I can’t speak past the anger flooding me as we leave the Wall behind and walk through the deserted streets of Lower Market. The image of the Commander eyeing Rachel in her skintight pants while rubbing the back of his hand against her bloodstained cheek fills my head, and I plow my fist into the wall of the wooden stall beside me.
Rachel jumps and gives me a sidelong look. She’s only seen the man I made myself into after Oliver took an interest in me. She has no idea the kind of things I’m capable of when backed into a corner.
But I know, and punching a wall is the best option available to me unless I plan to do something far more destructive with my anger. Like draw my sword against the Commander.
“Feel better?” Rachel asks, and I punch the wall again just to keep from letting my anger loose on her. Not that she doesn’t deserve some of it.
I shake out my hand and take hold of her arm as we leave Lower Market behind. I have to calm down. Think. The Commander now knows for certain Jared received a package he didn’t deliver. And he understands he’s found a useful tool in Rachel’s fervent belief that she can save her father.
And none of it would’ve happened if she hadn’t tried to sneak over the Wall.
“You’re hurting me,” she says as she matches my pace through the torch-lit streets.
“You’re lucky,” I say.
“That you’re hurting my arm?” Her voice is full of its usual sass, but I hear the unsteadiness beneath it.
“You’re lucky I’m not wringing your neck.”
She remains quiet, and I soften my grip.
We move past the ridiculous wealth of Center Square, where multistoried homes gleam beneath the warmth of lanterns hung at their doorways, and no one inside knows what it’s like to go hungry. When I was a boy, lonely and wild, I used to walk Center Square at night, imagining the perfect lives of the families who lived inside such beauty and wishing I belonged with one of them. That was before Oliver and Jared reached out to me, and I learned that true family is found in those who choose you. Wealth has nothing to do with it.
Leaving Center Square behind, we move south. The houses grow smaller. With the street torches further apart, the alleys darken, and I scan the streets constantly, cataloging potential threats, discarding those I know we can handle with our eyes shut, and planning our escape route from those we might not be able to avoid.
“What were you thinking?” I ask her as we round the corner into South Edge. Here the street torches disappear, and the only visible light hovers timidly behind windows boarded shut. I finally let go of her arm and reach for my sword even as she slides her knife free. Only a fool walks through South Edge unarmed.
“I was thinking Dad needs to be rescued,” she says, her tone sharp.
Something moves in an alley to our left, and I pivot around her back and resume walking, putting my body and my sword between her and the yawning darkness of the alley’s mouth.
“Let me get this straight.” I bite off each word to keep from spitting them at her. “You want to rescue your dad, so you decide to sneak over the Wall alone? Do you have a death wish?”
“Don’t be an idiot.” She sounds like she’s gritting her teeth. “I didn’t know the Commander had his guards following us.”
“Of course you didn’t. Because you’re so wrapped up in missing Jared, you refuse to look at anything else.” I regret the words as soon as I say them. I hadn’t realized we were being followed either, and as her Protector, it was my responsibility to see it.
I press my palm to the small of her back and guide her to the opposite side of the street. The heat from her skin seeps into mine and feels like comfort.
Which is proof my ability to think logically seems to be compromised. I’m beginning to worry being responsible for Rachel has somehow thrown me permanently off-kilter.
She steps away from my hand. “At least one of us is caught up in missing him.”
“Who says I don’t miss him?” A shadow moves out of a doorway behind us. A man. Taller than me by about two inches, but I have him by a good twenty pounds. Plus, he’s limping. Still, I wrap my hand around her arm again and pull her through someone’s backyard, over a small fence, and onto the street running parallel to the one we were just on.
He doesn’t follow us.
“Are you listening?” she asks, and I realize she’s been talking the entire time.
“I am now.”
“Typical. I was asking how you can say you miss him. All you do is sit around day after day, drawing pictures—”
“Pictures! They’re intricately scaled plans for an invention—”
She waves her knife through the air as if she can slice through my words and draw blood instead. “Drawing pictures, piecing together your little toys—”
That takes it. “You didn’t think so poorly of my little toys tonight when you planned to use my handgrips to sneak over the Wall, did you?” My voice is rising. My little toys are about to give us a way to find Jared and get off the Commander’s radar.
Of course, I haven’t actually shared that with her. I thought I was protecting her, but maybe if I’d trusted her in the first place, we wouldn’t be in our current situation.
She raises a fist like she wants to punch me. “All the toys and plans and books in the world won’t get us one step closer to rescuing Dad, and you just sit there like we aren’t running out of time!” Her voice breaks, and I reach out to haul her close to me and out of the path of a mule-drawn wagon clip-clopping along the street.
“We are almost out of time. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?” Her voice is unsteady, and I’m shocked to see tears sliding down her face, chasing a trail of heat between the icy pellets of rain still plummeting from the heavens.
