NotAfraid
August 18th, 2011, 12:41 AM
This shattered world hardly resembles the place we once called earth. White icy white flames exploded over the landscape three hundred years ago, and much has changed in that time. It has become a bitter, barren world of fighting, of ice that once traveled like a wildfire and ruined it all.
The humans took more than they needed, those selfish creatures. They used and borrowed from the earth. Some say the gods were angry; that this is punishment for ruining what was given to them. Some say it was bound to happen any day, and this was just it. Some say it was bad luck. Some rely on science to come up with an explanation.
Not one of them has the vaguest idea of the truth. None but us.
Long extinct creatures came back to life, only more dangerous. As the humans deserved. People froze. They starved. An illness started, the Silver Plague, able to kill in days. And most of all, war was incited.
Ever since the discovery of magic in 1782, anger had risen in a large grey cloud of a storm pitting science against magic, until it burst suddenly in 2213 and started the war. People had seen the magic, but didn’t quite believe it. They thought there had to be a reason for everything, an explanation for the insane world they lived in. Science and magic decided to form different countries, Ornaki and Kamar, both equally stupid.
For years they lived like this, until Ornaki learned that Kamar was testing children for imagination, to end the freeze. Plucking children from their homes and using them as experiments. A semi-truth, a vastly inflated reality blown up until it was to the point of being a rumor. Kamar wasn’t being cruel in their testings. They wanted the truth. But Ornaki, ever so ignorant and rash, declared war on Kamar against the injustice.
That’s when the R.O.N was formed from the bitterness between countries, the growing war between them. Us, who wanted to stay out of the conflict. Us, who want to wipe out the face of both magic and science, to live in a peace filled world. Us, who will melt the freeze and start a new age.
Children are the only ones that can stop the freeze, but no one knows that. Instead, they stay ignorant, people fighting from childhood on both sides in the Young Army.
I swear to myself that I will get back at these humans for destroying the earth. I will kill the Creator, a young child from the past, although she does not know her status yet. The prophecy says they can defeat me, but they can’t. I will also kill the silver and gold ones too.
Most of all, I will destroy those keys.
1
A night breeze drifts through the half opened window, along with the sound of a child laughing. Reyna looks up from the old, battered book in her hand, her flashlight still aimed at the pages. The laugh is smaller and higher pitched than an adult voice, yet seems to be hiding someone older, someone that knew more than any child ever should. Suddenly, the house no longer feels safe. The temperature drops. The curtain ruffles in the darkness blown by the wind. Moonlight slips through the glass into the dimly lit room, spilling onto the bedroom floor. The broken mirror across the room reflects the moon, its image distorted by the long; ugly crack running down the middle.
For a moment, Reyna catches a glimpse of a pair of pale eyes are staring at her from the mirror. Too bright to be human. She wonders if she just imagined it, but she knows her imagination, as sharp as it is, can’t create something that vivid.
The last traces of laughter are drowned out by the wind. It fads until there is nothing. Reyna looks around. She shivers and pulls her comforter closer to herself.
This is stupid. I’m acting like I’m six again.
Reyna picks up the flashlight and looks back at her book, staring at the faded yellow pages, at the messily scrawled words of the diary, smelling the strong scent of ink that she has always loved. All the words are familiar, all of them she knows she can recite by heart. Normally, reading this book can take her mind off of anything ever since she found it in the attic two years ago. The watercolor drawings are still so realistic. Reyna used to think they were looking back at her. But magic didn’t exist anymore. Magic was dangerous. Magic is what tore the world apart. Or that’s what they said.
Reyna tries to relax and release tension in her shoulders. But it feels impossible with the eyes she has seen. The room is as tense as she is.
She feels a strand of someone else’s hair brush across her cheek. It is like the river after winter, the coldness of the snow still trapped in the water. “Keep quiet.”
Then, the voice vanishes, leaving Reyna alone in the darkness.
Then she hears the knocking on the door.
“What is it?” Her mother’s voice, thick with exhaustion.
“We tracked magic coming from your house.” The voice is masculine and low.
Reyna leans forward, her eyes that were too big for her face the size of silvery blue suns. Still holding the leather bound book, she creeps from the bed and sticks her head through the wood bars of the staircase.
