Prodigy (25 page)

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I’m in my Ruby sector apartment, my head on a pillow damp with sweat, my body covered
by a thin blanket and bathed in golden light from the afternoon sun filtering in through
our windows. Ollie sleeps nearby, his enormous puppy paws resting lazily on the cool
marble tiles. I realize that this doesn’t make any sense, because I’m almost sixteen
and Ollie should be nine years old. I must be dreaming.

A wet towel touches my forehead—I look up to see Metias sitting beside me, carefully
placing the towel so water doesn’t drip in my eyes.

“Hey, Junebug,” he says with a smile.

“Aren’t you going to be late for something?” I whisper. There’s a nagging feeling
in my stomach that Metias isn’t supposed to be here. Like he’s late for something.

But my brother just shakes his head, making several chunks of dark hair fall across
his face. The sun lights up his eyes with glints of gold. “Well, I can’t just leave
you alone here, can I?” He laughs, and the sound fills me with so much happiness that
I think I might burst. “Face it, you’re stuck with me. Now eat your soup. I don’t
care how gross you think it is.”

I take a sip. I swear I can almost taste it. “Are you really going to stay here with
me?”

Metias bends down and kisses my forehead. “Forever and ever, kid, until you’re sick
and tired of seeing me.”

I smile. “You’re always taking care of me. When will you ever have time for Thomas?”

Metias hesitates at my words, and then chuckles. “I can’t keep anything secret with
you here, can I?”

“You could have told me about you guys, you know.” The words are painful for me to
say, but I’m not entirely sure why. I feel like I’m forgetting something important.
“I wouldn’t have told anyone. Were you just worried Commander Jameson would find out
and split you and Thomas into different patrols?”

Metias lowers his head, and his shoulders fall. “I never really had a reason to bring
it up.”

“Do you love him?”

I remember that I’m dreaming, and whatever Metias might say is simply my own thoughts
projected into his image. Still, I ache when he looks down and answers with a slight
nod of his head.

“I thought I did,” he replies. I can barely hear him.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. He meets my gaze with eyes full of tears.

I try to reach up and wrap my arms around his neck. But then the scene shifts, the
light fades, and suddenly I’m lying in a dim whitewashed room on a bed that isn’t
my own. Metias disappears into wisps. Caring for me in his place is Day, his face
framed by hair the color of light, his hands readjusting the towel on my forehead,
his eyes studying mine intensely.

“Hey, Sarah,” he says. He’s using the fake name he made up for me. “Don’t worry, you’re
safe.”

I blink at the sudden change in scene. “Safe?”

“Colonies police picked us up. They took us to a small hospital after they found out
who I am. I guess they’ve all heard about me over here, and it’s working out to our
benefit.” Day gives me a sheepish grin.

But this time I’m so disappointed to see Day, so bitterly sad that I’ve lost Metias
to the shallows of my dreams again, that I have to bite my lip to keep myself from
crying. My arms feel so weak. I probably couldn’t have wrapped them around my brother’s
neck anyway, and because I didn’t, I couldn’t keep Metias from floating away.

Day’s grin fades—he senses my grief. He reaches over and touches my cheek with one
hand. His face is so close, radiant in the soft evening glow. I lift myself up with
what little strength I have and let him pull me close. “Oh, Day,” I whisper into his
hair, my voice breaking with all the sobs I’ve been holding back. “I really miss him.
I miss him so much. And I’m so sorry, I am
so sorry for everything.
” I repeat it over and over again, the words I said to Metias in my dream and the
words I will say to Day for the rest of my life.

Day tightens his embrace. His hand brushes through my hair, and he rocks me gently
like I’m a child. I cling to him for dear life, unable to catch my breath, drowning
in my fever and sorrow and emptiness.

Metias is gone again. He is always gone.

IT TAKES JUNE A HALF HOUR TO FINALLY FALL BACK asleep, loaded up on whatever drugs
a Colonies nurse injected into her arm. She’d been sobbing over her brother again,
and it was like she’d fallen down a hole and crumpled in on herself, her bleeding
heart torn open for all to see. Those strong dark eyes of hers—now, their expression
was just . . . broken. I wince. Of course, I know exactly what it feels like to lose
an older brother. I watch as her eyes dance around behind closed lids, probably deep
in another nightmare that I can’t help her out of. So I just do what she always does
for me—I smooth down her hair and kiss her damp forehead and cheeks and lips. It doesn’t
seem to help, but I do it anyway.

The hospital is relatively quiet, but a few sounds form a blanket of white noise in
my head: There’s a faint whir coming from the ceiling lights, and some sort of dim
commotion on the streets outside. Like in the Republic, a screen mounted to the wall
broadcasts a stream of warfront news. Unlike the Republic, the news is peppered with
commercials the way the streets outside had been, for things that I don’t comprehend.
I stop watching after a while. I keep thinking about the way my mother comforted Eden
when he first got the plague, how she whispered soothing words and touched his face
with her poor bandaged hands, how John would come to the bedside with a bowl of soup.

I’m so sorry for everything,
June had said.

Several minutes later, a soldier opens the door to our hospital room and walks over
to me. It’s the same soldier who’d realized who I was and had us delivered to this
twenty-story hospital. She halts in front of me and gives me a quick bow. Like I’m
an officer or something. Just as surprising is the fact that she’s the only soldier
in the room with us. These guys must not see me and June as threats. No handcuffs,
not even a guard to watch our door. Do they know that we’re the ones who botched the
Elector’s assassination? If they’re sponsoring the Patriots, they’re bound to find
out sooner or later. Maybe they don’t know we worked for the Patriots at all. Razor
had
added us fairly late in the game.

