by Shelly Crane
I laughed lightly. “Well, maybe we’ll see you again then.” I paid for our items and told her to have a good one. Then I took Sophelia over to a fruit cart and picked us out some dried strawberries, bananas, whole almonds, and refilled our water containers.
Sophelia watched me buy everything and stuff it in my bag, and then said, “What is it with you and food?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always buying these things that I’m pretty sure you don’t eat all the time. And you never buy the same food twice.”
I gave her a sidelong glance. “Is that a problem?”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s your silver.”
“It’s our silver,” I told her, just like I’d told her last night and at my mother’s house. “This silver has your name on it, literally. It’s only right that you take your half.”
“I don’t want it.”
She’d said the same thing last time, too.
I ignored that. “Anything you see that you want or need, just say the word or point and I’ll make sure that we get it.”
“But why are you always getting this random stuff?”
I decided not to keep up our playful banter. “Because I like to watch you.” I took her arm as we maneuvered into the street into the people. I went ahead and finished it since I knew what she wanted to ask next, whether she had the guts or not. “When you take a bite of something you’ve never had before, it’s like… Remember learning about Christmas in history? How they got presents and decorated their pods and a tree, and it was just this magical two hours before it was over and then it was back to being just a normal day?”
She nodded. “I bet Christmas was fun. And Thanksgiving.”
“That’s what it’s like watching you. You enjoy it so much. You savor every bite; you don’t just eat it for eating’s sake. You appreciate it, which makes me want to get new things for you to try.”
She walked with her head turned to me and barely gave me a little nod. Not watching where she was going, I gripped her elbow and tugged her toward me so she wouldn’t run into the carrier bot that was being loaded down with holographic barrier boxes. The only bad thing about those kinds of containers is that you could see everything the person had bought through the holographic sides. This person obviously needed dried prunes.
Badly.
I chuckled to myself and then realized I still had Sophelia’s arm in my hand. But when I looked back up, I saw a couple of sentries three blocks down. I acted. I slung my arm over her shoulder as we exited the busy district. When I saw them still steadily coming, I walked us a little faster, but saw that the street led to nowhere.
So I did what anyone would have done in my position.
I turned to Sophelia and pressed my face into her neck. Like we were laughing, being silly, being in love, and luckily for me, Sophelia was either too stunned or knew what was up to knee me in the junk.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, her fingers going to my shirtfront and tightening in the fabric.
“What?” I pushed her back to the black brick alley wall once we reached it and continued to assault her skin, torturing myself, so I could watch the Militia as they came up the street. “Maybe I just wanted to press my face into your neck. Ever think of that?”
My eyes were on the Militia but my nose was on her skin, my lips skimmed her skin, too—just barely—enough to make me start to sweat all over. When she didn’t respond, at all, not even a chuckle, I flicked my eyes to hers and realized what I’d done.
After what Ivan just told her about what fy melys means, and that kiss yesterday, I could not be telling her I wanted to stick my face into her neck. I completely did want to press my face into her neck. And that wasn’t all.
And with her in those pants, I was about to lose my mind, but I knew that she wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted to be told outright that you were losing your mind, no matter what my mother said.
This was a delicate situation and I planned to feel it out and handle it as such. And so far I wasn’t starting out great. I grimaced. “Sorry. I was just kidding.”
“So…” she squinted so cutely, “you don’t really want to press your face into my neck.” Long pause. “Right?”
Oh, boy. “No, not really.” I sighed. “Totally kidding.”
She sighed so harshly—with relief?—that I was starting to get a complex.
“I knew that old man was pulling my leg.” So she thought that Ivan, the nicest man on the planet, would make it up because she couldn’t believe it that much? Did she not want me to want her that badly? It must have been on my face because she scoffed. “What?”
I forced my eyes away from her and onto the sentries who were now so close I could smell them. That’s what I get for not paying attention to the enemy and having my eyes instead on the gorgeous redhead in my vicinity.
Then I heard her gasp. “Maxton.”
I loved how she called me by my full name instead of ‘Max’ like everybody else did, but when my eyes landed on hers, I saw the fear there and knew that one of two things was about to happen. One, her oxygen was running out, which wasn’t happening because the pills lasted for a few days, or two, she needed a gravity tab, which I couldn’t give her in front of the Militia because they’d know they were black market.
This was no longer a recon on the Militia, this was now a mission to get Sophelia her gravity and make sure we didn’t get killed or taken in for processing. I pulled her behind me and she followed without a word until we reached the next alley that was stuck in a darker, hidden alcove.
I put her back to the wall and took both of her arms and put them on my chest so they couldn’t see the screen on her arm flashing a warning through her jacket if they were looking. I looked down into her frightened eyes, wondering if she’d ever come to floating away before. I’d come pretty close; too close.
“I’ve got you, Soph,” I assured her, “I promise.”
