Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) (9 page)

“Then we clearly don’t come from the same place.”

He scowls. “Okay. Fine. I’m glad you didn’t drown. Sort of. Good luck with whatever it is you’re doing out here.”

I square off my shoulders at him and lock my jaw. “Thanks.”

He’s still barefoot when he backs away from the other side of the river, the mud oozing up between his toes. He doesn’t turn away from me until there are a good few trees around him. Maybe he suspects I’ll send a knife his way, although I’m sure he must have noticed that my throwing blades are gone. I feel my mouth curling into a weird expression as he melts into the forest, and I raise my fingertips up to my lips to see what they feel like.

KIT

The forest is freezing at night and filled with sounds I don’t recognise. Every shadow or rustling sound is Lowrence or even Cai’s True father coming to get me, and I must only sleep half an hour at a time. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do now, and a part of me regrets not wheedling some information out of that stranger on the far side of the river. He did try to help me, I think, but I can’t be sure. I was just so battered both mentally and physically from the water that I didn’t really think properly. I shouldn’t have let him leave.

The ground is unbelievably hard, and when the sun finally steps out over the horizon, I think my bones are more bruised than when I laid down to try and sleep. Everything hurts. Everything throbs. My halo has somehow found its way out and over my shirt in the night, and I’m panicked when I tuck it back under my clothes. The smooth, rigid metal is icy cold. Makes me suck in a sharp breath when it hits my skin. It’s entirely free from my body now. All of the tumbling and the thrashing yesterday must have finally worked it loose from the back of my neck. The skin definitely feels sore there, anyway. I prod the metal with my fingers underneath my shirt, and the whole thing rotates around my neck.

I shake my head and clamber to my feet, and that’s when I notice I’m covered in small, brown insects. They’re everywhere, crawling all over me. I make a very high pitched noise and start slapping at my clothes, my skin, my hair. Their tiny little bodies have worked their way down the back of my shirt, I’m sure of it. I’m not satisfied they’re all gone until I’ve ripped off my clothes and hopped around for fifteen minutes, swatting at any speck of dirt or faint mark on my body.

I don’t hear anybody approaching, and that’s a mistake. I should be paying attention, should be on guard, but I’m too freaked out to realise I’m not alone. When I look up, standing there in my underwear, I meet a pair of sombre brown eyes. My hand automatically goes to my waist where my knife belt should be, but it’s not there. It’s on the ground, still attached to my combat gear. The brown eyes watch carefully as I step back and sink to the ground, reaching out for a blade.

Having a dagger in my hand feels good and helps me think I’m in control, but when he starts walking forward, four legs
―
four legs!
―
on the ground, I panic.

“Stop!” My voice jars in the heavy silence of the morning, and something comes to life in a tree above me. Long, extended wings rustle and take to the sky in a flash of black and grey, with a sheen of blue-green. A bird. My first bird. I’ve only ever seen them represented by distant specks of black against the sky before; they never land in the Sanctuary, like they know the place is simply off limits. I’m so shocked by the sight of the small animal taking flight now that I don’t realise the creature in front of me has crept forward. A feeling, a wet rasping across the back of my hand, startles me, and I shriek. Not very smart at all.

The animal drops into a hunched position straight away, looking up at me with curiosity in his eyes. There’s hair all over his body, tan and black, and he smells musky and warm like the earth. I know he’s a dog, I just never expected to see one. He looks equally as astounded to be seeing me, too.

Dogs aren’t supposed to be friendly. They’re supposed to be vicious meat eaters, and I have no trouble believing this when he opens his mouth and a large, pink tongue lolls over his gigantic canines. Ripping, tearing teeth. I stagger backwards and stoop low to gather up my clothes. I’m slipping my legs into my pants when he tips his head to one side and lets out a small bark, which is enough to make me topple over backwards. Lying on the floor, wrestling the rest of my clothes on takes but a few seconds. I’m warily watching the dog, tugging my boots back on, when he darts forward.

For a moment I freeze, unsure what to do. His face is in my face, and his tongue is still lolling as he breathes in and out and in and out. His breath stinks like day-old stew. I’m sure he’s going to attack me, and I brace for it.

He licks my cheek instead.

I resist the urge to scrub at my face with the back of my hand, because the way he’s watching me, his head bobbing up and down as he pants, sort of makes it look like he’s laughing. My apprehension falls away, and I find myself laughing, too. This is the first time I’ve ever enjoyed the sensation of laughing. It bubbles out of me, rises up from my belly, and I listen to it echoing off the crowded lengths of the tree trunks that stretch on forever.

I get up eventually, and the dog shadows me, flicking his pricked ears back and forth behind him as he listens to things I can’t hear. I begin to make my way further into the forest, and he whines. His whine becomes a bark when I continue walking, and I stop and turn to look at him. He’s stood watching me, his body still, as though he’s waiting for me to do something.

“What?”

He cocks his head to the side again and nods at me impatiently. I have no idea what this means. He circles quickly and waits again, and I make back towards him to see what he wants. As soon as I take a step, he spins and bounds off through the forest, back towards the river. He stops after six or seven paces, looking over his shoulder to see if I’m still there. I could be wrong, but I think he wants me to follow him.
 

“I’m not going back in that water.”