“What do you mean?” asks Reyna’s father, his voice quivering. Reyna doesn’t know what was wrong with magic, but she did know from the sharp tone of the voices downstairs that whatever it is, it’s something serious.
“Prove it to us,” says one of the voices.
“We don’t need to prove it.” Father’s voice has tightened, and Reyna can hear his clenched teeth from the staircase.
“We’ve been watching your house for a while. That was just the proof we needed.”
“I heard from your neighbors you have a little girl,” a woman says, as though starting a kind conversation. “What’s her name?”
Reyna gasps, suddenly realizing what is happening. The R.O.N. The Republic of Neutrals. She has been warned against it many times. It is a nation of magic and knowledge hunters, people that battle people with magic. Reyna doesn’t know why they hate magic and science so much, but she remembers hearing about it while her parents talked about it long after her bedtime. She learned how her parents were revolutionaries against the King and the R.O.N, how they planned to have Reyna as a spy once she was older. “Soon,” they would say. “But not yet.”
Her parents told her once that she was chosen to do something great, but weren’t sure what yet. There is one reason and one reason only they came to get children to work for the King, and that is because the children had imagination.
They’ll be dead by the time I’m done with them, thought Reyna. Dead, and lying in a pool of blood. Reyna grins wickedly. It didn’t matter that she’s only eight. That didn’t mean she couldn’t attack them and leave them dying on the floor.
“What are you talking about?” Panic in her father’s voice, loud and clear.
“Don’t even try to lie to us. We know you are.”
Reyna leaps from her place on the floor and thunders down the stairs. I’ll show them what teeth and nails look like after they tear their throat. They can’t use me for experiments. They won’t use me for experiments.
When Reyna was about three, it was made clear to her that the research her parents were doing on the silver plague and the meetings against the R.O.N and the King was to be kept a secret, and that she was supposed to hide her parents’ studies.
The dark shapes of four adults came into the room and grew larger. Reyna recognizes the frazzled shape of her mother’s hair and the sharply edged flaps of her father’s jacket.
A woman’s voice says, “Hi, Reyna.” A pair of hands reach out to grab her and pull her shoulders forward, but Reyna jerks back, her hands cupped over her thin, white shoulders.
“We’ll get you away from these terrible people, won’t we?” the woman croons.
“I promise, in a it, you won’t even remember this.”
The fingers, like thin, cold tree branches, grab her shoulders, this time succeeding. She wants to scream, and almost does. All that comes to her mind is one thing: Escape.
She digs her fingernails into the hands until she feels it make a deep crevice in the invisible skin. Then another pair of hands grabs her, yanking her further backwards. The hands grabbing her shoulders unfortunately do not let go of her, and responded by digging into Reyna’s own shoulders until she feels a trickle of blood run down her skin. Her mother was screaming.
Let me go. LET ME GO.
They pulled her harder and harder away from the bedpost that Reyna now desperately clings to. She then loses awareness of how many there are. They wrenched her from her place in the room, her hands involuntarily untwining from the wood that tied her to her other life. She heard, just for a second, the laugh once again, louder than ever.
Her parents struggle into the mass of hands, trying to get to their daughter. But they pull her through the whole house, and out the door, Reyna kicking and screaming.
They pull her outside. The air is cooler and clearer than usual, and snow has started to fall. A string of horses are tied together, waiting. This is all she can see before the mass of bodies closed in and everything around her was nothing but dark velvet cloth.
Before she knows what was going on, they place her on a pony that jerks its little head up into the air. Someone cracks a whip behind them, and the pony shoots forward, leaving Reyna clinging to the horse, half on and half off of its bare back. She could feel the pony’s muscles bunch underneath her half bare legs, and she twines her fingers into its mane.
“Reyna!” Her father is getting closer and closer, his hands reaching for his daughter. Reyna reached back for him, suddenly not caring that she might fall off the horse. The clang of metal and the sound of her parents calling her followed.
They are far away already when Reyna asks where they’re going.
She doesn’t dare leap off the pony, because about an hour ago the man said, “If you so much as turn in that direction, your windpipe will be sliced in two.” He then stroked his glinting steel dagger lovingly and gave a crooked smile. Reyna doesn’t doubt the damage that can be done with that simple little blade, but she doesn’t doubt how much damage can be done by fingernails and teeth, either.
