Hadley was officially a part of Brielle's Wildling Tribe, which meant being assigned jobs around the Caves. Jamila was a part of Kade's Tribe. Different tribes were usually assigned different tasks, so they didn't get to see each other much during the day, meeting only in the evenings when they headed back to Jamila's room, which was their new home. But by then, they'd be so exhausted from their designated duties with that they'd usually just take a quick shower each and fall asleep. Although, after everything she'd been through to get here, Hadley couldn't complain about falling asleep with Jamila only an arm's length away every night on a thick, warm, comfortable, queen-sized bed.

'Fishers change the world, Hadley.'

Gram Lee's explanation of who the Fishers were, and the expectations automatically placed upon them had shifted Hadley's world view. At first, she'd wanted to join with the Wildlings and eventually generate enough interest in The Cause, thus leading the revolution that would join all humans in Compounds, the Wildlings and the Progenies to take their rightful place as heirs of this world, like they had once been. But this was no longer Hadley's goal, especially after learning more about the humans who lived before the Human Error from the Wildling perspective.

Those humans weren't the flawless model of great power, creativity, and compassion Mrs. Smith had painted them as during her lessons about the past. Instead, they were reckless and drunk with power, greedy and obsessed with consuming as much as they could as fast as they could, killing the planet they lived in, not just for themselves but for every generation that would come after them. There were cracks of doubt in her belief in The Cause.

Hadley was suddenly unsure if humans deserved to rule the world.

She decided to shelve her ambitions to embody The Cause and chose to keep a low profile instead. She kept her head down and worked hard to fit into the Wildling society, avoiding anything that could be construed as her "changing the world". When it was all said and done, the Wildling way of life was as good as it got, and Hadley was happy for her daughter to grow into the society as it was. She would live the normal, unbeleaguered, nonchalant life of a basic tribe's member, determined to ensure that the blanket belief about the Fisher legacy would never burden or plague her daughter as it did her.

'...You will always be seen as a Fisher, and that will either instil fear or hope in those you meet, there's no in-between.'

Her little girl would be free to live as she pleased, learning the Wildling Way, discovering and cataloguing mushrooms of all kinds, enjoying the universe hidden between the trees and shrubs of the rainforest, relishing the night-sky with Hadley by her side as they sipped on mead and herbal tea.

Hadley's gift to her daughter was everything Hadley had missed out on before.

The perfect life.

No matter what it took, Hadley would make sure of that!

It was now two weeks after arriving at The Caves and Brielle's tribe was tasked with tanning hides to leather. These hides ranged from small prey such as wild hare and possums to larger prey, this time including the hides of two vampire dogs brought in by a Wildling Tribe who'd arrived the day before. The tribe had lost a few members in the vampire dog attack, saying that the monsters had changed. That they'd become more dangerous. Hadley wasn't sure how they'd changed, but she didn't really care to find out. She wasn't going to leave the Caves for a long time. At the very least, not until her little girl was sitting up on her own.

The tribe members were spread across the tanning room, broken up into pairs to do different tasks.

"So..." Brielle drawled in a sing song voice, breaking the silence between her and Hadley. They usually paired up for duties that needed pairs. "How's it going with your lady, Jamila?

"Jamila and I are... totally fine." Hadley replied to Brielle's badgering with a shrug.

Brielle paused from loading the vampire dog hide Hadley had handed her onto the fat scraper. Hadley looked up at her questioningly.

"Did you just say, 'Totally fine'?" Brielle asked, her eyes narrowed.

"Yeah, so?"

"No!" Brielle countered. "That's not how you describe a hot and heavy affair filled with lust and undying love written in the stars to persist forever through the darkest and brightest hours! 'Totally fine'? That's... lukewarm at best. Definitely not hot!"

"Brielle..." Hadley sighed, returning her focus to the fat scraping machine. Her back was starting to ache from all the standing and walking around with hides, but she wasn't going to complain.

Hadley liked Brielle, but when the woman got like this, it was a sign that she was about to become a tad bit dramatic, diving into a tirade that would end with her offering up some crazy idea about how to romance Jamila or whatever.

Thankfully, they were interrupted.

"I heard you were here, Hadley," a voice said from behind them.

Hadley recognised the deep, rich voice like she'd only heard it yesterday.

"Kade!" Brielle said with a smile. "This is unexpected!"

Hadley turned to face the man standing with his hands in his pockets.

