The Daybreak Bond by Megan Frazer Blakemore

Author:Megan Frazer Blakemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

17

In the morning, Theo was gone. Where he, Amnah, and Mouse had slept, there were rumpled blankets. His pack was gone and the fire was dead. I stared at the charred remains and felt the blackness come over me.

Ilana was next to me with her back against mine, still sleeping. Her breath came even and sure as a metronome. I should wake her, I thought, but I didn’t.

In the brush behind us, something scampered. Some forest creature that was baffled by this sudden apparition of three children lying on the ground it had considered its own. It made a screeching, scratching noise, but then moved along to find some better, safer place.

The trees spread out over us, but in between the leaves the morning sky was visible. Satellites spun up above us, collecting information, beaming it back down to earth. I couldn’t see them, but perhaps they could see us. Anyway, so many drones had flown overhead, surely one of them had sent some imagery back to Old Harmonie.

This thought made my stomach turn even more. Maybe they knew we were out here, lost, and they weren’t coming for us. I had thought being found was the worst possible outcome, but as I lay there in the cold under a scratchy blanket, I realized there could be something even worse: they weren’t going to save us. They weren’t going to save us because they didn’t want us anymore. Theo could get out, find a town, make a call home, and it wouldn’t do any good. We were stuck out here.

“Ilana!” I whispered. “Ilana, wake up!”

She kind of moaned, then blinked her eyes three times. Her face was still and cold, but then she blinked once more and there was the Ilana I knew so well. “What time is it?” she grumbled. “Are we really still in the woods? I thought maybe that was a dream or a—an experiment, I guess, something they ran through me.”

“Ilana, Theo’s gone! Theo and Amnah and Mouse, they’re all gone!”

Tommy sat up and stretched his arms above his head. When he did, his shirt went up and revealed his pale paunch, like a deepwater fish’s belly. “Gone?” he asked.

“Gone! All of them. You don’t think they went together, do you?” But maybe that made sense. Amnah was done with our escapades. And Theo was done with me. So they’d left together while we slept.

“No worries,” Tommy said. “They’ll be back any minute, I bet. They wouldn’t leave without telling me.”

I wanted to believe him, but I still had a cold pit in my stomach. Ilana stood up and put her arm over my shoulder. “Theo would never leave you here.”

“I told him to go last night,” I said.

“You told him to go before, too, and he stayed,” Ilana replied as she zipped her sweatshirt up closer to her chin. Her breath made small puffs.

“Exactly. I keep telling him I don’t need him, and now he’s finally listened to me.” With Amnah and Mouse. That was the strangest part.

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