by Stacey Mac
“Tessa? Jesus Christ. What happened? What happened to you?”
“Hey,” I say. “Can I stay with you?”
He swears, his eyes looking me over quickly, and then says, “Help me take her to the infirmary.”
“Can’t. She got to go into holdin’. We’ll get a medic to see her once she’s locked down nice and tight.”
“Jesus fuck,” Dean spits, and then I’m being lifted off the ground.
I turn my head and find it against Dean’s chest, and it feels exactly as it should.
I think we’re moving, I don’t know. “Tessa, don’t close your eyes, okay? Someone needs to check on you first.”
I open them, and see that he isn’t looking at me, but forwards, determined.
“I missed you,” I tell him sleepily, the way a child says goodnight. My eyelids droop one final time. I hear him say “You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
And I am swallowed. Down I go.
*
I have dreams that I’m falling and falling and falling. They make me twitch and jump but never quite bring me back to the surface. I don’t feel fear, or doom. I am invincible. My stomach turns sickeningly through the freefall, but I only wait patiently, limply, to reach the bottom, which never comes.
When I do wake up, it’s confusing. I’m alone in a tiny, dark, concrete room, and for a second I think I’m home in my concrete room. But the cot that I’m lying on has no mattress, just a blanket folded over on itself, and the walls don’t have windows. The door next to my head has a faint, glowing outline. Daylight. It was dark when I reached Resolute, I must have slept all night.
I am honest-to-god in Resolute. Last week, I had never in my life stepped outside the Galore boundary. Now I am fifty miles away, in a whole other sector.
And a prisoner.
I sit up slowly, gasping at all the kinds of pain that strike me in so many areas. I swing my legs around slowly and allow my feet to find the floor. I stretch my arms experimentally, and then my legs. Someone has removed my parka, and had bundled it under my head as I’d slept. I lift my shirt slightly and check my skin, then I pull up the legs of my pants, too, and balk at the sight of my rainbow skin. They blossom with bruises of varying age; yellow and green all the way through to purple. Having said that, other than a few scratches and bruising, it looks as though I am mostly unharmed.
But holy fuck, does it hurt. Every part of me aches. Layers of it, coming in waves, again and again and again.
The door is locked when I test it. Figures. I find a jug of water on the floor, chilled and heavenly. I down the lot. Chugging, I think it’s called. Some of the water dribbles down my chin and into the neckline of my shirt and I couldn’t care less, because this water is quite possibly from the same pool that god himself bathes in.
I spend the next hour lying down, waiting patiently as the gallon of water works its way through my system. I imagine it spreading within the maze of my veins, healing all the damage I’ve done, renewing me from the inside out. The headache recedes slowly at first, and then all at once.
I don’t hear a thing from the other side of the door. I am in no hurry to, either. I recall the fronters at the boundary last night, yelling for me to kneel when they heard I was from Galore. I don’t think the Resolutes will kill me (the weakness in this statement doesn’t escape me), but there is a very valid chance that they will release me back into the wild. Back into the mouth of the same monster I’ve only just narrowly escaped, and that is as good as shooting me.
I’m placing all of my bets with Dean. I’m betting on his sway, on whether he has any leverage to convince them to let me jump.
The truth, and I tell you as I realise it myself: I don’t care about Resolute, or about jumping. What I really want, what I need, is him. I find myself in a very large world where the only friend, the only family I can hope to have, is here, with a foreign militia.
That is why I’m here.
Footsteps approach now. Boots hit the floor beyond the door with purpose, coming closer. The door handle rattles, turns, and then the door swings slowly inwards.
The light bursting inside makes me sit bolt upright, and I squint painfully.
“Finally, she wakes.”
My eyes don’t adjust right away, but I smile in his direction. Dean. Thank god. Just Dean. “Morning.”
“Afternoon, actually,” he says, and I hear a smile in his voice. He pushes the door behind him, leaving it slightly ajar, so that the light, which seems to be coming from a violently fluorescent solar lamp, is dimmed. He steps in front of me and squats, so that I’m looking down on him.
