ARC: The Almost Girl

by Amalie Howard

  “Don’t hold a weapon–”

  “–that you’re not prepared to use,” Caden finishes. “Shae told me.”

  “Cade…” I begin.

  “What? Are you so afraid to fight me?” he asks softly. There’s something in his voice that I can’t identify, something painful and aching.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I say. “These are real swords, you know. Not fencing foils.”

  “I know.”

  And before I can think, all I see is the flash of a blade curving toward me. The clash of steel in the small room is like thunder as my blade meets his in a shower of sparks, but Caden is already sidestepping and striking from the underside.

  In a few seconds, I’m aware that Caden is more than good. He’s really good.

  Shae wasn’t joking about how easily he holds a sword. I sense that most of it is instinct, but he has the basics of what we are all taught in Neospes. He’s taken that a step further with his own fencing training. Despite the fact that I’ve spent the better part of two hours practicing, Caden has me on my toes. Even though my body wants to go into full attack mode, I restrain myself.

  “Why are you holding back?” he taunts, reading my slowed movements accurately.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  I drop to a crouch and jerk upward, only to find the top end of my sword crashing into the bottom of his on its way down. His ability to read responses is uncanny, almost as uncanny as my own, and I grin widely at the unexpected challenge.

  Caden’s bare foot catches my heel and I fall backward, only to catapult to my feet in a crouch, my sword at his back. He fends me off capably, and then we are spinning to the discordant tune of crashing metal, until I am against the wall with his sword upon my neck. Caden’s eyes are triumphant.

  But so are mine.

  I tap the point of my sword against the inside of his hip, and as he looks down, I grin. And then I’m laughing, and Caden is laughing, until his fingers slide against my cheek, and the laughter slips from my lips. His eyes are so green, it feels like I’m drowning in them. I want to move, but my body won’t listen. My arms drop to my sides, and my tongue slips out to moisten suddenly dry lips. I pull my lower lip between my teeth.

  “Don’t do that.” The harsh whisper is Caden’s.

  “Don’t do what?” I say chewing unconsciously on the corner of my bottom lip.

  His eyes darken. A storm-tossed meadow. “That thing with your mouth.”

  “I didn’t–” But his lips silence mine in mid-sentence, the soft warm pressure of them hugging the curves of mine like they’d known them forever. Our breaths mingle as we draw apart, and Caden is staring at me with those impossibly green eyes. I can’t help myself. I lean into him, parting my lips and slanting my mouth against his. His hands are on the back of my neck and around my back, drawing me against him so tightly I can barely breathe. But I clutch him tighter, lost.

  The second kiss of my life.

  Kissing is an anomaly in Neospes. Couples are paired by genetic compatibility, not by what they feel about each other. But humans are social creatures, and sometimes love blooms after the pairing, although that is incredibly rare. I remember one boy in my training group who developed an affinity for another trainee. It’d affected his performance so clearly that within a day, the girl had been transferred to another sector.

  Love made us vulnerable, made us weak. Those were our rules.

  But Caden’s kiss makes me weaker and stronger all at the same time. And the way it makes me feel – like I am flame on the outside and liquid on the inside. It makes me feel alive, as if I can take on anything. And the only time I ever feel like that is when I’m fighting, when the adrenaline takes over and I’m only fire and fight.

  Now I’m fire and something else entirely.

  My hands tangle in his hair, into the soft mess of it, and I draw him closer. Not even the clatter of the swords on the floor tears us apart. Eventually, we come up for air, and as we pull apart, my mind drifts to our first kiss in the bathroom at Horrow, so similar to this one but so intoxicatingly different. My fingers slide against the square line of his jaw and across the sharp rise of his cheekbone.

  Caden presses his lips into my hair and stays there for what seems like an eternity. I can’t move, not even when he leans into me and rests his head on my shoulder, turning his face into my damp neck. In fact, every part of me is motionless as his lips find the curve of my collarbone, winding their way up to my ear, fanning the fire once more unfurling in my chest. My legs are unsteady.

