The Acceptance (The GEOs Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  That night, when Skylar Two returned from the day’s hunt, the sun had already disappeared behind the mountains. I was careful to retire before the others to avoid landing myself in danger with my foul mood, but I found myself unable to sleep. Still, as Skylar Two entered the dwelling, I pulled the woven blanket over my shoulder and closed my eyes. Whether or not he believed that I was asleep, I wasn’t sure, but if he was suspicious in any way, he kept his concerns to himself.

  In this way, I was able to avoid conflict with him for the next two days. But, on the third day, the wild nature of the Above sabotaged me. A thunderstorm kept the hunters and gatherers from their normal tasks. That morning, Skylar woke up with an extra bounce in his step and greeted me with a wide-eyed grin when I finally stumbled from the bedroom, long after the morning meal had passed. He’d managed to wait me out, and this victory only served to encourage his mood.

  “Finally!” he said. “I wondered how long I’d have to wait for you. Now, I know why your body is so soft. You undergrounders must be very lazy.”

  I didn’t take his bait. Showing him that I was annoyed by his antics would only make it worse. Instead, I pushed past him and made my way toward the front door, but he was quick and blocked my way before I could exit.

  “You can’t ignore me forever, you know!” he called after me. When I didn’t respond, he proceeded down the steps after me.

  I sighed. He was right that I was only delaying the inevitable. I spun around to face him. “Fine. What do you want?”

  “A hello would be nice,” he said. “Or rather, customary. It’s not even nice, just a standard acknowledgement of my existence.” His calm demeanor just made my situation more annoying. I knew I was taking my frustrations out on the closest thing to a friend I had outside of the Geos, and yet I couldn’t seem to reel it in. Rather than make matters worse, I said nothing.

  “I get the feeling that this isn’t just about me,” he said, his voice subdued. “Did someone step out of line while I was on the hunt? Tell me if they did, and I’ll make sure they’re taken care of.”

  I sighed. “No, it isn’t that.” My frustration at being stuck in the caves blended with embarrassment, and I hoped he didn’t notice how my face burned. I folded my arms and stared at the ground. “The guard wouldn’t let me leave.” I kicked a weak spot in the packed dirt with my boot as I spoke, antsy and annoyed. I looked up at his face and my lip trembled.

  Skylar Two’s face softened. “Oh, yeah... I thought you knew...” his voice trailed off.

  I wanted to scream. “Thought I knew that I was your new pet?” I fired back instead, my words sharp and jagged.

  “It’s not like that,” he said, holding up his hands in a sign of submission. “Everyone from the underground goes through a quarantine of sorts.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I argued. “I’ve been all over the cave; if I’d been exposed to the Virus, everyone would be infected!”

  The corner of Skylar’s eyes wrinkled, and I could tell he was suppressing a laugh. “No, not that kind of quarantine.” He paused for a breath, and a small chuckle escaped his throat. “A tech quarantine. It’s part of your trial. Each of us goes through it at one time or another, where we’re exposed to technology beyond our own, and then quarantined to the cave. If we settle in with minimal complaint, then we belong here. But if we preoccupy ourselves with ways to leave and seek out that technology, we are banished. My father is waiting to see what you will do. That is the only way he will know if we can trust you.” It was my turn to be surprised. I couldn’t wrap my head around his intentions. I hesitated, and my skin prickled in anticipation as I collected my thoughts.

  “So, what do I do, then? Just wait around for Skylar One to give me his blessing and set me free?”

  “More or less.” Skylar Two shrugged. “Of course, it doesn’t mean you have to mope around the whole time.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you suggest?”

  The twinkle returned to Skylar Two’s eyes. That was exactly the question he’d been waiting for, apparently. He took me by the hand and said, “Come with me.”

  He led me down the staircase and across the cave to a cluster of large tents made from leather draped over wooden poles. The tent spanned enough space to fit an entire coding room, or maybe even two. Skylar Two pulled aside one of the panels to reveal a rectangular arena lit by torches on heavy glass stands. The floor was covered by deep sand, and seating areas surrounded the outer walls. It was an arena.

