Cameron

CAMERON

The Tooth stank like shit from where she stood on the road, just out of sight. Shit and death. Only the desperate would dare stay in such a place, and here she was. God, she was so fucking desperate. She'd never hated herself more than in this moment. An embarrassing wretch of a person. An obsessed person. Journal Siena was right—she'd hyperfixated on Avery for seven years, and would go so far as killing herself to find her. In a lovely addition, she'd now also go so far as killing herself to prove Tammy wrong.

There was no Mother, and she was no imaginary bitch's sacrifice.

Cam continued toward The Tooth, mud squelching beneath her boots. She didn't bother sneaking around back. It was midday, and she hadn't shown up for her morning scraping shift. Tammy knew she was gone.

But the catwalk was empty. Had the guards gone looking for her?

The gate creaked open long before she neared The Tooth's walls. When she stepped through to the village, only Tammy, in a pair of dirty overalls, stood in front of the smoldering bonfire pit.

The Elder leaned against the shovel she held and simpered at Cam. "The Mother's will is stronger than yours after all. "

Cam fought to keep her expression neutral. "Where is everyone?"

"Getting ready for the feast, of course," Tammy said. "And you should, too. Tonight, join us by the gate when you hear the bell."

Cam glanced around. Not a single pork-addled villager roamed the streets. Her fingers tingled with anxiety, and she clenched her hands.

She turned back to Tammy, whose eyes flickered like she was waiting for a retort, or anger at the very least. The only card Cam had left was her anger, and she wasn't ready to give it up. So she left for her cabin without a word.

Upon entering, she noticed her table was missing, but nothing else, not even the bag beneath her bed. Odd—though it wasn't like she would need it any longer. Her stomach twisted with unease, and the last thing she wanted to do was eat, but she had to. She couldn't imagine this feast being anything more than butchered pig, and once she was in the woods, she'd need enough energy to figure out where to go.

Ruby's jerky was salted, and it was the best goddamn thing Cam had ever put in her mouth. As protein and electrolytes flooded her system, the world around her sharpened like she'd just chugged a vat of coffee. Sustenance.

She chuckled to herself; even after a lifetime backpacking through the wilderness, starvation was a new worry. Perks of being an overfed American. She rolled up the remainder of her jerky in the cloth bag and tucked it into the oversized pocket of her cargo pants. Her dated and dorky hiking ensemble was finally proving useful. She fit her water filter, knife, flashlight, extra underwear, and Avery's map into the pockets she'd sewn into her clothes, then patted around her body, as though the act would provide her some comfort. It didn't.

Cam tried sleeping a bit and failed, her stomach knotting around the jerky too tightly. Every time she heard a noise outside, her adrenaline spiked. She cracked her shutter and watched the sunset as voices finally filtered into the streets.

She could check if her hole in the fence was fixed. Still make a run for it.

"I have nowhere to go," she whispered to herself.

At dusk, a bell chimed at the gate, and Cam stepped from her cabin into the muck of the village. It wasn't raining. Of course it wasn't raining, praise the blessed-fucking-Mother. At least she wouldn't be soaking wet when they cast her out of the village tonight.

Mist clung to the air, the night a soft haze, like the backdrop of a portrait. Unsettlingly beautiful. She used to be perfectly content walking on her own in the eastern California mountains on a night like this, eyes adjusting to the dark, her mind finally quieting as leaves crunched beneath her boots.

Instead, acid fear burned through her stomach, and she refused to show that fear to anyone tonight. Not even steel could withstand acid. She needed to be stronger than any alloy. Impossible, but she had no choice.

The mist carried laughter and banter, but the air was suspiciously empty of the smell of meat. The torches around the perimeter were extinguished. She followed the only source of light to the front of the village. Her eyes flitted left and right as she peered down alleys and into corners, but saw no one. Tammy had told her to wait for the bell, but everyone else must have been given instructions to arrive earlier.

She approached the bonfire and a long line of tables and mismatched chairs. So this was why her table was missing. They were even chronologically ordered by the numbers carved into them.

Everyone in the village was here, the conversation like a roar of flame. Some sat while others stood at the bonfire. A few even carried cigarettes and cigars. They must have had them from their lives before and saved them for the special occasion .

Everything felt too happy. Too bright. And where the hell was the food?

Bert approached her with a thin smile. She hadn't seen him in weeks, and that same uncanny familiarity about him triggered her amygdala, her mind screaming at her to run. But the only way to go was out the open gate. Why was the gate open? Was it a symbol of something? Her exit?