  “I love you.”

  “I love…”

  For a second, I imagine that’s what I started to say. And then I’m splintering into an abyss of darkness and cold and pain.

  DECEPTION’S DAUGHTER

  “Is she going to be OK?”

  There are white, bright lights everywhere, flashing. They hurt my eyes, even closed. I try to move, but my arms are restrained. So are my legs. I’m lying on a cold, white surface in what appears to be an emergency medical bay. I crack open an eyelid, squinting at the wave of agony that threatens to send me back into an unconscious stupor.

  A hologram of a human body is suspended in the middle of the room and surrounded by all kinds of shifting miscellaneous data. I blink. Everything is so white. Even the medical garments barely covering my torso are white. My lips are cracked and sore. My tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth, and when I try to talk, my voice crumbles like dust. I blink again, opening both eyes and trying to focus. Pain stabs through my head.

  “Water,” I manage to gasp.

  A shadow looms and the rim of a cold cup is held gently to my lips. The water is like ice, soothing the dryness inside my mouth. I want more, but the cup is gently taken away.

  “WhereamI?” The words merge into one. I try to sit up, but forget that I am restrained. The panic is immediate. “Where am I?” I scream, my throat seared raw.

  “Sector Seven,” a voice says. “You’re safe.”

  My brain registers only two things. I’m back in the city, in a Sector on the outskirts of Neospes. And there are no bioengineering facilities in Sector Seven. Where am I being held?

  Flashes of Cale and Shae and my mother wind their way through my mind, and then I see another face. It’s Cale’s but not Cale’s. And he’s looking at me with gentle eyes full of something that terrifies me. It terrifies me because my heart understands what his eyes are saying, and it feels the same. Who was the boy? A dream? A figment?

  My mind is angry, squelching the tiny spark of emotion. I am two separate things. Memory and present. Frailty and strength. I have to be strong. The boy is nothing to me.

  But he’s not a dream. The shadow forms into focus, and I see him. His name is Caden, my brain whispers. He’s the target. You brought him here. You have to take him to Cale, the Lord King. But not yet.

  Why not yet?

  The questions are overwhelming, dueling inside of me.

  “Hey,” the boy says with a crooked smile. “You OK?” I nod, and close my eyes, turning away from him.

  “Caden,” another voice says, a woman’s voice. “You need to get some rest. We’re through the worst, and she’s awake now. You’ll be able to talk to her soon.”

  “What happened back there?” I hear Caden ask. “No one told me anything.”

  “Get some rest. I promise I will explain later.”

  I hear the sound of the door closing as Caden leaves. The woman checks my arms and the neural leads that run from my chest and temple to the base of the metal table. It connects below to the row of computers monitoring my vitals. I realize then that the suspended holo body is mine.

  Her fingers are gentle. I stare at her through my lashes, surreptitious. She has long silvery blond hair that has been tied into a row of braids across the top of her head, and hangs thickly over one shoulder. Her eyes are clear, her face youthful.

  She is your mother, my mind tells me. Aure
la. But it is a piece of information, nothing more. I don’t feel anything overwhelming, not like the rush I’d had with the boy earlier. I open my eyes to meet hers.

  “How long have I been here?” I ask hoarsely.

  “Three days.” Her hand brushes across my forehead. Her touch feels odd against my skin, tingly and tender. I shy away automatically. “Do you remember anything?” she asks but I only stare at her silently. “What’s your name?”

  “Riven. Legion General.” I watch her face slide from relaxed to anxious to pained.

  “Do you remember the Otherworld? The Outers? Anything?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Aurela studies me, her eyes narrowed as she comes to some understanding in her head. It worries me, and I feel my brow furrow, uncannily matching hers ridge for ridge. “What is your mission?” she says slowly.

  “To secure the target.” I blink. The response is automatic, programmed in my brain, but something doesn’t feel right. The feelings in my head don’t match the words in my mouth. They’re coming from somewhere else… some alternate source of information feeding answers to my lips. The thoughts are there but something tells me that they are not my own.

