“I had a beaky nose and I was too tall and my hair would never lay flat,” to which Ida would say, “Your nose is still beaky!” and her father would tickle her again.
“I wanted her to go see Doc Shuster, in town, so he could check her wound, but she didn’t want her mother to know what’d happened. She said she had to get home and change clothes before she got in trouble.” Jon would grab his heart in mock pain and say, “So she left me! Arrrgh!”
“Stop exaggerating, Jon,” her mother would say, rolling her eyes.
“She did ask if she could come back the next day.”
“He blushed like a ripe strawberry!” her mother might add.
“As soon as she was gone, I couldn’t wait to see her again. And lucky for me, she came back the next day. . . .”
“And the next . . . ,” her mother added.
“And the next . . . ,” Ida chimed in. “And the next . . . and the next . . . and the next!”
“It took you a week to even ask my name!” her mother taunted.
“‘Elizabeth,’ she told me, but I preferred to call her ‘Bet.’ We were married two months later.”
“And then you had me!” Ida cheered.
“Yes, then we had you,” her father cooed.
“And when you grow up one day,” her mother would always add, “you might be lucky enough to be shot by someone you love.”
This was the signal that it was time to say good night. Her parents would tuck her blanket in tightly, and kiss her on the forehead, and she would always sleep soundly, knowing they were just in the next room.
Those days had been pure bliss for Ida. She and her parents had lived just outside of Gulm, and Ida had spent her days running and playing in the woods.
Everything was heaven until the Master, the merciless ruler of Gulm, decided to prepare for a new war. The Master attacked a neighboring mining town, reasoning that he might, perhaps, someday need more metal, so that he could, perhaps, someday make more weapons, should he, perhaps, maybe, just in case, ever have to go to war.
Jon and Bet Dorrington opposed the idea of war, and so when soldiers arrived at their front door and told Jon to hunt extra food for the growing army, he refused.
He was shot on the spot.
Ida had been observing from the kitchen, and she was confused and thought that the soldier must have been in love with her father, because that was the only reason she knew to shoot someone. But Bet ran out from the bedroom, grabbed Jon’s gun, and told Ida to run. Ida didn’t want to leave, but the insistence in her mother’s voice made her do as she was told. She climbed out the window, jumped, and rolled onto the grass below. Ida heard a second shot and turned in time to see her mother fall to the ground next to her father.
Ida’s screams of horror drew the attention of the soldiers. They started toward her. Ida ran into the woods and didn’t stop running or crying for three days. By the end of day three, she could weep no more, and she decided she had used up her life’s supply of tears.
By this time, she was far from the woods that she knew so well. Ida was in a land she had never known before, with short grass and purple trees. She soon came upon the Institute, the only structure in a sea of nothingness. She was dehydrated and on the verge of starvation when she knocked on the door and was yanked inside.
That was five years ago. Ida hadn’t been outside since.
Until now.
Ida’s feet were numb from walking so long. She and Fargus had been walking around barefoot for years, having no one to buy them new shoes. Around the Institute that had been fine, but last night, when she had first got outside, she had felt every rock and twig. She hadn’t complained—she was not one to show weakness. Now that her feet were too cold and numb to feel anything, Ida was relieved, knowing that this was for the best. She would be able to travel as far as necessary.
THIRTEEN
The night sky became a dull blue as the sun fought to appear on the horizon. Josephine noticed that the landscape had changed yet again, and the shapes that had seemed so ominous during the night were actually clusters of boulders littering the plains. Seeing the rocks now, she understood how she could’ve mistaken them for sleeping monsters.
“You thought they were sleeping what?” Ida asked.
Josephine blushed. She was thinking out loud again. “Nothing.”
This time Ida was kind enough to let it go.
As the sun began to peek out at them and illuminate the landscape, Ida stopped walking. She looked at them both and announced, “The Brothers will be waking soon.”
Josephine looked around in terror. “What do we do?”
“We hide,” Ida answered matter-of-factly. She started toward a mound of boulders where an overhanging rock formed a cavern seemingly big enough for the three of them. They stretched out side by side, and Fargus was asleep the moment he laid his head down. Ida and Josephine lay staring at the cavern ceiling and nibbling on small bits of food.
“Ida, why does everyone call them the Brothers? Are they related?”
“Who knows? Maybe it’s just because they fight like brothers. Stairway Ruth liked to tell us stories before we went to bed, just to scare us. She claims that one time there was this girl, Laura, who dropped her favorite doll out an Institute window, and she climbed down using her sheets tied together to fetch it.” Ida’s voice got dark and menacing. “That night, when Stairway Ruth finally discovered the sheets hanging out the window, she pulled them back in and all that was left was a severed hand clutching the fabric.”
Josephine felt she might be sick. She put down her bread and cheese.
Ida took no notice and kept munching on a piece of pigeon jerky. “But I don’t really believe that story. I mean, who drops their favorite doll out a window?”
“So they ate Laura?”
“Exactly.”
“But . . . how could they? They don’t have any mouths.”
Ida wrinkled her brow; this had never crossed her mind. “Maybe they just tore her apart with their big claws?”
