The Earth Dwellers

“Why not? Don’t they want to be protected by the Glassies, too?”

Deep breath. Take a sip of hot tea to open my throat. “The thing is, the Glassies are supposedly ‘protecting us’ from the Tri-Tribes.”

Jolie starts cracking up. She doesn’t believe me and I don’t blame her. “Why would we need protecting from our friends?” Sometimes she’s too smart.

I sigh. “We don’t, but the leaders think we do.”

“We should ignore the leaders and go live with Skye,” Jolie says, her face lighting up, like she’s just come up with the best idea in the world. Which she has. The best, impossible idea.

“They won’t let us,” I say. “Trust me, Joles, we have no choice. Now let’s get packed up.”

“This sucks iceballs,” Jolie mutters, and finally Mother snaps her gaze away from the fireplace, her mouth half-open as if to rebuke her daughter’s vulgarity. But then her mouth slowly closes and she gives me the saddest look I’ve ever seen.

~~~

We’re all packed up and ready to go. Mother, Jolie, and I decided to bring just what we can carry on our backs, which isn’t much.

As we walk through the snow, leaving final footprints like markers so we don’t get lost, I glance back at our house, half expecting it to crumble into ash behind us. But it doesn’t, just stands resolute and waiting, the final wisps of smoke from the snuffed out fire snaking from the chimney toward the sky.

A large snowflake lands on my nose, and I watch with crossed eyes as it melts into a tiny droplet that drips to the ground.

I hold Jolie’s hand on one side and Mother’s on the other, and it’s not weird at all like I’d expect it to be. If we must go, we’ll go together, as one. We are the Unity Alliance, and we’ll see it through, somehow, someway, if only in our minds and hearts.

We pass the rigid form of a soldier, red-faced and standing at attention, staring past us as if we’re not even there. Are we ghosts? Have we been reduced to wraiths, shadows of ourselves who give in to tyrants? My eyes never leave the soldier’s, as if challenging him, but he doesn’t so much as change the path of his stare; until, just as we’re about past him, his eyes flick to Jolie’s and he winks.

The sudden rage that fills me splits me like a logger’s axe on a fallen tree. I’m taking deep breaths and clenching and unclenching my fists and thinking happy thoughts—doing all the things I’ve practiced to control my temper—when Jolie sticks out her tongue. Well—yeah, get ready for another deep thought—let me tell you, the soldier’s face goes even redder, and it’s not from the cold. It’s humiliation and embarrassment and for a second I think he might shoot us all dead right here and now. But his hand only twitches on his weapon and then he flashes a smile and goes right on back to staring at nothing and nobody.

I look down at Jolie, and she’s gri

Down the path we go, making our way to Buff’s house. At least we’ll be able to travel with him and his family.

I chuckle softly to myself as we approach. It’s like all the chaos and insanity that’s usually hidden behind the thin wooden walls has spilled out into the snow. They’ve got a wooden-wheeled cart, full of all sorts of odds and ends, like pots and kindling and water skins and—is that a feathered hat?—and bundles of clothes that appear to be dark with wetness and maybe mud, as if they were dropped a dozen times before making it into the cart-bed. All around the cart are munchkins: two of them are rolling over and over, a boy and a girl, grappling, shoving snow in each other’s faces; another one’s climbing the cart wheel, screaming “Ayayayayayaya!” with streaks of mud on her face; a fourth kid, who I like to call Baby-Buff, because of his striking resemblance to my friend, has his boots on the wrong feet and is tossing handfuls of what appears to be flour into the air. “It’s snowing!” he yells at the top of his lungs. The fifth is being wrestled to the cart by the second-oldest, Darcy, who looks to be about at the end of her rope with impatience and frustration, her dark, curly hair tumbling out of a knit-hat and across her face.

Buff’s right behind her, his father’s arm looped around his neck. As they hobble over to the cart, Buff sees us and says, “Want to go kid-wrangling? Whoever gets the most in the cart—you might have to tie them up, mind you—gets a rare and wonderful prize.”

“Ooh, I want a prize,” Jolie says. “What is it?”

“Don’t encourage him,” Darcy says, shoving one of her brothers into the back of the cart. Within seconds, he’s climbed over the food and clothes and leapt off the side, managing to dislodge the wheel-climbing kid at the same time. They tumble through the snow in a fit of giggles and shrieks of delight.

“You get to eat yellow snow!” Buff exclaims, as if that’s the most original joke he’s ever made.

“Eww,” Jolie says, but she’s giggling.

I swoop down and grab the two kids wrestling, one under each arm. “I’ll help with the wrangling, but I’ll skip the prize if I win.”

“Your loss,” Buff says with a tight grin. To anyone who doesn’t know him as well as I do, he would almost look happy, like his good old jovial joke-cracking self. But I can see something behind his façade of wisecracks and wide smiles: fear. For his family; for my family; for this entire freezin’ world that’s become a huge Heart-icin’ mess.

I toss the kids onto a soft pile of unfolded clothes in the back of the cart, and then help Buff lift his injured father. My mother takes his crutch. “What do you make of all this?” she says to him in a low voice.

“Honestly, I don’t know. It feels so wrong, but so do so many things nowadays.”

My mother nods, takes his hand. “We’re in this together. All of us.” I give her a boost to sit beside him. “We’ve got two of the best boys in the whole of this world,” she says once she’s settled.

I turn away to grab another kid so she can’t see the ice water in my eyes.

Chapter Sixteen

Adele

Finally, it’s just Tristan and I again.

The curving glass dome stands before us, dispersing the last rays of the dying red sun into fragments of light. It’s beautiful. Almost doesn’t seem real. I still can’t get over how big everything is up here. I’d thought some of the Sun Realm subchapters were more enormous than anything in the world, but this land, fire country, makes everything below seem like dwarfs, stunted.

And an entire city contained within a glass dome? Sounds impossible, and yet I’m staring at the buildings rising up like giants made of stone and metal and glass.

The heat of the sand warms my belly, even through the camo shirt, which is tucked into my camo pants.

“Adele…” Tristan says, and I can feel his heat, too, as he looks at me, as his hip brushes up against mine.

I stare straight ahead, as if hoping to cut an opening in the glass with the intensity of my gaze. I can’t look at him, can’t break down, can’t be attached to anything but my objectives. Infiltrate, gather intel, sabotage, assassinate.

“Adele, look at me,” he says.

“No.”

“Adele, I—”

“No.” Seriously, no.

Tristan grabs my chin and pulls it toward him and then we’re ripping off our masks and kissing, his lips so soft and yet moving fiercely against mine. I wrap a hand around the back of his head, lace my fingers through his hair, breathe him in, kiss him back. My heart blossoms.

It can’t. I can’t feel this, not now.

I pull away, but can’t bring myself to unlock my hand from his head. “Adele, I—I love you,” he says.