Jennie smiled back.
“Felicité?” Mayor Wolfe indicated the windows.
Felicité closed them. The hot room instantly became stifling. Jennie didn’t understand how Felicité could stand the silk scarf wrapped around her throat, covering her from collarbones to jaw. Everyone else had managed to dress respectably without also risking heat stroke.
Felicité opened the book of records, dipped her pen, and poised it to record the meeting.
Mr. Preston put on his silver-rimmed glasses. “I don’t need to recap how terrible yesterday’s drill was. The children and teenagers were particularly unsatisfactory. That can’t continue. Las Anclas nearly fell to Voske’s attack. The only reason it didn’t was because of Ross Juarez and his . . .” Mr. Preston’s lip curled in disgust. “. . . power.”
Jennie bit down hard on her anger. How could he acknowledge in one breath that a Change power had saved the entire town, and make it sound like something shameful in the next? He undoubtedly still expected her to act like a Norm whenever he was around, as the price of being the only Changed person in his elite Rangers.
“But that trick can only work once,” Mr. Preston went on. “We have to be better prepared.”
Jennie’s chair creaked as she braced for the reprimand she deserved. Maybe Mr. Preston would take over the training, and she could bury herself in lesson plans—
“Jennie, we don’t blame you. It’s only been two months since we began training like this. And so we have decided not to re-open school today.” Mr. Preston smiled at her. “We don’t want you teaching anything but fighting.”
Jennie’s stomach roiled again. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how much she wanted to be reprimanded, to be removed from battle training altogether. When she’d dreamed of being a Ranger, she’d thought only of risking her own life. Not even her most frightening experience on patrol, when teenagers had been injured fighting giant rattlesnakes, had prepared her to lead children into war.
She had to talk them out of it. “As the teacher of Las Anclas . . . I mean, speaking as the teacher and the trainer of the children, the teenagers, and the Ranger candidates . . .”
Jennie turned to Mr. Preston. “You said yourself that Ross saved us. You didn’t mention that he almost died doing it. The only reason he stayed in Las Anclas long enough to get to know us—long enough to be willing to risk his life for us—was to get an education. We’re all here today because Ross wanted to learn how to read. Do we want to become a place where that wouldn’t happen?”
The ensuing silence had a distinctly puzzled quality.
The mayor smiled. “Jennie, very well put. But you misunderstood. School will resume next week. We will rotate the job among qualified elders, until my mother is able to . . .”
Control her fire-starting Change power, Jennie thought. Would the mayor say that aloud, in front of her prejudiced husband?
“. . . return to teaching,” the mayor continued smoothly. “And Ms. Lowenstein has agreed to train the young ones. We put too much on you, Jennie. We need you to focus on being a Ranger and on training the Ranger candidates.”
Mr. Preston nodded. “Sera valued your ability to train a group. In fact, she said that despite your youth, you were the best trainer of all the Rangers. Jennie, you don’t have to worry about teaching school any more. You’re a Ranger, and that’s all you have to be.”
The entire Council nodded their approval.
Jennie should have felt honored. Instead, she felt trapped.
She loved the Rangers—she loved pushing her body to its limits—she loved the camaraderie, the jokes—she was delighted that her ex-boyfriend Indra had finally recovered from his wounds enough to at least warm up with them.
She loved the idea of being a Ranger, but there was a Sera-shaped hole in the Rangers’ drills, their camaraderie, even their jokes. When Jennie was away from the Rangers, she could imagine that Sera was out on a mission. But when Jennie was with them, she could never forget that Sera was dead.
Or that she’d died because Jennie had failed to save her.
Chapter Three. Las Anclas.
Yuki
Yuki Nakamura knelt on the beach, examining the intricate construction of twigs and pebbles and wire that Ross had assembled on the damp sand. The “artifact” gleamed in the center: a steel bolt. Ross sat cross-legged beside him, head bent, giving him no clues.
