“It’s over, Heidi,” Émilie says.
Heidi wheels on her, but Émilie raises Petra’s little gun and says, “No.”
“Fine,” Heidi spits. “Let me go. I’ll—”
“It is over.” Émilie enunciates each word. “You are going home, whether you want to or not. Your people are going home, whether they want to or not.”
“They’ll want to,” Maryanne says as she comes around the back of the plane. “Most will. Once their minds are clear. Even if they joined by choice, no one stayed by choice.”
“You!” Heidi lunges at Maryanne, but I grab her as Dalton comes over to tie her hands.
Heidi pulls harder than I expect, and she breaks free, getting two steps before Maryanne yells, “No!,” and I think she means Heidi. But then I see Maryanne running for the plane. The boy, Bennett, is out of the plane and aiming a gun at Heidi. M
aryanne is running right into the line of fire.
“Maryanne!” I shout as I lunge her way.
But Bennett doesn’t shoot. He just stands, frozen. Then Maryanne is there, taking the gun from him, and he lets her, his eyes glistening with tears as he rocks in place.
“She’s—she’s—” he says.
“She’s nothing,” Maryanne says to him as we cuff Heidi. “Not anymore.”
He nods and falls against her shoulder as her arms go around him.
THIRTY-SIX
We don’t linger after that. Victor is definitely dead, and he’s taken any further answers with him. We need to find Edwin and Felicity. We know at least one hostile fled, possibly to warn those holding them captive. Following Bennett’s directions, Dalton and I take off with Storm and leave the handcuffed hostiles with Petra and Anders.
It turns out there’s no need for concern. Yes, the remaining hostile did run to the others, but only to warn them to flee. The three of them melted into the forest, leaving Felicity and Edwin, who are half out of their bindings by the time we arrive. They’re unharmed. They were only pawns, grabbed by a madwoman because she’d been sane enough to know that if they’d been coming from Rockton, they could be valuable hostages.
As we’re escorting Edwin and Felicity, we meet two of Edwin’s men searching. We leave Edwin and Felicity with them after securing a promise that they’ll send Sebastian home tomorrow.
Once they’re on their way, we take a moment to breathe, just breathe. And then we head back to help Anders get the hostiles to Rockton.
* * *
Four captive hostiles. I don’t include Bennett in that. He’s been a prisoner for two months, and we won’t treat him as one now. On the way to Rockton, we get his story. He’s from a community nearly two days’ walk from here. A couple of months ago, he’d been captured while hunting away from home. His family and community will certainly have been searching for him, but he hadn’t told anyone where he was going—he’d left after a fight with his parents, needing time alone. He’s eighteen, and the authorities may have written him off as a runaway. In northern communities, particularly Indigenous ones, that’s often as far as an official “investigation” goes.
For Bennett, the last couple of months are a blur. He barely believes me when I tell him it’s May—he’d presumed this must be a freakishly early thaw, because there’s no way two months have passed. We’ll need to have a long talk about what happened and what to tell his community, but he’s a smart kid, and I trust he’ll help us out with whatever spin we put on it.
We don’t bring the hostiles into Rockton. That’s unsafe on so many levels. We put them in the hangar. Émilie, Phil, and the council arrange a swift pickup.
Do we trust the council with this? I can’t even begin to answer that. All I know is that our priority is Rockton and its residents, and I will grudgingly trust Émilie to oversee the hostiles’ proper care and rehabilitation.
As for the small group still left in the forest, any action there has been put on hold. Rounding them up and shipping them south for reintegration smacks of some very ugly history, but in this case—knowing that most have been unwilling participants in an experiment—it’s a move we must seriously consider.
Dalton and I are in the Roc. It’s two in the morning. Going on forty-eight hours without sleep, and now that the hostiles are gone, we should be in bed. But Isabel wanted a celebratory drink, in honor of solving the hostile mystery, and the truth is that I’m not sure I could sleep just yet.
So we’re in the Roc waiting for Isabel. A single candle lights the silent building. Storm sleeps nearby, a celebratory bone abandoned nearly untouched before she drifted off.
“You did it,” Dalton says, his arms around me as I stand with my back to the wall.
He hugs me so tight I can’t breathe. There are congratulations in that hug and there is pride and there is love, and there are all the things I desperately wanted from my family growing up and never got. I can wallow in self-pity about that, or I can accept that my family was unable to give what I needed. They did love me. They were proud of me. Whatever I lacked, I have it now, in this place, with this man, and my eyes flood with tears.
I look up at him and say, “Do you think it’s enough? That this will fix things?”
He hesitates, and then his smile falters. It doesn’t break or evaporate. One second of dismay, and it returns with a fierceness that sends pride and love coursing through me.