Pacifica Page 6

  Her lips brushed against his neck. Each time he breathed, his stomach pressed against hers. She became aware of every place they touched, and every place they didn’t. Of the clean scent of his skin. Of his bent knee, pressed against the outside of her thigh.

  Of her wrist, now throbbing harder with each beat of her heart.

  She wiggled free.

  He stayed on his knees and elbows for a long moment, back rising and falling, and she felt the sudden sinking sensation that he’d been hurt worse than she had.

  “Hey. You all right?” she asked, quickly assessing the boy who’d pulled her from danger. Straight nose, broad shoulders, lips pulled into a tight grimace. His skin too pale to have spent time near the water, and there were no acid burns on his face like most of the other Shorelings. No weapons, from what she could tell.

  Something was off about him. It didn’t give her a good feeling.

  He rocked back on his heels, brows scrunched together.

  “Fine,” he said, blinking and rubbing his eyes before looking up at her. “You?”

  She nodded, but her breath came in shallow gasps, and she couldn’t yet manage to peel her injured arm away from her chest. Every second that passed, it hurt worse.

  “I’m great too, thanks,” said Adam, who had stood and was wiping his hands down his pant legs. Though he was half shrouded in shadow, she could make out the dirt smudge on his cheek and the dust highlights in his short hair.

  “Hey!” He banged on the door. “Anyone there?”

  No one answered.

  Above on the street, the smoky air glowed eerily with the blue flashing lights of the patrol cars. The crowd had thinned, but footsteps still slapped against the pavement, punctuated by the burst sirens. In unspoken agreement, they backed up against the door, hiding in the shadows.

  “We have to get off the streets.” The twist in her gut turned her mind to another problem. The tar she’d spent two full days making—that she’d spent weeks gathering supplies for—was gone. The credits Gloria could use to feed her people were gone.

  Those kids may not have been her responsibility, but she felt the burden of their empty stomachs all the same. Where she came from, you gave everything you had to your people, and if you couldn’t, or you didn’t, you were sent out to face the storms. Even if she knew it was different here, the same desperation snaked through her. It left her raw, and unhinged, like a ship with no anchor.

  La limpieza’s siren wailed above them, kicking her pulse up another notch. She could not be caught. The punishment for rioting would be different for her than for the other Shorelings. Worse.

  Because she was not a Shoreling. She was a criminal.

  The boys were arguing in hushed tones. Something about a comm, and how they could be out of here in ten minutes. Blue Eyes wasn’t a fan of the idea, saying they’d be busted if their dads found out.

  Their speech was wrong, the way their words flowed together, one leading seamlessly into the next. With his wary stare and hunched shoulders, Adam might have passed as one of the rioters, but Blue Eyes stood too tall, like the world had never bent his back. His skin was like polished marble, without even a hint of roughness.

  He wasn’t a Shoreling. Not just any land-born terreno, as her people called them. He was from Upper Noram. The type who dressed in suits and gowns, had more money than they knew how to spend, and never set foot below the cliffline.

  He was from those who had betrayed her grandparents.

  A kanshu.

  Her body went rigid, strengthened by generations of distrust. She jerked away, putting a foot of space between them and bringing another sharp pang to her arm.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, teeth locked.

  Blue Eyes faced her. “Same thing as you. Hiding.”

  “Why?” she pressed. “You in trouble or something?”

  Adam gave a weak laugh. Shoreling or not, he was with Blue Eyes, and that made him just as dangerous.

  “Are you?” asked Blue Eyes.

  She was torn, unsure if she should run, or fight, or laugh because of course it was her luck that she’d found herself trapped in a stairwell with the most dangerous people in the country.

  How had she not known who they were? She felt like a fool, and worse, a traitor to her own kind for helping them escape the riots. But they’d helped her too; they didn’t seem like the kinds of pale, land-loving monsters her father had once talked about around the fire pit.

  Blue Eyes looked more like a boy who’d tumbled down a hill, and Adam just seemed afraid.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Her back scraped the wall as she pushed herself to a stand. Careful not to be seen, she extended her arm into a patch of blue light and looked down at her wrist.

  “Your arm…” Blue Eyes stood, gaping down at her. She jerked away, and the movement brought another punch of pain. She squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her teeth together, until it eased.

  Her wrist wasn’t lined up right. Her hand didn’t make a straight line with her forearm. Her fingers were numb.

  “You need to go to the hospital.”

  “She can’t,” Adam snapped. “Unless she wants to get picked up by the patrol. There’s a curfew, didn’t you hear them?”

  She couldn’t go to a hospital—hospitals asked questions about who she was, and where she’d come from. Questions she couldn’t answer.

  “Hiro,” she muttered. “He’s a doctor. He can hide us.”

  She didn’t know why she said “us.” These boys weren’t Shorelings—their people were responsible for all of this. But in that moment she didn’t care. They’d helped her, and all she could think about was that they needed to get off the streets.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  But when she took the first step, she lost her swagger. Her stomach turned, the sweat on her brow turned ice cold. She blinked rapidly and braced herself against the wall.

  When her vision cleared, Blue Eyes’s face was before her.

  “We’ll stay together,” he said. “Can you run?”