He barks, and I think we’re on the same page. I trudge after him, not particularly enjoying the way that my boots are still squishy and damp inside. After an hour we’re back by the river, and the water is even more ferocious than it was yesterday. Good thing I came through when I did, because the brickwork aqueduct is no longer visible, and the seething vein of water floods and rushes straight over it, bursting through the fence. A shiver runs the length of my body, and the dog makes a hushed yip.

“I don’t know what you’re so nervous about,” I tell him. He wags his tail and starts off away from the fence, following a trail that hugs the side of the river. It looks like a real pathway, although it’s overgrown and difficult to navigate in places. I constantly have to clamber over fallen logs and fight my way through overgrown plants with long, vibrant green fronds. The dog patiently waits for me.

By midday the fact that I haven’t eaten or drunk anything in a while begins to become a problem. I have no clue what I’m going to do about this. There’s no food out here but at least there’s water. I stop every twenty minutes, cupping my hands gingerly into the raging river that we follow, drinking draught after draught until my stomach feels like it’s going to split. This takes away the hunger pains for a while, but it’s not long before they’re replaced by a whole new kind of pain.

The sweating comes on hard, and I can feel the buds of my perspiration pushing their way out of every single pore on my body. My skin feels irritated and flushed. About an hour after the sweating starts, I begin to throw up. The experience is new, painful and violent, and it goes on and on until I feel like I’m going to pass out. The dog comes and stands by me dutifully as I kneel in the dirt, staring at the filthy half crescents of muck under my nails. I can tell he wants to get moving but I can’t. I feel like I’m dying.

I roll onto my back and pluck out one of my daggers from my knife belt because it’s comforting to have it in my hand. I know its weight. I know the texture of its handle beneath my fingertips. It’s the only thing familiar to me in this alien world. I stare up at a chink of blue sky that’s visible through the forest canopy, waiting for my body to stop trembling. I lie there for a long time before the dog whines softly and then sinks down beside me, pressing his warm, musky body against mine. I go to sleep thinking of Cai.

RYKA

Hot. Something feels blisteringly hot, too close to my face. I sit up quickly and a wave of vertigo punches through my body. Without a doubt, if there was anything left inside me I would throw it up. The dog is gone. I’m not where I fell asleep anymore, either. I’m sitting on some sort of blue foam mat, and there’s a balled-up wad of dark material behind me where my head was resting. A fire crackles about a metre away from me. I shuffle away from it, worried by its proximity.

“What’s the matter? Don’t like being warm?” a voice,
that
voice, asks me. I try to focus my eyes in the dark, but they’ve been blinded by the bright flames and it takes me a second to locate him. The blond boy leans against a rotten tree stump on the other side of the fire, and the dog is nestled into his side.
Traitor.

“Of course I like being warm. I’ve just never been this close to a fire before,” I grumble.

“
Never?
” He seems incredulous.

“No. The Sanctuary has strict rules about fire. Too easy for it to get out of control. It could take out the whole city in one go.”

He seems to think about this. His face is a little rosy from sitting too close to the flames. I take the opportunity to make a quick study of him, looking for his tells. The way he holds himself is confident and a little cocky, even just sitting there. His muscles are tensed in a way that suggests he’s not as comfortable as he’s pretending he is, though. He’s still wearing his knife belt, although he must have taken mine off me because it’s bundled up neatly at my side. I was wrong before; there isn’t much boy left in him. He’s at that almost grown stage where all he needs to do is fill out a little more and he’ll be worryingly big. Fat chance I’m admitting this to him, though.

“How did you find me?” I ask him.

“Jada,” he replies, scrubbing his hand against the back of the dog’s neck. The dog perks up his ears, recognising his name.

“You sent a dog to spy on me.” This is a ridiculous concept, but that’s what it seems like he’s saying.
 

“I couldn’t cross the river for a while. She could. I knew she’d find you. She’s good at finding people.”

“She?” I don’t know why, but I’d never even questioned the fact that the dog was male.
 

The blond guy stretches his legs out and crosses his ankles. “I’ve had her since she was a puppy.”

“Oh.” Now would probably an appropriate time to ask what he plans on doing with me, but instead I slump back against the blue mat and stack my hands across my stomach. It feels tender and sore.

We remain there in silence with the fire snapping and sending embers skirling off into the night air. They twist and spiral upwards around one another, burning orange and yellow, and watching them makes my breath catch in my throat. After a while the blond guy says, “I’m leaving early in the morning. If you want to come with me, you should get some rest. Go back to sleep.”

“Who says I want to go with you?”

The blond guy chuckles and tosses another log onto the fire, making it spit. “You’re right. You were doing so well on your own. I shouldn’t have made any assumptions.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“You’re really hostile, you know that?”

I have no idea what he means. All I know is that I don’t like his attitude or the way he looks at me with that smirk on his face. I roll onto my side, away from him and away from the fire. “I’m getting some sleep.”

“Good.
If
you decide to come with me in the morning, I can take you to someone who can help.”

I bend my arm under my head and use it as a pillow, but it’s really not that effective. Despite the mat, I can tell this is going to be just as uncomfortable as last night. “Help with what?”

He pauses for a long second before he says, “With getting that thing off your neck.”