“There’s no one else left to blame.”
They were quiet for a long minute.
“It was my idea. No one had ever successfully explored the Badlands. Just an excursion here and there on the edges.” Shea felt the need to explain. “Over a thousand years and we only have the barest glimpse into the world before the cataclysm. I wanted to see. I wanted to explore and make life better for everyone. The Badlands are one of the few untouched places; the chance to make a name for myself was ripe for the picking.”
“Until everyone died.”
Shea made a sound of agreement. “Until everyone died.”
That was the kicker. So many friends. People who followed Shea. People who trusted she knew what she was doing. Their voices still haunted her dreams.
“Why do they blame you for the current turn of events?”
Shea was quiet, not able to put into words the thoughts coursing through her head. “We have stories of what lies at the heart of the Badlands. They’re stories passed along for centuries. I thought they were myth, something made up by our elders to explain the unexplainable.”
Turned out she was wrong. Those stories were just the barest glimpse into what waited there.
“The elders think we penetrated the heart—that we were in danger of waking what slept there.”
“But you didn’t.”
Shea took her time answering. “I told them that we barely made it past the first marker. There are five total.”
“And the truth?”
“The group fell apart long before that. There was dissention almost as soon as we crossed into the Badlands.” Shea didn’t like thinking about that time. She’d prefer to bury what happened and move on. “Shortly after reaching the first demarcation, the golden eagles descended. We’d already lost several people. They carried off half of our number, leaving the rest to fight among ourselves.”
Fallon rested a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, saying without words that he was here. That she wasn’t alone.
“Some of us wanted to continue on; the rest wanted to go home.”
“You split up.” Fallon sounded sure of his answer.
She nodded. “Not at first. We tried to stick together and agree on a course of action. There were too few of us to have a good chance of surviving if we split up, so I made the decision to pull us out. I told the rest they’d follow, or I’d have them excommunicated from our guild.”
Shea had told the elders she was the only one to survive the eagles, that by some miraculous turn of events she had survived where the others had not.
“A few days later, three of our number decided they weren’t coming home, that they had come too far. They got up one night and disappeared into the mist that had descended while we were sleeping. I sent those who remained home while I went after the three.”
She should have left them to their fate. If she had, maybe things would have turned out differently.
“I tracked them several miles before finding two of their bodies. The third was too damaged to identify. The mist must have affected their senses, or maybe they just lost their caution, because they’d wandered into a bantum nest.”
The bantum was a beast whose smell, that of rotting flesh and garbage, preceded them. It was very easy to know when you were close to a nest. The pathfinders should have been able to easily avoid it.
“I don’t remember too much after that. Everything blurs together. I remember being afraid and constantly running from something. My people found me several weeks later, delirious and raving.”
“What about the men you sent back?”
She shook her head. “They never made it. We don’t know what happened to them.”
They’d probably gotten disoriented much as Shea had or been overtaken by the mist and been unable to find their way out. She never should have left them. It had been stupid of her.
“You blame yourself for their deaths.” It wasn’t a question. Not just theirs; everybody who went on that mission. “You must know that you would have probably suffered the same fate had you stayed with them.”
She lifted one shoulder. “Maybe, maybe not. I do know that none of us would have been there, if not for me. I planned that expedition, everything that happened can be laid at my feet.”
He arched one eyebrow, his expression understanding and chiding. “That’s an arrogant assumption.”
