CHAPTER FORTY

The guards dragged me inside the circle. Right up close to the fire.

“But I can help you,” I told them, starting to get panicked. “We should all work together. Share the prize, like you said. Share the burden.”

“Yes. Lord Kade told us how you intended to divide the trees.” Bracelets wagged her finger at me, rattling her jewelry. “Pirates and Rastas. Bootleggers. The Samurai Five and the Salvage Guild. No mention of the poachers, who refuse to trade for GenTech’s corn, and who battle agents every day of their lives.”

“Battle? I’ve run into you people topside,” I said, remembering what had happened in the cornfields, when poachers had got their hands on me and Hina, and a poacher had shot Alpha in the gut. “All you do is take. And then you scurry back in your holes.”

“Enough,” said Orlic from beneath his crown. “We’ll not argue with you. You will tell us what you learned from your parents. You will tell us how to keep the young trees alive.”

“I’d tell you to go to hell.” I stared at all those rag-and-bone lords. “But it looks like you’re stuck there already.”

The boss man lowered his head, so all I could see was the cornhusks on top of it. And the others followed suit, bending their chins to their chests, like they were afraid of seeing something. Hell, I got plenty afraid, too.

Then the guards grabbed my fists and twisted me up off the ground a few inches, ripping the scraps of clothing that hung on my ribs.

And then, inch by inch, they pressed me forward. Edging my guts to the flames.

I wouldn’t scream, I told myself. Not for them. Not for nobody. But the fire bit into me. It gnawed and sizzled, more sharp than hot. And I thought of Zee. Pictured her body spinning towards the lava, her hair blown out in strands around her like spokes on a wheel. And I’d told her I’d take care of the trees for her. I had promised I would. So now I was letting her down in death, as I’d failed her in life. And she’d wanted me to trust people, but I’d trusted Kade, and this is where it had got me.

The pain howled brighter. Fiercer and louder. But I grit my jaw and clamped every part of me shut.

“That’s enough,” said Orlic. The guards pulled me backwards, and I let myself breathe. “You must tell us, boy. Tell us these secrets you know.”

I glanced down at my belly—bright red and scorched white and blistered. I choked back tears. Then I turned to Kade.

“Damn you,” I croaked. “We could have made things different.”

“He won’t tell you,” Kade muttered, refusing to look at me. “Unless it’s to spare someone close to him.”

“Which one?” asked Baxter.

“The only one we’ve not questioned.” Kade stood, straightening his crispy robes around him. “I’ll bring her.”

“The girl?” someone asked him.

“Yes.” Kade stared at me as he said it. “His girl.”

I had secrets, but none the poachers wanted. I didn’t know a thing about how to get them trees to grow. But Crow had given these freaks something to sink their teeth into. Maybe he was trying to get rid of me. Or maybe he’d thought it might keep me alive.

And it might, I reckoned. If I could think of something, I could trade these bastards for knowledge, and maybe they’d let us go.

But could I leave here without the trees?

I didn’t know what should matter most. I didn’t have time to plan or no one to talk to. I was stuck, held tight in cornhusk ropes. Facing cornstalk spears and that fire, sweat pouring off me and dripping into the flames.

And when Kade got back, he had Alpha gripped before him. She was tied up like I was, and I could see she’d fared no better than me.

I called to her. But she was blurred and busted, her eyes hardly open. She had a gash on her head and blood on her arms.

Kade wrangled her up beside me, right next to the fire. She had rags wound around her breasts and her belly, and Kade had one of the guards hold her up so he could start to unwrap her. Unpeeling the scraps from her beautiful skin.

I knew they’d see it. Once her rags were unraveled and her belly was revealed. The poachers would see the bark GenTech had spliced to her stomach, where she’d been shot by a poacher—hell, it was their bullet meant she’d needed patching up at all. And now these scum would poke at that bark with their filthy fingers. Study it with their underground eyes.

And then they would most likely burn her for her secrets, I reckoned. Just like they’d burned at me.

“It’s all in the timing. In the spring,” I lied, picturing the body in the caves of the Kalliq. The dead woman encased in a wooden shell. “You got to know when to plant them.”

Kade quit what he was doing. A single scrap of clothing clung to Alpha’s body. Like a bandage hanging on a wound.

“When?” said Baxter.

“The first full moon after the snow melts.” I just kept making stuff up. “Certain time of night.”

Orlic nodded, like what I was saying made perfect sense to him. “Tell us more.”

“Not till you let her go. You can keep me here,” I said. “You let her go, and I’ll help you.”

“And give up the one way we can get you to speak?” This was Bracelets. I could feel her thin slice of eyeballs upon me. “You are in no place to negotiate. But we know now how to make you see reason. Guards, help Lord Kade take them back to their cells.”

They threw Alpha in a cell, and then hurled me back inside the one I’d woke up in. I landed on my back, staring up at the dirt like I was stuck in a grave.

Kade strode into the cell and slammed the door shut.

“Leave us,” he told the guards. “I have a debt to settle with this one.”

He wound the chains back in place, fumbling around one-handed until he got the locks sealed. Then he stood over me, blocking the light from the doorway. My eyes got used to the dark quick, though, like I was subterranean already, as used to life underground as these filthy poachers.

I watched as Kade reached inside his cornhusk robes and pulled out a small nylon pouch and dropped it beside me. Then he reached into his robes again and plucked out a knife.

“What you gonna do?” I whispered. “Kill me?”

“And let you off easy?”

“Can’t believe you waited this long. That’s what you been itching for, ain’t it? Except you needed me. Needed all of us. Acting all high and mighty all the damn time, when you’re the lowest sort of scum after all.”

“So this is it?” he said. “That’s all the fight you have in you?”

“Untie me, you cheating bastard. I’ll show you a fight.”

He knelt beside me. Took the knife to the back of my head and started slicing apart the rope that bound up my hands. My wrists popped free, and I waited as Kade set to cutting the ropes from my ankles. But soon as my legs could move, I swiveled up and bore down on him, pummeling my fists in the knots of his spine.

He spun and wriggled, and I had him pinned down, but Kade was stronger than me. He got the knife between us, grasped in his one bony hand.

“You messed with my sister. And you was gonna burn my girl,” I said. “So go ahead and stab me. I’ll kill you with my bare hands and that knife in my gut.”

“No,” Kade whispered. His face all wrong.

I punched him in the mouth. “That’s for lying to me.”

Then I punched him again. Harder. “That’s for Alpha.”

Again. “For Crow.”

I pulled my fist back. “And this one’s for Zee.”

But I remembered my sister pulling at me when I’d been beating Kade on that cold beach full of skulls, at the side of the lake. And it distracted me, remembering Zee. Feeling the look that had shone in her eyes.