The Forsaken

maybe he just hasn’t spoken in a very long time.
    “ Who are you? ” Gadya growls. I hear the fear and anger in her voice, intertwined like the vines that grow all around us on the trees.
    “You’re the Can—” Markus begins softly, but then stops. Backtracks. He almost said “cannibal” by accident. “You’re the Monk, aren’t you?” I hear horrified awe in his voice.
    The mask turns to stare at him. It’s like his head is the only part of his body that moves. “Some call me that, yes.”
    I shut my eyes.
    So this is the bogeyman.
    Finally, right here in front of me. A myth made into flesh. I feel the blood rushing from my head. I think about what David said, that the Monk’s drones know my name. I wonder if the Monk himself knows it. Should I speak, or stay silent?
    “We’re not here to fight,” Markus finally says. “We’re headed into the gray zone—”
    Sinxen interrupts, his voice tense, “Please don’t kill any more of us, okay?”
    I chime in, finding my own voice at last. “We’ll leave your sector. Honest. We were just trying to get through the barrier.”
    The Monk’s head swivels in my direction. “I know. We’ve been following your group. Watching.” His words are stiff but oddly authoritative, and he speaks in clipped sentences.
    “What do you want with us?” Gadya asks. “Why are you here? To massacre us?”
    “I know about your plan. To find the aircrafts.” He pauses. “I need your help to reach them. Behind that barrier lies salvation.” I assume he means a way off the wheel, but then he elaborates. “Salvation for the sickness that ails me.”
    Then I understand.
    The Monk has the Suffering.
    That’s why he wears the mask. Why he can’t move. Why his eyes burn so red. His face has probably rotted away in the tropical heat.
    Gadya instantly voices my thought: “You’re infected.”
    The Monk laughs, low and throaty. He slowly raises a shaky hand from under his blankets. He’s just skin and bones, his flesh dotted with sores like an old man with leprosy. The Suffering has ravaged his body. Most people this sick just die. But not the Monk.
    At his signal, a drone rushes forward, flask in hand. He kneels before the Monk and dribbles water into the mask’s mouth hole.
    “I’m going to kill you when I get the chance,” Gadya says to the Monk, with cold fury.
    I flinch, terrified of all the weapons pointed at us. It’s clear the Monk’s drones won’t hesitate to kill every last one of us if he gives the order.
    “Gadya—” Rika warns. “Not smart.”
    The Monk waves his drone away and licks the wooden lips of the mask, lapping up the water. The wood around his mouth is a darker color now, stained by the liquid.
    “You have information that I need,” the Monk continues. “Yes, I have eyes inside your village. I know that your hunters mapped the gray zone well. Better than my drones have managed. I need you to take me to the city in the gray zone. I don’t have long to live.”
    Markus glares at him. “Why should we help you?”
    “First, you have no choice. Second, I alone know how to get through this barrier. Without my help, you will fail.”
    “I don’t trust you,” Gadya tells him. “You’re a maniac. A killer.” She glances down at the bodies of Veidman and the others.
    He nods. “Yet we share a common goal. You want to leave this island. And I want to cure my condition, so I can resume leading my flock.” He clears his throat. It’s a wet, horrible sound. “In addition to the aircrafts, there is a laboratory inside the gray zone. Staffed with doctors who can help me. So let us go into the zone together.”
    There is something seductive and vaguely hypnotic about his deranged rasp. His cadence sounds almost familiar, but I can’t place it.
    “Why did you kill Veidman?” I ask.
    “To get your attention.” I sense a sick, cruel smile behind the mask. “Besides, if our groups join forces, we only need one person in charge.”
    “You took his life for no reason!” Gadya begins, but the others hush her. I sense her barely repressed hatred for the Monk bubbling underneath the surface. Like me, Gadya is a mass of churning emotions: grief, fear, and fury.
    “We need to talk about this among ourselves,” Sinxen says. I know he’s stalling for time. “Just us villagers.”
    “No,” the Monk says bluntly. “If you don’t obey me, my men will torture you until you do.” He pauses. “We will make our assault on the barrier in