Intrepid (38 page)

And that was all he said. He was gone, rolling onto the jetty. I heard a buckled curse and remembered Xavi’s warning.
“You have to commit. A broken bone is better than death.”
 

Chapter Two

I didn’t like the choices in front of me, and to commit to one was like kissing lightning. Electricity was everywhere, moving me past the choice— past the idea that either was right. The only thing left was to act.
 

The pack had to go first because, if I kept it on, it’d cause me to land wrong. As it left my fingers, I hoped I’d see it again, and I followed it without any further hesitation so that it wasn’t lost to me forever. I kept my arms over my head, like a roly-poly, the way Xavi had taught me. I knew protecting it was the most important thing. After all, Mama always told me it’d be my head that’d save me when the world fell apart, despite the fact that it wasn’t doing me much good in that moment. All I could pay attention to was the screeching train and the way my breath was coming in and out of me entirely too fast as I pushed off the railing and jumped.
 

“A broken arm is better than a broken skull.” Xavi was all about practicing for worst case scenarios, and he had me duck-and-roll and roll-and-duck over and over again. The boulder he had me jumping off of was hot under the summer sun, and every time I clambered back up it, it sent heat up my fingers. “If it’s fast, it’s better to tuck the legs too. You won’t be landing on your feet anyways, so it’s better to prepare for the roll. If it’s slow, then you can try to run it out if there are no train jetties.”
 

“What if there are train jetties?”

“You deal with it. You choose. You gamble. But it’s always a gamble. Death by rock or death by torture. If they catch you, they’ll think you’re a Rebel… that you can give intel,” he spat. His shivers were contagious, and I wondered what memory taught him of torture. I’d always been good at reading people, and I could tell when a person spoke from someone else’s stories or from their own.
 

Xavi always spoke in nuances of personal experience.
 

“Possible or sure— you make decisions about your death every moment of every day. Especially out here,” he said.
 

“But won’t I get hurt anyways, if it’s that fast, that is?”

“Hurt is better than dead. Anything is better than dead.”
 

The world orbited around me until a boulder came to an abrupt stop against my back. The rocks were sharper than I’d imagined, but small pieces of luck pulled together to help. Had it been warmer weather, my skin would have been more exposed. As it was, my overabundance of layers shielded me from some of the scrapes as my momentum was stopped by the first boulder. The train was still tha-thrumping along, but I recognized the screeching of breaks. The slowing of the train played into my timing. Within seconds, the dangerous became less so, and the momentum went from deadly to injurious. There was a burning on my cheek and a ringing in my ears. I pulled off my glove to reach up and check my face. Although I couldn’t see it, the blood was sticky and warm on my fingers. Other than that, nothing felt broken, and everything felt bruised.
 

I knew I needed to move, and fast, but I was still dizzy from rolling. As a little kid, I used to face the sky, stick my arms out, and twirl and twirl and twirl until I was dizzy enough to fall over. The lightheadedness always made me feel out of control, and it was a rush, seeing as life back then had been anything but. I didn’t know it then, but I knew it now. Control always came back once the dizzies dissipated. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, and used the same boulder that had sideswiped me to steady my body. A forever second later, I was ready to move on again.
 

The light from the train played along the edges of the track, and my eyes quickly found my pack. It was a shadowed lump among the jetties, and I was relieved the boulders were so light-colored in comparison. Had they been darker, I may have lost the pack forever since time wasn’t exactly on my side. I scrambled over the distance between myself and my belongings and shivered adrenaline as I pulled it on my back.
 

I looked around. I only had one option in terms of direction, but there was a meadow between the jetties and the tree-line. The moon hovered just above the arrow-tipped tops of trees to cast an eerie glow on the world around me. I hiked the pack up and made sure it was secure on two shoulders and buckled at the waist before darting towards the forest. Whatever the boy had done, I did not want to be associated with it. I didn’t bother to look for him or check on him. I just sprinted.
 