And then my hands slid to the backs of her legs as I picked her up, feeling smug knowing that the gasp she let loose wasn’t for show but all too real, and then pressed her to the wall with my hips as I held her there tightly against me. In her eyes, I could see she didn’t care that Militia were on the way to us or that she could be about to float away into the atmosphere. No, there was only her and me, the wall against her back and the non-existent space between us. Her breaths raged in her lungs as she watched me come closer, inching toward her, my lips parted, my chest touching hers, and then I was on her, kissing her…or at least that’s what it looked like to the guards.
I leaned in as I held her there, one elbow on the wall by her head, and looked into her eyes for a few seconds because I could do nothing else. Her eyes were gorgeous. Gray orbs of trust that held me to my spot. I’d never have thought that gray was a beautiful color before, on a planet filled with gray, but now I couldn’t stop looking at them. Her lips began to crack into a smile and I knew that I’d been just staring at her entirely too long for common decency.
When she giggled a little, I leaned in and poked her under her ribs once. Her giggling only helped our cause that we were “making out”. Girls giggled when they made out…right?
I had to assume that was true.
Hoped.
Envisioned.
Prayed.
I wanted her to giggle one day in the near future when we made out because that seemed…so hot.
I put my forehead against hers when I heard the crunch of gravel directly behind me, feeling her tense up under me. I wrapped my arms around her tighter.
“Shhh,” I whispered against her mouth. Her mouth opened against mine and she inhaled. I could feel the cool wind on my lips. I kissed the corner of her mouth, wanting more, wanting so much more than that, but not wanting to take it, not like this.
I wanted her to give it to me.
Her hands came up, taking my face in them. I groaned a little, unable to stop it. I could feel her chest rise and fall with mine. Her eyes o
pened and I knew what was coming, I was getting those lips, but before her mouth could meet mine I heard the sentry bark behind me.
“Hey.”
Her eyes changed so quickly to panic.
I didn’t have a license, but I thought since we were being so blatantly obvious they’d never question it, they’d never imagine we’d ever be so bold. Yet, here he was barking at me.
But when they heard a commotion further down the road, he said under his breath, “I bet that’s the convicts,” and forgot all about us as they took off.
I kept my eyes on hers as I pulled my bag around and dug around in it for the gravity tabs. Scientists had discovered a way to change our blood so we could breathe, making it oxidized, but in the process of doing that they also discovered the way for our blood not to boil and rebel against us as it tried to rise while our body stayed on the ground. Liquids rose while solids stayed, as long as it was weighted and magnetized down, so even though we had our gravity boots on, we still had to take a “gravity tab” to keep our blood from trying to rise. The tabs also gave us iron to fill our blood. It made our bodies “subtly”, magnetically attracted to the planet’s magnetic granite-metal mix. It felt like you were boiling at its worst, but at the beginning, it just felt like you were going to float away if you didn’t get your tab in time.
It wasn’t any fun, at all. It felt real.
And if you didn’t have your boots on, you would have floated away.
Just another day on this treacherous planet.
I took a tab out of the canister with the end of my thumb. She didn’t waste any time before she was pulling my hand to her mouth, sucking up the square tab…my thumb with it.
“Oh, uh…Soph,” I groaned. In ecstasy. Nothing but ecstasy.
I watched her as she held my thumb in her mouth, her eyes on mine, letting the tab dissolve. I could feel the slight movement of her tongue against the pad of my thumb before she released me. Her eyes closed for a second before she sighed in relief. Then she pressed herself against me as she waited for the tab to take effect, her head on my chest.
She seemed so content there, pressed between a brick wall and my hard chest, my hands planted literally two inches from her glorious behind. Hey, if that made her happy, who was I to argue with her?
I smiled as much as I could in my shocked and drunk-on-Sophelia state. This girl.
This girl.
She was going to be the proverbial death of me.
Maybe the actual death of me. But what a way for a guy to die.
“Are you okay now that you’ve got your gravity in you?” I joked softly.
She lifted her head and said just as softly, shyly, like she was just realizing something herself and didn’t know what to make of it. “There is no gravity. The only thing holding me to this planet is you.”
Ah, no. I was going to kiss her.
I leaned in slightly. My eyes raced across her face, looking for some sign that she didn’t want me to, even as I kept leaning in. She kept her eyes on mine for the longest time before they dropped lower to what I could only imagine was my mouth and I was done for. I went in for the kill. When I was so close I could feel her breath on my lips— “That was a clever trick.”
Our heads whipped to look in that direction. Sophelia was breathing so hard. I felt bad that I hadn’t noticed it until now. Had she not wanted me to? She had leaned in. I thought she wanted this just like I did. Had I taken advantage and misread everything?
And this guy? Wait. Guys. There were two of them and they looked exactly alike. “What are you?” I asked and then grimaced, knowing my brain was scrambled. Sophelia had officially scrambled my brain. “Who are you?”
They were twins who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, standing off to the side, leaning against the opposite brick wall. They had blue boots on their feet with their arms crossed, shaggy blonde hair and long noses. They were the hip kind of guys who wore all that weird junk, like mesh shirts over their t-shirts and neon green pants on one and then hot red pants on the other. They looked like mirror images of each other standing like that. But the cocky smiles on their faces made me cautious…and the fact that they had obviously seen and heard everything with the Militia, or something at least, and waited to say something until right before we were about to kiss.
