Chapter Seven: Pocketing Threads of Moonlight

Feel tranquility under the canopy of heaven -
Where stars wear the twinkle of chloroform.

- Robert Dummet

Ekaitza Jones was unsurprised when there was a knock at her door around midnight.

Nor was she surprised that Cor did not wait for a response.

The czarina of Pandora pushed the bedroom door open, just the tiniest crack, and peered into the dark room, and whispered, "Come on." She did not seem inclined to even try and sound persuasive; the Sonage girl's voice brokered absolutely no debate. Ekaitza should have known better than to try and argue, but arguing was one of the few things the smuggler did well, so she spoke nevertheless.

Ekaitza said, "They'll kill us if they catch us."

In the darkness, Cor's smile was very white. Snow over jagged rocks, Ekaitza thought, thin ice over a bear pit. "Don't you trust me, Jones?"

Not in the slightest.

Of course, Ekaitza's protest was a weak one. She was already fully dressed.

"Of course I don't trust you," she said, and slid from her bed, and crossed the room silently. Cor was dressed as a thief might - soft black boots and a long-sleeved black t-shirt and black canvas trousers, her dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.

Even like this, she managed to look like a rich girl. Well, Ekaitza thought, that was in her best interests. Poor girls couldn't pay you.

And she was certain that Cor would pay. The girl that gangs still called the Raven in the north did not have a reputation for screwing her associates over. That, too, was in Ekaitza's best interests.

So instead she said, her voice low, "you're not as clever as you think you are, Rouen."

They crept down the stairs. The entire safehouse was silent. The windows on each floor were lit a flickering red-orange from bonfires that the rebels had lit outside to keep themselves warm. Most of them were not staying too close to the safehouse, but had ferreted out some hidden places to sleep in the ruined shell of the town in the valley below which was, Ekaitza thought, probably why they had decided they could risk a fire. She had noted how cautious they were about those things, even here in the Wastelands; it reminded Ekaitza of cold nights in the taiga, when you knew that the only thing between you and the authorities was the thick mantle of night, which drew cold about you and drove the breath from your lungs. Those were the worst nights, when you had to choose which death would be slower: being caught by those who chased, or freezing to death in the snow.

Cor shrugged. "If I'm half as smart as I think I am," was her reply. "That's still twice as smart as you. I think we'll shake out alright. Now shut up. Wouldn't want to wake the king's pale dog, would we?"

Ekaitza scowled as they moved past the rooms on the first floor, which belonged to the group the rebels called, quite affectionately, the inner circle. Ekaitza wasn't yet entirely sure who made up that group - Enyakatho seemed a likely candidate, as did Field Marshal Uzokuwa, but she had seen them head out towards the abandoned town earlier in the night to set up camp. Why did that leave behind? "No," she agreed. The man they called Taj gave her the creeps like few other people could. "We wouldn't want that."

They reached the bottom floor and Cor again crept towards the door. For a rich girl, Ekaitza had to give her this - she knew how to walk lightly when she wanted to.

"I'm honestly appalled at this lack of security," Ekaitza muttered. "If we can get out, what's stopping people from getting in?"

Lissa Dove's laugh ghosted across the sand. As they rounded the house, Ekaitza saw that the ethereal blonde was sitting by the dying embers of the stove, resting her chin in one hand. With the other, she pointed towards the wide expanse of sand that spilled out in all directions as far as the eye could see - which, once the sun had vanished behind the horizon and left the entire Wastelands doused in an impenetrable layer of gloom, was not very far at all. "That," Lissa said simply. "Is what's stopping them."

Ekaitza could remember, when she was young, believing that she and her family lived on the very precipice of the entire universe, and if you ventured far enough out to sea, that eventually the ocean would meld with the sky and you would find yourself sailing through stars. If that had been one edge of the world, she thought, then surely this was the other. As they started to walk away from the safehouse, she imagined herself walking and walking and walking until she was adrift amongst the constellations.

At least there was some moonlight by which to navigate their way across the sand. They skirted the edge of the village - Cor allowed Ekaitza to lead, for it was the Baffin girl who knew how to guide their path by the stars in the night sky. You could go anywhere, Ekaitza thought, but the stars would always remain quite true.

