by Frankie Rose
I nod. “Of course.”
He shuffles by, head down, and positions himself in the far corner of the room, out of the way. It seems as though he wants to disappear. I know the look—it’s how I feel eighteen hours out of the day. If that’s what he needs right now, though, I’ll give it to him. I turn back to Penny, and I’m pleased to see she is still fuming from my knife throw.
“Pick. It. Up,” I repeat. She stoops and tugs the flick knife from the floor, taking a second to juggle the handles together. They won’t cooperate at first, and she ends up having to use both hands to get them into the safe position. The fumble makes her furious, but I don’t smile. Nothing about this is funny. “If you’re so desperate to attack, if you think you’re ready for that, then go ahead. Attack me.”
Penny rolls her shoulders out, looking me over. “You’re serious?”
“Perfectly.”
“You’re just going to stab me with one of those daggers,” she says. Her eyes go to my knife belt, and I shrug. I snap the buckle open and slide the whole thing off, slinging it toward the wall.
“Now I won’t.”
Penny hesitates for a split second, and then goes for it. I see it all happening before she’s even made her first move, of course. Her eyes give her thoughts away. With the Balisong gripped tightly in her hand, she lunges forward, aiming it directly for my head. Most people attack the torso, the heart. That’s how you kill quickly with a knife. Penny goes for my face. That speaks volumes. She doesn’t want to kill me. She wants to hurt me in the worst way I’ve learned you can hurt a girl—she wants to disfigure me. Of course, I’m not the same as her. I’m not the person she thinks I am.
I let her get within a foot of me before I pivot on the spot, striking out and snapping my booted foot square into her chest. She reels backward but I’ve already tucked and rolled, and I’m waiting for her once she regains her balance. I grip hold of her wrist and flex it backward—immediate agony—and she drops hold of the flick knife. I catch it as it falls, spinning it in a double index rollover before closing it, twisting my body, pulling my shoulder back and slamming my open palm forward and upward into her solar plexus. Penny’s airborne when I reach for her again, grabbing a fistful of her shirt. Before she can even start to fall, I use my whole body weight to slam her back to earth. She hits the concrete, hard. Her teeth smash together and she clenches her eyes closed, reeling from the impact. I straighten and open the Balisong again, taking a look around the room at the group of startled faces.
“Who else wants to learn how to defend themselves?” I ask.
Twenty-one hands shoot into the air.
******
Surprisingly some of the Theron are good learners. I have everyone pair off, lunging toward each other so they can learn how to look for tells before movement occurs. It’s a skill that doesn’t develop overnight, one they will be learning for a long time before it becomes second nature. Halfway through the morning, Callum shoves away from the wall and starts helping people. He does it quietly, politely, showing how the slightest dip in a shoulder or the angle of someone’s foot can give you clues as to how they’re going to attack. He’s good at teaching them, probably better than I am. Certainly more patient. Some of them just don’t seem to get what I’m trying to show them and it takes a different approach from Callum before they get it. I can’t be positive, but I really hope I’ve acquired myself an assistant. He makes this whole nightmarish arrangement a little easier to handle.
Penny completes the rest of the training session in silence. She refuses to look at me. She also refuses to let on that she is in pain, even though I know she must be. I could have gone easier on her, but she needed to know the reality of her situation. She is untrained and physically weaker than ninety-nine percent of her potential attackers. Sanctuary guards train even harder than some of the Falin, and they are strong and proficient with their weaponry. Penny is tall, yes, but she basically has no muscle mass and no clue how to handle herself in a fight. Her best option, the best option for most of them right now, is to figure out how to protect themselves until someone else can come help them. Not an ideal strategy, I admit, but they have to start somewhere. The Falin who are coping a little better with their newfound emotions fare better today than I’d hoped they would, which leads me to believe they’re on the road to recovery. The ones who aren’t coping better with their emotions…it’s all they can do to hold their knives without dropping them. Their nerves are shot to hell, and I have no idea in hell how I’m supposed to fix them. A tall woman, Arella, just sits on the floor and starts shaking, and I know we’re done for the day.
