will. I'll have it out in a few weeks, but in the meantime, have some chapters! The first one was posted once before, but the second one is new (as long as you didn't catch it on Wattpad). Just scroll and enjoy.
I hope you're all as well and healthy as can possibly be.
***
Luckless
By
Cari Z
Chapter
One
“Incoming,
one thousand feet!”
The
gunner manning the corner turret wielded his megaphone like a whip, waving
toward the edge of the wall. “Archers, move forward! Pikemen, get your asses
ready to back them up!” Evan stepped up to his position, close enough to the
edge to shoot over it but far enough back that he wouldn’t be vulnerable to the
first thing with claws to crawl up there.
He
glanced down and frowned. The crix were still about eight hundred feet away,
but there were a lot of them—more
than he’d ever seen before during a winter attack on the city. The dragons and
their riders were already battling the bigger beasts farther out in the ruins
that used to be Denver, but there weren’t enough of them anymore to keep the
city completely clear. That was where Evan and the people like him came in.
The
man to his left—a boy, really, probably no more than sixteen—shivered as he
took his own peek over the wall. His hands were shaking so badly they could
barely hold on to his bow, much less nock an arrow when the crix got close
enough to shoot. His fear struck a chord in Evan, who still remembered the
brutal chaos of his first battle almost twenty years ago. He smiled
sympathetically. “First time on the wall?”
The
boy gulped and nodded. “Uh-huh.” His posture was so stiff it seemed his back
might break. “I thought—I thought there would be fewer of them. That’s why my
dad chose now to bring me up here, so I could—I could get used to fighting them
before the big waves come in the spring. But this is . . .”
“Unusual,”
Evan supplied. “Around double what we’d see during a normal winter attack. That
probably means they’re being driven.”
“Driven?”
The boy turned wide eyes on Evan. “By what?”
Evan
shrugged. “Lack of food, a bad weather front closing in, or more likely in this
case? A bigger monster. Crix are tough, but they’re too small to put up much of
a fight against a really big monster, and they don’t have the temperament for
swarming for long. Too prone to cannibalism.”
“Oh.
Right.” His voice sounded so small, already close to defeat without even seeing
battle.
Evan
moved a little closer to him. “Remember, aim for their heads—if you can crack
the carapace, you’ll stun them, and then the other crix will take care of them
for us. If you shoot them through the eye socket, you’ll kill them fast. Don’t
bother going for the legs, they’ve got too many backups. Just breathe, nock,
draw, and loose.”
“Breathe,
nock, draw, and loose,” the boy repeated, sounding better already. “Breathe,
nock, draw, and loose. Aim for the head.”
“You’ve
got it.”
“Right.”
Evan
patted the boy on the shoulder, then dropped his hand when the man stationed on
the kid’s other side stalked over to them, pointing an accusing finger at Evan.
“You
leave my boy alone, Luckless!”
“Dad,
calm down.” The kid seemed embarrassed, but whether for his dad’s words or for
responding to Evan’s attempt to comfort him, Evan didn’t know. “He was just telling
me about how to take down crix.”
“You
take down crix like you do any other monster—you shoot it,” his father said
stiffly. “That’s what the damn bow is for. You don’t need Luckless to tell you
that.” He focused on Evan again. “Ollie doesn’t need advice on killing beasts
from a failed rider who couldn’t even keep his own dragon alive. I’ll tell you one
last time—leave my boy alone.” He grabbed Ollie by the arm and hauled him a few
feet farther to the left, away from Evan.
The
kid seemed confused, but Evan just looked away. He’d gone through this same
encounter so many times since coming to the massive fortress that was the city
of Forge that the accusations had almost stopped stinging. There wasn’t much
about what the man had said that wasn’t true, after all. Evan had lost his dragon, as well as everyone
else left in Marble after that hellish summer five years ago.
