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“Hopefully it won’t,” I said.
Alex glanced down at me and I could almost see his tension ease; for a second, we were the only two people in the room. With a small smile, he briefly touched my back, his fingers warm through my shirt. “Yeah, hopefully,” he said.
Things became even tenser after that, more determined: the team had actually seen who they were going to be fighting. Alex was still taking them out on daily hunts – which made me curse my inability to disguise my aura more than ever. I hated just staying at home when the danger was increasing with each day that passed – because the angels had to be aware by now that there were AKs in the city. I could never really relax until everyone was back again. Alex was careful to never fall into a predictable routine, though. He always took the team to different places, and at different times; they even went at night sometimes. And the AKs were improving by leaps and bounds. I knew Alex thought that if we could just get the security information, we’d have a real chance against the Council now.
When asked, all he would say was that he had a plan to get us into the Torre Mayor, but he was working out the details.
“Do you have a plan?” I whispered one morning when we were alone in his bedroom. I was lying in his arms, savouring the feel of his skin against mine. I’d slipped into his room while the others were having breakfast – I knew Alex would already have had his; he was an early riser. When I timed things right, we could sometimes have almost half an hour alone together. It was incredibly precious to us both – and not just as a time to talk. Now I stroked his bare chest. “Or are you just trying to keep morale up or something?”
Alex sighed. Keeping an arm around my shoulders, he stretched up a hand to bat at the dust motes that were drifting past. “Yes, I’ve got a plan – but I don’t like it very much,” he admitted. “I don’t want to say anything to the team until after we get the security information. I’m hoping we’ll find out something that’ll improve on it. ”
I bit my lip. That bad. I didn’t say anything; he clearly didn’t want to go into it. After a pause, he rolled towards me, and we lay gazing at each other without speaking. I felt myself falling into his blue-grey eyes, so vivid under their black lashes. As I caught a wave of his emotions, my throat tightened: a deep yearning; a suppressed fear that the two of us wouldn’t have the long life together that we both wanted. The thought filled me with dread.
He reached out and touched a strand of my hair, as if he’d never seen it before, and then lowered his lips to mine. I could feel how much he needed to lose himself in me; it was what I needed too, with him. I held him to me tightly as we kissed, and wished there were no time limits and no other people, and that we could just do exactly what we wanted. Because even though I tried not to think about it, in my darkest moments I couldn’t help wondering if we’d really survive all this. And I didn’t want to die without ever truly giving myself to the boy I loved.
“Alex, maybe. . . ” I whispered now. My heart was thudding; my body felt flushed and prickly.
He rose up on his elbows, scanning my face. Before he could say anything, we heard Sam and Brendan come back into the dorm, arguing about basketball. Basketball, when we were a thousand miles away from the NBA. I closed my eyes tightly; I felt like crying. Alex let out a breath, and then kissed me.
“Soon,” he said, and I could tell from the determination in his voice that he was going to make it happen, no matter what.
With only one digit left to crack on the six-number security code, it turned out that they changed the code every week, knocking us back to square one. Everyone was stressed – especially Kara, I think, whose task of finding the new code couldn’t be hurried, though we all longed for it to be. There was just over a week left now. The rest of the team spent any spare time either grimly working out or watching TV in near silence.
But the success of the plan wasn’t my only worry. Once or twice now, I’d gotten glimpses from Seb of the same powerful emotion I thought I’d felt in him the first day we’d met – warm, deep flashes, which told me exactly how much he still hoped that something more than friendship would happen between us.
He usually kept it hidden far below the surface, though. And selfishly, I was glad of it. I didn’t want to face his feelings for me. I didn’t want anything to change between us, not ever – because Seb and I just clicked, on every level. He really did feel like a brother: a soul-twin who’d somehow found me again, after a lifetime apart.
Blue. I imagined an airy light blue, like the sky on a summer’s day. As we sat outside in the courtyard, I focused only on my aura, lightly keeping the sense of oneness, of play. My aura shifted, its silver lights turning obediently to the colour of the sky. Somehow I kept myself detached, ignoring the distant pounding of my heart. For a change, Seb’s energy wasn’t bolstering me up, though I could feel him sitting nearby, silently willing me on.
Then a car alarm went off and I started; my aura snapped back to silver. When I tried again, I knew I’d totally lost the sense of light-heartedness – I’d have to go into aura-sparkler mode again to get it back. I sighed as I opened my eyes. Now that I’d reached this stage, Seb kept saying I needed to lock away the aura part of my mind and keep it separate, so that nothing could distract me, but I just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it.
“You really are doing much better, you know,” he commented. We were at the picnic table again; Seb was sitting backwards on the bench with me up on the tabletop beside him.
“Yes, but—” I broke off, scraping my hands over my face. “Oh, argh. Why can’t I get this, when you can do it so easily? This is worse than being back in algebra class!”
“I learned when I was a small child – I think this made it much easier,” Seb pointed out mildly. He sat back against the table edge, propping his elbows to either side as he gave me a curious look. “You took algebra?”
I shrugged. “Not by choice. It was required. ” I’d told Seb a lot about high school; like Alex, it was something he’d only seen on TV. I pulled my knees up, sitting cross-legged. “Would you have wanted to go, if you’d had the chance? To high school, I mean. ”
A ripple of surprise, so that I knew the answer before he said it. “Yes, of course. Even if I’d felt alone there, the way you always did – I’d still like to know more than I do. ” He pulled a wry face, like he didn’t want it to matter too much to him. “I could have learned how not to get caught at stealing, maybe. ”
Actually, Seb read so much that he knew a lot more than I did about some things. I studied him, trying to picture him in high school. Like Alex, he’d have had every girl in the place after him if he’d gone. Though I had a feeling Alex would have been out on the basketball court, while Seb would have been holed up in the library somewhere.
He pushed lightly at my leg. “Anyway, I know you didn’t like school very much, but there must have been something about it you enjoyed. ”
“Enjoyed” was pretty strong. I started to laugh and say Guess again – and then I remembered my art class. I’d always loved making things with my hands. When the whole Church of Angels thing happened, I’d been working on a kinetic sculpture that used pieces of old engines. If I’d managed to do it right, the different pieces were actually going to move on their own.