Luna's Arc

Chapter 15 of 29

Luna woke before the others. The fence still held. She sat with Luke's multitool in her lap and made a choice. She would not walk into the deep woods blind to what her own hands could do. She would test them now, while the children slept, where nothing could hurt them. She slipped past the sleeping bodies and out through the gap. A short walk brought her to a dead pine. Its bark hung in loose strips. She opened the red multitool and set to work on a fallen branch, thick as her wrist. Her hands moved on their own. The blade peeled long curls of wood. She notched a grip, then sharpened one end to a point. The scissors trimmed the splinters clean. She carved small marks along the shaft, crossed lines and dots, without deciding to. When she finished, she held a wooden weapon. She turned it over. She had never made one before. Her hands had. Then she tested what else they knew. She squared to the dead pine and struck. The point bit deep into the trunk. She twisted it free the way she had twisted the blade from the slug. She spun, dropped low, swept the pole at knee height. Her feet knew where to go. Her weight shifted before she thought about it. She struck again, higher, and the wood cracked bark from the tree. She stopped, breathing hard. Her body knew this. Someone had drilled it into her, over and over, until it lived under her skin. The knowledge sat in her arms and legs like a stranger she could not see. A branch snapped behind her. She turned and leveled the pole without thinking. Luke stood there, the kitten in his arm. His eyes were wide. "You looked like Mom," he whispered. "When she showed me. You moved just like her." Luna lowered the weapon. The word landed cold in her chest. Not a teacher. Not a stranger. Their mother had trained her hands for combat, the same mother who left her in these woods with nothing. "She taught me to fight," Luna said. "Then she made me forget." She looked at the marks she had carved. "Why would she do both?" Luke had no answer. He came and stood beside her. Behind them, the fence stirred as the children began to wake. Luna gripped the wooden pole. It felt right in her hand, balanced, familiar. She was not helpless in the woods anymore. But the comfort of it frightened her. Her body had been built for something before the fog took her memory. The house on the map had shaped her for a purpose she could not name. "Wake them," she told Luke. "We move at first light." She slid the multitool shut and pushed it into her pocket. She kept the pole in her fist. Whatever waited at that house, she meant to reach it, and now she knew her hands were ready.