Page 5 of A Liar's Twisted Tongue

“Okay.”

The next morning, I wake up before my mom and begin braiding my hair—but I promised not to hunt today. In that, I promised not to worry about our empty stomachs and to surrender to the role of the child despite my not feeling like one.

Despite being only a year away from adulthood in the eyes of the Fire Folk.

I’m a quarterway through the braid when I stop. Like old times, I climb into my mom’s bed. She mumbles something and turns to me, groggily wrapping her arm over me.

“I missed this baby girl,” she mumbles.

“Me too.”

My own grogginess overcomes me and I find myself falling to sleep in her arms like I’m a kid again.

I wake once more, this time to the familiar feeling of Mom tugging my hair into a braid. I smile to myself when her fingers run along my scalp, sending shivers down my arm.

“You have the best hair to braid,” Mom whispers. She used to say this all the time.

I fiddle with my fingers while she fiddles with my hair and when she finishes I turn to face her. Her soft hand caresses my cheek.

“I love you,” she tells me. “It’s you and me against the worlds.”

It is. It really is. It always has been. Everything we do is for one another. It’s that love that makes me think I could tell her the truth—that we don’t have long until I die. Because that’s the truth. That’s my magic. Whatever happens between that ending and now could be terrible, but she deserves to know that it’s going to end.

I open my mouth to tell her. The only words that fall out are, “And I love you.”

Mom smiles. She wouldn’t have smiled if I told her the truth.

* * *

I take the long walk to school. I have to see the posts. Make sure Marice is dead for myself—if they haven’t already hauled his body off.

I can smell the corpses and blood before I can make out what I’m seeing. Rotting Folk don’t smell much different than rotting corenths. When I get closer, I see the thirteen bodies still tied to the top of the wooden posts by their bloodied wrists, their backs barely backs anymore, more a mangled mess of muscle, blood, and bone.

My own back prickles.

But I see Marice’s face, his light-brown hair, and his graying beard. With that, I head for school.

More posters are up in the classroom. There’s a drawing of a glass bottle, one of a bow and arrow, and one of a felled tree, each with six words in red: If you see something, say something. A photo of the keepers, their gray suits and gray eyes, accompanied by red words: The face of justice.

I turn to Elliae, whose already usually white skin is paler than I’ve ever seen it.

“Damien isn’t in the woods, right?” I whisper.

“I don’t think so.” She leans closer to me. “You don’t think they’re here because of you guys, do you?”

“We’re not the only ones who hunt.” That is true, but we are the only ones who hunt every day. Our moms are Light Folk in a welders’ village, the only jobs that are available to them are packing the products the Fire Folk make. It pays even less than welding. There is no way we could not hunt.

Which means I don’t know how we’re going to eat tonight and I should’ve taken the two austecs yesterday.

The time passes fast, up until the point when I hear five taps from outside the glassless windows. Elliae says softly, “Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you.”

She always does, but this time it seems a little more dangerous.

I slip out of my usual hole in the wall, ignoring the influx of posters in the old room, and walk next to Damien. I’m prepared for him to tell me there’s a marenth or winster in the woods, because a bigger corenth like that is something he has no shot of taking down on his own, and I’m prepared to ask him if he’s dense.

But those aren’t the words that come out of his mouth.

“Your mom wanted me to get you. Said it was urgent.”

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