Read Online Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) by Harry Manners - Free Book Online Page B

needed to say any more, not really. Because she had already known who she had to find: the other faces from her dreams. Two men, one old and one young: dark haired and blond.
    When she had asked where to go, she had received a final reply from the Panda Man. “ It’ll come to you. Find them, Billy. Find them .”
    Then he had been gone.
    She had stood there in the copse for a long time after that, confused, wondering whether her mind really had been playing tricks. Daddy would have said so, but he was sick. Somebody had burned the travellers’ camp to the ground, and there was danger in the air—she had felt it.
    Going away in the wilds of New Land was against everything Daddy had told her. With no food or water, what hope had she of finding anything or anyone before she became too weak to go on? But the Panda Man had said Daddy would die if she didn’t do it. And Daddy was barely strong enough to feed himself; there was no way she could burden him with what she had seen.
    Grandpa would have known what to do. But he was gone now.
    Grandpa. It burned in her chest to think of him. At night she could still hear him humming the Old World rhymes. He had given himself up so she and Daddy could escape. Losing him so soon after Ma, it was too much for her little heart to take. She had died for her as well, starved herself so that Billy could eat a real meal once a day, wilting in secret in front of Daddy and Grandpa. She had made Billy promise not to tell.
    And now Daddy was sick, so sick. He wouldn’t let her go for help or look for a doctor; not while the monsters were out there. “They’ll never get my angel,” he had been saying in his sweaty half-sleep, beet-red with fever and coughing up bloody phlegm.
    She couldn’t lose him too. She wouldn’t let it happen.
    And so she had set off without returning to the cabin, afraid she wouldn’t be able to leave Daddy if she laid eyes on him. Setting out from the copse without a clue which direction to take, she had let her feet guide her. They had taken her first into the travellers’ camp, and she had rooted in the smoking ruins for a few scant treasures that had survived the conflagration. Amongst the detritus she had found mostly ash, but her luckiest discovery had been a small, yet razor-sharp paring knife. It had been well cared for, without a hint of rust despite the Old World markings on the tang, and she had tested it by throwing it against a tree trunk. It had rolled end over end and snicked into the bark clean up to the hilt.
    Grandpa had taught her that. They had practised together on the days Daddy had gone to market to barter. When there had been food, before the big hunger, he had impaled rabbits against their barn door. She had never been quite that good, but she had been learning on wooden targets. Daddy would never have let her carry a weapon. But he wasn’t with her now.
    Armed with her new knife, a water skin, and a small pouch of dried berries and venison jerky, she had left it all behind. Her heart had rattled around in her chest every step of the way, and she had wept, but she had to be strong, for Daddy. She had let the tears fall to the grass, hadn’t once wiped them away, and had kept her course, trusting her legs to carry her away from the cabin and the smoking ruins. She hadn’t looked back.
    She had come to the forest after only a few hours of trekking across fields and meadows. They had crossed through one just like it when they had first landed on the beach of New Land, but Grandpa had been with them then. He had known how to read the sky, the stars, and their magic compass talisman. Billy had never wandered out of sight of a grownup before she had come to the cabin. And in all the long weeks she had been foraging for food while Daddy lay bedridden, she had never strayed more than a mile.
    Yet the forest had stretched from one horizon to the other, a vast wall of greenery that towered over her, creaking and whispering in all its impenetrable