Secondborn

by Bartol, Amy A.

  “It was an emergency!” I call back. My fingers bleed, cut by the sharp edges of the tool.

  “I don’t care if you shit all over the inside of your bunk, Soldier! I want you out here now!” The door rattles on its hinges.

  “Okay!” I answer as the final two pieces come apart. I drop them in and flush. When I’m sure that all the pieces have been swept away, I unlock the door. The door is thrown open by a Strato soldier, red-faced, towering over me, looking as if he’s about to breathe fire.

  “Tropo! What are you doing?” he demands. Anger gives way to annoyance when he sees my face. I must look petrified.

  “I had to go to the bathroom, Patrøn.”

  “We’re on lockdown!” he bellows. “You’re not allowed to leave your capsule!”

  “I just got here, Patrøn. I spent all night in detention.”

  He rubs the stubble on his chin. “Get down and give me fifty push-ups!” I exit the bathroom closet and drop to the ground. The act of doing something so commonplace makes me feel better. When I’m done, I stand and face him. “Now get to your capsule,” he orders.

  “Can I wash my hands first?”

  “No, you cannot!” he yells. He calls to someone over his shoulder. “Can you take this Tropo to her capsule?”

  I look over his shoulder to the soldier standing by the lockers. Hawthorne stares back at me. “Yeah, Barkley,” he says, “I’ll take her.”

  Chapter 13

  Ugly Moles

  I don’t realize that my feet are bare until Hawthorne asks, “Do you want your slippers?” I shake my head no because I don’t trust my voice not to be thick with emotion, and I don’t know exactly what he’ll see if I open my locker. I try to walk to the door that leads to the tiers of capsules. Hawthorne stops me with a gentle tug on my arm. “Sorry about Barkley. He’s a head case. Stay away from him if you can. He has a crazy fascination for the rules, and I know you don’t.”

  Hawthorne’s strong hand on my arm loosens. He’s about to let go of it when I turn and rest my forehead against his chest. I inhale Hawthorne’s scent that I now associate with safety. My shaking shoulders hunch toward him. A sob that I can’t force down breaks through and chokes me. He moves his rifle so that it rests against his back on the gun strap. I hide my face against his chest once more. His hands come up to rest on my shoulders as he holds me to him. “Shh,” he hushes softly, brushing my hair back from my hot face, tucking it back behind my ear. “Whatever it is that’s making you cry, look away from it. It doesn’t have you. I do.”

  I can’t get close enough to him. He lifts me up in his arms, and then sits down on a bench, settling me in his lap. He leans his back against the wall. I don’t know how long it takes me to stop crying, but I get the hiccups toward the end. Hawthorne doesn’t tease me about them. He reaches into the pocket of his gun strap and extracts a cloth used to remove condensation from the barrel. “It’s clean,” he says when he uses it to wipe my face.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmur.

  “About what?” He stuffs the cloth back into the compartment. “I’ve never cleaned my rifle with Roselle’s tears before. I’ll let you know how well it works.” He waits to see if I smile. I don’t. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I reply with a watery look and a set of sniffles.

  “You look exhausted. I know you were picked up for brandishing.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Agent Crow, when he gave me this.” Hawthorne shows me his new moniker and scar. “He also told me he wasn’t done with either of us.”

  “Is that all he said?” I ask.

  “Yes. Why?” he replies. I cringe. Hawthorne doesn’t know about Agnes Moon. Agent Crow didn’t tell him. How do I tell him that his girlfriend was murdered because he wanted to help me? He’ll never forgive himself . . . or me.

  “He killed her, Hawthorne. Agnes is dead. Agent Crow beat her to death. He showed me the photos.” Exhale—that’s how I tell him.

  Hawthorne shakes his head. I’ll never forget the look of horror on his face for as long as I live.

  “Agent Crow accused Agnes of being thirdborn. Was she?”

  His eyes smolder. His nostrils flare. “No! She was secondborn, like us! She was just a Moon. She’s never even been trained to defend herself!”

  “He was going to kill her either way, for helping me. He’s insane, Hawthorne. I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I feel powerless to take away his pain.

