She had blood on her head. I pulled a scarf off someone who wasn’t moving and pressed it on the gash in her head. “Lydia, hold this here. I’m going to get this person off of you.” I said, pushing the draping body that wasn’t moving at all. I pinched her leg hard, but she didn’t move at all. She didn’t even cry ouch. This is not good, a cold voice in the back of my head told me. I wanted to scream at her to get up, I wanted to scream.

She pushed the scarf to her head quietly. “Seth?”

“I’m here.”

A voice came from outside, almost snatched by the wind. That was Northern dialect. I didn’t know it completely, I hadn’t spoken it in months. My mind turned furiously, familiar with the words but having trouble stringing meaning to them. “Have we found all the supplies? What is that one?” my brain finally put together. I looked up.

There were feet and hands pressed to the windows above us, blocking the light streaming in. And then pair of gloved hands was opening a window above all of us. A man with a big chest and a thick, warm, fur coat dropped into the lopsided car. He looked around and ordered several boys who were out of their shackles to come to him, pointing to a big boy and the black-haired boy I’d shown the spike to. He asked them if they were injured, but they just stared—they didn’t speak Northern. Another boy limped up, still in chains, but the man pushed him away.

I was looking at Lydia. Where did we go from here if she couldn’t walk?

“What about the rest of us, sir?” I called, holding the scarf to Lydia’s head. Lydia was holding my hand and breathing even and slow. I had to get her out of here.

“We can’t take you.” Another rough voice, speaking Northern, but his grammar was slow and his accent was clumsy, clipped and tart. An older boy dropped into the car, bundled up and covered in snow. His hair was red under his hat and his hood. A Xavian. “There’s a blizzard in the distance, sir. We need to go.”

My heart sunk. Seth, be brave. “Please, she’s injured,” I called, “She needs help!”

The red-haired Xavian looked at me. “All the more reason.” His disinterested, maroon-eyed gaze landed on the two boys in front of him. “Who let everyone out of the chains?”

We froze, paralyzed. I was dead already. Seth, be brave. “It was me, sir. There was a spike from the window pane that fit in the lock.” I said, my voice thin as the threadbare patches of my coat, swallowing.

“We should take him over one of them, Master Teacher,” he said, pointing to me and pushing the big boy back. The big boy clasped at his hand, but the Xavian boy jerked him aside. “He’s smart.”

I looked down at Lydia, who was clutching my hand in hers. I closed my eyes and found my tongue. “Take the two of them.” A weight fell off me. I wasn’t going to lose someone again. It’s done.

“We’ll take all three if you have room on your horse,” the big man in the fur coat said.

“As you wish, Master Byron.” He kneltand the man stepped on his knee to lift himself through the window, and then the two of them passed up the two chosen boys. The chorus of “please don’t leave us” began, the girls and smaller boys crying that they were healthy too. The Xavian boy cocked his head to me.

I choked, “Sir, I can’t leave her.”

“What is he saying?” Lydia asked me.

“He’s saying I should go with them, but I’m not,” I whispered.

“She’s going to die. You can either come or die too,” the red-eyed boy replied.

Lydia squeezed my hand, her eyes shut. “Seth? What was your home like?”

“I don’t know, I grew up in Xavia on the coast.”

“No, where’s your family from?”

“Andhiem,” I replied. I looked to her, looked to him, looked frantically back to her. We weren’t going to leave until we were dragged apart. I had found someone, an island for an albatross. She was asking stupid questions, why was she asking me stupid questions? Andheim was where we ran away from! The capitol of Kyja drove out waves of refugees with every new power struggle and spurt of political instability. “It doesn’t matter, you’re my family now,” I tried to explain, but it wasn’t logical to me either, “I said I would take care of you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I don’t know anyone,” I pleaded.

She squeezed my hand and slowly pulled mine from hers, but she looked so afraid. I’d made her a promise. All we had was each other, two people who still dared to meet eyes. We were no one. We were refugees, not kings or queens or Xavians or even servants, and no one would remember us, not even in our home country. She was going to die here, of exposure.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do.

