A jolt of pain runs through me. Now I’m ten. I’m back in the Los Angeles Central Hospital’s lab, locked away with who knows how many others, all strapped to separate gurneys, blinded by fluorescent lights. Doctors with face masks hover over me. I squint up at them. Why are they keeping me awake? The lights are so bright—I feel . . . slow, my mind dragging through a sea of haze.
I see the scalpels in their hands. A mess of mumbled words passes between them. Then I feel something cold and metallic against my knee, and the next thing I know, I arch my back and try to shriek. No sound comes out. I want to tell them to stop cutting my knee, but then something pierces the back of my head and pain explodes my thoughts away. My vision tunnels into blinding white.
Then I’m opening my eyes and I’m lying in a dim basement that feels uncomfortably warm. I’m alive by some crazy accident. The pain in my knee makes me want to cry, but I know I have to stay silent. I can see dark shapes around me, most of them laid out on the ground and unmoving, while adults in lab coats walk around, inspecting the bundles on the floor. I wait quietly, lying there with my eyes closed into tiny slits, until those walking leave the chamber. Then I push myself up onto my feet and tear off a pant leg to tie around my bleeding knee. I stumble through the darkness and feel along the walls until I find a door that leads outside, then drag myself into a back alley. I walk out into the light, and this time June is there, composed and unafraid, holding her cool hand out to help me.
“Come on,” she whispers, putting her arm around my waist. I hold her close. “We’re in this together, right? You and me?” We walk to the road and leave the hospital lab behind.
But the people on the street all have Eden’s white-blond curls, each with a scarlet streak of blood cutting through the strands. Every door we pass has a large, spray-painted red X with a line drawn through its center. That means everybody here has the plague. A mutant plague. We wander down the streets for what seems like days, through air thick as molasses. I’m searching for my mother’s house. Far in the distance, I can see the glistening cities of the Colonies beckoning to me, the promise of a better world and a better life. I’m going to take John and Mom and Eden there, and we’ll be free from the clutches of the Republic at last.
Finally, we reach my mother’s door, but when I push it open, the living room is empty. My mother isn’t there. John is gone. The soldiers shot him, I remember abruptly. I glance to my side, but June has vanished, and I’m alone in the doorway. Only Eden’s left . . . he’s lying in bed. When I get close enough for him to hear me coming, he opens his eyes and holds his hands out to me.
But his eyes aren’t blue. They’re black, because his irises are bleeding.
I come to slowly, very slowly, out of the darkness. The base of my neck pulses the way it does when I’m recovering from one of my headaches. I know I’ve been dreaming, but all I remember is a lingering feeling of dread, of something horrible lurking right behind a locked door. A pillow is wedged under my head. A tube pokes out of my arm and runs along the floor. Everything’s out of focus. I struggle to sharpen my vision, but all I can see is the edge of a bed and a carpet on the floor and a girl sitting there with her head resting on the bed. At least, I think it’s a girl. For an instant I think it might be Eden, that somehow the Patriots rescued him and brought him here.
The figure stirs. Now I see that it’s Tess.
“Hey,” I murmur. The word slurs out of my mouth. “What’s up? Where’s June?”
Tess grabs my hand and stands up, stumbling over her reply in her rush. “You’re awake,” she says. “You’re—how are you feeling?”
“Slow.” I try to touch her face. I’m still not entirely convinced that she’s real.
Tess checks behind her at the bedroom door to make sure no one else is there. She holds up a finger to her lips. “Don’t worry,” she says quietly. “You won’t feel slow for long. The Medic seemed pretty happy. Soon you’ll be better than new and we can head for the warfront to kill the Elector.”
It’s jarring to hear the word kill come so smoothly out of Tess’s mouth. Then, an instant later, I realize that my leg doesn’t hurt—not even the smallest bit. I try to prop myself up to see, and Tess pushes the pillows up behind my back so I can sit. I glance down at my leg, almost afraid to look.
Tess sits beside me and unwraps the white bandages that cover the area where the wound was. Under the gauze are smooth plates of steel, a mechanical knee where my bad one used to be, and metal sheets that cover half my upper thigh. I gape at it. The parts where metal meets flesh on my thigh and calf feel molded tightly together, but only small bits of redness and swelling line the edges. My vision swims.
Tess’s fingers drum expectantly against my blankets, and she bites her round upper lip. “Well? How does it feel?”
“It feels like . . . nothing. It’s not painful at all.” I run a tentative finger over the cool metal, trying to get used to the foreign parts embedded in my leg. “She did all this? When can I walk again? Has it really healed this quickly?”
