Thomas’s eyes constrict as if I’d stabbed him. I study him closer, but he notices me analyzing him and jerks his face away, turning to the side and hiding his head in his hands.
I think about my brother again, this time flipping in my mind through his many years spent in Thomas’s company. Metias had known Thomas since they were kids, long before I was born. Whenever his father, our apartment floor’s janitor, would bring Thomas along to accompany him during his work shifts, Thomas and Metias would play for hours on end. Military video games. Toy guns. After I came into the picture, I remember the many quiet conversations the two of them would share in our living room, and how often they were together. I recall Thomas’s Trial score: 1365. Great for a poor sector kid, but average for kids in Ruby sector. Metias was the first to pick up on Thomas’s intense interest in being a soldier. He’d spend entire afternoons teaching Thomas everything he knew. Thomas would never have made it into Emerald sector’s Highland University without my brother’s help.
My breaths turn shallow as something falls into place. I remember the way Metias’s gaze would linger on Thomas during their training sessions. I’d always assumed that was just my brother’s way of studying Thomas’s posture and performance for accuracy. I remember how patient and gentle Metias was when explaining things to Thomas. The way his hand would touch Thomas’s shoulder. The night when I’d eaten edame at that café with Thomas and Metias, when Metias first stopped shadowing Chian. The way Metias’s hand would sometimes rest on Thomas’s arm for a beat longer than it had to. The chat I had with my brother when he took care of me on the day of his induction. How he’d laughed. I don’t need girlfriends. I’ve got a baby sister to take care of. And it was true. He’d dated a couple of girls in college, but never for longer than a week, and always with polite disinterest.
So obvious. How could I not have seen this before?
Of course Metias never talked to me about it. Officer and subordinate relationships are strictly forbidden. Harshly punished. Metias had been the one to recommend Thomas for Commander Jameson’s patrol . . . He must have done it for Thomas’s sake, even though he knew that it meant any chance of a relationship would be impossible.
All of this flashes through my thoughts in a matter of seconds. “Metias was in love with you,” I whisper.
Thomas doesn’t reply.
“Well? Is it true? You must have known.”
Thomas still doesn’t answer. Instead, he keeps his head in his hands and repeats, “I took an oath.”
“Wait a minute. I don’t understand.” I lean back against my chair and take a deep breath. My thoughts are now a whirling, jumbled mess. Thomas’s silence tells me far more than anything he’s said aloud.
“Metias loved you,” I say slowly. My words are quivering. “And did so much for you. But you still turned him in?” I shake my head in disbelief. “How could you?”
Thomas looks up at me from his hands, a flash of confusion lighting his face. “I never reported him.”
We face each other for a long time. Finally, I say through clenched teeth, “Tell me what happened, then.”
Thomas stares off into space. “Security admins found traces he left behind when he hacked through a loophole in the system,” he replies. “Into the deceased civilians’ database. The admins reported it to me first, with the understanding that I would pass the message to Commander Jameson. I’d always warned Metias about hacking. You cross the Republic too many times, and eventually you get burned. Stay loyal, stay faithful. But he never listened. Neither one of you do.”
“So you kept his secret?”
Thomas drops his head back into his hands. “I confronted Metias about it first. He admitted it to me. I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone, but deep down, I wanted to. I have never kept anything from Commander Jameson.” He pauses here for a second. “Turns out that my silence wouldn’t have made a difference. The security admins decided to forward a message on to Commander Jameson anyway. That’s how she found out. Then she tasked me with taking care of Metias.”
I listen in shocked silence. Thomas had never wanted to kill Metias. I try to imagine a scenario that I can bear. Maybe he even tried to persuade Commander Jameson to assign the mission to someone else. But she refused, and he chose to do it anyway.
I wonder whether Metias ever acted on his attraction, and whether Thomas reciprocated. Knowing Thomas, I doubt it. Did he love Metias back? He had tried to kiss me that night after the celebration for Day’s capture. “The celebratory ball,” I muse, aloud this time. I don’t need to explain that evening for Thomas to know what I’m talking about. “When you tried to . . .”
