The Reader (13 page)

Behind the cabin, the woman was already passing into the forest, but the boy paused. He waited for Sefia and Archer, fretfully drumming the barrel of his rifle.

“Clovis,” the woman hissed from the shadows.

The boy took Archer's hand. Archer was so anxious that he nearly recoiled, but the boy held on, his small fingers tightening over Archer's. He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. “Thank you.”

Archer swallowed, making his scar shift over the motion of his throat.

The boy dropped his hand and followed his mother into the jungle. The man went last, and he didn't look back when he melted into the darkness.

Archer closed his fingers over his palm where the boy had touched him. His mouth twisted.

Sefia slipped the package of knives to him. “We did a good thing,” she said. She meant it, but she also felt angry and hollow
inside, with this hot buzzing like bees. No one had warned Archer. No one had warned her.

Voices from the trail dragged her out of her anger. She and Archer ducked. The yard blazed with light from the cabin. You could see everything. They scrambled behind a woodpile at the far end of the clearing and breathed quiet.

She tugged at his arm and pointed into the woods. They could still get away.

Archer ignored her. He was already taking out the knives, testing their weight. The moonlight glanced off their polished bone handles.

Maybe he hadn't understood. She pulled at his arm again, but he shrugged her off. His hands flashed through a series of signs: the collar he'd made on the ridge; his sign for hunting; three fingers for the family. He was going to fight. He was going to give the family time to get away.

Sefia was about to protest when Hatchet's men reached the clearing.

There was a sudden crash as the door of the cabin broke in. Boots beat on the floorboards like drums.

“No one's here!” A few seconds later: “Food's still warm. They can't have been gone long.”

Another voice answered, deep and gravelly. Sefia remembered that voice. It belonged to Redbeard, the one who loved violence, the one carrying the tongs. “Check the woods,” he growled.

Shadows shifted across the ground as two figures appeared around the side of the cabin. They carried rifles.

Archer looked back at her. His eyes seemed to glow eerily
in the darkness, like those of an animal. He pointed into the woods, away from the clearing, and he didn't need words to communicate what he meant.

Hide.

Sefia scrambled away into the trees, dirt flying from beneath her hands and feet. She found a small hollow in a stump and squeezed inside. Rotten pieces of wood crumbled around her ears and shoulders, into the collar of her shirt. Spiders or beetles crawled over her skin. She'd barely gotten herself inside when she heard the first scream, cut off at the end. It came from her left, closer to the clearing.

She listened hard in the dark.

“What was that?”

Muffled cursing. “It's Landin. Throat's been cut.”

She tried to calm her breathing. The seconds lengthened into minutes. She heard the rustling of clothing and the quiet creaking of leather. Someone pulled back the hammer of a revolver. She cursed herself for picking a hiding spot with such terrible visibility. She could only imagine what was happening.

Where was Archer?

Her legs were cramping, begging to be moved. Sefia switched positions as quietly as she could, but her bow and quiver rubbed against the inside of the stump. She winced as the log crumbled around her, sounding like an avalanche to her heightened senses.

She paused. She had her bow.

She slid out of the stump and unhooked the bow and quiver from her pack. She listened for any change in her surroundings, but the nearby trees were silent, their leaves motionless.

Nocking an arrow to her bow, she peered over the stump. The orange glow from the clearing silhouetted a man at the edge of the yard, searching the trees with a rifle at his shoulder. After a few seconds, he pivoted away from her and began pacing the perimeter of the clearing.

When she was certain he wasn't looking, Sefia stalked forward, keeping low, like she would if she were hunting. She hardened her jaw. She
was
hunting.

Silently, she crept forward, pausing outside the ring of light. The man was rounding the drying racks on the opposite side of the clearing. As Sefia raised the bow, she recognized him: it was One-Eye, who'd built a stretcher for his dead friends and carried them away into the jungle to be burned. If she loosed the arrow now, it would strike him. She'd hit birds at farther distances than this. But she hesitated. The string cut into her fingers.

Do it,
she told herself. He was an impressor. He deserved it, for what he'd done to Archer.

You can't fail again.

Her fingers twitched. Across the clearing, One-Eye circled around to the front of the cabin and disappeared.

A heavy hand descended on her shoulder and yanked her off her feet.

Her body left the ground and collapsed in the clearing. The impact knocked the bow and arrow from her hands. Her head spun. She tried to sit up.

A huge, hulking man stood over her; he was so big the revolver in his hands looked like a toy. Catching sight of her red-fletched arrows, the man grinned, stretching the crooked
scar on his bottom lip. That scar. She recognized him from the first night—the man who'd had to remove the remains of the impressors' meal.

“So you're the one who caused all this trouble.” His voice was hot and dry as embers, but it made her shiver.

A gunshot rang out from the other side of the cabin. No screams. She twisted, trying to see what had happened. She kept picturing Archer lying on the ground. Archer motionless. Archer dead. She glared at the impressor in front of her. “Yeah,” she spat. “
I'm
the one.”

