An Ember in the Ashes (Ember Quartet #1)(44)

The boy’s dead. Which means that all this—the battlefield, the smell, the Wastes—must be a nightmare. I pinch my arm to wake myself up. The boy tilts his head. I pinch myself again. I take my dagger and cut my hand with it. Blood drips to the ground.

The boy doesn’t budge. I can’t wake up.

Courage to face their darkest fears.

“My mother screamed and tore at her hair for three days after I died,” my first kill says. “She didn’t speak again for five years.” He talks quietly in the just-deepened voice of a teenaged boy. “I was her only child,” he adds, as if in explanation.

“I’m—I’m sorry—”

The boy shrugs and walks away, gesturing for me to follow him onto the battlefield. I don’t want to go, but he clamps a chill hand on my arm and pulls me behind him with surprising force. As we wind through the first of the bodies, I look down. A sick feeling seeps through me.

I recognize these faces. I killed every one of these people.

As I pass them, their voices murmur secrets in my head—

My wife was pregnant—

I was sure I’d kill you first—

My father swore revenge, but died before taking it—

I clap my hands over my ears. But the boy sees, and his clammy fingers pull mine away from my head with inexorable force.

“Come,” he says. “There are more.”

I shake my head. I know exactly how many people I’ve killed, when they died, how, where. There are far more than twenty-one men on this battlefield. I can’t have killed them all.

But we keep walking, and now there are faces I don’t know. And it’s a kind of relief, because these faces must be someone else’s sins, someone else’s darkness.

“Your kills,” the boy interrupts my thoughts. “They’re all yours. The past. The future. All here. All by your hand.”

My hands sweat, and I feel lightheaded. “I—I don’t—” There are scores of people on this battlefield. Well over five hundred. How could I be responsible for the deaths of so many? I look down. There’s a lanky, fair-haired Mask on my left, and my stomach sinks because I know this Mask. Demetrius.

“No.” I bend down to shake him. “Demetrius. Wake up. Get up.”

“He can’t hear you,” my first kill says. “He’s gone.”

Beside Demetrius lies Leander, blood staining his halo of curly hair, trickling down his crooked nose and off his chin. And a few feet away, Ennis—another member of Helene’s battle platoon. Further ahead, I spot a mane of white hair, a powerful body. Grandfather?

“No. No.” There isn’t another word for what I’m seeing, because something so terrible shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I bend next to another body—the gold-eyed slave-girl I’ve only just met. A raw red line cuts across her throat. Her hair is a mess, snaking out every which way. Her eyes are open, their brilliant gold faded to the color of a dead sun. I think of her intoxicating smell, like fruit and sugar and warmth. I turn on my first kill.

“These are my friends, my family. People I know. I wouldn’t hurt them.”

“Your kills,” the boy insists, and the terror inside me grows at the sureness with which he speaks. Is this what I will be? A mass murderer?

Wake up, Elias. Wake up. But I cannot wake, because I’m not asleep. The Augurs have somehow brought my nightmare to life, unrolled it before my eyes.

“How do I make it stop? I have to make it stop.”

“It’s already done,” the boy says. “This is your destiny—it is written.”

“No.” I push past him. The battlefield has to end eventually. I’ll get by it, keep going through the desert, get out of here.

But when I reach the edge of the carnage, the ground lurches and the battlefield stretches out ahead of me again in its entirety. Beyond the battlefield, the landscape has changed—I’m still moving east through the desert.

“You can keep walking,” the disembodied whisper of my first kill brushes across my ear, and I start violently. “You may even reach the mountains. But until you conquer your fear, the dead will remain with you.”

This is an illusion, Elias. Augur sorcery. Keep walking until you find your way out.

I force myself toward the shadow of the Serran Range, but every time I reach the end of the battlefield, I feel the lurch and see the bodies spread out before me yet again. Every time it happens, it gets harder to ignore the carnage at my feet. My pace slows, and I struggle to stumble on. I pass by the same people over and over, until their faces are burned into my memory.

The sky lightens and dawn breaks. Second day, I think. Go east, Elias.

The battlefield grows hot and fetid. Clouds of flies and scavengers descend. I shout and attack them with my dagger, but I can’t keep them away. I want to die of thirst or hunger, but I feel neither in this place. I count 539 bodies.

I won’t kill so many. I tell myself. I won’t. An insidious voice in my head chuckles when I try to convince myself of this. You’re a Mask, the voice says. Of course you’ll kill so many. You’ll kill more. I run from the thought, willing with my entire mind to break free of the battlefield. But I cannot.

The sky darkens, the moon rises. I cannot leave. Daylight again. It’s the third day. The thought appears in my head, but I hardly know what it means. I was supposed to do something by now. Be somewhere. I look to my right, at the mountains. There. I’m supposed to go there. I force my body to turn.