I trail off as Thomas continues to stare at the floor, his expression oscillating between blankness and pain. Finally, he runs a hand through his hair and mumbles, “I knelt over Metias and watched him die. My hand was on that knife. He . . .”
I wait, light-headed from the words he’s saying.
“He told me not to hurt you,” Thomas continues. “His last words were about you. And I don’t know. At Day’s execution, I tried to come up with a way to stop Commander Jameson from arresting you. But you make it so hard for people to protect you, June. You break so many rules. Just like Metias. That night at the ball—when I looked at your face—” His voice cracks. “I thought I could protect you, and that the best way might be to keep you close to me, to try to win you over. I don’t know,” he repeats bitterly. “Even Metias had trouble watching out for you. What chance did I have of keeping you safe?”
The evening of Day’s execution. Had Thomas been trying to help me out when he escorted me down to see the electro-bomb storage basement? What if Commander Jameson was preparing to arrest me, and Thomas tried getting to me first? To what, help me escape? I don’t understand.
“I did care for him, you know,” he says through my silence. He pretends bravado, some false professionalism. Still, I hear a tinge of sadness. “But I am also a soldier of the Republic. I did what I had to do.”
I shove the table aside and lunge for him, even though I know I’m chained down to my chair. Thomas jumps back. I stumble against my restraints, fall to my knees, and then grab for his leg. For anything. You’re sick. You’re so twisted. I want to kill him. I’ve never wanted anything this much in my entire life.
No, that’s not true. I want Metias to be alive again.
The guards outside must’ve heard the commotion because they come pouring in, and before I know it I’m pinned down by several soldiers, cuffed with an extra set of shackles, and untied from my chair. They drag me to my feet. I kick out furiously, running through a list in my head of every attack I’ve ever learned in school, trying frantically to free myself. Thomas is so close. He’s only a few feet away.
Thomas just looks at me. His hands dangle at his sides. “It was the most merciful way for him to go,” he calls out. It makes me nauseous I know he’s right, and that Metias would’ve almost certainly been tortured to death had Thomas not taken him down in that alley. But I don’t care. I’m blind, smothered by my anger and confusion. How could he do that to someone he loved? How could he possibly attempt to justify this? What is wrong with him?
After Metias’s death, on nights when Thomas sat alone in his home, did he ever step out of his façade? Did he ever shed the soldier and let the civilian grieve?
I’m dragged out of the room and back down the corridor. My hands tremble—I fight to steady my breathing, to calm my racing heart, to push Metias back into a safe corner of my mind. A small part of me had hoped that I was wrong about Thomas. That he hadn’t been the one to kill my brother.
By the next morning, all traces of emotion have disappeared from Thomas’s face. He tells me the Denver court has gotten wind of my request for the Elector and has decided to transfer me to the Colorado State Penitentiary.
I’m off to the capital.
WE TOUCH DOWN IN LAMAR, COLORADO, ON A COLD, rainy morning, right on schedule. Razor leaves with his squadron. Kaede and I wait in the dark stairwell
leading out from the back entrance of his office until the sounds outside have quieted and most of the ship’s crew have left. This time there are no guards performing fingerprint scans or ID checks, so we can follow the last of the soldiers straight off the exit ramp. We melt right in with the troops that are actually here to fight for the Republic.
Sheets of icy rain pound the base as we step out of the pyramid dock and into the formidable grayness of this place. The sky’s completely covered with churning storm clouds. Landing docks line the side of the cracked cement street, an ominous row of enormous black pyramids stretching off in either direction, slick and shiny with rain. The air smells stale, wet. Jeeps packed with soldiers drive back and forth, splashing mud and gravel across the pavement. The soldiers here all have a wide stripe of black painted across their eyes from one ear to the other. Must be some sort of crazy warfront style. The rest of the city looms in front of us—gray skyscrapers that probably serve as barracks for the soldiers, some new with smooth sides and tinted glass windows, others pockmarked and crumbling as if they’ve been fed a steady diet of grenades. A few are ash and ruins, some with just one wall left, pointing upward like a broken monument. No terraced buildings here, no grassy levels dotted with herds of cattle.
