All that matters is the bridge. Reaching it. Getting through it, however the fuck I’m supposed to do that.
But Connie hesitates.
She stares at me, and I rinse the weak torchlight over the soil. Flattened soil, packed and treaded on over time.
A trail.
The breath is tugged out of me.
Relief slumps my shoulders.
A trail might not lead us to the next town, depending on the direction I take, but it does mean we don’t have to climb and cut and trudge our way through the thicket of a forest.
“Is that what I am?”
The sound of her voice is weaker than the wispy beams from the torch.
The corners of my mouth dig into my cheeks. A grimness—of guilt, I guess. Because she didn’t know what she is to that warrior, and I just gave her the worst news of her life in the worst way.
I wish I cared.
I don’t.
I just nod and push into step.
The light is weaker than it’s ever been. Like the battery is giving out.
It’s a fresh battery, or so I thought. Maybe it took a beating in the wave, or Samick got it out of an appliance back in the house, and it was already near-drained.
“We need to get to that town.” My boots stagger onto the trail. “This light isn’t going to last long.”
If I’m following the map and the compass right, then I’ll come across a town and a city on my way to the bridge—
And the final town, where the bridge is.
Sunken into a silence, one I’m certain is misery, Connie becomes a shadow trailing me.
Her mind must be going a hundred miles an hour, combing over every interaction she’s ever had with that beast, and comparing it to the have-nots in the group of human captives.
But she doesn’t say a word.
Not all the way to the fork in the trail.
Not as I check the map and compass, then decide on going downhill.
Not as we reach the bottom of the hill, and stumble onto a fucking massacre.
I turn the light over the faces of the corpses.
All of them, blank, and frozen—
And fae.
These aren’t freshly dead corpses. And they’re not wet. I don’t recognise any of them.
Not from our unit.
Connie tucks closer to my back, as though I’ll protect her from the dead, all seven of them.
