Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) (11 page)

“And why’s that?”

“Because,” he says, getting to his feet, “women don’t fight where I come from. And they certainly don’t cut random men.” His fingers twitch like he wants to touch the spot on his arm where I sliced him.

“It was a tiny scratch,” I tell him.

“I know. But where I come from it means something. Come on.” He slips his dagger back into his belt and steps forward, holding his hand out to me. I’m not stupid enough to think he won’t reach for his stiletto if I let him pull me up, so I kick back and stand without his help. He quirks an eyebrow at me.

“You really are something else.”

“So are you.” I don’t say this with quite as much admiration as he did.

“Just don’t say I didn’t warn you, okay?” he says. “You’re really going to wish you’d listened to me.”

COLLAR

Ryka gives me back the satchel now that there’s nothing in it I want, and we set off walking. It’s less than an hour before I start feeling sick again, and the sweating comes on hard. I must look flushed because Ryka stops stalking through the forest like he’s hell bent on leaving me behind and makes me rest. I think if he wasn’t so desperate to get his knife back he really would leave me. The way he keeps glancing at the stiletto sitting above my hip reminds of the hungry look in the starving children’s eyes when I passed through the shanties. That feels like a lifetime ago.

“When was the last time you ate?” he asks.

I spit into the undergrowth, trying to rid my mouth of the sensation that I’m going to throw up. “I don’t know. Two days ago?”

“
Two
―
”
He rolls his eyes. “And what about water?”

I blow out a heavy breath, wishing he’d go back to being silent. It feels distinctly like I’m being told off. “Yesterday. I drank about five litres of water from the river.”

Ryka looks accusingly at Jada, who watches us with her tongue unfurled over her teeth, puffing. He shakes his head. “I thought I told you to fetch her back in one piece,” he tells the dog. She tenses when he puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out something that he throws into the undergrowth. She bounds off after it, sniffing madly. Ryka loses his smile when he turns to me.

“Don’t you know anything? You have to boil water like that if you want to drink it, even if it is fast flowing. It’s got all kinds of filth in it.”

I feel too terrible to argue with him, so I just breathe deeply and try to piece myself together. I’m kneeling in a sea of green ferns, biting back a groan, when his hand descends into my field of vision. In it is a speckled apple, green for the most part and tinged with pink.

“Eat it,” he says. “You’re going to pass out otherwise, and I’m not carrying you.”

I begrudgingly take the apple and wait for him to back off before I bite into it. We don’t have apples like this in the Sanctuary. This apple is imperfect, where as every piece of fruit and vegetable we consume back home is a uniform shape and a uniform size and a uniform colour. The taste is the same, though. Sweet and granular on my tongue. I haven’t realised how hungry I am until now, and I make short work of the apple, even eating most of the core.

“How far do we have to go?” I ask. Ryka’s been sitting on a rotted-out tree stump watching me eat with blatant curiosity. Gives me the same sort of feeling I used to get when I knew thousands of people were watching, waiting for me to kill someone in a match. I don’t want to feel like that right now. I toss what’s left of the apple core, and Jada comes barrelling out of nowhere and snatches it up before it hits the ground. “Well?”

He pulls his mouth to one side, looking up at the sky. It must be a few days since he’s shaved, because there’s a shadow across his jaw, a darker blond than his head. “If we can get moving, we should be there before nightfall.”

I nod, thinking. Another night out in the open doesn’t sound appealing, but finding the energy to push on seems impossible. There’s a little hesitation in me now as well. I hadn’t really considered the logistics of leaving the Sanctuary
―
where I would go, what I would do. Everything just happened so fast.

“This place were going,” I say. “Does it have a name?”

Ryka rocks back on the tree stump, giving the knife another furtive look. “Freetown.”

“Free
town?
” I must look horrified with my mouth hanging open.

“Yeah. What did you expect?”

“I don’t know, I…how many people are there?”

Ryka pulls the corners of his mouth down and shrugs. “Twenty thousand or so.”

I mouth the words,
twenty thousand
feeling the apple in my stomach twist. “I had no idea. I had absolutely no idea there were so many.”

Ryka snorts and gets to his feet. “What, so you’re all shut away in your little city on top of the hill thinking the rest of the world just doesn’t exist?”

I look up at him, startled. “Yes!”

“Ha ha! That’s possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. What did they tell you?”

I frown, trying to process this information. “We’ve always been told there are only small bands of Radicals out here in the forest, maybe ten or fifteen people per group. Certainly no more. I’ve never really thought about it, I guess, but I figured maybe there were a couple of hundred people living beyond the city walls.”

“Radicals?” Ryka narrows his eyes at me. “That’s what you call us?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, that’s ironic.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re the radical ones. Your government thinks you can’t be trusted, can’t be civilised enough to handle your own emotions, so they collared the whole population like dogs. Turned you all into walking zombies.” He kicks at a small rock with the toe of his boot, and it rolls to a stop in front of me. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands.

“It’s not like that. It’s for the greater
―
”

“Are you about to say it’s for the
greater good
?” His voice rises in pitch at the end.

I go to answer yes, but then I catch myself. I’m just repeating what they’ve told me since I was old enough to understand, what I’ve been brought up to believe was the truth. Except now I know they’ve lied, maybe about everything. That knowledge makes me feel very small. Remarkably lost. I stare at the rock, pressing its sharp edges into my fingertips until the skin underneath my nails turns white. “I don’t know what’s good or what’s bad anymore.”

