24. An old picture

Runt.

Several things happened at once: before we could answer the woman, we were bagged and picked up. And then we were thrown onto a cold floor, with the air around us musty. The smell of spoiled milk was seeping through the bag over my head. And then we waited. Nothing but wait. Cleo shouted, Jack was still wheezing, but I sat still and waited. Cleo wouldn't be able to see my hands anyway, so I'd be a ghost to her.

From the thick smell of sweat as well as the bad milk, we were probably in a room full of bodies. Thankfully not dead bodies. They have a specific smell. A rotting and mangy smell. This smell was just tangy and barely breathable. If Jack hadn't been choked, he'd probably be wheezing from the smell alone.

But a thought had been playing in my mind ever since that woman blew off that beast's head. I'd seen her before. From somewhere. If not, then I'd heard about her. Had my brothers spoken about her?

I thumbed the palm of my hand against my forehead. I couldn't remember. The memory was too dim and light to hold onto. She was the Nomad's leader, which was easy to tell. They all stopped what they were doing as soon as she had appeared. They'd practically stopped breathing. But she'd also been the one who'd instructed them to throw bags over our heads, and with no hesitation, they did.

She was in a completely different league to them. Strange. I would have thought that Nomad leader was a lunatic like the rest of them, but it makes sense now. A group with a lunatic at its head wouldn't have grown to this size and become this well-known without proper leadership. They were all skinny, but they were all healthy. Fast and strong. Savages. Like Berserkers on a diet of human meat and the occasional desert plant.

"Runt?" Cleo called. She'd stopped shouting. I could hear her scuffling around, our hands had been tied behind our backs, and there was no point escaping anyway. A large door had been slammed shut, and we probably weren't the only ones in the room.

"Hey!" a squeaky voice said. "Get off of me, girl!"

"Call me that again and I'll make you wish the Nomads ate you," Cleo spat.

I could hear where she was coming from. A perk of not being able to taste that well or speak was that my hearing was a little more amplified. Hera and the man in the forest taught me how to better it as well, but they were on a different plain of existence when it came to utilizing their senses. Sought of like Dan when he had the Unit on.

I got my legs underneath me and gingerly stepped forward, making sure I didn't trip over any other writhing legs. I still tripped a few times, gaining a hissing swear word back. Language, the man in the forest's words rang.

I bent down and nudged her, she'd been calling my name for a while now to the disapproval hisses of our fellow inmates.

"Runt?"

I nudged her again and sat down next to her.

She breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank God. Thought I was the only one in here."

"We're all in here!" a voice shouted.

"That matters!" she shouted back. She dropped her voice to a whisper and said, "You alright."

It was hard, and required a lot of shimming, but I traced a yes on her rough palm.

"Good. I'm alright, too. But this isn't exactly great, huh?" She shuffled a little. "Finally found the Nomads, and now we're bagged and thrown into a ho-"

She was cut off as she gagged. Something heavy landed on both of us, a body, but wriggling and still alive. Skinny. "Oh. Found you guys."

"Jack!" Cleo sniped. "Get the hell of off us."

"I'm trying, Jesus," he muttered and wormed his way off of us.

"Like I was saying," Cleo continued, with only the slightest tinge of anger in her voice, "and now we're in a hole. Swear to God this is a shit show if I've ever seen one. Hera's probably going to chew us out."

There was a sudden silence in the room. All the soft moans, cries, shouts, and mutters all fluttered to an uncomfortable silence. The only sound coming to me was Jack's sharp breaths and the soft hammer of my heart in my ears. Hera's name could either get you anywhere you want, or leave you with a bullet in your head. She didn't have too many friends in the middle of the country, let alone the Gray.

These were the times when I wished Cleo and I swapped and she was the one who couldn't talk.

"Did you just say Hera?" a gruff voice said, her name spat out of his mouth like it was the worst thing that had ever been on his lips.

"I did," she said in a whisper a little too near to a growl.

"Ya'll work for her?" another voice asked.

Cleo didn't respond, I couldn't, and Jack was holding his breath to make himself all but invisible.

"I asked you a damn question!" the voice shouted again. "Answer it!"

Calls for 'answer it' filled the room. A raging chant that shook the concrete underneath us.

A gun barked, a single shot, but that snapped the chant off. "I ain't supposed to touch any of you, but I'll kill a few of you if you keep talkin'." A pause. "I'm pretty darn hungry."

There's a guard here as well. Alright. The room was big from the echo of the chant, but that could also be misleading in its own right. But from how far I walked to get to Cleo, it must be pretty big. Stuffy, so barely any ventilation. A large door slamming shut, metal by the groan and clank. And it was either dark, or the bags they used were extremely heavy. Now I just have to figure out how many guards and where he is, or where they are.

"That freakin' name isn't good anywhere in this country," Cleo muttered.

She was right on that.

The door opened to the cry of bodies. People must have sat against it, an escape from the sticky warmth in the room. The smell of a cigarette, and not the new type they deal out in the Gray, coming in different flavors and lasting for different amounts of times, but the old kind. The raw, disgusting smoke, sly sizzle type. I'd only seen those once at the orphanage when one of the nuns was perched in the attic with a bottle of alcohol and the thin white cigarette in between her lips.

At least this time when I smelt it, I wasn't punished for it.

