Scavenger of Souls by Joshua David Bellin Page A

around him and lay his head on her chest. I tried to fight off the urge to close my eyes, but with nighttime hastening to a close and my hopes of getting away pretty much vanished, I realized how utterly exhausted I was. “You going to sleep?” I asked the girl through a yawn.
    She sniffed. “Fat chance.”
    â€œWell, I am.” My words sounded hollow and far away. “Am I going to wake up?”
    Her shoulders lifted in a slow, careless shrug.
    â€œFine,” I said. “But you’re making a terrible mistake.”
    That was all I had left before my eyes closed. My final image before I fell asleep was of the girl’s hands still gripping the stock of her rifle.

    I woke to the glare of daylight off black rock. I could tell from the position of the sun that I hadn’t slept long, but the fact that I’d woken at all gave me hope. When I rose and stretched my sore body, made even sorer by the jagged stone that had been my only bed, I realized two things: my strength had returned during my short sleep, and the girl hadn’t budged from her spot. It seemed as if her rifle hadn’t moved an inch from its target on my chest, though she’d packed hertent before I woke. She showed no signs of tiredness as she stood and reached into her pocket, coming out with a small, oblong shape covered in what looked like tin. She threw it at my feet, and I realized it must be food, wrapped in some kind of metallic paper. I bit the wrapper and tugged at it with my teeth, but it wouldn’t open.
    She sniffed, almost a laugh. “Here.”
    Rifle still aimed at my chest, she pinched the wrapper and tore it open. The food inside, a crumbly brown bar, tasted like dirt, but it revived me an amazing amount after more than a day on empty. Tyris and the others, I noticed from the wrappers sprinkled around their feet, had already eaten. They resumed their places at each end of Aleka’s stretcher and hefted her from the ground. This time, the girl gave me a brief moment to check on Aleka, whose waxy face and mutilated arm looked neither better nor worse than the night before. Then she dug her rifle into my back, said, “Let’s go,” and continued to march us east across the stone wasteland.
    All attempts at conversation failed this time. We marched until midday, when I was relieved to discover she was human enough to stop and rest in the relative shade of a large stone. We sat through the worst of the day, the whole time spent with the rifle lined up on my heart and her right hand straying periodically to stroke her left arm. We drank when she offered us a fresh water bottle, ate another of the bars when she handed it to us or, in my case, shoved it under my nose. She showed no overt hostility to Tyris or the others, watchingsilently while our healer went through the ritual of dressing Aleka’s wound. But me she continued to regard with anger and distrust. I looked for opportunities to open a conversation, but there were none, much less any chance of distracting her so I could get away. When we resumed our march, I tried repeatedly to catch her eye, without success.
    Evening had come again when a black wall of polished stone blocked our way. The girl signaled with the rifle and led us around the wall. Only then did she say curtly, her first word since morning, “Stop.”
    We did. We stood on a margin where the black rock came to an abrupt halt, the glassy surface giving way in a perfect arc to the familiar dusty landscape of the desert. The wall of volcanic stone at our backs cast feeble evening shadows down the slope, but they were blotted out before they reached the valley floor by something so bright it took my eyes a second to figure out what it was. When I finally did, I drew in a breath and blinked in wonder.
    Nothing I’d seen or heard prepared me for the sight of the fenced compound that spread out before us. Pale yellow light poured from a palisade of metal