“Alright. Feel free to practise this with each other later on in the day. It’s time we all grabbed some food and took a break.” Everyone but Callum leaves. We stand in silence for a moment before he walks over to the window and stares out at the crumbling city beyond.
“What’s going on with you and Ryka?” he says softly.
“Nothing,” I tell him. He crooks an eyebrow at me—you’re a pathetic liar. I sigh. “Okay. He freaked out when Caius showed up. He said he needed to concentrate on this new role the priestesses have given him. He…he said he couldn’t do it anymore.”
“It?”
“Us, I guess.”
Callum thinks this over, and I take the time to check him over. Dark circles rim his eyes, and his clothes hang off his frame a little looser than before. He needs sleep. He needs to eat. My heart aches for him.
“Does he think you want to be with Cai?” Callum asks eventually.
I lift up my hands and let them drop to my sides. “I don’t know. I have no idea what he thinks. He wouldn’t talk about it. He just left. We haven’t spoken since.”
Callum glances at me sideways. “Do you want to be with Cai?”
The question takes me by surprise. “No! No, of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
Am I sure? Instead of reacting immediately, I give myself a moment to really think. It’s almost impossible to feel anything past the sharp, bitter pain in my chest that was left behind when Ryka walked away from me. Callum presses his lips together.
“Because if you’re not sure, then you really need to figure that out before you go after Ryka. It’s no good chasing him down if it isn’t really him you want.”
Callum’s words make me turn cold. The microsecond that I’ve just allowed myself to consider not being with him, needing him, having him close, was too awful to bear. No. No, I don’t want to be with Caius. The knowledge is a relief more than anything. A part of me has been a little scared, I guess. Scared that I’ll feel guilty enough to leave Ryka and give things a shot with Cai. But this feeling, this desolate emptiness inside me says that no guilt will ever be strong enough. No sense of duty or debt will ever overcome my need to be with Ryka. As if summoned by the very prospect of this conclusion, Caius’ voice breaks the silence.
“Kit, I need to speak with you.”
My heart nearly explodes in my chest. Callum barely flinches, like he’s in a constant state of readiness for the next terrible thing to happen and nothing can startle him anymore. I recoil when I catch the deadpan expression on Caius’ face. That’s the blank face I looked at every single day for twelve years back in the Sanctuary, and yet it’s the unfriendly face of a stranger now.
“I’ll see you later,” Callum tells me, reaching out and squeezing my hand. I don’t want to let go of him. I want him to stay and make sure I don’t say or do anything stupid or hurtful, but I can’t. Callum’s dealing with enough on his own. Caius doesn’t speak until he’s gone.
“Why is my sister walking around the canteen like a cripple? She’s got a bruise on her ribs the size of my fist. I thought you were giving them training sessions.”
“How many bones got broken during our training sessions, Cai? You broke both my arms, my right leg, three of my ribs. Most of my fingers. I broke your collar bone and your nose.”
“And my wrist, and most of my fingers, yes, I
get it, Kit. But that was different.”
“How so? Didn’t our lives depend on what we taught each other in that training room?”
Caius scowls. “Of course they did. But we were children when we learned the simple things she still needs to learn to keep herself safe. You need to show her, show them everything from the ground up.”
“That’s precisely what I was trying to do, but she didn’t want to take it slow. I was simply demonstrating what would happen if she rushed head on into a situation she couldn’t handle.”
“Oh, come on, Kit. That’s a pretty rough way to teach her the lesson, don’t you think?”
“Pain’s an effective deterrent. Better than a few words of warning, anyway.”
“No, Kit!” His exasperation cuts deep. He looks utterly confounded by me—a sentiment I can half understand. “You’re just terrible with words! If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have struggled so hard to give Callum an answer just now.”
My cheeks flame. Holy crap. “What…what did you hear?”
