Chapter Text
Naia searches through the small stack of clothes in their hut, hoping to find something, anything, to keep her warm. All the clothes are worn out, threadbare, and nowhere near thick enough to give the girl any warmth. She sighs and turns around, heading over to her bed to pull the fur over her shoulders.
“Naia?” her mother’s voice comes muffled through the tarp working as a makeshift door.
“I’m here,” she calls back, heading over to the entrance, but then her mother comes inside, her braided hair falling over her shoulders.
“Hey sweeta1,” she greets her and gives the girl a kiss on the forehead. Naia leans into the touch. “Are you cold again?”
Naia nods and pulls the fur a bit tighter around herself.
“I wish we ha…” Loud voices stop her. She turns her head towards the door and then back to her mother. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t think…” her mother starts but Naia is already moving and out of the door. It’s dark outside and the moon shines through the treetops, but the girl can see exactly what’s going on.
The gate is being closed behind a party of four of their own men dragging an unfamiliar figure in their middle.
“Chon bilaik daun2?” Naia asks her mother absent-mindedly who now stands next to her, but doesn’t take her eyes off the group crossing the village.
“GET OFF ME,” the boy screams, and he can’t be older than her. He’s clearly one of the Sky People, the ones who fell from the sky not so long ago. He rebels violently against the guards holding him by his arms, dragging him over to the train station.
“Shof op3!” one of the guards says but if it accomplishes anything, than it’s for the boy to revolt even more.
“I don’t speak your damn grounder slang!” the boy says, and Naia watches him as he’s dragged past her. The twilight obscures his features some, but she sees the hair falling into his eyes. They lock eyes for a second before Naia is pulled aside by her mother.
“You don’t want to mingle with him,” she says as she guides her away from the train station, but Naia throws one last glance behind at the boy. All she sees is the back of his head.
*
Back inside their hut, Naia instantly turns to her mother again.
“Why did they capture him?”
Her mother fixes her with a stern look.
“The people from the sky are a threat. Maybe the Mountain Men sent them. We need to get to know as much about them as possible.”
“How do we know that?” Naia can’t believe it. “And also: By torturing him?! How is that going to help? He can’t be older than me! Would you want someone to torture me?” she asks accusingly. She’s not even sorry.
“No more!” her mother demands, her face fiery with anger. Naia opens her mouth to protest, but then knows better than to provoke her mother with contradictions, so she shuts it. She sits down on her bed frustrated.
That’s when the first scream breaks the peaceful silence of the village.
And Naia knows that precaution is a basic principle of their life, with it constantly at stake because of the Mountain Men and the Reapers, but these are just kids. Like herself. And she can’t bring herself to agree with her people. These people from the sky – they didn’t attack them. All they did was come crashing down on their land. And you can’t hate someone for that.
*
The boy’s screams echo through the village throughout the next day. Naia can’t think straight because of it. She’s supposed to work together with Artigas, let him teach her how to become a warrior, but she can’t concentrate. Throwing her dagger at trees ends in it almost getting buried in the neck of one of the elders, and Naia abandons the practice after that.
She ignores her mother’s warning and wanders outside the village and aimlessly through the woods for hours on end, just to escape the boy’s screams. But not hearing them doesn’t mean she doesn’t think about them.
And she knows that she shouldn’t think that, but she wants to end it. The Sky People are no threat, they can’t be. Their lives are full of dangers already, and she just can’t bring herself to believe that the Sky People were sent to wipe them out.
When Naia finally returns back to her village as twilight falls, the boy doesn’t scream anymore. She’s glad. She couldn’t have taken it.
*
The next morning, she tries to practice with Artigas again. Today it’s fighting two-on-two, and Naia is glad. She can’t actually hurt people this way – at least not seriously – and it takes her mind off things.
Artigas knows not to ask what’s going on with her, and she’s glad. She’s not good at keeping her emotions bottled, and she’d rather not talk about all of this. So they fight until the sun is at the zenith and they go to get something to eat. Naia settles for some dried berries and a piece of freshly smoked meat.
And then the boy screams again.
The berries fall from her grip and Naia shudders. She has to know what’s going on. If he’s doing okay.
“You have no business here,” Banto, one of the guards, growls as she paces in front of the door to the train station. She stops in her tracks. It’s no use, they won’t let her in, no matter how long she lingers here. She turns on her heels and heads in the opposite direction.
But as soon as she is out of view, she turns around and sneaks around their village, approaching the station from the back. She remembers from when she was a kid that there are air vents, but she never explored them. And sure enough, as she inspects the backside of the building, she finds a grate blocking the vent. She pushes her finger through it and pulls. And again. On the third try, it gives away and she topples over.
