“Well, you did.” I feel myself tremble and fall apart under his glare. “You led the soldiers right to my family’s door. You’re the reason they’re dead.” Day turns his back on me and storms out of the kitchen. I stand there alone in the sudden silence, for once at a loss over what to do. The lump in my throat threatens to choke me. My vision swims with tears.
Day thinks I’m being blindly faithful to the Elector instead of being logical. That I can’t possibly be on his side and still loyal to the state. Well, am I still loyal? Hadn’t I answered that question correctly in the lie detector chamber? Am I jealous of Tess? Jealous because she is a better person than I am?
And then, the thought so painful I can hardly bear it, no matter how angry his words made me: He’s right. I can’t deny it. I am the reason Day lost everything that matters to him.
I SHOULDN’T HAVE YELLED AT HER. KINDA TERRIBLE thing to do, and I know it.
But instead of apologizing, I go back around the shelter and check the rooms again. My hands are still unsteady; my mind is still fighting down the rush of adrenaline. I’d said it—the words that have been stewing in my head for weeks. They’re out now, and there’s no going back. Well, so what? I’m glad she knows. She should know. And to say that money means nothing—that phrase just flowed from her mouth, natural as water. Memories fill my head of all the times we needed more, of everything that could’ve been better with more. There was one afternoon, during a particularly bad week, when I came home early from grade school to find four-year-old Eden rummaging in the fridge. He jumped when he saw me step inside the house. In his hands was an empty can of beef hash. It’d been half full that morning, precious leftovers from the night before that Mom had carefully wrapped in foil and stored away for the next night’s supper. When Eden saw me staring at the empty can in his hand, he dropped it on the kitchen floor and burst into tears. “Please don’t tell Mom,” he begged.
I ran over to him and took him in my arms. He gripped my shirt with baby hands, burying his face against me. “I won’t,” I whispered to him. “I promise.” I can still remember how thin his arms were. Later that night, when Mom and John finally came home, I told Mom that I’d caved in and eaten the leftover food. She slapped me hard, told me I was old enough to know better. John gave me a disappointed speech. But who cares? I didn’t mind.
I slam a door in the corridor in anger. Has June ever had to worry about stealing half a can of beef hash? If she’d been poor, would she be so quick to forgive the Republic?
The gun that the Patriots gave me sits heavily against my belt. The Elector’s assassination would have given the Patriots the opportunity to take down the Republic. We would have been the spark that lit a powder keg—but because of us—because of June—it fizzled out. And for what? To watch this Elector go on to become just like his father? I want to laugh at the idea that he’d free Eden. What a Republic lie. And now I’m no closer to saving him, and I’ve lost Tess, and I’m right back to square one. On the run.
That’s the story of my life, yeah?
When I go back to the kitchen half an hour later, June’s not there anymore. Probably off in one of the hallways, making mental notes to herself about every goddy crack in the wall.
I throw open the kitchen’s drawers, empty out one of the burlap sacks, and start sorting stacks of each type of food into it. Rice. Corn. Potato and mushroom soups. Three boxes of crackers. (How nice—everything’s going to hell, but at least I can fill my stomach.) I grab several bottles of water for each of us and then close up the sack. Good enough for now. Soon we’ll have to be on our way again, and who knows how long the rest of this tunnel is or when we’ll hit another shelter. We have to move forward into the Colonies. Maybe they’ll be willing to help us when we get to the other side. Then again, we might have to keep a low profile. We did ruin the assassination that the Colonies were sponsoring. I sigh deeply, wishing I had more time to chat with Kaede, to coax out all her stories about living on the other side of the warfront.
How did our plans turn into such a mess?
There’s a faint knock on the kitchen’s open door. I turn around to see June standing there with her arms crossed. She’s unbuttoned her Republic coat, and the collar shirt and vest underneath look rumpled. Her cheeks are more flushed than usual, and her eyes are red, like she’s been crying. “The electric circuits in here aren’t feeding into the Republic,” she says. If she had shed any tears, I sure as hell don’t hear them in her voice. “Their cables run down through the other end of the tunnel, the part we haven’t covered yet.”
