When Copper Suns Fall (14 page)

“I don’t think so. I’m turning in early
today, okay?”

I returned to my room, fell into a deep
sleep, dreamed of Faris and another boy strolling along beaches
untouched by soot, a place where seagulls and songbirds filled the
air. Memories buried somewhere in my subconscious. The calm inside
me was a welcome change, filling me with waves of joy pulsing
through my veins, washing away a year of sorrow. And then I dreamed
of the black beast—a lion of some type—chasing Faris and the other
boy. It ate the seagulls after the demon bird singed them with its
fire.

* * *

When I found out Seth Alton was going to be
my Thoughtmaster for defense training, the hives set in.

By the time I met him for our first session
the next day, I had squeezed an imprint of my fingers over my left
fist. A crowd had gathered to watch the co-champion train. People
like Governor Winthrope surrounded by a staff of border guards and
SOCS, Yolanda Fuquay, and a group of men and women dressed in
purple and gray suits, Conservancy members. No Faris, though. He
probably didn’t want to be upstaged by a girl again. I couldn’t
blame him for that. But I’d rather face Faris’s aloofness over
Seth’s militant style any day as I soon found out during my first
session.

“You can do better than that. Again!” Seth
yelled at me.

I ran the obstacle course with even more
resolve than before. This was my eighth round. Two tire tests—one
on the ground and another attached to a fifty-foot ladder—made the
course impossible to complete in ninety seconds.

At the end of the first tire course, I had to
pick up a saber. Correction, I jumped from the platform, rolled,
and kept going without wasting a second. I almost forgot to grab
the saber lying on a table between the test areas.

A border guard waited at the end, the same
boy who was responsible for putting me here. Wonderful. His job was
to make sure none of us got near the second course, and he did his
duty well. I heard Seth call him Hagan. He stood at the beginning
of the Metal Fight, parallel bars attached to a 50-foot high
platform. Padded gloves in the shape of giant fists swung on
pulleys situated between every other vertical bar. To make your way
through was a matter of timing the swings and avoiding Hagan at the
end.

Muriel, Diranna, Zach, and Thresh had all
bottomed out. From the sidelines, they watched and caressed their
bruised body parts. Muriel shouted a few times just before Seth
quieted her with a look.

The 100-pound gloves were my weak spots. I
just couldn’t get the timing right. After the third round of stars
I’d seen from being pushed from the metal platform, I began to
doubt myself. The pad we fell down to must have been filled with
rocks. I’d have bruises for life. But I was pretty sure the idea
wasn’t to make us comfortable after we fell. Each time I lost, I
imagined it took me further away from finding answers about
Micah.

I wasn’t about to let that happen.

On the last fall, I bent my fingers back. My
right hand throbbed. Holding in a scream, I ignored the pain,
stood, and charged up the ladder again. This time I made it past
the first set of swinging gloves, shoved past Hagan waiting at the
end, and knocked him down to the rock mattress.

The strange thing? I didn’t even have to
touch him.

“Ground the power, keep it inside,” I said
under my breath. There were only three gloves left to avoid before
I reached the end.

Seth yelled for me to focus. Faster, harder,
faster, harder. What did he want from me? I was humiliated, but I
was even more angry. No one else had repeated the course so many
times. Weaving through the padded gloves, I envisioned the tires
hanging on the storage line over his head, exploding like mini
bombs. Fuzz surged into me. I wasn’t surprised and was starting to
enjoy getting what I wanted from my powers. I rolled past the last
glove and hooked myself to the Metal Fight’s zip line leading down
a small embankment.

When I hopped down, thunderous applause came
from the crowd. An excited feeling coursed through my body, making
me feel confident and strong. My brother was not going to be
removed from the system. With my heart pounding, I suddenly felt as
if my body were a magical instrument. Every vessel, each bone, all
of my muscles, filled with energy.

