When Stars Burn Out (Europa Book 1) by Anna Vera

Author:Anna Vera [Vera, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

The next week passes in a fog.

We learn, later, that Tex was one of the many who died in the breach, even after Cyb and I saved his life. Lucia was at the opposite perimeter—the western—and was killed after a leak of the Muted scaled the fence.

The final body count was fifty people, even. We piled their corpses together on a wooden platform built three miles away from the quarantine’s compound and burned their remains.

I’ll never forget it—the column of black smoke rising into the pale sky, the way it made my gut churn. I’ll never forget the pungent odor of burning flesh or the way ash got whisked up in the breeze, settling in my hair, a dry wisp of somebody else.

I had stood by myself, absorbing that moment, every shred of its hideousness, when Jac arrived. With a lit cigarette bouncing between his chapped lips, he told me about the Muted. There are different kinds, different “classes.”

“Not a lot of people know about the Haunt,” he’d said with his jaw set grimly, a band of sweat collecting on his lip, despite the cold weather. “Don’t tell anyone.”

I’d raised my brows, unfamiliar with the term. “I won’t.”

“If the infected live long enough, they eventually transform into a different class of Mute—a Haunt, we call them, because they no longer need physical sustenance to live.” He’d thrown his cigarette into the snow, bitterly. “They suck the souls right out of the living. I’ve seen it myself, seen the way they reap a life and get stronger from it.”

“How?” I’d asked disbelievingly.

“Nobody knows.” Jac, being who he is, laughed fully and genuinely at the absurdity of it all, tilting his neck back and forth, giving it a crude popping. “But the others infected—the smaller, second-class ones—are fucking obsessed with them.”

“Obsessed?” I’d asked as he started walking off, no longer interested in the conversation.

Jac’s eyes had glinted malevolently. “They will die trying to devour a Haunt—that’s why we caught one and used it to lead all the others away.”

At that point in time, Silas arrived, jabbing an elbow into my side as he passed. “Didn’t you figure that out already?”

To this day, a week later, Mabel hasn’t returned and nobody has really been the same—especially Rion, who disappears where nobody can find him, not even Jac or Silas.

And when he “supervises” me at night, we barely talk.

So far, it appears they don’t know anything about who we really are or where we’ve come from—and I wonder if that’s the only reason we’re still alive.

Will it be this easy to fool Mabel?

This afternoon, I help Merope clean guns—an order issued by Silas, who’s impressively managed to keep his head straight since the breach last week.

We sit outside of the barn, running dirty rags over the guns set aside for us, watching grievers wandering the compound with bouquets of sage smoking in their hands. They mutter prayers and sing sad songs, a terrifying lethargy wrought into their bleak and hollowed eyes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Nova.

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