Gunner explained how they went through the ashes of the workshop, hoping to recover something, and then went on to the scholars’ quarters and found nothing.
“Who helped you search?”
“Priya, Titus, and Samuel…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Tiago, Mason. I think that was it.”
“Could one of them—”
“No. Nobody took anything.”
Someone did. Papers didn’t walk off on their own, and I knew I had seen a stack of them the night we took Phineas. The king had known they existed too. “All right,” I said. “But you won’t mind if I check with the others.”
“Check,” he answered.
We looked at each other, and I guessed the same question lurked in both of us: Could we really move forward?
And maybe the same answer: We were family now. What choice did we have?
We walked back to the kitchen together.
We are forty-four now. Our family continues to grow.
Yesterday we added three more children. We found them scrounging through the ruins. They were afraid but Greyson offered them food, just as Aaron Ballenger had to me when he found me wandering alone.
I am not that frightened girl anymore. I have changed. So has Greyson.
I see him looking at me differently now. I look at him differently too, and I wonder about all the feelings inside me that I don’t understand.
I have so many questions and no one to ask.
Everyone older than me is gone.
—Miandre, 22
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
JASE
It was beginning to look like the formidable arsenal we had always envisioned. More than enough to protect caravans from raiders. Nine launchers were laid out on the table, and beside them were a stack of loads. Twenty-eight, which translated into a hundred and twelve shots. That was a lot of damage and firepower.
But it wasn’t enough.
Paxton had tempered our elation quickly. “The king has a warehouse of munitions—thousands of loads—plus two hundred more launchers and enough soldiers to carry every one of them. The only reason he’s been guarding the town with a handful is because he can. He made a show when he roared in that first day, blowing up everything, and it worked. Everyone has a healthy respect for his power now.”
“You mean a healthy fear.” I stared at our stack of ammunition. My fingers tightened around the back of the chair. “We’ll get more, then,” I said. “Enough to make our own show. Where does he keep it?”
That was the question Paxton had been trying to answer since all this began. The king and Banques kept it a closely guarded secret. It was somewhere at the arena, he knew that much. Kazi had told Paxton to check warehouse seventy-two—the number that was on the piece of paper she had stolen from the king, but Paxton never got the chance to go there.
“Seventy-two is near the end of the third row. We could approach at night from behind through the pastureland,” Priya suggested.
“Getting to it is one thing,” I countered. “Hauling out thousands of pounds of munitions is another. I’ve been to the arena, and it’s crawling with guards, and our towers are manned with more of them. They can see everything.”
“Then we don’t haul it out,” Aram said. “We just commandeer the warehouse and claim it as our own. We have enough arms to defend it. If it’s out of their hands, their power is gone.”
“Until they blow you to kingdom come, the same way we did with the icehouse,” Mason said. “They still have enough loaded launchers to do that.”
“Or we could blow up the munitions ourselves,” I suggested. “It would be an even fight then.”
“Even? He has five hundred trained soldiers,” Paxton said.