Naihabi Ridge

Chapter Twenty-Four - The Stratagem

Romia kicked the trapdoor to the southernmost hideout two times hard, followed by a scuff with her heel and a moment later a gruff voice asked, "You wanna fight?"
    
"Not now, Hadley." Her voice cracked as she disregarded the entrance code.
    
She heard Hadley mumble something to himself, then the entrance opened and he stepped aside to let them in. Romia passed the unconscious Avi to him swiftly and leaped inside without missing a beat. She was done being emotional and now definitely wasn't the time.
    
She swiveled around and shut the trapdoor, then faced the hideout and though most eyes were on her, quite a few were on Avi. Perhaps he was more popular than she thought. She motioned for Hadley to follow her and assigned a new doorman with her other hand then walked to the deepest part of the dugout. The refugees parted as she passed and she glanced for a moment back at the man as he delicately held Avi like a child. Who was she kidding? Avi was a child. He was so childish that he couldn't even wait for his broken bone to heal before getting hurt again. Stupid child.
    
Once she reached the furthest, darkest, deepest room in the dugout, she pushed aside the cloth that did for a door and threw off the quilt in one of the alcoves, then told Hadley to lay Avi down there. After doing what she asked, he respectively left and Romia spread the quilt over Avi and absentmindedly realized that he was taller than she thought—it was hard to cover both his feet and his shoulders at the same time.
    
She shook her head and turned away. It didn't matter anyway. The lamplight filtered into the room when she pulled the cloth in the doorway aside, then she let the darkness in again as she left and returned to the area everyone was gathering in.
    
This dugout was much bigger than any of the others and Romia had known she could trust it to hold as many refugees as she'd had with her. It was tunnel-like—almost labyrinthine—and could easily sleep thirty people in the seven rooms that the main tunnel let out to. No one was normally anywhere near the entrance, though. They would be too easy to hear from the surface. This hideout had been her savior on many an occasion.
    
The voices of Romia's allies echoed slightly in the tunnel as she came upon the meeting room, then they went almost silent as she entered. She flashed a regal smile to the group and took the only empty spot at the splintery wooden table.
    
"Where shall we begin?"

+++

There was darkness yet again. I thought there would be a light after I died, but who could say? My body felt light and my mind was fuzzy as if stuffed with the softest fur that could be found. Fur... I chuckled, then started at the sound of my own voice. I could talk in the afterlife? I started speaking just hear my voice, saying the names of my family. First, it was Lilli—I decided to start with the youngest—then I skipped myself since I was dead and went straight to Diana, our cousin. We hadn't seen her since she moved away. I wondered if she was still alright.
    
"Hannah, Beth, Fraz, Aunt Rihanna, Mom, Dad, Uncle Titus, Aunt Esther..."
    
Suddenly, I saw a light and shrieked, jumping up to a sitting position. Wait, I was laying down?...
    
"Uh..."
    
My head swiveled around to see a young boy in the doorway...

Doorway?
    
My eyebrows furrowed and I looked around to see that the darkness wasn't death at all, but a dark, dank dugout room. The packed sand under me was hard as rock and upon I realizing this, I also noticed the constant, sharp pain in my left arm and the familiar numbness in my right. My head started throbbing and my feet ached so badly. My gaze slid down to my arms and I frowned at the clean gauze.
    
"What the...?"
    
The kid in the doorway looked around frantically, then he bit his nails and shoved the cloth over the entrance again and I heard his sandals slapping on the ground as he fled. I blinked once, then I focused again on the small room, though it had become increasingly harder to see without the light. It was empty save for the tattered quilt laying over my legs that looked eerily like the one I had fallen asleep under. How in the world had I managed to get here from the southern border?
    
I threw the quilt off and slung my feet over the edge of the alcove, then I sucked in a breath and stood. For a full second I wobbled dangerously on my heels, then I found some excuse for balance and strutted forward. I moved the cloth from over the door and peered out into the eerily dark, empty tunnel that laid beyond, then I wandered down the tunnel as the slice on my arm began to throb. I looked to the sand beneath my feet and instantly became dizzy, then my head shot up when a loud, clear voice rang through the dim light. I couldn't understand what she was saying, but I instantly recognized the stern order of Master Romia's voice.
    
I inched forward as quietly as my lingering aches and pains would allow toward the doorway where the brighter lamplight flooded out from. Now I recognized another voice and my back went rigid, but I bit my lip and tried to listen through my distaste.

"That equals about seventy-five losses," Pasha said from the other side of the sand wall. "How many rebels do we have again? A hundred? How many are we planning on using during the attack? Say each group has five rebels including the leader. If Romia takes a larger group—say, seven people, making an eight-person group—that leaves us with about twenty people. If Kathryn and Tok then take another five people each, that leaves ten people. How many people would that leave for our backup? Will the weakest ten rebels be enough to secure victory?"
    
My headache worsened just listening to his self-righteous voice. Apparently, they were discussing some type of confrontation with the collectors, but that was all I could conclude from his... speech.

"No, ten people won't be enough," Pasha continued. "Not only that, but we're planning on taking refugees with us when we leave. How many refugees can we take if it's questionable that we'll even get out ourselves?"