They stayed quiet. She wondered what Cor had offered the blonde Likely girl to convince her out with her tonight. She certainly seemed the most reluctant component of the operation. "How far?", she asked now, her voice still grudging, and in the pale wan light of the night sky, Cor's eyes looked like two black pits in a pale face as she turned to Ekaitza for the answer.

"About five miles," was Ekaitza's response. At Lissa's expression, she elaborated: "Just over an hour if we keep our pace up."

"Then let's keep our pace up." Cor's voice was cold. Focused. That was how southerners always sounded, always acted. They had hearts of ice, the lot of them, Ekaitza's grandfather had always said, veins weighed leaden with frost. Was it because they knew they could spare the warmth?

She scanned the sky. Cor's instructions had been refreshingly clear: a long string of numbers, indicating the longtitude and latitude of the location to which she and Lissa needed to be guided. Ekaitza appreciated someone who knew what she wanted, and knew how to ask for it - in turn, she thought Cor seemed to appreciate someone who took a job without asking too many whats and whys. Someone who could do the job they needed to do.

Ekaitza could definitely do this. Far above them, the plough had rotated anti-clockwise about Polaris, so that it appeared on its side, lying very low, nearly kissing the sand, and Cassiopeia was shining, high and bright, in the west. Mintaka was only just rising in the east - within one degree of true east, Ekaitza knew - and when Ekaitza raised her hands and formed fists and gauged the angle of the north star, she could estimate the latitude of the safehouse, and their current location, and thus ascertain the path they needed to trace across the sand towards Lissa and Cor's rendezvous point.

It was almost soothing. Tracking was therapeutic, even in such an alien land. The Wastelands of sand in the south had some similarities with the wastelands of snow in the north, among which Ekaitza had been raised. But city girls, she was beginning to realise, did not seem to appreciate just how far noise could travel over the flat surface of this kind of wilderness - how the bare rock bounced sound around like it was the ball in some sort of children's game - how even speaking used up a certain amount of energy and focus that might be better spent watching your feet, making sure you weren't about to step on a snake or a poisonous plant. The man who had brought Ekaitza south after the Selection, a short rebel who introduced himself as Mouchard - a name, she suspected, that was meant to be ironic - had warned her of these hazards on their long journey. He had the uncanny ability to simply rattle of names and descriptions of the various plants and animals that might get any runaways before the rebels and Crown did, and Ekaitza had memorised them all.

"Don't step on that," she told Lissa now, and the blonde girl made a face and skirted the innocuous green thistle to which Ekaitza had pointed. It was not all flat sand through which they were walking. There was a little inconsistency, a landscape that reminded Ekaitza of the Australian outback that she had glimpsed in photos - mostly desolate, arid land, but here and there some outcroppings of rock, dropped here and there like dice with which some careless god had been playing. They loomed out of the dark abruptly, at first so suddenly you couldn't tell what they were, and vanished behind the girls once again just as quickly.

Mouchard had smiled when he said it. "If you try to leave before the king dismisses you, we won't even go looking for you until the morning. What would be the point?"

But that was why they were doing this tonight, she thought, looking at the two girls with her. Because the king had dismissed a set of girls, and a group of rebels had been dispatched to take them wherever eliminated ladies went. Ekaitza didn't want to think about that too much. She wanted to believe that they would be sent home - that she could go north once more, and hunt, and smuggle, and in the mornings see the sun split into a thousand versions of itself on the cracked ice over Lake Hazen. But not everyone would be welcome in whatever home had once been theirs, she knew, so what happened next?

She was so lost in her own thoughts that she was almost glad to have an excuse to snap out of them as her eyes struck on something in the sand. In the dark, she could barely even see her own feet, but she could clearly perceive here that the sand had been disturbed, churned up by passing footsteps. It was subtle, she thought - people who knew how to cover their tracks, someone who had taken a very circuitous route to avoid being caught. And yet she had caught them anyway.

Or had they caught her?

She held up her hand to signal Cor and Lissa to stop, and knelt to run her fingers along the identation. Sand, she thought, with barely restrained frustration. It couldn't hold its shape as surely as snow could - there were no footprints to be divined. She coudn't tell if it was a boot or a dog's paw that had made this mark, or maybe some wild animal, a coyote or a desert fox. But here - she almost smiled - a metal casing in the dirt, still a little bit warm, and a few drops of oil, still wet.

