Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) (21 page)

“What, stab me or nearly tear my shirt off?”

“Either. And I didn’t stab you. I barely broke the skin.”

I look down at the bleeding cut just above my hipbone and see that he’s right. It’s only an inch long and a millimetre deep, but still. I’m not used to pain yet, how much it actually
hurts,
and this fairly innocuous graze stings like crazy. I glare at him, but that doesn’t seem like enough. I follow up my unhappy look with a hard slap across his arm.

“Hey! It was an accident!”

“Yeah, right. I bet you’ve just been itching to get back at me since the woods.”

An odd, crumpled expression flashes across Ryka’s face. “I promise you, if that were the case, I would just kick your ass. I definitely wouldn’t cut you with a knife.”

It takes me a beat to figure out why he’s so freaked out, and when I do all the blood drains from my face. “Oh. Wow. So I cut you, and now you cut me. What does that mean?”

Ryka just looks at me, his brown eyes piercing mine.

“I don’t want to know, do I?”

He shakes his head, a tiny, nervous smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Nope. I’m guessing you don’t.” He ducks down and reaches for my shirt again. I slap his hand, but he shoots me an
I’m-not-messing-around
look, and I avoid the otherwise inevitable argument by letting him continue. He lifts my shirt slowly and frowns at the single line of blood running down towards my knife belt. With slow, careful movements, he traces his finger along my stomach and catches the droplet before it hits the fabric. He studies it for a second before stooping and grabbing his knife from the grass, clenching his hand—the one with my blood on it—into a fist.

“Why did you do that?” I demand, as he sets off walking towards the trees. “What did you just do?” He throws a smirk at me over his shoulder. The look is ruinous, will be the end of me, I’m sure.

“Nothing, little Kit. Nothing at all.”

DECAY

The next morning I’m woken by a scraping sound against the side of my tent. It’s still dark and I’m particularly unhappy about being woken up.
 

“Come on, little Kit. Time to get up and train with me.”
 

It’s him. Standing outside my tent. Dragging his fingernails across the fabric. I hide my head under my blankets, waiting to see if he goes away, but he doesn’t. The scraping continues, setting my teeth on edge.
 

“All right! All right! Sheez!” I get up, sulking enough that Ryka pretends to cower when I fling back the tent flap and stalk towards the river to wash up. “I thought you were joking when you said you would train with me.”
 

“You thought, or you
hoped
?” he replies, leaning against a tree, watching me as I splash cold water onto my face. “I don’t know why you’re bothering with that. You’re only going to get dirty again.”

I scowl up at him, freezing cold water running into my eyes. “Some of us don’t look or feel as great as you obviously do first thing in the morning.”

“I look great first thing in the morning?” Ryka grins and that dimple appears in his cheek, deep and pronounced. A jolt of adrenaline and goodness knows what else makes my heart start flip-flopping in my chest.
Damn. Well, I guess I walked into that one.
 

“Don’t get smart, mister. I’m sorely tempted to climb back into bed.”

“And miss out on the opportunity to twirl those blades of yours around? I don’t think so. You should be nicer to me, Grumpy Morning Kit.”

I scramble back up the riverbank, doing my best to ignore his wicked smirk. It’s tough, though. I end up sneaking a glance at him as he falls into step alongside me. He’s looking straight ahead but his smile hasn’t slipped a bit, and I get the feeling he knows he’s being watched. He ducks his head, his eyes shining brightly, and I see that his hair grows in a tiny, perfect whorl at the back of his neck. Shaking my head, I tear my eyes away and clench my teeth. Noticing things like that is only going to get me into trouble.

“Don’t pretend like I’m not helping you out here,” I say, shoving past him to grab my knife belt from inside my tent. “You’re kind of without a training partner right now, yourself, remember.”

Ryka’s eyebrows pull together a fraction. “Fine, I’ll admit it. You’re helping me out. We should probably keep our little arrangement under wraps, by the way. The both of us could end up in hot water over this.”

“You more than me, I think.”

He shrugs. “Probably. Still, I think it’s going to be fun. Oh, and you’re going to need to bring a bag with food and water. We’ve got a long hike ahead of us.”

“Where the hell are you taking me?”

Ryka pauses when Jack’s voice breaks the silence of the morning, calling his name. I raise an eyebrow at him to see if he’ll respond, and he mirrors me, raising his own. “I’m taking you back to the Colosseum. Now come on, before I get roped into field work.”

*****

We walk for three hours straight, and the whole time Ryka refuses to clarify what he means about taking me back to the Colosseum. All I know is that he’s not taking me back to the Sanctuary, because we’re walking in the opposite direction. A series of questions are fired at me, each one more confusing than the next. Why he wants to know such random things about me is a mystery, and my deep contemplation over each enquiry is a source of constant frustration for Ryka.

“You’re not supposed to think about it, you’re just supposed to know. Come on, what’s your favourite colour?”

“Uhhh…green?”

“Are you asking me, or are you telling me that your favourite colour is green?”

“Um. Telling. I think.”

He sighs, the sound exaggerated and unnecessary. “Okay, since you started feeling again, what’s been your favourite moment?”

“My favourite moment?”

“Yeah.”

“People have those?”

“Sure they do. I have lots.” He looks over his shoulder and there’s that dimple again.

“Well…” I feel really, really stupid trying to think of a moment I favour above all others since I left the Sanctuary. There have been few truly happy moments. “Last night was interesting,” I say, my cheeks burning a little. “The knives, I mean. When you made them sing like that.”

Ryka turns around and walks backwards, hooking his thumbs under the shoulder straps of his bag. I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow his smile just got wider. My cheeks burn, and he shakes his head, laughing at me.

