Ascended

I could feel her loss.

We hadn’t been gone from her hometown long enough for it to be out of sight, and she had looked back at it more times that I could remember.

“You know you can’t stay there.” A hometown was something I never had. Master Bran had traveled all over the province, helping the walled towns combat their zombie problems. There were so few Masters that they couldn’t afford to even keep one in a town, instead, they roamed from city to city.

I could have considered the Island a hometown. It was the place that we always went back to, but it wasn’t a place of comfort or security. It was the place that was simply a stopover before we went out on the next mission.

“”I know.” Val grumbled as she scratched at her marks. The dull purple lines crisscrossed all over her body, marking her as one of the Bokor. Someone could fake our leather that we wore and they might even be able to steal one of our swords with the polished purple heartstones in the hilt. But they couldn’t fake those lines. Contact with the raw purple magic was enough to infect a regular person and there wasn’t anyone who wanted to take the chance to become a zombie.

“Are these supposed to itch?” The red haired woman looked at me.

“Master Bran never complained about them.” I saw that wasn’t the answer she was looking for, “But he didn’t talk much.” I shrugged as I started walking again.

“Where are we going?” Val caught up to me

I took out a map of the peninsula and pointed at the town we’d just left. “We were here.” I traced my finger over the handful of towns, “I’m supposed to follow this route to get back to the island to show…” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I was supposed to be on this mission with Max, one of the other Potentials to show that we were ready for our Marks. Except he had been killed in the last town and I couldn’t receive the Marks.

The Bokor fought the Zombies, but there was a type of sentient Zombie. They acted like humans, except they had magic. The other difference was that they had purple eyes instead of purple marks, like the Bokor did.

While it may have seemed like an amazing upgrade, all the Touched that I’d ever been around had been crazy. They lived outside of society and almost every zombie attack that required the Hunter’s attention had a Touched directing the Zombies.

Which meant that if I went back to the Island, I’d be killed. If not for being a Touched, then for showing Val how to become a Bokor. I had less than a month to find a way to show that I was in control and could work with the Bokor instead of the zombies.

I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble for converting Val. Women rarely survived the transformation, instead becoming Touched to the point that there weren’t any female apprentices at the Island. So not only was she a rarity, but Val had been a wrangler as a human. It had been her job to go outside the safety of the walled cities, capture zombies that were roaming, and bring them back to the pen by the city wall, where they’d stay until a Bokor came through and harvested them.

I thought about the Heartstones in the leather pouch on my hip. Each Zombie had a crystal that grew on their heart. The older the zombie, the larger the crystal. It was the job of the apprentices to harvest those crystals so that the Bokor could use them to power the magical devices back on the Island.

I realized that Val was already heading in the direction I’d mapped out. It irritated me a little that she was just going off on her own. This was supposed to be my mission to lead, but she was older and used to being in charge. There was no reason to fight while we were going the same way, but I wondered what would happen as soon as we had a difference of opinion.