I get up eventually, and the dog shadows me, flicking his pricked ears back and forth behind him as he listens to things I can’t hear. I begin to make my way further into the forest, and he whines. His whine becomes a bark when I continue walking, and I stop and turn to look at him. He’s stood watching me, his body still, as though he’s waiting for me to do something.
“What?”
He cocks his head to the side again and nods at me impatiently. I have no idea what this means. He circles quickly and waits again, and I make back towards him to see what he wants. As soon as I take a step, he spins and bounds off through the forest, back towards the river. He stops after six or seven paces, looking over his shoulder to see if I’m still there. I could be wrong, but I think he wants me to follow him.
“I’m not going back in that water.”
He barks, and I think we’re on the same page. I trudge after him, not particularly enjoying the way that my boots are still squishy and damp inside. After an hour we’re back by the river, and the water is even more ferocious than it was yesterday. Good thing I came through when I did, because the brickwork aqueduct is no longer visible, and the seething vein of water floods and rushes straight over it, bursting through the fence. A shiver runs the length of my body, and the dog makes a hushed yip.
“I don’t know what you’re so nervous about,” I tell him. He wags his tail and starts off away from the fence, following a trail that hugs the side of the river. It looks like a real pathway, although it’s overgrown and difficult to navigate in places. I constantly have to clamber over fallen logs and fight my way through overgrown plants with long, vibrant green fronds. The dog patiently waits for me.
By midday the fact that I haven’t eaten or drunk anything in a while begins to become a problem. I have no clue what I’m going to do about this. There’s no food out here but at least there’s water. I stop every twenty minutes, cupping my hands gingerly into the raging river that we follow, drinking draught after draught until my stomach feels like it’s going to split. This takes away the hunger pains for a while, but it’s not long before they’re replaced by a whole new kind of pain.
The sweating comes on hard, and I can feel the buds of my perspiration pushing their way out of every single pore on my body. My skin feels irritated and flushed. About an hour after the sweating starts, I begin to throw up. The experience is new, painful and violent, and it goes on and on until I feel like I’m going to pass out. The dog comes and stands by me dutifully as I kneel in the dirt, staring at the filthy half crescents of muck under my nails. I can tell he wants to get moving but I can’t. I feel like I’m dying.
I roll onto my back and pluck out one of my daggers from my knife belt because it’s comforting to have it in my hand. I know its weight. I know the texture of its handle beneath my fingertips. It’s the only thing familiar to me in this alien world. I stare up at a chink of blue sky that’s visible through the forest canopy, waiting for my body to stop trembling. I lie there for a long time before the dog whines softly and then sinks down beside me, pressing his warm, musky body against mine. I go to sleep thinking of Cai.
RYKA
Hot. Something feels blisteringly hot, too close to my face. I sit up quickly and a wave of vertigo punches through my body. Without a doubt, if there was anything left inside me I would throw it up. The dog is gone. I’m not where I fell asleep anymore, either. I’m sitting on some sort of blue foam mat, and there’s a balled-up wad of dark material behind me where my head was resting. A fire crackles about a metre away from me. I shuffle away from it, worried by its proximity.
“What’s the matter? Don’t like being warm?” a voice, that voice, asks me. I try to focus my eyes in the dark, but they’ve been blinded by the bright flames and it takes me a second to locate him. The blond boy leans against a rotten tree stump on the other side of the fire, and the dog is nestled into his side. Traitor.
“Of course I like being warm. I’ve just never been this close to a fire before,” I grumble.
“Never?” He seems incredulous.
“No. The Sanctuary has strict rules about fire. Too easy for it to get out of control. It could take out the whole city in one go.”
He seems to think about this. His face is a little rosy from sitting too close to the flames. I take the opportunity to make a quick study of him, looking for his tells. The way he holds himself is confident and a little cocky, even just sitting there. His muscles are tensed in a way that suggests he’s not as comfortable as he’s pretending he is, though. He’s still wearing his knife belt, although he must have taken mine off me because it’s bundled up neatly at my side. I was wrong before; there isn’t much boy left in him. He’s at that almost grown stage where all he needs to do is fill out a little more and he’ll be worryingly big. Fat chance I’m admitting this to him, though.
“How did you find me?” I ask him.
“Jada,” he replies, scrubbing his hand against the back of the dog’s neck. The dog perks up his ears, recognising his name.
“You sent a dog to spy on me.” This is a ridiculous concept, but that’s what it seems like he’s saying.
“I couldn’t cross the river for a while. She could. I knew she’d find you. She’s good at finding people.”
“She?” I don’t know why, but I’d never even questioned the fact that the dog was male.
The blond guy stretches his legs out and crosses his ankles. “I’ve had her since she was a puppy.”
“Oh.” Now would probably an appropriate time to ask what he plans on doing with me, but instead I slump back against the blue mat and stack my hands across my stomach. It feels tender and sore.
We remain there in silence with the fire snapping and sending embers skirling off into the night air. They twist and spiral upwards around one another, burning orange and yellow, and watching them makes my breath catch in my throat. After a while the blond guy says, “I’m leaving early in the morning. If you want to come with me, you should get some rest. Go back to sleep.”
