by Lu, Marie
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 too. 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 q
uick, 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.”
Even in the dark, I see hints of a smile creep onto her face. “Yeah. You are a smooth talker.”
I give her a wounded frown. “Sweetheart, would I ever lie to you?”
“Don’t try. I’d see right through it.”
I give her a low laugh. “Fair enough.”
Our words sound light and almost carefree, but we can both feel the strain behind them. The effort of trying to forget, to push down. The consequence of things neither of us can ever take back.
We linger there for a few more minutes. Then I wrap up our belongings, carefully pick her up, and continue down the tunnel. My arms are shaking now, and each breath I take sounds ragged. There are no signs of any shelters ahead. Despite the tunnel’s wetness and the cold, I’m sweating as if it’s the middle of a Los Angeles summer—my breaks become more and more frequent, until I finally stop at another dry stretch of tunnel and collapse against the wall.
“Just taking a quick breather,” I reassure June as I give her some water. “I think we’re almost there.”
Just as she said earlier, she can see right through my lie. “We can’t go any farther,” she says weakly. “Let’s rest. You’ll never last another hour like this.”
I brush off her words. “This tunnel’s got to end somewhere. We must have gone right under the warfront by now, which means we’re already on Colonies land.” I pause—the realization hits me at the same time my words come out, sending a thrill down my spine. Colonies land.
As if on cue, a sound comes from somewhere beyond the tunnel, somewhere far above us. I fall silent. We listen for a while, and soon the sound comes back—a whirring, humming noise muffled through the earth, coming from some massive object.
“Is that an airship out there?” June asks.
The sound fades away, but not before it brings an icy cold breeze into the tunnel. I glance up. I’d been too exhausted to notice earlier, but now I can just make out a tiny, rectangular sliver of light. An exit to the surface. In fact, there are several of them lining the ceiling in sporadic intervals; we’ve probably been passing them for a good while. I force myself back to my feet and reach up to run my finger along the edge of that sliver. Smooth, frozen metal. I give it a tentative push.
It shifts. I push harder on the metal and start sliding it to one side. Even though I can tell that it’s nighttime outside, the light coming into the tunnel is more than we’ve been getting for the past few hours, and I actually find myself squinting. It takes me a second to realize that something cold and light is falling gently onto my face. I swat at it, confused for a second, until I realize that they’re—I think—snowflakes. My heartbeat quickens. When I’ve slid the metal as far as it will go, I shrug off my Republic military jacket. No fun getting shot by soldiers right when we’ve reached the promised land.
When I’ve stripped down to my collar shirt and waistcoat, I jump up and grab the sides of the opening, arms trembling, then pull myself up halfway to see where we are. Some sort of dark corridor. Nobody around. I jump back down and take June’s hands, but she’s starting to fade away into sleep again.
“Stay with me,” I murmur, gathering her in my arms. “See if you can pull yourself up.” June unwinds the blanket. I kneel and help her step up onto my shoulders. She wobbles, breathing heavily, but manages to pull herself to the surface. I follow with her blanket tucked under an arm, then pop up through the ground with one thrust.
We come up into a dark, narrow alley not unlike where we came from, and for a second I wonder if somehow we’ve come all the way back around into the Republic again. Wouldn’t that be something. But after a while, I can tell that this isn’t the Republic at all. The ground is even and nicely paved under a patchy layer of snow, and the wall is completely covered with brightly colored posters of grinning soldiers and smiling children. On the corner of each poster is a symbol that I recognize after a few seconds. A gold, falconlike bird. With a shiver of excitement, I realize how closely it resembles the bird imprinted on my pendant.
June’s notices the posters too. Her eyes are wide and hazy with fever, her breath rising in faint clouds of steam. All around us are what appear to be military barracks, covered from top to bottom with the same bright posters. Streetlights line both sides of the road in neat, orderly patterns. This must be where the tunnel and those underground shelters get their electricity. A cold wind blows more snow in our faces.
June suddenly grabs
my hand. She sucks in her breath at the same time I do. “Day . . . over there.” She’s trembling uncontrollably against me, but I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or from what we’re seeing.
Stretching out before us, peeking through the gaps between the military buildings, is a city: tall, shining skyscrapers reaching up through low clouds and delicate snow, and each building illuminated by beautiful blue lights that pour from almost every window and every floor. Fighter jets line the skyscrapers’ rooftops. The entire landscape is aglow. My hand tightens around June’s. We just stand there, unable for a second to do anything else. It’s exactly how my father described it.
We’ve reached a glittering city in the Colonies of America.
METIAS HAD ALWAYS TOLD ME THAT WHENEVER I DO GET sick, I pull out all the stops.
I know it’s cold, but I can’t tell what the temperature is. I know it’s night, but I can’t tell what time it is. I know Day and I have somehow made it across the border and into the Colonies, but I’m too tired to figure out which of their states we crossed into. Day’s arm is wrapped tightly around my waist, supporting me even though I can feel him shaking from the effort of carrying me for so long. He whispers encouragingly to me, urging me on. Just a little longer, he says. There must be hospitals this close to the warfront. My legs are trembling from the effort of keeping me up, but I refuse to faint now. We crunch through light snow, our eyes fixed on the sparkling city before us.
The buildings range between five stories and hundreds of stories tall, some of them disappearing into low clouds. The sight is familiar in some ways and entirely new in others: The walls are lined with foreign flags shaped like swallowtails, colored navy blue and gold; the buildings have archway designs carved into their sides; and fighter jets line each rooftop. They’re distinctly different models from the ones in the Republic, with a strange reverse-swept-wing structure that makes them tridentlike in appearance. The jets’ wings are all painted with ferocious gold birds, as well as a symbol I don’t recognize. No wonder I always heard that the Colonies had a better air force than the Republic—these jets are newer than the ones I’m used to and, considering their rooftop placements, must all be able to perform vertical takeoffs and landings effortlessly. This warfront city seems more than prepared to defend itself.