  “What do you think?” Skylar Two smiled, taking in my reaction. When I didn’t answer, he walked past me to a large storage closet made of bamboo. “Let’s get set up.”

  “Set up for what?” I asked.

  “This is where we train the newcomers.” He pulled the door open, revealing a closet full of tools and weapons. There were staffs, blunted spears, and knives made from wood.

  “You just leave these here? For anyone?” The idea of leaving so many potential weapons out in the open made me nervous. Back home, only the EFs were allowed to have weapons.

  Skylar Two laughed. “They’re training weapons. For children. See?” He handed me one of the knives that had looked so intimidating from a distance. Once I had it in my hands, I realized that it was made of a soft wood and its edges were dull.

  “Don’t get me wrong, some of these things can pack a punch if you don’t know what you’re doing,” he admitted as he pulled a wooden staff that came up to the height of his shoulder from the closet with ease. “Lucky for you, I know what I’m doing.” With that, he tossed the staff full-force at my chest.

  I caught it, barely. The staff was heavier than it looked and weighted at the ends. I stumbled as I tried to balance its weight.

  Skylar Two reached for another staff and flashed an impish smile.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said. I backed up, maneuvering the staff until it was even with the floor, raising it instinctively as Skylar Two approached me.

  “Good instinct!” he complimented me as I blocked his first attempt at contact. “This will be fun.”

  “You have a weird way of entertaining yourself,” I countered. He began circling me then, not unlike the beasts I’d fought in the sims during my training. I knew better than to turn my back on him. He lunged, and I blocked him once more, though this time I lost my balance in the process and nearly tumbled to the ground.

  “To each their own,” he said smugly. “My body is strong because I fight well, and I fight well because my body is strong.” With the flick of his wrist, he reached out and raked his staff across my knuckles. I recoiled, rubbing the point of impact.

  “Stings a bit at first,” he offered. “You’re lucky you’re fighting me and not one of the younger men. They’re not old enough to learn such precision.”

  “Now you’re just being a braggart.” I jumped forward, raising my staff to block his counter swing, then swept at his feet with my staff. I was faster than he’d expected, and made contact, though there wasn’t enough force behind my swing to take him off his feet.

  “Impressive,” he offered. “I didn’t know the undergrounders could fight.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t know everything about us,” I countered, both with my words and my weapon.

  We sparred all morning, and well into the afternoon. As the day went on, my appreciation for the time I’d spent training for the Acceptance grew, though Skylar Two was also careful to keep me humble, as well.

  This became our routine on days when he stayed home from the hunt, and over the course of the next month, I started walking into the arena with more confidence as I watched my soft arms transform into muscle. Training on the days he was out on the hunt gave me the added bonus of avoiding socialization with the others, too—especially Donalt. Outside of meals, which I soon broke down and joined in for, I stayed to myself or sparred with Skylar, and the time flew.

  For his part, Skylar Two was pleased to find that I was a quick
study. It wasn’t long before I moved on from wooden swords and blunted staffs to weapons made of bone and obsidian. At times, I almost seemed to match Skylar Two’s skill, until he surprised me with a move specific to the Rejs and took me to the ground. He was doing it to teach me, not to assert dominance, but there was a part of my brain that responded with a burning desire to best him in a match. It was the fire he seemed to like most.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “You’d fit in pretty well here,” he said one day after training, “if you’d let go of some of that tech.” He motioned to the water filter, which I’d begun to carry around the cave freely.

  “We’ve been through this before,” I reminded him, tracing the side of my bracelet as I did so. “I’m not staying. I’m just here until your father decides to let me go.”

  “Maybe,” he said, taking a long swig of water from his leather flask. I tried not to let my eyes linger too long as I sipped water slowly through the filter. It was becoming harder and harder for it to produce clean water, and it had started clogging.