Evan
watched as the gunner swung his .50 caliber M2 machine gun toward an incoming
flock of harpies—carrion feeders who only banded together when there was bigger
prey in the offing. The gunner fired a short burst and half of the monsters
fell, losing feathers and blood and shrieking almost intelligibly. This machine
gun was one of only four in the city, and one of the very few firearms that
they still managed to produce ammunition for. Even so, its store of brass
casings would wear out eventually, and then they’d have little more than muskets
to fire along with their arrows.
Some
of the defenders cheered, but Evan simply tuned them out and glanced over the
edge again. The first wave of crix was almost within range, their leg blades
singing over the whistle of the icy wind, their armored bellies nearly scraping
the chunks of pitted concrete and rebar that were all that remained of
southbound I-25. Their front legs were shaped for climbing, short and stubby
and tipped with thick, sharp claws, while their hind legs were long and built
for propulsion. When they rubbed those blades together, they made a sound
almost too beautiful to possibly herald death.
They
were no more than a hundred feet away now, the bigger ones starting to jump in
anticipation of bounding up the wall. It was an ugly, patchwork thing, made
from the bones of skyscrapers and museums, the city it surrounded packed to the
brim with the survivors, their herds, and their dragons. In most places, it was
too steep to jump straight over, and the crix had to climb, but sometimes a few
of them got lucky—especially the bigger ones, closer to mule-sized than
dog-sized.
The
gunner lifted his megaphone again. “Archers, fire at will!”
Evan
had an arrow nocked before the man finished speaking, and loosed it at the
largest crix within range. It hit a glancing blow on the creature’s head—not
quite enough to crack its shell, but it was still stunned, limbs waving dazedly
as it rolled onto its side. Five or six smaller crix immediately diverted to
attack it, and Evan smiled grimly. There was no better way to take out a
monster than with another monster.
He
fired again and again, striking true and winnowing down the oncoming horde as
effectively as he could. Unfortunately, most of his fellow archers weren’t
having the same success. Ollie in particular seemed to have forgotten Evan’s
advice in the heat of the fight, firing almost blindly and with no thought to
aiming, which meant most of his arrows skittered into the ground. Evan gritted
his teeth over it until his last arrow was gone, then lowered his bow and ran
to the boy’s side.
“Slow
down!” he shouted.
Ollie
turned to him, his expression blank with shock, hands so tight on the bow they
were blanched bone white. “Wha-what?”
“You
have to slow down if you’re going to have a hope of hitting anything.” Evan
kept his voice loud even though they were face-to-face now, trying to break
through Ollie’s fear and the rising sounds of the advancing crix. The gunner yelled
something again, but Evan couldn’t make it out. “You’re just wasting arrows
otherwise. Try to—”
“Luckless!” Ollie’s father marched back
over, dodging around advancing pikemen with rage written in the craggy lines of
his face. “What the hell did I just tell you? You leave my boy alone or I’ll—” A
crix the size of a house cat leapt over the edge of the wall, dodged the pikeman
who tried to impale it, and landed on Ollie’s father’s chest.
It
was small, but heavy enough to knock him to the ground. He screamed as he fell
back, the crix fastening its mandibles into the front of his shoulder and violently
shaking its head.
“Dad!”
Ollie dropped his bow and ran to his father, trying in vain to pry the crix off
of him. The creature’s leg blades keened and the boy jumped back, cradling his
lacerated hands to his chest with a dumbfounded expression.
“Son
of a bitch,” Evan muttered. He unsheathed
his bowie knife as he ran over, reversed his grip on it, and then stuck it
straight down, right through the side of the crix’s neck. He put his other hand
on the back of the creature’s head and drew the blade in a circle. The wound
seeped dark-blue blood, staining his glove, and a second later the crix slumped
over onto the parapet, its grip vanishing in death.
He
glanced back at Ollie, who blinked at him uncomprehendingly. For fuck’s sake,
what were they doing in training
these days? “Get your father off the wall,” Evan said. “Take him to the
medics.”
Ollie
nodded but didn’t move.
“Now!”