It has been a few hours since Reyna was dragged away from her parents, and she has gone completely numb. Even if she does try and escape, she couldn’t get far in the cold. But she isn’t going down without a fight. She just has to wait for the right opportunity…
“You’re going to go work for the King. It’s an honor. You’ll be safe there.”
“I want to go home,” Reyna says, gritting her teeth. “I’m not stupid. I know the stuff they do there.”
“You’re eight years old. How can you know?”
“I just do. And if you don’t believe me… lets just say feeling is believing.”
“Huh. Fiery little thing, aren’t you?”
“Never, ever call me little.”
“Okay, okay, you’re enormous. Big, enormous, and intimidating,” the Agent says mockingly.
There are other children in the train too, all wide eyed with horror. Some are missing a limb, like one little boy missing an arm where a stump of a shoulder grows. He’s about her age, and he rides a pony next to Reyna. When Reyna gets a closer look at the boy, she notices how thin he is. His ribs and hipbones stick out at sharp angles, and there are purple circles outlining his eyes and red outlining his cheeks.
Starvation. No doubt about it. Reyna has seen the malformed and thin bodies all too many times.
Reyna leans forward and whispers to him, “You’re going to work for this “king” guy, too?”
“Yeah,” he says. “They’re taking us all to the doctor first, though, to make sure we’re healthy as servants. I’m going to fight for him. What branch are you going to be in?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Figures. Most of the time they don’t tell kids like you what branch they’re working for. Figure it’s gonna scare them too much. I know though. My parents chose to send me to the Young Army.”
Reyna feels her stomach move uncomfortably inside of her. “They gave you up?”
“Yup. They said it’ll have more food there.”
It suddenly dawns on Reyna. “Wait a second, did you just say you were going to take us to the doctor?”
“Yeah. So?” the boy says.
“Lordy, are you an idiot? They’re going to use us for experiments, stupid?”
“But my parents said-“
“Look. I honestly couldn’t care less about you, or what your parents said. I’m escaping.”
“But they’ll kill you!”
“I’m not going to let them. Magic’s dangerous in their eyes,” says Reyna. “They think it caused the Freeze. And honestly, I’m not letting them take my imagination for granted.”
“People blame others for a lot of stupid stuff,” Max says. “No one caused the Freeze, it just happened. They always sort of knew, right? That it was going to happen?”
“They knew it was going to come. They need the kids to collaborate in the end and end the Freeze. The reason is there isn’t enough imagination.”
“I never heard it like that.”
Reyna watches the boy’s arm stump rotate as he speaks. Then she asks, “What’s your name?”
“Max,” he says simply, and rides on.
“I’m Reyna,” she murmurs through cold lips.
“Nice name,” Max replies, almost inaudibly.
Reyna feels her horse’s muscles stop moving, the jerk of the train of horses stopping at a speed that nearly throws her off balance. The man calls, “We’re stopping here tonight.”
Reyna perks up in her mind. Her body is too heavy and tired to sit up on the pony, and none of what is happening feels real. Her hands are numb, and she is starting to lose all feeling in her pinky.
She slides from the pony and onto the snow on the ground. For once, she doesn’t care that she’s so cold it’s starting to feel hot, or the burning sensation in her blood. The white is like a blanket of peace that threatens to fade to black any moment.
God, just let me die.
“Reyna.”
It’s the Max’s voice, although Reyna isn’t sure if she’s imagining it or not. How does he know her name? She ignores it. She thinks she sees one of the snowflakes glitter in blue colors as they gather together in another layer on the already iced over snow.
“Up. You’re gonna die if you don’t.”
It isn’t the man’s voice. It’s a voice of a boy. She looks up, and sees Max. Not looking at her with concern or any emotion at all. His eyes are dull, and his mouth is set in a remarkably perfect straight line.
He reaches his arm out and takes her hand, pulling her to her feet. How long has she been lying there, watching snowflakes that have no way of being real? Reyna whispers, “Thank you,” and Max gives a slight nod in reply to let her know that he has heard.
