Brave New Girl

  I stop walking and clear my throat. “Cadet, this is not the way out of the training ward.” I’m allowed to say that to him. This isn’t fraternization, because he’s here on official business, and that business is me. Still, I feel strangely exposed, speaking to him out loud. Outside. Where anyone could hear.

  In reply he smiles and pulls open the door to his left, then motions for me to go inside.

  I stare through the door at the stairwell exit of the Specialist Academy. Then I shake my head. Management is expecting me. I can’t just take a detour with him!

  Trigger gestures more insistently at the stairwell.

  Against my better judgment, I go in. He follows me and closes the door, but before I can ask him what’s going on, he gives me a “shh” gesture with one finger over his lips. Then he stares up at the series of three landings above. “Hello?”

  His voice echoes, but there is no answer. We are alone.

  “What are we doing here?” I demand before the echo of his voice has fully faded from my ears. This detour can’t be part of his official business, which means I shouldn’t be talking to him. Why would he put me in this position?

  “I wanted to see you,” he says, as if it’s just that simple, and I can’t believe how casually he’s willing to smash his way through the fraternization directive. “Why didn’t you meet me in the dormitory stairwell?”

  “Because it was too dangerous. Trigger, this is not okay!”

  “But you did get my message?” he asks, as if he doesn’t understand how risky it is for me to be here.

  “Of course I got your message. It was wrapped around a carrot in my drawer. What was your plan? That we chat about things I’m not supposed to know on the eighteenth-floor landing?”

  He shrugs. “We could have gone down to the twelfth-floor landing. That’s my floor.”

  I’m not supposed to know what floor he lives on. We’re not just breaking the fraternization directive. We’re pounding it into tiny little bits.

  “So was the carrot good? They’re different than the ones you grow, so I wasn’t sure you’d like it.”

  “I didn’t eat it.” I shake my head, trying to bring the entire preposterous, perilous conversation back on track. “I’m not a cadet. You can’t just—”

  “Why didn’t you eat it?” He looks terribly disappointed, and in spite of the fact that we’re about to be dragged away in handcuffs by soldiers, I want to fix that.

  “Because…I wanted to keep it.” The admission feels beyond dangerous, but the lines in his forehead disappear and his bearing relaxes a little. Why does making him happy make me feel so good when we’re both risking everything just by standing here?

  “Oh. Well, you should probably eat it before someone finds it. There will be other carrots.”

  “No, there won’t!” I exhale, grasping for patience. “Trigger, there can’t be other carrots, and you can’t sneak into my room again! You’re going to get caught!”

  His shrug is too casual. No matter how different his bureau is from mine, even a cadet would be punished for sneaking into a dorm room belonging to a member of another division. I’m missing something.

  “I know how to avoid the cameras,” he insists. “And if I have to, I can make them glitch for a second. Sometimes the feed gets fuzzy.” He shrugs with a small smile. “Can’t be helped.”

  “You…?” I don’t even know the word for what he’s describing. “What did you do?”

  “I hacked the feed,” he says, and when he finds no comprehension in my expression he tries again. “I used my tablet to break into the security system—that’s called hacking—and cause static in the camera feed. Just for a few seconds. It goes unnoticed because it happens periodically on its own, and since the feed isn’t really down they don’t send anyone to investigate.”

  I need a second to process what I’m hearing. I had no idea such a thing was possible. “They have a name for breaking that specific kind of rule? Maybe if they hadn’t named it, you cadets wouldn’t do it. How do you even know how to…hack?”

  He gives me another shrug. “I’m Special Forces. My primary specialty is hand-to-hand combat, but my secondary is cyber-intelligence.”

  “Your instructors taught you how to bypass Lakeview’s security feed?” The most daring thing I’ve ever done is graft a tomato vine to a potato plant and grow two kinds of vegetables from one plant.

  “They taught me how to bypass other cities’ security feeds,” Trigger clarifies. “Mountainside, Oceanbay, and Valleybrook use very similar systems. From there it wasn’t hard to figure out our own. They must know that’s a possibility. They just don’t think we’ll actually do it. They have to trust us, because in a couple of years we’ll be their first line of defense.”

  Defense against what? His training sounds more like offense.

  Trigger’s dark eyes shine even brighter for a second. “I’m the best in my class.”

  My gasp echoes around the stairwell.

  “What?” Trigger stands straighter. “That’s what this cord indicates.” He tugs on the red braid looped around the stiff, square shoulder of his uniform jacket. “I’m the leader of my squad.”

  “Are all cadets so arrogant?” My voice is a whisper, as if volume could possibly influence the scale of my fraternization violation.

  “That’s not arrogance; it’s truth.”

  “It’s pride. What if you start fighting to bolster your own arrogance rather than to glorify and protect the city?” That would surely be a slippery slope toward ruin.

  Trigger 17 looks confused. Then he chuckles. “It doesn’t work like that in Defense. My ‘arrogance’ does glorify the city. And if my superior skill motivates my fellow cadets to fight harder, the city is glorified that much more.”