When we leave? They were planning the escape mission? For a moment, my eyes caught on the mesmerizing pattern the light made on the ground near my feet, then I nodded to myself and moved in front of the doorway, around the cloth, and immediately locked eyes with Master Romia. The room reluctantly fell quiet and for a second it was only her surprise that overwhelmed me, then the men and women around the table broke out in a flurry of murmurs and Master Romia rushed around the edge of the room and directly in front of me, her eyes glaring daggers.
    
"What do you think you're doing?—no, more importantly, are you okay? How are your injuries?"
    
I hoped my expression said it all because I wasn't confident enough in my aching throat to tell her off. My mouth pressed into a line and I sighed loudly, then she pursed her lips in what seemed to be irritation and swiveled around. She swatted a rather flustered man out of his seat and motioned to the empty chair with a serious face. I sat down. So did Pasha, I saw, in his seat across the table. My breath tightened.
    
"Where were we," Master Romia asked with and edge to her voice, resuming her position in the front of the room and not making eye contact with me. "The map on the table marks every refuge in Naihabi Ridge with a red smudge..."
    
I had to scoot up in the chair to see the large piece of weathered parchment. The map was a bird's-eye view of the Ridge, which was actually disturbingly circular. The summoning building circled the Ridge and made up the outside rim and the bathhouses were in the middle where the borders came together. The quarters were almost exactly the same size, with the southern being the biggest, and many smaller dots and lines marked the buildings and fields in between. It was huge, to say the least. Also dotting the map were what seemed like a random array of bright red dots—or smudges, as Master Romia would have it—that marked the dugouts. There were at least three of them in each quarter with the most in the southern, and my eyes darted up to Master Romia's hand as she pressed her finger down on one of the bigger red dots in the southern quarter.
    
"This is where we are," she moved her finger directly on top of the summoning building. "And this is where we need to be."
    
I raised my eyebrows and stared at the red dot. I thought we were talking about escape, but I suddenly doubted her intentions. My eyes shot up to Master Romia in the hope that she would meet my gaze and somehow explain things, but she didn't. She completely ignored me.
    
I looked around the table at the faces of the young adults and at people even younger than me. We were supposedly planning escape, but we only had children. Now that I thought about it, the only older people I'd seen were Grengal and his colleagues; everyone else was under twenty-five, which made Master Romia actually pretty old. My eyebrows furrowed. What an odd thought.

"We are going to split into groups." Master Romia reached into the bag at her side for a second, then pulled out a pin, a thimble, a rock, and a piece of cloth. She took the pin and placed it on the map at the front entrance of the summoning building—small dashes marked the entrances and exits on the map—then she put the thimble outside the western side of the summoning building and tore the piece of cloth in half. She put a piece of the cloth on either edge of the summoning building and moved the rock next to the thimble, then looked at the group she had assembled.

"We'll discuss the groups using the rough plan I have set up here. The thimble is Grengal and Pasha; the piece of the cloth in the east is Tok and the west is Kathryn; and I am the pin. Are there any questions?"
    
A smaller, younger-looking girl in a yellow headscarf cleared her throat and stood, then motioned vaguely to the map. "With all due respect, Romia, there are people all around Naihabi Ridge. It would be reckless to focus all our forces around the summoning building and be surrounded from behind by every other collector, leader, and pawn around." Her face got darker and she muttered, "They aren't above forcing refugees to fight, either."

"Point taken," the boy next to me rubbed his stubbly chin. "But where are we going to gain enough forces to spread out like that? If we can't get enough people, which groups will we split up? Will those groups then be too weak?"

"Don't overthink it, though," another voice pitched in, and soon there was a full discussion over the pins and rocks on the map.

My head hurt and I found myself drifting away from the conversation. The words became fuzzy and I sighed almost inaudibly as my mind entered the world of bad memories.

The white coats blurred my vision and I winced as they brought out a needle and the orange liquid. My head throbbed and my eyes became unwilling to focus all of a sudden. Lilli's cry echoed in my mind with Hannah's contagious laughter, then my head hurt more. Mom knelt in the garden over the cabbage and Dad sat on the bench near the street talking with Miguel, the farmhand. The familiar sounds, places, visions, they all disappeared as suddenly as they began, replaced by red and orange and black. Crimson fire ravaged my town of Mithle and screams replaced the banter. The singing in the background became screeching and the world spun in a million different shades of scarlet.

"Avi,"

The fire backed away, leaving a single wisp of smoke which was quickly plucked straight from the air by a glowing figure. She seemed to be all of the colors at once, her fingers delicate but strong and her voice calming as ever.

"Haven't I told you not to visit those places?" She blew the wisp of smoke away and it turned to a black feather as it fluttered through the air toward me. Subconsciously, I stuck my hand out and let it land on my palm. It was tipped with orange, the same wondrous orange that was Soha. I looked back up at her.

"Don't get stuck in your mind, child, you're missing essential information in the real world right now."

My gaze shot up as she shooed me away with a wave of her hand and suddenly I was surrounded by people again, all sitting around a table topped with a map. A few gave me odd glances, but most were engrossed in the heated discussion over group placements.

I felt an itch on my hand and looked at my lap, opening my loose fist.

A single, orange-tipped feather laid delicately on my palm.

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Hello. As you are probably are of, votes, questions, and comments are always welcomed.
Man, I'm so lazy anymore. 😖