Chapter 4: The Well

Nathan did not move.

One minute became ten. Ten became thirty.

Outside, on Hills Street, his father's body lay on the ground. His mother was wailing. His sister was screaming. And he was inside a hole in the ground, biting his hand and listening.

He could hear Varric's voice inside his house.

"Take that chair out and burn it. No, not here. Take it to the truck. I don't want fire marks on my new floor."

"That wall there, break it. I want an open kitchen."

"This is well behind the house, cover it. Fill it with sand. I don't want a well in my mansion."

Nathan's eyes widened in the dark.

They were going to fill the well.

If they filled it, he would be buried alive.

He pressed his back harder against the cold bricks and tried to make himself smaller. His heart was beating so loudly that he thought the soldiers outside could hear it.

A soldier walked into the backyard. Through the small gap between the bricks, Nathan saw his boots stop right beside the well.

The soldier lifted the wooden planks that Nathan had pulled off when he fell in, and he looked down.

Nathan looked up.

For a second, they stared at each other.

The soldier was young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, not much older than Nathan. There was sweat on his face. He saw a boy in the well, blood on his head, tears on his cheeks, one hand shoved in his mouth to stop a scream.

*This is it,* Nathan thought. *He will shout. He will call Varric. They will drag me out and beat me the way they beat my father.*

But the soldier did not shout.

He stared for maybe three seconds. Then he glanced over his shoulder toward the house, where Varric was barking orders, and looked back down into the well.

He put a finger to his lips. *Shhh.*

Then he lowered the planks back over the well, not fully closed, but enough that no one else would look.

And he walked away.

"The well is empty, sir!" he called loudly, so that Varric could hear. "Just old trash inside! We can fill it later!"

Varric's voice came from inside. "Leave it for now! Come help with the furniture!"

The boots walked away.

Nathan collapsed. He let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. His whole body was shaking, and not from the cold. It was from holding in a scream for almost an hour.

He took his hand out of his mouth. There were deep teeth marks, and blood: his own, mixed with his father's, which had seeped through the bricks from the floor above.

Finally, he cried. There was no sound, only hot tears falling into the dust of the well. He cried for his father, who had thought he could bring down the General with his team. He cried for his mother outside. He cried for Lily.

He cried until he had no tears left.

After a while, the sounds changed.

The truck outside started. He heard furniture being thrown into it. He heard his mother's voice being dragged farther and farther away. He heard neighbors whispering, but no one helping.

Then, slowly, the street went quiet again.

The truck left. The boots left. Varric left.

Nathan waited. He waited one more hour after the last sound of boots had faded, just to be sure, because his father had taught him: "If you hide, hide until you are sure the lion has left the forest, not just the tree."

When he was sure, he tried to climb out.

The well was only five feet deep, but his legs were numb and his head was still bleeding. He put his hands on the old bricks and pulled, but the dust made them slippery, and he fell back.

On the second try, he set his foot on a small stone sticking out of the wall and pushed. This time, he got his upper body over the edge.

He rolled out onto the grass of the backyard.

The backyard was empty. The house was empty.

He stood up on shaking legs and walked in through the back door.

What he saw made him fall to his knees again.

The house was destroyed. Not burned, but ruined.

The dining table was broken in half. The chairs were smashed. The pots were crushed. His mother's clothes were scattered everywhere. His father's work belt had been cut to pieces. Lily's school books were torn and stamped with muddy boot prints.

On the wall where the family photo used to hang, there was a boot mark. Someone had kicked the photo down.

And on the floor in the center of the living room was a large dark stain. Blood. His father's blood. Still wet. Still warm.

Nathan touched it. He pressed his hand into it.

He lifted his hand to his face and smelled his father's blood.

Then he stood, walked to the front door, which was gone completely, and looked out onto Hills Street.

His family was no longer there.

The neighbors told him later that a small government van had taken his mother and sister to the general hospital, because Lily was unconscious, and that his father had been taken to the morgue. The soldiers had thrown them onto the street like trash and left.

Only one house on the whole street had been left untouched.

At the end of the street stood Ashley's house. The gate was still painted, the flowers were still in the yard, and the light was on. No soldiers had entered. No furniture had been thrown out.

Why?

Nathan stared at that house for a long time from his broken doorway, his hand still covered in his father's blood.

Then he went back inside and into his room. He took his small school bag and put only one thing in it: his father's work hammer, heavy, made of iron, with a wooden handle. His father had used it to build this house forty years ago.

He looked at the well one last time. That well had saved his life.

"I will come back," he whispered to it. "I will come back, and I will take out the General."

He did not pack clothes. He did not pack food. He simply walked out of Hills Street through the back alleys so that no soldier would see him, his head bleeding, his hand bleeding, his father's hammer in his bag.

He walked for six hours.

He walked from Hills City to Grayport, the slum behind the industrial zone, where people who had been thrown out of their houses went to live. No government officials went there. No soldiers patrolled it. There were only poor people, angry people, people with no homes.

There, in a small rusted zinc room, lived his two cousins, Jace and Milo, who were nineteen and eighteen. Varric had thrown them out of their house two years earlier, for the same reason.

When Jace opened the door and saw Nathan, with blood on his head, blood on his hand, and a bag holding only a hammer, he understood without asking.

"They threw you out too?" Jace said.

"They killed my father," Nathan said.

Milo came out, saw Nathan, and hugged him tightly.

That night, in the small zinc room in Grayport, with rain pounding on the roof, Nathan took out his father's hammer and placed it on the little table.

Jace set his knife beside it.

Milo laid a small map of Hills City next to that.

Three boys who had lost their homes. Three boys who had watched soldiers march into their houses.

Nathan looked at them and spoke his first words since the well.

"My father thought he could bring down the General by himself, with his team. He was wrong. One man cannot bring down a General."

He looked at Jace and Milo.

"But three can. We will train. We will learn. And one day, we will go back to Hills Street, and we will take out the General."

Outside, the rain fell hard over Grayport. Inside the zinc room, three boys sat around a hammer, and revenge was born in the shadow of the well.