“That’s actually my problem. While normally I like my projects to be seamless, no troll is going to get caught in this.” Stef stood beside me and bumped my hurt shoulder again, ignoring the way I cringed. “Look right there. You can see the ropes and pulleys.”
Ah. Now that he’d pointed them out, I could see the rusted metal and crisscross of ropes. “Right. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s okay that the ropes and pulleys are invisible—mostly—but I need something to draw the trolls here.”
“And who says that has to be you?” He couldn’t have been much older than I was. But like he said, his skills were useful—maybe—which might have made a difference in his decision to take the initiative. After all, humming at a troll wouldn’t hurt it.
Stef sauntered over to a low branch and pulled himself up to sit on it. “No one said I have to do it.” He shrugged. “My aunts might kill me if they knew what I was doing, but I don’t live with them, and I bet they’ll think differently after I present the trap to the Council. I want the Council to hire me to build more traps, and maybe other useful things in the future.”
How ambitious.
“Anyway,” he went on, “we have to do something, right? The drought is driving the trolls toward the nearest source of fresh water, and that’s our springs and wells. They keep wandering into the Community when they smell food. There was a bad attack a few weeks ago—”
“I know.” I could still hear the screams from the last attack, the crash and bang of collapsing walls, and Mother’s cries as she urged me to flee. And I . . . I’d been rooted by fear. Unable to move. Unable to help. Only when the life had been squeezed from her and the troll slain by warriors did I jerk into a run, through the falling debris and rising dust. “I remember the attack.” I’d never forget it.
He squinted at me. “Right. Well. I want to test out this idea. If it works, the Council will let me put up more traps throughout the forest. Hopefully that will discourage them from coming closer to the Community.”
“What can I do to help?” The words were out before I realized. Troublemaker or no, Stef was doing something about the trolls. Or trying to.
Stef lifted an eyebrow. “What makes you think you’ll be any help?”
“You said you needed something to draw the trolls to the trap. A lure.”
Stef nodded.
“What about shiny pieces of metal?”
“They’re trolls, not raccoons. They don’t care about shiny pieces of metal. Though something shiny would help draw their attention.”
“What do they want, then?”
Stef threw up his hands. “How should I know? Do I look like a troll?”
“A little.”
He rolled his eyes.
“My brother is a scavenger. He can take us into the old city to look for something.” I pushed my sweat-dampened hair out of my eyes and glanced westward, but the crumbling towers weren’t visible through the dense forest.
“That sounds like your brother is useful, not you.”
Without another word, I turned and started deeper into the woods, back on the same aimless path as before. Footfalls thumped behind me, but I ignored Stef’s approach, even when his hand landed on my injured shoulder. I shook him off, keeping my face hard against the pain.
“Sorry.” Stef kept my pace. “I was joking. Can’t you take a joke?”
I stopped walking and balled up my fists, but I wouldn’t hit him. I’d never hit anyone in my life, and I wouldn’t let this obnoxious stranger be the first.
Stef glanced at my hands, though, and raised his eyebrows. “Wow. Calm down.”
“Only jerks blame their victim for not being able to handle a joke. Or tell them to calm down.” I was overreacting. Stef couldn’t possibly know this was a refrain I’d heard too often from Father and Fayden, but the words were out.
Stef held up his hands in surrender, his cocky smirk vanishing. “You’re sensitive.”
“Go lick a plague house.”
“Really sensitive.” He made a face. “I said I’m sorry. And I do mean it.”
I sucked in a breath of the hot, muggy air to clear my head. “I’ve had a bad day.” A bad life was more like it. And Mother’s death meant that it would only get worse. She’d liked my music. She’d understood it. Now she was gone.
Stef eyed my shoulder, then my cheek, and nodded. “Guess so.” I didn’t offer details, and—incredibly—he didn’t ask. “Well, do you think your brother would help?”
“He might.” The truth was, I hardly saw Fayden anymore. My encounter with him this morning had been unusual. “You said trolls come looking for water, right?”
He nodded. “As far as anyone’s been able to tell.”
I rubbed at my sore shoulder again, thinking. “What about colored glass? Blue glass, to trick them into thinking there’s water reflecting sunlight. But then they get too close, and wham.” I made a tiny explosion with my hands. “Or whatever your invention is supposed to do.”
Stef narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, that might work. I’d have to position the glass just right, so it would mimic running water. But where would we get blue glass? Neither of us can afford to buy anything like that.” He left an opening, but I didn’t tell him how I knew about it. “How many traps could we make from it?”
Where had that “we” come from? I ignored it. “I don’t know. Several.” I hesitated. “I can show you the glass.”
“Right now?” His eyes widened with delight.
I checked the sky; it was almost noon. Who knew how Father would react if I didn’t make it to Janan’s gathering today?
Humiliate myself, or help a potential new friend find a way to defend the Community against trolls?
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll go right now. It’s in the old city.”
“And your brother?”
I wished I’d never brought up Fayden. Older, stronger, more useful. “I think he’s already there, in the old city. I don’t know if we’ll see him. Anyway, I know where the glass is. You should be able to figure out whether it will work by looking at it, right?”