His mouth split open. "Everyone, sit!" he boomed. "The Mother's Chosen has arrived."

Some idiot cheered, and as the villagers of The Tooth scrambled for a seat, Bert touched her arm. "You're with me."

She stepped out of reach, but then followed him to his seat at the head of the table that faced the gate. Candles adorned all the tabletops, melted wax dripping through the cracks in the wood. Their table was unnumbered, unlike the others. She sat to Bert's left while Tammy sat to his right, bonfire light glittering on her sweat-slick forehead. She looked at Cam like she wanted to eat her.

Was firsthand cannibalism better than secondhand cannibalism to these people?

The table quieted as Bert took a breath.

"We begin tonight as we do every year, with an account of our faith, and why ritual and dedication is the only way we survive." Bert set something on the table and pushed it into Cam's view.

The deck of cards.

"It started with a search for the truth, as it always does. Humanity likes to tease apart the elements of the universe, decipher what makes things tick and hum and call it science. I was a man of science, until this world swallowed me whole and reminded me why faith is the crux of our species."

"Amen," someone shouted from the foot of the table. They all were riveted, even those with the shakes so bad that they could hardly hold their head up.

A bead of sweat rolled down Cam's temple. She didn't want to wipe it away for fear of someone noticing her nervous anticipation.

Bert placed his hand on the card deck. "The first time I drew the cards, I became obsessed with the image of our Mother. I spent weeks, months in the woods in search of her, and find her I did.

"She is a thing of beauty. Tender, albeit omnipotent. Critical but fair. A beacon of life, for she wants us to survive in this vibrant place. She believes we can. And while we must do much on our own, we are guided by her hand of mercy. A gift, once a year, so we may flourish.

"Upon our first harvest sacrifice, we found the cabins and the crag. The next year, the hogs arrived, the gift of long-lasting nourishment. Every year but the Year of Doubt has brought supplies or aid to our village."

Cam had no idea what the Year of Doubt was, but so much of this religion was literal, so she assumed it was a year where this community forwent the sacrifice.

Down the length of the table, a few of the silhouettes shifted. A nod here and there, but most everyone had fallen still. Cam spotted Thia, the woman she'd patched up in the clinic yesterday. Her skin was pale and glittering with sweat. Feverish from infection. Cam hadn't done enough to clean her wound, then again no one could have. Death came too quickly out here, but Bert had survived years. She couldn't imagine there was anyone left who'd lived through this history alongside him.

What were the more recent boons? What had some of these folks actually witnessed?

She scoured the table for Dee, but couldn't find her face.

"It is once again time for us to sacrifice, to show our merciful Mother we are still here, and still thriving. That we are growing stronger, but still require her blessings to thrive."

Bert bowed his head. As did Tammy. Heads bowed in a wave down the table, and the newborns followed the leads of the others. Cam's eyes darted around wildly for any sign of what the next several minutes would bring. Beyond the strip of candlelight, there were only still bodies, bowed heads, and darkness past the open gates. Even the bonfire had dwindled to smoldering coals.

And it remained that way. Bert didn't pray out loud. No one did. Seconds ticked by, and then minutes. Cam bounced her knee, faster, faster, faster, the wood squeak of the chair the only sound in the entire goddamn forest. There were no birds, no crickets. Nothing beyond the fence. No one else at the table so much as shifted in their seat or lifted an eyelid.

If hell was a place, it was right here, right now. This silence, this wait, this ambiguity was almost as bad as when she was dragged underwater to the bottom of the tarn, and into the Briardark.

Fuck this place. Fuck these people.

She counted the bounces of her leg. One, two, three, four . . . one-nineteen, one-twenty, one-twenty-one . . . eight-ninety-nine, nine hundred . . .

She made it to almost three thousand before a twig snapped somewhere beyond the gate. A couple of heads swiveled toward the opening.

"Be still." Bert nodded at Tammy, who bent, disappearing beneath the table. She reappeared holding a rifle, which she rested on the wood in front of her.

Cam pressed her palms to the tabletop, ready to jump and run. "What the hell is going on?"

Everyone's eyes darted to her, the Toothers taken aback by her sudden interruption. Cam's heart thudded in her throat.

Bert lifted the hand in his lap and put it on top of hers so quickly, she hardly had time to register the glove before she felt the cold, rigid metal encasing his hand. It looked not like armor, but a medieval torture device, each finger adorned with a three-inch steel claw sharp enough to gouge the table. The claws were so close to her flesh that if she moved her hand at all, one would cut right into her wrist.

