Page 44 of Triplets for the Barbarians

“We’ll be prepared,” I say. “We’ve made it this far.”

So close to a conclusion, yet that horizon still feels so far away. It was never meant to be easy. Our fathers knew it, and we understood it from the moment we took over the Fire Tribe. We inherited this war, but we’ll be the ones to end it, one way or another.

The hours pass in silence as Jewel dozes off in the back seat. Yossul takes my place behind the wheel, and I manage to get some shuteye, as well. But his trembling voice awakens me with a terrible feeling quickly settling in my stomach.

“Wake up,” he says. “WAKE UP!”

I snap open my eyes and immediately understand. We’ve reached our home base, except… we don’t have a home base anymore. It was leveled and then some. The entire wall of the riverside plateau was bombed to smithereens, blown away, and carved out—our tunnels, our rooms, our shelters. It’s as if the wall itself regurgitated and spilled out into the stream.

“No,” I whisper as Yossul pulls over on the other side of the river.

Jewel is as pale as a sheet of paper, unable to speak. The sight before us is beyond horrifying. Everything burned and molten, charred and fractured. Steel rods and blackened stones jut out like unnaturally bent limbs. Fires still burn here and there. Bodies. So many bodies. Our brothers. A handful of our Kreek sisters, too.

“NO!” I cry out and fall to my knees as soon as my feet touch the ground.

The grief hits me like a wall of bricks, my heart breaking over and over as I struggle to take it all in. The Sky Tribe must’ve found our base while we were away. The attack must’ve been sudden and brief. Those present didn’t stand a chance. So much death, so much pain.

Our hidden hangar is destroyed, too. Whatever bombs they threw at it, they were powerful enough to crack open the dirt and melt the sliding roof right down. The shuttles and the aircraft were reduced to carbonized bits and pieces scattered across the ground.

“This can’t be,” Jewel mumbles.

We make our day down to the water, then cross and try to understand what is left. It smells of smoke and burnt flesh. Of violence and destruction. Of savagery and failure. The Sky Tribe came in with a mission. They executed it flawlessly, and our people didn’t even have the sliver of a single opportunity to get out and warn the others.

“They blew up the telegraph station, too,” Yossul says once we reach the topside of the riverbank, our shelter unraveled at our feet. “I don’t see any survivors.”

“How many do you think were here when they hit it?” I manage.

Tears prick my eyes, and it’s hard for me to focus. Grief curdles the blood in my veins, tightening a knot around my heart, squeezing until I struggle to breathe. Jewel holds my hand, but I can barely feel her touch at this point.

“I’m afraid to try counting,” Yossul admits. But I can’t see or smell any sign of life anywhere around us. If anyone survived, they’re not here anymore. And if we’re to warn Sapphire City and Opal City, we’ll have to head northeast to the second telegraph station—the desert one.”

“When did this happen?” Jewel asks.

Her gaze wanders everywhere. And when it stops, tears flood her eyes. All she can do is keep looking around, out of focus, out of sync, in a desperate bid to keep herself from falling apart. She’s crumbling on the inside, and I know the guilt is eating away at her.

“We couldn’t have done anything about it,” I say and wrap my arms around her. The minute she relaxes in my embrace, I sense her whole body caving in and her very soul breaking as she starts sobbing like a little girl. “I know, baby, I know. I’m sorry.”

“We weren’t here,” she wails, holding on to me for dear life.

Yossul sighs and gently caresses the back of her head. “They would’ve killed us, too. They brought in the big guns. They carefully planned and executed this mission, Jewel. It’s better that we weren’t here. Clearly, they attacked when no one could see them coming, either by a diversion or by pure luck, I don’t know. I don’t even know how they found out where we were.”

“Oh, I think they kept a Yellow Gang member alive,” she hisses and pushes herself away, cursing under her breath as she starts kicking rocks with the steel tips of her boots. “They must’ve tortured him long and hard enough to get this information out of him. They destroyed your clan!”

“They didn’t,” Yossul replies firmly. “We’re still here, Jewel. They didn’t kill all of us. And as long as there’s a Kreek drawing breath, we can fight them.”

“We should’ve seen this coming,” I mutter. “I don’t think it should have shocked us the way it did.”

“Nobody wants to see something like this coming,” my brother snaps. “Dammit, Fadai, we’re at war. We swore we’d never get too emotionally invested in any of our relationships. Not with our friends, not even with one another, especially knowing we could die at any given moment!”

But that is precisely what has happened with the three of us, isn’t it? We’re beyond emotionally invested. We’re so deep in love with Jewel, and she is so deep in love with us that we can no longer fathom an existence without one another.

Even as we stand here, the rubble of our whole world scattered at our feet, I find peace knowing that we’re still breathing. That we can go on from here. Our whole clan is likely dead, and it’s something we’ll never truly recover from. But we’re alive.

I can’t look away. Everywhere my gaze lands, I see suffering. Ghosts to rise, someday. Echoes of a bloody past. The promise of an even bloodier future. The more I look, the clearer everything becomes. All the chaos and all the hacking and slashing, the whistling of laser weapons, the screams and the agony… we thought we’d be safe down here, if only for a while. We were safe.

Until we weren’t.

“The hurt was inevitable,” Jewel declares with a tremble in her lower lip.

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