Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Read Free

suppressed another scowl.
    “You sleep in like we was lords,” Bud said, tossing aside the charred remains of a hair comb, crouched on his haunches in the burned-out living space, waiting for Pepper to probe the rest of the house. He was starting to get fur on his face like older boys, too tall to fit through the tight crawlspaces where the good treasure tended to hide. He looked good, and he knew it—but she wasn’t going to tell him that. He was getting so lazy that his chiselled jaw was losing some of its charm.
    He would expect a fair share of the loot, of course, even if Evian and Pepper did all the scrambling around the hot cinders themselves.
    Evian stepped carefully over the still-smoking outer wall, no more than a strip of foundation sticking a few inches out of the ground. Everything was still warm, a dry kind of heat that came only from intense fire, filling the air with a clinging acidity that etched the back of her throat. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”
    Bud grunted, his gaze locked fast on a small pile of debris he’d collected, filtering through it. A shadow crossed his expression.
    “What is it?” She waved a hand in front of her nose, kicking idly at a blackened table leg. “Smells pretty good. Like bacon.”
    “Evian.”
    “I could go for some bacon right now. We haven’t had meat in so long.”
    It had been a rough year. To even speak of bacon would have been heresy a short while ago when the meekest scraps of food had all but vanished. People had died, a lot of people. Even the lords of the North had starved.
    A year ago, the Pepsi Squad had been over two dozen strong, Robin Hoods of the wilds, robbing from the lords and giving to those in need—and seeing as they were all orphans, who could have been more in need than themselves? Times had never been easy, and when food ran short they were the first to struggle, but they had had each other.
    Then the food ran out completely.
    Sunny D, Horlicks, Sprite, even Bovril. All gone now… It had been just the three of them since winter’s end.
    “Seriously, where is it? You found breakfast, and you’re hiding it from me,” Evian said.
    The shadow on Bud’s face deepened. “Evian…”
    She whirled, stomach gurgling. “Stop holding out. I saw the barn on my way in. They had pigs. So, bacon. Gimme!”
    A half-cindered book tumbled from Bud’s hand. “Evian, bloody hell, would you think for a moment!” he yelled.
    Evian flinched. Bud never yelled. “What’s up with you?”
    He just stared, his eyes big and round and—yes—tearful. Beaten into action, Evian’s mind turned anew to the burned-out house around her.
    Just like all the others. They littered the landscape like tiny beacons, any free-standing inhabited structure for all the miles in the Pepsi Squad’s territory—and probably much farther beyond. A few days ago people had just showed up, swept through this place on their way north, and set fire to everything in their path. Thin, broken, mean-looking people, marching under the flag of a white bird.
    The highwaymen and lords of the North had squabbled over this land since long before any of them were born. Evian would be fifteen soon—she wasn’t quite sure when, but soon—and she had never seen anything that could match them. This land belonged to them.
    No longer. They had been extinguished, exterminated like a pack of wild dogs, in a single day of bloodshed.
    Evian didn’t understand it. Didn’t care to. They’d got more loot out of it over the past few days than the previous six months combined.
    She realised now, staring around, that she had forgotten. So busy had she been hauling away all she could, thinking only of what they could trade for, of who they could become if they stockpiled enough—the new lords of the North! People would come scrabbling to them instead of the other way around. She had forgotten what these burned-out husks really were. Homes. People’s homes.
    These things had been