  They’re orders. Someone else’s orders.

  “No… I don’t know,” I say, pulling my arms against the steel manacles. “Someone is in my head. It’s not me!”

  “Riven, calm down,” Aurela says. “Let me get the doctors. Everything will be OK.”

  But my panic is swift, and I’m wrenching my arms on the table until the metal starts to cut through my flesh. Oddly, I don’t feel a thing. The veins in my arms and neck are corded so tightly that they are raised and navy against my skin, and I’m mesmerized by the intertwined deep red and pale blue fluid oozing out of the lacerations at my wrists.

  Red. And blue.

  The machines are beeping so loudly that they sound like some kind of terrible security breach. One hand breaks free, the twisted wrist bracelet still attached to the table, and I’m clawing at my other hand. I don’t know where I’m finding the strength, but I rip off the leads stuck to my chest without even blinking. More machines bleat in immediate succession, but they’ve dulled to a low hum in the back of my mind as everything goes strangely calm. My only objective is to escape. It has ahold of me like a starving dog defending a bone, relentless.

  A team of people rushes into the room, and Aurela’s face is hanging over mine. Something cold slides into the back of my neck and spreads through the rest of my body. Aurela’s eyes are clear, holding my own. I can see the answers in them. The last thing I think before sedation grabs hold of me is that she knows. She knows.

  She’s always known.

  When I awake once more, I’m no longer in the operating analysis room. I’m in a small four-walled gray cube, lying on a thin bed. There are cameras in the ceiling and a metal stool and table in the corner of the space. Someone has dressed me in soft flannel clothing.

  I try to sit up, and surprisingly do so with little pain. It feels weird, like I am somehow back to normal. I stretch my neck in slow circles, but everything feels fluid and strong. It almost seems that everything I remember must be some sort of bad dream, but of course, I know that it is not. I run through my mental checklist in my head, confirming all of the factual information I know about myself and who I am.

  My name is Riven. I am a Legion General. My target is Caden. I have acquired the target. Caden is my friend.

  The last thought shoots into my head like an errant arrow, and I analyze it carefully like a piece of forensic evidence. I feel nothing for the thought itself, but it’s an oddity that intrigues me. In Neospes, friends are a luxury and oftentimes, in my opinion, more of a hindrance. Unlike family, they complicate things. Lines become blurred, and I like being able to make decisions objectively. As a result, I have no friends, so it’s odd that I would have a memory that a target had become my friend. My only “friends” have been Cale, and Shae once upon a time.

  Shae.

  The name is a bullet exploding inside of my consciousness… a part of my brain that I know is wholly mine. A wave of agony ripples through me, and my body folds in on itself, the memories flooding my head like boiling lava. My arms grip around my torso so hard that I can barely breathe. I can hear someone screaming – keening – and it takes a second before I realize that the sound is coming from my own mouth.

  Shae is dead. She died to save me. My sister is dead. She died to protect Caden.

  Caden is my friend.

  The waterfall of memories assaults me anew, and it all comes back in a rush – Cale, the Otherworld, the Vectors, Shae, Caden, the Outers, Aurela.

  All of it.

  The keening sound continues, and I’m rocking back and forth, curled over. I feel like I am being torn down the middle, between an overly rational part of my brain that doesn’t even feel like me and the tiny insistent part that nearly does. Neither feels like who I am. Because I don’t know who I am.

  “Who am I?” The words spit themselves from my lips like acid. I stand in front of the camera in the corner of the room and scream the words again.

  The door opens and a man clothed in a black uniform walks in, his hand on the butt of an electro-rod sitting at his hip. He is a Legion Commander; I can see the seal on his neck clearly. I feel my eyes narrow, and I unconsciously sink my weight back into my haunches. His hand hovers over the weapon, correctly interpreting my movements. But he has no chance.

  My reaction is instantaneous, despite my lack of practice. I run at the side of the wall, kicking off of it and somersaulting to land directly behind the man, my elbow around his neck and his left arm up against the middle of his back before he can even breathe. I jam the heel of my foot into the back of his leg, and he sinks to his knees.