"Still," he ordered. Cam froze, forcing her hand still until it was all she could think about.

"It's here," Tammy said, her eyes trained on the open gate. Hushed whispers rolled across the table.

Deep in the pit of Cam's belly, the real repercussions of her choices manifested. She buried them with all the false optimism she could muster up. Every sad, trembling villager was in on the performance, one they'd clearly rehearsed together. Bert was a profoundly terrible writer who wouldn't know subtlety if it socked him in the jaw. And the spectacle to come, the one that waited to take center stage, Cam would laugh at it, because the terror that lived in her now was too pure to withstand much longer.

Once the usher hit the house lights, everything would be fucking fine .

" Still, " Burt said.

Screams shattered the night. A silhouette emerged beyond the open gate and jumped, thundering across the far end of the tables, so heavy it splintered the wood. Antlers darker than night rose above all of them. A stag? A buck? It was so dark, she could see nothing but its obfuscated shape, like it didn't know whether it wanted to be a stag. It was an ink stain. An idea. It meandered forward along the table length, clop, clop, clop, its footsteps vibrating through the tables as it crossed them. Candles toppled and rolled to their demise.

A man fell back in his chair. Once he hit the ground, his limbs quaked too violently for him to crawl away. No one helped him. The only ones who jumped from their seats did so with ease. Newborns, all of them. The sick—the ones who'd been here longer—stayed put. They'd seen this before.

Cam jerked her arm to get away, forgetting about Bert's glove, and cried out when the claw dug into her flesh, blood gliding along her skin. "Let me go!"

As the stag neared the head of the table, a sharp ringing pierced the air, high-pitched and insufferable .

Tammy stood and grabbed her rifle, stepping onto her chair and then the table. She aimed the gun at the stag, and Cam clapped her free hand over one ear as she pulled the trigger.

Boom .

The dark animal staggered, its inkstain legs collapsing. Some of the veteran villagers finally dove from their chairs, screaming as tables skidded apart or crushed beneath the stag's weight. The beast slid and fell, its head lolling to the side, one of its massive antlers skimming the shoulder of a young woman who hadn't yet jumped back. She crumpled alongside the animal.

"Penn!" the man beside her shrieked.

Cam pushed herself up to see, but Bert's claws still wrapped around her stinging wrist. Who knew what kind of infection lay dormant on the metal? God, she was fucking done for, and she hadn't even been sacrificed yet.

The commotion didn't dissipate; the man who knelt by the fallen woman sobbed uncontrollably, and Cam wanted to throw up in panic just watching him. The woman on the ground hadn't so much as twitched.

Cam forced her body to relax, and Bert removed the metal glove from her hand. She shoved her wrist toward the candlelight, examining the wound. Bloody, but shallow.

At some point, Tammy had stepped off the table, but Cam couldn't remember when. The Elder crouched near the crying man, and pressed a hand to the shoulder of the unmoving woman.

"Dead," she announced.

The man wailed and punched the earth with his fist. Dead, how? The antler of this strange animal had merely grazed her.

Tammy stood. "The death is proof enough. We should move on without the roll."

"We have to go through with it," Bert said. Cam could hardly hear him over the commotion of the villagers, some crying, others muttering like they were speaking in tongues. A few groups huddled together, trying to soothe one another or hold each other up. Many were too feeble to stand, watching idly and apathetically from their seats.

Cam took the opportunity to leap away from Bert and run toward the body. She shoved Tammy out of the way.

"I said she was dead!" Tammy said.

"Like fuck I trust you," Cam said, but it was obvious the collapsed villager was beyond revival. Her eyes were orbs of dull obsidian, scream frozen in death. The man had flung his body over her torso and continued to weep. Cam almost knelt to check for a pulse and then clenched her fist.

Bad idea to touch a body.

She glanced at the dead stag, expecting some definition, now that she was closer, but her brain revolted against making sense of the dark mass. Eyes watering, she blinked and looked back at Bert, who withdrew a spherical gem from his pocket. He held it up within his gloved hand for all to see and then threw it across the table.

The gem knocked over one of the remaining candles, molten wax flinging through the night, before rolling to a stop. Not a gem, but a die, the candlelight illuminating its dozens of faces, each etched with a number.

"The Lover reads," Bert said, and motioned for Cam to approach the die.

Though Cam stood motionless, her insides sped forward, taking flight, breaking the sound barrier. Run run run runrunrunrun .

The crowd quieted. She glanced around at them staring at her, meager, swollen-eyed, sniveling. Menaced, she pulled back her upper lip in a snarl. She hated them. Hated how, in this moment, she was one of them.

