And even if I made it to the fields, what do I truly expect? That I can waltz into the workers’ quarters, round up my pack, and slip into the wastes unseen? Ma will probably fight me, tell me to be loyal to the cause. The guards will see me enter the shanties, and if they don’t, they’ll certainly catch us trying to cross the dam. And if by some gods-granted luck we make it out, bullets will find our backs within minutes. Sentry posts overlook the land beyond Bedrock, which is unsheltered and sprawling, with nowhere to go but south through the Barrel. Through a bottleneck. Through hell.

We’d be caught.

We’d never make it.

But still I run through scenarios. I plot and plan, because I know that tomorrow my time is up. I even comb through every childhood memory I can recall, wondering if the Oracle may be correct. Perhaps I know something that unlocks the map—a cipher or a key, as she called it. I start with the day I was branded, a suffocatingly hot summer day, and move through the days that followed. Nothing stands out. Our pack was so concerned with keeping the map hidden, so eager to please the gods with blind faith and trust, that we rarely spoke of the brands Asher and I wore. There’s nothing. Nothing outside the rule we lived by.

Show it to no one. Unless you trust them with your own life, keep it hidden. Always.

When the sun rises, I am still at the window, still staring at the dam, still at a loss for how I will possibly spare Ma from her fate.

At first light I request a visit with the Oracle. Reed escorts me, the ram-skull mask resting on his forehead. His falcon is not with him today.

“Are you a Barrel gunner or a Bedrock guard?” I ask him. “I can’t figure it out.”

“I’m a Loyalist,” he says dryly. “And the General’s fourth.”

“Fourth?”

“It means I’m just unimportant enough to get stationed in the Barrel for a moon, but important enough to get dragged back to my regular duties when you showed up. Some reward for locating a map to the Verdant.”

“Maybe you should have kept your mouth shut. Might have been better for both of us.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he grumbles. He actually sounds like he means it.

As we walk, I consider what his number might mean. That Reed is one of General’s most trusted advisers? That he is fourth in a line of succession? By blood or by chance? Reed is sweeping aside the curtain to the library before I can settle on a theory.