We hurry along the street with our stiff jacket collars turned up in a pitiful attempt to shield us from the rain. “This place has been bombed, yeah?” I mutter to Kaede. My teeth chatter with each word.
Kaede opens her mouth in mock surprise. “Wow. You’re a cracked genius, you know that?”
“I don’t get it.” I study the crumbling buildings that dot the horizon. “What’s with the shell-shocked look here? Isn’t the actual fighting happening farther away?”
Kaede leans in so the other soldiers on the street don’t hear us. “The Colonies have been pushing in along this part of the border since I was, what, seventeen? Anyway, for years. They’ve probably gotten a good hundred miles in from where the Republic claims the Colorado line is.”
After so many years of listening to the constant bombardment of Republic propaganda, it’s jarring to hear someone tell me the truth. “What—so are you saying the Colonies are winning the war, then?” I ask in a low voice.
“They’ve been winning for a while now. You heard it from me first. Give it a few more years, kid, and the Colonies will be right in your backyard.” She sounds kinda disgusted. Maybe there’s some lingering resentment she has against the Colonies. “Make of that what you will,” she mutters. “I’m just here for the money.”
I fall silent. The Colonies will be the new United States. Can it really be possible that after all these years of war, it might finally come to an end? I try to imagine a world without the Republic—without the Elector, the Trials, the plagues. The Colonies as the victor. Man, too good to be true. And with the Elector’s potential assassination, this might all come true even sooner. I’m tempted to press her more on it, but Kaede shushes me before I can start, and we end up walking in silence.
We make a turn several blocks down and follow a double row of railroad tracks for what feels like several miles. Finally, we stop when we reach a street corner far from the barracks, darkened by the shadows of ruined buildings alongside it. Lone soldiers walk by here and there. “There’s a lull in the fighting right now,” Kaede murmurs as she squints down the track. “Has been for a few days. But it’ll pick up soon. You’re gonna be so grateful to be hanging with us; none of these Republic soldiers will have the luxury of hiding underground when the bombs come raining down.”
“Underground?”
But Kaede’s attention is fixed on a soldier walking straight toward us along one side of the tracks. I blink water out of my eyes and try to get a better look at him. He’s dressed no differently from us, in a soaked cadet jacket with a diagonal flap of cloth covering part of the buttons, and single silver stripes along each shoulder. His dark skin is slick behind the sheets of pouring rain, and his short curls are plastered to his head. His breath comes out in white clouds. When he gets closer, I can see that his eyes are a startling, pale gray.
He walks by without acknowledging us, and gives Kaede the subtlest gesture: two fingers of his right hand held out in a V.
We cross the tracks and continue for several more blocks. Here the buildings are crowded close together and the streets are so narrow that only two people can fit down an alley at a time. This must have once been an area where civilians lived. Many of the windows are blown out and others are covered with tattered cloth. I see a couple of people’s shadows inside them, lit by flickering candles. Whoever isn’t a soldier in this town must be doing what my father used to do—cooking, cleaning, and caring for the troops. Dad must’ve lived in squalor like this too whenever he headed out to the warfront for his tours of duty.
Kaede shakes me out of my thoughts by pulling us abruptly into one of the dark, narrow alleys. “Move fast,” she whispers.
“You know who you’re talking to, right?”
She ignores me, kneels down along the edge of one wall where there’s a metal grating lining the ground, then takes out a tiny black device with her good arm. She runs it quickly along an edge of the grating. A second passes. Then the grating lifts off the ground on two hinges and silently slides open, revealing a black hole. It’s purposely designed to be worn and dirty, I realize, but this thing’s been modified into a secret entrance. Kaede stoops down and jumps into the hole. I follow suit. My boots splash into shallow water, and the grating above us slides shut again.