Okay. She stood, and glanced at her companions. "Someone came this way. Heading the way we are. I'm gonna say about ten minutes ago, but that's not precise."

"That's probably just my guy." Cor had that way of speaking, when she said my guy, that reminded Ekaitza of mob bosses in old movies, like she had almost forgotten that it was meant to be a euphemism. She wondered how many guys Cor had. What was so urgent that she needed to speak to this guy tonight? "It's about that time, isn't it?"

"Why would he be coming from the west?" An excellent question from Lissa. Ekaitza couldn't help but give her a piercing look and wonder what the Likely girl was getting out of this midnight journey. Cor certainly didn't seem to like her very much; she hadn't even feigned friendliness, as she had done with Ekaitza at the beginning. Cor had seemed to assemble a little entourage around her at dinner, so why had they brought the blonde, the tracker wondered, rather than the good-natured Saran or the sweetly supportive Yue?

She had answered her own question. Those girls, out in the Wasteland, in the dark, in open defiance of the king's edicts, with coyotes prowling? No. No need for Saran Altai or Yue Yukimura tonight. Lissa Dove had something Corvina Rouen wanted. Corvina Rouen had something Lissa Dove wanted. This was a barter. Ekaitza could understand that much more clearly than any kind of friendship.

Case in point - Cor was vehemently disagreeing with Lissa. "He'd know better than to go straight."

They kept their voices soft. Ekaitza was almost proud of them. They grow up so fast, she thought sardonically.

She paused.

On the horizon.

That was not a star.

Ekaitza was of an average sort of height, so she knew that the horizon was about three miles away. Even if the safehouse was lit up like a beacon, they would be able to see only the faintest dregs of light around its edge, not the building itself. So this light, she thought, fixing her eyes on it. It was about two miles away, and it was bright.

It wanted to be seen.

Lissa said, her voice very dry, "Are you sure about that? Would he know better than to do that?"

In the dark, Ekaitza could only just make out the shape of Lissa's hair, but she could tell that the other girl was pointing at the light.

Cor was silent for a long moment. Ekaitza started walking again, towards the light, and shook off Lissa's hand impatiently when the Likely girl tried to grab her arm. "They can't see us," Ekaitza said softly. "They can't smell us. They can't hear us, unless one of you fucks up. We might as well see who it is."

Cor made a sound in agreement. "I train my people," she said sharply. Though her words were simple, Ekaitza could hear the venom in them. "Whatever this is, your side screwed up, Kayleeth."

The whites of Lissa Dove's eyes seemed to glow in the dark as she stared at Cor. "How did you..."

Cor waved away the question. "Jones, you had the right idea. I want a name and a face to put to the idiotic action."

Ekaitza nodded. Lissa, her voice narrow and suspicious, said, "fine". And they crept forward once again.

Ekaitza took the lead. Her eyes had attuned quickly to the dark, but the closer they drew to the light, the more night-blind she felt. She was acutely aware that there could be someone just out of sight a metre to her right, a metre to her left, watching and waiting, and she would be none the wiser. There could have been someone following them, she thought, and the first she would know about it was when they were breathing down her neck. For chrissake, she could walk right into someone in this dark.

Abruptly, Ekaitza found herself wondering whether the rebels had night-vision goggles.

At least Baffin had the woods. It was much easier to hide among woods. Here, they were wide open to someone with better vision than they.

Well, Ekaitza thought wryly, it was like her grandfather had always told her when she went out to the woods as a child. You don't need to be faster than the wolf. You just need to be faster than your little brother.

Ekaitza was pretty sure she was faster than Cor or Lissa.

Then again, she'd seen the guns the rebels were carrying. She imagined they were a little bit faster as well.

A shape grew up against the light, as it slowly melted from a single pinprick of yellow in front of them into a circle of illumination in which silhouettes moved back and forth.

Much more than one person. They were only here to meet one person.

And they drew closer still, and Ekaitza held out her arm as though to hold them back, and shot Cor a look that said this far and no further. They couldn't risk it, but they were close enough by now - close enough to see that there was a young blond man kneeling in the circle of light which was, Ekaitza thought, a pair of extraordinarily bright headlamps belonging to a dusty truck, one of many the rebels seemed to use to travel around the Wastelands in... well, not style. The men standing around were dressed like the soldiers of the Kingdom in Exile, all dirty jackets and torn trousers, guns slung around their shoulders or worn at their hips. They were not looking at the kneeling boy, Ekaitza could see, but they were, instead, looking quite bored.