The man cocked his pistol.

A round black eye and the moonlight on a silver barrel.

A smile warped by a scar.

Sefia took one last breath. The sound was sucked out of the clearing. She didn't even hear the dirt scatter beneath her as she scrabbled backward.

She blinked.

Then her vision took over.

The man's lips parted, and his mouth, his chin, the veins in his neck, the joining of his bones, his shoulder and arm and wrist all turned into light. Bands of it flooded his body, twisting around his torso and crossing his limbs, spiraling down his legs and over his boots.

He pulled the trigger, but it wasn't a bullet that came out at her. It was a band of light.

She'd seen the light before, but she'd never seen it like this. Strings of it radiated from his body, twining and intertwining, on and on, back and back, whirling around this moment. The world spun.

In the spirals of light she saw him trip. Just a kid, he lost his footing on the slippery dock. His face splitting on the splintered edge. That's how he got his scar.

The currents shifted, and she saw his birth. His mother had been a woman with curly hair and a mole on the side of her neck, and she'd named him Palo, after her father. Palo Kanta. That was his name. She saw his sisters and half brothers and the raggedy old cats he rescued from the streets, fistfights, blood, the smell of sewage, the first time he ever held a gun, his first murder, the women he'd loved or thought he'd loved and really just wanted to own. She saw a recurring nightmare in which he tried to outrun a rising tide but no matter how fast he ran, no matter how hard he pumped his arms, it caught his feet and legs and body, and it always swallowed him up.

Nausea struck her, and she gasped. She saw his death: knifed outside of a bar, past midnight with no witnesses.

She could see all the interconnected ways his life was knotted up, and how it had led here—to her own death. She could see it coming, the whole thing: the moon and the trail of smoke leading into the sky, the bullet speeding toward her, the light streaming out behind it like waves. It would puncture her. The cords of her life would snap.

She didn't want to die. She had so many questions left to answer. She was suddenly filled with hot, biting anger. She hated this man with the scar on his mouth, this man who was preventing her from doing what she had vowed to do.

Sefia found her feet. She put all her strength in her legs and lunged, swiping her hand through the streams of light. She felt her muscles burn, her bones buckle under the pressure. But the
tides shifted. A wave of gold roared away from her, sparking with whitecaps.

This wasn't her death anymore.

Maybe there was thunder. Or was it the sound of the bullet exploding from the chamber—delayed?

The man ripped.

His threads snapped.

Making fragments.

The sound came rushing back into the world.

She looked down at her arm, expecting to see ruptured flesh and broken bones, but it was unharmed. The world was spinning, twisting tighter and tighter around her skull. She looked wildly for the man with the gun, but he wasn't there. He was on the ground, gasping. With a hole in him.

He was just a man now, no longer filled with light. The light was leaking out of him, growing dimmer and dimmer. The scar on his mouth no longer looked menacing. His face was crooked, yes, but sad, like the reflection in a cracked mirror.

He looked at her but didn't speak. Maybe he couldn't. Maybe his words were leaking out of him too. He looked at her . . . and then he wasn't looking at her anymore. He wasn't looking at anything anymore.

Sefia fell to her knees and pressed her hands to his wound. His blood was slick and lukewarm between her fingers. Her hands turned red.

This was what it meant to kill someone.

She looked up and saw Archer standing at the corner of the cabin, staring at her.

She looked down again. The world had gone wet and blurry. Was she crying?

Palo Kanta. That had been his name.

Then Archer was beside her, pulling her to her feet. He took her hands unflinchingly and held them in his own. He put his forehead to hers. He didn't speak.

She tried to jerk away. “Where are the others?”

He pulled her back to him and shook his head. Holding up three fingers, he pointed northwest toward Hatchet's camp.

Only half of the impressors had survived the encounter. Archer must have killed two of them.

“They ran?”

He nodded.

“Because of me?”

He nodded again.

As he led her to the cabin, she tried to explain. The man had shot her. The bullet had come at her. And she didn't know how, but she had turned it back. She'd seen his story—and then she had violated it, changing the man's death.

Changing everything.

He sat her by the front door and brought her a pot of water and poured it over her hands. The liquid splashed over her skin and onto the ground, creating a small puddle of mud. Archer gently rubbed the blood away. The color. The stickiness. Sefia let him.

While he raided the cabin for supplies, pulling open drawers, grabbing things out of the cabinets, she sat dumbly in the doorway, rubbing her fingers one by one. She had killed a man. She
kept picturing the vacant expression, the slack jaw. Her head ached.

“I didn't want to kill him.” She found the words, feeling for them like foreign objects in the dark.

Silence inside. Then Archer sat down beside her. His fingers strayed to his neck—the scar. He understood that sometimes you did things out of necessity, things that were horrible, or underhanded at best, things you wouldn't do if you had a choice.