Kaede grabs my hand and leads me through a tunnel. It smells stale here, like old stone and rain and rusted metal. Ice-cold water drips from the ceiling and through my wet hair. We travel only a few feet in before taking a sharp right turn, letting the darkness swallow us whole.
“There used to be miles of tunnels like this in almost every warfront city,” Kaede whispers into the silence.
“Yeah? What were they for?”
“Rumor’s that all these old tunnels used to be for eastern Americans trying to sneak west to get away from the floods. Even back before the war began. So each of these tunnels goes right under the warfront barricades between the Republic and the Colonies.” Kaede makes a sliding motion with her hand that I can barely make out in the gloom. “After the war started, both countries started using them offensively, so the Republic destroyed all the entrances within their borders and the Colonies did the same on the other end. The Patriots managed to dig out and rebuild five tunnels in secret. We’ll be using this Lamar one”—she pauses to gesture at the dripping ceiling—“and one in Pierra. A nearby city.”
I try to imagine what it must’ve once been like, a time when there wasn’t a Republic or Colonies and a single country covered the middle of North America. “And no one knows these are here?”
Kaede snorts. “You think we’d be using these if the Republic knew about them? Not even the Colonies know. But they’re great for Patriot missions.”
“Do the Colonies sponsor you guys, then?”
Kaede smiles a little at that. “Who else would give us enough money to maintain tunnels like this? I haven’t met our sponsors over there yet—Razor handles those relationships. But the money keeps coming, so they must be satisfied with the job we’re doing.”
We walk for a while without talking. My eyes have adjusted enough to the darkness so that I can see rust crusting the tunnel’s sides. Rivulets of water drip patterns across the metal walls. “Are you happy that they’re winning the war?” I say after a few minutes. Hopefully she’s willing to talk about the Colonies again. “I mean, since they practically kicked you out of their country? Why’d you leave in the first place?”
Kaede laughs bitterly. The sound of our boots sloshing through water echoes down the tunnel. “Yeah, I guess I’m happy,” she says. “What’s the alternative? Watching the Republic win? You tell me what’s better. But you grew up in the Republic. Who knows what you’d think of the Colonies. You might think it’s a paradise.”
&n
bsp; “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?” I reply. “My father used to tell me stories about the Colonies. He said there were cities completely lit up by electricity.”
“Your dad worked for a resistance or something?”
“I’m not sure. He never said it out loud. We all assumed he must’ve been doing something behind the Republic’s back, though. He’d bring back these . . . trinkets related to the United States. Just odd things for a normal person to have. He would talk about getting us all out of the Republic someday.” I pause there, lost for a moment in an old memory. My pendant feels heavy around my neck. “Don’t think I’ll ever really know what he was up to.”
Kaede nods. “Well, I grew up along one of the Colonies’ eastern coastlines, where it borders the South Atlantic. I haven’t been back in years—I’m sure the water’s gone at least a dozen more feet inland by now. Anyway, I got into one of their Airship Academies and became one of their top pilots in training.”
If the Colonies don’t have the Trials, I wonder how they choose who to admit into their schools. “So, what happened?”
“Killed a guy,” Kaede replies. She says it like it’s the most natural thing in the world. In the darkness, she draws closer to me and peers boldly at my face. “What? Hey, don’t give me that—it was an accident. He was jealous that our flight commanders liked me so much, so he tried to push me over the edge of our airship. I damaged one of my eyes good during that scuffle. I found him in his locker room later and knocked him out.” She makes a disgusted sound. “Turned out I’d hit his head too hard, and he never woke up. My sponsor pulled out after that little incident tainted my reputation with the corps—and not because I killed him, either. Who wants an employee—a fighter pilot—with a bad eye, even after surgery?” She stops walking and points at her right eye. “I was damaged goods. My price went way down. Anyway, the Academy booted me out after my sponsor dropped me. It’s a shame, honestly. I missed out on my last year of training because of that damn con.”