The Forsaken

Gadya says to him. “Or I’ll smash your ugly face in. I’ll turn your mask into splinters and use ’em as toothpicks.”
    “Gadya!” Markus calls out, ready to start hiking again. “No fighting. Not yet. Let’s go.” He shoves David forward. “Move it!”
    Gadya turns away from the Monk and starts heading through the trees. I follow, catching up. I don’t want to talk to the Monk. His drones might have faith in him, but the only thing he has faith in is himself. He even abandoned his own flock.
    But the Monk does have an uncanny knack for knowing things. I wonder if he knows that David told me about Shawcross Rock. How long has the Monk even been on this island? Where did he even come from?
    I continue hiking, placing one heavy foot in front of the other. We bunch up, the cold driving us together, like a herd of animals. Even the Monk and his drone don’t stray far from us now. There’s no chance to talk to David alone, because Markus keeps guarding him.
    In the cold gray landscape, I’ve lost track of time, and of how far we’ve traveled. We could have walked five miles, or we could have walked fifty. I can barely keep my legs moving anymore. The cold has made all of us silent and introspective.
    Finally, I see a break in the forest ahead, where the trees inexplicably thin out into nothingness.
    “Look!” I yell, my words loud in the silence. The others see it too. Everyone starts walking faster.
    “Are we there?” Rika asks, sounding a little dazed.
    I reach the opening in the trees and stumble cautiously out of the forest, right behind Markus and David.
    For a moment, I’m speechless. Then I feel a wave of dizziness, and I crouch to my knees, wanting to sob. Markus is cursing angrily. David looks confused. The others step out behind us.
    This can’t be possible!
    My hopes of finding the city and the aircrafts anytime soon have been obliterated.
    We’ve been following all of Markus’s directions, not to mention the arrow that my father drew. But they’ve taken us to an unexpected place.
    We stand at the edge of a huge frozen lake that sits in glacial silence. The surface is perfectly smooth, like a sheet of treacherous glass.
    The lake is so massive, it stretches out on either side as far as I can see. There’s no way to walk around it, unless we want to add twenty or thirty miles to our journey—miles that we wouldn’t survive in these temperatures.
    On the other side of the lake, which looks about half a mile away at most, I can see the forest resume. That means the only way to get past this lake is to walk across the ice—an incredibly risky move that will leave us exposed to anyone watching.
    “I’m guessing this wasn’t part of the plan,” I mutter.
    Markus shakes his head grimly.
    “We’re lost?” Rika dares to ask in a small voice. “For real?” No one answers.
    For once even the Monk isn’t chuckling. It looks like he can barely move. His thin, twisted fingers have curled into icy gloved claws that grip the robed shoulders of his drone.
    “Markus, we need answers,” Gadya prompts.
    “I don’t think we’re lost,” Markus begins. “But this frozen lake doesn’t make any sense. The directions I memorized didn’t take us to any lake. The other landmarks match up perfectly. Just not this one.”
    “How is that possible?” Sinxen asks, sounding panicked.
    “Maybe it’s man-made. Maybe it’s been flooded since this area was scouted,” Markus offers.
    “Now I wish I were a spy, so I could help us all out,” David begins. “I thought you guys knew the way.”
    Markus glares at him. I just stare across the lake in despair.
    It’s then that I finally notice something in the trees on the other side. It’s an odd shimmering of the light that almost looks like a mirage. It rises up above the tree line by about fifty feet or more.
    Gadya notices it too. “What the hell is that?”
    We all squint, but it’s impossible to make out what we’re seeing. It almost looks like there’s another translucent barrier on the other side of the lake. A barely visible one, flickering in the forest. Without fireworks we won’t be able to get through it.
    “We’re not lost,” the Monk suddenly rasps, catching us by surprise.
    “I thought you didn’t know how to get where we’re going!” Gadya says. “I thought that’s what you needed us for.”
    “I don’t know the way, but I do know what we’re looking for.” His mask has patches of frost on it. “What you’re