Prodigy

Page 36

I go back to stacking cans. “So?” I mutter.
“That means they must be getting their power from the Colonies, right?”
“Guess so. Makes sense, yeah?” I straighten my back and pull the two burlap sacks I’ve prepared tightly shut. “Well, at least it means the tunnel will lead out to the surface somewhere, hopefully in the Colonies. When we’re ready to go we can just follow the cables. We should probably get some rest first.”
I’m just about to walk out of the kitchen and past June when she clears her throat and speaks up. “Hey—did the Patriots teach you anything about fighting while you were with them?”
I shake my head. “No. Why?”
June turns to face me. The kitchen entrance is narrow enough that her shoulders brush past mine, raising goose bumps on my arms. I’m annoyed that she still has this effect on me, in spite of everything. “While we were getting into the tunnel I noticed that you were swinging at the Patriots from your arms . . . but that’s not very effective. You should be swinging from your legs and hips.”
Her critique grates on my nerves, even though she’s giving it in a strangely hesitant tone. “I don’t want to do this right now.”
“When are we going to do it if not now?” June leans against the door frame and points toward the shelter’s entrance. “What if we bump into some soldiers?”
I sigh and put my hands up for a second. “If this is your way of apologizing after a fight, then you really suck at it. Listen. I’m sorry I got angry earlier.” I hesitate, remembering my words. I’m not sorry. But telling her that now won’t help anything. “Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll feel better.”
“Come on, Day. What’ll happen when you find Eden and you need to protect him?” She is trying to apologize, in her own subtle way. Well. At least she’s giving it a shot, however crappy she is at it. I glare at her for a few seconds.
“All right,” I finally say. “Show me some moves, soldier. What you got up your sleeves?”
June gives me a small smile, then walks me over to the center of the shelter’s main room. She stands beside me. “Ever read Ducain’s The Art of the Fight?”
“Does it look like I’ve had free time in my life to read?”
She ignores me, and I immediately feel bad for saying it. “Well, you’re already light on your feet and you have flawless balance,” she continues. “But you don’t use those strengths when you attack. It’s like you panic. You forget all about your speed advantage and your center of mass.”
“My center of what?” I start to say, but she just taps the outside of my leg with her boot.
“Stay on the balls of your feet and keep your legs shoulder width apart,” she goes on. “Pretend you’re standing on train tracks with one foot forward.”
I’m a little surprised. June’s been watching my attacks closely, even though it usually happens when all sorts of chaos is going on around us. And she’s right. I hadn’t even realized that all my instincts of balance go right out the window when I try to fight. I do as she says. “Okay. Now what?”
“Well, keep your chin down, for one.” She touches my hands, then lifts them up so one fist stays close to the side of my cheek and the other hovers out in front of my face. Her hands run along my arms, checking my posture. My skin tingles. “Most people lean back and keep their chins high and jutted,” she says, her face close beside mine. She taps my chin once. “That’s what you do too. And it’s just asking for a knockout.”
I try to focus on my own posture by putting two fists up. “How do you punch?”
June gently touches the tip of my chin, then the edge of my brow. “Remember, it’s all about how accurately you can hit someone, not how hard. You’ll be able to knock out someone much larger if you catch them in the right spots.”
Before I know it, half an hour’s gone by. June teaches me one tactic after another—keeping my shoulder up to protect my chin, catching my opponent off guard with fake moves, overhand hits, underhand hits, leaning back and following through with kicks, leaping out of the way with speed. Aiming for the vulnerable spots—eyes, neck, and so on. I lunge out with everything I’ve got. When I try to catch her by surprise, she slips from my grasp like water between rocks, fluid and constantly moving, and if I blink, she’s behind me and twisting my arm up behind my back.
Finally, June trips me and pins me to the floor. Her hands push my wrists down. “See?” she says. “Tricked you. You’re always staring at your opponent’s eyes—but that gives you a bad peripheral view. If you want to track my arms and legs, you have to focus on my chest.”
I raise my eyebrow at that. “Say no more.” My eyes shift downward.
June laughs, then turns a little red. We pause there for an instant, her hands still holding my arms down, her legs across my stomach, both of us breathing heavily. Now I understand why she suggested the impromptu sparring—I’m tired, and the exercise has drained my anger. Even though she doesn’t say it, I can see her apology plainly on her face, the tragic slant of her eyebrows and the slight quiver of unspoken words on her lips. The sight finally softens me, albeit only a little. I’m still not sorry about what I’d said to her earlier, true, but I’m also not being fair. Whatever I lost, June has lost equally. She used to be rich, then she threw it away to save my life. She’d played her part in my family’s deaths, but . . . I run a hand through my hair, feeling guilty now. I can’t blame her for everything. And I can’t be alone at a time like this, with no allies, no one I can turn to.