The grass was high— knee deep, and I prayed there were no animals hiding in it. If Xavi was there, he’d say,
“A snakebite is better than a bullet-bite.”
I knew it was too cold for snakes, although there were other things biting. Horse-flies lodged themselves between my hoodie and my hairline. They buzzed around my ears and left welts where my neck was exposed.
 

I knew the searchlights would be coming soon, and I was surprised they hadn’t come yet. Luckily, the meadow was out of time and space just as the train stopped screeching. I dove into the darkness of the trees where the ground was soft and springy. It made me think of all the times I jumped on Mama and Daddy’s bed. When they’d catch me at it, they’d join in, and we’d bounce until laughter made us nauseous. That was before, when I was a Colony-kid. This bouncing was different.
 

The moment I thought I was nearly safe, something yanked me back, and there was a vice-tight grip on my pack. I unclipped the clasp around my waist and tried to wiggle my way out of it.
 

I could live without my pack.
 

I could if I had to.
 

I was almost free when a voice held me tighter than the grip. “Wait. Wait. Please. Help me.”
 

The grip became less rigid after he threw out the plea to let him follow. I didn’t have time to argue, so I said, “Fine.” I knew I’d have to lose him later, but, for the moment, I was stuck with him. We stumbled over broken trees and anxious roots, and a different kind of darkness tugged at my vision, so I just pushed forward. The boy hindered my progress in some ways, but helped me in others. For every moment I wanted to move faster, his grip on my pack slowed me, but for each dark step I took down a steepening bank, he anchored me from slipping.
 

We picked up a rhythm through the trees quick enough, and when I reminded myself to open up my ears and listen, I noticed another sound.
 

“You have to be aware. All the time… aware. You never know when nature will put an obstacle in front of you or offer a solution. This just happens to be both.” Xavi stood on the boulder. No. The word boulder was too kind. It was its very own mountain in the middle of the river, and climbing up it had been enough of an obstacle. The water trickled over, around, and seemingly through it. We’d already hiked for hours with the water pushing and our feet slipping, and I’d been waist deep the entire morning, attempting to keep my balance between the current and the weight of my pack. “But, can’t we just—“

“Backpedal? It’d take us half a day to get out of this.” He looked up at the walls of the mountains edging up along the sides. The canyon was too steep and offered insecure handholds: trees in soft dirt, rocks that fell with too much applied weight, roots that came apart at the slightest tug.
 

He was right. He was always, annoyingly right. I looked down at the space between me and the water below, and I couldn’t tell how deep it was. We could jump only to land in three feet of water with broken limbs dangling like broken tree branches.
 

He tugged at my pack so that I took it off, then tossed both our packs on the boulder just past the watering hole before I could protest. I envisioned them landing in the water and floating away without us, but his aim was perfect. His aim always was. “Together? Okay? Count of—,” but before he finished, I felt a shove from behind.
 

It was a quick betrayal.
 

Flying. Falling. Weightless. All of it only lasted a few seconds, but my scream lasted forever. My mouth was open when I hit, and I kicked and flailed to claw back up to the surface. I spat out the water that my lungs had tried to swallow, and when my ears rose above the water, they were greeted with Xavi’s howling laugher. “You should have seen your face!” he yelled.
 

“You could have killed me!”

“I couldn’t kill you if I tried. You’re indestructible!” he screamed as he leapt and balled up his knees into his chest.
 

Xavi. He was always in my ear. Even now.
 

When we stepped onto the bank, my sight adjusted again. I could make out the moon overhead, and the river sliced through the trees to make a road of stars in the sky.
 

The water was going to be cold. There are certain things I’ve learned to know out here, and mentally preparing for temperature was one of them. “We need to make obvious tracks going that way, then we’ll double back in the water,” I told the boy. There was more to the logic than I let on. The train stopped somewhere left, and I knew the river went right under the track a few miles up. It was a bridge Xavi and I’d camped at a few times in the past. We’d wash up in the river before we made our way into the Colony to snag supplies. Whoever’d be looking for us would expect us to go away from the train rather than towards it.
 