  I sighed. I didn’t want to get into this argument. The way he looked at me had changed recently, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint when it had happened, exactly. It had come on subtly, and yet all at once. Sometimes, when I let my guard down, I wondered if he could tell that the way I looked at him had begun to change, too.

  It was no use denying what he was thinking, though. The longer I stayed, the more Skylar Two’s hope that I would stay here in the mountains with him grew.

  It wasn’t like we hadn’t danced this dance before. I’d told Skylar Two about my life in the Geos. The duty I had to my people. We may not have agreed when it came to Farrow Corp, but I thought that he’d have related more to a sense of duty. Or sacrifice for the greater good, considering his responsibility to his people as their future leader.

  “I hacked into the Acceptance,” I said, avoiding eye contact.

  “Huh?” Skylar put down his flask. “I don’t understand. Hack?”

  “The way they choose who comes to the surface,” I explained. “There’s a process, and I cheated.”

  He was taken aback, clearly. “But why—"

  “My mother is sick. We’ve talked about that before, remember?”

  He nodded, but my heart sank at the nonchalant gesture. The Rejs didn’t seem to have much fear of disease. Indeed, none of them ever seemed to become ill in any of the ways we did in the Geos.

  “She is going to die unless I win this. I wasn’t even supposed to be here. Don’t you understand? I risked my life so that I could save her. I can’t do that if I stay here.”

  When our eyes met again, I saw a new reverence for me reflected in his gaze.

  “That is something I can understand,” he said solemnly. He was silent for a long while then, staring off into space as the muscles in his jaw tensed and released. He took one last drink from his flask before twisting the lid back on and setting it aside.

  “Yeah, so, can we get back to work then?” I asked, glad to have an excuse to stop talking about my future with the Rejs. He tossed the staff that I had begun to think of as mine in my direction before retrieving his own from against the wall.

  “Can’t hog the sprout forever,” Donalt’s voice called from the doorway. I spun around, trying to hide the fact that she’d startled me behind a flat expression. ‘Sprout’ was a term they used for someone from the Geos who had recently joined the community. It indicated growth, the breaking from the underground to the surface. It also symbolized softness. To Donalt, that meant weakness. In her mouth, the term became an insult, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of a reaction. I chose instead to pretend I hadn’t recognized the teasing.

  “Hey, Donalt. Come to train with us?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” she said, smiling mischievously.

  It hadn’t taken me long to realize why Donalt saw me as such a threat. It wasn’t just that I was fresh from the Geos. Skylar Two was completely blind to it, and anyone else who may have caught onto her was too afraid to speak up, but I saw the way that she looked at him when she thought no one else was looking. She wasn’t fighting me for status among her people. She was fighting for Skylar Two’s time.

  The problem with that was, I wasn’t at all interested in taking the place she was trying to preserve for herself. No matter what feelings she thought were developing between Skylar Two and me, my place was in the Labs with my parents, my people. Maybe even with Ben. That last thought made me bite my lip. I didn’t have time to unpack everything attached to it. It didn’t matter now anyway.

  When it came down to the wire, I was here to save my mother—not to crown myself future queen of the Rejs, and not the future.

  “Only one problem,” Donalt said, smirking. “See, little sprout…” She circled me like a predator, and then said, “That staff you have? It’s mine.”

  “Come on, Donalt,” Skylar Two called in her direction. “It’s for community use and you know it.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s fine, Skylar—if she wants it, she can have it.” I walked over to Donalt, who reached for the staff expectantly. Now it was my turn to smirk. “But she’s gonna have to come get it.” I set my body in a fighting stance. Donalt glared first at me and then at Skylar Two, who rolled his eyes and sighed as he tossed his staff to her.

  “Fine,” he said, resigning himself to sitting this one out.

