The Memory Trials

Chapter 59

The twins' screaming tears through the still night of the glade, Newt and I both woke up with irritated groans.

"I'll get it" I murmur after realising that Newt tended to them last night, he made a half-hearted offer to help but flopped back to bed with a measly retort.

With one eye still refusing to wake from a dream in which I finally got a full nights sleep, I breast-fed and sang the babies back to their sleep of random patterns. I walked back across the smooth wooden hallway back to our room, the light of the full moon lit put the glade like a huge torch through the wooden framed, mesh covered hole in the wall that served as a window and, seeing as I was fully awake by now, I decided I'd take a look. I saw the dew covered glade reflect the moonlight like a mirror. I noticed movement coming from the map room like a hawk zeroing in on a faraway mouse. I heard the metal hinges on the heavy door groan in protest even from where I was standing, an undistinguishable person in the baggy, dirty clothes that seem to be glader uniform peek our of the door, look right and left and continue tip-toeing out across the glade with the overdone cautiousness of an old children's cartoon. If it was the bathroom or the deadheads (which sometimes substitute as a bathroom) that he was heading out of, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but he is coming from the map room, carrying what I now see as a large pile of maps, heading towards the gathering hall, he couldn't be more suspicious if he tried. The wind stole a single map from the top of the pile and danced with it teasingly to the ground. The unknown person, unable to see above or around the huge pile of maps, tried to bend down and grab and while doing so dropped all of the maps on the dewy grass.

I rolled my eyes and stormed after him. The impressively continuous string of curses he was letting out whilst picking up the wet maps reached my ears from the doors of the homestead.

'Only a builder can swear like that' I think to myself while the wet grass grips my bare toes with icy fingers. I stomp across the cold ground like an awakened dragon and grab the boys' face in my hand, holding it up to the moonlight to reveal a frightened Isaac, looking at me like a rat in a trap.

"What, the shuck, are you doing?"

"What? I just kind of couldn't get sleep and I-" His voice trails off while I look towards the direction he was heading. A small flower of fire blooms from within the gathering hall, barely a twinkle in the distance but enough to tell me that Isaac is not the only restless glader tonight.

"You're about as good at lying as you are at building" I cut off his lazy excuses and drag him by the ear across the slippery grass, a handful of maps clenched in my fist. I was halfway there when Kai ran out and met me, without stopping my monster like stomps I told him to wake anyone who he thought might help, except for Newt, who I wanted to stay with the babies, he ran away like a boy scout finally getting a job to do.

"What the shuck is this!" I bang open the door of the gathering hall, fully expecting a group of dim witted builders having a petty conspiracy against the new leadership in the middle of the night like a pile of old granny's at a book club, what I saw made me almost fall on my backside, I grabbed the door frame for support.

Black shadows danced with the maleficence of a chant, boys sat around a small fire in the middle of the room in a swirling, hypnotising circle, the shadows painted darkness above their cheeks and nose the way children hold torches under their chins as they tell scary stories.

"What's going on?" I ask with confidence as translucent as glass when Georgia rounds the corner followed by Kai, shoving on dirty glasses and puffing. The boys look back and forth between each other.

"Well, this makes things a lot easier" A boy who's face is masked in shadow smirks as Isaac, who had slipped out of my grip in my shock, closes the door shut behind us with the finally of a full stop.