Little bastards.
“I’m Roddy and this is Fletch. We’re twins.” He grinned.
Sophelia let a little giggle slip, making me look at her in question. She shrugged and muttered. “Come on, it’s funny.”
I looked back at the twins and gave them my best glare. If Sophelia wasn’t mad at them for messing up that kiss, that’s fine, but I sure as hell was. “What do you want?”
He smirked. “I think she’s probably safe now, dude. I doubt she’ll float away if you want to set her down.” His grin widened. “Unless you just like holding her against the wall like that in front of civilized company.”
Sophelia couldn’t scramble down fast enough. Her cheeks flamed as she took two steps away from me. “He was helping me,” she insisted.
“I know,” the guy insisted back; I didn’t know which one was which. “Sucks when you run out and let it get so close like that. But when you’re on the run, what are you supposed to do? Am I right?”
I took the two steps Sophelia had put between us and closed the gap so fast as I took up guard in front of her. “I repeat, what do you want?”
I was pretty happy when I felt her hands on my back gripping my shirt instead of pushing me away.
The guys looked at each other and kind of chuckled, which was doing nothing to calm my nerves. I was two seconds from clocking these clowns, taking Soph’s hand, and running as far away from them as we could get before he said, “We want to help you. Correction, we want to help her.”
“What?” I heard myself say. “Do you know her?”
“We don’t have to know her to know of her,” the other one finally spoke. “Our mother talked about how one day we’d have to fight, how one day the revolution would no longer just be something we talked about at the dinner table; it would be real and it would be in our faces. We think that time is here.” They looked behind me and I realized that Sophelia had peeked out around my shoulder. “And we think all the revolt needs in a pretty little redhead who isn’t afraid to stir things up.”
“You think?” she said, and I was happy to hear that snappy Sophelia was back, the girl I met on the ship, the girl who wasn’t all broken and waiting for things to happen, she was making things happen. The girl who defied her proprietor and ran, consequences be damned.
I pulled her to my side.
“Not just us. There’s an underground group of revolutionists just waiting to overtake the government. We’re called the Patriots.” He chuckled.
“Like the Civil War Patriots?” I said wryly. That’s all he could mean, right?
“You know it? Of course, bruh! What else?” He got even more animated if that was possible. It was, apparently. “The Patriots, or the Whigs as I like to call us, but Mommy gets her skirt all in a bunch over that one since we—”
“You call her ‘Mommy’?” I asked.
I had to. But really, did I have any room to talk?
“Yeah,” he defended and stepped toward me. “What of it, dude? I love my mommy. Don’t you love yours?”
His brother grabbed his arm, like the guy was about to murder me right there on the granite sidewalk, filling the cracks in the stone with my blood. I wanted to laugh so badly, but held it in for Soph’s sake. I did not want to get into a fight with her there, especially since they were being weird and talking about needing her.
I shrugged and held up my hands. “Please continue,” I mocked.
“Anyway,” he said loudly, throwing his hand in the air before proceeding, like no altercation had taken place, “the Patriots believe that we should have the same rights as the Elites. We’re not asking for handouts, not at all. We’re just asking for the same opportunities. We want
to work for our money, buy our own food, and take care of our families. No more of these massive taxes that no one can afford, no more food and oxygen rations from the government, and no more regulations that don’t allow the same things for us as it does for the Elites. We work and live for us and our own. The less government the better.”
“No more being told how we should exist.” We all looked at the other one, who had been strangely quiet.
“That’s…” I tried, but came up with nothing.
“Perfect,” Sophelia said softly beside me, but she may as well have screamed it. It spoke to that place inside us all that wanted to be woken up, that begged to be heard, that waited for those small moments to feel alive.
The pause held, the silence clinging to us, until one of them finally said, “So now that we’re all on the same page, let’s let everyone else in on it. Let’s let the revolution leaders know you’re here and then let’s get the rest of the stacks and the people on board. And then let’s get our rights back.”
What he was talking about was what everyone wanted, of course…and it would never happen.
“And you think Sophelia is somehow the key to this?”
He began slowly, “In the mines, our parents worked hard. But they also talked while they worked down there, where there were no cameras or techs, and they began to convene secret meetings. And then the workers began to pool their money to buy an Around Landu doll.”
Sophelia gasped. I looked over at her, but she didn’t look back. She just gripped my hand harder and waited to hear more.
I felt ice run through my veins at that gasp.
He grinned at her, knowing he had her somehow.
“Stop,” I barked at him and turned to face Sophelia. My Soph. No matter how quickly it had happened or how slowly, depending on how you looked at it, because I had always been waiting for her, hadn’t I? I had always thought myself so big and grand, so purposeful and on point in my actions to save my family, no matter the cost, but she was the one who had paid everything, not me. I reveled in my rebellion, even though I liked to tell myself I didn’t. She fought against it.