All except one. There was a dark-haired man in a dark purple coat sitting on the hood of the car, forearms resting on his knees, speaking very quietly to the fair-haired figure kneeling on the ground. The young man, for his part, did not seem inclined to answer. That didn't surprise Ekaitza - Cor and Lissa didn't seem like the kind of people to keep disloyal company. At this distance, only a few sounds managed to drift over to the girls: knocks, outsiders, pandora.

Raven.

The words meant little to Ekaitza, but instincts told her to glance over at Cor. So that, she thought mildly, was what if looks could kill meant.

Cor's voice was low. "Let's go."

The dark haired man turned in their direction.

He couldn't see them.

He couldn't possibly see them.

Could he see them?

Even from this long distance, Ekaitza could tell that Thiago Wesick was smiling.

Atiena Morris could not say that she was a girl accustomed to loneliness, or boredom. Such was life as a Morris - one rush of adrenaline followed the last, a ceaseless carousel of one long hard-scrabble moment after another, everyday with a voice in her ear and someone she trusted watching her back. When she wasn't on the run, she was looking over her shoulder; when she wasn't looking over her shoulder, then the danger was usually in front of her.

And so far, she thought ruefully, the Selection was pretty lacking in danger. It made sense - she imagined that she and the other seventeen remaining girls were being kept much more sheltered than the rest of Demetri's subjects, cloistered in a gilded cage while he carefully picked out his queen from among their number.

It made for a nice change of pace, she supposed, but that wasn't precisely why she had decided to venture down here, so far south, so far away from the people she cared about, so removed from the cityscapes in which she was most comfortable. She had spent a sleepless night in her little assigned room on the fifth floor of the safehouse - how could she sleep, when she was thinking of her siblings, her Mama, her Killmonger, and the missions that they would be carrying out without her tonight in Tammins.

Stay safe, had been her last words to Maria before leaving. I won't be around to bail you out for just a little while.

You don't have to worry about us, Ati.

If only that were true.

So she could not sleep, but nor could she leave the safehouse, and so her first night in the Selection was spent fitfully - she did sit-ups on the floor in front of her bed until she had entirely lost count, searched the room for bugs, flicking through the books that the king had supposedly set out for her in the room - a veteran's autobiography, she noted, and found herself wondering whether the king had a good sense of humour. After the first few chapters, she started wondering whether he maybe had a better idea of her than she had first thought.

In any case, she thought, it was better than just staring at the wall for six hours.

She had to bide her time, she thought. She would get her opportunity. Sooner or later. The more she learned about the rebels, the more she understood that she would have to work hard to work her way into their ranks. She wasn't sure that she would have trusted them if that wasn't the case; she knew that Killmonger had always said a group was only as secure as its membership requirements. And Atiena could afford to wait. After all, her priority wasn't the king - although it was a nice perk, she would not deny.

And so Atiena spent her first night in the Selection safehouse.

Biding her time.

When the sun rose, she could not bear to sit about sleepless any longer, and stood, and dressed, and made her way outside - anything for a glimpse of the sky and a breath of fresh air. Privately, she found herself hoping that there would be some guards hanging about, preparing breakfast, or transporting the king to the safehouse, or, well, doingsomething.

She was not disappointed. Just on the other side of the white picket fence that encircled the safehouse - a small touch that Atiena still found slightly hilarious, like something Daniel would come up with, a fenced-off garden in the middle of nowhere - there was a flurry of activity as the stoves were hauled out of a truck once more and the rebels set about making breakfast in a slight frenzy. Uzohola had told them that they would be served breakfast in their rooms. Atiena thought it was meant to be something of a consolation for the sudden mass elimination the night before, but the idea of staying trapped within those four walls for even another minute seemed like a sort of hell to her at the moment, so instead she leaned against the safehouse wall, and watched Wickanninish Harjo and his team shovel fistfuls of bacon onto the stove, and watched the first birds of the morning flit across the white-and-pink sky that was dawning, clear and bright.