She shoves the grate off of herself and crawls into the vent. It’s barely enough space for her to fit in, but she keeps crawling.
It’s like someone slices her eardrums open as an agonizing scream cuts through the silence. It’s even more intense inside the metal walls of the vent, and Naia clasps her hands over her ears for a second as good as possible. But then the scream dies away and another voice is carried over to her. Naia starts crawling again.
“How many of you are there?” the person asks and Naia immediately recognizes it as Anya. The boy doesn’t respond.
Naia keeps crawling.
“How many?” But again, the boy doesn’t answer. But he screams seconds later.
Naia keeps crawling.
Finally, she comes to the end of the vent. The grate hides her from the view of the people inside the station, but she can see all of them clearly.
The boy is tied to a stake, his arms high above his head. His matted hair falls into his eyes like two days before, but now he’s covered in blood. Naia clasps her hand before her mouth.
Why are they doing that? she asks herself, but all the answers in her brain don’t make sense to her. She eyes all of the places in which the boy’s shirt is ripped, or worse, singed, and has a hard time not to gag.
“I will only ask once again, John Murphy of the Sky People – how many of you are there?” Anya hisses in a threatening voice. She steps closer to the boy, and Naia sees him stir. He raises his head to look directly into their leader’s eyes. His eyelids are heavy, but he manages to smirk.
“Go float yourself.”
Naia understands the words, but not their meaning, but in the way he says them, she knows that it is an insult, like branwada is for them. He has to pay the price immediately. One of Anya’s guards produces a pincers from a table next to him and steps in front of the boy. He loosens one of the slings securing the boy’s – John’s – wrists and takes it into a firm grip. Naia doesn’t even have to look to know what happens next. The boy’s cry is enough to go by. It shudders her down to her bones.
When she dares to open her eyes again, she sees the flow of blood from the boy’s hand and two bloody pieces on the floor. His fingernails.
“Let this be a learning experience,” Anya says and Naia knows it’s a threat. She backs out of the vent as quickly as possible. She doesn’t want to see any more of this.
*
Naia crawls back into the vent again the next day, and John looks even worse then. Slashes and cuts cover his arms and face, blood crusted everywhere. She wants to throw up, to scream, to cut the boy from his bonds, to get him out of here. But she can’t. She can’t help him, and it’s driving her insane.
But she returns the day after that again. She can’t help it. All she can do is make sure he’s still alive. And he is. Barely hanging on, but still standing strong. But a big burn covers his right shoulder and the smell of singed flesh still lingers in the air. Naia flees.
She stumbles out of the vent and onto her knees, but bobs up and walks away from the air vent, her eyes still lingering on it, her thoughts still lingering on what she just saw. When she finally tears her eyes away, they find something else. Her mother right before her.
A slap that wipes the air from her lungs for a second hits her before she knows what’s happening. Naia clutches her hand over her cheek as she looks at her mother like a beaten dog.
“I told you not to mingle with him. But I should have known better. You’re hopeless.” With a final glance, her mother turns around and leaves Naia standing between the huts on her own.
*
Naia doesn’t dare return to the air vent. She knows that her mother told the guards, there’s just no other way, and like that, she can’t do anything else.
So she escapes their village as often as possible. She’s mostly on her own, but sometimes, Artigas comes with her. She always comes back before nightfall, bringing some hare or fish with her occasionally, so that it seems she’s still contributing to the village. But all she really wants is for her people to leave the Sky People alone. She knows that the Sky People wiped out another village of theirs with these weird fires they sent into the sky, but they looked more like a version of their own communication fires than an attack. They just had to be.
*
Two days later when Naia returns to the village earlier than usual, she immediately notices that something is different. And she also finds out what – the door to the train station stands wide open. She storms over to it. The two men guarding the building don’t stop her when she enters it.
She rushes down the stairs and then finds herself in the room in which they held Murphy captive. Anya stands before the stake, like she awaited her.
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” her leader asks and untangles her arms from before her chest. She steps towards Naia. “For the Sky boy to be free? Well, he is. But we sent him with an illness that will let us wipe out all of them.”
“No!” Naia cries furiously. “Don’t you see that you’re making everything worse? You can still end this, Anya!” Naia wants to kick and scream, but she keeps herself still, her bottom lip between her teeth to keep herself from crying. She tastes blood.
“It is already done,” Anya responds calmly and rounds her. When Naia hears her leader’s footsteps on the stairs, her knees give away under her and she slumps to the ground. She had no way of stopping this, but still she blames herself. A single teardrop falls to the ground.