The short cries in the room continued as boots clamped down against the floor. Feet and legs getting caught underneath heavy boots. I was bodily picked up and thrown over a large shoulder. No point fighting it. I could end up with a bullet in my head as soon as I slammed a knee into a nose.

Cleo's swear and Jack's whimpering groan signaled that they were right behind me.

A sudden freshness washed over us as we – I presume – left the room. The smell of the raw smoke was still here, just in front of me now. I bounced on the large shoulder as we started down a corridor. It was disorientating, losing my bearings as soon as we turned a few too many corners to count.

Finally, another door creaked open and I was thrown onto something soft. A couch. Like the one Hera used to have in her manor. Cleo landed on top of me, Jack landed hard with a grunt on the floor next to my feet. The bag was ripped off of my head, and my one good eye squinted. The sudden explosion of light was jarring, but it showed off something impressive. We were facing another couch, with a table in between us. A chess board on top of it. And a wall of tattered and ruined books the backdrop of the woman from before.

A leg over the other, powerful rifle leaning against her couch, cigarette pressed between her strong fingers. Black hair touching the darkness of the shadows in the corner of the room, barring a few gray strand in the sea of black, and a single blue eye. Sharp and straight, like Hera's gold.

"You said something about Hera." Her eye twinkled. "What business do you have with her?"

"All you need to-"

I cut Cleo off with a hand over her mouth. We'd been close to getting thrown around that room, and this lady didn't look like she played games. That and the room had four burly Nomads standing in its corners, shivering with adrenaline, stringy muscles quivering as they watched the lady like predator animals.

Hopefully she would understand me, if not, Cleo would translate. And I'd make sure she doesn't mix my words up, she'd done it before. One too many times.

We've been sent here to get your help, I started. We need the Nomad's help. The Gray is…Hera needs your help.

She put out the cigarette on a glass dish. "Huh. Hera, the one and only, needs the help of the Nomads?" She leaned forward. "Stop bullshitting. Who are you and why are you this close to the East Coast?"

Well, at least she understood me.

"Look, lady," Cleo said. "We know that Hera asking for help sounds pretty farfetched. But if we were bullshitting you, we'd have come up with a better opening line than that." Cleo's turn to lean forward. "So she actually needs your help. She's ready to give you land, food, weapons, and everything else that would give you Nomads wet dreams. We just need your help."

"Let's say I believe you." She leaned back. "Why would Hera need my help?"

Because there's a war for the Gray, again, I cut in. Grace.

She straightened at that and swung her legs apart. "Grace? Grace Fallow?"

Fallow? Grace Fallow? No. She couldn't be…Dan was related to that lady? He would have told me. He said he only had a dad and mother. No siblings. No one else he knew about. Dan wouldn't lie to me. Would he? I was young when he was still around, but he told me everything. Did he tell Tick?

A better question: how did the woman in front of us know?

"If…if she is a Fallow," Cleo muttered, Jack was stoic and soaking in information, "how do you know? Because we didn't, and we're part of Hera's battalion."

She stood up and paced the room, fiddling with a silver ring on her hand. "I know because I've tried to kill her before."

"What?" Cleo said, and I signed at the same time.

"It was a long time ago. Years. Thirteen maybe? More?"

"That was during the war," Jack added.

"Coming to its end," she said. "That bitch." Language. She gripped onto the back of the red couch, her fingers dug into the cushion and her nails pressed into the fabric. She examined us, her eyes eventually falling on me. "You. What's your name?"

Runt, I signed.

"Real name."

Rebecca.

She lightly chuckled. "Isn't that a coincidence?" She dug her hand into her trouser pocket and brought out and old, dirty, and worn photo. My photo. Dan to my right, Tick to my left, and a smile on all our faces. "This. How did you get this?"

The better question was how the hell had she gotten it off me? I tapped my pocket to make sure it was real, and it was. Taped up in the middle from a time I'd torn it in training. Lightly burnt in the top right because of the house fire a few days ago.

"How did you get this?" she repeated, her voice low now. The shadow underneath her eye dark.

"Don't talk to her like that," Cleo cut in. "Those are her brothers. They died two years ago."

"Bullshit." That hurt. A dull jab to my heart as she spat the word. She tapped a rigid finger on Dan's smiling face. "Him. What was his name?" Her voice cracked, the slightest of cracks. A minuscule fracture, but still there.

"How about you tell us what your name is first?" Cleo jumped in again, to her credit, a lump had formed in my throat because of the lady. "And will you help us or not?"

"It'll be a giant pain in the ass to get the Nomads to the Gray quickly, but I can." She clutched onto my photo. "How did the boy with black hair die? The one without the tattoo."

Cleo glanced at me and squeezed my hand. "People say he fell off the center bridge connecting the Gray and the Island."

"People say?" she spat.

Cleo glared. "Hera was busy slaughtering my family, so excuse me for not being able to absorb or want to remember that night."

She looked at me again. "You knew him?"

I nodded.

She nodded back, blue eye becoming distant for a second and then snapping back to us. "Alright. It'll take a few days, but I can get my Nomads there."

"Who exactly are you?" Jack finally chirped.

She gave him a lopsided smile, creasing the skin underneath the eye patch. "Rebecca. My husband used to call me Becky." She looked at me. "Dan used to call me mum."