And I see him properly. His eyelids are darkly shadowed, as though he hasn’t slept in a few days, and the tip of his nose is bright red with cold. I retract my fingers when they automatically reach out to warm it.
His half-smile is guarded, reading me. “Don’t take this wrong, but you look like shit.”
I grin. “So do you.”
“Yeah, well,” one hand scrubs down his face, “girl problems, you know.”
I do know. I’ve been mostly one big, fat problem for him from the day he met me. Constantly blundering, asking for favours, and then allowing him to leave Galore after he’d told me he loved me. And now I’ve stumbled into his sector, causing more problems. So I get it. I get it if he doesn’t want this to be his problem. But there are a few broken parts inside of me, and they need someone like him to string them together. And despite all the not-knowing, I lean forward tentatively, and wrap my arms around his neck, letting my head rest against his shoulder.
I don’t have to wait at all. His arms wrap around my waist instantly, and with the momentum the rest of my body slides from the cot so that I’m kneeling with him on the ground, holding on for my life, and crying into his shirt.
One of his hands rubs circles into my back, and he kisses my hair, sighing loudly, but not impatiently. He’s tired.
I wipe my nose with the sleeve of my shirt and pull away. Dean looks concerned as he guides me back to a sitting position on the cot. “You okay?”
I nod, trying to smile casually, and failing. I push the hair out of my eyes, but my fingers get caught in the feral knots that have tangled there, and I suddenly feel self-conscious. I have to look dreadful. I definitely smell dreadful.
“Tess, what are you doing here?” Dean asks finally, having waited for me to gather myself.
And I tell him. I tell him about the contribution trouble, and my Dad’s old gun. I tell him about how the fronters came to my house, but I don’t tell him everything about what happened there. I tell him that I ran, and that I killed a fronter. I explain that I had nowhere else to go, no one else who could help. And I tell him about how desperately I’d needed the help. The contaminated water and the taproot. And finally, finally, finding him.
He stays quiet throughout, now sitting close beside me, and looks ahead, thinking. I watch him close his eyes briefly when I tell him how I’d fired the gun, and he leans his head forwards on his hands.
“I know that I don’t really have the right to ask you for something else,” I tell him finally, my tone careful, “but I’m sorry, for what I did…when you left.”
He nods, knowing what I mean. We aren’t good at sharing feelings, Dean and I; the conversation always punctuated.
“Also, I really fucking suck at being a vagrant.”
“I did notice,” he mutters with a small grin.
“I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to be in Galore, even if I could. Once I started running, the only place I could think of was with you. You are the only one I have left who is worth hiking blindly for.”
He sits up slowly and looks at me then, his eyebrows furrow, dubious, “What about your parents?”
One of the broken pieces flutters up from my chest and forms a lump that my voice has to squeeze around, but still, I fight on a smile, tinged with desolation. I shake my head, as more tears amass. “It’s just you now. Sorry.”
&nbs
p; Dean’s expression flattens. His green eyes become tight as he holds my face in one of his hands, wiping the moisture away with his thumb. “I’m sorry, too,” he says, like he has something to be sorry about.
We stare at each other for a little while longer, and it really becomes too much. I’m not good at this, the emotional upheaval. I’m also not good at having it witnessed.
I know what Dean is thinking, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I would love to avoid. He’s counting all the ways I’ve been so nearly ruined, and all the things that might yet succeed in doing so: my parents are dead, my home is gone and I’ve murdered a man. But I don’t want to be his problem to fix. I don’t want him to worry about his pitiful, weakened, female.
I don’t want him to think at all.
I lean forward, and place my lips carefully on his, testing. When he doesn’t pull away, a put my hands in his hair and press harder against him, and his lips finally move underneath mine.
When we break apart, he grins, letting his entire body sigh, as though he’s finally put down something that was too heavy to carry. “I missed you.”
