The Forsaken

got you and Rika.”
    “No, one of them was David. The drones made him paint his face red. Told him he had to kill someone.”
    “An initiation rite. He’s lucky to still be alive.”
    “But what was that other thing?” I ask. “The thing in the sky.”
    Gadya doesn’t answer. She just asks, “Can you stand?”
    I struggle to my feet. Two hunters are already questioning Rika. I can tell she’s explaining everything to them.
    “Buck up,” Gadya tells me. “Maybe we’ll get another chance to save David.” She looks me up and down. “I’m glad you fought back. Or tried to. That means there’s a chance you’ll live longer than a week.” She sticks her spear into the earth, where it stands upright. “The passive ones? The weak ones? They’re only good for a few days.”
    “But what was that noise? And those tentacles . . .” I swallow hard. “You have to tell me.”
    She looks at me. “I’m sorry you had to see that on your first day. I was on the wheel for two weeks before I saw someone get taken.”
    “Taken?”
    “The light, the noises. The whole shebang.” She pauses. “We don’t call them tentacles, though. They’re not alive. They’re robotic filaments, attached to the bottom of some kind of helicopter, probably unmanned. We call them feelers .”
    My hands are still shaking, so I cross my arms and bury my fists in my armpits. “Where do the feelers come from? What do they want?”
    “No one knows. But once someone gets taken, we never see them again. We don’t know where they go, or what happens. They just never come back to the wheel. We figure they get killed.”
    Rika walks over to us. Her glasses are askew, smeared with mud. “Scary, right? You did good.”
    “Thanks,” I say, feeling empty and quavering inside.
    “Look on the bright side,” Gadya declares. “Now we’ve got one less drone to worry about.” She bends down and picks something up. It’s lizard boy’s lighter. She flicks the flint, and a yellow flame appears. “Nice.” She slips it into her back pocket.
    “How do I know one of those feelers won’t come after me?” I ask.
    “The odds of getting taken are pretty small, if you play by the rules. It mostly happens to people when they cross from one sector to another. Our best guess is that it’s a UNA enforcement mechanism, to make us stay where we belong. We don’t know why the UNA even cares about the sectors, but if we cross over into the Monk’s sectors, or his drones cross into ours, this kind of thing tends to happen. Not all the time, and obviously not to everyone.”
    “We cut off part of a feeler once,” Rika adds. “Well, I mean, Liam and some of the other hunters did, with a knife. It just looked like a piece of electrical cable with tiny wires inside.”
    Gadya and Rika exchange looks. I get the sense they know some things they’re not sharing with me yet, but I don’t press them.
    We start walking back to the fire pit. I’m trying to mask my total horror over the feeler attack, as well as my inability to help David. “Tell me about Liam,” I say, hoping to focus on something positive. But I don’t get a good reaction from Gadya.
    “He’s the best hunter and tracker in our village,” she replies tersely, her shoulders tensing. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”
    Rika pipes up. “Liam and Gadya dated for a while—”
    “Shut up!” Gadya snaps. “Remind me to kick your butt later.”
    Rika cackles. She seems a little giddy now that the battle is over. Meanwhile, I’m more frightened than ever. And because Liam is obviously a sensitive subject, I don’t know what else to say.
    “Get some rest,” Gadya tells me. “The drones won’t attack us again tonight. They get tired too.”
    I look around and see other members of the village already cleaning things up. They’re getting the camp together again and tending the fire. Hammering splintered cabins back together with homemade tools. It’s like they’ve just accepted the drone attacks—and the risk of getting taken—as normal parts of everyday life. Maybe I’ll end up feeling the same way, if I live long enough.
    “Come on,” Gadya says, taking my arm and pulling me toward a row of vine hammocks slung between trees. “If you can’t sleep, at least lie down. You look like you’re going into shock. We usually take turns keeping watch and doing chores, but don’t worry about it tonight. You get a free pass for being a newbie.”
    Rika nods in