Free Among the Nameless Stars by Diana Peterfreund

One
    The first week was the hardest.
    Kai’s fingers would itch for a paper glider to write down everything he saw and share it with Elliot, just as they always had. The ruins, sprawling and dangerous but utterly empty, even of other travelers. He’d heard that, at its height, the city had been home to a million people. And now there was nothing. By the second week of his journey, Kai had grown used to his solitude, though he still caught himself composing letters in his head.

    Dear Elliot,
    This morning, the sky was clear and I got my first glimpse of the volcano. It was just like the pictures in books: an enormous red cone pointing at the sky.

    He was a good paragraph in before he realized what he was doing and stopped himself. He’d sworn he’d never write her. Never. If she wasn’t coming with him, she didn’t deserve to know what he saw.
    Most Luddites who traveled south of the ruins took horses and the ferry, but that was only an option if you could pay the toll. For everyone else, it was the treacherous fire fields, the sinkholes and geysers, ash pits and crevasses. Even before the wars, the fire fields had been dangerous, desolate, reserved for wilderness lovers who somehow took joy in walking through a burned-out, lava-ridden desert. Now the geologic instability wrought by the wars had turned this entire swath of the island into a ticking time bomb. No one knew when the next eruption would Among the Nameless Stars by Diana Peterfreund
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    scald the landscape clean. Kai spent several days scrambling through the scree, searching for paths—or at least what he hoped were paths and not just trails carved by flash floods or lava flows. He’d come prepared for this, though, knowing that the fire fields would offer him no water to refill his canteen or shelter from the wind and the sun.
    One day, at twilight, he heard the sound of hoofbeats. Two men on impossibly large horses, bearing down on him at full gallop. He stepped off the path to let them by, but they veered in his direction. He scooted farther off the raised shoulder of the road, and in the fading light, he could barely see them signal to each other, angling their horses to surround him. One began to swing a long piece of rope with weights on the ends over his head. A bola.
    Later, Kai would say this moment—the split second before he realized that the horsemen were chasing him —was when he truly became a free Post. Before, it had meant getting out from under the command of Baron North. But as he spun around and started running, Kai realized the truth. He was also free of the Norths’ protection.
    That night, he ran faster than he’d thought was possible for humans since the Reduction. But even as he sprinted from the horses, he knew it was pointless. The fire fields offered no ground cover and no trees to climb or caves to hide in. And as slippery as the scree might be for those beasts coming after him, it wasn’t easy on his feet either. He hit a patch wrong and went sprawling.
    The bola flew over his head, its weighted tentacles twirling. Had he been upright, it would have wrapped around his throat. But Kai had no chance to feel relief, as the horses were nearly on top of him. One horse reared to a stop in front of him as he scrambled to his feet. He heard the other rider’s feet crunch on the gravel at his back. Kai shot to the left, and the men started running, so he cut right, past the horse—and into nothingness.

    Among the Nameless Stars by Diana Peterfreund
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    He fell hard against the slope. Pain tore his knee in two, and he raised his hand to protect his head as he rolled, tumbled, rolled, then fell again.
    After what may have been a minute, or maybe endless hours, he came to rest on the bottom of the ravine, battered and bloody. He couldn’t rise if he wanted. From far away, he heard the men’s voices.
    “Is he dead?”
    “Don’t matter. He’s useless now. I’m not hauling him up that scree in the dark just to find every