A whistling gust burst onto the scene,
knocking seats over. Murmurs came from the crowd as the winds
loosened a tire attached to the line near Seth’s head. It slid down
the cable and bumped into a tire hanging directly over him. The
tire domino was in full swing, now. The cable snapped where the
tires had gathered. They slid off the line and fell toward Seth
standing under them. He held his hands up, palms facing the sky.
For a brief moment, it was as if they’d been suspended in air.
Impossible. At least for a Thoughtmaster it was. Then tires hit the
ground, rolled away from Seth, and headed toward Hagan and a few
other border guards who took off running, tires right on their
heels. The wind had breathed life into them, it seemed. Another set
rolled toward the crowd that was scrambling for the exit doors.

A few more tires fell over Seth’s head. But
this time they stopped just before hitting him, as if an invisible
wall stood around him. I squeezed my eyes closed as the winds
faded. First thing I saw after I opened them was the hard smile on
Seth’s face. Cold washed over me. Several border guard trainees
rushed over to remove the tires from his path. They glanced at me
and looked away.

Seth strolled over to me as if I’d just done
something he was pleased with, rather than almost striking the
governor with tire bombs. “That’s exactly what I wanted to see from
you. It’s what I’ll expect from now on. Give me some of what you
gave my…our reigning champion.” He dusted himself off, as if almost
getting rung out by tires was a common thing for him. But nothing
about Seth Alton was normal.

“You pushed me, somehow,” I said.

“I could say the same thing about you, and
that little trick with Hagan on the Metal Fight. You’re no
second-rate girl with a chromo mutation. You’re first class in
every possible way,” he said, circling me. I turned to face him,
trying to ignore the stragglers murmuring around us and the pain
waving through my right hand.

Muriel shouted to me from the sideline. I
glanced at her. “Put your face back into attention. You are still
holding back.”

“What do you want me to do? I can’t
just—”

“Speak when spoken to. Manners—a vital thing
in this game. You need a tweak or two in order to understand that,
I see.” He took my hand in his, and pulled my disjointed fingers
back into place before I could say anything. Icy pain waved through
my hand and up into my shoulder. Angry because there’d been no
warning, I doubled over, leaning into his shoulder. His ashy and
peppery scent tickled my nostrils. He jerked me back upright,
cupping my face. I stared into empty pools, those eyes with no
reflection. “For the next two months, I am defense Thoughtmaster to
you. Now, stop whining, act like a champion, and suck it up.”

“You’re trying to kill me,” I said.

He scoffed and moved closer to my face. “What
did you think would happen here? This isn’t a camp for the
no-talents, the commoners. People like your friend Alexandra.” He
hissed Lexa’s name in a way that sent goose bumps prickling over
me. I flinched. “Yes, I know about her. Just like I know those
sudden wind gusts weren’t caused by an early hurricane. In fact,
there wasn’t anything natural about them, was there?” He stared
until I felt as if he might pull the truth from inside me, forcing
me into the black void in his eyes. What did he know?

“It’s our secret as long as you never cross
me. Be the model student. Is that too much to ask? Course not. But
don’t worry, I can be easy.” He ran a thumb across my lips. It
wasn’t a lover’s touch. Instead, it was as if he was a ringmaster
soothing his pet in training.

Behind him, a throat cleared. He eased his
hands away and spoke without turning around. “Lock those thoughts
away, for me.” Looking bored and pleased with our training session,
he strolled over to where the girl stood. She was familiar to me,
even though I couldn’t place her face. Behind them, only Muriel and
a few others had braved the wind.

All during the first week of training, I
missed dinner. Thoughtmaster Alton was grueling. I also didn’t
understand why my training had to be separate from everybody
else’s. It was awful enough I was the only government girl at
camp.

On the eighth night of training, I sat on my
bed, staring at the ceiling, refusing to cry. My body ached in
every unmentionable place. My mind raced as I tried to connect the
Thoughtmasters, border guard trainees, and pledgees all together.
What connection did they share with my brother?

And then there was Faris with the
unforgettable silvery eyes. Thinking about him made me think of the
girl who approached Seth that first day. But why?

Getting around drinking the ale-meds was
easier than I thought it would be. Muriel rebelled with me. It was
easy for one of us to create a diversion while the other poured her
medicine into the empty vials we carried. But we had to be careful.
If I strayed or didn’t show up for a training session, Seth would
call out Lexa’s secret. Plus, my carelessness made him suspect
something was up with me, too. If the truth about me got out,
Father’s name would be ruined. I’d never find out what happened to
my brother, or be able to help him recover.