  “She didn’t want to help. I convinced her to do it.” His lips thin in despair. “I’m going to kill him.”

  “One day. I’ll help you.” Rubbing my eyes in exhaustion, I rise from his lap and sway on my feet. Hawthorne stands and catches my shoulders.

  “I’m taking you to your capsule.” I don’t argue. He places a comforting hand on the small of my back, and we walk.

  “How do you know which one is mine?”

  “I asked around once I found out we were in the same air-barracks.”

  I pause. “That’s more than coincidence, Hawthorne. There are literally a million capsules on this Base and thousands of air-barracks.”

  “I know,” he says grimly.

  “Who put me here with you?” I stare at him accusingly, searching his eyes.

  He cups my cheek. “I swear to you that I don’t know, Roselle.”

  “I don’t either.”

  We continue walking until we reach my capsule.

  “Get some sleep,” Hawthorne insists. “I’ll check on you later.”

  I climb the ladder up four levels, open my capsule, and crawl inside. The door shuts. Resting my head against my pillow, I pull my blanket over me, but for hours, I lie awake in total darkness.

  My thoughts turn to last night. Flannigan planted herself in my detention cell. The privateer manipulated me into helping her steal monikers, but for whom? She died to get them. What am I supposed to do with them? Turn them over? Say that I accidentally shot eight Census agents and helped blow up and flood the tunnel-dwelling hunters and their scary interrogation rooms?

  A part of me wants to rationalize the eight deaths as mercy killings. They would have died anyway—drowned by the wall of water—except for the one in the elevator. He probably would have made it. But how many thirdborns had he murdered? He had at least twenty kill tallies by his eyes. Maybe I brought justice.

  All I know is that I’m in possession of contraband that will get me tortured and killed. Now that I have time to think, I can see every mistake with glaring clarity. I was released a few hours before my sentence was officially over. Strike one. If anyone asks Holcomb Sword, he’ll be able to say he hadn’t released me. Strike two. They won’t find a moniker trail of my leaving the detention center at five a.m., or arriving at the air-barracks at five twenty, except for the login at my locker. And there won’t be a record of my entering the air-barracks at all. Strikes three and four.

  I feel more and more confident that at any second, Agent Crow is going to bang on the door of my capsule and arrest me. But one hour slips by, and then another, and another, and nothing happens. I switch on the virtual-access screen on the ceiling. No one is reporting on the bombing of the Census Base. The news is all about the semifinal rounds of the Secondborn Trials. Half of the competitors scale the side of a mountain. From a bluff, the other half picks them off, one by one, with fusion arrows. Something inside of me feels like it’s dying.

  I’m startled awake. The visual screen above my head is still on. Commentators discuss the deaths of several of the champions from the Fate of Seas, burned up in a fiery crash when an incendiary device ignited their ultra-light aircraft in the aviator challenge. A fist bangs on my door, and Hawthorne’s voice calls, “Roselle?” I scoot down to the panel and open the door outward. He gazes at me from the ladder.

  “Hi.” He fakes a smile. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I just had a coronary. I thought you were Agent Crow.” I rub sleep from my eyes.

  “He’s back at the St
one Forest Base,” Hawthorne says, a look of hatred in his eyes. “We’re in the air, en route to the Twilight Forest.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “You missed breakfast and lunch. It’s fourteen hundred.” He hands me a silver foil ration pack. “It’s turkey pasta—one of the better ones. You know you can come out now? We’re no longer on lockdown. Whatever was worrying them while we were docked at the Base has passed now that we’ve left. We were cleared for active duty.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He’s worried, but I’m relieved. It’ll be harder for Agent Crow to get to him. After Agnes, I don’t know how to protect him, beyond not telling him anything about the thousands of monikers hidden in my locker. He can’t be involved in that.

  “Would you like to go for a run with me?” Hawthorne asks.

  I nod, set aside the ration pack, and climb out of my capsule, meeting him on the catwalk. We head to the locker room, where I pick up a workout T-shirt and sweats from stacks of them. No one here is shy, I’m learning. Naked bodies, male and female, walk around for all the air-barracks to ogle. I take my clothes to a bathroom unit and change there.