His volume finally mobilized the kid, who managed to get a grip on his moaning
father despite his bloody hands and hoisted him to his feet. Evan plucked the
rest of the arrows out of Ollie’s quiver before he could disappear, then shoved
the pair of them toward the nearest stairwell. Their injuries didn’t look too
bad. They’d probably both live to fight another day.
Although
if this was their idea of fighting, everyone would be better off if they stayed
at home.
Not nice,
Evan thought as he fired a pilfered arrow at the next crix to make it past the
pikemen, a larger specimen that hissed menacingly when he cracked its shell. It
reeled like a drunk, though, and he was able to jam his knife into its brain
with little danger. But there’s no place
for nice when you’re fighting for your life. He’d offered to help train the
archer corps before, but had been bluntly rebuffed. Might have to insist.
The
sound of the machine gun rang in the air, ugly and beautiful all at once. Their
gunner was a good shot, really good, but he was too busy taking out fliers to
help with the horde coming over the wall, and over it they were. Evan fired his last arrow straight into the eye
of a crix not ten feet away, partly on and partly over the wall. He ran to it
and shoved the quivering carcass off the edge, diverting half a dozen others
toward their next meal, but it wasn’t enough. The crix were still coming, four
or five bodies deep as they crawled up the wall, mandibles clacking and leg blades
singing a haunting chorus. The pikemen would be overwhelmed soon, and there
weren’t enough archers left on this section of the wall to do much good. They
needed a strafe.
“Hey!”
he shouted at the gunner, hoping against hope that he’d be heard above the
noise. “Flare!”
The
man didn’t even glance his way, still focused on shooting down harpies. Their
feminine faces contorted with agony as the bullets tore into their flesh, the
girlish illusion ruined by the cluster of razor-like teeth framing every scream.
“Flare!” He started running toward the
turret, dodging the pikemen engaged in direct combat. He could climb up there
and—
Shing!
Bright white pain shot through Evan’s left calf and emerged as a half-choked
shout. He turned to face the raccoon-sized crix that had sliced into his leg
even as he drew his right foot back. Too fast for the creature to counter, he
kicked it just beneath its jaw. The beast flew onto its back, writhing and
squirming, and Evan jammed his knife into its throat and twisted the blade
before it could right itself. His glove was soaked with blue now, but he kept
his grip—salamander skin didn’t slip. He pulled the knife free and kept
running, forcing his gait to stay long and smooth. He didn’t have time to
limp—they were going to be overwhelmed, and their idiot of a gunner wouldn’t even
notice until a crix pulled him out of his perch.
The
easiest way to get up the turret was to take the stairs, but those weren’t
accessible from the outside, so Evan found purchase for his hands and began to
climb.
It
was only twenty feet. It felt like twenty miles, especially when a tiny crix,
no bigger than the palm of his hand but no less deadly for it, jumped straight
at his face. Evan saw it coming and managed to parry it with the knife, barely
maintaining his hold on the wall with his other hand. The crix hit the ground,
but it wasn’t hurt, and it gathered itself to jump again. This time Evan met it
with his boot, and the steel in the toe impacted the beast’s head hard enough
to crack the carapace. The crix fell again, twitching uncontrollably, and Evan
turned back to the climb.
He
hauled himself over the edge of the turret, then threw up his hands when he
found the gun swinging around to point at him. “Whoa, easy, relax!”
“What
the fuck are you doing up here?” the gunner demanded. His lank brown hair was
held back from his face by a red kerchief, and his eyes blazed with
indignation. “Get back down to your post!”
“We
need a strafe! Or we’re going to lose this section of the wall and all the
defenders on it.”
“I decide when we need a strafe, not
you!” He swung the gun around and fired off a few shots at a distant cluster of
harpies. “You’ll manage.”
“Look
at our complement—it’s down by half with injured.” Injured or dead. “We don’t have the archers or the ammo to slow
down the crix enough so the pikemen aren’t overwhelmed.”
