Fire Country

For a moment I’m happy. Without a word of question, they’ve accepted me as one of them.

~~~

After the reception they gave me I’m left breathless. Every girl knows my name ’cause apparently Skye’s been talking ’bout me since the moment she arrived. And, although I was introduced to every last one of them, I can’t remember a single name.

“You wa

I nod, and as she whisks me away I thank as many of the girls as I can, meaning it with every thud of my heart. Lara tags along like my shadow.

Skye takes me to her tent.

Inside, we sit cross-legged in the middle of a wide space, in which a second bed has been added for me to sleep in. Our legs form a triangle, Skye’s and Lara’s and mine. My head’s still buzzing with excitement.

“How’re you feelin’?” Skye asks, reaching out to squeeze my hand.

I search my body for the strongest feeling but there are so many. “I—I don’t know. Happy and sad and surprised and everything.”

Skye smiles. “I know exactly whatcha mean. I’s the same way when I arrived, more surprised’n a newborn baby tug. Not everyone’s been groomed since birth to be a burnin’ Wild, like Lara ’ere.”

Lara blushes. “I wasn’t groomed from birth, maybe from a Totter…”

“You were made for this,” I say to Lara. Without even trying she fits in with these—these warriors. I’m somewhere between six and sixty miles behind.

“You were too!” Lara protests.

I laugh, hold out my tent-pole arms. “Tell that to my body.”

“It’s not about that!” she says. “Tell her, Skye.”

I look to my sister, once more adjusting to the new her. Everything ’bout her is different. Not just the short hair and her physique, as muscly and lithe as a Killer, but her eyes, too, still brown, but with a steel gray behind her gaze. Also her voice, as cut as her body, as if it’s made from stone. It’s filled with slang and language so colorful it’d make Mother cringe all the way up in the land of the gods. “She’s burnin’ right, Sie. It’s what’s in yer heart that matters. Lara tol’ us all ’bout the Killer attack, how you tried to save Circ.”

“And about the Glassies,” Lara adds.

“The baggards,” Skye adds.

I shake my head. “Circ ended up having to save me. And the Glassies? You hadta practically drag me into it, Lara,” I say.

“You were already there, remember?” Lara says.

“Tell me everythin’,” Skye says. “I wa

“First tell me ’bout your markings,” I say, glancing at her abdomen.

~~~

Her stomach is as flat as the upper parts of the canyon walls, as flat as my stomach even, but like sheetrock, hard and stacked with muscle.

“Hit me,” she says. I stare at her strangely. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t wa

“Burnin’ hit me!” she repeats, louder this time.

“Just do it,” Lara says. “She won’t stop asking until you do it.”

Tightening my hand into a fist, I aim for the tree marking to the left of her belly button. “Ow!” I grimace when my knuckles co

“Father wouldn’t recognize me now, eh?” she says proudly.

“I don’t recognize you,” I say. My fingers return to her stomach, graze her skin. A sun. A flame. A tree. No coincidence. “Our charms,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “I hadta git rid of the charms, too many bad memories. But I wanted to keep these ones permanently.” She nods at her markings.

“Why?” I say, my hand jerking protectively to cover my own bracelet. Circ’s charm.

“Burnin’ filthy customs and Laws of the Heaters,” she says. “First rule: ferget everythin’ you learned in that place. Right now.”

I frown, think ’bout it, swing the pointer charm back’n forth with the tip of my finger. “If you don’t believe in the customs, then why mark the charm symbols on your skin at all?”

She looks away, at the side of the tent. “I hadta keep the three most important people close by. Lara,” she says, “can I speak with Sie ’lone for a while?”

Without another word, Lara scoots outta the tent.

~~~

“What do you know?” Skye asks when Lara’s gone.

I stare at her, this imposter that’s trying to be my sister. “’Bout what?” I say.

“Ma. How you got here. Any of it.”

I shrug. “I don’t know much. Mother told me next to nothing till the night of my Call, and then she just said she’d sent you here and she was doing the same for me. And she gave me directions.” I shrug again.

Skye pushes out a breath. “Guess she had more time to talk to me,” she says. “She tol’ me most everythin’.”

“She told you about Brev and the Marked?” I say, and as soon as I see Skye’s expression, I know she didn’t. Least not everything.

“She tol’ me ’bout Brev. But what the scorch does he hafta do with the Marked?” Skye asks.

I tell her what little I know, which is next to nothing. How he couldn’t hang ’round the village with Mother not being allowed to see him. How he left. That he started the Marked.

“Ain’t that interestin’,” Skye says, mulling it over for a bit. In my mind is flashing Feve, Feve, Feve, like some kind of bright star that can’t decide if it wants to shine or not. Should I tell her? Should I tell her that I’ve met a Marked? I can’t. ’Cause then she’ll know I was too weak to make it here on my own.

“Have you ever met a Marked?” I probe, snapping her out of her thoughts.

“They come ’round sometimes,” she says. “To trade and such. But only their leaders. And they only speak to our leaders.”

“Was this Brev guy with them?”

“I du

~~~

After getting settled in Skye’s tent, we go to meet the Wild leaders. Well, technically I’ve already met them, but I wouldn’t know them from anyone else in the throng.

They set in a large tent, almost as big as our hut back home—well, not home, not anymore, and not our hut—it was always my father’s hut—all in a line. Three girls, three leaders, none older’n twenty. Dim light flickers from torches sticking from the ground, casting an eerie glow over everything. They take turns saying their names.

“Crya,” says the one on the left with silky black hair that falls like rain to her waist. Although she hasn’t cut her hair like so many of the other girls, her skin is wound with markings, as many as Feve had.

Next, on the right, is, “Brione,” with a voice like a hammer, firm and strong. She’s built like a tug, with arms the size of my legs and shoulders that could plow through a hut wall. She’s gone even further’n the other girls, shaving her hair to the scalp.

The girl in the center, average-looking with brown eyes and standard-length short hair, finishes, her voice as pleasing as tinkling glass. “Wilde,” she says. “Welcome to Wildetown.”

And with that single introduction, everything clicks into place. Not the Wild Ones, but the Wilde Ones. Although there is a wildness ’bout all the girls in this place, it’s not what gives them their name. This girl, as plain and unspectacular as an old moccasin, started it all when she escaped the Call. I never knew her name but everyone told stories ’bout the first girl who went missing—the first girl who was kidnapped by the Wilde Ones. Really, she left to start the Wilde Ones.

Too engaged in my thoughts, I don’t reply. “And we already know your name,” she says. “Your sister has told us so much about you.”