I go back to stacking cans. “So?” I mutter.
“That means they must be getting their power from the Colonies, right?”
“Guess so. Makes sense, yeah?” I straighten my back and pull the two burlap sacks I’ve prepared tightly shut. “Well, at least it means the tunnel will lead out to the surface somewhere, hopefully in the Colonies. When we’re ready to go we can just follow the cables. We should probably get some rest first.”
I’m just about to walk out of the kitchen and past June when she clears her throat and speaks up. “Hey—did the Patriots teach you anything about fighting while you were with them?”
I shake my head. “No. Why?”
June turns to face me. The kitchen entrance is narrow enough that her shoulders brush past mine, raising goose bumps on my arms. I’m annoyed that she still has this effect on me, in spite of everything. “While we were getting into the tunnel I noticed that you were swinging at the Patriots from your arms . . . but that’s not very effective. You should be swinging from your legs and hips.”
Her critique grates on my nerves, even though she’s giving it in a strangely hesitant tone. “I don’t want to do this right now.”
“When are we going to do it if not now?” June leans against the door frame and points toward the shelter’s entrance. “What if we bump into some soldiers?”
I sigh and put my hands up for a second. “If this is your way of apologizing after a fight, then you really suck at it. Listen. I’m sorry I got angry earlier.” I hesitate, remembering my words. I’m not sorry. But telling her that now won’t help anything. “Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll feel better.”
“Come on, Day. What’ll happen when you find Eden and you need to protect him?” She is trying to apologize, in her own subtle way. Well. At least she’s giving it a shot, however crappy she is at it. I glare at her for a few seconds.
“All right,” I finally say. “Show me some moves, soldier. What you got up your sleeves?”
June gives me a small smile, then walks me over to the center of the shelter’s main room. She stands beside me. “Ever read Ducain’s The Art of the Fight?”
“Does it look like I’ve had free time in my life to read?”
She ignores me, and I immediately feel bad for saying it. “Well, you’re already light on your feet and you have flawless balance,” she continues. “But you don’t use those strengths when you attack. It’s like you panic. You forget all about your speed advantage and your center of mass.”
“My center of what?” I start to say, but she just taps the outside of my leg with her boot.
“Stay on the balls of your feet and keep your legs shoulder width apart,” she goes on. “Pretend you’re standing on train tracks with one foot forward.”
I’m a little surprised. June’s been watching my attacks closely, even though it usually happens when all sorts of chaos is going on around us. And she’s right. I hadn’t even realized that all my instincts of balance go right out the window when I try to fight. I do as she says. “Okay. Now what?”
“Well, keep your chin down, for one.” She touches my hands, then lifts them up so one fist stays close to the side of my cheek and the other hovers out in front of my face. Her hands run along my arms, checking my posture. My skin tingles. “Most people lean back and keep their chins high and jutted,” she says, her face close beside mine. She taps my chin once. “That’s what you do to
o. And it’s just asking for a knockout.”
I try to focus on my own posture by putting two fists up. “How do you punch?”
June gently touches the tip of my chin, then the edge of my brow. “Remember, it’s all about how accurately you can hit someone, not how hard. You’ll be able to knock out someone much larger if you catch them in the right spots.”
Before I know it, half an hour’s gone by. June teaches me one tactic after another—keeping my shoulder up to protect my chin, catching my opponent off guard with fake moves, overhand hits, underhand hits, leaning back and following through with kicks, leaping out of the way with speed. Aiming for the vulnerable spots—eyes, neck, and so on. I lunge out with everything I’ve got. When I try to catch her by surprise, she slips from my grasp like water between rocks, fluid and constantly moving, and if I blink, she’s behind me and twisting my arm up behind my back.
Finally, June trips me and pins me to the floor. Her hands push my wrists down. “See?” she says. “Tricked you. You’re always staring at your opponent’s eyes—but that gives you a bad peripheral view. If you want to track my arms and legs, you have to focus on my chest.”
