It was all a lie.
"Talk loudly," Rymar whispered to me. "Say it like you want it to be heard all the way back at our house. Yell if you must. Just let them hear, okay?"
I nodded my head quickly, but when he stepped back, my throat wanted to close with a sudden rush of nerves. "I..."
"Louder," Rymar encouraged.
So, pulling in a deep breath, I clutched the sign die I'd retied around my neck, feeling my mother's ring beside it, and lifted my head. I was not a Mole. I was a fucking Dragon now. I could do this.
"I came to the surface to die!" I called out. "I thought the Devil was winning the battle between good and evil. I was sure the Dragons would eat me and the wild men would rape me. That is all we know of the world. It is all we're told, over and over, from the moment we're old enough to attend sermons."
There was a murmur in the crowd, but a soft one.
"But I was never an obedient girl," I went on. "I snuck around the compound. I read the books that were banned and locked away. I got punished so often, I learned to ignore the pain, lower my eyes, and act like a proper woman should." The next words came out filled with rage. "Meek! Dutiful! Submissive! Silent! They taught us a woman's place was no place at all. We only existed to be fruitful. To have their children, even if it killed us. They lied!"
"Tell them the rest!" Kanik yelled at me.
Clenching my fist at my side, I kept going. "My mother was kept in quarantine because she had been 'taken by the Devil.' I saw the others kept in that locked hall. Some had hair as dark as night. Others had skin that was brown, darker than anything I'd seen before, but still pale compared to the colors of the people in Lorsa. So many women, all behind electronically sealed doors. All married. All forced to have children over and over, promised they would be released if they learned how to properly believe in God!
"A God that is nothing like the one Father Dayne talks about. A God who sounds more like the Devil. A God who only wants suffering and torment, usually of the women." I pulled in a breath, refusing to let anyone stop me now. "But that's the thing. Those women weren't Moles! They were Dragons! I found this out because I dared to keep my mother's ring!"
Lifting my hand, I showed the golden ring I'd been clasping so hard. "My mother's name was Tiesha. She was known here as the Serpent! She raised me on stories of a wondrous place where life would be idyllic, and somehow I ended up here. Somehow, I learned that I was not my mother's second child, but her third. I have a sister. My mother was a Dragon until the Moles stole her!"
"It's true!" Saveah called out. "I remember that ring. I used to play with it as a baby."
"And this was what I inherited from her when she died giving birth to a Mole's child. All my life, she was Tiesha Ross, wife of Thadius Ross, and nothing more. Her words couldn't be trusted because the Devil had his claws in her mind. She was locked away, unable to mingle with the rest of the society belowground, likely blind in the dim light we thought was normal."
People were talking now, whispering to each other, yet their eyes were locked on me.
"And that's how I figured it out," I said. "That's how we stop the Moles! The men can't do anything. They don't know how to cook, or mend, or even clean. They cannot survive without the women they call useless. The women they beat for merely existing. The women they need so much they're willing to steal them from here!"
"Oh, hell," Rymar said, stepping back just to drop onto the bench hard.
"Those women aren't all Dragons, but some are!" I said. "We need to save them. We need to save my friends. We need to get the wives out! Somehow, we have to stop the Moles, because they are evil in a way I never could imagine." I slashed my hand downwards, making the point. "But to do that, we have to get in. We have to push them back. We have to fight harder, be more offensive, and show the Moles what it's like to suffer."
"How?" someone called out. "Our bows can't stand against their guns."
"So we take the guns," I told them. "They only have so many. It's a lot, but each one that stays out here makes us stronger and them weaker. This. Is. An. Arms race! We take the weapons, we take the women. We take and take and take from them, just like they do from everyone else, until the Moles are no more."
I bowed my head but didn't lower my voice. "That is the only way we can stop them."
Before me, the crowd cheered. Some jeered instead, but it was loud. So many people, many times more than the number in the compound, and it felt like all of them were calling out their opinion of my idea.
But through the middle of them, Saveah was making her way forward. She was alone. Worried about the children, I scanned the crowd, but Tamin's teal color was easy to spot since he was sitting on Zasen's shoulders. Kanik held the baby.
Saveah barely had her feet on the stairs before she was yelling at the crowd. "Listen up!" she demanded, making her way to my side. "Listen! We're not done yet!"
Slowly, the volume fell, but it didn't completely go away this time.
"Look at us!" Saveah demanded, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. "We share a mother, but not our fathers. This woman? She's as much a Dragon as I am! Tiesha was the Serpent. Ayla is the Phoenix - and who better to burn our enemy to the ground? But look at her!"
I glanced at Saveah, confused as to what point she was making.
She gave me a smile and kept going. "My sister is not orin! She is not a Mole. She looks just like me. If you say she's not one of us, then you say I'm not either. Not any woman with blonde hair and lighter skin. Is that really what you want to do?"
"No!" multiple voices screamed back.
Saveah just nodded. "And if Ayla is a Dragon, then aren't the children of the women they stole? Aren't those daughters down there just as much a Dragon as we are? They not only take our tailed citizens, but they steal our women, and then they hoard our nieces, nephews, and grandchildren! They are Dragons! They are ours!"
"And we are going to fight back!" Zasen yelled.
"Kill the Moles!" Tamin added in his childish voice.
That made a few laugh, but Drozel also lifted his voice. "The Phoenix knows. The Phoenix is ours. Zasen said she was worth her weight in gold, and she's already proven it. That woman is a warrior, just like the rest of us, and she's right!"
"Let's get our citizens back!" Omden yelled right after.
"Now, let's think this through," Jerlis said, moving up beside me. "We're all angry and grief-stricken after what happened last night, so let us not be rash."
"We're not going to let them come back again!" a woman screeched at him.
So Jerlis dropped his massive hand on my shoulder. "No. We're going to give Ayla time to make a plan, though. We are going to let her show us what we need to do, because she was down there. She knows things we do not, and while I wasn't ready to trust her..."
He turned to me and lowered his voice. "Did you know a woman named Ione, Ayla?"
I shook my head. "We didn't know the names of the women in quarantine. They weren't talked about."
"Tall," he said. "Brown hair. Very tall."