Stef nodded.
“Good. Then let’s go.” I waved him down the path, away from the Community.
The sun beat through the thinning canopy, making sweat drip down my face and neck. Insects buzzed and birds called; the woods grew noisy with thirsty wildlife as we walked. Just before we broke through the woods, Stef stopped and faced me, his expression twisted with amusement.
“It finally occurred to me,” he said. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“You didn’t ask.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m asking now.”
“My name is Dossam.”
“Sam.”
“No, it’s Dossam.”
Stef shook his head. “Well, I like Sam better.”
“Well, it’s not your name.”
“I’m the one who has to say it.”
“And I’m the one who has to answer to it.” I bumped his shoulder with mine, cringing as a burst of pain flared. But I smiled, too, because he was smiling.
“I think we’re going to be great friends, Sam.”
In spite of the way my day had started—and the wreck of the last couple of weeks—I believed him.
3
MOUNTAINS REACHED IN the distance, cradling the sky in their curves and crests. The volcano spewed smoke into the air, but everyone said it would be ages before it erupted again. Maybe so. Still, the smoke and ash that poured from the crater every day was certainly ominous.
Stef and I trudged into the old city, its ruins heaps of twisted metal and burned rubble. Since the Cataclysm and the volcano eruption a generation past, only shreds of the city were left, but still, every day, people like Fayden went to scavenge for anything that might be useful.
It was well after noon by the time we took to one of the cleared roads, and I began leading him down the familiar path to the concert hall.
“What do you think happened here
?” The cracked pavement crunched under Stef’s boots.
Great walls of rubble rose on either side, no doubt carefully sifted through during some early scavenger’s quest for valuable, useful items. Now there were only unidentifiable pieces of plastic, wires, and palm-sized bits of metal with glass screens—though most of the unbroken bits of glass and metal had been torn off and repurposed.
“What do I think happened where?” I couldn’t see the domed peaks of the concert hall yet, not with the crumbling steel towers and collapsed bridges in the way.
“Here.” He gestured around the falling city. “During the Cataclysm.”
I shrugged. “I think the same thing everyone thinks: earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions. It’s not a stretch. Just look around. Buildings shook apart. There’s a seam of volcanic rock running through the lower areas of the city.”
“Right, but what made the Cataclysm?”
“I don’t know. Trolls?” A troll had certainly ended my world.
“And how did humans build all of this if they had to compete with so many large predators?”
“Are you saying there weren’t trolls before the Cataclysm?” Didn’t he ever stop thinking and questioning things? As far as I could tell, our lives were short, brutal, and would never have enough music. Knowing the past wouldn’t change our present, and our time would be better spent surviving our reality.
Stef shrugged. “If there were, humans had a much better way of dealing with them than we do.”
“They had electricity.” Fayden’s voice behind us stopped us both, and I cursed the chatter that had distracted me from hearing his approach. “Dossam, aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?”
I turned to face my brother. “I’m not going.”
“Ah.” My brother glanced toward the Community, hidden beyond the heavy veil of trees. Streaks of dirt ran across his face and throat, staining the collar of his shirt brownish gray. He carried a knife in his belt, and a sling; sometimes, wild animals and worse ventured into the old city. “What brings you here,” he asked, “besides pointless questions about the old world?”
I crossed my arms and did my best to avoid looking in the direction of the concert hall, toward the center of the city. “Our own business.”
Stef glanced between us for only a heartbeat. “Sam is going to help me find something.”
“Sam?” Fayden swiped at a trickle of sweat coursing down his temple. “Who’s Sam?”
“Dossam. He wants to be called Sam.”
“I do not—”
Stef waved away my protest. “Here’s the short version: I almost crushed Sam to death with my troll trap, and then he offered to lead me to some colored glass to help draw trolls toward it.”
Fayden’s jaw went slack and he turned on me. “You know where there’s colored glass?”
I heaved a sigh and glared at the cloudless sky. “Can you just leave us alone?”
“Not until you tell me why you’re not in the Center right now volunteering for Janan’s quest.”
“Why would I want to go on Janan’s quest?”
“Because he’s our leader? Because he trained hundreds of warriors to protect the Community? Because he made this valley safe enough to grow crops and families?”
I let sarcasm flood my snarl. “Great job he’s done, too.” The valley wasn’t that safe. Mother and a dozen others were proof of that.
“Janan can’t help the drought, or hunger and plague that come after that. It’s not his fault.”
No, it wasn’t. But still. “How many quests has he been on now, with promises that everything would change when he returned? Four? Five? Whatever he’s looking for, it doesn’t exist.”
Fayden threw his hands into the air. “You’re insufferable. Is this what you do all day? Complain about Janan and come up with ways to shirk your duties?”
“So I’m guessing you must be the brother.” Stef put on that smirk I was coming to know, and he studied us. “You don’t look alike.”
No, we didn’t. Fayden looked like someone who worked with his hands, trekked through the forest, and braved the most dangerous areas of the old city. I was considerably softer, with untamable curls on top of my head, rather than my brother’s—and my father’s—cropped haircuts. The only thing Fayden and I had in common was our brown complexion, inherited from Mother.