I smile. Unwilling to break eye contact for once, I say: “I missed you, too, trainer.”
He rolls his eyes. “How do you feel?”
“Rubbish,” I exhale. As we speak my energy is fading. I could easily sleep again.
“A medic checked you over last night while you were sleeping. Other than exhaustion and dehydration, you’re okay. Your feet look like they’ve been cooked, though, and there’s a minor infection on your neck, from those scratches.” His eyes drop to my collarbone as he says this, searing into a point on my skin.
It takes me a few seconds to figure it out. The scratches have to have come from that perverted fronter, back in Galore. A swift memory surfaces of his hands around my neck, thrusting my chin back, and then biting down into the skin as I heaved him off me before he could… do anything more.
“It was those fronters that came for the contribution.”
The question in his expression turns to stone, his hands clench on the cot. “They put their hands on you?”
Did they ever. “Yeah, well, Galore fronters aren’t known for their manners,” I shrug. I’m not willing to go further into this line of questioning. “More importantly, do you know where my citizenship status is at? Am I being executed at dusk, or…?”
Successfully side-tracked, Dean grimaces. “We don’t execute people in Resolute, unless they’re attacking us.”
“What?” I splutter, “No one? Ever?”
“None that I know of. Sometimes the council exiles people, but that ain’t happen often.”
I sigh. “Are they going to let me stay?” It sounds feeble, and I don’t like it: the begging. Pride isn’t something I can afford anymore.
Dean’s eyes squeeze shut again as his hand scrubs over his face. “They won’t make a decision until you’re interviewed. I’ve kept some of the council members up half the night trying to talk ’em into letting you jump, but they’re paranoid.”
“Why?” I ask, though I can guess.
“Resolute officially renounced the alliance with Galore.”
Nope, didn’t guess that. “They what?”
“The council suspected that Galore were planning something big. That they have been for a few years. That’s why we came to Galore, Tessa. This year, and the year before. We were gathering information, clues that Snare is planning a mass attack on the other sectors, and we were right.”
I’ve put this much together myself, and I wouldn’t call it a big deal. In fact, Snare was rather open about his plans to squash Scarce, what with the child soldiers and deploying the majority of the population. The extra ammo that Dean found was a surprise, but this is war. War needs guns and bullets, and then more bullets and guns.
I shrug at him now. “Snare is always planning attacks on Scarce.”
Dean shakes his head. “He ain’t planning to attack just Scarce.”
“You guys think he’s coming for you.” I’m not asking.
“We know he is.”
I frown, splutter. “What? But, why? Resolute has nothing to do with the feud.”
Before anymore can be explained, the door is pushed back on its hinges once again. This time, a woman walks through.
She’s tall and slender, with midnight skin so dark it makes her eyes and teeth flash with this beautiful brightness. Her hair, a wiry, crinkling mess, has been gathered high on her head, stretching the skin of her temples to show taught, pulsing veins. She wears a pair of fatigues, and oddly, an offensively bright, tie-dyed shirt that says, ‘Spiritual Healing’.
“Oh, you’re awake. Good,” she says, her face emotionless.
“Tessa, this is Rooks. She’s been looking in on you.”
I tell her thanks, with honesty.
“Yeah, well, thank him. I was under duress.”
Dean rolls his eyes, and moves away from the cot.
Rooks takes a step towards me, taking a rusted wristwatch from her pants pocket. Her fingers close around my wrist and press against my veins. “How you feeling? Light-headed? Nauseous?”
“Tired,” I tell her, slumping. “And…hungry. Really hungry.”
Dean jerks oddly at my words, “Shit. Yeah, I’ll get you something.”
“Good one, Einstein,” Rooks mutters.
Dean scowls at her as he hurries from the room. Before he leaves he looks back at me, and I raise an eyebrow at him. Silently, I tell him that this conversation isn’t over.
“Well,” Rooks says now, moving my chin out of the way to better examine my neck. “I hope your boyfriend was worth almost getting yourself killed. A real-life Romeo, that one. Forgets the food for the starving girl.”
