The Forsaken

automatically.
    “Maybe you’ll see them again one day.”
    “Not on the wheel, I hope. But yeah, someplace else.”
    He holds an arrow shaft up to the sun, nearly finished. It’s smooth and polished like it’s been put on a lathe. He squints at it. “Looks good, right? Wanna help me put the fletching on?” He picks two long black feathers out of the bowl, raises the knife, and slices them perfectly in two. Then he hands the pieces to me. From another bowl he takes a gluey substance and slathers it around the blunt end of the arrow’s shaft. “You put the feathers on like this, see?”
    He guides my hand, sticking the feathers onto the wood. The substance is already drying, fusing them in place. “What is this gunk?” I ask.
    “Pine sap.” He plucks the arrow out of my hands and holds it up again, rolling it between his hands. “Nice.” He tosses it into a pile with the other arrows, awaiting their flint heads.
    “I can help more.” I have the urge to be useful around him. Show him I’m not just some spoiled city girl who arrived here and expects to be taken care of.
    “Good. I need all the help I can get.”
    We sit there working together. A few minutes slide by in silence. It’s a little awkward at first, but then it grows increasingly comfortable.
    There were no boys like Liam at my school. Not many like him in all of the UNA, for that matter. Everyone back home seems dull and complacent in comparison. There’s something special flashing behind Liam’s eyes. He has substance. Charisma. I can see why Gadya would have trouble getting over him.
    “How’d it go with Markus and the prisoners?” he finally asks.
    I hedge, wishing I could tell him about David, but not wanting to give anything away yet.
    “Markus kept beating on David with a stick.”
    Liam frowns. “He’s not supposed to do that.” He looks around, like he doesn’t want anyone to hear what he’s going to say next. “Markus has changed a lot from when I first met him. His girlfriend Chloe got taken four months ago. Not by drones, but by feelers. After that he was different.”
    “Different how?”
    “Before then, he’d give people the benefit of the doubt. What happened to Chloe messed with his head. Now he gets mad really easily, and he takes it out on the prisoners.”
    “Veidman lets him?”
    “He looks the other way. Maybe even encourages it sometimes.”
    “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I say quickly. I don’t want to seem too interested in the prisoners, given my plan. “So what’s the gray zone like?”
    “It’s the worst sector on the wheel. And before it collapsed, the tunnel leading into it was a good place to get ambushed. There’s so many stories I could tell—” He breaks off. “All I’ll say is that you see weird things in the gray zone. Huge stones with etchings on them. Remains of lost towns. And there are old gravestones too. It doesn’t really make any sense.”
    I instantly get goose bumps all over, and the hair on the nape of my neck begins prickling. I’m thinking about what David said. A prison colony . Inside that treacherous, forbidden zone. Were my parents really sent to this place, just like me?
    Liam keeps talking. “The air’s different too—way colder all year round. So cold you have to wear jackets and gloves in there. No one knows why it’s like that.”
    “That’s really weird.” I’m trying to imagine how a person could ever be cold on this sweltering island.
    “I think the gray zone is where we first arrive when we get sent here, even if we don’t remember it,” he continues, looking over at me. “Think about it. You just went to sleep in a testing arena, and woke up on the wheel, right? In the middle of nowhere.”
    I nod.
    “Even if an aircraft brought you to the wheel, what could have deposited you so far inland, right near our sector?”
    It takes a second, but then the pieces suddenly snap together. “The feelers!” I blurt out. “They take people, but I bet they also bring us here, don’t they?”
    “That’s my theory. I think there’s some kind of landing station inside the gray zone. One that unloads us from the aircrafts and turns us over to the feelers. We have to get to that station, find out how it works, and then report back to the village. If we know what we’re up against, we can figure out how to fight it.”
    “How far do you think the wheel is from the mainland?”
    “Veidman told me that some kids built a boat a few years ago.