“You
bein’ up here isn’t helping! I can— Oh, shit.” The gunner pivoted again and
continued to fire, winnowing through an incoming cluster of fliers in a spray
of blood and feathers. “Yeah! Take that, you bitch-faced pigeon fuckers! Take— Hey!” He grabbed for the flare gun that
Evan had just lifted from his belt, but too late—Evan aimed it into the sky and
fired. A few moments later, a burst of red exploded above them. The defenders
on the wall cheered.
In
the distance, Evan could just make out one of Forge’s dragons—Gorot, such a
dark green he was almost black—turning away from whatever he was fighting and
flying ponderously toward the wall. The dragons and their riders were spread
thin these days, only three of them left with the mass and strength to engage
with whatever might come at them across the ruin of the old city.
Once
Gorot and his rider, Susan, got close enough to flame, the gunner—still glaring
at Evan—lifted his megaphone and shouted, “Cover!” Fighters all along the wall
pulled back to the far edge, and eager crix followed them.
Hundreds
of monsters died instantly as a dense spray of fire roasted them in place
against the wall. The heat was brief but intense, the burning warmth clinging
to cold concrete in the form of charred gore. The crix already on top of the
wall lost their focus, scattering in panic at their confrontation with an
immeasurably more powerful beast. Some leapt back down the wall; others were
skewered as they scuttled about, either by defenders or their own frantic
cousins. Gorot turned to make another pass, but a sudden rumbling roar sent him
heading back the way he’d come, and stopped everyone else in their tracks out
of pure shock.
“Oh
god,” Evan breathed. “Manticore.” He hadn’t seen a manticore in the flesh since
leaving Marble, but he’d never forget that roar. The sound echoed across the
city, and in its wake came the creature itself. As tall as a dragon but
thicker, stronger, this beast with a shockingly human face, a lion’s body, and
a killing, quill-covered tail was one of the deadliest and most destructive
monsters roaming what used to be the United States.
It
wasn’t in and of itself so dangerous to a dragon—they were armored and could
fly, after all, and enough fire would drive off even something like this. No, the
greatest danger a manticore posed to a dragon was to his rider. The quills in
its tail could be fired like darts, and they were poisonous on top of being
wickedly sharp. If a dragon got too close, the odds of their rider escaping
injury were . . . not good.
Evan
and the rest of the defenders watched in anxious silence as the two dragons who
were closest engaged the manticore. It leapt at them like a cat jumping for a
bird, dodging their fire with the speed of a snake. Two on one should have
favored the dragons, but they were already tired from the earlier battle, their
flight slower than it should have been. One of them—Lyra, the oldest dragon,
grizzled and gray and missing half her teeth—was glanced by a leaping paw as
she banked around the beast.
The
move destabilized her flight, tilting her dangerously toward the ground. That
was when the manticore fired his quills. Evan couldn’t see them fly, but he saw
their effects clearly enough. One second, Lyra was attempting to stabilize
herself and then—
A
dragon’s roar was different from a manticore’s, less of a growl and more like
an instrument, a clarion trumpet. Usually clear and smooth, Lyra’s roar now was
tortured, a sound of pure, animalistic grief and rage. Evan could just barely
make out the silhouette of a tiny figure dangling limply from Lyra’s back. His
heart spasmed in his chest, his withered empathy reaching out but still unable
to connect to the dragon. He was broken, and with the loss of her rider, Bram,
so was Lyra.
Lyra
abandoned the skies, diving straight at the manticore and spewing flames from
her maw. The manticore ducked low and darted forward, but Lyra caught his
hindquarters with her claws as she crashed to the ground, and dragged the beast
in tight before smashing hard into an old pile of rebar.
Evan
winced as he heard a loud crack
reverberate across the valley—she had likely broken a wing, and just as
obviously didn’t care. The manticore bit and scratched, but Lyra wouldn’t let
go, rending it as she fought to bring her fire to bear again. For a moment it
seemed like she would prevail, but the manticore was more agile on the ground.