That night, they start making plans to escape.
Laying in the tent, eyes staring, wide open, at the tarp covering them from the cold, Reyna and Max are talking. Reyna buries her face in the pillow, as if it will make her forget about her parents, and lets the tears come in a wet spot on her pillow. It is too dark for Max to see, fortunately, because crying is a sign of weakness.
“I heard from one of my brothers that the King beats kids and eats the bodies for breakfast.”
Reyna makes a face. “Charming.”
“Charming?”
“Sarcasm?”
“No, really. He isn’t a very nice guy, say?”
Reyna smiles. “Most likely not.”
“He uses kids. Makes them his human slaves.”
“Who exactly is this “king” guy?” Reyna has heard so many things about him. How the King is the ruler of all of the four countries: Kamar (science), Ornaki (Magic), Simier (planning) and Gazzia (invention). How he rules it with an overbearing hand. But nothing about who the King is, why he has so much power.
Max drops his voice to an almost whisper. “Nobody knows…”
Reyna rolls her eyes. “You’re hopeless.”
“Well, do you have any good ideas?”
Reyna is quiet. Then Max watches the darkened, shadowed corners of her mouth curve upward in an upside down rainbow, her eyebrows the other direction in a sot of clever, almost evil smile.
“Yes, actually.”
“Well, where’ll we go?”
“You know the Ornakian Young army?”
The Young Army, as its name suggests, is four legions of children fighting each other for resources and supplies. People always talk about them as barbaric, evil creatures that have reverted back to their primitive ways and have no ethics whatsoever. But this is only what Reyna has heard, and not necessarily the truth.
“Y-yeah…”
“We can escape to there. I hear it’s preparing to rise against the King. It’s just across the Splitting Lake. We could make it.”
Smoke rises upward in a sea of gray, the only gray in the white and black world. Two figures sneak out of a tent.
“Come on. Grab your horse.”
Max grabs the other pony, a plain buckskin gelding with no markings or anything special whatsoever about his appearance, perfect for escaping. “Hey, beauty,” he croons to the pony, who looks at him lazily from where he stands.
Reyna mounts her own pony and turns the mare around, tucking the leather book into the saddle bag. The pages are miraculously undamaged, and the cover is just as beautiful as it always, with the same golden engravings and colors as always. Reyna remembers reading it with her mother, and feels more protective of it than ever before. She isn’t worried about it not making it through the Splitting Lake. Once, she spilled water on it and it remained undamaged, its pages just as beautiful as the before.
“Okay,” whispers Reyna. “Let’s go.”
Reyna thinks about all the other children in the tents, unaware that there are others escaping from the agents, running away while they are forced to work for this “KING” person, whoever that is, and how they will have wanted to come with, to go back to their families and back home to the place they know. They don’t deserve to work, no more than Reyna or Max do. But how can seventeen children escape together as one big group?
Rena leans forward and urges the mare into a gallop. There is no way to try a stealthy approach, as Agents and Markrae are not deaf and can hear hoofbeats in the snow. Max follows, guiding with his one handThe hoofbeats form into a rhythmic beat. One-two-three. One-two-three. Soon the sound is accompanied by shouting.
“Escape!”
The loud noise sends the mare shooting forward faster, and Reyna clings on like a tiny, curly headed burr in the horse’s black mane. Getting further and further away feels unreal, like they really aren’t leaving, like they really aren’t running from being the King’s slave.
Reyna turns around, one of her hands outstretched in defense, and a silver blur explodes from her hands, hits one of the agents in the chest, and blows him a hundred feet backwards into a tree. He lies in the snow, blood pooling from a cut in his forehead.
How did I do that?
Reyna expects the agent to get to his feet and curse, but he lays there in the snow. Dead? Alive? Reyna isn’t sure.
And she never will be sure. Just then, one of the Agents starts shooting at them with arrows. Whizzes of wood with a flash of colorful feathers stuck to them. One grazes Reyna’s arm, peeling off a small amount of skin with it.
Reyna grips to book to her chest, refusing to let go. Her other hand rips the horse’s mane as they ride away.
Did I kill him?
