It wasn’t Max that woke me up.

I had finally been able to ignore his whining long enough to fall asleep. I was beginning to see why Master Junk only stayed in towns. Max might have survived as an apprentice, but fear was going to kill him before he became a Master. I had my doubts that he was going to be an asset, but the Council wouldn’t look favorably on me if I turned around and asked for another partner. I was just going to have to stick it out with him until the missions were over.

I heard the noise a second time. It was still too dark to see much, but I didn’t need to see to know what the growl belonged to.

“Byler?” Max’s voice was full of the fear he was projecting.

I leaned against the tree, “What?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

The growl rumbled again beneath me.

“THAT!!!” Max exclaimed.

“It’s nothing,” I said, “just the wind.”

There was no reason to freak out any more than he already was. Plus, it was too dark to fight the things. Add in that I also didn’t know how many of them there were, it was just better to stay up in the trees where they couldn’t reach us.

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“It doesn’t sound like the wind…”

“Can you see anything?” I asked.

“No,” Max answered.

“I’m not going down there until it’s lighter.” I said, “We still have a few hours until morning, so try to rest.”

I closed my eyes and began counting the seconds until his next question. I made it to three.

“Byler?”

“What?” I pushed the word through clenched teeth.

“What are we going to do if there are zombies down there?”

“We kill them.” I couldn’t believe he asked the question. Killing zombies was what we were literally trained to do.

“What about the heart stones?”

I opened my mouth but realized that he had a point. If we kept the hearts until we got back to the island, then the flesh would be rancid and nothing but mush. That meant that we would have to harvest the stones on the spot. It had been over a year since I had cleaned a heart stone, and it was something that I didn’t look forward to doing.

“We’ll have to clean them here,” I answered.

Max was silent for a moment. “We could always leave them.”

His offer shocked me. I didn’t want to do the dangerous job, but it was something that had to be done. If the Council found out that we had left heart stones in the wastes… I shuddered at the thought of the punishments.

“It won’t take me long to harvest them,” I said.

“Okay.” Max answered. There was disappointment in his voice. Almost like he had been hoping I’d want to leave the heart stones behind.

I closed my eyes as I wondered just what Master Junk had taught his apprentice. And just how many rules Max was going to try to get me to break in the future.