Four.

  Initializing.

  Mia bit her lip.

  One more. She needed one more life.

  Mia had her ledger open. The words on the page were offensive and filled her with dread. She needed one more life, or she'd lose something: maybe her sight or her hearing, or something worse.

  She sat at the table, members of the Ravagers streaming out to hand over their loot. They glanced at her ledger, but they didn't ask about it.

  Dan glanced at her functioning eye and hand and gave her an approving nod and a healing potion. She no longer had a limp, but it wouldn’t last.

  Tomorrow she’d lose something.

  ***

  They sent us back to camp.

  No explanation.

  Dan had simply appeared at her side on the staging ground, while the First and Second Division soldiers were still reforming their lines, and tilted his head in the warp gate’s direction. Mia had questions and was almost certain he’d answer them, but she’d walked away. She was good at leaving when it was the sensible option. She also wanted to see what remained of the camp.

  Mia needed distance from her decisions. It felt like running, but she wasn’t sure if it was away from or towards something.

  There was also the lingering weight of a decision she’d have to make. Mia knew that if she were going to get the final kill, it would be at her original camp.

  Maybe that was why Dan was sending her away. Mox’s ledger probably listed how many people she’d killed.

  Mia glanced back.

  Nessa followed but kept her distance, her little face scrunched up, and the edge of her shirt torn to bits. At least she stood beside Mia. The distance between them earlier was harder to bear than she’d thought.

  The camp was different.

  It took her a few minutes to understand why.

  They’d moved. The battle had taken place in an area with denser trees. Here, light shone through the thinning leaves into a wide-open space.

  The tents were the same.

  The fire pits were the same.

  But the space felt larger than it had, the way a room feels larger when you remove furniture from it. Mia counted the tents as she walked.

  There were fewer people. It wasn’t the warriors, or the logistic members, or the beautiful people at the edge of camp. The reduction you'd overlook if you weren't looking for it. More than half the scavengers were dead.

  You’ll pay the debt even if you’re dead.

  Or maybe those people were worth more dead than they’d ever be worth alive. She remembered finding it odd that they were old, young, or sick. The young and able-bodied must have been separated earlier and sent to Ashfall by warp gate. Those with Flesh Ledger were common and left here to act as bait that the Perts couldn’t resist.

  Though the Command snuck them out before the fighting started.

  They’d brought them back.

  They sent Mia back.

  No warp gate. No transfer order, no reassignment. People had simply stopped being here.

  The warriors were back, though. They’d returned from wherever they'd been, filling the space where the leftovers used to be. She had seen them in the inner camp. She could hear their particular brand of noise, that specific combination of equipment clank and low-voiced arguments. It was a subdued sound.

  Mia looked at the arrangement and understood. The camp had shape and form. That form had a purpose.

  They were still bait.

  Either the Perts were still active, or there was another threat out there.

  Exhaustion made her steps heavy. She found her tent, sat down on the cot, and held her left arm up in front of her face. Flexing her fingers, she watched them move.

  Both eyes. Both hands. Full hearing. The wind through the canvas, someone laughing in the distance, a pot scraping against stone. Everything restored, whole and functional, and she should feel something uncomplicated about that. Gratitude, maybe. Relief.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Instead, it felt like a problem.

  ***

  A better part of an hour passed staring at her hands and listening to the sounds around her, when she heard the footsteps. Small, deliberate, the rhythm of someone who’d made a decision, and was working up to it with every step.

  Mia smiled for the first time in days.

  That was how they first met, a determined little girl making a deal.

  Nessa came around the side of the tent and stopped.

  She looked at Mia's face, then at her hands, then at her face again.

  "You look terrible," she said. Nessa’s shirt was back to front, giving her new material to worry between her fingers. There was also a blanket clutched in her hand.

  "Thank you." Mia looked at the torn edges of her nails.

  "Not the injuries." Nessa sat down in front of her, cross-legged, with the blanket she'd been carrying folded in her lap. The bruise on her neck was going yellow at the edges. The rest had healed, but that remained. Mia hadn't asked about it, and Nessa hadn't offered. "You looked like that before. When we first met…when we were walking." She picked at threads on the blanket's edge. "When you weren't really thinking about what was in front of you."

  Mia watched her pick at the thread.

  "I'm fine," she said. There wasn’t anything fine about it, but she didn’t have the words to explain. She hardly understood it herself. “I’m figuring it out as I go.”

  Nessa's expression did something complicated. The expression of a ten-year-old who thought someone was behaving like an idiot, and who was finding their patience thinning. "No," she said. "You're not. You haven't been fine for a while. And neither am I. I’m not sure we’ll ever be fine again, but we’re alive. I know you're not going to tell me everything because you don't know me and I wouldn’t tell you everything, but…" She stopped. Pressed her mouth together. Started again. "We were attacked. They left us here to die." Her bottom lip wobbled, but she didn’t cry.

  "I noticed."

  “They sent us back here to die.”

  Mia looked through the tent opening. “Mox has this plan in his head, and he’s putting me in places he thinks I need to be. If I meet his expectations, I’m useful to the plan.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “I’m dead either way.” Mia curled her left hand into a tight ball, her nails biting into flesh.