Before the Agents can run from the tent and other captives can look bleary eyed from the tent flaps, only a mark of hoofprints remains. Not a sound, not a whisper, not a hoofbeat. It’s like the two children are gone, disappeared from existence, taken to a far off place where no one will find them.
The humans took more than they needed, those selfish creatures. They used and borrowed from the earth. Some say the gods were angry; that this is punishment for ruining what was given to them. Some say it was bound to happen any day, and this was just it. Some say it was bad luck. Some rely on science to come up with an explanation.
Not one of them has the vaguest idea of the truth. None but us.
Long extinct creatures came back to life, only more dangerous. As the humans deserved. People froze. They starved. An illness started, the Silver Plague, able to kill in days. And most of all, war was incited.
Ever since the discovery of magic in 1782, anger had risen in a large grey cloud of a storm pitting science against magic, until it burst suddenly in 2213 and started the war. People had seen the magic, but didn’t quite believe it. They thought there had to be a reason for everything, an explanation for the insane world they lived in. Science and magic decided to form different countries, Ornaki and Kamar, both equally stupid.
For years they lived like this, until Ornaki learned that Kamar was testing children for imagination, to end the freeze. Plucking children from their homes and using them as experiments. A semi-truth, a vastly inflated reality blown up until it was to the point of being a rumor. Kamar wasn’t being cruel in their testings. They wanted the truth. But Ornaki, ever so ignorant and rash, declared war on Kamar against the injustice.
That’s when the R.O.N was formed from the bitterness between countries, the growing war between them. Us, who wanted to stay out of the conflict. Us, who want to wipe out the face of both magic and science, to live in a peace filled world. Us, who will melt the freeze and start a new age.
Children are the only ones that can stop the freeze, but no one knows that. Instead, they stay ignorant, people fighting from childhood on both sides in the Young Army.
I swear to myself that I will get back at these humans for destroying the earth. I will kill the Creator, a young child from the past, although she does not know her status yet. The prophecy says they can defeat me, but they can’t. I will also kill the silver and gold ones too.
Most of all, I will destroy those keys.
1
A night breeze drifts through the half opened window, along with the sound of a child laughing. Reyna looks up from the old, battered book in her hand, her flashlight still aimed at the pages. The laugh is smaller and higher pitched than an adult voice, yet seems to be hiding someone older, someone that knew more than any child ever should. Suddenly, the house no longer feels safe. The temperature drops. The curtain ruffles in the darkness blown by the wind. Moonlight slips through the glass into the dimly lit room, spilling onto the bedroom floor. The broken mirror across the room reflects the moon, its image distorted by the long; ugly crack running down the middle.
For a moment, Reyna catches a glimpse of a pair of pale eyes are staring at her from the mirror. Too bright to be human. She wonders if she just imagined it, but she knows her imagination, as sharp as it is, can’t create something that vivid.
The last traces of laughter are drowned out by the wind. It fads until there is nothing. Reyna looks around. She shivers and pulls her comforter closer to herself.
This is stupid. I’m acting like I’m six again.
Reyna picks up the flashlight and looks back at her book, staring at the faded yellow pages, at the messily scrawled words of the diary, smelling the strong scent of ink that she has always loved. All the words are familiar, all of them she knows she can recite by heart. Normally, reading this book can take her mind off of anything ever since she found it in the attic two years ago. The watercolor drawings are still so realistic. Reyna used to think they were looking back at her. But magic didn’t exist anymore. Magic was dangerous. Magic is what tore the world apart. Or that’s what they said.
Reyna tries to relax and release tension in her shoulders. But it feels impossible with the eyes she has seen. The room is as tense as she is.
She feels a strand of someone else’s hair brush across her cheek. It is like the river after winter, the coldness of the snow still trapped in the water. “Keep quiet.”
Then, the voice vanishes, leaving Reyna alone in the darkness.
Then she hears the knocking on the door.
“What is it?” Her mother’s voice, thick with exhaustion.
“We tracked magic coming from your house.” The voice is masculine and low.
Reyna leans forward, her eyes that were too big for her face the size of silvery blue suns. Still holding the leather bound book, she creeps from the bed and sticks her head through the wood bars of the staircase.
“What do you mean?” asks Reyna’s father, his voice quivering. Reyna doesn’t know what was wrong with magic, but she did know from the sharp tone of the voices downstairs that whatever it is, it’s something serious.
