The rest of the world kept spinning, even though mine had stopped.
Father wanted to me to meet Janan in the Center at noon. Maybe I would. Or maybe he’d be disappointed in me once again. As I headed away from the Community, stretching my legs to reach the solitude of the woods more quickly, I honestly didn’t know whether I’d make it back.
If I thought I stood a chance on my own, against the rocs and trolls and griffons, I might never go back to the Community. The concert hall was quiet and hidden; there hadn’t been a day since Mother’s death that I didn’t dream about packing my belongings and staying there for the rest of my life.
But I barely survived with the Community. I wouldn’t make it a day on my own, especially not in the middle of the old city, without food or clean water.
Sunlight broke through the clouds and their false promise of rain. Insects droned lazily in the heat.
More than anything now, I wanted to be alone with the music of the forest: the wind sighing through the tall conifers, the rustle of feathers as birds took flight, and the bubble of shrinking streams in their rocky paths. The woods sang a dark and lovely melody that haunted my thoughts.
Grief was a chasm in my heart, unaffected by the beauty of the morning-clad woods. I pushed myself down the path. Walking nowhere was better than hanging about the Community, missing someone who could never come back.
A loud crack sounded above me, followed by the noise of crashing and cursing. A deep voice shouted from the trees. “Watch out!”
I jerked up just in time to see a metal beam swing toward me, bringing with it a shower of pine needles and cones.
I ducked to the left, but not quickly enough.
Sharp pain splintered down my right arm as the impact shoved me backward, leaving me sprawled over a log. The beam sailed back and forth, inches from my face, held by only a fraying rope.
Rust flaked off the iron and into my eyes as I clutched my shoulder and rolled off the log. “What—”
“Sorry!” The voice came again from above, but a moment later, boots thumped onto the ground next to me. The boy from the trees crouched, his dark eyebrows pulled inward. “Are you okay?”
“No.” My breath coming short and fast, I waved away the stranger’s extended hand and sat up. Conifer needles and cones cracked and dug at my knees, and fire raced down my arm and shoulder blade. My cheek and shoulder throbbed off tempo from each other, encouraging a headache that formed just behind my eyes. “I think you broke my shoulder. What were you doing up there?”
“Nonsense. If I’d broken it, you’d be a lot angrier with me.” The stranger gripped my arm in both hands and shoved. Bone crunched. An inferno ripped through my shoulder and back. But when he sat on his heels and smirked, the pain faded to something more manageable. “How’s that?”
“Better.” I reached around and massaged the muscles, vainly trying to ignore the pop and groan of the tree. A thread of the rope snapped, and the beam dropped lower; if I hadn’t moved, my face would now be a much flatter thing.
“Well. You’re welcome.” The boy nodded at my shoulder. “For fixing that.”
“It’s your fault it was hurt.” I blinked a few times and gathered my nerves before climbing to my feet. My head buzzed and my vision grayed, but—as nonchalantly as possible—I rested my hand on the metal beam that had nearly killed me. I took a few deep breaths. “Who are you?”
“Stef. Well, Stefan, but I like Stef better.” He wore his lean form and square jaw with confidence, and had roguishly narrowed eyes. It gave him the look of a troublemaker—the kind of person I tried to avoid.
This sort of near-death encounter was precisely the reason why, too.
“What were you doing up there?” I tipped my head toward the trees. The woods were quiet now, the birds all frightened off by Stef’s loud swearing and the thunderous falling objects.
Stef stood and brushed off his trousers. “I was setting a trap.”
“For what?” Only the occasional twig and spray of needles moved above, brown with thirst as the drought continued its slow assault on the world. “Random passersby?”
“How did you guess?” Stef thwapped my sore shoulder. “No, it’s a trap for trolls. Unless you somehow didn’t notice, they’ve been coming this way more often.”
“I have noticed.” I clenched my jaw and moved away from him, searching the high boughs for a sign of his trap.
“It’s not that I want to spend my days out here in the heat, sweating, getting leaves in my hair and down my trousers.” He pulled a brown-green sprig from his shirt and flicked it into the woods. “But I’m good at making things, and if I spent all my time sitting in my house hiding from what’s going on out here, I’d be no better than anyone else in the Community. I have useful skills. I need to use them.”
I kept my attention on the trees and tried to ignore the throbbing in my cheek, shoulder, and ego. “Is your trap invisible?” There was nothing I could see in the trees, and nothing on the ground—except for the beam still hanging suspended from its branch.
“That’s actually my problem. While normally I like my projects to be seamless, no troll is going to get caught in this.” Stef stood beside me and bumped my hurt shoulder again, ignoring the way I cringed. “Look right there. You can see the ropes and pulleys.”
Ah. Now that he’d pointed them out, I could see the rusted metal and crisscross of ropes. “Right. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s okay that the ropes and pulleys are invisible—mostly—but I need something to draw the trolls here.”
“And who says that has to be you?” He couldn’t have been much older than I was. But like he said, his skills were useful—maybe—which might have made a difference in his decision to take the initiative. After all, humming at a troll wouldn’t hurt it.