"Hello Brielle," he said, a wide grin splitting his face. Hadley couldn't ignore Brielle's futile attempts to try and tame her wild afro, which she'd left open today because, as she'd explained to Hadley when they'd met for their shift, her hair had decided to stage a coup and make demands for unreasonable amounts of attention that morning and she didn't negotiate with terrorists.

Brielle and Kade held some cordial small talk, but on the sidelines, Hadley turned solemn, the levity from earlier dissipating into the melancholy that now enveloped her. She'd been dreading meeting this man for weeks now, even though she knew it was an inevitability. The Caves were massive, that was true, but she'd always known that it was not big enough to keep them out of each other's way forever. What's more, it looked like the man, Kade, had purposefully been seeking her out. Hadley wiped the hide's greasy muck off her hands and finally addressed the man, only just noticing that she'd rudely interrupted them.

"Kade, I'm sorry about your men. I didn't know we'd lead the vampire dogs to you. If I had..." Hadley's voice faltered as Brielle and Kade both went silent and turned to face her.

"We'd heard rumours about the dogs being seen around that area," Kade finally said. He now wore the same solemn look that she did. "We should have come back to The Caves sooner. That was on me, not you."

Hadley didn't know what to say to that. If Kade and his tribe had come back to The Caves sooner, she would have never found the Wildlings and would have lost her mind endlessly searching for them, sentencing her friends to a horrible fate of forever being lost in the jungle wilderness. But finding the Wildlings had brought the tribe undue tragedy!

She suppressed the storm of emotion threatening to overwhelm her.

There was one other thing playing in Hadley's mind. According to Jamila, Kade was the last person to talk to Ruqwik before the vampire left his tribe. That meant that maybe he knew what had happened to her or how Hadley could find her. Hadley desperately wanted to ask about it. However, she struggled to find the words.

Wildlings weren't the biggest fans of vampires.

"And I'm sorry we couldn't keep the Scavengers from taking you." Kade continued.

"About that," Hadley said, looking at both Brielle and Kade. This was yet another thing she'd been desperate to ask about, but it was a lot easier to discuss than her vampire lover. "Who exactly are these Scavengers? Where do they come from? What do they want? Why did they take me? Take the others? Can we find them?"

Kade sighed.

"Scavengers were once Wildlings. But they have a different view on how we should be doing things. They don't think it's worth it trying to save the planet for the next generation when we aren't even sure we ourselves can survive the pollution already present in everything." Kade explained. "A large group of them splintered away a few centuries ago and disappeared. We'd run into their members every so often, breaking down ruins and mining materials from the days before Human Error, collecting them and hauling them away, disappearing to their unknown base."

"They were scavenging." Hadley mused. "That's how they got their name."

Kade nodded.

"They never bothered us, and we never bothered them. But a few months ago, they started coming in with high tech hover vehicles, violating the Wildling code of traversing the rainforest, and they started abducting our people. They mostly take women and children. They kill or injure the men, especially those who resist the most."

High tech hover vehicles.

Drew's "floating monsters".

If the boy was right about that...

"You don't know where they're taking them?" Hadley asked, inwardly fighting demons of doubt and fear trying to block her throat and pushing her heart to break through her ribs.

"None of the people taken have ever come back." Kade said. "You're the first. The only one."

Hadley took a moment to process that, past everything else she was contending with.

"Did you see anyone else where you were being kept?" Kade asked. "Can you find your way back to the Scavenger base?"

Hadley shook her head.

"I don't think I was being kept in a base," Hadley explained. "And the woman who had me was alone, that much I'm sure about. I think she was breaking their rules. Doing something to me."

"Doing what?" Brielle asked, suddenly curious.

The memory of the vampire dog in the forest dying after it bit her, played through Hadley's mind. It gagged, desperately scratching at its snout, its eyes pinning Hadley with a pained, questioning gaze, asking what she was, why she was killing him. The look pierced through Hadley's mind's eye, empowering her inner demons! She wouldn't survive the Wildlings looking at her any more differently than they already were. She wasn't going to encourage them thinking of her as this special being better than and above them all! Hadley wasn't afraid to lead, but she wanted to earn the chance. She wouldn't accept it forced onto her because of a perceived special status she couldn't control.

Especially when it was nothing but a label tacked onto her for the involuntary act of being born.

"I escaped before she caused any major damage." Hadley said with a nonchalant shrug and wave of her hand. "I'm fine."

Perfectly fine.

