Secondborn

All I know is that I’m in possession of contraband that will get me tortured and killed. Now that I have time to think, I can see every mistake with glaring clarity. I was released a few hours before my sentence was officially over. Strike one. If anyone asks Holcomb Sword, he’ll be able to say he hadn’t released me. Strike two. They won’t find a moniker trail of my leaving the detention center at five a.m., or arriving at the air-barracks at five twenty, except for the login at my locker. And there won’t be a record of my entering the air-barracks at all. Strikes three and four.

I feel more and more confident that at any second, Agent Crow is going to bang on the door of my capsule and arrest me. But one hour slips by, and then another, and another, and nothing happens. I switch on the virtual-access screen on the ceiling. No one is reporting on the bombing of the Census Base. The news is all about the semifinal rounds of the Secondborn Trials. Half of the competitors scale the side of a mountain. From a bluff, the other half picks them off, one by one, with fusion arrows. Something inside of me feels like it’s dying.

I’m startled awake. The visual screen above my head is still on. Commentators discuss the deaths of several of the champions from the Fate of Seas, burned up in a fiery crash when an incendiary device ignited their ultra-light aircraft in the aviator challenge. A fist bangs on my door, and Hawthorne’s voice calls, “Roselle?” I scoot down to the panel and open the door outward. He gazes at me from the ladder.

“Hi.” He fakes a smile. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I just had a coronary. I thought you were Agent Crow.” I rub sleep from my eyes.

“He’s back at the Stone Forest Base,” Hawthorne says, a look of hatred in his eyes. “We’re in the air, en route to the Twilight Forest.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“You missed breakfast and lunch. It’s fourteen hundred.” He hands me a silver foil ration pack. “It’s turkey pasta—one of the better ones. You know you can come out now? We’re no longer on lockdown. Whatever was worrying them while we were docked at the Base has passed now that we’ve left. We were cleared for active duty.”

“You’re serious?”

He’s worried, but I’m relieved. It’ll be harder for Agent Crow to get to him. After Agnes, I don’t know how to protect him, beyond not telling him anything about the thousands of monikers hidden in my locker. He can’t be involved in that.

“Would you like to go for a run with me?” Hawthorne asks.

I nod, set aside the ration pack, and climb out of my capsule, meeting him on the catwalk. We head to the locker room, where I pick up a workout T-shirt and sweats from stacks of them. No one here is shy, I’m learning. Naked bodies, male and female, walk around for all the air-barracks to ogle. I take my clothes to a bathroom unit and change there.

When I come out, Hawthorne is leaning against my locker with his arms crossed. “Do you intend to do that every time you change your clothes?” he asks with an amused grin.

“Yeah. I do,” I reply. I kneel on one knee and secure the straps of my running boot.

“Why would you want to hide your body? Do you have an ugly mole or something?”

“Uh, no. No mole.”

“I can lend you some merits to get that thing removed, you know.”

“Hawthorne,” I say, my face reddening by the second. “You’ve been getting naked with these people since you were ten. I’ve never changed my clothes in front of anyone since I could change them by myself.”

“Your access feeds showed you training, your diet, your lessons, almost every aspect of your life, but they never showed us your room or anything like that.”

“That whole place—everything you saw—those were all my rooms. I had an entire wing of the Sword Palace to myself.” We exit the locker room and walk along a row of capsules to a heartwood. We step on facing each other. It takes us down to the lower floors.

He leans toward me. “What was that like?”

“It was lonely, Hawthorne. There were days when I thought that if someone didn’t speak to me, I’d go mad. And then there were times when I thought I was a ghost, and only drone cameras could see me. Now it’s as if everyone sees me, and they can’t look away.”

We step off the heartwood onto a training deck. A track spans its circumference. Soldiers stop talking as we pass, their eyes on me.

“I see what you mean,” Hawthorne says. “It won’t last forever. The regiment will get used to you, and then they’ll stop paying attention.”

Hawthorne and I keep pace for the first fourteen miles. It feels right to run after days of not training. I haven’t had a decent workout since I left the Sword Palace—since I lost Dune. We pass other runners, but no one passes us. In the final mile, Hawthorne pulls away from me. I try matching his stride, but it’s impossible, and he beats me by a hundred yards. He has the decency to breathe hard afterward. I have to pinch my side.

“You don’t lose often . . . do you?” he asks.