Free The Reader by Traci Chee

and Sefia was exhausted. She clambered wearily up a nearby tree and began slinging her hammock.
    The boy followed, wincing, but he made it. Sefia gestured him into the hammock, where he fell asleep immediately. Settling herself on a wide limb, she leaned back against the trunk, knotting a rope around her so she wouldn’t fall. For a while she tried to keep watch, scanning the ground for signs of movement, but soon she drifted off, frowning and fists clenched, as the night melted into gray predawn.
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    O nce the door began to open, letting in a crack of moonlight so bright it was painful, the boy scuttled to the corner of the crate and huddled there, shielding himself from the light. He had been locked up for days, had been jostled, bumped, dropped. If he saw sky at all, it was only through the holes in the sides of the crate; everything else was dark and close, smelling of blood and waste.
    He winced. Every extra breath of light and air meant fear and pain were coming. Fear and pain were coming soon, and it would hurt and someone would die. The sight of the trees and the forest floor made him cower and cringe. The moonlight was drifting through the door. Fear and pain were coming.
    Instead, it was a voice that came to him—
Shh. I’m here to help you.
—like a soft dark tendril in the devastating light, stringing one word after another so, so gently, stirring inside him memories so deep that they had become like dreams:
Comewith me.
A dark shape reached for him and he cringed, but the words were still there:
Please, come with me.
    He began to crawl, like an animal, out of the crate and toward the words, which fluttered before him like delicate shadows. He stood and blinked and looked around. Fear and pain were not here. They were not here. Only this cold, and this voice. But he remained alert. Because they were coming. They always came. And it would hurt, and someone would die.
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    K nife cuts in a tree trunk, high above the forest floor:
This is a book.

Chapter 7

Born Killer
    O ver the spreading canopy of the Oxscinian forest, the clouds rolled through the sky, growing darker and darker with each wave. The night creatures returned to their hollows and grottoes, and the birds flitted nervously between the branches, twittering. Rain was coming.
    It wasn’t until well after noon that Sefia woke. The rope tying her to the tree dug into her waist, and she spent a few moments unknotting it while she studied the boy, asleep in the same position he’d been in the night before. His nose was crooked—it must have been broken in the past—and there was a slight powdering of nearly invisible freckles on his tawny cheeks. He looked more human now, less like a caged animal.
    She wondered what her vision had shown her the night before. Moments from an ordinary life. His life? Did this magic allow her to see the past? Had her parents been seers too? Was that why the woman in black wanted them?
    No, Sefia corrected herself. The woman in black had said
it
. She’d wanted the book.
    Was she in league with Serakeen?
    Sefia unhooked her pack as quietly as she could, but at the slight noise the boy opened his eyes. They trained on her, golden, or amber, with flecks of copper and mahogany in them. He seemed unafraid.
    She’d never been this close to a boy her own age before. She hadn’t been this close to
anyone
since Nin was taken. Coiling the rope into her pack, she averted her eyes from his bare skin. “You can go home today.”
    The boy didn’t speak, but he crawled slowly out of the hammock, barely rocking it. He looked around him like a baby animal seeing the world for the first time. Even the leaves and the grayed-out light filtering through the branches seemed new to him. He rubbed his eyes.
    As Sefia soon learned, the boy didn’t speak at all. She didn’t know if he
could
speak. He only watched her, mild and curious, as she