Too much rode on my shoulders. I refused to
accept fear, and failure wasn’t in the training plan.

Chapter Twelve – The Ruins

We traveled by Q-train for six hours, away
from the camp and into the northern wastelands. I’d never left
Castle Hayne before. Travel virgin was the best way to describe me.
I glanced out the window, watching lands pass by that no picture
could ever portray. A deep twinge of sadness brought tears to my
eyes. I blinked them away and focused on the scenes as we passed
them.

Dark skies, heaps of stone, jagged metal
where buildings once stood, mangled branches and tree stumps spread
throughout traces of old forests, ghost lands with no flowers or
animals or life of any type sailed by the window. Other trainees
were as captured by the sights as me, and silence blanketed the
cabins. Some of them knew people in the Dim Cities or lived with a
fostered outcast kid. Only a few of us had ever left Castle Hayne
to face reality firsthand.

I grasped my saber, another relic of a mother
I never knew. The three armored cherubs decorating the hilt would
be my guides through this journey. It was as if they held magic
arrows filled with relief ready to ease my tangled chest.

Thoughtmaster Oxendine handed out the maps.
Unlike our English teacher, no one dared challenge him. At almost
seven-feet tall, he commanded obedience. It was as if someone added
black and white-streaked hair pulled back into a ponytail, hollowed
cheeks, pasty skin, dry humor (correction…no humor) and the voice
of a thunder god, together to create the most frightening
Thoughtmaster ever. He silenced Thresh and Zachary with one hard
look.

Our task was to find markers left by the
outcasts. Just as the Tribunal trained its gifted kids in
pre-careers, so did the outcasts. Only these kids were taught to
mark their territory with radioactive orbs. Hidden by darkness, the
elders among the groups would return later and plant mini bombs
inside the orbs. It was a survival technique for the outcasts. But
the Tribunal didn’t allow radiation to be used for any purpose, and
more reports about them came in everyday.

We were to release our signal, and return to
the launch spot. Although the job sounded simple, I knew it wasn’t
going to be. Our greatest challenge? Avoid the mutated animals
living in the woods around the volcanic ruins and the outcasts that
owned them. Easy enough, right?

The train eased to a stop outside of station
one, a metalized building. Airvans parked along a gravel road in
front of the station waited to take us into the Ruins. My backpack
weighed a ton as I stepped down from the train and walked a short
distance off, taking in the scene around me. A shove from behind
made me stumble forward. I spun around. The culprit was Diranna
Tilley armed in combat boots and attitude.

“Hey runt, are you ready to get a little dirt
on that fancy suit?” she said.

I smirked. “Maybe if you can manage to use a
brain instead of your mouth.” Oohs from Nathan and Thresh standing
beside her.

“You just earned yourself a one-person spot
on top of my dung heap,” Diranna said.

“Yeah, I think I made a note when you said
that before.”

“Watch your back in those woods. I heard all
kinds of baddies are on the loose today,” Nathan said, grinning as
he adjusted his motion device. He was a Tracker like Jalen. How
could someone so slimy be in the same class as my best friend?

I didn’t want to go into this venture with
enemies on board. Shoving my saber down into the hilt, I turned and
tried talking to some of the other kids. But Diranna moved into my
way.

“What are you doing here? You think because
you won a stupid little costing match that you own the champion’s
spot, now?”

I wanted to say: “yeah, because somebody
thinks your sorry butt is important enough for me to spy on
Thoughtmasters.” But instead, I said, “That’s not what I think.
News beat, I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Well, you got it, didn’t you? Forget about
being champion. The spot belongs to Zach. Not some wimpy guide-girl
with a daddy who pulled some strings.” Her greenish-blue eyes
glared with such intense hatred. With no challenge-the-bully energy
tucked away, I turned and walked over to my assigned airvan. I was
grateful to hear the steam-powered engines hiss to life as we
lifted and sped on deeper into the Ruins.