Melissa la Cruz - Frozen

“You like to play, huh?” he asked, pointing to the young boy who had choked his comrade. He gestured to a row of cages. “Hold those up for me!”

The boy seemed uncertain what to do next.

“DO IT! OR I’LL STICK THIS THROUGH YOUR ROTTING NECK!”

The marked slave closed his eyes. He had a dotted patch of raised skin on his temple, the most common mark, which meant he had the power of telekinesis—he could move things with his mind. Slowly, ever so slowly, the row of cargo containers rose from the ground. They floated a few inches, then a foot, then three feet, but the effort was too much and the slave collapsed on the ground, along with the cages, crashing on the deck.

“OY! WAKE UP!” the pirate yelled, kicking at him.

“He’s dead. You killed another one. Slob will be pissed. Traders are coming. You know they pay more for the marked ones.”

“What they want with ice trash is beyond me. In a month they’ll all be thrillers.”

“Besides, he’s not dead,” the other one said, throwing a bucket of black water on the poor boy’s face. “But I’m sure he wishes he was.”

They were marched back to their cages, Nat too weak and too scared to talk, even as Wes tried to console her by rubbing her back. So that was what Avo wanted the marked for—to use them for amusement—for sport until they could sell them. The slavers would toy with them, a form of torture, like pulling wings from a fly, until they were sold.

That night Nat heard a faint fluttering sound outside her cage.

“What is it?” she asked Wes, who moved toward the door, looking through the tiny hole.

“Don’t worry, it’s not the guards,” he said. “Look.”

Nat peered through the slit. A flock of multicolored creatures surrounded their cage—they looked like large butterflies or birds, but were not either—they were flitting and flying, as their marvelous blue, pink, purple, gold, and silver feathers lit the night like a rainbow.

“Can you hear them?” Liannan asked, her melodious voice echoing through the darkness.

“Yes—I can—I can even understand what they’re saying!” said Nat in wonder.

“What are they saying?” Wes wanted to know.

Nat tried to explain—it wasn’t so much that she could hear them speak words or sentences, it was that she was filled with their emotion, their spirit.

“They’re saying . . . they’re saying . . . there’s hope. There’s hope for us. Hope and welcome.”

There was a noise from the food slot. Nat cried out in surprise as small nuts, seeds, and fruit began to fall through the hole. She took Wes’s handkerchief to catch them.

Hope, she thought. We will survive this.

Thank you, she sent to the birds. Thank you. Please, we are not the only ones here. Bring food to all.

They ate their meal, and Nat could hear cries of delight murmuring through the slave quarters.

Nat picked several berries and shared them with Wes, their lips turning red from the juice.

Afterward, Nat found she still had her deck of cards that she always kept in her pocket, and they played card games, using seeds as chips. “Fold,” Wes said disgustedly as he threw his cards down. “Where did you learn how to play?”

“It’s one of the first things they teach us at MacArthur. How to play cards. They size up our abilities that way. See who can use their powers to predict things, read minds, stuff like that,” Nat said, shuffling the cards and dealing the next hand.

“So that’s how you win,” he said with a wry grin. “Not fair.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “Not at all. I can’t do anything like that, I’m just good at it,” she said, a little annoyed. “Is that so hard to believe?”

Wes grunted. He assessed his hand. “Fold!”

She laughed.

He pushed a cup of seeds her way and she knew he would have given them to her anyway. “So, card sharking is just part of the training?” he asked.

“We move on from the poker table to number games, patterns . . . like the one at the fence.” She picked up a card from the stack. “What about you? You never told me how you ended up a mercenary or why you left the military. I know you said you didn’t want to go career, but still, wasn’t it easier being a soldier than having to do this sort of thing? I mean, look where we are.”

“Truthfully, being a hired gun is a more honest life than one in the military,” Wes said, as he studied his hand.

“How’s that?” she asked, putting a pair of cards facedown on the floor.

“You were never in the service—so you don’t know half the things they ask us to do, in Lower Pangaea, New Rhodes, Olympia. It’s their way of guaranteeing the soldiers’ loyalty. They make us all complicit in their crimes. Once you’ve done it, you don’t think twice about saying yes the next time, since you’ve already crossed the line.” He discarded a few cards, picked up two more.

She was silent for a moment. “Is that what happened . . . in Texas?”

He brooded on that. “Yeah.” He didn’t look her in the eye. “The rebels wouldn’t surrender, we had them cornered, but they wouldn’t wave the white flag. The town was empty; no one knew where the Texans were hiding their people. I found out by accident. I got caught on a run, hauled in, and tortured. That’s how I got this scar. Avo too. But we didn’t break. They thought we were dead. We managed to escape, and we even caught one of their people . . . he was marked . . .” Wes sucked in his breath.

“You don’t have to tell the story if it’s too hard.”

“I didn’t want to do it, I wanted no part of it . . . but I couldn’t stop him either. Avo, he . . .” Wes looked agonized.

“He tortured him.”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes. “He had a mark on his cheek, a brand . . . like a serpent. Avo figured out he could . . . he could . . .”

“Hurt him by touching it,” Nat said softly.

“Yeah.”

“He would push on it, and it would glow . . . and the guy just kept screaming . . . and finally, he broke. The Texans were hiding their people a few miles inland. Hidden in the snow. They’d moved them into one of those old arenas. I thought we’d surround them, you know, like a siege. But the orders came. Bomb the entire place. Kill their kids, their wives, everyone. Get them to surrender.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do it. You didn’t torture him and you didn’t give the order.”

“But I couldn’t stop him either. Their blood is on my hands and I’ll never be able to wash it off.” He took a shaky breath. “I left the service after that . . . I didn’t want to be any part of that . . .”

“Wes—you’re not a bad person,” she said, putting her cards down, the game forgotten.

Wes did the same. He shook his head. “It was war—but it wasn’t right. We were no better than the slavers. Worse, maybe.”

THE NEXT MORNING, THE SLAVERS WERE intent on discovering why their prisoners were not starving and listless as they had been. A team of guards searched every cage and stripped down every captive but found nothing. The cages were empty. Every crumb and every seed had been eaten.

Nat was worried the pirates would punish their captives, but the arrival of a new batch of pilgrims focused their attention elsewhere.

That was the routine: Every day the slavers scoured the surrounding area in a small black inflatable. Some days they returned with captives, some days, none. Nat, Wes, and the rest of the prisoners were on deck, watching as the next batch of victims arrived. From afar, the captives—a group of smallmen—looked strangely peaceful, hopeful even, but as the boat neared the slave ship, they began to react violently. One drew a dagger from his pocket, while two others attacked the slavers, kicking and punching.