Authors: J.D. Brewer
I looked back to see through the tall blades as two soldiers stepped out of the corn. Their black uniforms slithered out of the green like oil. “Wait. You’ll regret shooting me.” Ono’s Colonial accent was sharp and commanding. How did I not see it before? Of course he’d be someone important. Genetics never lied. The hints his stories dropped didn’t lie either. I’d known he was important since I’d met him. It’d been on the tip of my tongue.
I knew him from somewhere. I knew him. The thought came back in full force, and I strained my brain trying to figure it out. Where had I seen him before? Where?
I pushed forward. I crawled and dug my bare elbows into the ground, and I tried not to cry out while the dirt and rocks rubbed my arms raw. I thought about leaving my pack, because I knew I was moving the grass more than I would have without it. I forced myself to slow when I realized that speed would hurt me more than help me. Bugs were loud and buzzed in my ears. My stomach twisted this way and that.
“State your business,” the formality shot back. The voice was so similar to Ono’s, it almost sounded like he was talking to himself.
“You just blew my cover,” he growled.
“Cover?”
“Just take my print and be done with it,” Ono sighed. The annoyance was either great acting or genuine. Silence roared for a moment. “See?”
“Petrakis, Paramonos,” the other voice said. He must have been reading off the scanner, but then realization sunk in. “Chancellor Petrakis’ son?”
The information settled around me and gathered in my nerves. It froze all movement. Paramonos Petrakis. I’d been
indecent
not just with a spy, but… the Chancellor’s son? It didn’t make sense. I had to force myself to unfreeze my joints so I could keep crawling away.
“Yes. Way to botch my mission. It took weeks to find the right subject, and now, you just— who is your Commanding Officer?”
“Commander Hanas. The 116
th
, sir. Should we chase after the other one if your cover is blown? We may as well expend the—“
“Seriously? Did you leave your brains back in the train? I need you to clear out fast if you want me to have any hopes of salvaging this. How am I going to infiltrate if the 116
th
and 140
th
continue Cleansing measures? Move on and out.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
Sir? They were calling Flea, sir? It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so maddening. He was a teenager. How did he have ranking enough to give orders to others? How could I have been so stupid to trust him? Tell him everything? Give him everything? And he was a
sir
?
“Yes. It is. And here’s another. Pause the Cleansing for now. Or at least check your monitors for your comrades before you start shooting. We are out here too.”
We? Who else was a spy? How many had I run across over the last two years without being any the wiser towards their intentions. The voices grew smaller the farther I got, and the buzzing of bugs in my ears turned into a drowning kind of loud.
“We did check our monitors, sir. We—“
“Did I ask for excuses? You idiots got me. Pass my concerns up the chain. Use caution when executing Terrorists.”
The reply was muffled. It was out of range and beyond understanding anyways. Everything about Ono finally fit into a completely different puzzle. He thought I was a Rebel and that I was playing coy. He hoped I’d lead him to them. He even went above and beyond his duties when it came to me. He was a Militia prodigy after all. Perhaps he figured out it’d help him blend in to be less reserved when it came to… sleeping with a Track-girl. Rebels were so much more free when it came to their bodies, and how better to prove you’d given up your Colonial ways than to—?
I couldn’t even think it.
If that was his plan, he’d judged wrongly. I was no one special.
Was he planning on turning me in? Why didn’t he just do it right then and there?
“Knucs!” he called out. “Knucs! You can come out now! They’re gone!”
He was either lying or he wasn’t. Either way, I’d be dead, so I stood up and faced him. The two soldiers were gone alright, and Ono stood in the middle of the field like a lonely tree, broad and reaching. He had a grin on his face. A grin!
I turned and ran to the tree line.
I’d given him enough.
It was time to go.
Chapter Fourteen
I hit the ground hard. Ono was fast and big, and when he tackled me, the weight of our packs amplified the momentum. “Wait. Knucs, let me explain.” I pushed myself up and flailed my arms so that they could impact and damage however they could. His arms wrapped around my body and pulled my face into his chest in an attempt to stop me. “Wait. Okay. I’ll let you go. Just let me explain!”