The first time Yuki had tackled the exercise, the “ruined building” had collapsed when he’d removed the second twig. Though he’d gotten better at gauging what was supporting what, in two months of prospecting lessons, he hadn’t safely extracted the bolt yet. His only consolation was that in two months of giving Ross riding lessons, horses still walked him into low branches.
But Yuki’s frustration was mingled with anticipation. Soon he’d be a full-fledged prospector, and finally—finally!—travel again.
His gaze drifted to the open sea, which he’d once sailed as the prince of a ship the size of a town. Then the Taka had been captured by pirates, leaving Yuki the sole survivor of the raft that washed ashore in Las Anclas. He’d lost everything: his home, his family, his friends, his position, even his culture. And for a long time, he’d thought he’d lost his future, too.
But Ross had offered him a new future. Yuki would never again explore the deep sea, but he’d explore the land instead. His breath caught with excitement at the thought of how close he was to once again spending every day in new territory. And he wouldn’t even have to do it alone—his boyfriend Paco had promised to come with him.
But first, he had to get that bolt.
He visualized the model as the size of a house. The twigs were beams, the pebbles bricks, the wedges of bark concrete slabs. He eased out three pebbles and a precariously balanced twig, then used them to brace a piece of bark.
Yuki bored a tunnel into the sand with his pocket knife, keeping it only large enough to fit the bolt through. The bark quivered, but nothing fell down. The last time he’d dug a tunnel, he’d hit a buried “girder” and a wall had collapsed. His heart pounding, he eased the blade up and cut out the other entrance.
He pulled the knife back, slowly removed the sand, and threaded a string loop around a stiff wire. Barely daring to breathe, he pushed the wire through the tunnel, caught the bolt in the loop, and tugged it safely through.
“Good job.”
Yuki had gotten so absorbed that he’d forgotten Ross was there. He pocketed the glasses that enabled him to see up close and wiped the sweat from his eyes.
“Seriously,” Ross added. “It took me months, too.”
“How long after that before you got to do any actual prospecting?” Yuki asked.
“I was already prospecting.”
Yuki stared at Ross, annoyed and frustrated. “You told me it was too dangerous to prospect until I could get the bolt ten times in a row!”
Ross began neatly disassembling the structure. “It is too dangerous. The guy who taught me that exercise figured if a building was going to fall on someone’s head, better mine than his.”
“His name wasn’t Mr. Alvarez, was it?” Yuki asked wryly.
Now that Yuki finally had someone trustworthy to teach him, he didn’t feel quite so bitter remembering the prospector who had taken him on as an apprentice, then drugged him, stolen everything he had, and ditched him in the desert.
Ross smiled. “I was thinking about your sea cave, Yuki.”
Yuki glanced toward the rippling sea below the cliffs, where an earthquake had exposed an underwater entrance into an ancient building. He’d extracted an artifact from it, but he’d also stirred up a blinding cloud of silt, gotten disoriented, and almost drowned.
Though Ross had picked up swimming much better than riding, he couldn’t hold his breath as long as Yuki. Ross hadn’t managed more than a glance into the cave before he’d had to surface, but he’d seen enough to call it a death trap.
“I don’t know how to prospect underwater,” Ross went on.
“So we both need to learn. We can practice in safer caves, setting stuff up for each other. Like an obstacle course.”
“That’s a good idea. Thanks.”
Ross scooped up his wires and bolt, and stood up. “Okay, see you tomorrow.”
Yuki scrambled to his feet. “Wait, what about the ruined city? You’ll take me now, right?”
Ross shook his head. “I’m going alone.”
Yuki gritted his teeth in frustration. Once again, the opportunity to leave Las Anclas and explore had been dangled in front of him, and once again, it had been snatched away. “But I got the bolt. And I wouldn’t so much as breathe on anything without your go-ahead.”
Ross twisted the bolt between his fingers. “I know that. It’s because of the singing trees.”
“What do you mean? You can control them, right? I’m not afraid.”
The afternoon sunlight illuminated the shadows around Ross’s eyes, as if he’d been up all night. “You should be.”
