Chapter 31: Rain
“You can at least look at me while you’re rejecting me,” I utter, trying to keep the deep hurt from my voice.
Face me like I’m facing you!
“I can’t,” he mumbles
“You can’t or you won’t?
Outside our little nest the drizzling rain is coming down again. We hardly feel any drops because of the blanket of leaves around us, but the sound makes it difficult to hear each other. I have to lean into him to decipher what he’s saying. At least we seem safe from the colonel picking up our voices.
“You don’t understand,” he explains with a burst of emotion that I rarely see in him.
“What don’t I understand?”
He finally turns to me, his dark eyes entreating mine. “I can’t let my emotions get the best of me anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to know how I feel about you, right?”
“I think so,” I say with insecurity.
“Don’t think so, Madrigal—know,” he blurts with frustration. You know how I feel about you—you do.”
“How should I know if you’ve never told me anything?”
“That kiss on the tree didn’t tell you?” he asks incredulously.
I shake my head. “For all I know it could’ve been the craziness of the moment.”
“For such a smart girl you can sure be clueless,” he grumbles. “It’s obvious to everyone except you how I feel about you.”
“How you feel about me?”
He rolls his eyes. “Madrigal, how do you not realize this?”
“Royce, how am I supposed to realize it when you keep your emotions so controlled?”
He exhales a deep breath in frustration. “That’s the problem—I haven’t done a good enough job of managing them,” he expresses quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been one mistake after another—surprise after surprise with people shoving rifles in our faces and leading to what happened at the tree. It almost cost us our lives and even the world if you had exploded.”
I nod solemnly.
His dark eyes stay on mine as he continues, “We only have to think about what happened to Peter to understand what happens when you let your feelings go crazy, right?”
I nod again.
“Peter and I grew up with the same ideas. We always knew how important the resistance was and were both passionate about it. But the minute he falls for you and Constanza chooses me as the leader, our ideals take second place and he feels he has to prove himself. He feels he has to satisfy his ego.”
“That wouldn’t happen to you. You’d never let your ego get in the way.”
He exhales a deep breath. “But I’ve let my feelings for you do that.”
“Royce—“
“I’ve let them distract me.”
I sigh, letting my eyes rest on him a few seconds before I speak. “I guess I’ve let my own feelings for you distract me too.”
“That kiss—that kiss was just too much. I should’ve been checking every branch but instead I was thinking about you—about when the second kiss would happen.”
“Me too,” I say quietly.
“We can’t let anything like that happen again. We have to always be on guard—always!”
I nod solemnly.
“Now you understand that I’m not rejecting you,” he states, his deep eyes firmly on me. “I care about you, Madrigal, more than you can imagine, but we have to put all our concentration on staying alive.”
“I know we do.”
“Maybe when this is over,” he murmurs, “we’ll see where we go from here.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
Deciding that it would be too dangerous to travel in the dark, we camp out where we’re at for the night. Royce takes the first watch while I shut my eyes to invite sleep, but thoughts spring to my mind.
He has feelings for me.
But we have to keep ourselves in check—our lives depend on it.
I had opened my heart. Even though we couldn’t be together, I’m glad I did.
When I wake up in the morning, Royce is gone. I quickly sit up. Before I can start looking for him, he crawls back into our hiding place.
“Good morning,” he says.
I return his greeting as he drops raspberries on my lap. “I found them while I was poking around and thought they’d be good for breakfast,” he comments.
I smile. “Good idea.”
“No one seems to be around,” he assures. “As soon as we eat, we should head out.”
“Okay,” I say, jamming a few berries into my mouth.
“There are some poisonous berries out there, but these are safe,” he asserts.
After we finish the delicious fruit, we leave our safe nest. To an extent, I’m sad to leave it behind. With the evil colonel and his sidekick searching for us, we have to tread much more carefully than we’ve ever done. We try to speak as few words as possible—whispering in each other's ears if anything important comes up. The ground is still wet from yesterday’s rain, so we try to keep to the grass at all costs or our footprints will be glaringly visible. We hide our tracks as best as we can—leaving no broken branches and such—like Pilar showed us.
“But still,” she had said, “there’s no way to erase all tracks. Living creatures leave there marks no matter what.”
Royce and I hope that the colonel isn’t anywhere near as excellent of a tracker as Pilar, or he’ll find us for certain. When we’ve been walking for a few hours, keeping our ears open and making as little noise as possible, we hear an out-of-place sound not too far from us. Royce and I slide into some leafy bushes that completely cover us but still allow us to see in front of us.
