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But her eyes burn in the light, and although it’s hot and might be my imagination, I think I see a small smile on the girl’s face.
Thomas, I whisper, but it comes out as Metias. I blindly reach out a hand for my brother, and then I remember that he’s no longer there to take it.
Then there’s a voice telling me to get up. When I look to my side, I see a boy holding out his hand to me. He has bright blue eyes, dirt on his face, and a beat-up old cap on, and at this moment, I think he might be the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. “Come on,” he urges. I take his hand. In the dust and chaos, we hurry down the street and disappear into the afternoon’s lengthening shadows.
“Who said anything about you, sweetheart?”
Haha
I ALMOST KISSED THE GIRL LAST NIGHT.
Hurhur
“I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this,” he begins. He doesn’t blush, and his eyes don’t dart away. Instead I find myself staring into a pair of oceans—one perfect, the other blemished by that tiny ripple. “You’re very attractive.”
Eheehehehe
Next to her is a dark-haired young man in a captain’s uniform. And standing in front of him, unmoving and unprotected, is the Girl.
The captain lifts his gun and points it at my mother. Then he shoots her in the head.
An old memory struggles to resurface—a needle injected into one of my eyes, a cold metal gurney and an overhead light—but it vanishes as soon as it comes.
What if it was no accident that Eden got the plague? What if it’s no accident when anyone gets it?
We stand in silence for a moment. Then, before I can protest, one of Thomas’s gloved hands brushes my chin as he leans in to kiss me on the lips.
Yuck
Day didn’t fail his Trial. Not even close. In fact, he got the same score I did: 1500 / 1500. I am no longer the Republic’s only prodigy with a perfect score.
They will make an example of me.
Another prodigy—and not just an average one. I’ve met other prodigies before but certainly never one that the Republic decided to keep hidden. Especially one with a perfect score.
They experimented on him. Probably for the military.
Some of them have painted a bloodred streak into their hair.
The gunfire lasts only a minute, if that—but it seems like forever. Thomas finally shouts an order to cease fire, and those in the crowd who haven’t been shot fall to their knees and throw their hands up over their heads.
“Why? You afraid of me or something? Only brave enough to shoot people’s mothers?”
Poor crime scene photography.
June stays silent for a long while, with her eyes cast down. Finally, she looks at me. She’s searching for something, I realize. Is she trying to find a way to trust me?
June was not the one who shot my mother. She was not the one who brought the plague into my home. She was a girl who’d lost her brother, and someone had led her to believe I did it, and in anguish she had tracked me down. If I’d been in her place, would I have done anything differently?
“It’s more proof.” At first my father tried to show it only to Mom, but I managed to get a good look as he turned it over in his hands. A bird on one side, a man’s profile on the other. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN GOD WE TRUST, QUARTER DOLLAR embossed on one side, and LIBERTY and 1990 on the other. “See? Evidence.” He pressed it into her palm.
It’s a genuine coin from nineteen-ninety. See the name? United States. It was real.”
If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system. That’s much more powerful than rebelling outside the system. And if you choose to rebel, bring me with you.
If Metias and Day had met somewhere other than the hospital’s back streets, would they have become allies?
“He was exposed to his brothers. That young one’s Patient Zero, isn’t he? Maybe the medics didn’t pick it up back then.”
Maybe I can steal a good-bye kiss from her before I step into the yard.
“Ms. Iparis,” he says, “you’re under investigation. Follow me.”
The boy’s blindfolded, with hands cuffed tightly behind him. He looks just like me. Except for a few details that only I would notice. His shoulders are slightly broader than mine. He walks with what looks like a fake limp, and his mouth looks more like my father’s than my mother’s. I squint through the rain. It can’t be . . .
The boy is John.
“You’re brilliant,” he says. “But you’re a fool to stay with someone like me.” I close my eyes at the touch of his hand. “Then we’re both fools.”
“It’s strange being here with you. I hardly know you. But . . . sometimes it feels like we’re the same person born into two different worlds.”
“I never did ask you about your street name. Why ‘Day’?” “Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything’s possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.” He looks toward the railway car’s open door, where streaks of dark water blanket the world. “You try to walk in the light.”
