Erin Bowman - Frozen

I fire a perfect shot in the next round. Xavier slips in the snow and shoots wide, but both Emma and Bree strike close to my arrow. Bree is a tad high, Emma a tad low.

“Not bad,” I tell Emma again. Bree snorts from behind me, but if she expects praise for missing a bull’s-eye, she’s crazy.

“Aiden wants to help judge!” Sammy scoops the boy onto his shoulders and comes racing through the show. Once we’re all gathered around the target, Sammy points at the two outlying arrows. “All right, Aiden. Which of these is closest to the center one?”

Aiden screws up his face in concentration and finally points at the arrow below mine.

Bree throws up her hands. “Of course he’d pick Emma’s. He hates me!”

“We didn’t tell him which arrow was hers,” Sammy points out.

“Ugh, whatever. I’d slaughter you all if this was a spear-throwing match. We didn’t use arrows much in Saltwater, you know. A spear is far more effective for catching fish.”

“But it’s not a spear-throwing match,” I say, nudging her with my elbow.

She scowls at me, furious, and stalks off. I should have known better than to joke with her during a competition.

“Don’t you want to see who wins?” I call after her.

“I couldn’t care less.”

“Moody thing, huh?” Xavier says. “Must be that time of the month.”

Sammy smirks. “Yeah, these next few days should be downright peachy.”

September and Emma glare at the both of them.

“What?” Sammy asks innocently. “Can’t a guy speak his mind on his birthday?” Xavier buckles with laughter. Even I can’t help smiling.

“What time of the month is it?” Aiden asks from atop Sammy’s shoulders.

“Forget it, Aiden,” Emma says. “They’re just being boys.”

“But I’m a boy! I want to know.”

“How about we finish the game? You can judge the final shot, too, if you’d like.”

“Okay,” he agrees.

But when we get back to the shooting spot, Rusty is trying to have another go at Jackson, and Blaine is somehow stuck in the middle of it. His pack is held out like a shield, protecting him from the dog’s jaws. The Order spy stands safely behind him, laughing through his gag. Aiden calls Rusty off and Blaine throws his pack in the snow.

“That dog needs to get it through his thick skull,” he snarls. “Yes, the prisoner is with the Order. Yes, he’s no good. But he’s going to be with us for a while, and I’m not okay with losing a limb because the dog feels like attacking me in the process of getting to him !”

“Blaine, are you feeling all right?” Emma asks. She reaches out to him and he shrugs away. “You’re not one to get worked up over something so small.”

“He would have killed me just to get at the spy, Emma. I swear it,” he says. “That’s no small matter.”

“All right!” my father calls out. “Clipper got us straightened away. We need to cut south for a few miles.”

“But the match,” Sammy says. “Emma and Gray have to play the final round.”

My father looks between us. “Gray would win—no offense, Emma—and we have a pace to maintain. This is not negotiable.”

We start walking again, but tensions are high. Clipper’s worried about the nearby town; my father, our pace. Sammy’s sullen and Blaine, suspicious. He keeps glaring at Rusty and holding the spy in front of him as protection. And Bree’s ill temper is transmitting in waves so thick it could knock a person over.

When I ask her if she’s okay, she rolls her eyes and walks faster.

Somehow, I feel like I’m at fault, even though I obviously have no control over any arrow fired but my own.

THAT NIGHT AFTER DINNER, WEdisperse into smaller groups around the fire. My father and Clipper are deep in conversation, likely discussing our path. Again. Xavier is hard at work drying out his socks—he’s stuck them on the end of a forked stick so he can dangle them over the fire like roasted meat—and Aiden is back to playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with the spy.

Someone removed Jackson’s gag and retied his hands in his lap so that he could eat, and he’s now able to make hand gestures back at the boy. He has a look on his face that almost appears big-brotherly as he plays with Aiden, not at all like the blood-hungry Order-spy-on-a-mission that we know he is. Blaine hovers nearby, watchful. Rusty, too, while not barking, hasn’t stopped snarling in Jackson’s direction. If I were the spy, I wouldn’t make a single sudden move with that dog around.

I’m sitting with everyone else, listening to Sammy ramble about his childhood in Taem. Bree, who hasn’t said a word to me since the archery match, has taken especial interest in his story. Mostly, I think, so she has an excuse to not make eye contact with me. Emma, on the other hand, seems to have zero interest in Sammy’s words. She keeps twisting around to check on Aiden, her shoulder knocking against mine each time.

“He’s fine,” I whisper to her. Blaine’s been looking at the boy the same way he looked at his daughter, Kale, back in Claysoot. Like he wants to show him the world and teach him everything he knows and protect him with his own life if it comes to it. I don’t understand how Blaine can care so much for a person he’s only recently met. More proof that he’s a better person than me.

“I just worry about him,” Emma says, as if I didn’t already know this. She hasn’t taken her eyes off Aiden since he joined our group, and he hasn’t wandered far from her side either. The fact that he’s sitting with Jackson—farther than an arm’s length from Emma—is a small miracle in itself.

“Well, you’re wasting your energy. He’s with Blaine. He’s as safe as he’ll ever be.”

Emma gives me a look that seems to say, You know I can’t help worrying.

“. . . I was barely six when he died,” Sammy says, and we’re both pulled back to the conversation happening beside us.

“Who died?” Emma asks.

“My great-grandfather. He lived through the Second Civil War and watched Frank come into power nearly fifty years ago. Man, the stories he would tell.”

“Like?” I prompt.

“They’re not really fireside material.”

“And this isn’t a typical campfire in the woods,” Bree points out.

“Fair enough, Nox,” Sammy says. “Fair enough.” He tosses snow at the fire for a moment, listening to it sizzle.

“He used to talk about how chaotic things were in the years between the Continental Quake and the Second Civil War. That was his favorite word for it all— chaotic. ”

“Well, it fits,” September chimes in. “We learned about it all in middle school. Decades before the Quake, scientists were predicting massive shifts in the Earth’s plates. Plus, the climate was changing. Getting hotter, drier. There was less rain and more droughts, and the ocean levels were rising like crazy. A lot of major cities were in jeopardy of flooding. That’s where Robert Taem came in.”

“Taem like the city?” Bree asks.

“People forget it was named after him,” Bo says. He starts tapping on his knee, his fingers unable to stay still, and September nods in agreement.

“Taem was the engineer behind the domed design—nearly indestructible, safe from harsh suns, better air quality. The government contracted him to make it, and then the capital ended up beneath it, farther inland and safe from the rising ocean. Voilà! The city of Taem.”

“My great-grandfather used to joke that Robert Taem knew what was coming, but he couldn’t have,” Sammy says. “Not really. Taem died young, long before the War.”

“I don’t even think he saw all the other domed cities spring up,” September adds. “But they did, all based on his original design.”