  Donalt didn’t waste any time chatting. She was sparring to teach me a lesson, but not in the same way as Skylar Two. This lesson was fueled purely by the need to settle a personal score. Although I walked a big walk, I really didn’t want to fight her, but I wasn’t going to let either of them know that. I had to keep up appearances if I wanted to be accepted by Skylar Two’s people, and there was no way I was going to gain their respect if I couldn’t prove myself as a survivor. A warrior. At least this is something I can relate to, I thought to myself as I dodged Donalt’s first swing. After all, fighting for status was one of the main motivators for competing in the Acceptance to begin with.

  She lunged at me again and I countered, sweeping at her legs, but it was a move she seemed to anticipate, as she pushed off of the floor, pulling her feet into the air and evading my staff as it swept through the sand. Instinctively, I recoiled, flipping the sand into her eyes. It was a disabling move that Skylar Two had taught me to tip the scales in my favor if I ever found myself battling above my skill level.

  Donalt sputtered as she stumbled back. “What the—PFFFT. ARGH!” She flew at me in a literal blind rage, which was a response that I hadn’t expected. I flung myself out of the way too late, and her staff clipped my side hard enough to send me tumbling to the ground, Ben’s comm flying from where I always kept it tucked away in a pocket of my cargo pants.

  Donalt leaned on her staff as Ben’s comm landed at her feet, and I held my breath as she bent over and recovered it from the sand.

  “Your roots are rotten, little sprout.” Donalt had nearly spat the slur. I stood, brushing myself off and hoping no one else could tell how hard I had to clench my jaw to keep from taking her bait. A small crowd had appeared behind Donalt in the doorway to watch our sparring, and all of them were watching now.

  “That’s enough, Donalt.” Skylar Two made his way across the arena and took up Ben’s comm without another word. His actions silenced the crowd, and I couldn’t help but smirk at the stunned look on Donalt’s face as he handed the technology back over to me.

  “Thanks,” I said as I pocketed the tech.

  He turned a shoulder to the crowd at the door, inching inward toward us, and lowered his voice so that only I could hear him. “What is it?” I looked into his face and saw a mix of curiosity and something very much like sadness.

  “It’s nothing,” I lied. I didn’t want to reveal to him all of my secrets. Not like this, in front of Donalt. “Just something Ben gave me.”

  “Ben Farrow?” He’d raised his voice with the question, and my eyes went wi
de. I nodded.

  Everything else happened in a flash. Skylar Two took me by the hand and pulled me through the crowd as the chaos of voices talking over one another overwhelmed me.

  “Where are we going?” I called above the roar of voices as he pulled me from the training room.

  “To see my father.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Skylar Two pulled me through the crowd, which did its best to anticipate his movements and make way before him. More than once, the crowd misjudged, and Skylar Two clipped their shoulders without even noticing it.

  “Slow… down,” I said in between staggered breaths. I was more winded from my fight with Donalt than I’d thought, and I was struggling to keep up as he pulled me across the cave, weaving in and out of the children and elderly who were tending to their normal chores.

  He didn’t respond. My heart sank, and I tugged against the ache that was growing in my shoulder.

  “Stop, you’re hurting me.” He froze, dropping my hand the second the words were out of my mouth.

  “I’m sorry.” He glanced nervously over my shoulder through the throngs of people, at Donalt, who appeared to be recruiting some of the others in her campaign against me as she followed after us.

  “What did I do?” I asked.

  “It’s not about you. At least, I hope it isn’t.” He paused long enough to give me a helpless look. “I can’t take a chance, however.” He took my hand again, this time more gently, and led me up another staircase I hadn’t noticed before, slowing just enough for me to keep pace.

  His father’s main quarters were set higher than Skylar Two’s, which was the opposite of how most of the older members of the tribe were housed in comparison to the younger ones. Priority choice, he’d explained to me once, was given to the older generations. Youth, at their peak in life, were generally situated on the higher levels, inconvenienced by the height. Skylar One, however, chose to live above the rest of his people. He said it gave him a better vantage point to look after his people. When I’d likened his home to the Greens, a shadow had fallen over his face.