Free Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) by Harry Manners

you know, Norm. The others. I can feel them.”
    “Uh huh, that’s great,” Norman said, turning her around to face him. “But we have to go. Are you with me?”
    Her eyes remained glazed for a moment, but then she seemed to return to him from a great distance. “Yes.”
    “Good. Let’s go then,” he said to Fol.
    Lucian wheezed, “If you really can work up some magic voodoo to get us back.”
    “I can get you close enough. Maybe.”
    “We’ll take it. Show-and-tell’s over.” Robert’s voice was dead, unyielding. “We’re going now, or you lose your spine.”
    Fol’s inveterate grin sharpened. “I like you.” He held out his hands. “Group huddle!” he cried, giving a little titter.
    Norman offered Billy a weak smile. With what seemed enormous effort, she returned the sentiment.
    “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Lucian growled as he floated closer, linking hands with Norman and Richard. “You got a screw loose? How can you laugh at a time like this?”
    “Because,” Fol said, winking, “back home, I was the Jester. Let one hell of an old fella tell you: most times, laughter is all we have.”
    Then Norman tumbled through space again, turning backwards through the same impossible angles, leaving the dark prison and the Vanished behind, a long wailing echo ringing in his ears.

V

     
    The spiky-haired woman gripped the rakish young man by the shoulder so hard he grunted. “Shh, they’ll hear you!”
    “Nobody’s listening. You know I’m tellin’ the truth,” he said.
    “I said shut up!”
    He threw her off. “What’s the plan once we’re through? Say we burn everything there is to be burned, what then? What’s the point?”
    “Gettin’ even. They starved us out of house and home and left us to die.”
    He beat her across the mouth. “Don’t be a damn fool, woman!”
    She cried out and slapped him back. The two of them sneered at one another, half-crouched like cats in the dying afternoon light. “Don’t you fuckin’ touch me.”
    “I just trying to beat some sense into you. I want to get even as much as anyone, but I didn’t sign up for this. This is just bloody murder. They’re going to destroy everything they touch and they won’t stop until there’s nothing left to torch but themselves.”
    “Don’t be stupid.”
    “I’m tellin’ you, we’ll turn on each other when the last of the Alliance folk are in the ground.”
    The woman said nothing.
    Charlie watched from behind the rocky bluff where his campfire flickered. He cringed inwardly.
    Why do the damn fools have to have their little secret meeting here?
    If only they knew the lion’s den lay a few feet away.
    The two idiots had crept away quietly for their little collusion. On Charlie’s right, through a thin screening of trees, the main encampment lay sprawled across a square mile of open prairie. Thin tendrils of smoke trailed skywards from enough campfires to boggle his mind, even now. He had grown up with only his father for company. The towns they had visited had numbered in the dozens at most.
    He would never get used to these numbers: thousands, all looking for blood.
    Over a day, they had been marching. The land had been scoured clean on their way to rendezvous in Radden Moor. Anybody left had either taken up and scattered, been cut down where they stood, or been absorbed into the marching ranks.
    We’re all broken. Some of these people were highwaymen and bandits, but most of them might have broken bread with strangers not long ago. Now look at them. They’re so thirsty for blood they’re a hair’s breadth from taking chunks out of one another.
    The weak were being left in the army’s dust, sloughed off like dead skin. It was almost as though the army was an organism unto itself, a relentless carnivore bent on mindless killing, growing ever more terrible as those with conscience were stripped away, leaving only the true killers to carry on.
    The arguing pair had already sealed their fate.