It got beneath her long jaw and dug its fangs into her throat. Her scream was a
death knell now, tapering off after several agonizing seconds of pain.
The
manticore had no time to celebrate its victory. Gorot and Kisthe converged on
it from opposite directions, fire blazing so hot it was nearly white as it
poured from their throats. The beast, still tangled with Lyra’s corpse,
couldn’t avoid both jets. Half its body caught fire, the long, dangerous tail
shriveling and curling like a dead match. It swatted fruitlessly at the sky,
enormous paws grasping greedily until the very end. When it died, it did so
with an enormous shudder that even Evan could make out.
The
dragons screamed with grief. The defenders watched with breathless dread. And
the remaining crix reversed direction and scuttled, en masse, toward the
carcasses.
Chapter
Two
Evan
stood beneath one of the goalposts of what had once been Denver’s football
stadium, now Forge’s dragons’ den, and shivered, his hands tucked under his
armpits. Yesterday’s fight was old news, leaving only the memory of dragonfire
for warmth. Snow had come during the night, tiny, frozen flakes dropping bitter
and desultory from the sky, an insult of a shroud for Lyra’s and Bram’s bodies.
The bodies of dozens of crix were stacked above the far entry to the stadium,
collected by the surviving dragons to be eaten later. Even grieving as they
were, they had to eat, and the meat of their kills was the simplest option.
The
stadium blocked the worst of the wind, but the help it gave Evan was limited. He
didn’t have the means right now to bargain for suitable winter clothes. His
jeans were still a little damp from washing out yesterday’s blood, and had been
patched so often they were almost more stitch than cloth. His sweater was thick
and warm, at least, and the leather jacket helped, but his gloves were too thin
to be much good against the cold.
He’d
tied his hair back and shaved away three days’ worth of brown stubble from his
too-sharp jaw and cheekbones, a futile genuflection in the direction of
respect. He still felt shabby compared to everyone else—most potential riders
went out of their way to dress up for Choosings, like the dragons gave a shit
what they wore when they could feel what was in their hearts.
It
was so strange, living in a place where some people were profoundly better off
than others. In Marble, everyone had shared what they owned, whether they were
a rider, a fighter, or a cook. Here, the riders were the upper echelon of
society. They got to live in special apartments near the stadium that housed
the dragons, they got extra rations, and they had first pick of everyone’s
ammunition. Their lives were dangerous, of course—being a rider was never
safe—but Evan didn’t think they were much more dangerous than fighting from the
wall.
He
shivered, glanced around at the small crowd that waited uneasily with him—all fellow
empaths—and thought about monsters.
Evan
had never known a world without monsters.
He
knew they hadn’t always been here, of course—not the way they were now. Even
when he’d lived in Marble, the tiniest little mountain town still standing on
this side of the continental divide, there’d been evidence of the way things
used to be. Cabins without bars across the windows and doors, buildings that
were designed to keep out bears, not beasts. Old Coca-Cola ads on the wall of
the general store, once a bright, attractive red, now faded to a pinkish gray.
Empty boxes of ammo that had been mass-produced—flawless bullets, lined up in neat
row after neat row, with no fear of using them up because, according to what he
knew of the internet, you could just go online and buy more. Amazing plenty.
Astonishing variety. Delivery.
Nothing came by delivery anymore, not between cities—the monsters would kill
you in the dead zones that the Plains had become.
Evan
didn’t know exactly how the rifts had opened, those massive holes between
dimensions that had ushered in a flood of the worst of another world’s
offerings. The only way people had survived was by clustering in their most
defensible areas—mainly cities that had been vastly reshaped to provide a safe
haven inside of thick walls—and by making alliances with the dragons.
Dragons,
it turned out, had a peculiar empathic ability that a small percentage of humans
shared. It didn’t stop at a simple connection, though—dragons loved the humans they bonded with, and protected
that bond with their riders ferociously. If their rider was killed, the dragon
almost inevitably left behind the city they’d helped, too brokenhearted to stay.