  When I come out, Hawthorne is leaning against my locker with his arms crossed. “Do you intend to do that every time you change your clothes?” he asks with an amused grin.

  “Yeah. I do,” I reply. I kneel on one knee and secure the straps of my running boot.

  “Why would you want to hide your body? Do you have an ugly mole or something?”

  “Uh, no. No mole.”

  “I can lend you some merits to get that thing removed, you know.”

  “Hawthorne,” I say, my face reddening by the second. “You’ve been getting naked with these people since you were ten. I’ve never changed my clothes in front of anyone since I could change them by myself.”

  “Your access feeds showed you training, your diet, your lessons, almost every aspect of your life, but they never showed us your room or anything like that.”

  “That whole place—everything you saw—those were all my rooms. I had an entire wing of the Sword Palace to myself.” We exit the locker room and walk along a row of capsules to a heartwood. We step on facing each other. It takes us down to the lower floors.

  He leans toward me. “What was that like?”

  “It was lonely, Hawthorne. There were days when I thought that if someone didn’t speak to me, I’d go mad. And then there were times when I thought I was a ghost, and only drone cameras could see me. Now it’s as if everyone sees me, and they can’t look away.”

  We step off the heartwood onto a training deck. A track spans its circumference. Soldiers stop talking as we pass, their eyes on me.

  “I see what you mean,” Hawthorne says. “It won’t last forever. The regiment will get used to you, and then they’ll stop paying attention.”

  Hawthorne and I keep pace for the first fourteen miles. It feels right to run after days of not training. I haven’t had a decent workout since I left the Sword Palace—since I lost Dune. We pass other runners, but no one passes us. In the final mile, Hawthorne pulls away from me. I try matching his stride, but it’s impossible, and he beats me by a hundred yards. He has the decency to breathe hard afterward. I have to pinch my side.

  “You don’t lose often . . . do you?” he asks.

  “I believe . . . you went easy . . . on me.” I give up trying to play it cool and hobble around outside the track, staring up at the black ceiling and panting like I might die. “That last mile . . . was painful.”

  Sweat dripping from his face, Hawthorne offers me a towel. “I have something I want to show you.” He guides me to the other side of the deck. “We’re close to the Vahallin Sea. We’ll fly low, near the water. Do you feel us descending?”

  He motions for me to wait, goes to a small compartment door, and unlatches it. He slides the door open, securing it from closing with a hook. Wind whips around us. He holds out his hand to me. I inch toward him, my hair pulling free in wisps from its stays. The wind is so loud that I’d have to scream to be heard, so I don’t even try. I grasp Hawthorne’s arm and cling to it. I long to explore the world drifting by beneath us, knowing I’ve squandered my existence by never having trudged through these green fields dotted with sheep.

  We fly over a cliff, the land falls away abruptly, and the Vahallin Sea moves as if it’s breathing. Its scent is a primal thing, bringing tears to my eyes, as if some ancient part of me remembers it—knows what it feels like to swim in its depths, its vastness.

  Hawthorne taps my shoulder. I look up at him, tears on my cheeks. He brushes them away with his thumb, then takes my hand and helps me up, sliding the door closed.

  “That was—” I have no words to describe it. “Thank you.”

  “It’s nice to share it with someone.” I nod, my throat tight. “C’mon,” Hawthorne says, “I could use a shower.” My eyes widen. “I don’t mean together.”

  “Oh.”

  We make our way back up to Section Black. At my locker, Hawthorne asks, “Have you put on your combat armor yet?” I shake my head no. “Okay, when you’re finished with your shower, put these on.” He indicates the tight black shirt and leggings that go beneath the armor. “I’ll show you how to armor up.”

  Hawthorne walks away. I gather the special shampoo and detangler that Emmy had requisitioned for me, a razor and shaving cream from the shelf of supplies available to everyone, and a towel from the stack. Then, following Hawthorne, I find that his locker is two rows over from mine.