“Enough. Enough to know that when Callum asked you if you wanted to be with me, you had to think about it.”
“I didn’t…I wasn’t—”
“When I pulled that halo from around your neck, Kit, I imagined you free of all restriction, able to feel and breathe and love. It was the most amazing thing to imagine that. As it turns out, your emotions are still just as restricted as they ever were. Except it’s not the Sanctuary or a halo keeping everything inside you now. It’s just you.”
My eyes are burning by the time he stops shouting. I don’t want to cry, I really don’t. I can’t let myself. Caius blows a sharp breath down his nose. He breaks eye contact with me, looking down at his feet, as though the very sight of me is painful to him.
“We have to go downstairs. They’re calling a meeting.”
The canteen is packed. The small room holds all of Opa’s people, including the old man himself, and Freetown’s few residents alongside them. James and Ryka are the only people missing. Luke sits beside me on top of a table, swinging his legs back and forth. He hums softly under his breath. It takes me a moment to realise it’s something our mother used to hum to us while we fell asleep.
People chatter over one another, arguing, laughing, telling stories, and I can barely hear the melody Luke murmurs to himself, but it does something amazingly powerful: it washes over me, soothing some of the hurt caused by arguing with Caius. The melody calms me. That calm slips when a familiar head of blond hair appears at the doorway and Ryka walks in, followed swiftly by James. Ryka stares at the floor. When he does finally look up, his eyes sweep the room with an indifferent, even coolness to them, which doesn’t falter as he glances over my brother and me. My stomach seizes. I can’t look at him, so I angle my head ever so slightly and gaze out of the rectangular hole in the wall that used to house a pane of glass. That doesn’t work out so well for me, either, because I realise that Caius is sitting in that direction and his brown eyes are fixed on me, boring holes into the side of my cheek. I snap my head down and glare furiously at my hands. This is the safest thing I can do.
“As you know, Ryka and several other members of Freetown arrived earlier in the week. You will also probably have heard that Ryka has been chosen by our High Priestess to lead our efforts. We’ve asked you here today to discuss what that means, and what we intend to do over the coming days.” James is a voice of authority that no one can ignore. The room goes quiet as he speaks. Ryka’s arms are folded across his chest, and to those who don’t know him he must seem stoic and closed off. I do know him, though. I know he’s nervous by the way he clenches and unclenches the hand folded under his arm. His chest rises as he pulls in a deep breath, and then he steps forward.
“Freetown lies five hours that way.” He points over our heads, and some of the younger Falin actually turn and look, as though they might be able to see the place through the concrete wall behind them. “Our town is a fifth of the size of Lockdown, with a fifth of the population. Our settlement isn’t made of bricks and mortar. We have no streets, no compounds. No Colosseum. The Sanctuary have known about our existence since we first settled there, and we’ve shared a…tense relationship with them over the years. We’ve witnessed a number of practices that haven’t always sat well with us, but we were in no position to protest. Our position hasn’t changed; we’re still the weaker force, but now we can’t keep silent any longer. We’ve been attacked, and Freetown’s faith forbids us to let that attack to go unanswered. We know that they’re looking for you, too, which means Lockdown isn’t going to give up, either. We need to organise ourselves and formulate a strategy with which to defend ourselves and the people we’ve left behind in Freetown.”
“You expect us to fight for your people?” a voice at the back of the room asks. It’s Arella, the woman who collapsed during my training session. She seems to have found her voice, shaky though it is.
“We don’t expect anything of you,” Ryka says. “You have free will and your own consciences. You won’t ever be forced to do anything again. Certainly not by us.”
Arella doesn’t say anything else. She looks away, and I get the feeling she won’t be holding her hand up for fighting any time soon. Opa, sitting on the other side of the room, clears his throat.
“What did you have in mind, young man?” Young man. He makes him sound like a child. Ryka doesn’t seem fazed by the title.
“Our plan is to set up checkpoints throughout the city. Two or three able bodies will man them. If any of the checkpoints see Lockdown’s forces approaching, they will signal the next checkpoint and they signal the next and so on.”