She sways.
I prop myself up on my elbows. “You okay?”
She shakes her head, frowns, and tries to shrug it off. “Fine. I think I picked up a bug or something. Nothing big.”
I study her under the artificial light. Now that I’m paying closer attention to the color of her face, I can see that she’s paler than usual, and that her cheeks look flushed because her skin is so wan. I sit up higher, forcing her to slide off. Then I press a hand to her forehead. Immediately I pull it away. “Man, you’re burning up.”
June starts to protest, but as if our training session has weakened her, she sways again and steadies herself with one arm. “I’ll be fine,” she mumbles. “We should be heading out, anyway.”
And here I’ve been angry with her, forgetting all she’s been through. Trot of the year. I ease one of my arms around her back and wrap the other under her knees, then scoop her up. She slumps against my chest, the heat of her brow startling against my cool skin. “You need to rest.”
I carry her into one of the bunker rooms, pull off her boots, lay her down carefully on a bed, and cover her with the blankets. She blinks at me. “I didn’t mean what I said earlier.” Her eyes are dazed, but the emotion’s still there. “About money. And . . . I didn’t—”
“Stop talking.” I smooth stray hairs from her forehead. What if she caught something serious while under arrest? A plague virus? . . . But she’s upper class. She should have vaccines. I hope. “I’m going to find you some medicine, okay? Just close your eyes.” June shakes her head, frustrated, but she doesn’t try to argue.
After upending the entire shelter, I finally manage to hunt down an unopened bottle of aspirin and return to June’s bedside with it. She takes a couple of pills. When she starts shivering, I grab two more blankets from the other beds in the room and cover her with them, but it doesn’t seem to help. “It’s okay. I’ll manage,” she whispers right as I’m about to go hunting for more blankets. “Won’t really matter how high you stack them—I just need my fever to break.” She hesitates, then reaches for my hand. “Can you stay here?”
The weakness of her voice worries me more than anything. I climb into the bed, lie beside her on top of the blankets, and pull her to me. June smiles a little, then closes her eyes. The feel of her body’s curves against mine sends warmth coursing through me. I’ve never thought of describing her beauty as delicate, because delicate just isn’t a word that fits June . . . but here, now that she’s sick, I realize just how fragile she can be. Pink cheeks. Small, soft lips against large, closed eyes fringed with the curve of dark lashes. I don’t like seeing her this delicate. The heat of our argument lingers in the back of my mind, but for now I need to forget about it. Fighting will only slow us down. We’ll deal with the problems between us later.
Slowly, we both doze off.
* * *
Something jerks me out of my sleep. A beeping sound. I listen to it for a while, trying to pinpoint its location through my grogginess, and then crawl out of bed without waking June. Before leaving the room, I lean over to touch her forehead again. Still no better. Sweat beads on her brow, so her fever must’ve broken at least once, but she’s as warm as ever.
When I follow the beeping sound out into the kitchen, I see a tiny beacon blinking above the door that we’d come into the shelter from. Words flash below it in bright, menacing red.
APPROACHING—400 FT
A cold fear seizes me. Someone must be coming down the tunnel toward the shelter—Patriots, maybe, or Republic soldiers. Can’t decide which would be worse. I whirl on my heels and hurry to where I’d stacked our burlap sacks of food and water, then empty some cans out of one of them. When the bag’s light enough, I pull my arms through both sack strings like it’s a backpack and then rush to June’s bedside. She stirs with a soft moan.
“Hey,” I whisper, trying to sound calm and reassuring. I bend down and stroke her hair. “It’s time to go. Come here.” I push the blankets aside, keeping one to wrap around her, pull her boots onto her feet, and hoist her into my arms. She struggles for a moment as if she thinks she’s falling, but I just hang on tighter. “Easy,” I murmur against her hair. “I’ve got you.”
She settles into my embrace, half-conscious.
We leave the shelter and head back into the darkness of the tunnel, my boots splashing through puddles and mud. June’s breath is shallow and quick, hot with fever. Behind us, the alarm grows quieter until we round several bends, then it fades to a soft hum. I half expect to hear footsteps coming after us, but soon the hum of the alarm fades away too, and we’re left to travel in silence. To me, it feels like hours have passed—although June mutters that “it’s been forty-two minutes and thirty-three seconds.” We trudge on.
This stretch of tunnel is much longer than the first, and dimly lit with the occasional flickering fixture. At some point I finally stop and slump down in a dry section, sipping on water and canned soup (at least, I think it’s soup—I can’t see much in this darkness so I just pop the lid off the first tin I grab). June’s shivering again, which is no surprise. It’s cold down here, cold enough for me to see the faint clouds of my breath. I wrap the blanket tighter around June, check her forehead one more time, and then try to feed her some soup. She refuses it.