  I peek around the corner. Hawthorne strips off his sweaty T-shirt. His broad shoulders and back muscles bear witness to his intensive training. His skin is perfection. His training trousers hang low on his narrow hips—so low I get a glimpse of the two dimples just above his rounded backside. I back away, my cheeks burning. He’s right, I am weird, and right now, I wish he had an ugly mole.

  An empty shower closet isn’t hard to find at this time of day. I step inside one, close the door, and lock it. I strip off my clothes and turn the water on by scanning my moniker. I only get five minutes.

  But five minutes isn’t long enough. I finish shaving one leg, sans water. After towel drying my hair, I wrap the damp cloth around my body, exit the shower closet, toss my dirty clothes in the clothes chute, and run my fingers through the tangles in my wet hair. Rows of sinks are located near the lockers. Putting toothpaste on my toothbrush, I begin brushing my teeth in front of one. Two buttons are on a panel near the side of the mirror. Above them, a label reads “dryer.” I push the top one. Warm air blows down on me, drying my hair. Soft waves form as I run my fingers through it. On a shelf behind me are grooming supplies—razors and shaving cream. I take a new razor and some shaving cream to finish shaving my leg properly.

  I set the items on the edge of the sink. With my toothbrush still in my mouth, I bend over at my waist, flipping my hair over so that the underside can dry. Running my hands through it, I feel the curls loosening. Reaching for the shaving cream, I rub some on my ankle before pulling the razor across it. I rinse the blade in the sink without looking up, and then drag it across my skin again. Large feet stop right next to me. I flip my long hair out of my face and look up. Hawthorne is there, with just a towel wrapped low on his hips. He is knee-weakeningly handsome.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Bruwshing my teef,” I reply, my mouth full of foam. Beyond him, a group of male soldiers watches in fascination. I turn and spit. “What?” I ask Hawthorne’s reflection in the mirror.

  “I meant what were you doing with that razor?”

  “Shaving my legs. I don’t have wax to remove the hair, so—”

  “I thought only Diamond-Fated women shaved their legs—models, and you know, feminine women, not soldiers.”

  “No one here shaves their legs?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t. Hammon doesn’t.” Putting toothpaste on his toothbrush, he turns around and scowls at the males still watchin
g me behind us. “Show’s over. Go on now.” The men laugh, telling him to lighten up. They push each other around before dispersing.

  “I didn’t know,” I mutter, embarrassed. “We do things differently at home. Every woman shaves or waxes her legs and her armpits—all the aristocracy does it. Do you find it disgusting?”

  “No.”

  “They think it’s disgusting though, right?” I wish someone would tell me these things before I make an ass of myself.

  “Roselle, you just made their top-five lists,” he says, pointing in the direction of the other soldiers. “Honestly, you were probably on that list anyway, but now it’s a safe bet you’re number one.”

  My nose wrinkles. “What’s a top-five list?”

  “You don’t want to know. Rest assured, they find you the opposite of disgusting.”

  I gesture with my thumb over my shoulder. “All right. I’ll just go—”

  “Change in the bathroom—yeah, that’s actually a good idea.”

  Hawthorne is in his uniform when we meet later at my locker. Tossing my long hair into a ponytail, I tuck it into the neckline of my undershirt. My clingy under-armor attire doesn’t leave much to the imagination, and Hawthorne’s eyes rove over me. My cheeks flush with color. He looks away, reaching past me to retrieve the armor from inside my locker. His arm brushes up against my breast. I bite my lip and move back, giving him more room.

  “Excuse me,” he says.

  “It’s fine,” I assure him. “Thank you for doing this.” My fingers tangle together nervously. “I’ve never used this kind of combat gear before.”

  “It’s no problem.” He inhales deeply, then leans close and sniffs my hair. “You don’t smell like a soldier,” he jokes. His nose brushes my neck.

  “Oh.” My blush turns to one of embarrassment. “They gave me this special detangler because they wouldn’t let me cut my hair.”

  “Why wouldn’t they let you cut your hair?”

  “Oh, you know—I need permission from Admiral Dresden, Clifton Salloway, or Agent Crow in order to change how I look.” Admitting my total lack of freedom regarding my own body is humiliating.