“I bet. You said you’ve fought over a hundred matches in Lockdown. That makes you a killer on a pretty grand scale. That can’t feel all that good.”

I snap my head up at him, biting on my lip. I taste blood before I open my mouth to speak. “I’m not thinking about that.”

Ryka laughs loud enough that three birds launch themselves out of the tree branches above us. He ignores them but I follow their flight path upwards until they disappear from view. “You think it’s that simple, do you? You think you can just not think about it and it goes away?” He blows out a sharp breath. “I’m telling you now,
if
you ever
do
kill someone, you’ll see how absolutely stupid that statement was.”

I slump forward and scrub my face in my hands. “You still don’t believe me?”

“No way!”

“Urgh! Whatever.” The time for wallowing in the dirt, trying to ignore Ryka’s scathing comments is over. I’m shaky as hell when I get to my feet, but at least the apple stays down and I feel minutely better. “We should go,” I say. Jada lopes off into the forest on a pathway I can’t see but she seems to know well. I set off walking, but Ryka catches me by the arm.

“I really am gonna need that knife back before we reach Freetown.”

“All you have to do is give me the stick.”

He gives me a guarded look. “And I will. But you have to tell me what’s on it first.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

I shake my head. “It belonged to a friend of mine. He used to record himself on it apparently. I haven’t had chance to watch it yet.”

“So you’re telling me you went head to head with a Tamji fighter to get some
diary
back? One you haven’t even watched yet? Gee.” He rolls his eyes and sets off walking, releasing my arm. “I figured it was something important.”

“It
is
important.”

“Uh-huh. So where’s this important friend of yours right now, huh?”

I hold my breath in my mouth, feeling the words hovering over the tip of my tongue.
 
I keep it short. “He’s dead.”

Ryka’s pace slows. “How?”

“He lost his match.”

“Who was he fighting?”

He’s going to find this laughable, so I try and lend some weight to my voice when I say, “
Me
.”

“Of course.” In his words, I can hear the stupid, annoying smile he’s wearing. I pretend I don’t notice. Better not to acknowledge it at all.

“What’s a Tamji fighter?”

Ryka clears his throat. “We have progressions of fighting in Freetown. Everywhere else that I’ve ever heard of, too.”

“There are other places?”

He slows a little more so that he falls into step alongside me. “There are
lots
of other places, other cities,” he says. He’s mocking me with the way he speaks to me, like I’m a small child. “A Tamji is a fighter of high honour. I’ve been Tamji for six months. Everyone keeps saying I’ll be upgraded after the next few bouts. I’m not sure, though. It depends.”

“On what?” I can’t help but ask. Their system of fighting sounds so different to the one back home.

Ryka chews on his lip. “On the priestesses. Fighters are upgraded during the blood ceremonies, which are held before each match. The town’s priestesses have visions. They call men from the ranks and upgrade them when it is their time.”

“So, you aren’t promoted based on your skill?”

“It’s supposed to be that way, I guess. Loosely. We just go when the priestesses call us.”

I screw my face up. Is he lying? He could be for all I can tell; I’m still no good at differentiating the truth from anything else. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because! What if someone with no skill is called up to become a
Tamji
,” I say, emphasising the term, “and he’s not ready?”

“Then it must be his time to die.” Ryka says this with such nonchalance that I’m stunned. I try not to let my horror show but it’s getting tougher; there are no half measures for me anymore. Everything is either the very best or the very worst thing ever. Mostly the very worst.

“Who are these priestesses? They must be monsters to pitch two unevenly skilled fighters against one another. That’s not a match. That’s murder.”

Ryka blows out a sharp breath from his nose and glares at me. “Firstly, it’s
all
murder, no matter how you look at it. And secondly, the Priestesses are revered. Be careful saying stuff like that in future, especially if you want to stay in Freetown. You’ll get yourself killed otherwise. Don’t you have the Faith in Lockdown?”

“No.” The only religion I’ve ever known is the religion of routine, of training, the religion of fighting.

“Huh. Explains a lot,” Ryka says. “No religion, no feelings, no freedom. All of those things go hand in hand. You’re all just a bunch of collared animals with no idea that you’re being held captive in the first place.”

I feel my muscles twitch, not liking the way he’s talking. There’s a hard edge to the timbre of his voice, incredibly bitter. “Do animals wear collars?” I ask.

“Yes, they do.”

Weird concept. I can’t really picture it; an animal is still a lump of meat on a plate to me. “But Jada doesn’t?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Ryka gives me a stern look, tucking his hair behind his ears. “Even she has more freedom than you did in Lockdown.”

The hard, bright light in his eyes is really more aggressive than it needs to be. I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me, so why does he look like he’s personally offended? Not that it matters. Who cares what he thinks, anyway? Sadly, I guess
I
do, because I find myself snapping at him. “It’s not the same, okay. Stop calling it a collar. I’m not an animal, and this is a
halo
.” I tug at the hard metal hanging loose around my neck.

Ryka looks at me for a moment before bursting into laughter. I want more than anything in the world to slap him across his face. Jada runs back to us and starts barking like she wants in on the joke.

“What’s so funny?” I snap.

“Your
halo
?” He reaches out to hook his finger under it. I can barely believe he’s done it for a moment, can barely believe his finger is touching the skin on my neck beneath the ring of heavy metal. I haven’t even been brave enough to touch that skin yet; it just felt wrong when I thought about it. I flinch away like his touch burns me, wide eyed. This sobers him up, and he stops laughing.

“You can’t have any idea what a halo truly is,” he says. “Or if you do, you should know…yours has well and truly slipped.”