  I can hardly even process that thought. My identicals and I have spent our entire lives learning to work as a unit. To bond with and support one another without fail. To celebrate one another’s successes as our own. Yet…“Your academy encourages competition?”

  “Defense requires it. You can’t run an army as if it’s a factory, or a construction crew, or a garden. Our leaders can’t be managers; they have to come from within our ranks, and command positions are awarded through competition.” He takes a deep breath, then stands straighter and practically barks a motto in a practiced cadence. “It takes the best to lead the rest.”

  All at once I understand. But I’m not supposed to. No one outside of the Defense Bureau is supposed to know that their rules encourage competition and allow for arrogance and—evidently—for one child locking another in a dark closet.

  I want to be able to declare that I’m the best hydroponic gardener in my union, but the city neither requires nor allows arrogance from its gardeners. And now I wish I didn’t know that Trigger is allowed to feel and say what I am not.

  “Okay. I promise I’ll eat the carrot. But we have to go. I can’t keep Management waiting.” And I have no idea how I’ll explain the delay.

  Trigger 17 throws his head back and laughs. The sound echoes up through the stairwell above us, and I scowl at him. I’m not in on the joke. “Management isn’t expecting you, Dahlia. I just told your instructor that so he’d let you come with me.”

  “You lied to Belay 35?” I can’t even process that statement. Keeping our secret has been hard enough for me, but an outright lie? Skipping class? “What if he pings Management to verify what you told him?”

  “He probably won’t, because he doesn’t expect to be lied to. And even if he tries, the ping won’t go through, because Management’s communications truly are down. I hacked the system. They’re restricted to verbal communication until I repair the damage. Or until they figure out what’s happened, and even if they do they can’t trace it back to me.”

  I stare at him, wide-eyed. How can a cadet—a student—have broken into the city’s security system without alerting the people who run that system? Just how special are these Special Forces? “Do you have any idea how ins
anely dangerous all this is?”

  “Yes. This is what I’m trained for.” Trigger looks exhilarated, and with a strange sense of intuition I realize I know exactly how he feels. This same reckless thrill races through me every time I think about him. “It’s good practice for real-world application,” he adds.

  “But I’m not trained for…whatever this is.” And all this adrenaline is making my heart race too fast.

  “Relax. Once you’re back in class, I’ll restore Management’s communications and they’ll think it was a random glitch. If your friends ask what Management wanted, just tell them it was about the instructor’s position, but that’s all you’re at liberty to say.”

  My focus narrows on him. “How do you know about the instructor’s position?”

  “It’s in your file.”

  “You looked at my file?” Does that mean I’ve been hacked?

  “How else was I supposed to know whether Management would have a plausible reason to want to see you?” Trigger gives me a sly smile. “They’re very impressed with your efforts in the hydroponic lab. Your work with vines and climbers is especially noteworthy.”

  I shake my head, setting aside the compliment clearly meant as a distraction. “Won’t they be able to see that my file was accessed?”

  “Yes, if they go looking.” Trigger leans against the top half of the stair rail and crosses his arms over his chest. “But I used your academic instructor’s access code.”

  “Do I even want to know how you got that?”

  His grin is small but indomitable. “Probably not.”

  “And you want me to lie to my friends about where I went?”

  “I want you to give them the benefit of plausible deniability. Protect them from the truth, just in case. It’s in everyone’s best interest.”

  I can’t argue with that.

  Grasping for patience in spite of the increasingly insistent awareness that we should not be here, I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and stare up at him. “Do you have an answer for everything?”

  He grins. “Cadets are trained to be prepared.”

  I feel like I should yell at him, yet I find myself returning his smile. Something about his stalwart confidence is charming, even as it makes me want to pull my own hair out by the roots.

  How is that possible? Is it something they breed into a soldier? “Are there thousands just like you?”

  Finally he hesitates, clearly giving his response serious thought. “I’m not sure there are any like me anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My identicals and I are genetic duplicates, of course, but that just means we’re operating with the same basic genetic tools at our disposal. And obviously we’ve had the same training. But I’m the only one who got trapped in an elevator with a beautiful girl who so clearly wanted to ask a million questions yet so clearly knew she wasn’t supposed to. My experience diverged from theirs that day. Meeting you led me and my training down a different path.” He makes a gesture that encompasses the two of us. “Down this path.”

  “A path that makes you willing to break rules that Management doesn’t even know it needs yet. Like ‘Do not hack into the city’s security and communication systems.’ ”

  “Exactly.”

  What he’s done is incredibly risky. Yet I understand the impulse. Before I met Trigger 17, I had no idea how little I actually knew about the world, outside of hydroponic gardening, and if that knowledge were available to me with a few taps on a tablet, as it is for him, wouldn’t I tap?

  Trigger pushes himself away from the stairs and stands straighter. “I’m sorry for all the covert maneuvers. I just wanted to talk to you again, and this seemed simpler than rigging an elevator to break down while we’re both on it. Although I have to admit, that was my backup plan.”

  “I can’t tell whether you’re joking.” Violet is like that. It drives me nuts.

  “I am. Mostly. Although it is much harder to find time to talk to you than to girls from my own union.”