I bit at his chest, but he didn’t let go. “Traitor! Liar!” I yelled as if that’d hurt more than the biting did.
“I never lied to you. You never asked. And, I’m afraid you’re the one who’s a traitor, but I’m willing to forgive that.” My arms beat at his back, but his pack was in my way. We were in a standstill on our knees. I kept trying to push myself up so I could get away, but he used his weight to push me down and took out any use of my legs. I couldn’t even pick up my knee to hit him in the groin. “I’m going to let you go now, but I’m asking that you do not run. Let me explain, and, if you don’t believe me, then you can go your own way.” He pulled back tentatively so that the air was fresh on my face again.
My arms fell to my side. Would he really let me go?
I’d have to trust that, because I couldn’t outrun him. I could try to fight him, but he was probably trained better than I was. This may be the easier way.
“Sometimes, it’s good to trust your instinct,”
Xavi once said. My instinct said to listen. It also said to run. I couldn’t trust myself or that fickle thing called instinct. It was the thing that had gotten me into this mess in the first place.
“There are some things science can’t explain— yet,” Xavi whispered in my ear. “Have you ever gotten that feeling like there is something bigger than even us, and I’m not talking about that saving Humanity spiel. I think there’s something even bigger than Humanity, and that everything happens for a reason. One day, science may discover the little cords that link us all to the universe, but for now, we get to play around in the whys of things like kids playing in a water sprinkler. I can’t help but think you stumbled onto my path for a reason.”
The world outside the tent was quiet, and it promised to be a pleasant night. We’d left the trails behind completely and decided to spend some time in the mountains we met in, hiking, fishing, and gathering berries. We’d found this field in a small clearing filled to the brim with blueberries. We turned into baby bears as we plucked up the tiny orbs and shoved them into our mouths so that our tongues turned blue and our hearts turned light.
We spent the nights in a shiver-cold frenzy of kissing and halting, like desire and fear couldn’t fit into the same space between us.
Xavi was in a philosophical mood as he kept talking. “It’s strange the way we all cross paths, like there’s this design in the fabric of life that connects and strings us together before we even know the other exists. The Greeks called it fate.”
When Xavi got like this, it unnerved me. He kept trying to tell me something, but he held back. There were still secrets behind his eyes, and, as much as I trusted him, sometimes I didn’t. If I was honest, it was why I kept stopping things at the kissing. I couldn’t share my secrets if he couldn’t share his.
We sat back with our legs crossed in front of us like pretzels. I kept my pack on, ready to leave when Ono was ready to let me. He ripped off his shirt and tied it around the space just above the crook of his elbow where he’d gotten his flea-bite. The thought almost made me laugh. Flea got a flea-bite.
I hoped it hurt.
He wasn’t Flea. He wasn’t even Ono. He was Paramonos Petrakis, and he was a liar. I’d seen his face before on the vids with his father. He was younger then, and hadn’t been featured for years but it was still a bold risk to become a spy with such a recognizable face. I’d been so close to seeing it so many times before, but I’d let myself get distracted by other things.
His muscles moved involuntarily as he tightened his shirt around the wound. They were the same muscles that my fingernails dug into last night, and the sun bounced off his dark skin, making shadows in every crease. I wanted to tear every muscle out, fiber by fiber, sinew by sinew. His efforts stanched the bleeding, but the shirt had already turned red. The bullet wound cut into his perfection and tore it away. It wasn’t deep, but I hoped it left a scar.
I watched in silence until he finally began his story.
“When I was fifteen, I was partnered. My father was ecstatic, because we both thought I wasn’t viable. I’d been flagged at birth.”
“Yeah, right.” I laughed. Anyone with eyes could see the impossibility of that lie.