Riders kept dragons close, and more importantly to the governor, controlled.
Evan
thought of Lyra and tightened his jaw. Word had gotten around that he had been the one to fire the flare
that’d brought help to the wall. Some people—and the son of a bitch gunner, Dale
was his name, was definitely one of them—thought Lyra was dead because Gorot
hadn’t been there to fight the manticore as well, because he’d been off
strafing the wall that didn’t need it,
could have held, stupid, idiot, bring him in, KICK HIM OUT! Apparently, to
them, Evan had cost the city a dragon. Bad
enough he couldn’t keep his own alive, now he’s killing ours as well.
Governor
Townsend hadn’t agreed. Not because he liked Evan, really—in fact, Evan was
pretty sure the man regretted allowing him to stay five years ago. Towns, even
big ones with over ten thousand residents like Forge, were hostile to strangers
in this day and age. Evan had been the only survivor of the Marble massacre,
and the first newcomer to petition to live in Forge in a decade.
But
Townsend had let Evan stay in the hope that he would bond again with a dragon,
however unlikely that might be. Evan had failed at every Choosing, and had instead
proven his worth to the city as a smith instead of a rider. Still, as an
empath, even a broken one, he was required to attend, and today was the fourth since
he’d arrived. No one would meet his eyes, and no one came close enough to talk
to, much less touch.
Evan
told himself it didn’t matter, and stamped his feet in an effort to get more
heat into them. The sooner the dragons came out, the sooner he could get back
to his workshop. He wasn’t going to get caught short of arrows again.
“There,”
a woman murmured, pointing to the far end of the field. Dragons were emerging
from the massively-enlarged tunnel that had once welcomed men in uniform who’d
made a living playing ball games, of
all the ridiculous things. Evan snorted quietly and turned his attention to the
fledglings. They were worth looking at, even if none of them were meant for
him.
Gorot
and Kisthe were a mated pair, and every year they brought a new egg into the
world. After a year’s careful incubation, a dragon was born from it. Over the
past forty years, thirty-eight of those eggs had hatched. Three of them had
grown mature enough to claim riders, but all had died in a truly terrible
battle last summer. Too young, too green, their scales not tough enough yet and
their riders not skilled enough to effectively defend them . . .
their deaths had been tragedies. The entire city had mourned their loss, but
none more so than their parents. Frankly, Evan thought it was a miracle that
Gorot and Kisthe were letting more of their young emerge at all. With Lyra gone,
though, they needed all the help they could get to stay alive to rear the rest
of their hatchlings.
That
was why the Choosing was today. Whether the fledglings were ready yet or not,
the city needed them. If they were lucky, the young dragons would last more
than a single season.
There
were three of them total, the oldest of Gorot and Kisthe’s surviving offspring.
The largest was as big as the courthouse back in Marble—which was to say, not
big but not despairingly small. The littlest one was no larger than a one-room
cabin. It had bright black scales and coppery eyes, and was so beautiful that
Evan had to lower his head to hide his sudden, unwelcome surge of emotion. God,
there was no way such a tiny dragon would survive in combat. Don’t pick someone, don’t pick anyone, go
back to the nest and live and grow stronger.
They
couldn’t feel his urgency. Of course they couldn’t—Evan was broken. Still, it
hurt a little bit to watch them advance across the dead field, catch the eyes
of every human in the group in turn, and flinch when they encountered the blank
spot that was Evan. The biggest veered to the right, heading for a young man
dressed like a blacksmith. That was good, at least—a rider needed to be strong
if they were going to keep themselves and their dragon safe in the sky.
Evan
saw the man’s grin, heard his, “Me?
Really? Thank you, oh fuck, thank you!” He threw his arms around the slenderest
section of the dragon’s neck and stood there for a long moment, gasping and
trying not to cry, until one of the caretakers gently interrupted the moment to
lead them both away. They needed time to bond, to get to know each other,
before they could begin training together. A year was standard, but there was
no way that was going to happen now.