The rebels seemed at ease around one another, moving sleepily around one another, joking quietly between themselves, passing parcels of food back and forth and teasing one another. Watching them made her feel even more homesick. Swift and Mouse would be at home here, playing an imagined hide-and-chase game among the trucks; she could imagine Sanji and Maria among them, laughing and inspecting their weapons; she could picture Killmonger watching them all from the sidelines, keeping them safe like he always did. The Morrises were their own peope, Atiena thought, but she could see the appeal of the Kingdom in Exile. They seemed a rough, sharp, feral lot, but they had each other.

There was a lot to be said for finding your pack.

She wasn't eavesdropping, she would have objected to that label quite vehemently, she wasn't eavesdropping, but she was also content to sit on the windowsill and breathe in fresh air, and listen to the general shape of their conversation. The king had ordered his first two dates, she heard. Her name did not seem to be among those chosen.

A few of the rebels looked over in Atiena's direction, but she did not say anything, and after a few moments of curiosity, neither did they. She was grateful for that. She wondered what they had been told about her. What they knew about her. What they thought about her. She could not help but wonder: did she look like a queen-to-be?

Or did she still, as she suspected, look like a soldier?

The door next to her swung open, and one of the members of the inner circle stepped out, and squinted at the sky like it had personally offended him, and set a lighter to his lips, and though his eyes skated across Atiena, he seemed inclined to simply accept her presence as he lowered his hands and exhaled past his cigarette, running one hand through his already dishevelled hair.

They stood in silence, Atiena reclined against the window, watching the breakfast being made, Täj watching the sky and smoking. Atiena appreciated that. The Kingdom in Exile was a quiet kingdom, she thought, its people prone to silence rather than idle chatter. She could see herself being happy in this sort of environment - happy, provided the rest of the Morrises were here with her, and happy here, as well. She loved her younger siblings but sometimes there was just so much chatter.

And there was something about Täj that reminded Atiena so strongly of the older brother that she called Lethal, like it was the same bones lying underneath, the same arteries tangled within. She almost couldn't help herself; she uttered her first words in over two days: "You're up early." And it was still early - if she had to guess, it couldn't be later than half past four in the morning. And unlike the others, Täj didn't seem to have anything to do.

"I have to go kill a man."

Atiena wasn't sure if he was joking or not.

His tone suggested he wasn't.

A cloud of dust had appeared on the horizon. Täj and Atiena watched it approach with detached interest. It was, for once, not a truck but a car - a low Dodge Charger with its hood missing, all of its engine components open to the morning air. It pulled up, and a man with long dark hair leaned out of it. To her surprise, Atiena realised that she recognised him - Theo Malone, she thought, from Hansport. He had accompanied Atiena and Evangeline Khan down to the Wastelands two days ago. They had taken the train across the country, and jumped off the back about six miles outside of the Paloma border. He had been quiet enough. Inoffensive, Atiena thought. Again - there was something to be said for someone who knew when to be quiet.

Theo Malone said, "someone wanted a car?"

Atiena looked at Täj.

In answer, he held out his pack of cigarettes towards her. She shook her head, and said, almost apologetically, "I don't smoke."

Täj dropped his tab, and extinguished it with his heel. "Don't start," he said wryly, and caught the keys that the long-haired rebel threw in his direction as they crossed paths. Into the car, and away he went again.

He was a good driver, Killmonger would have said. He drove like he had a death wish.

Atiena watched the car go, and wondered who was going to die. It was such a beautiful, pale, crisp morning. The air was only just beginning to warm. There were still lizards darting across the sand in search of a place to sleep.

"That," Theo Malone said, his voice almost admiring, "Is the most I've ever heard him say in one conversation."

He looked at Atiena rather suspiciously.

"Well," Atiena said simply. "I guess I'm special."

She pushed off the wall, hopped the fence in a single seamless motion, and went to see if she could steal a bread roll from the rebels cooking around the stove.

Yay! Our seventh chapter in seven days. I hope you guys are enjoying this as much as I am! Our viewpoint characters in this chapter were Ekaitza Jones and Atiena Morris. I hope you enjoyed seeing the world through their eyes!

Please do let me know what you thought - I have been absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude for every single review so far. I really love hearing what you like and don't like, and what you would like to see more of. I really appreciate absolutely any and all feedback you can give me.

Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!

- Izar