“Why not just use the radios?” Foster asks.
“Because we only have five radios,” James tells him. “Plus they’re unreliable. We can’t count on them to work one hundred percent of the time. We plan on having twelve checkpoints throughout the city, covering areas of entry that we deem most likely to be used by Lockdown’s forces. The three key areas considered most likely to sight the guards will receive a radio, but they also need to signal the other checkpoints.”
I sense someone behind me. Callum moves forward from the very edge of the room and comes to sit at my side. He nods hello to me, his eyes still sad and reserved. “What are we going to do about Freetown? What about our families, the people we’ve left behind? Are we going to go back for them? Do we…do we know how many died?” he asks softly.
Ryka shakes his head. “We don’t know how many. Foster managed to strengthen the radio receiver this morning, and we were able to talk with Jack, though. A lot of people are unaccounted for. I do know your parents are fine, Cal.”
Callum’s shoulders slump, tension seeping out of him in one long exhalation. I, on the other hand, react differently to Ryka’s words. He spoke to Jack this morning? Why didn’t he come and tell me? Do I mean so little to him now? I have a thousand burning questions I want answered. Is Melody okay? Is August? Did the Keep get hit? It’s not that I really care about the priestesses. I can’t bog myself down by wondering if I would care if they all died. I only care about one of them: Olivia. She was in that Keep when Lockdown showed up and started bombing Freetown. I have no idea what I will do if she got hurt. Worse, if she died. He knows the answers to these troubling questions, and yet he’s kept them to himself.
“Our aim is to relocate the majority of the people from Freetown here to the city,” Ryka says. His voice is controlled, yet I know he doesn’t like what he’s saying. The tight pull at the corner of his mouth gives him away.
“And how do you intend on doing that?” Opa asks. He folds his hands in his lap and shunts his considerable body weight forward in his chair.
“In stages. We don’t have a hope of moving twenty thousand people all at once. That just wouldn’t work. We’re going to orchestrate a series of night runs, where teams from the city will lead groups of, say, two or three thousand people at a time back here. In the meantime, we need to prepare the surrounding buildi
ngs to receive people.”
That sounds like it might work, though are the Sanctuary likely to notice that amount of movement in the forest? Probably. I keep my mouth shut. I don’t say a word. Mainly because I don’t think I can bear talking directly to Ryka at the moment, seeing as he hasn’t said one word to me since he broke my heart into microscopic and apparently inconsequential pieces. But also because I’m concerned about the reactions of those around me. If I’m honest, I’m mostly concerned about Caius. The look on his face is stormy to say the least.
“What training do you have, Ryka? What experience are you bringing to the table here?”
Ryka locks eyes with Caius and I think I’m going to throw up. It’s the first time either of them has looked at each other properly—they have mostly avoided eye contact like the plague. So far this encounter doesn’t appear to be going well. Ryka slowly rolls his shirtsleeves up. He is icy when he says, “I have no training in leadership or warfare. The fights, eighteen years of learning how to kill…that’s all I have.”
“That’s all I have, too,” Caius says. “But I don’t think I’m capable of leading twenty thousand people to safety. And I don’t pretend I’d be capable of keeping them safe once they got here either. What makes you think you are?”
Ryka shrugs. “I never said I thought I was the best choice for this role. I didn’t exactly volunteer for it.”
“So you don’t even want to be here?” Caius stands, looking around the room. “Can anyone else see how unfeasible this all sounds? Shouldn’t we be deferring to Opa right now?”
“And what great battles has Opa fought and won?” James demands. He rolls his eyes, as though the whole exchange is juvenile. “No disrespect intended, Opa.”
The grey-haired old man waves a hand. “None taken.”
Caius’ hands twitch on the hilts of his knives. “Opa’s older. He organised and helped us back in the Sanctuary. We know we can trust him. He risked everything to keep us safe, to give us our freedom.”