“He’s not so bad,” I tell her tiredly. I yawn.
“Keep your head still.”
I do.
She clucks her tongue and releases me. “I washed those infections with antibiotic wipes last night, but they’ll have to be dressed until the inflammation clears. Another couple of days out there and you’d have been dead from blood poisoning.”
“I’d be dead earlier than that.” My stomach gives a timely grumble.
“You ain’t eating much today. Just nibbles while your body adjusts. Got it?”
“Yes, Tr −. Yes.”
“I’ll get you some more water in a minute. But now, I need you to strip down.”
“What?”
She huffs impatiently. “Strip down. I have to check you over for infection, bites, swelling and whatnot.”
I am pulling my arm through the hole of my shirt when Dean walks back in. He is holding a yellowed plate with some sort of cooked grain on it. Even this makes me salivate.
His eyes go to my stomach, which is showing and he says, “Should I come back?”
“Yes, idiot!” Rooks growls, and slams the door in his face.
Despite myself, my filthy clothes, my hunger, I laugh.
*
Dean apparently has a shift that he has to get to. Rooks reminds him by means of yelling at him through the closed door. He ends up leaving my meal at the foot of the door.
“Tessa, I’ll be back when I can,” he calls to me before he leaves, reluctance tinting his voice. I hear him huff a sigh as his boot-steps trail away.
When the examination is done, Rooks leaves me alone to redress, only returning once more to hand me the hot plate, and the water she’d promised.
The rest of the afternoon is spent in the same solitude, fading in, fading out, surfacing and sinking over and over. And when I surface, I think.
I think about a bunker, full of artillery. I think of an Arena filled to the brim with triple the amount of graduates. I think of the haste in which the Resolutes left Galore, in the dead of night, and I think of the quiet cover-up that ensued in the days that followed. I think of the executions, one after the other, falling, falling. Red seeps into snowy white. And finally I think of a skeleton train that might carry me far from any place.
Since obviously, none are safe.
Chapter Twenty-seven
A knock at the door alerts me to the arrival of two Resolute fronters. One of them is unfamiliar to me, and the other, is Dean. They step over the threshold, one after the other, and the fronter I don’t know asks me to stand and follow them.
I give Dean a nervous glance, and his gaze holds mine for second. He silently tells me to do what I’m told, to not make a fuss.
The older fronter leads me out of my room and down a narrow, rabbit-warren hallway, and Dean trails close behind me. I long to reach out a hand to his, or even to turn and read his expression, seek reassurance, but I don’t. I feel that I should be careful.
Our escort pushes against the door ahead, and we step out into the cold night air.
I grit my teeth against the biting chill, zipping my jacket up to my throat. There are a few fires in the distance. I can see the illuminated smoke spiralling skyward beyond some dark structures. Other than that, this part of Resolute is in darkness, and I’m being lead blind through it.
We reach what looks like a deteriorating chapel. There is one in Galore just like it. Paint peels from the rafters and boards. I imagine that it had stained glass windows at one point, but they’ve since been boarded shut.
The fronter stops before stepping onto the narrow steps. “Wait here.”
I watch his bald head disappear through the door.
A breath, so close that it tickles my jaw, makes me jump.
“Don’t lose your temper, Tess.” Dean whispers to me. “Just listen, and then answer, got it?”
I nod shakily.
The door ahead opens, and the unknown fronter leans out of it, gesturing me forward.
I tell myself not to show these people that I’m afraid. I am not afraid of them, after all, only afraid of their decision.
I stand straighter and follow the fronter into the chapel.
Sitting towards the back of the tiny building are four middle-aged Resolutes, two men, two women. They sit on pews that have been obviously ripped from the chapel floor and positioned around an imposing square table. Other than this, the chapel is utterly bare. The wooden floor boards are in seemingly perfect condition, having been obviously replaced. Light beams down on us from long strip lamps attached to the ceiling rafters.