Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) (23 page)

“Yes, they’re cast out.”

“Good. The next time someone takes your weapon from you, think about that.”

“It won’t happen again,” I spit.

“Yes,” he says. “It will.”

He turns and marches off into the forest before I can say or do anything else. Instead of trying to tug my scrunched up clothes over my damp skin, I gather them up and run into my tent, fighting down the urge to sob.

CUT

By nightfall I’m starving but too ashamed to come out of my tent. If only I could hole myself away back here for the next few weeks, the horror of being so defenceless might subside and I could face the world again. But there’s Olivia, of course. It’s not really possible to knock on a tent; instead, she sings when she lets herself in, hallooing to announce her presence. I consider throwing myself under the beautiful covers of my new bed and hiding, but what would that accomplish?

Her eyes go wide when she spots me sitting on the edge of the feather mattress. From the expression on her face, my hair must look pretty bad. “Kit! What
―
?” Her mouth falls open and she loses the ability to speak. An irritated flash plays over her face after that. “Did you do this yourself?” she says. I hear the accusation in her voice, that she thinks my new haircut is a drastic way of rebelling.

“Of course not!” I’m a little snappy, but I can’t help it. I really need some time alone, and I just don’t have it in me to be polite.

“What happened, then?” She sits beside me on my bed, hitching her skirt up a little so she can tuck one leg underneath her. She reaches out to touch my hair but I flinch and she lets her hand drop into her lap.

“Some men
―
” I start. A really bad start.

Olivia grows a bright red. “Oh, Gods, Kit. What happened? Who was it? Did…did they—”

“No!”

She ignores my protests and pulls me into a hug. “Don’t worry, I’m going to tell Jack. He’ll make them pay for what they did.”

“They didn’t do it, Olivia. It was James.”

She stops fussing and pulls back. “
James?
”

I nod and run my fingers over the ends of my hair. It only just reaches my jaw line now. “Yes. He said if I didn’t want to act like a woman of Freetown, I shouldn’t look like one either.”

“I can’t believe he would do that.”

“Believe it.”

She shakes her head. “No, you don’t understand. James has been canvassing for women to have their own matches for years.”

 
“What? Why would he do that? Hardly seems like he would care if the women here are treated like second-class citizens.”

Olivia shoots me a disparaging look. “It’s not equality for women he’s after. It’s equal rights for the
men
. James thinks men should be allowed to be priests. The women who work in the kitchens at the Keep say he’d have himself as the High Priest before nightfall the day Jack and the priestesses ever allowed that to happen.” She takes a deep breath. “James is just about the most power hungry individual in Freetown. He’ll do anything to get ahead, even if that means faking his beliefs in the Faith. Or putting women in the pits. He figures that you can’t change one tradition without changing the other.”

“That’s really messed up.” I screw up my nose and sink back onto my bed, feeling my hair fan out around my head in a way it never did before. “Are you going to tell Jack what happened?”

“No.” Olivia finds my hand and squeezes it. “It’s not my place. You should be the one to tell him.”

I eye her in my peripherals. “Can we just let him think I did it myself?”

A vaguely irritated expression flashes across her features. “It’s your decision. You have to do one thing, though.”

“What?”

“You have to let me tidy it up for you.”

Olivia disappears and returns a few minutes later with a pair of slim, narrow scissors, and spends the next twenty minutes trimming my hair into what she deems ‘tidy’. I sit on the floor at her feet, trying my hardest not to think of my halo, or how I took it back to August to get it fixed. If he had said he was able to repair it, if there
was
an easy fix, I might already have been wearing it. With hair this short, barely brushing the bottom of my ears, I’ll never be able to hide a collar around my neck in Freetown. Everyone will know if I put the thing back on, and that scares me half to death. I’m already a social pariah, and with that loop of metal flattening out my emotions, I really would have no place in the world. No place but the Sanctuary.

BEAUTIFUL

Sky-blue eyes widen at me as Olivia and I walk across a clearing in the vast tent maze. I can’t see the girl’s whole face; half of it is hidden by a male shoulder, which she is looking over. The guy’s back is broad, and even before I see his hair, I know it’s Ryka. The way his body weight rests on his left foot. The way his shoulder slopes down as he whispers into her ear. After all of our time spent together training the other day, I now know the way he holds himself, and that makes me feel conflicted. So does the way he angles into her as he continues to talk into her ear, too close to notice the surprise on her face, presumably at seeing me.

I’m really turning heads with this new haircut. I can’t say that I’m enjoying the attention, although Olivia warned me I can’t be shy about it if I want to pretend I did it myself. For a few panicked moments after leaving my brand new tent, I worried about what I was going to say when people asked me why I’d done it. Shouldn’t have worried, though: of course, no one breathes a word to me. They just stare.

Blue Eyes blushes as Olivia and I drew closer, and I can’t help but wonder what Ryka is saying to her to make her react that way. He shifts his weight slightly and reveals more of her: flowing red dress with bronze bells, stitched into the gentle pleats of the material; very slim, with softly curled brown hair all the way down her back. I’m pretty sure my hair used to look like that only this morning.

“I didn’t know he was going to be here,” I hiss. For some reason I feel self-conscious about seeing Ryka after our day together. Olivia pivots to smirk at me over her shoulder. There are tiny white flowers woven into her hair, painfully pretty.

“I didn’t know he would be, either.” Her smirk gets wider. “He told me he had better things to do. I didn’t realise he meant Simone. Oh well, if he’s all distracted with her then he won’t bother us. That’s not a problem, is it?”