The
pair would be lucky if they got a month. Idiot
kid. It’s wonderful, it’s exciting, not
a romance but a powerful, transformative love nonetheless, nothing you’ve ever
known but everything you’ve hoped for—until you lose it.
The
second dragon was the color of milk that had gone slightly off, white with a
tinge of yellow. Its snout was shorter than the others, and it had a heavier
body and shorter legs. It was a tank of a creature, not a fighter jet, and just
looking at it made Evan’s heart pang with remembrance. Juree had been built the
same way. Built to last, his father
had said, and she had lasted, from
his grandfather through his father all the way down to him. He was the one
who’d broken the streak. There was no dragon to pass on to his child now—which
was for the best, really, since Evan knew himself well enough to figure that
he’d probably never have one of his own.
This
dragon chose a woman, older than most of the other candidates, with faint
streaks of gray marking her dark hair. She carried herself like a fighter, and
if the tight nod she gave her dragon was any indication, she knew the odds they
were up against. There was none of the young man’s exuberance in her, just a
calm, almost resigned acceptance. For a moment, Evan wished he knew her name.
She seemed like someone who might understand.
Only
the small one was left, and it practically frolicked from person to person,
wide eyes gleaming with curiosity and excitement. As it came closer to Evan, he
knew from the slow, cold curl in his guts that he couldn’t handle coming face-to-face
with it. He didn’t want to see it recoil in disgust once it got a better sense
of him. He didn’t want to smell the musk of its scales or feel the banked heat
of its fire. Touching it would break him all over again.
Evan
gritted his teeth and turned his back on the dragon. The people closest to him
murmured, and one of them whispered, “Rude bastard,” but he didn’t care. He
would stay—as an unbonded empath he was legally bound to stay, it was one of
the conditions of being here in Forge—but he wouldn’t look. It would be better
for both of them.
Instead
he stared straight ahead, down the gray, dingy tunnel that he and the other
candidates had been led out of, and tried desperately not to focus on anything
at all. Not the barren walls that used to separate players from fans, not the
few disjointed chairs that were left in the stands above the tunnel itself, not
the man in the black suit and cloak standing to the right of it, his hands
resting on the shoulders of a child—
Wait,
what?
Evan
blinked and refocused. There actually was
a man there, tall from the looks of him, but that was about all Evan could make
out from here other than the long, pale fall of his hair over his shoulders.
The child in front of him had the same pale hair, but cut shorter, and was
holding the edges of the man’s cloak in front of his body like a blanket.
What
were they doing here? If the man or his child was an empath, they should have
been out with the rest of them for the Choosing. It was strange, though—Evan
had done this before, he knew the other empaths in Forge by sight if not by
name, and he didn’t recognize these two. Newcomers? Where the hell were they
from?
Almost
nobody traveled these days; it was way too hard to get from one fortified city
to another. Hell, the closest city to Forge at this point was Cheyenne up in
what used to be Wyoming, and they still told stories about the disaster that
had befallen the last group trying to make that trip. Had this man and boy just
been kept under wraps so far? Were there special circumstances made for the
child for some reason?
Curiosity
kept Evan staring at the pair, until a tiny wave from the boy made him realize
that he’d been caught out. Shit, he was
being rude now, right? If they were allowed to stand back that far, then the
people in charge knew about them and had made arrangements and it was none of
Evan’s damn business. He should turn around, he should—
The
boy waved again. Evan, despite himself, lifted his hand and waved back.
“The
choices are made!”
A
wave of relief swept over him, and Evan turned around just in time to see a
sylph of a girl throw her arms around the black dragon’s neck. God, she
couldn’t be more than fifteen. He felt like he was going to puke. He made
himself stand with the others long enough for the newly bonded pair to leave
and, permission given to retreat, then hurried out of the stadium as fast as
his injured leg would let him.
As
he passed through the entrance of the tunnel, the boy and his father were
nowhere to be seen.