“Prove it to us,” says one of the voices.
“We don’t need to prove it.” Father’s voice has tightened, and Reyna can hear his clenched teeth from the staircase.
“We’ve been watching your house for a while. That was just the proof we needed.”
“I heard from your neighbors you have a little girl,” a woman says, as though starting a kind conversation. “What’s her name?”
Reyna gasps, suddenly realizing what is happening. The R.O.N. The Republic of Neutrals. She has been warned against it many times. It is a nation of magic and knowledge hunters, people that battle people with magic. Reyna doesn’t know why they hate magic and science so much, but she remembers hearing about it while her parents talked about it long after her bedtime. She learned how her parents were revolutionaries against the King and the R.O.N, how they planned to have Reyna as a spy once she was older. “Soon,” they would say. “But not yet.”
Her parents told her once that she was chosen to do something great, but weren’t sure what yet. There is one reason and one reason only they came to get children to work for the King, and that is because the children had imagination.
They’ll be dead by the time I’m done with them, thought Reyna. Dead, and lying in a pool of blood. Reyna grins wickedly. It didn’t matter that she’s only eight. That didn’t mean she couldn’t attack them and leave them dying on the floor.
“What are you talking about?” Panic in her father’s voice, loud and clear.
“Don’t even try to lie to us. We know you are.”
Reyna leaps from her place on the floor and thunders down the stairs. I’ll show them what teeth and nails look like after they tear their throat. They can’t use me for experiments. They won’t use me for experiments.
When Reyna was about three, it was made clear to her that the research her parents were doing on the silver plague and the meetings against the R.O.N and the King was to be kept a secret, and that she was supposed to hide her parents’ studies.
The dark shapes of four adults came into the room and grew larger. Reyna recognizes the frazzled shape of her mother’s hair and the sharply edged flaps of her father’s jacket.
A woman’s voice says, “Hi, Reyna.” A pair of hands reach out to grab her and pull her shoulders forward, but Reyna jerks back, her hands cupped over her thin, white shoulders.
“We’ll get you away from these terrible people, won’t we?” the woman croons.
“I promise, in a it, you won’t even remember this.”
The fingers, like thin, cold tree branches, grab her shoulders, this time succeeding. She wants to scream, and almost does. All that comes to her mind is one thing: Escape.
She digs her fingernails into the hands until she feels it make a deep crevice in the invisible skin. Then another pair of hands grabs her, yanking her further backwards. The hands grabbing her shoulders unfortunately do not let go of her, and responded by digging into Reyna’s own shoulders until she feels a trickle of blood run down her skin. Her mother was screaming.
Let me go. LET ME GO.
They pulled her harder and harder away from the bedpost that Reyna now desperately clings to. She then loses awareness of how many there are. They wrenched her from her place in the room, her hands involuntarily untwining from the wood that tied her to her other life. She heard, just for a second, the laugh once again, louder than ever.
Her parents struggle into the mass of hands, trying to get to their daughter. But they pull her through the whole house, and out the door, Reyna kicking and screaming.
They pull her outside. The air is cooler and clearer than usual, and snow has started to fall. A string of horses are tied together, waiting. This is all she can see before the mass of bodies closed in and everything around her was nothing but dark velvet cloth.
Before she knows what was going on, they place her on a pony that jerks its little head up into the air. Someone cracks a whip behind them, and the pony shoots forward, leaving Reyna clinging to the horse, half on and half off of its bare back. She could feel the pony’s muscles bunch underneath her half bare legs, and she twines her fingers into its mane.
“Reyna!” Her father is getting closer and closer, his hands reaching for his daughter. Reyna reached back for him, suddenly not caring that she might fall off the horse. The clang of metal and the sound of her parents calling her followed.
They are far away already when Reyna asks where they’re going.
She doesn’t dare leap off the pony, because about an hour ago the man said, “If you so much as turn in that direction, your windpipe will be sliced in two.” He then stroked his glinting steel dagger lovingly and gave a crooked smile. Reyna doesn’t doubt the damage that can be done with that simple little blade, but she doesn’t doubt how much damage can be done by fingernails and teeth, either.
