Free The Reader by Traci Chee Page B

all of them. He was a golden blur leaping past Sefia, landing on the second man’s chest, knocking him aside so the arrow struck his shoulder instead of his heart. The man let out a grunt as the air left his lungs, the boy on top of him like a jaguar on its prey. There was a brief struggle, fists and fingers. Then the boy grabbed the man’s head and twisted. Sefia heard the
crack
and felt its tremors go up her spine.
    The sentry backed away, turning to run, but the boy grabbed the man’s sword. He was standing. The blade was leaving his hands.
    Everything slowed.
    The boy’s arm extended, fingers empty.
    The sentry’s back exposed.
    Sefia blinked.
    Between them, the trajectory of the sword was outlined in rippling eddies of light. She could see them more clearly this time: each current was made up of thousands of tiny specks, all drifting and swirling.
    The boy’s hand—the sword—the sentry’s back.
    She blinked again, and the currents of light disappeared. Time snapped into motion again.
    The blade went straight through the sentry’s spine. Her bow clattered as it fell from her hands. She looked for the boy. He was just standing there, staring at the bodies.
    The men were dead. The boy had killed them. They’d died so fast. She hadn’t known it would be so fast.
    Was that what it would be like to take someone’s life away?
    She clenched her fists at her sides, digging her nails into her palms, wondering if that was what had happened to her father when he died.
    No.
Her hands trembled.
They made sure to kill him slowly. It would have looked nothing like this.
    The memory of his corpse burned behind her eyes.
    Next time, she’d be faster. She’d make the kill herself.
    It started to rain. The drops pelted the canopy, filling the forest with the roar of water. Thunder rumbled through the sky like drums.
    Sefia and the boy were drenched within minutes. Water dripped down their faces and puddled around their feet. The ground turned to mud beneath them.
    Slowly, painfully, she uncurled her fingers. These men weren’t the ones she wanted. She wanted the woman in black. She wanted the man with a voice like ice.
    And if he was involved with them, she wanted Serakeen too.
    There was a light touch at her elbow. Sefia hissed and drew her arm away. The boy backed off, looking at his hand as if it had burned her.
    The
snap
of a branch burst like a gunshot through the jungle. She looked up suddenly. Amid the thunder, shouts sounded in the woods.
    â€œPatar!”
    â€œTambor!”
    The boy grabbed her bow from the ground, took her hand, and pulled her toward the nearest tree, where he climbed to the first branch and hauled her up after. Her hands clutched at thewet bark. Their mad scrambling sounded so loud. The scratching and scraping. Blood came up on her palms.
    â€œWhere’d you get to? Boss wants us to head back!”
    Sefia and the boy didn’t have time to climb any higher. There were a few branches blocking them from sight, but Sefia had to hoist her legs up so that they wouldn’t dangle beneath the screen of leaves. They were so exposed. She barely dared to breathe.
    â€œPatar! Tambor!”
    Two more of Hatchet’s men appeared in the clearing below. The rifleman and the man with the eye patch. One-Eye knelt beside the first body he came to, felt his broken neck. The rifleman dropped to his knees with the gun at his shoulder.
    â€œDead?” he asked.
    â€œDead.”
    â€œThe boy?”
    â€œProbably. But he had a partner.” One-Eye pulled Sefia’s arrow from the body, its shaft glistening red. He squinted, blinking water out of his good eye. “Any sign of them?”
    The rifleman swept the edge of the clearing. To Sefia, it was obvious where they had sat, where the broken stems and twigs and churned-up places in the mud revealed their passage, but the man was looking out into the trees, not at the ground.
    Lightning