“Ma, don’t you want to know where Bay is? Or why the General is after the brand on my back? Don’t you care that he killed Old Fang, Astra, and Cobel just to recruit you here?” She goes on picking pods. “Ma! Look at me, dammit.”

I grab her shoulder and force her to turn. Her face is slack, almost expressionless. There’s a sweet aroma about her now that drowns out the stench of sweat, and her eyes are more detached than ever. She looks toward me, but not at me. “Find your basket and tend to the land, Delta,” she says blandly. “Be loyal to the cause, or I’ll report you.”

Be loyal to the cause. The same words the General snarled while his men held me down and copied the brand on my back. I back away from Ma. She watches me indifferently for a moment, then returns her attention to the crop.

I flee down the row. I’m not even out of the pea field when Reed tackles me around the waist. I crash to the ground. The fertile land smells like wet earth—completely natural, no sweetness like the water in the barrel Ma drank from.

The truth strikes like a knife to the heart.

The General is tending to the land but drugging his workers. I will never get through to Ma. And if I don’t start pretending to be drugged also, the General is going to force the tainted water on me too.

Chapter Twelve

Back in my room, the inverted well has yielded nearly a full cup of water. I drink it slowly, savoring each drop as I watch shadows creep across the fields.

Does Ma know the water she drinks has been tampered with?

We’re used to stagnant water in the wastes. Murky, cloudy, sometimes even a touch brackish, but our purified fare was always odorless after boiling. Clean. It’s hard to imagine that she didn’t notice the sweet undertone to the General’s water. Or maybe she just didn’t care. Like every worker in those fields, it was drink the strange water or die, and she doesn’t have a warning from Asher echoing in her mind.

I’m not sure what the drug is. Moonblitz can fog a person up good, but Ma’s dazed state was different. A blitzed drinker will stagger, stutter, sometimes even pass out, but the workers today were competent, seemingly healthy in all ways except their logic. And even wasteland remedies like nightshade and humweed, which can force sleep or dull pain, don’t match Ma’s symptoms. I don’t know of anything addictive that can keep a person functional and subdued. Which means I have no idea how quickly the drug can take hold of a person, or how long it takes to get out of one’s system.