It has been a few hours since Reyna was dragged away from her parents, and she has gone completely numb. Even if she does try and escape, she couldn’t get far in the cold. But she isn’t going down without a fight. She just has to wait for the right opportunity…
“You’re going to go work for the King. It’s an honor. You’ll be safe there.”
“I want to go home,” Reyna says, gritting her teeth. “I’m not stupid. I know the stuff they do there.”
“You’re eight years old. How can you know?”
“I just do. And if you don’t believe me… lets just say feeling is believing.”
“Huh. Fiery little thing, aren’t you?”
“Never, ever call me little.”
“Okay, okay, you’re enormous. Big, enormous, and intimidating,” the Agent says mockingly.
There are other children in the train too, all wide eyed with horror. Some are missing a limb, like one little boy missing an arm where a stump of a shoulder grows. He’s about her age, and he rides a pony next to Reyna. When Reyna gets a closer look at the boy, she notices how thin he is. His ribs and hipbones stick out at sharp angles, and there are purple circles outlining his eyes and red outlining his cheeks.
Starvation. No doubt about it. Reyna has seen the malformed and thin bodies all too many times.
Reyna leans forward and whispers to him, “You’re going to work for this “king” guy, too?”
“Yeah,” he says. “They’re taking us all to the doctor first, though, to make sure we’re healthy as servants. I’m going to fight for him. What branch are you going to be in?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Figures. Most of the time they don’t tell kids like you what branch they’re working for. Figure it’s gonna scare them too much. I know though. My parents chose to send me to the Young Army.”
Reyna feels her stomach move uncomfortably inside of her. “They gave you up?”
“Yup. They said it’ll have more food there.”
It suddenly dawns on Reyna. “Wait a second, did you just say you were going to take us to the doctor?”
“Yeah. So?” the boy says.
“Lordy, are you an idiot? They’re going to use us for experiments, stupid?”
“But my parents said-“
“Look. I honestly couldn’t care less about you, or what your parents said. I’m escaping.”
“But they’ll kill you!”
“I’m not going to let them. Magic’s dangerous in their eyes,” says Reyna. “They think it caused the Freeze. And honestly, I’m not letting them take my imagination for granted.”
“People blame others for a lot of stupid stuff,” Max says. “No one caused the Freeze, it just happened. They always sort of knew, right? That it was going to happen?”
“They knew it was going to come. They need the kids to collaborate in the end and end the Freeze. The reason is there isn’t enough imagination.”
“I never heard it like that.”
Reyna watches the boy’s arm stump rotate as he speaks. Then she asks, “What’s your name?”
“Max,” he says simply, and rides on.
“I’m Reyna,” she murmurs through cold lips.
“Nice name,” Max replies, almost inaudibly.
Reyna feels her horse’s muscles stop moving, the jerk of the train of horses stopping at a speed that nearly throws her off balance. The man calls, “We’re stopping here tonight.”
Reyna perks up in her mind. Her body is too heavy and tired to sit up on the pony, and none of what is happening feels real. Her hands are numb, and she is starting to lose all feeling in her pinky.
She slides from the pony and onto the snow on the ground. For once, she doesn’t care that she’s so cold it’s starting to feel hot, or the burning sensation in her blood. The white is like a blanket of peace that threatens to fade to black any moment.
God, just let me die.
“Reyna.”
It’s the Max’s voice, although Reyna isn’t sure if she’s imagining it or not. How does he know her name? She ignores it. She thinks she sees one of the snowflakes glitter in blue colors as they gather together in another layer on the already iced over snow.
“Up. You’re gonna die if you don’t.”
It isn’t the man’s voice. It’s a voice of a boy. She looks up, and sees Max. Not looking at her with concern or any emotion at all. His eyes are dull, and his mouth is set in a remarkably perfect straight line.
He reaches his arm out and takes her hand, pulling her to her feet. How long has she been lying there, watching snowflakes that have no way of being real? Reyna whispers, “Thank you,” and Max gives a slight nod in reply to let her know that he has heard.
That night, they start making plans to escape.
