Free Stolen by Erin Bowman Page A

spent the day doing nothing of importance. They sat around the fire and drank hot tea. They went for a walk through the town, which was dusted with a thin layer of white. Heath was good on his crutches now, but the snow made him clumsy. Bree laughed when he fell, and when she refused to help him up, he called her a word he’d most certainly learned from Lock. Heath managed in the end—awkwardly bracing his weight against the crutches until he pulled himself upright. He tossed another swear Bree’s way but she smiled. He could manage without her, and that was all she’d been testing.
    Chelsea brought food back from the bonfire that night and the three of them had a private meal. No one said much, but what really remained to be said? Besides, Chelsea was present, looking at Heath instead of through him, and Bree knew everything would be fine in her absence.
    Later, when the town was sleeping, Bree wandered to the jetty. It was here that it always happened, a private occurrence without spectators. The brave would wait. The desperate would chase the horizon. And the people of Saltwater did not interfere.
    Against her island’s traditions, Bree witnessed a Snatching for the first and only time at the age of seven. She’d wanted to see what had happened to her father—not just hear a vague recount of the phenomenon—and it had been terrifying. The roaring wind, the blinding light, the thrashing ocean. A dark shadow had taken the trembling boy.
    And now she was on that same jetty—her harbor, her port—facing an uncertain future.
    The horizon was barely discernible from where she stood. The star-strewn sky met the water like an old friend, bleeding into one. Waves crashed around her, a familiar song Bree was suddenly terrified she’d miss. Her thoughts drifted to Lock. She couldn’t change whatever was coming—if it even was coming—but she understood him clearly now. The nerves and fears, the overwhelming sense of helplessness that threatened to drown. The difference was that she wouldn’t run.
    There were pieces of her that no force could take away. No matter where she might find herself tomorrow, she had the stars as her confidants. And if she lost the sky, she had her hands. She had calluses from spears and the means to whistle to loons. And even if those were stolen she had memories of Lock and Heath and herons and hope and all the things that mattered. They were hers, and nothing could take them from her.
    When the night sky went ablaze, Bree didn’t flinch. She didn’t tremble or cringe or cower in fear. She greeted it like an equal.
    She might have even smiled.

THIRTEEN
    HER WORLD WAS LARGE NOW. Frightening large. And so much more complex than she ever could have imagined.
    She’d read the truth in a series of leather-bound journals, equal parts appalled (at the lies she’d been fed in Taem) and amused (at the minor discrepancies in the captured notes). Saltwater had no Wall—the ocean was a mighty guardian—but it had been watched. Just like the other test groups. She, like so many, was another victim of the Laicos Project.
    Those journals had lit a fire beneath Bree, a need to right wrongs. She’d picked up a firearm eagerly, shocked—if not a little bit startled—to find it as comfortable as a spear in her grasp.
    Her hands were the only things to get her through those first few months. She whistled into them almost obsessively, a loon call reminding her that she was still Bree from Saltwater. Bree, Bree, Bree. The same girl, despite how much of her life had dissolved like a crashing wave.
    She peered at her mark through the binoculars. The boy was still dragging his brother—at least, she assumed they were related. They looked identical. Especially in those horrible Order uniforms.
    She could hear Fallyn in her ear: Act now, question later . Fallyn, whose name Bree had heard whispered around Saltwater fires—a legend there, now a captain here.
    But even after tracking the brothers, stalking them