Tess puffs up a little with pride. “I helped the Medic. You’re not supposed to move around much over the next twelve hours. To let the healing salves settle and do their work.” Tess grins and the smile crinkles up her eyes in a familiar way. “It’s a standard operation for injured warfront soldiers. Pretty awesome, yeah? You should be able to use it like a regular leg after that, maybe even better. The doctor I helped is really famous from the warfront hospitals, but she also does black-market work on the side, which is lucky. While she was here, she showed me how to reset Kaede’s broken arm too, so it’d heal faster.”
I wonder how much the Patriots spent on this surgery. I’d seen soldiers with metal parts before, from as little as a steel square on their upper arms to as much as an entire leg replaced with metal. It can’t be a cheap operation, and from the appearance of my leg, the doctor used military-grade healing salves. I can already tell how much power my leg will have when I recover—and how much more quickly I’ll be able to get around. How much sooner I can find Eden.
“Yeah,” I say to Tess. “It’s amazing.” I crane my neck a little so I can focus on the bedroom door, but this makes me dizzy. My head is pounding up a storm now, and I can hear low voices coming from farther down the hall. “What’s everyone doing?”
Tess glances over her shoulder again and then back to me. “They’re talking about the first phase of the plan. I’m not in it, so I’m sitting out.” She helps me lie back down. Then an awkward pause follows. I still can’t get used to how different Tess seems. Tess notices me admiring her, hesitates, and smiles awkwardly.
“When all this is finished,” I begin, “I want you to come with me to the Colonies, okay?” Tess breaks into a smile, then smoothes my blankets nervously with one hand as I go on. “If everything goes according to the Patriots’ plans, and the Republic really does fall, I don’t want us to be caught in the chaos. Eden, June, you, and me. Got it, cousin?”
Tess’s burst of enthusiasm wanes. She hesitates. “I don’t know, Day,” she says, glancing over toward the door again.
“Why? You afraid of the Patriots or something?”
“No . . . they’ve been good to me so far.”
“Then why don’t you want to come?” I ask her quietly. I’m starting to feel weak again, and it’s hard to keep things from getting foggy. “Back in Lake, we always said that we’d escape to the Colonies together if we got the chance. My father told me that the Colonies must be a place full of—”
“Freedom and opportunities. I know.” Tess shakes her head. “It’s just that . . .”
“That what?”
One of Tess’s hands slides over to tuck inside my own. I picture her as a kid again, back when I first found her rummaging through that garbage bin in Nima sector. Is this really the same girl? Her hands aren’t as small as they used to be, although they still fit neatly into mine. She looks up at me. “Day . . . I’m worried about you.”
I blink. “What do you mean? The surgery?”
Tess gives me an impatient shake of her head. “No. I’m worried about you because of June.”
I breathe deeply, waiting for her to continue, afraid of what she’ll say.
Tess’s voice changes into something strange, something I don’t recognize. “Well . . . if June travels with us . . . I mean, I know how attached you are to her, but just a few weeks ago she was a Republic soldier. Don’t you see that expression she gets now and then? Like she misses the Republic, or wants to go back or something? What if she tries to sabotage our plan, or turns on you while we’re trying to get to the Colonies? The Patriots are already taking precautions—”
“Stop.” I’m a little surprised by how loud and irritated I sound. I’ve never raised my voice to Tess before, and I regret it instantly. I can hear Tess’s jealousy in every word she says, the way she spits June’s name out like she can’t wait to get it over with. “I understand that it’s only been a few weeks since everything’s happened. Of course she’s going to have moments of uncertainty. Right? Still, she’s not loyal to the Republic anymore, and we’re in a dangerous place even if we don’t travel with her. Besides, June has skills that none of us have. She broke me out of Batalla Hall, for crying out loud. She can keep us safe.”
Tess purses her lips. “Well, how do you feel about what the Patriots are planning for her? What about her relationship with the Elector?”
“What relationship?” I hold up my hands weakly, trying to pretend that it doesn’t matter. “It’s all part of the game. She doesn’t even know him.”
Tess shrugs. “She will soon,” she whispers. “When she has to get close enough to manipulate him.” Her eyes lower again. “I’ll go with you, Day. I’d go anywhere with you. But I just wanted to remind you about . . . her. Just in case you hadn’t thought of things that way.”
“Everything will be okay,” I manage to say. “Just trust me.”
The tension finally passes. Tess’s face softens into its familiar sweetness, and my irritation slips away as quickly as it had come. “You’ve always watched out for me,” I say with a smile. “Thanks, cousin.”
Tess grins. “Someone has to, yeah?” She gestures at my rolled-up sleeves. “I’m glad the uniform fits you, by the way. It seemed too big when it was folded, but I guess it turned out all right.” Without warning, she leans over and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. She jumps away almost instantly. Her face is bright pink. Tess has kissed me on the cheek before, when she was younger, but this is the first time I’ve felt something more in her gesture. I try to figure out how, in less than a month, Tess left her childhood behind and became an adult. I cough uncomfortably. It’s an odd new relationship.