“We’re not too far from them,” states the colonel, coming into the area.
I tense up but realize that if I make even the slightest of movements, the shrub will move with me. I keep myself like a statue.
“How can you be so sure, sir?” the private asks, also coming into view.
“Are you questioning me, Stupid Head?”
“No, sir. I’m just curious as to how you know they’re near.”
“I may not be an expert tracker, but I’m a step above an amateur and there are some signs I’ve been watching closely.”
Hopefully, he’s exaggerating his abilities, but he’s come this far—so close to us that I can distinguish the small differences between the military rifles of the two soldiers. The colonel’s weapon is newer and has more gadgets.
“Where do we go, sir?” asks the private.
“I’m pretty sure they went that way,” the colonel states, pointing and moving in the general direction of the bushes where Royce and I are in.
I tell myself to be prepared to grab my slingshot if the need arises. Be prepared for anything.
The colonel stops a few inches away from us. I’m reminded of the time Royce, Peter, and I had hid under the fallen tree when we were beginning this journey. Bending down to tie his boots, he scowls at what he sees. He’s so close to us!
“I’m noticing . . . ,” he furiously snaps, unable to finish his sentence.
“Yes, colonel?”
“I don’t believe this!”
“What is it, colonel?”
“How did I not notice it before?”
“What is it, colonel,” the private repeats.
“Look down. What do you see?!”
“Sir—”
“What do you see?”
“Sir—”
“You didn’t shine my boots very well, Stupid Head!”
“Sir, I—”
“How incompetent are you?! You can’t even shine some boots correctly.”
“Sorry, sir. Next time I’ll do a better job.”
“You’d better!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s go!” he demands. “Time is a-wasting!”
They rush past the bush Roy
ce and I are in. We wait for a few moments, listening carefully and trying to catch every movement in the woods before leaving our hiding place.
“We’re going the opposite way,” Royce whispers in my ear.
As we quietly and carefully continue with our journey again, the sky remains clear of rain. We keep traveling, only stopping to re-fill our canteens with water at a spring along the way.
I try not to swallow all the water in my canteen when the purifying pills have taken their affect and it’s properly clean. However, Royce tells me to drink up and stay hydrated. A person can subsist for weeks without food but water is a different matter. Still, I don’t want to go through our water so fast. It feels wrong to be so greedy with it, but it’s excruciatingly hot, muggy, and humid. The rain yesterday had made a misery out of today and while there are a few clouds rolling around in the sky, it doesn’t look like it’ll rain any time soon.
As we keep a steady pace, the scorching sun pushes down on us. I take another desperate swig of my canteen when Royce and I hear the joyful gurgling and flow of fast water. We move swiftly towards the sound. A river. We’ve reached a river—and this one is not like the violent monster Royce had fallen into. This one is as wide as that one but much calmer. I quickly kneel down on the bank and splash my face.
“Let’s get in,” Royce suggests.
He doesn’t need to mention it again. I kick off my shoes and fling my backpack off my shoulder and dive in. As soon as the cool water hits my burning skin, I’m a different person. The heat-infused fogginess in my head dissipates.
Royce doesn’t get in right away but instead, he grabs my backpack and shoes where I had discarded them and hides them in a shrub along with his own things.
“Sorry,” I tell him when he jumps in the river. “I didn’t think to hide my stuff.”
“Just taking precautions.”
I smile at him. “I know.”
“I don’t mean to be such a stick in the mud.”
“I’m glad that you’re not a careless person. I doubt if we’d still be alive if you were.”
“Is that a compliment?” he asks mischievously.
I return his smile. “Maybe.”
When we’ve been in the glorious water for a few minutes, he turns to me with serious eyes. “That colonel was too close, right?”
“That was intense with him staring down at his boots.”
“And us in the bush next to him.”
“Yep.”
“You’re good at not panicking and jumping the gun,” he tells me with a grin.
“I’m learning from the master.”
“You’re learning from yourself,” he points out.
“I’m trying.”
“You pick up fast.”
“I have to—it’s our lives.”
His dark eyes flicker. “Madrigal, I just want you to know that we’re not far from the person who’s going to get us to headquarters. When we reach him, our hiking days should be mostly over. Much of the danger should be over with too.”
An ear-splitting gunshot suddenly reverberates through the air.
Royce’s eyes automatically meet mine. We are no longer alone.
Supernova Page 29