Ross had spoken so softly that Yuki had strained to hear him. But at his words, memories flooded Yuki’s mind:
The pop of a seed-pod, followed by the dying scream of a rabbit.
On a long patrol, his rat Kogatana had squealed a warning from the saddle. Mom shot an arrow into what looked like a shimmer of heat rising from the desert floor. It bounced off a singing tree as clear as glass. Eerie chimes rang out, and continued ringing until they were out of earshot.
After the battle, Yuki had listened incredulously to babble about Ross making a singing tree kill Voske’s soldiers; later, while walking the wall as a sentry, he’d looked out over the now-abandoned corn fields at the jagged-edged forest, black as a mussel shell, surrounding a single blood-red crystal tree. Each of those new trees had risen from the corpse of a human being wearing black.
“Hey!” came a familiar voice.
Ross spun around, his right hand flying up in a block. Then he relaxed, looking embarrassed.
Yuki’s boyfriend Paco Diaz ran up, sand flying behind his heels. Droplets of sweat gleamed on his face, emphasizing the sharpness of his bones, and glistened on his muscular arms.
“Hi, Ross,” said Paco. “Yuki, did you get the bolt yet?”
“I did. Tunneled in,” Yuki said with a grin.
Paco clapped him on the shoulder. Yuki leaned into the heat rising up from Paco’s body.
“I came to fetch you for Ranger candidate practice, Yuki.” Paco turned to Ross. “You can do the training even if you don’t plan to try out. That’s what Yuki’s doing. Why don’t you join us?”
Ross gave Paco a furtive glance. “Dr. Lee hasn’t cleared me to train yet.”
“What, still? And you plan to go into that city alone?” Yuki exclaimed.
Ross edged back. “Dr. Lee’s just being cautious. I’m fine now.”
But Yuki saw him wavering. “How much concentration does it take to use your power? Can you control those trees and fight at the same time? Anything could be in that city.”
Ross rubbed his left arm. He wore long sleeves, but Yuki had seen the scar from where Ross had cut out a shard from a crystal tree. He looked as if it still hurt him.
Finally, Ross said, “You’re right. But . . . I want . . . I need someone who’s done this with me before.”
“Prospecting?” Yuki asked, irritated. “That would be me.”
Ross shook his head. “I’ll take Mia.”
“Mia Lee?” Yuki said incredulously. “Instead of me?”
“I’ll take you next time.” Ross crammed his wires into his pockets and took off.
Yuki sighed as he and Paco headed back to town. “The first trip into dangerous, unknown territory, and he’d rather have a mechanic than the only other person in town who knows anything about prospecting.”
Paco’s slanted eyebrows flicked upward. “I wouldn’t take it personally. Ross obviously has stuff going on that he doesn’t want to talk about. At least, not in front of me.”
“Not in front of me, either.”
“Mia’s his girlfriend.” A smile—too rare these days—lit up Paco’s fox-like face. “If it was me, I’d want you.”
“And I’d want you.”
They were standing still now, gazing into each other’s eyes. If they’d been alone, they would have kissed. But Yuki hated having busybodies watching him while he was doing something intimate. Or worse, commenting. No one in Las Anclas had any proper sense of privacy. He glanced around.
An old woman using her Change power to levitate razor clams out of the sand and into her basket, a fishing boat hauling in its catch, two boys and a girl playing jump-rope, the entire Tehrani family having a picnic . . . Yuki would have to get Paco alone later.
Paco laid his hand on Yuki’s cheek. He’d been so distant and sad since the battle, when his mother Sera had been killed, that Yuki didn’t have the heart to pull away. Yuki closed his eyes, tried to forget about the nosy onlookers, and let their lips meet.
When he opened his eyes again, he had forgotten about the onlookers. The razor clam woman gave them a benevolent smile. Before she could make any embarrassing comment about how sweet they were, Yuki pulled Paco away.
As they walked on, Paco said thoughtfully, “But you’re right, Yuki. Ross can’t use his power and fight at the same time.”
“How do you know?” In the two months Yuki and Ross had been teaching each other, that morning was the first time Ross had so much as mentioned his power.