A voice shouted down to the Xavian boy. “Keep it moving, Zimora!”

The Xavian boy’s—Zimora’s—arms picked me up like I was an empty sack and lifted me into the grasp of the man with the coat. He put me aside on the top of the train roughly. The world was white, the snow coming in drifts. At the head of the train, a landslide—an avalanche—of snow had blocked the way. The world was white, and I wanted to get back in the train where Lydia was. Deciding to die was hard, living was harder. This wasn’t right.

Zimora seized one of my forearms and I stumbled along behind him, up the rocks making up the side of the ravine the train rain through. Horses and more men were on top. He lifted me and loaded me onto a horse, and settled on behind me. A sharp order was given but I couldn’t remember what it was, and the horses and sleds, loaded with sacks and boxes of supplies, began to sprint. I didn’t know why I was crying. The boy, Zimora, didn’t say anything to me. Just kept kicking his heels into the animal and pushing it hard. There was no reason for his people to persecute us, they just made one up. They claimed technology was only for the genetically pure Xavian nobility, and that it corrupted the minds Kyjans and lowborns, made them amoral, less human—that was why Kyja had so much civil war, and Kyjans brought too much of it in, across the border. Fine reason to eradicate an entire population of refugees.

She was bargaining with the Xavian deportment guards like we were all on the same side now. She’d been stopped and pushed back into the group that they weren’t putting on trains.

“He’s a boy. He’s small enough to fit in the machines. He can work a few years.” Her hair was long and soft and the color of ink, her eyes had been furrowed with determination. No fear, no panic, no pain. She didn’t cry. She just pushed me into the hands of the men with red hair in the grey, stiff-pressed uniforms, the men that we’d hidden and ran from, while they pulled the two of us away. “It’s okay, Seth, you go. You go with them.”

She knew it was the end, because that was the only circumstance under which she’d let go of me. It didn’t matter that she was still alive at the moment. Gone, as sure as the gunshot that was going to tip her into a mass grave. I called for her, but she’d prepared. The comb my father had given her, the only thing she’d kept when we fled our burning manor in the dead of night without me knowing why—she’d tucked it into the back of my shirt, where it stayed, the lines of its teeth and the smooth drops of pearl pressed into my small bare back by my spine. It was mine, even though I had no hair to comb through.

She looked over her shoulder, nodded to me. “Seth, you live. No weakness.” I reached for her, not wanting to believe this was happening. We were at the Kyjan border wall, almost back to the home country we’d left, literally less than a mile from freedom. In the end, it was a smuggler who lied to us and called the Border Guard, in the end, they sorted us into two groups, the ones to die and the ones to work. They’d carried me sobbing to the train and clapped me into the irons, she was gone in the blurring world of tears and crowd. I was in the line of spiny boys. It was taking us back into Xavia. The train rocked and began to move.

I squeezed my eyes, but I couldn’t shake the memory—how many hours ago was that? Six? Eighteen? “Where are we going?” I finally found enough voice to say.

He looked at me and I shuddered, he had eyes the color of the blood that was always draining between the cobblestones of the butcher shop where our cook bought her meats when we lived by the sea. A pound of pork, a side of beef. I didn’t want him to look at me. “A village,” the boy said blandly, like I was stupid.

“Why?” I demanded.

He didn’t answer the question.

“Who are you?”

He still didn’t answer the question. The miles passed as the horses sprinted to outrun the storm. There was a village. I was taken into a big cabin, where there was an old woman who was peering in my eyes and at my teeth, with a teenage girl with dark hair helping her heat something on the fire. I didn’t think I could eat food. The Xavian boy was looking at me again when he said, .“You train hard, and maybe some day your life will be worth something.” I wanted to hide, but wanting to hide made me feel angry with a heat that would never die down, not the fire in the hearth, the fire that burned down the house in Islingraet. And then it all blurred—