I’ve never seen her cry before. Not when she was a young girl training with a man’s weapons, getting injured more often than not. Not when she was a budding woman facing me across her back porch and spilling her heart only to have me hand it back to her. Not even when it became clear Jared wasn’t coming back. The fury in me sinks beneath a sudden, sharp ache, and I wish I knew how to have a civilized conversation with her.
We take the corner marking the line between South Edge and Country Low. I want to have the perfect words to comfort her, but I don’t, so I walk in silence as the ramshackle houses become cozy little cottages, and the patches of dirty grass between them expand into gardens, farm fields, and small orchards. Though no street torches exist, the darkness is now friendly.
My house comes into view, and she pushes ahead of me to stalk up the stone walkway, reaching the iron-hinged wooden door first. Hanging her damp cloak on a hook beside the door, she enters the main part of the cottage while I light the pair of lanterns hanging in the entryway.
She’s rummaging through the kitchen, her movements jerky with either anger or grief. Probably both. I make my way across the living room until I’m less than three yards from her.
“I know we’re running out of time. But you have to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
She jumps at the sound of my voice so close behind her, and shoots a glare over her shoulder before moving toward the wooden box of a pantry resting in the corner. “I know what you’re doing, too. You’re going into the Wasteland with me. I’m sorry about that, by the way.” She opens the pantry and rummages through it.
Sorry for what? Having to take me with her? Does she really despise me that much? The hurt that follows this thought is a slow, dull ache that takes me by surprise. My voice is sharp as I follow her and ask, “Are you really sorry?”
This time, she bangs her head when she jumps. Turning, she shoves a sack of mutton jerky into my arms and snaps, “Stop sneaking up on me.”
I grab the sack before it falls, and frown. “Why are you removing food from my pantry?” I toss the jerky onto the table behind me as she pulls two dusty jars of fig paste from the back of the pantry, knocking over a bag of potatoes in the process.
“Packing, of course.”
“Wait a minute.”
She shoves the paste at me and rolls her eyes. “Fine. I’ll finish apologizing. I didn’t want you involved. I should’ve made it over the side before they caught you. Then this whole thing wouldn’t be an issue.”
I slam the paste onto the wooden table beside the jerky. “How can you say that?”
She fists her hands on her hips and ignores the potatoes rolling across her feet. “I would’ve been gone, Logan. Deep into the Wasteland. And if you’d kept quiet about your reasons for being at the Wall, nothing would have changed for you.”
“Nothing …” My stomach drops as I realize how little she thinks of me.
“You’d be free to invent and read and make life better for the citizens here. Duty finished.” She kicks a potato, sending it careening across the floor as something blazes to life within me.
I glare at her. “And what duty would that be? The one I swore to the memory of the man I consider my one true friend?” I lean toward her as my voice rises. “The one I swore to myself when I could see how lost you are without him?”
She takes a step back and bumps into the pantry. “I’m not lost.”
“You’re lost. And everyone knows it. Three months till Claiming age. Every available man in the city suddenly looking at you like you’re …” I snap my mouth closed and turn my back before I say what I’m really thinking. What every man who stops to stare at the fiery beauty with the indomitable spirit and glorious red hair is thinking.
She’s yelling now. “Like I’m what? Pathetic? A poor little girl who needs a man every time she leaves the house? I’m not like that. My father saw to that. You should’ve gone after him with me when I first asked you to. You should’ve gone!”
I whirl to face her, and step forward until the distance between us can be measured in breaths. She’s trembling. I am too. She stares at me with wounded eyes, and I want to wipe all the ugliness out of our lives, but I don’t know how.
“Rachel.”
Her hair is drenched. Glistening drops of water slide effortlessly down her pale skin. I raise my hand slowly, but she doesn’t flinch as I press my palm against her cheek, letting the water slide over us both. My fingertips are calloused and ink-stained, rough against the softness of her skin. She looks fragile and fierce, and I long for something more than the animosity between us.
“You’re right.” I say quietly. “I should’ve gone after him. Does it make it better to know that I always planned to go? “
“When?” she whispers.
“When I finish building the tracking device I want to use to find him.”
Her skin warms beneath my hand as her anger fades into something tentative and soft.
“I should’ve told you what I was doing.” My thumb traces a path across her cheekbone, catching another drip of water. “I should’ve trusted you. I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. Sorry I misjudged you. Sorry I got us caught tonight.” She sways closer to me.
My gaze wanders to her lips, and I can’t see anything but a thin trail of water gliding over her skin, gathering at the corner of her mouth, and then slowly drifting toward her neck. She raises one shaky hand and presses her fingers against her lips. Her breath catches, a tiny sound that makes me realize how close I’m standing to her.
Warmth rushes through me, and I dip my face toward hers.
“Logan?” Her voice is soft, but the sound of my name slaps some sense into me.
I jerk back a step and swear.