  “Move and you die,” I say. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in Sector Seven,” the man gasps. “Please…”

  So I’m still in Sector Seven. That surprises me. Are we still in the bio-research facility?

  “Where in Sector Seven?”

  “Underground research lab,” he answers. “Off the grid. Look, I can explain if you just let me up.” I can feel myself wavering between wanting to eliminate the threat and getting answers. A fully stocked bio-research plant that’s off the grid? In all my years in Neospes I’ve never heard of one of those. My arms tighten involuntarily. “I’m… I’m Aurela’s first-in-command,” the man gasps. “She left me to watch you.”

  Releasing my hold a fraction, I remove the electro-rod from its harness and toss it away. Against my better judgment, I let him go, and he falls back to his haunches, his hands to his neck.

  “Aurela’s first-in-command,” I repeat slowly. “What do you mean, she left you to watch me? Where is she? Who are you? Why do you have a Commander rank seal on your neck?” My questions are fired in immediate succession. The man smiles and removes his black beanie to run his hands through his white-blond hair.

  “I’m Commander Sauer, an active soldier in Sector Seven,” he begins. “But I’m also Artok and your mother’s guard,” he adds.

  “She never mentioned you,” I snap unmoved.

  “It was part of our agreement,” he says quietly, his stare meaningful. I understand where he’s coming from. He’s her agent on the inside. If he’d been connected to Aurela in any way, especially after her defection, he would have been targeted and executed as an example.

  “So you’re a spy.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  I study the seal on his neck and the colors that mark him as Sector Seven. He is a Sector Commander, which would give him – and Aurela – unrestricted access to valuable information. Still, being an inside spy in a place like Neospes is incredibly risky, as in face-the-Vectors risky. I eye Sauer with a little more respect.

  As the Legion General of the elite Vector task force, I never heard of him, but Neospes is a big place, with allotted sectors policed by different branches of the monarchy, so it isn’t farfetched that we
never met. Unless, of course, I had been the one to catch him being a traitorous spy. The old me would have fed him to the Vectors myself.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Did you grow up here?”

  “I came here with my grandmother.” Sauer is unfazed by my rapid-fire questions. “Any more questions?”

  His cool attitude annoys me. “Why is this place off the grid?”

  “Aurela started to build it before she left. She needed a base with the appropriate technology to face whatever your father was planning. We finished it. It’s not a registered facility.” Sauer smiles again. “If Murek knew this existed, he’d probably torch the whole sector.”

  I frown. “So everyone in Sector Seven is a part of this?”

  I think back to what I know of the area. Sector Seven has always been a peripheral colony and classified as non-confrontational. Their citizens have always lived on the outskirts, keeping to themselves. They’d been deemed artisans – despite some of their Artok roots – and weren’t considered a threat to the monarchy. How wrong we’d been, I understand slowly. From the little I knew of the Artok, they’d been far from a placid tribe of people. There are obviously more of them than anyone had guessed living in Sector Seven, and my mother now leads them all.

  Sauer nods. “Not all but most of us. We’re the liaison to the Outers, to Aurela. We keep tabs on Murek and the Lord King.” He says the last words quietly, and I can feel his eyes on me. I keep my face expressionless. The doubt in his voice is easy to read. He doesn’t trust me. And why should he? I don’t even trust myself. I don’t even know myself.

  Sauer stands slowly and stretches his arms across his head. My body tenses, but I don’t move. He hasn’t made any offensive moves toward me, and even if he’d been lying, we would have been surrounded in seconds by scores of Vectors desperate to get their hands on their absconding general.

  I turn on my heel, giving him my back. It doesn’t really mean anything, but I’ve learned that it implies a level of trust and vulnerability. It’s a misconception, though – I’ve been trained to detect shifts of movement in the air by fighting blindfolded with steel weapons. If he pulls any kind of weapon to attack me, it will have the same outcome.