“Here, try this.”

I held out my hand for her to drop it into my palm. She reached for my lips. My cheeks went red. I grabbed the berry from her hands and stuffed it in my mouth, embarrassed. Someone shoved me from behind.

“Keep moving, jackass.” Rash’s irritated voice pelted me with disapproval.

I stumbled forward, Elise giggling as she strolled forward too casually.

We walked a few more meters and broke free of the bushes. The group squatted down in the high grass, leaning against fencing wire, waiting for stragglers. Olga waddled through the opening last, looking annoyed, her face covered in tiny scratches. We were huddling at the fence of a large field. A field that looked organized. Wire dissected it into neat squares. A frozen crop jutted out of the ground, seemingly snap frozen mid-grow. My eyes struggled to take in all the unexplainable images, particularly what appeared to be a road. A road that led directly to a gate. A gate in the side of the wall of Palma.

I gasped despite myself, crouching closer to the ground.

“Yep. See what I mean.” Desh elbowed me in the side. “Different.”

“We knew it would be different, but not quite like this!” Pelo announced, his eyes shining the way they used to, before Rosa.

“I don’t get it. Look at the guards.” I pointed to the soldiers stationed on the outside, the outside of the concrete walls, in surprise. Their large guns were slung over their shoulders. Bigger guns than I’d seen before.

We observed silently, passing water between us and waiting. The sun shifted from overhead, to bobbing above the tops of trees.

Pelo shifted on his long legs and whispered, “What are we waiting for?”

Gus, who was eyeing the gate like it was a deer he was stalking, lifted his finger to silence Pelo and then pointed directly at the gate as it opened and about ten citizens, dressed in colorful clothing, were ushered outside.

“That!” he said sharply.

We all peered over the tips of the grass in fascination. The citizens had baskets in their hands or on their heads. One of the guards shoved a woman in the back with his gun, and she stumbled forward. We’d all seen this before. A soldier hurting a citizen. I closed my eyes, awaiting the sound of gunfire. I waited a few seconds and when I heard nothing, I dared to open them.

“You watching this?” Desh whispered, elbowing me in the ribs. Our clutter of people was too close, heat and the smells of unwashed hiker wafted up my nose with the sourness of the berries.

I nodded and kept my eyes on the soldiers.

A tall, dark man with a bright orange and brown patterned shirt turned to the guard and yelled at him, pumping his fist. He received a gun butt to the head for it but the man got up, spat at the guard, and helped the woman to her feet. The guard hovered over the pair, but he didn’t shoot. I expected him to shoot.

Why didn’t he shoot?

The other citizens had paused and were watching the altercation, hands on hips, standing tall. Not cowering or running for cover. I couldn’t see their faces but I got the feeling their eyes were proud, unafraid, and it baffled me.

“Holy shit, that dude’s got some balls!” Rash muttered, shaking his head from side to side.

Gus actually laughed, well sort of. He held his stomach and coughed with a short smile on his weary face.

We watched the group dig in the frozen ground with sharp, metal implements, retrieving roots and putting them in the basket. When they finished, they got up and were escorted back inside. Just as the last man passed through the gate, I watched as a tall, lean woman, her bones jutting from her skin, offered the basket to the soldier. He rifled through it, took out a handful of roots, and then he pulled cash from his pocket and offered it her. She shook her angular head, and the man fished out some extra coins, dropping them in her basket. She bowed her head and walked inside.

My mouth hung agape, the cold freezing my lips open. What we’d just witnessed, apart from being contradictory, was extraordinary. This place was different in a way I could never have imagined. These people had some independence.

Desh tapped my chin, and I closed my mouth.

“You all right?” he asked, his tone more joking than I’d heard in a while.

“Um, yeah, just surprised,” I answered, my eyes scanning the top of the walls of the Palma compound, coils of razor wire crowning the wall. We didn’t need that kind of barrier in Pau. No one ever tried to get over the wall. The concrete also looked damaged and patched in places. I ran my hand over my jaw; the stubble was now long enough to be more of a sketchy beard now. I stared down at my other hand, pressed into the mud, and thought, Rosa would have loved to see this. And then I pushed the thought behind other things.

We retreated from Palma, creeping backwards slowly until we were at the blackberries, and then we moved quickly into the forest to a safe place. The big question pulsing through the whole group was—did this change our plans?

Pelo grabbed my arm excitedly.

“Did you see that? It’s change. Things are changing…”

I turned to face him, avoiding his eyes, my mouth not wanting to even utter her name. “From what I’d heard, Palma was always a bit different to the others.”

Gus joined us. “What have you heard?”

Desh stared down, his memories pushing up from the dead-looking ground.

“Clara, this was Clara’s home,” he muttered.

I didn’t want him to say it, Clara led to Rosa, and thoughts of her led me into darkness. A picture of her, slumped against a tree after Clara died, entered my mind, her thin arms wrapped around her tiny body, wearing nothing but her underwear as I washed her clothes of Clara’s blood and wished I could wash her pain away with it. She didn’t shake with cold, she didn’t cry—her eyes were two wells of nothingness, empty of feeling, like Rosa had left her own body.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible but my feelings for her deepened in that moment. The way she loved her friend Clara so fiercely and the fact that she took it that hard when she died, made me love her so much.

I took a step back from the conversation and watched, unable to contribute anything useful as Desh explained who Clara was and what we knew of Palma. The Spider filled in some of the blanks, but he also said the gate was new.

“You ok, friend?” Elise asked, her eyes sincere, her hands hovering over my shoulder but not touching me.

I swiped the air like I could clear the vision like smoke. “Bad memories.” And good memories and everything I’ve lost rolled into one.

“Things have changed a lot since the retrieval mission,” Matt said. It became apparent our intel was pretty outdated after only twelve months.

The Spider from Palma smiled wide. “I didn’t know it would change this much. But I’m happy to see it!”

We listened. We voted. We decided it changed nothing. We would do the same as we had done in the other towns.

That night.

JOSEPH

The clouds moved in. Thin ones that weren’t about rain. They just kept the small amount of warmth from the day in.

The atmosphere at the camp was more relaxed than normal. Maybe we were getting used to it or maybe it was because we had more hope with this particular mission. Either way, we sat on rocks or in the dirt, surrounded by brittle trees with dresses of thorny bushes, making our plans. Some of the men pulled out their precious flasks and offered them around as we jumped from foot to foot, trying to stay warm. There could be no fire tonight as we were so close to the compound. Small battery lanterns or torches sat by people’s feet.