Stef sauntered over to a low branch and pulled himself up to sit on it. “No one said I have to do it.” He shrugged. “My aunts might kill me if they knew what I was doing, but I don’t live with them, and I bet they’ll think differently after I present the trap to the Council. I want the Council to hire me to build more traps, and maybe other useful things in the future.”
How ambitious.
“Anyway,” he went on, “we have to do something, right? The drought is driving the trolls toward the nearest source of fresh water, and that’s our springs and wells. They keep wandering into the Community when they smell food. There was a bad attack a few weeks ago—”
“I know.” I could still hear the screams from the last attack, the crash and bang of collapsing walls, and Mother’s cries as she urged me to flee. And I . . . I’d been rooted by fear. Unable to move. Unable to help. Only when the life had been squeezed from her and the troll slain by warriors did I jerk into a run, through the falling debris and rising dust. “I remember the attack.” I’d never forget it.
He squinted at me. “Right. Well. I want to test out this idea. If it works, the Council will let me put up more traps throughout the forest. Hopefully that will discourage them from coming closer to the Community.”
“What can I do to help?” The words were out before I realized. Troublemaker or no, Stef was doing something about the trolls. Or trying to.
Stef lifted an eyebrow. “What makes you think you’ll be any help?”
“You said you needed something to draw the trolls to the trap. A lure.”
Stef nodded.
“What about shiny pieces of metal?”
“They’re trolls, not raccoons. They don’t care about shiny pieces of metal. Though something shiny would help draw their attention.”
“What do they want, then?”
Stef threw up his hands. “How should I know? Do I look like a troll?”
“A little.”
He rolled his eyes.
“My brother is a scavenger. He can take us into the old city to look for something.” I pushed my sweat-dampened hair out of my eyes and glanced westward, but the crumbling towers weren’t visible through the dense forest.
“That sounds like your brother is useful, not you.”
Without another word, I turned and started deeper into the woods, back on the same aimless path as before. Footfalls thumped behind me, but I ignored Stef’s approach, even when his hand landed on my injured shoulder. I shook him off, keeping my face hard against the pain.
“Sorry.” Stef kept my pace. “I was joking. Can’t you take a joke?”
I stopped walking and balled up my fists, but I wouldn’t hit him. I’d never hit anyone in my life, and I wouldn’t let this obnoxious stranger be the first.
Stef glanced at my hands, though, and raised his eyebrows. “Wow. Calm down.”
“Only jerks blame their victim for not being able to handle a joke. Or tell them to calm down.” I was overreacting. Stef couldn’t possibly know this was a refrain I’d heard too often from Father and Fayden, but the words were out.
Stef held up his hands in surrender, his cocky smirk vanishing. “You’re sensitive.”
“Go lick a plague house.”
“Really sensitive.” He made a face. “I said I’m sorry. And I do mean it.”
I sucked in a breath of the hot, muggy air to clear my head. “I’ve had a bad day.” A bad life was more like it. And Mother’s death meant that it would only get worse. She’d liked my music. She’d understood it. Now she was gone.
Stef eyed my shoulder, then my cheek, and nodded. “Guess so.” I didn’t offer details, and—incredibly—he didn’t ask. “Well, do you think your brother would help?”
“He might.” The truth was, I hardly saw Fayden anymore. My encounter with him this morning had been unusual. “You said trolls come looking for water, right?”
He nodded. “As far as anyone’s been able to tell.”
I rubbed at my sore shoulder again, thinking. “What about colored glass? Blue glass, to trick them into thinking there’s water reflecting sunlight. But then they get too close, and wham.” I made a tiny explosion with my hands. “Or whatever your invention is supposed to do.”
Stef narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, that might work. I’d have to position the glass just right, so it would mimic running water. But where would we get blue glass? Neither of us can afford to buy anything like that.” He left an opening, but I didn’t tell him how I knew about it. “How many traps could we make from it?”
Where had that “we” come from? I ignored it. “I don’t know. Several.” I hesitated. “I can show you the glass.”
“Right now?” His eyes widened with delight.
I checked the sky; it was almost noon. Who knew how Father would react if I didn’t make it to Janan’s gathering today?
Humiliate myself, or help a potential new friend find a way to defend the Community against trolls?
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll go right now. It’s in the old city.”
“And your brother?”
I wished I’d never brought up Fayden. Older, stronger, more useful. “I think he’s already there, in the old city. I don’t know if we’ll see him. Anyway, I know where the glass is. You should be able to figure out whether it will work by looking at it, right?”
Stef nodded.
“Good. Then let’s go.” I waved him down the path, away from the Community.
The sun beat through the thinning canopy, making sweat drip down my face and neck. Insects buzzed and birds called; the woods grew noisy with thirsty wildlife as we walked. Just before we broke through the woods, Stef stopped and faced me, his expression twisted with amusement.
“It finally occurred to me,” he said. “You didn’t tell me your name.”