“Breakfast!” Ma called, her voice echoing through the cavern, turning the simple sustaining noun into an imperative. “Fast … fast … fast … fast…”
With the surviving battle boys sharing the meal, it was an appropriate echo; if Kylee didn’t get to breakfast fast, the boys would devour every scrap of food before she had taken her first sip of weak tea.
Grazim had already shoved off the wall to make her way toward the large kitchen chamber. “I’ll save you some bread,” she said, “if the vultures haven’t snatched it all already.”
“Thanks,” Kylee said.
The Six Villages themselves were deeply overcrowded now and desperately unsafe, and the caves set into the foothills above the village had become coveted property. The cave they lived in had once been a distillery for the Tamir gang’s foothill gin, so it was fairly secure and easy to defend, which Kylee appreciated. Defending it, however, meant living with Brysen’s old friends, the ragtag gang of battle boys who protected it and protected them. Just because the ghost eagles declared war on all humanity and united the different armies against a common enemy didn’t mean they all suddenly got along. It didn’t help that people blamed Brysen and Kylee for the ghost eagles’ attacks in the first place. They had a lot of enemies in the Six now, and there was a need for friends with few scruples when it came to using violence to protect their own. Grazim described them as vultures, but Kylee thought of them as a mob of loud but loyal crows.
“You coming?” Kylee asked her brother. She wanted to keep an eye on him. If he was following the dream footprints, too, then she wanted to know about it.
“I’m not hungry,” he replied.
She left him and Jowyn in their sleeping nook. She’d developed a rule for herself: to eat whenever she had the chance, because in war you never know when your next meal might come. She had the same rule about going to the bathroom. So much of survival is about the basics, and she made a point not to neglect them. Brysen, as usual, had different priorities. He’d probably sleep through the end of the world, if it weren’t for the nightmares. If the world hadn’t, in fact, already ended.
The battle boys were already scarfing down breakfast when she reached the kitchen.
“It’s real good, mem,” Nyck told Kylee’s mother as he shoved flatbread dusted with chili root into his mouth, then crunched on a handful of crisped river rice with charred sweetgrass. He looked up at Kylee when she came in but didn’t stop eating. Ma was, it turned out, a decent cook.
“Your father never appreciated subtle flavors,” she told Kylee as she gave her a smooth ceramic dish. “If there was no meat, he didn’t think it was food.”
“I remember,” Kylee replied, and felt a jolt of pain as the memory yanked her backward, an entire history boiling up behind her eyes: the fervent prayers and dire curses Ma offered instead of affection; the retreat Ma took in the face of her violent husband; the suffering Brysen endured, from which Ma never once shielded him; the lack of comfort Ma offered, never once helping Kylee soothe him. Kylee had never been hit, but she felt the blows in her own way, even now, and they stung.
Kylee breathed through the memory, amazed that the simple act of remembering could make her body react so aggressively. She felt actual sweat beading in her hairline, and her heartbeat accelerated. She hated the power the past still held over her present.
Ma’s mouth twitched at the corners. She wasn’t asking forgiveness, and she wouldn’t get it, but, of all the strange developments since the ghost eagles’ return, her mother’s transformation was by far the strangest: She’d become an actual parent.
Kylee took her dish over to the mat where Nyck and three other battle boys sat, glad for the distraction they’d provide. Grazim preferred to sip her tea and eat a short distance away from the others—she didn’t like the sound of people chewing—but she tossed Kylee a disc of flatbread she’d saved. Her aim was good, and Kylee thanked her again. The constant thank-yous made Grazim roll her eyes, but Kylee really was grateful. It was nice to have a reliable ally in the house. It was not something she was used to. Brysen had never been reliable, and his loyalty often caused more problems than it solved. She wondered now if she could even count on that.
“Where’s your brother?” Ma asked.
“Having a late morning with Jowyn?” Nyck smirked, eyebrows waggling with insinuation.
“Not every bird is a peacock,” Grazim grunted.
“He’s resting,” Kylee said.
“Resting could be a euphemism,” Nyck offered, which got a well-aimed pebble winged at the back of his head. “Ow!”
“And that could be a sharper stone next time,” Grazim said.
Kylee smiled. This little community that surrounded her had become something like she always imagined a family should be. They bickered and they bantered, and they ate together whenever they could, and even Ma, who never appeared to enjoy anything in their lives before now, appeared to enjoy providing for all these young people. All it had taken to find happiness was the fall of civilization.
“They caught one!” Jowyn came running into the cavern, still pulling a shirt on over his too-pale chest, which was covered with strange tattoos from his time in the blood birch forest, with the covey of the Owl Mothers.
“One what?” Nyck asked, but Grazim and Kylee were already on their feet.
“A ghost eagle,” Jowyn said. “In the nets, last night. It’s injured.”
“How do you know?” Lyra asked. She was new to the battle boys, the daughter of a slain Altari grass merchant, and she hadn’t known any of them before the war began. She didn’t know the history of Kylee, Brysen, and the ghost eagles beyond what rumors carried on the wind and the hints and insinuations made around the cave. She asked questions no one else was fool enough to ask out loud, either because they already knew or because they didn’t want to know the answers.
“Brysen can hear it,” Jowyn explained, and tapped the side of his head. “Said it’s being tortured, and he went to…” The sentence trailed off.
Kylee bit the inside of her cheeks. Was she angry that Brysen ran off without her? Or was she upset because he heard the ghost eagle’s cries and she didn’t?
And then she realized that she did hear them. The pain she felt when she remembered her father, remembered their lives before … that was the ghost eagle’s pain, too, like two words that rhymed, sung in harmony. She didn’t hear the ghost eagles because her own inner voice was too loud and indistinguishable from theirs.
It was not easy having the thoughts of giant killer birds echoing in your head, not easy to feel so much of what they did, half-tamed and enraged.
She was out the door before her plate finished rattling where she’d dropped it. The others ran close behind. The ghost eagles had already killed hundreds of Six Villagers, and she really hoped her brother wasn’t going to run into a mob of the surviving friends and families just to do something stupid, like try to help this injured eagle.
She knew, of course, that helping the injured ghost eagle was exactly what he was going to do.