“And what was your earliest childhood memory?”

“I don’t know. I guess…I guess meeting Cai for the first time. We were learning to train, so I must have been around four years old.”

“Huh.” He nods, as though he’s thinking this over, and turns back around. He goes quiet for a while after that, and neither of us speaks. I begin to feel the pressure of the silence between us, like something happened that I don’t know about, like maybe I said the wrong thing. I could be doing this whole conversation thing wrong for all I know. It’s not like I’ve done it much before, apart from with Olivia, and sometimes she’s just content to be silent. I love her for that. This isn’t like that kind of silence. Maybe I should be asking questions, too. This whole social etiquette thing is far more complex than I had first imagined.

It takes me a while to pluck up the courage to ask a question, and when I do I kind of blurt it out in a rush. “What was
your
first memory?”

“My father,” he says simply. He doesn’t expand on that, and I don’t push. We walk for another hour or so before he says, “We’re there. Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“For a
real
city.”

The trees thin out and suddenly I see exactly what he means. A city. A huge, sprawling, ruined, over-run city stands off in the distance, buildings taller than I have ever imagined possible, some standing majestically, others a tumble of ruins, leaning drunkenly against one another. A cracked concrete pathway emerges out of the forest, leading directly into the heart of it.

“Wha—how?” It’s the most amazing, terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. It’s just so big. Sunlight glints off broken glass in the distance, the shards broken teeth in the open maw of countless smashed windows. “What happened?” I’m literally breathless as I try to take it all in, but it’s just too much.
 
I look at Ryka and he’s watching my reaction with a soft smile on his face. It seems secret, though, as though the smile, unlike many of his others, is purely for himself. A smile of pure pleasure.

“Didn’t they tell you about the world before?” he asks quietly. I shake my head, trying to find words, but they just won’t come. “The country was covered in cities like this one before the collapse. In fact, from what I can gather this city was pretty small in the scheme of things.” He considers me for a second before shoving me gently with his shoulder. “Come on, I want to show you.”

And he does.

We spend the next few hours trailing through an obstacle course of crumbling rubble and abandoned items that confuse and intrigue me. Ryka seems to know what most of them are, although a few remain a mystery to the both of us. Large wire baskets on wheels, rusted and stacked in huge piles that tower two storeys high, litter the walkways between the buildings. Peeling orange and brown metal shells of cars lay abandoned everywhere, with fronds of green ferns and vines twisting around their decaying skeletons. The city is dead in so many ways, but alive in so many others. It feels like there are a thousand pairs of eyes peering down on us as we travel towards a destination that only Ryka knows, and it’s hard to work out if there are actual people lurking in the surrounding buildings, or if it’s just the ghosts of the past watching over us.

“What happened to all the people?” I ask. I can’t even imagine how many of them there would have been all in one place, to justify a settlement this huge.

“War.” Ryka shrugs, gazing up at the toppling building next to us. “Swiftly followed by his friends Disease, Famine and Death.
We
happened, I guess. The same crap we do to one another now, only with better technology and on a grander scale.”

He leads me from one building to another until we finally arrive at a squat, gigantic building that he declares was a version of the Colosseum, once upon a time. It’s true that when we walk through the tunnels and find ourselves in a large, open space, surrounded by thousands and thousands of seats, all looking down upon us, red and cracked and rusted, I immediately think of the Colosseum back in the Sanctuary. Except this is so much bigger. This place could literally seat every single inhabitant of the Sanctuary and then some.

“So this is where we train today,” Ryka tells me. He yanks his shirt over his head with one hand and tosses it into the knee-high grass that grows from the arena floor of this huge gathering place. “Are you ready?”

Somehow I find that I am, even though I’m completely overwhelmed by the morning we’ve had together and the things we’ve seen. We spend the next three hours lunging and parrying, learning the way the other moves. It becomes a dance after a while. Our bodies are in tune in a way that I’ve never experienced before, not even with Cai. Would Cai and I have been like this if things had been different? I’ll never know, but something deep within me suspects that this kind of alignment is something I’m only meant to share with Ryka. And the thought scares me stupid.

By the time we’re done, we have created an almost perfect circle of flattened grass where we’ve been stalking around one another. I sink to the ground, exhausted from not training for weeks, and Ryka follows, grinning. He’s not even out of breath.

“Did your last training partner run circles around you, too?” he asks brightly, propping himself up on one arm. I pull a face, but I know he’s only joking so I let the comment slide.

“We were pretty evenly matched, Cai and me,” I tell him through laboured breaths. “We both broke each other’s bones. Gave as good as we got.”

“Huh.” Ryka falls onto his back, his eyes unfocused as he stares up at the sky. “Do you think I could have beaten him?” he asks slowly.

I frown, turning to look at him. Why would he ask something like that? “I don’t know. You’re…you’re good. Maybe.”

“Mmmm.”

We lie there in silence for a while, watching the sky, such a stark hue of blue that it looks faded and washed out. The sun disappears for a moment when a teased out, wispy cloud passes over it.
 
“I would have liked to meet him,” Ryka says softly.

“Really? Why?”

He blinks, pulling one shoulder up in a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know. You were obviously very close, even with the halos. Seems like I can’t understand you without understanding him a little, too.”

A prickle of heat dances across my skin, burning at the base of my neck. That he’s even thinking things like that makes me feel…odd. “Well…I suppose…you could
kind of
meet him.”

Ryka frowns and sits up, the skin on his back still slick with sweat. “What do you mean?”

Cringing, I wonder if I should have even said anything. He looks intrigued now, intrigued and intense, and I don’t know that I can face seeing them together side by side. “Uh…forget it. It’s stupid actually.”