Laying in the tent, eyes staring, wide open, at the tarp covering them from the cold, Reyna and Max are talking. Reyna buries her face in the pillow, as if it will make her forget about her parents, and lets the tears come in a wet spot on her pillow. It is too dark for Max to see, fortunately, because crying is a sign of weakness.
“I heard from one of my brothers that the King beats kids and eats the bodies for breakfast.”
Reyna makes a face. “Charming.”
“Charming?”
“Sarcasm?”
“No, really. He isn’t a very nice guy, say?”
Reyna smiles. “Most likely not.”
“He uses kids. Makes them his human slaves.”
“Who exactly is this “king” guy?” Reyna has heard so many things about him. How the King is the ruler of all of the four countries: Kamar (science), Ornaki (Magic), Simier (planning) and Gazzia (invention). How he rules it with an overbearing hand. But nothing about who the King is, why he has so much power.
Max drops his voice to an almost whisper. “Nobody knows…”
Reyna rolls her eyes. “You’re hopeless.”
“Well, do you have any good ideas?”
Reyna is quiet. Then Max watches the darkened, shadowed corners of her mouth curve upward in an upside down rainbow, her eyebrows the other direction in a sot of clever, almost evil smile.
“Yes, actually.”
“Well, where’ll we go?”
“You know the Ornakian Young army?”
The Young Army, as its name suggests, is four legions of children fighting each other for resources and supplies. People always talk about them as barbaric, evil creatures that have reverted back to their primitive ways and have no ethics whatsoever. But this is only what Reyna has heard, and not necessarily the truth.
“Y-yeah…”
“We can escape to there. I hear it’s preparing to rise against the King. It’s just across the Splitting Lake. We could make it.”
Smoke rises upward in a sea of gray, the only gray in the white and black world. Two figures sneak out of a tent.
“Come on. Grab your horse.”
Max grabs the other pony, a plain buckskin gelding with no markings or anything special whatsoever about his appearance, perfect for escaping. “Hey, beauty,” he croons to the pony, who looks at him lazily from where he stands.
Reyna mounts her own pony and turns the mare around, tucking the leather book into the saddle bag. The pages are miraculously undamaged, and the cover is just as beautiful as it always, with the same golden engravings and colors as always. Reyna remembers reading it with her mother, and feels more protective of it than ever before. She isn’t worried about it not making it through the Splitting Lake. Once, she spilled water on it and it remained undamaged, its pages just as beautiful as the before.
“Okay,” whispers Reyna. “Let’s go.”
Reyna thinks about all the other children in the tents, unaware that there are others escaping from the agents, running away while they are forced to work for this “KING” person, whoever that is, and how they will have wanted to come with, to go back to their families and back home to the place they know. They don’t deserve to work, no more than Reyna or Max do. But how can seventeen children escape together as one big group?
Rena leans forward and urges the mare into a gallop. There is no way to try a stealthy approach, as Agents and Markrae are not deaf and can hear hoofbeats in the snow. Max follows, guiding with his one handThe hoofbeats form into a rhythmic beat. One-two-three. One-two-three. Soon the sound is accompanied by shouting.
“Escape!”
The loud noise sends the mare shooting forward faster, and Reyna clings on like a tiny, curly headed burr in the horse’s black mane. Getting further and further away feels unreal, like they really aren’t leaving, like they really aren’t running from being the King’s slave.
Reyna turns around, one of her hands outstretched in defense, and a silver blur explodes from her hands, hits one of the agents in the chest, and blows him a hundred feet backwards into a tree. He lies in the snow, blood pooling from a cut in his forehead.
How did I do that?
Reyna expects the agent to get to his feet and curse, but he lays there in the snow. Dead? Alive? Reyna isn’t sure.
And she never will be sure. Just then, one of the Agents starts shooting at them with arrows. Whizzes of wood with a flash of colorful feathers stuck to them. One grazes Reyna’s arm, peeling off a small amount of skin with it.
Reyna grips to book to her chest, refusing to let go. Her other hand rips the horse’s mane as they ride away.
Did I kill him?
Before the Agents can run from the tent and other captives can look bleary eyed from the tent flaps, only a mark of hoofprints remains. Not a sound, not a whisper, not a hoofbeat. It’s like the two children are gone, disappeared from existence, taken to a far off place where no one will find them.