Stef let out a long breath. “Maybe we should go, Sam.”
I didn’t break my glare from Fayden.
“So where’s this glass?” Fayden asked after a moment of uncomfortable silence. He’d kept my gaze. Neither of us could look away.
“We’re not selling it.”
Fayden cocked an eyebrow. “If you knew about that kind of glass, you could sell it and move away from Father.”
“It’s for my trap,” Stef reminded him. “We’re catching—and killing—trolls.”
My brother grew quiet, his features softer. He broke our stare to look at Stef. “Will it work? The trap?”
“Maybe if I get the glass.” Stef motioned down the road. “Can we go?”
Fayden faced me again, his expression a mask of curiosity. “You don’t want the glass for yourself?”
Why couldn’t he understand that I thought stopping trolls from hurting more families was more important than my personal wealth?
Because Fayden was like Father: hard, practical, and he didn’t let sentimentality get in his way.
“We’re not selling it,” I said again, and turned on my heel. If he followed, then he followed.
“So what’s your name?” Stef asked as they started along behind me.
“Fayden.”
“Great. Fay.”
“No. It’s Fayden.”
Amusement colored Stef’s tone. “I suppose we could call you Den.”
“Is Dossam letting you call him Sam?”
“He will.”
“That seems unlikely.” But Fayden chuckled and they began chatting about junk they found on the side of the road. Stef was more than eager to talk about old pieces of technology, water systems, and how people could communicate across the world without delay. “Everything was instantaneous.”
Stef whistled. “Sounds incredible. Maybe one day, we’ll be able to have that back.”
Speaking of unlikely things.
We’d all be dead before that kind of technology came back to the world. There was no time to work on that sort of thing; we were too busy just trying to survive.
“There are enormous piles of mysteries,” Fayden said. “Scavengers keep it in pits around the city, because most of it doesn’t work anymore, and never will again. I’d be happy to show it to you, though.”
“You know what all of it was used for?”
“Some.” Fayden’s tone was all casual superiority. He’d been scavenging for three years now, hearing stories from those who’d been doing it longer. “There are handheld devices with cracked screens, round bulbs that used to emit light, and stoves that cooked using only a metal coil to heat pans.”
The best things didn’t need electricity to power them, though. Musical instruments, tiny boxes that played music when the knob was twisted, and books.
I let their discussion become white noise as we rounded a corner, and instead stretched my hearing to catch the edges of other voices around the city: scavengers working, animals skittering through trash, and buildings creaking in the wind. Soon, maybe they’d just fall into the ground and be swallowed up.
Low growling ahead made me pause. I held up a hand, and the other two fell silent behind me.
Another growl came from across the road, behind a wrecked vehicle, its windows smashed out long ago. Then a third growl.
“Dogs,” Fayden breathed. “There’s a pack of feral dogs around here.”
Three lanky beasts slinked out from behind rusted signs fallen to the earth and from behind that vehicle. They were all big dogs, with patchy black fur that had matted around their legs and scruffs. Ribs stuck out like shelves, and ears had bee
n nipped. One of them limped.
“They’re hungry,” Fayden said. “And there aren’t as many as before.”
They were starving and desperate. They’d never have approached three humans otherwise.
I glanced at Stef, who shook his head. “Don’t look at me. I don’t deal with wild animals. Unless you want to trap one.” He took three long steps backward. “I’ll just be over here if you need me to drag your corpses off the road.”
“I’ve never met anyone so brave,” I muttered, and stayed put.
“It won’t come to corpse-dragging.” Fayden moved forward, making one dog bare a set of broken, yellowed teeth. My brother pulled out his sling and snatched up a fragment of shattered pavement. “These guys are supper. Ours, or someone else’s.”
My stomach turned over, and I stopped just short of touching my brother’s arm. “Don’t kill them.”
“They’re going to die anyway.” He loaded the sling and gave it a few turns as he stepped closer to the dogs. The one with broken teeth prowled forward, deepening its growl.
“But we don’t have to kill them. There’s nothing on them anyway. You couldn’t sell their bodies.” My heart pounded as I watched the other two dogs shift behind their leader. Dust coated their fur, and they were all so painfully skinny. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. “Just scare them away and let’s go.”
“They’d bite you if they had the chance.” Fayden’s eyes flashed toward me. “They’d tear open your throat and eat you.”
I said nothing.
Fayden swore. “Fine.” He loosed the pavement shard and aimed just before the lead dog.
The beast barked and lurched toward us, but the other two dogs crouched and ducked their tails between their legs as my brother grabbed a handful of rocks and pebbles.
“Get!” He released a spray of pebbles at the first dog. “Get out!” When he stomped and waved his hands, all three dogs scampered off.
I exhaled relief. “Thank you.”
“Don’t.” Fayden put away his sling. “The dogs hadn’t been that hungry, or a few rocks and some waving wouldn’t have scared them.”
“They looked plenty hungry to me.” Stef frowned in the direction the dogs had fled.