I raise my eyebrow at that. “Say no more.” My eyes shift downward.
June laughs, then turns a little red. We pause there for an instant, her hands still holding my arms down, her legs across my stomach, both of us breathing heavily. Now I understand why she suggested the impromptu sparring—I’m tired, and the exercise has drained my anger. Even though she doesn’t say it, I can see her apology plainly on her face, the tragic slant of her eyebrows and the slight quiver of unspoken words on her lips. The sight finally softens me, albeit only a little. I’m still not sorry about what I’d said to her earlier, true, but I’m also not being fair. Whatever I lost, June has lost equally. She used to be rich, then she threw it away to save my life. She’d played her part in my family’s deaths, but . . . I run a hand through my hair, feeling guilty now. I can’t blame her for everything. And I can’t be alone at a time like this, with no allies, no one I can turn to.
She sways.
I prop myself up on my elbows. “You okay?”
She shakes her head, frowns, and tries to shrug it off. “Fine. I think I picked up a bug or something. Nothing big.”
I study her under the artificial light. Now that I’m paying closer attention to the color of her face, I can see that she’s paler than usual, and that her cheeks look flushed because her skin is so wan. I sit up higher, forcing her to slide off. Then I press a hand to her forehead. Immediately I pull it away. “Man, you’re burning up.”
June starts to protest, but as if our training session has weakened her, she sways again and steadies herself with one arm. “I’ll be fine,” she mumbles. “We should be heading out, anyway.”
And here I’ve been angry with her, forgetting all she’s been through. Trot of the year. I ease one of my arms around her back and wrap the other under her knees, then scoop her up. She slumps against my chest, the heat of her brow startling against my cool skin. “You need to rest.”
I carry her into one of the bunker rooms, pull off her boots, lay her down carefully on a bed, and cover her with the blankets. She blinks at me. “I didn’t mean what I said earlier.” Her eyes are dazed, but the emotion’s still there. “About money. And . . . I didn’t—”
“Stop talking.” I smooth stray hairs from her forehead. What if she caught something serious while under arrest? A plague virus? . . . But she’s upper class. She should have vaccines. I hope. “I’m going to find you some medicine, okay? Just close your eyes.” June shakes her head, frustrated, but she doesn’t try to argue.
After upending the entire shelter, I finally manage to hunt down an unopened bottle of aspirin and return to June’s bedside with it. She takes a couple of pills. When she starts shivering, I grab two more blankets from the other beds in the room and cover her with them, but it doesn’t seem to help. “It’s okay. I’ll manage,” she whispers right as I’m about to go hunting for more blankets. “Won’t really matter how high you stack them—I just need my fever to break.” She hesitates, then reaches for my hand. “Can you stay here?”
The weakness of her voice worries me more than anything. I climb into the bed, lie beside her on top of the blankets, and pull her to me. June smiles a little, then closes her eyes. The feel of her body’s curves against mine sends warmth coursing through me. I’ve never thought of describing her beauty as delicate, because delicate just isn’t a word that fits June . . . but here, now that she’s sick, I realize just how fragile she can be. Pink cheeks. Small, soft lips against large, closed eyes fringed with the curve of dark lashes. I don’t like seeing her this delicate. The heat of our argument lingers in the back of my mind, but for now I need to forget about it. Fighting will only slow us down. We’ll deal with the problems between us later.
Slowly, we both doze off.
* * *
Something jerks me out of my sleep. A beeping sound. I listen to it for a while, trying to pinpoint its location through my grogginess, and then crawl out of bed without waking June. Before leaving the room, I lean over to touch her forehead again. Still no better. Sweat beads on her brow, so her fever must’ve broken at least once, but she’s as warm as ever.
When I follow the beeping sound out into the kitchen, I see a tiny beacon blinking above the door that we’d come into the shelter from. Words flash below it in bright, menacing red.