Sloppy footsteps pattered as a man raced toward the gate. A shot rang out. Cam clapped her hands over her ears as he rag-dolled face-first in the mud. The woman closest to him jumped and cowered, covering her head with her arms. She didn't drop to help him, but it didn't matter. The man lay still in the mud .

Tammy lowered her rifle. "We stay until the feast is over." She nodded at Cam. "Go on."

Despair clawed at Cam's throat. There was nothing left to do but listen to Bert before anyone else got shot. Leaning closer to the die, she read the metallic numbers etched into—was it quartz? "Forty-seven."

A young woman standing at the edge of the crowd released a desperate howl, the way one sounded when their greatest fear inevitably came to fruition. Cam had made the same noise the day Grandma June died. Denial. It was the sound of denial. The woman's wail shot through Cam's body, chilling the tips of her fingers. She took a step back, and then another, hoping to blend into the darkness enough to run, but Tammy's eyes were on her. Holding her rifle, she stared at Cam like she was the next piece of wild game. She wouldn't dare shoot Cam, would she? Mother knew best, after all.

The woman spun from the table and ran right past Tammy, who whipped around, caught her by the hair, and dragged her down to her knees.

Light erupted as one of Bert's hulking goons lit a torch with a melting candle. Cam didn't know his name. Another of his men had taken over for Tammy and scuffled with the woman. The torchlight illuminated her heart-shaped face and bright skin.

The new catwalk guard. A newborn. Cam carefully approached the table close to where the woman had been standing before she'd read the die. The number 47 was carved into the wooden surface.

Bert lit a torch off a candle and walked the length of the mess of tables, toward the fallen stag. The flame passed over the animal, and it was like someone had taken a knife to the fabric of reality and cut from it the shape of this deer. No smoke and mirrors. No trick was this good.

With his gloved hand, Bert grabbed one of its legs and rolled the tangible creature onto its back. The stag lay sprawled out like it was about to be field dressed. Bert's clawed hand hovered over its chest, and then he inched it lower, beneath the sternum. His hand sank into the deer's upper abdomen to the rip of skin and snap of tendons, as though the animal were a real warm-blooded mammal. He reached up and beneath the rib cage, grimacing, now elbow deep in inky matter, though Bert didn't drop dead like the others.

He reached higher, clawing through what had to be the diaphragm and lung tissue. With another wet rip, he tore from the void a black lump almost too big for him to grip within his glove.

More torches erupted behind Cam, but she only faintly registered the light, unable to tear her eyes away.

Bert knelt next to Forty-Seven—the catwalk guard—as Tammy wrenched open her mouth. But it was all for show. The woman couldn't eat the heart, because the moment Bert placed it against her lips, her body seized. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and then lost their white sheen, the color bleeding from her skin and leaving a rubbery, translucent sac for her insides. Dark veins spidered across wiry muscle and pockets of fat.

Cam released her breath in a long hiss, too horrified to scream.

"We know the cards speak truth because we see that truth with our very eyes." Bert stood straight. "And I ask, does this mean our devotion to our Mother is no longer faith, but the science of survival?"

The moment Bert turned toward her, Cam stumbled back, arms swiftly restrained by two large men.

Sacrifice. He'd always meant to kill her with this poisoned beast. Was she supposed to ascend to whatever afterlife these lunatics believed in and be The Lover to The Mother there?

Bert approached her with the heart raised, and she thrashed to no avail.

She deserved this. Her punishment for avoiding Avery after college, then failing to find her. Her punishment for leaving Siena. Her punishment for being selfish. And now this motherfucker would be the last thing she ever saw.

She clamped her mouth shut. He could push the deadly heart into her face all he wanted, but she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of pretending she would eat it.

He gripped her face with his unadorned hand the second he was close enough, fingers jamming into the hinge of her jaw.

"Open up, ."

.

She'd never told him her full name.

The torchlight flashed across Bert's face, and she saw him for the first time up close—really, truly saw him. His beard mostly masked his facial features, an uncanny face she'd mostly dismissed. Because he was so young. But now it was unmistakable: the high cheekbones, the heavy brow ridge over icy eyes. She never looked at men so intently, but she knew these features because she'd been forced to exist around this man for years, just to get credit for this nightmare of a study. Features she'd once considered kind, harmless, and sometimes obnoxious, his journal entries always far, far too spiritual to be from a scientist.

"Feyrer," she said.

He seized the opportunity and jammed the heart into Cam's mouth.