“I always knew I wanted to kill
someone
,” she said. “But not him . . . and not like this.”

Whatever
this
was.

Archer put his hand on her shoulder. He had a pack now, filled with items. A dark ribbon of blood caked his left temple. The gunshot she'd heard earlier. The bullet must have grazed him.

“You're hit,” she whispered.

He touched the side of his head with his fingertips and showed them to her. The blood was already drying. Then he collected her bow and helped her to her feet. He led her around the side of the cabin, past the body of the man he'd killed. One-Eye. His throat had been split, and the dirt was dark beneath him. Sefia tried to focus on where she placed her feet.

They crossed into the trees. The silver leaves rustled. The loam was soft and spongy beneath their feet. Archer got Sefia to direct him to her hiding place in the stump, where her pack was still stashed, and then they walked into the woods—Archer leading, Sefia following.

I
t was all so quick, so improbable, that if she hadn't seen it before, if she hadn't done it herself, she never would have believed it.

There was a gunshot.

A burst of smoke and a lashing of fire.

And the girl sent the bullet spiraling back into the man's chest.

Crouched just beyond the reach of the light, Tanin fought to steady her breathing. She was suddenly aware of her body, her lungs, the ache in her chest. Behind her, the trackers hefted their rifles and watched for her signal, but she didn't move.

The girl dropped to her knees by the man's side. Tanin marveled at her. She was so young, but she had the same lampblack hair, the same dark eyes.

And she knew Manipulation. If she had already mastered
the second tier of Illumination, there was no telling what else she could do.

“Now,” the Assassin said. She blended into the darkness so neatly that even her voice was a shadow, like the breath of a nonexistent breeze.

“Not yet.”

The girl was trying to stanch the wound. She was going to fail.

She looked like
her
. Tanin hadn't been expecting that. Hadn't thought it would matter so much.

There was a crackling in the undergrowth, and a man burst from the trees behind them, his round face twisted in anger. He took one look at Tanin and the trackers and raised his rifle.

This she could handle.

A glance at her men, a flick of her fingers.

The lead tracker ran his knife across the man's throat and caught the corpse as it slumped to the ground. The man's head lolled forward, his short-billed cap tipping over his lifeless eyes.

The Assassin edged forward, toeing the pool of light. “Why not?”

“You didn't know . . . her.” Tanin grimaced. Even after all this time, she still couldn't bring herself to use her name.

“It's not
her
.”

No,
she
was dead. And Tanin hadn't even been there to see it. To hold her hand or wipe her brow or whatever you did when your loved ones were dying.

She had to do something now. This was what she'd come for, wasn't it? Tanin scanned the clearing, her gaze skimming over
the cabin, the fallen bow and arrows, the bodies. “She doesn't have the Book on her.”

“You could make her tell us. It would be easy.”

Tanin watched the boy help the girl up. The light from the cabin flashed on his collar of scar tissue.

He was a candidate.

Tanin shook her head. Out of all the companions the girl could have chosen, she had picked a candidate.

“Look at his neck,” she whispered, her voice trembling. When was the last time it had done that?

The Assassin didn't take her eyes off the girl. “So what?” Her voice dripped with condescension. “Serakeen's dogs bring another one to the Cage every few months.”

Tanin passed her hand over the hidden pocket of her vest where she kept the folded page. “Edmon used to say there are no coincidences, only meaning.”

Ten years, Serakeen had been paying impressors to fetch him scarred young killers.

Twenty years, she had been searching for the Book.

And now here they were, both of them together.

It had to mean something.

“We can take the boy too, if that's what you mean.” The Assassin slid her sword an inch out of its sheath. The smell of copper bloomed around them.

Tanin caught her by the elbow. “I said no.”

The Assassin glared at her, but Tanin's attention had already moved on.

The boy took the girl in his arms and led her back to the
cabin, where she collapsed on the steps, all knees and pointy elbows. Awkward. Vulnerable.

The Assassin wrenched her arm from Tanin's grasp. “This is what we came for. Capture her. Take the Book. It has to be now.”

“If he's the one, you couldn't take her with a hundred swords.”

“I only need one.”

With a wave of her hand, Tanin directed the trackers back into the jungle, where they slipped away like eels in black water.

She turned on the Assassin. “You will obey me in this, or you will be removed from this assignment.” Her voice cut. “I have no use for subordinates who can't follow orders.”

The Assassin balled her fists until the leather glove on her left hand creaked. “You never trust me,” she said. “Not like you trusted her.”

“You're not her.”

The Assassin's eyes widened at the sting of Tanin's words, and she whirled away, darting soundlessly into the undergrowth.

The girl was sitting on the cabin steps, rubbing her fingers as if she could erase what they had done. For a moment, Tanin wanted to go to her. Hold her, maybe. She didn't know.

Slowly, she backed away from the clearing, fading into the shadows beneath the trees until she could no longer see the girl.

Sefia.

A reader and a killer.