APPROACHING—400 FT
A cold fear seizes me. Someone must be coming down the tunnel toward the shelter—Patriots, maybe, or Republic soldiers. Can’t decide which would be worse. I whirl on my heels and hurry to where I’d stacked our burlap sacks of food and water, then empty some cans out of one of them. When the bag’s light enough, I pull my arms through both sack strings like it’s a backpack and then rush to June’s bedside. She stirs with a soft moan.
“Hey,” I whisper, trying to sound calm and reassuring. I bend down and stroke her hair. “It’s time to go. Come here.” I push the blankets aside, keeping one to wrap around her, pull her boots onto her feet, and hoist her into my arms. She struggles for a moment as if she thinks she’s falling, but I just hang on tighter. “Easy,” I murmur against her hair. “I’ve got you.”
She settles into my embrace, half-conscious.
We leave the shelter and head back into the darkness of the tunnel, my boots splashing through puddles and mud. June’s breath is shallow and quick, hot with fever. Behind us, the alarm grows quieter until we round several bends, then it fades to a soft hum. I half expect to hear footsteps coming after us, but soon the hum of the alarm fades away too, and we’re left to travel in silence. To me, it feels like hours have passed—although June mutters that “it’s been forty-two minutes and thirty-three seconds.” We trudge on.
This stretch of tunnel is much longer than the first, and dimly lit with the occasional flickering fixture. At some point I finally stop and slump down in a dry section, sipping on water and canned soup (at least, I think it’s soup—I can’t see much in this darkness so I just pop the lid off the first tin I grab). June’s shivering again, which is no surprise. It’s cold down here, cold enough for me to see the faint clouds of my breath. I wrap the blanket tighter around June, check her forehead one more time, and then try to feed her some soup. She refuses it.
“I’m not hungry,” she mutters. When she shifts her head against my chest, I feel the heat of her brow through my shirt.
I squeeze her hand. My arms are so numb that even this seems difficult. “Fine. But you’re going to have some water, okay?”
“Fine.” June huddles closer to me and rests her head in my lap. I wish I could figure out a way to keep her warm. “Are they still following us?”
I squint down into the black depths we came from. “No,” I lie. “We lost them a long time ago. Just relax and don’t worry, but try to stay awake.”
June nods. She fiddles with something on her hand, and when I look closer
, I realize it’s the paper clip ring. She rubs it as if it can give her strength. “Help me out. Tell me a story.” Her eyes are half-closed now, even though I can tell she’s struggling to keep them open. She’s speaking so softly that I have to lean over her mouth to hear it.
“What kind of story?” I reply, determined to keep her from fading into unconsciousness.
“I don’t know.” June tilts her head slightly to face me. After a pause, she says sleepily, “Tell me about your first kiss. How was it?”
Her question confuses me at first—no girl I’ve ever known has liked me talking about other girls in front of her. But then I realize that this is June, and that she might be using jealousy to keep herself from dozing off. I can’t help smiling in the dark. Always so goddy clever, this one. “I was twelve,” I murmur. “The girl was sixteen.”
June’s eyes become more alert. “You must’ve been quite the smooth talker.”
I shrug. “Maybe. I was clumsier back then—almost got myself killed a few times. Anyway, she was working a pier in Lake with her dad, and she caught me trying to smuggle food out of their crates. I talked her out of turning me in, and as part of our deal, she led me off to a back alley near the water.”
June tries to laugh, but it comes out as a coughing fit. “And she kissed you there?”
I grin. “You could say that.”
She manages to raise a curious eyebrow at my short reply, which I take as a good sign. At least she’s awake now. I lean closer to her and put my lips next to her ear. My breath stirs soft wisps of her hair. “The first time I saw you, when you stepped into that Skiz ring against Kaede, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I could’ve watched you forever. The first time I kissed you . . .” That memory overpowers me now, taking me by surprise. I remember every last detail of it, almost enough to push away the lingering images of the Elector pulling June to him. “Well, that might as well have been my first kiss ever.”