Emmy's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Emmy stayed in the sand until her legs stopped shaking. No one was coming. If she wanted to know where her friends went, she had to find it herself. She got up and started walking the ring of the camp, slow, looking at everything. She checked the sleeping bags first. Hers was the yellow one, still wadded the way she'd kicked out of it. The green one next to it was her bunkmate's. Empty. She crouched and pressed her hand into the fabric like something might answer. Nothing did. She moved on. The fire pit told her nothing. The mug tipped on its side had a dry brown ring at the bottom. A flashlight lay in the dirt with its lens cracked. A single shoe, not hers, sat upright near the tree line as if someone had stepped out of it. No blood. No drag marks. No packs missing. Whoever took them hadn't bothered to take anything else. She made herself remember. She had been asleep. Then the light. The bright quiet that pressed on her ears like water. She had opened her eyes and seen it pour through the gap in the back stone wall, the wide break between the two crumbling halves where the desert trees leaned in. The Vael came through that gap. Purple. Fast. Their tails moving wrong. She had grabbed the girl next to her and pulled her flat. When Emmy looked up, the girl was gone, and so was everyone else. She walked to the wall now. The gap was still there, stone piled on either side, thin trees clawing over the top. She put her hand on the warm rock. This was where they came in. So the ones who ran, ran the other way. Away from the wall. Out the south side of the camp, past the fire pit, toward the low open ground. She turned to check it and froze. On the flat stone at the base of the gap, a single track pressed into the dust. Three narrow toes. A drag line behind it from a tail. Fresh enough that the wind hadn't smoothed it. Emmy stepped back slowly. The camp was not as empty as she'd thought. One of them had come back, or was still close. She scanned the trees at the top of the wall. Nothing moved. But she could feel her own heat on her skin and remembered what Mendez had said once, quiet, when he thought she wasn't listening — that the purple ones tracked by warmth. She wiped her palms on her shorts. She had her answer. If anyone from her camp had made it, they went south. She would go south too. And she would go now, before whatever left that track in the dust came back to finish the count. She cut around the fire pit and started walking, fast, away from the wall.