“I kept your secret about the inverted well, and I brought you clean water the first night you worked the fields,” he goes on. “I want to help you find the Verdant. That’s why you’re here, right? You know something.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. And I think you’re full of shit. I think you were sent to spy on me. You were supposed to follow me to the Verdant and report back to the General, but you got yourself caught and are trying to trick me with the shallowest lie the wastes has ever seen.”

“So you know where it is?” he asks, eyes brightening. “The Verdant?”

“Goodbye, Reed. Rest easy.”

His bound arms come up expertly fast, swiping in a circle and knocking my blade aside. Harlie and Asher sharpen their aim with the rifles. I recover the knife. But before I can strike, Reed draws something from beneath his shirt that freezes me solid.

“Don’t shoot!” I yell to the others.

I stand there, staring. Barely able to believe it.

Hooked on Reed’s thumbs is a leather cord, and hanging from it, quivering between us as it finds north, is a lodestone.

I drag him to Harlie’s shanty and shove him inside. Asher grabs my wrist. “You shouldn’t be alone with him,” he says thinly. “I don’t trust him.”

“Then stand watch. I’ll shout if I need help.” I shake Asher off and push through the fabric that serves as the door. Reed is standing against the far wall.

“Explain,” I say, eyes on his chest. The lodestone still rests there, identical to mine. As black as night. A luster of shine, even in this dim lighting. An indentation to mark north.

“I got it from a trader when I was eight,” he says, tucking it beneath his shirt. “I was living with a pack near East Tower at the time. The trader said there was a man named the General gaining power to the north, that I should leave my pack and head there, pledge my loyalty to him. I didn’t understand, but the trader insisted that I would need to be in Bedrock. That someday, a girl might arrive. She’d have a lodestone to match mine, and he said I needed to help her.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because we’re blood, Delta. Half-siblings. The trader claimed he was our father.”

The room seems to swim. Reed’s eyes flit to the center of my chest, where my lodestone rests beneath my shirt. He’d seen it that day in Bedrock, I realize. When I stole his waterskin and he grabbed me, pulling me close, he’d glanced it down the front of my shirt.

That was the day he discovered who I was.

“What did he look like?” I demand.