  “And what about me?” Nessa’s face said she already knew the answer.

  “You were supposed to be like the rest.” Nessa was sent here to die, to be bait. If she lived fine, if she didn’t, there would be more people who came through to replace her.

  “Then I met you,” Nessa said. "And you're sitting here. And yesterday you couldn’t hear, only one hand worked, and you could barely walk, and today you’re back to normal." The thread came loose. Nessa wound it around her finger. "I'm not going to pretend I don't notice things just because it's easier for you."

  Mia looked at her.

  Nessa looked back. Ten years old, dirty fingernails, a scholar's attention, a noble sitting in the dirt of a war camp on the wrong side of a barrier that should have killed her. Waiting.

  Mia said nothing for long enough that Nessa started to stand.

  "Sit down," Mia said.

  Nessa sat.

  The silence stretched and shifted and settled into something else. Mia lifted the saber from where it rested on the bed. Not for any particular reason, just to have something to do with her fingers. So she wouldn’t summon the ledger.

  "Have you heard of ledgers?" Mia asked at last.

  Nessa stilled. "You mean the book Mox has?"

  "Similar." Mia pulled the saber from the scabbard. "There are different kinds. Mox's ledger tells him things. Records information.” She thought about how much to say. About how to explain, and settled for everything. There are these things called Overseers who manage the barriers. When they give a person a ledger, you owe them a debt. His debt…what he owes his Overseer is information. He pays it with knowledge." She talked about Senric, the Secret Keeper, and the rabbit.

  Nessa was listening with her whole face, the way she did when she was learning something.

  "Some debts are information. Some are flesh." Mia kept her voice flat. "Some are memories. They're all different. And…" She stopped. The next part wasn't easy. Not because she was afraid of Nessa's reaction, or not only that. Because saying it out loud still tasted wrong, even now, even after the forest and the river and all the rest of it.

  Senric had warned her to keep it a secret, and Nessa could betray her. Mia said it anyway. "Mine is lives."

  Nessa didn't make a sound.

  "I have to pay lives to my Overseer. Every month. This month it’s five." She stared at the saber, remembered the blood, and felt Nessa's stillness. "The next one is more. I don't know how many yet. But if I don't pay." She touched her left arm, her ear, and her eye in sequence. "You've seen what happens."

  "That was the ledger," Nessa said.

  "Yes."

  Silence.

  Mia waited for the recoil, the stepping back, the shuffling of distance being put between them. She was good at tracking it; that moment when people recalculated who you were. How valuable you were. If you were a threat. She’d forgotten it when life was comfortable, but all those old skills and habits seeped into the way she acted.

  Nessa said, "So when you got better. After the attack."

  "Yes." Mia closed her eyes. The image was still there, the old man with his head thrown back, his mouth open.

  "That wasn't…it wasn't because the fighting stopped." Nessa’s voice was small, her back hunched.

  "No."

  Nessa wound the thread around her finger tighter. Her fingertip went red. "When does the month end?"

  "In a few days." Mia had time, but it didn’t feel like an opportunity or a break. It was constant pressure.

  The quiet between them was different now.

  Mia watched Nessa work through it.

  But Nessa didn’t seem horrified, which was a good start. There wasn’t any moral outrage, but Mia sort of expected that. Nessa was a street urchin, no matter who she was before.

  But Mia also remembered the first battlefield, when Nessa said there was something wrong with the scavengers. There was something wrong with Mia, too. Still, the world had mechanisms, and the mechanisms didn't care how you felt about them.

  "And you haven't—" Nessa started.

  "One more."

  "One more, what?" Nessa asked, not because she didn’t know. She wanted to hear it said out loud just as much as Mia wished she never had to admit a word of it.

  "Lives," Mia said it plainly. "I need one more. Or tomorrow I will wake up missing a part of myself."

  Nessa's eyes went to the inner camp, then back. "The battlefield…"

  "If I wait…" Mia turned the saber over again. "I thought about waiting. Hoping there would be someone already dying when they put me back out." She'd been thinking about nothing else for an hour. "But I don't know that there will be. I don't know what the battle will be or who'll be on the field or whether it'll be a Nazirian fight with everyone already dead and useless." She stopped. The word useless. She'd thought it, wondering if that was how she’d think of people and their lives going forward. Like when she was back in the forest regretting not stripping the clothes off a woman she knew. "So I'm here. And I need to make a decision."

  She hadn't meant to say that last part. It sat between them, and Mia couldn't take it back.

  Nessa looked at her steadily. Her expression was the one Mia had least expected. There wasn’t any disgust or pity, not the particular blankness of someone deciding how far away to stand. Not the frightened gaze of a child who wanted to run. Not even the forced bravado Nessa sometimes portrayed. It was something harder and more painful than any of those. It was understanding.

  Mia saw Nessa growing up, and she hated it. Hated the way Cinderwild was twisting them into people they weren’t meant to be.

  "My name isn't Ben," Mia said.

  She didn't plan to say that either. It felt right.

  "I know," Nessa said quietly.