“Who says I want to go with you?”
The blond guy chuckles and tosses another log onto the fire, making it spit. “You’re right. You were doing so well on your own. I shouldn’t have made any assumptions.”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
“You’re really hostile, you know that?”
I have no idea what he means. All I know is that I don’t like his attitude or the way he looks at me with that smirk on his face. I roll onto my side, away from him and away from the fire. “I’m getting some sleep.”
“Good. If you decide to come with me in the morning, I can take you to someone who can help.”
I bend my arm under my head and use it as a pillow, but it’s really not that effective. Despite the mat, I can tell this is going to be just as uncomfortable as last night. “Help with what?”
He pauses for a long second before he says, “With getting that thing off your neck.”
My body tenses and I pull in a sharp breath. “You know what it is?”
“Oh, I know what it is. And I know you really mustn’t have wanted it on you anymore to have torn it off.”
If I had any energy, I might have told him that it wasn’t my choice. Every part of my body hurts, though, and talking about how my halo came to be ripped from me will only serve to make my heart hurt, too. I don’t go to sleep; I just lie there on my side listening to the boy and the dog shift quietly. As I grow drowsy, an impulsive part of me forces me to ask, “What’s your name?”
I think he’s fallen asleep for a moment, but then he says, “Ryka. My name is Ryka.”
“Huh.” Ryka feels too short. He is so close to my age and he’s wearing a knife belt. Seems to me he should be a Falin of some Household, and a rich one by the looks of his blades. But he’s clearly not. I chew on my thumbnail, wondering where he’s come from and whether he’s grown up his whole life without a halo.
“You feel like telling me who you are?” he asks, his voice low.
I try to figure out if I even know the answer to that myself. “I don’t really have a name.”
“What? But…you must be called something. How do people usually address you?”
“They don’t.”
Ryka sighs, loud enough to make Jada whine. “You’re being difficult.”
“I―ugh—” I hold my hands up to my face and flex them out. My knuckles are caked with dried-on blood and swollen, which is no doubt why it hurts so much to move them. “I am Falin Kitsch.”
“Wow. Clinical. I’m not calling you that.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Come on, you have to think of something shorter. I’m not referring to you as hey, you all day tomorrow.”
I squint up into the sky where one of the stars, a distant silver pinprick, looks to be moving ever so slowly across the bruised blue of the heavens. “Kit, then," I say. “I guess you can call me Kit.”
CHOKEHOLD
I wake up to find Ryka pouring water over the burning embers of the fire and Jada licking furiously at an empty wooden bowl. Her tongue makes wet tearing noises as she goes to work. My clothes feel damp and cold, and my bones ache almost as much as yesterday. Almost.
I’m trying to work out how I’m supposed to retract my previous statement―the one about not wanting to go with Ryka―whilst retaining my dignity, when I see it. The satchel. The one Penny gave me. It sits on the ground next to a more rugged-looking black bag, which was definitely designed for hiking and running. My heart does a small summersault when I realise Cai’s holostick is probably still in the water flask.
“That’s mine,” I say, pointing at the satchel. My first words of the day are broken, my voice cracking from disuse. Ryka looks at me sharply.
“I don’t know about that.”
“It is. I lost it when I was in the river.”
“Exactly. You lost it. I found it.”
My face reddens as I scramble to my feet, suddenly very, very awake. “Give it to me.”
Ryka laughs, flashing white, straight teeth. “I don’t think so. That’s not how things work out here.”
“I don’t care how things work out here. I want my bag back.”
“Why? What’s so important? Are you partial to sodden bread and water-logged cheese?”
My urge to scream is incredibly strong, and I have to fix my jaw to stop myself. “I just want the water flask.”
Jada looks up from her bowl and studies Ryka and me with inquisitive eyes. It’s like she can sense that I’m about to lose my temper and fly at him.
“Just the water flask?” he asks. There’s a small smile ticking at his mouth.
“Yes.”
Ryka makes a show of slowly stooping down and collecting up the satchel. The leather is still soaking wet, and water drips from it when he picks it up. The small black water flask is the very first thing he pulls out. “You mean this?”
“Yes. Give it to me.” I lunge forward and try and snatch it from him, but he’s quick, just like I thought he would be. He twists his body around so I can’t reach the flask and a wicked smile breaks out across his face. He opens it without taking his eyes off me, and pulls out the tiny piece of metal and plastic. For a moment I’m so relieved that it wasn’t damaged in the water that I feel like I’m choking. Ryka pops the lid back onto the water flask and then holds it out to me. The holostick remains gripped firmly in his other hand.
“Here you are. One water flask.”
This is just too much. I may have only just woken up, and my body may be stiffer than it ever has been before, but I somehow find it in me to dive for my knife belt and snag one of my daggers. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting this, because Ryka’s smile wavers a little before he slips the holostick into his pocket and plucks out one of his own knives. A narrow stiletto blade, four inches long and beautifully sharp. A puncturing blade. It shines like molten silver.
“I guess it’s time we got this out of the way,” he tells me.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re a girl walking around with a knife belt like it belongs to you. Some people might consider that asking for trouble.”