“You’re going towards the train?”

“Yes.” I pushed past him to break a few lower branches near the water.

“Um. Did you forget something? They’ll be looking for us—”
 

There was a noise in the distance; not even the trees could block it. The loudness was like a gun shot amplified by thousands upon millions of decibels. Boooooom. Boooooom. Boooooom. Each explosion was equal in distance, timing, and sound, and it stunned me that this boy could be the cause of it. “What did you
do
?” I asked.
 

“Escaped.”
 

The sounds of the explosion, at least, let me know where the train stopped, and the distance the noise had to travel told me that it wasn’t on the part of the tracks I needed to go— that danger was still a good distance from the bridge I was headed towards. It was another lucky occurrence, and my plan remained intact. I ignored the panic that wanted to pull me into different reactions and kept breaking branches. I tugged so the break-lines faced the direction I wasn’t planning on going, and I tried to grind divots into the moist earth. It was too spongy and not much stuck, so I gave up on it.
 

“What are you doing?” the nuisance asked again.
 

“Making a false-trail.”
 

“But that’s where—”

“Look. Go where you like. I need to get this done. If you want to go that way, it’ll help me out, actually. It’ll divide their attention if they have two people to chase after. I plan on going under that bridge. So, if you don’t mind. Go your way. Or go mine. Just. Shut. Up.” I didn’t wait for his reply. Instead, I looked down at my shoes. It’d be easier to make it through the rocks in the water with them on, but the boots wouldn’t dry easily. I could freeze my toes off all night or for the time being, so I unlaced the intricate knots to pull them off. I yanked off my pants and stripped down to my first layer, then to my underwear and the thin t-shirt. I didn’t know this boy enough to strip down any further. Had it just been Xavi, I’d have been brave enough to get all the way to the bra and I’d be one layer drier when all was said and done. As it stood, I chose modesty around the stranger.
 

“Imagine hiking before this technology.” Xavi grinned. He rolled up the jacket and tucked it into the pouch designated for clothing. “See this? Synth-e-dry. I could throw this bag into the river, and as long as it’s zipped, everything in it stays dry.”
 

“What happens if you don’t zip it?”

“Soggy clothes. They dry though. Not the end of the world. My— my friend once told me that in the past, these were less durable. They’d leak, and you needed extra bags made of something called plastic.”
 

“Plas-sic?”

“Plastic. Tic. With a T.”
 

“Oh.”
 

“They called them dry-bags. Now the entire pack is a dry-bag. Thank the Stars for the Scientists of the Republic.” He smiled as he said the prayer that ran wild in the Colonies. I couldn’t tell if it was a prayer that mocked or one that was sincere. I for one was thankful as the river water rose up around my pack, that the technology would keep my belongings dry.
 

I shoved all the clothes into the pack, making sure to zip it up. I knew my pack better than I knew myself, so the clothes went right where I needed them to go. The boots wouldn’t fit, so I tied them to the top of the pack and hoped they would remain dry there. The wind bit into my bare skin and sent shivers into every crevice of my body.
 

The boy had stopped questioning my motives and followed suit. He was smart, I’d give him that. He didn’t have a pack, so he tied his clothes into a makeshift pouch with his jacket.

Eyes have a way of adjusting to darkness. In the absence of light, they pull color from the strangest of places: from the stars bouncing off the water or from the clouds soaking up parts of the moon. Eyes are stronger than we give them credit for, and they sometimes find ways to see more than we can handle. I knew my face was swimming in colors that could only exist in my cheeks when I glanced his way. Near-naked men were not exactly something I saw everyday, and although it was dark, I saw more than I felt comfortable with.

I looked away and focused on the task at hand. I focused on my clattering teeth and my shivering skin.