Alex glanced at the black-haired, blue-eyed girl next to him. The protective barbed-wire ceiling that crisscrossed and covered the entire land of Quill made a shadow box on her face, capturing a tear. She shook silently. She was not thirteen, Alex decided. In a brave moment, with nothing to lose, he whispered, “I’m Alex. It’ll go quickly.” He wasn’t sure why he said that. It was the only comforting thing he could think of.
She blinked and turned her face up at him, making the shadow boxes race across her face like they did across everything, everywhere. “Lani,” she whispered back, and shook her head. “And no. It won’t.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. He stood at attention as a governor took a key from a string around her neck and unlocked the gate. “Summon the Eliminators,” the woman said.
Another governor obliged by pounding on the gate. When the enormous gate creaked open, the governors stepped away and began boarding the bus again.
Lani watched them go, tears streaming down her face. “Good-bye, Father,” she said as a slight, gray-haired man boarded. The senior governor paused in the doorway for a split second and then, perhaps heavily, continued up the steps without looking back. He took a seat on the opposite side of the bus. Lani turned away and roughly whisked the tears from her cheeks. The bus drove off as the giant black iron door to the Death Farm widened enough for the chained children to enter single file.
Inside were four enormous Eliminators robed in black. Their heads were covered in cloth, but their beady red eyes pierced into the already frightened souls of the children. Lani now appeared to be the only calm one. She held her head high as the long chain of children walked inside.
“What are they?” Meghan gasped, and reached awkwardly for Alex’s hand.
Alex grasped Meghan’s hand and gave it a frightened squeeze. “I don’t know,” he whispered. He felt like his chest was going to collapse. Breathing in and out slowly, Alex closed his eyes for a moment and shivered as the gate groaned and closed with a loud clang, the lock clicking automatically on the other side, separating them from Quill forever. The Eliminators took the ends of the chains and trudged slowly, the children following.
They were in a small, cement yard. A gray stone building stood before them, and a steaming black lake boiled beyond it. Alex shuddered. That’s where they’ll do it to us. The oily stench seemed to grow stronger as they shuffled across broken cement, past bundles of burned-looking weeds, toward the building. It was more desolate than the most wasted section of Quill. Even the sky was clouded and gray here, although there was no barbed wire—just open sky. None of them had ever seen an uninterrupted sky before.
Everything was eerily silent but for the clanking of the chains and the scuffle of shoes as the Unwanteds moved forward. The seconds felt like hours. When the Eliminators stopped walking and turned their eyes to the sky, Alex followed their gaze.
The other children looked up too. From the sky over the boiling black lake, a large bird—or something—slowly approached. The Eliminators seemed to be waiting for it, and they stood, huge, hulking, silent, as a four-legged winged creature landed with an ominous thud directly in front of them.
Elimination
The creature was an extraordinarily beautiful yet frightening tortoise with long wings that were covered with glistening white feathers, tipped in black. The mosaic-shelled beast stood on all four legs, stretching out its neck to view its audience, and, even on all fours, was more than half as tall as the smallest child, Lani. The spectacular creature bobbed its head to the Eliminators, and then it looked each Unwanted in the eye. In turn, each dropped his gaze and instinctively drew back as far as his chains would allow.
After a few moments the tortoise appeared satisfied. When it spoke—to the utter shock of the children—it was in a deep, agonizingly slow voice.
“Wel … come,” the tortoise said, low and grim, and the word caused a chill to run up Alex’s spine. “We’ve been”—it paused for a breath—“ex … pect … ing you.”
Samheed, the glaring boy from the bus who had been silent all this time, muttered an oath under his breath and raised his fists, ready to fight, but Alex and the others were fearfully mesmerized by the odd creature that stood before them.
What was this thing? Was it going to attack? What did it have to do with this decrepit farm that contained nothing but the smell of death? They watched the tortoise, almost afraid to look at its grim face, but not quite able to look away, either.
The tortoise blinked a long, slow blink. Craning its long neck to look behind it, it lifted its round front leg and held it next to its mouth, as if to cup its words. “Mar … cus,” it called out in its slow, grim voice. “It’s time.”
What in the name of Quill is it doing? Alex wondered. A moment later a tall, thin figure emerged from the gray building and lifted his hand.
All at once, Alex felt dizzy, as the space around him seemed to swirl, the oily lake whirling with the gray building and the wall behind them until everything was a spinning charcoal haze. He blinked rapidly and wondered if he and all the children had already been eliminated—if it was over. Nothing on his body hurt, yet the charcoal blur of everything around him now faded, softened, cooled to white, and then grew steadily brighter, nearly blinding him. This was nothing at all like what Alex expected to feel when immersed in the Great Lake of Boiling Oil.
Meghan, who could not help herself, cried out, “What’s happening?”