And normal.

"Do you really think they're experimenting on those they're abducting?" Kade asked, a stricken look on his face. "That makes me feel even worse about letting them take you. Letting them take all the others."

"I'm here now." Hadley said, wearing a solemn look. "I'll try my best to think of anything else that can help us locate them! And as soon as I can, but only after my daughter is born, we'll go look for everyone the Scavengers took. We'll save them all. Together."

Kade offered a hand that Hadley accepted to seal the pact.

"Brielle told me you were pregnant. Congratulations! And thank you for offering your help. I'll take you up on that." Kade said.

Hadley smiled. She was never going to get used to being congratulated for a pregnancy!

Kade looked around the room. "So? What do you think about The Caves? Better than your Barn?"

"Compound," Hadley corrected him. Then she pointed to the greasy grime and dirt on her clothes, smiled and twirled. "I do have to admit, this place has got it its charms."

Kade laughed, though there was still an edge of sombreness to it.

"No, I love it." Hadley said, with her own sad smile at what it had taken to get here. But it wasn't a lie.

She did like it here.

This was a new beginning. Despite everything, happiness and hope were at a constant simmer in Hadley, easy to bring to the boil in the presence of Jamila or when she would imagine her daughter giggling as they raced through the mazes of tunnels that span The Caves astounding architecture. She was making it work. For Aunt Zee, the one who'd started this journey for her, and for Gram Lee, who'd encouraged her to embrace it all.

"That's good. I'm glad you're happy here," said Kade. Then he stared at his feet for a while before speaking up again. "To be honest, Hadley, I was actually looking for you so I could finally come and say, 'thank you'."

"What? Why?" Hadley wondered, taken aback by how nervous he'd suddenly become. Even though he was a head shorter than Hadley, he usually had a magnetic, vivacious, grand presence that called to his confident authority.

Kade looked up at her. "That day we first met? You saved my life. You didn't even know my name, didn't even know me, and yet, you risked your life for mine."

The memory slammed against Hadley's mind. Ruqwik's eyes. Both blue. The metallic taste in her mouth from the overwhelming telepathic cloud of rage emanating from the vampire. Razor sharp teeth sawing through bone and crushing her clavicle and shoulder joint. Indescribable pain. Then the ease of tension when Ruq pulled herself back from the edge as she fed. Hadley remembered the eyes that looked back at her again. One green and one blue. Both filled with horror and remorse. And then darkness. Restful and peaceful darkness gently folded over her.

"It was my fault that Ruq was there," Hadley said, her voice faltering from the intensity of the memory.

Kade put his hand on her shoulder reassuringly. "You had a choice. You chose to save me. Thank you."

Hadley couldn't speak anymore, so, she nodded and smiled back.

"Jesus! You two are incredibly depressing!" Brielle interjected with an exaggerated sigh, causing Kade and Hadley to chuckle.

Kade hugged Hadley then bid them goodbye.

"Finally! Remind me never to invite you two to dinner at the same time. Sheesh. Now, back to all things romance!" Brielle said, conspiratorially, though Hadley knew the woman felt the gravity of what they'd been discussing. Hadley still did too. How could they not?

Brielle gave Hadley a hard stare.

"What?" Hadley asked. Despite being wary of Brielle's usual over-enthusiasm, Hadley was appreciative of her always-positive outlook and enjoyed talking with her. Having Brielle as a friend was one part of being in The Caves that she couldn't be more grateful for, especially after Brielle explained that sharing a grandmother in Gram Lee made them family and thus bound to each other for life.

Cousins.

Another new word, but Hadley was learning to really love this one.

"You know what you and Jamila need?" Brielle finally asked, as if the answer to that specific question would be the same as figuring out the meaning of life.

"What do we need, Brielle?" Hadley asked, trying to sound exasperated, but genuinely interested in what the woman had to say.

Hadley hated to admit it, but it hadn't been a smooth transition between her and Jamila. She had tried everything, including trying to switch tribes so she could be with Jamila during the day, but Jamila had opposed the idea, stating that they shouldn't be making waves yet and to go along with the current arrangements until they had both earned a little more responsibility and respect – the same way Aunt Zee and Hadley's mother had done it in the beginning back at the Compound. Jamila comparing Hadley to her mother had hurt more than she'd thought it would and had made it even more difficult between them.

So, yeah, Hadley was curious about Brielle's suggestion.

"You need a Wedding!" Brielle announced, proudly.