Something tells me she’s trying to goad a reaction out of me. I shake my head and bite my tongue between my teeth quickly, just enough so that I taste copper. “No. No, of course it’s not a problem.”

Olivia tuts, giving me a weird look. I ignore it and let her grab hold of my hand, and she draws me farther into the clearing, where a huge fire licks and spits at the sky. A horrible feeling wells up inside me, one that makes me feel sour and a little angry. I try to put aside the awful, niggling sensation, try not to wonder who the girl is and what she and Ryka are doing together, but it doesn’t seem to work.

The only thing that distracts me from my line of thought are the looks I’m getting as we make our way through the crowds. The hair. It has to be the hair. It’s better to believe that, anyway. It will grow back eventually, and it’s nice to dream that as it does, people’s interest in me will diminish.

“Come on, Melody’s over there. I promised we’d meet her.” Olivia pulls me in the red-haired girl’s direction, close to the fire on the other side of the clearing. Standing beside her are two guys, about the same age as Ryka, and as the light plays over their skin I see the tattoos on their arms. They’re fighters. Melody squeals when she sees us, but then her happy expression dissolves the second her eyes hit me.

“What happened?”

My hand hesitantly goes to the short ends of hair. “It’s nothing. I— my hair’s very thick. It’s been really hot, so I cut it off.”

“Is that a Sanctuary thing?” one of the boys asks. His eyebrows are pinched together, and I can’t decide whether he’s being confrontational or if he’s just interested. His blue eyes are sharp.

I nod my head. “It just makes sense.”

“Mmm. It seems like everything in Lockdown is more sense than the natural order of things,” he says.

“Oh, come on, Max. We came here to enjoy ourselves.” Olivia playfully slaps his arm, and Max smiles. The sharpness fades from his eyes the instant she touches his skin.

“It was just an observation, Liv. Didn’t mean anything by it.” He offers me his hand, still smiling. There’s no concealed malice in his face, nothing to make me wary. “I’m Max. This is my brother, Callum. We’re celebrating tonight. This loser has finally made Tamji.”

The guy Max gestures to steps into the light to shake my hand as well. His black hair is ruffled and falls into his face, almost disguising the same colour blue eyes he shares with Max. The boys are so similar that I find myself confused.

“Yeah,” Olivia laughs, “they’re twins.”

“Twins?”

“Yeah, you know, born at the same time?”

I can’t hide my shock. “
You mean from the same woman?
”

Everyone but me laughs. Hard. My cheeks burn like crazy but I’m too concerned over the idea that a woman can carry two children at one time. “How do they not die?” I exclaim.

“Well, sometimes they do,” Olivia tells me. “But Cal and Max’s mother was just fine. They were just tiny when they were born is all. They’re identical. Cal’s hair is longer, though. And if you can’t tell them apart by that, then their personalities are a dead giveaway. Callum’s a whole lot nicer than his brother.”

“Hey!” Max lunges at Olivia and throws her over his shoulder, making her squeal. She reaches out to me for help, eyes bright, her pleas gasped through her laughter. I just shrug my shoulders. Twins? I’ve never heard of anything so strange. Max runs off through the tents behind us, crowing, with Olivia still doubled over his shoulder. Melody sighs. “One day they’re going to stop pretending they’re not in love with each other.”

Callum laughs. “The day my brother admits to anything other than a fierce need to pound his fist into something, the Gods will crown me king of Freetown.”

Melody rolls her eyes. “Come on, he may play the tough guy but he knows Olivia wants to join the priestesses. I think if her plans were different, he would have Claimed her already.”

“What?” This is news to me. I tug nervously at the hem of the loose shirt Olivia picked out for me. “Priestesses? And what do you mean,
Claimed her
?”

The look on Melody’s face is pure conflict. “Oh
―
I shouldn’t have said anything. She hasn’t told Ryka or Grandfather Jack yet. She’s waiting to see if she’s accepted into the order first. As for the Claiming thing, that’s pretty straightforward. If a man wants a woman for himself, he Claims her. Sometimes someone else wants to Claim the same woman, so there’s a challenge. Whoever wins the fight, wins the girl. Isn’t that how it’s done in the Sanctuary?”

“No!”

Callum clears his throat. “No, it’s much more civilised there. Women are just given away by their Trues, right?”

When he puts it that way, it does sound pretty bad. That was the future I had to look forward to. If I lived long enough to make it out of the colosseum, that is. “There’s an algorithm that selects cohesive partners. That’s how they work out if two people will work well together,” I tell them.

“And where’s the fun in that?” Callum’s eyes rove over my face. It’s like he’s trying to work out if I believe in what I’m telling him.

“Is it supposed to be fun?”

The laugh that bursts out of Melody is so loud that people turn to look at us. Across the fire, Ryka’s head lifts and our eyes lock. “Yes,” Melody says. “It
is
supposed to be fun. You definitely want to have a little more than
cohesion
with your partner.”

“You mean love?” I ask. My eyes remain locked on Ryka, trapped by the way he’s staring at me, unblinking, still leaning into Little Miss Blue Eyes. “How can a girl fall in love with someone who ‘Claims’ her? It’s a little barbaric, don’t you think?” My cheeks feel warmer than they should, even by the fire. I manage to force my gaze back to Melody and Callum.

“I’ll take barbarians over cold-blooded scientists any day,” Melody sighs. Her face becomes serious. “No offense, of course.”