“Mia told me.” At Yuki’s surprised glance—he hadn’t known that Paco had any particular interest in Ross or friendship with Mia—Paco added, “I wanted to know more about the battle. Mia didn’t mind telling me what she saw, but she wasn’t in the right place.”
“The right place?” Yuki echoed, bewildered.
“Where my mother died.” Paco’s dark gaze was fixed on some distant point. “I wanted to know exactly how it happened. But Jennie won’t talk about it, and the other Rangers said they didn’t see who shot her.”
“Paco . . .” Yuki reached out to comfort him.
Paco stepped aside with a brusque shrug. “But it doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. Voske gave the order. That’s all I need to know.”
Before Yuki could figure out how to respond, Paco was walking again, his lips pressed tight together. As silence fell between them, Yuki thought that Ross wasn’t the only person with a lot going on that he didn’t talk about.
Chapter Four. Las Anclas.
Mia
Mia recognized Ross’s quick steps outside her cottage. He’d put away the demolition gear faster than she’d expected. She cast aside her polishing cloth and flung the door open.
“I have something for you!” Fizzing with joy, Mia made a grand gesture toward the worktable.
Ross stepped inside, brushing off cement grit from the afternoon’s explosion, then stood gazing at her gift—a steel gauntlet.
She’d measured his hand for it before the battle, but kept her progress secret as she made sure it was sturdy but flexible, strong but relatively light. She’d meant to give it some decorative inlay, but once it was done, she saw that its clean lines were what made it beautiful. She was certain that Ross would feel the same way.
She held her breath as he fitted it over his left hand and flexed his fingers experimentally. The shining steel and his brown skin set off each other beautifully, and the swell of his triceps was echoed in the curve of the armor.
It looked magnificent on him, but what did he think? She’d nervously started counting once he’d slipped it on, and an entire thirty-nine seconds had passed in dead silence.
She couldn’t stand it anymore. “Does it fit? Is it comfortable?”
“It fits perfectly.” Ross’s serious expression didn’t change as he made a fist. Though the fingers of his bare hand couldn’t close enough to make a tight fist, the thickness of the padding and metal allowed him to do so in the gauntlet.
“The bars brace your wrist,” Mia explained. “And you use the sliding
lever to lock your fingers in place.”
Ross flashed his rare grin. “Yeah, I remember from the diagram you showed me.”
His cheekbones darkened, and Mia knew exactly what he was thinking. That diagram had brought about the first time they’d ever kissed. After she’d given up on the whole idea of kissing and dating, let alone falling in love, let alone anyone falling in love with her, she’d met Ross.
If she’d drawn up a blueprint for the perfect guy, she wouldn’t have come up with anything half as wonderful as him. And he liked her. So much for everyone who’d said Mia was a weird loner who would never have a relationship with anything that didn’t run on electricity!
She took a step closer, and he pulled her in against his chest. That was another thing she wouldn’t have imagined when he’d first come to town, skittish and thin as a feral cat. Now he reached out to her, and he’d even gained a little weight. She happily snuggled in close. Her head fit against his shoulder like a ball in a socket.
“This is better than anything I imagined,” he said. She loved the way his voice rumbled through his chest. “I can’t wait to try sparring with it.”
“I wanted to test that—that is, I thought of having Jennie test it, her hands are about the same size as yours—but she was busy.”
Ever since the battle, Jennie never seemed to have any free time. But Jennie had been busy since she was six, and she’d never before been too busy to have time for Mia.
“Is Jennie . . .” Ross flicked the gauntlet’s lever off and on, testing his hand in different positions.
Mia reveled in his appreciation of its workings. But then he started moving the lever without changing the position of his fingers. Like he had something else on his mind.
“Ross?”
His glance was furtive, like the old days. “When you both asked me to the dance. Before the battle. I thought . . . I mean . . . You both liked me, right? And you didn’t mind that I like you both?”
Mia couldn’t help laughing. “It took you two months to ask that?”
Hostage Page 2