“No. I was flagged. When I got partnered, my father was so relieved, even more so than most parents. After all, the Chancellor’s son had to be the poster boy for the Republic. He kept me out of sight for the most part and hushed up the rumors with bribes, but flagged is flagged. Had I not been partnered, eventually it would have come out. What would it have said about my father’s Celebrity genetics if I wasn’t perfect? All his children that came before me? What would it mean for their lines?” He grunted a sad laugh about his own sad joke. “When we got the notice, things got better. My father was kinder. He backed off and let me relax a little. But that was when I overheard the first call. ‘What do you mean she’s flawed?’” The way he mimicked the Chancellor’s voice gave me sharp shivers. He sounded exactly like him. “‘Isn’t it a regression to pair him with someone beneath his Caste? An 18
th
for goodness sake? Everyone knows they are filth. Chunky, fat, brainiacs at best. Even their highest Caste in the 18
th
is a lower than the lowest Caste in our Colony. You think I don’t know what the G.E.G. is up to?’
“There are other things he said about my future partner I’d rather not repeat. The insults only got worse, and things with my father got bad again. He was convinced that the G.E.G. Radicals were trying to undermine his authority as a Politician. I don’t know if you’ve heard the Nature versus Nurture debates— how the G.E.G. Radicals want Scientists to control the policies of the Republic. My father thought this was just another cruel way to do it— show that his genome was regressing by pairing me so low that he’d loose popularity and votes.
“He only thought of himself, and not about me. I have to admit, I wasn’t thrilled to be paired with an 18
th
, but I didn’t believe the G.E.G. would destroy an entire generational line just to make a political move.”
I hated how Ono spoke about my Colony through his father’s words. Eighteen was my home, and I knew the people there. They deserved better than the horrible things his father said— the horrible things Ono had the audacity to repeat back to me. I felt sad for this girl. It wasn’t her fault she was a lowly 18
th
, and I wondered what he’d think if he’d known he slept up with an 18
th
despite it all. I wanted to interrupt him and rub it in his face, but he didn’t notice my flinch nor give me the chance to break into his story. He was on a roll.
Aeschylus pet the bear. It’s white fur looked soft under his ancient fingers. “What is diversity?”
Agathon grinned. “The amount of genetic diversity within a species.”
“Ah. Let’s define a word with the same word? What is di-vers-ity?” Aeschylus reprimanded.
Berenike piped in, “The amount of genetic characteristics or alleles within a specific species.”
“Getting there. Missing one word,” Aeschylus said.
“The amount of
different
genetic characteristics.” Berenike corrected her statement.
I groaned. We’d been over this lesson more times than I could count, yet there were still people who misunderstood. It always went so much deeper than everyone else in class was willing to explore.
“Nikomedes? You have anything to add?”
I looked at the bio-cage next to the one Aeschylus stood in. A nearly identical bear looked at us through the glass with angry eyes. Its gargantuan paw kneaded at the dirt as it paced back and forth in front of us. Our presence agitated it.
I shook my head. What was the point? Aeschylus knew I already had the answer he was trying to prod out of the others. They’d learn it better if I didn’t give it to them.
He continued. “In the past, people thought diversity in humans was just about the color of our skin, but diversity is not skin deep. It goes beyond that, and, speaking in all literal senses, it’s what’s underneath that matters. We stand on the hallowed grounds of the original ‘Melting Pot.’ Different people came from all around the world to this very land we stand on, and they naturally began mixing their genomes. We are lucky for this, because it already gave our genetic outcomes a natural inclination for genetic diversity in comparison to the rest of the world. The environment was so different here in terms of survival, and variations mass produced within the larger population. Some mutations were beautiful, others were harmful. Some of the harmful ones were even the result of the environment the population fabricated beyond what was natural. Any problems weren’t noticeable, because the population was so large and science was far behind what it is today. But after the Great Disaster, we had a significant reduction in population, and each person carried with them genetic issues within their DNA. Why would this be a problem?”