“Your friend is stable, I presume?” Her eyes rest on June. I just nod. Best if no
one here figures out that June is the Republic’s beloved prodigy. “Given her condition,”
the soldier adds, “she’ll need to stay here until she’s well enough to move around
on her own. You’re welcome to stay with her in here, or DesCon Corp would be happy
to sponsor an additional room for you.”

DesCon Corp—more Colonies lingo I don’t understand. But far be it from me to start
questioning the source of their generosity. If I’m famous enough over here to get
star treatment in a hospital, then I’ll take it for all it’s worth. “Thanks,” I reply.
“I’m fine staying in here.”

“We’ll have an extra bed brought in for you,” she says, motioning toward the room’s
empty space. “We’ll come check on you again in the morning.”

I go back to my vigil over June. When the guard doesn’t leave, I look up at her and
raise my eyebrows. She turns red. “Anything else I can do for you?”

She shrugs it off and tries to look nonchalant. “No. I just . . . so, you’re Daniel
Altan Wing, eh?” She says my name like she’s trying it on for size. “Evergreen Ent
keeps printing stories about you in their tabs. The Republic Rebel, the Phantom, the
Wild Card—they probably come up with a new name and photo for you every day. Say you
escaped a Los Angeles prison all by yourself. Hey, did you really date that singer
Lincoln?”

The idea is so ludicrous that I have to laugh. I didn’t know Colonians kept up with
the Republic’s government-appointed propaganda singers. “Lincoln’s a little old for
me, don’t you think?”

My laugh breaks the tension, and the soldier laughs along with me. “Well, this week
you are. Last week Evergreen Ent reported that you’d dodged all the bullets from a
Republic firing squad and escaped your execution.” The soldier goes back to laughing
again, but I fall silent.

No, I didn’t dodge any bullets. I let my older brother take them for me.

The soldier’s laugh trickles away awkwardly when she sees my expression. She clears
her throat. “As for that tunnel you two came through, we’ve sealed it up. Third one
we’ve sealed in a month. Every now and then Republic refugees come in just like you
did, you know, and the people living in Tribune have gotten really tired of dealing
with them. No one likes civilians from an enemy territory suddenly taking up residence
in one’s hometown. We usually end up kicking them back over the warfront. You’re a
lucky one.” The soldier sighs. “Back in the day, this all used to be the United States
of America. You know that, yes?”

My quarter pendant suddenly feels heavy around my neck. “I know.”

“Well, do you know about the floods? Came fast, in less than two years, and wiped
out half of the low-lying south. Places Reps like you have probably never even heard
of. Louisiana, gone. Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Carolinas, gone. So fast
you’d swear they never existed in the first place, at least if you couldn’t still
see some of their buildings peeking out far off in the ocean.”

“And that’s why you guys came here?”

“More land in the west. You have any idea how many refugees there were? Then the west
built a wall to keep the easterners from overcrowding their states, from the top of
the Dakotas down through Texas.” The soldier slams one fist into the palm of her other
hand. “So we had to build tunnels to get in. There used to be thousands of them back
when the migration was at its peak. Then the war started. When the Republic started
using the tunnels to launch surprise assaults on us, we sealed them all off. The war’s
been going on for so long that most people don’t even remember that the fight’s about
land. But when the floodwaters finally settled, things over here stabilized. And we
became the Colonies of America.” She says this with her chest puffed out. “This war
won’t go on for much longer—we’ve been winning for a while now.”

I remember Kaede telling me that the Colonies were winning the war when we first touched
down in Lamar. I hadn’t thought too much of it then—after all, what’s one person’s
assumption? Rumor? But now this soldier’s saying it like it’s the truth.

Both of us pause as the commotion outside the building gets louder. I tilt my head.
There have been crowds of people coming and going from the hospital ever since we
got here, but I hadn’t thought about it. Now I think I hear my name. “Do you know
what’s going on out there?” I ask. “Can we move my friend to a quieter room?”

The soldier crosses her arms. “Want to see all the commotion for yourself?” She gestures
for me to get up and follow her.

The shouting outside has reached a thunderous pitch. When the soldier swings the balcony’s
doors open and leads us out into the night air, I’m greeted by a gust of icy wind
and a huge chorus of cheers. Flashing lights blind me—for a second all I can do is
stand there against the metal railings and take in the scene. It’s some insanely late
hour of the night, but there must be hundreds of people below our window, oblivious
to the snow-packed ground. All of their eyes are turned up to me. Many of them hold
up homemade signs.
Welcome to our side!
one says.

The Phantom Lives,
says another.

Take Down the Republic,
says a third. There are dozens of them.
Day: Our Honorary Colonian! Welcome to Tribune, Day! Our home is your home!

They know who I am.

Now the soldier points at me and smiles for the crowd. “This is Day,” she shouts.

Another eruption of cheers. I stay frozen where I am. What’re you supposed to do when
a bunch of people are yelling your name like they’re completely cracked? I have no
goddy clue. So I raise my hand and wave, which brings their shrieks to a higher pitch.

“You’re a celebrity here,” the soldier says to me over the noise. She seems to be
much more interested in this than I am. “The one rebel the Republic can’t seem to
get their hands on. Trust me, you’ll be plastered all over the tabs by morning. Evergreen
Ent is going to be dying to interview you.”

She keeps talking, but I’m not paying attention to her anymore. One of the people
holding up signs has caught my attention. It’s a girl with a scarf wrapped around
her mouth and a hoodie covering part of her face.

But I can tell it’s Kaede.

My head feels light. Instantly I think back on the blinking red alarm down in the
bunker, warning June and me of someone approaching the hideout. I recall the person
I thought had been following us down the Colonies’ streets.
Was it Kaede?
Does that mean that other Patriots are here too? She’s holding up a sign that’s almost
lost in the sea of others.

The sign says:
You have to go back. Now.