  “Girls from…?” My chest aches in an entirely new and painful way. We’re allowed to talk to the boys in our union, so why does the thought of him talking to the girls in his union make me feel a little mad and a little sick at the same time?

  “If…” I can’t figure out how to ask what I want to know. “If you weren’t supposed to talk to those girls, would you go through this much trouble? Would you break rules for them?”

  Trigger is silent while he thinks, and each second that passes without an answer makes my heart beat harder. Finally, his head tilts to the side and he looks down at me with somber consideration. “It’s possible that I made hacking into Management’s communication system sound easier than it was. It actually took me a week and a half to analyze and break down the process, and another couple of days to work up the nerve to try it. I don’t think I would have done that for anyone else, Dahlia. I’m not even sure I did it for you. This was kind of selfish. I wanted to see you. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to know if you liked the carrot, and I wanted to tell you about where I found it and how it was growing.”

  Now my heart is beating too hard for an entirely different, equally perplexing reason.

  “Why?” Why would he be willing to take such risks for me? If it had been one of my identicals trapped with him in that elevator, would he have gone through so much trouble to talk to her, or would he and that hypothetical identical simply have parted ways after the elevator incident and gone about their separate lives?

  Why are Trigger and I still thinking about each other six weeks later?

  “Because you spoke to me.”

  “Because I…?”

  “In the elevator. You were as scared of talking to me—of breaking a rule—as you were of plummeting to your death. But you did it. A lot. You’re like a pretty little hydroponic flower, but you have wild roots. Dahlia, you look like a gardener, but you feel like a fighter.”

  Something deep inside me stirs. Something…hungry.

  We’re only a couple of feet apart—even closer than we were in the elevator—and I have a sudden inexplicable urge to close the distance between us. To touch him.

  I’ve never wanted to touch any of the boys in my union. That impulse seems very strange. Yet it doesn’t feel wrong.

  “What?” Trigger has noticed me staring. “Is there something on my face?” He runs one hand over his jawline, and it makes a soft scratching sound against the short stubble on his chin.

  “No. Well, I mean it looks like you need to shave, and I…” I can’t look away.

  One corner of his mouth turns up and I suddenly feel like he can see right through my skull into my most private thoughts. “You want to feel it?”

  “I don’t…I couldn’t…” If there are rules against talking to members of other divisions, there must be rules against touching members of other divisions. Yet I can’t think of any, probably because it never occurred to Management that we would try.

  I mean, we’d have to be looking for trouble, right?

  “I can’t…”

  Trigger takes my hand, and my heart leaps into my throat. I’ve never touched a boy before. His hand is warm but not really soft. There is a thick bit of scar tissue on his thumb, and I can’t resist moving my finger over the smooth lump.

  I look up and his gaze captures mine. All the warmth from his hand rushes through me and settles into my face. Touching him is one thing, but watching him while we’re touching feels somehow both prohibited and familiar. Forbidden and intimate in a way I’ve never considered before.

  Trigger lifts my hand toward his face and I suck in a deep breath. He smiles as if the sound means something to him. Something he likes very much. He presses my fingertips against the back of his jaw, just below his ear, and I’m surprised by how stiff the stubble is there. How coarse.

  He drags my hand slowly down his jaw toward his chin, and the sensation is prickly but warm. The combination is strangely enthralling. It’s so different
from anything I’ve ever felt. So rough and—

  My fingers slide over his bottom lip, and the transition between rough and soft is so jarring I’m almost startled by it. So startled that I don’t even realize at first that his hand is gone. I’m in charge of my fingers, and they seem to have found his mouth on their own.

  I look up until my gaze meets his again. I can’t make sense of the intense look in his eyes, but it makes my flush deepen. His pupils are dilated. His breathing has become slow and deep.

  Then I realize I’m still touching his lip.

  I jerk my hand away and smooth my hair back from my forehead, trying to disguise my embarrassment.

  “So?” Trigger asks. “Does it feel like you expected?”

  “I don’t know what I expected.” I don’t know how to look at him anymore after having lost control of my own hand.

  “It will feel different in the morning. After I shave,” he says, and despite my ironclad certainty that it will never be possible, I want to feel that too.

  “We have to go. I have to get back before…” Before I lose all ability to function. “Before someone figures out what we’re doing.”

  What are we doing? Is it so terrible to want to know what beard stubble feels like? Is this more evidence of a genetic flaw, or would any girl do the same thing, given the opportunity?

  It’s easy to follow the rules when you’re never given an opportunity to break them.

  Maybe I’m not flawed. Trigger attributes his misbehavior not to a genetic flaw but to experiences he’s had that his identicals have not. Could that be true for me?

  No. Cadets are designed with different genetic traits than laborers are. He’s supposed to react differently in any given situation than I am.

  So why do I understand everything he’s told me? Why do I not just comprehend it but feel it?

  There is something seriously wrong with me. I am dangerously flawed, and every moment I spend here with him is another moment I’m putting my sisters’ lives at risk. Poppy’s life.

  “Trigger, I…”

  He steps closer, and his proximity steals the words from my tongue. If I inhale too deeply, we will be touching. “Yes, Dahlia?”