“It does belong to me. And I’m not asking for trouble. I’m asking for what belongs to me,” I snap. I drop down so that my centre of gravity is lower and flick my dagger over in my hand so the spine presses flat against my forearm.
“C’mon, Kit. Who did you steal them from?”
“I didn’t steal anything. These daggers were given to me by the Sanctuary municipality in recognition of my fiftieth match win. They gave me some throwing blades in recognition of my hundredth but I lost them in the river.”
Ryka grins, dropping into a wide guard stance I’m not familiar with. He holds his knife like it’s an extension of his body, a part of him. “I almost believed you before, but now I know you’re lying. Even those heartless bastards in Lockdown wouldn’t put a girl in the arena. And fifty wins? Should have said five. That would have been unbelievable enough.”
I growl at him, tightening my grip around the dagger handle. If he doesn’t believe me then that’s his problem. But I’m getting that holostick back, one way or another. He’s too busy grinning at me to see what I’m doing with my feet. I angle my back leg so that it’s turned at a forty five degree angle to my body― a good, solid position to ground me. It only takes a slight lunge and I’m right up close. I keep my back foot planted and kick swiftly upwards with my front leg, feeling the energy twist from the floor through my body, travelling out when I make contact with the heel of his palm. His arm flies back and he lets go of his stiletto, which arcs upwards into the air before pivoting gracefully and falling point down. The knife strikes vertically and buries itself an inch in the dirt between us. Closer to me than him. I bend at the waist, never taking my eyes off him, and I snatch it up, sliding it into one of the free loops on my belt.
“I take it this is how things work out here, Ryka? You lost something. I found it. That makes it mine, right?”
Ryka’s face is very different to how it was a minute ago. His liquid brown eyes are wide and round, and his smile seems to have vanished altogether. He must have thought I would start slashing wildly just because I had sharpened steel in my hand. But why dirty my equipment when my feet are just as good a weapon as anything else?
“You’d better give me back that knife,” he tells me.
I curl my lips in a way that I think mirrors his smug smile from before. It feels good, and I can almost understand why he was doing it. “I don’t think so.”
A muscle jumps at Ryka’s jaw, and he runs his hand back through the bright blond hair that’s fallen loose from his ponytail. When he sweeps it out of his face, I catch a glimpse of the markings on his forearm again, a stack of evenly spaced black lines disappearing up underneath his shirtsleeve.
“Don’t get cocky,” he says. “Just because you surprised me doesn’t mean you’re a knife fighter. Now give it back.”
“Give me back the holostick.”
Ryka shoves his thumbs through the loops on his knife belt. I guess everyone that wears one everywhere in the world must do it. “No.”
I shrug my shoulders. “Well, you’re not likely to get this pretty piece of silver back then, are you?” I trace my thumb over the warm hilt of the knife, watching Ryka flinch as I do.
His shoulders tense, and even though his eyes are locked on mine I know what’s coming. When he leaps forward, a double-edged dagger of his own suddenly in his hands, I have already dodged to the side. There’s a cold fury to the way he snakes after me, like he’s angry I was prepared for him. He strikes out with his dagger and I duck low, hearing the metal whistle through the air. I drop and roll backwards, righting myself into a crouch. I balance with a hand lightly resting on the dirt and the other one held out, point first. A warning. Baring my teeth. If he comes any closer, I’ll strike.
Ryka blows out a frustrated breath and steps an inch closer, daring me. I explode up from the ground, but clearly n
ot how he expects me to. I lean my body weight on my right side, my strong side, making him think that’s where I’ll be moving. A small glimmer of a smile flashes over his face when he jumps to the left, thinking he’s outsmarted me. But that’s where I meet him. My body slams into his and we fall backwards, landing on Ryka’s bag and the satchel.
His boots kick up clouds of acrid dust from the charred remains of the fire. He shoves me roughly with his free hand, pushing me away. I can tell he’s not using all his strength with me, though. That’s a mistake. He’s quick, sure, but I’m quick, too. If he considered me a real threat even for a second, he would be using his strength against me. In the arena it would be the only thing between winning and dying a brutal death. His lack of conviction that I’m half the fighter I say I am makes me see red, and I decide to teach him a lesson. I whip my body around while he’s still scrabbling to get up, and I hook my legs around his neck.
Before he can react, or slip out of the hold, or even blink, I tighten my thighs and squeeze. I’ve killed someone like this before. Admittedly the crowd was displeased―you are technically supposed to overcome your opponent with your knives―but there are no set rules. And like I said, when it’s a matter of life and death, winning or losing, you should always use your strengths to overcome your opponent.
Ryka knows he’s in trouble. He reaches up and tries prising my legs free from his throat but it’s too late for that. I could probably sit back and relax until he passes out, but I don’t. I’m still polluted with this ridiculous anger, so I lean forward and nick his forearm instead―just a small cut, but it has a purpose. It tells him that I’m in the position of power right now, and if I wanted to, I could easily do a lot worse. When I unravel my legs from around him, Ryka pulls in a wheezing gasp and rolls away from me, clutching at his throat.
Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) Page 7