  She inhaled, and when the world was steady again, nodded.

  He peeked above the stairway and gave a quick nod. With both guys on her heels, she led the way up. Once they hit the street they were running, her wrist against her chest, making each stride uneven.

  The noise steadily grew again, a wave of shouts and chants through the eerie yellow haze. Her nose crinkled with the sharp scent of burning plastic. The riots felt impossible to avoid, like water gushing from a broken dam through the streets of Lower Noram.

  A turn, and then another. Blue lights cut across the cracked pavement in front of her, and she tore off to the side as they came to a dark shop front.

  She banged on the door, feeling la limpieza getting closer, closer.

  “Hiro!” she called. “It’s Marin. Open up!”

  No one answered.

  Blue Eyes went to the shop window beside her and was banging on the glass through the metal grate.

  “Hiro!” she tried again. “Hiro, Gloria sent me!”

  Ahead, in the middle of a street, a bonfire stretched into the black sky, crackling and hissing as it burned through the furniture and clothes fed to it by the mob.

  “Help! ¡Ayudame!” She banged the knife’s handle against a window, where inside candlelight flickered. Two eyes appeared behind the dark glass, and then the door cracked open.

  “Hurry,” came Hiro’s low voice. “Hurry, get inside.”

  She shoved herself through the crack, tumbling forward as the two boys followed. A man old enough to be her father, with silver streaks in his oily hair and dewdrops of perspiration on his broad forehead, quickly slammed the door and turned the lock.

  “Fools,” he said at the crowd outside as he pulled down the ratty blinds. “They think just because they stand together, they won’t all be arrested.”

  Marin tried to catch her breath. The pain in her arm extended up her shoulder. It made it hard to focus.
<
br />   “What is this place?” asked Blue Eyes.

  The slivers of firelight from the window revealed a small altar on the ground. A little stage, like the one she’d made from scraps when she was a child, only instead of pirate puppets made from threadbare socks, this held candles and a bowl half filled with water.

  As her eyes adjusted, a dozen more artifacts became clear. Colors, feathers, small figures in clay. Bundles of weeds and bottles of amber liquid. A glass jar filled with bugs. An iron sculpture of a naked woman reaching for the moon. Like every time she was here, seeing it made her want to believe in something, and wanting to believe in something made her feel weak.

  “Hiro’s a healer,” Marin said tightly.

  Blue Eyes looked skeptical.

  “There are many ways to be healed,” Hiro told him.

  “She’s hurt,” he told the old man. “Her arm. She was attacked by a patrolman.”

  She hadn’t realized she’d braced her arm against her chest in her opposite fist.

  “Patrolman, huh?” The word came from Hiro’s mouth slowly, as if it were in another language. He glanced at Marin, as if looking for confirmation that they were indeed outsiders.

  She nodded once.

  He considered this only a moment, then waved for them to follow him behind the counter. “Come. We’ll ride out the storm.”

  Pushing back the curtain on the wall, he revealed a narrow room running the length of the back wall, lit a moment later by the wave and flicker of candlelight. Just beyond the threshold was a cot, covered by a red-and-white quilted blanket. He bent to a square generator on the floor in the corner, wound the crank a couple times, and when it made a steady whirring sound, turned on a small lamp on the table beside the bed.

  “Show me,” he said, hands open.

  Tentatively, she extended her arm before him, inhaling sharply as he gently attempted to move her hand from side to side. Her teeth locked together. Tears burned her eyes. She flinched as he felt his way to her elbow, unused to anyone but Gloria touching her kindly, even after five years on the mainland.

  Blue Eyes watched her, an anxious kind of energy moving his hands from his pockets to wring in front of him. He didn’t look away from her arm. Adam, shorter by several inches, was standing close to him, close enough their shoulders were pressed together. His gaze kept returning to the sleek, silver comm at his wrist. She’d seen plenty of rip-offs sold on the street corners in the docks, but that one looked real enough.

  What were they doing here?

  “Is our friend at the library okay?” Hiro asked, referring to her boss. Marin had run supplies here for Gloria a few times—medicine, and disinfectant, and bandages that she’d managed to smuggle off the supply train. Not everyone could afford to go to the hospital, and those who could not, came to Hiro. For that generosity, Gloria stocked his clinic with what she could, free of charge.

  “As far as I know,” she said.

  Hiro did not seem upset that she had lied to get off the street. He wove her numb fingers with his, and then offered a grim smile.

  Then yanked.

  She cursed, first in her mother’s native tongue and again in hers, and then fell to her knees, gripping her arm against her chest.

  “What’d you do?” Blue Eyes demanded. He forced himself between her and Hiro, just as he’d stood in front of la limpieza in the riots—as if nothing could knock him down.

  She breathed in and out, forcing the air through the tight straw of her throat. Gradually, her fingers regained their feeling, though the pain lessened only a little. Blue Eyes reached down, helping her to the side of the cot, where she hunched over her knees.

  “Ah, yes,” said Hiro. “That will be sore for some time. Dislocated, is all. Not broken. Let me find something to wrap it.”

  A loud banging at the front door snapped their attention to the main room of the store. Jolted from his spell, she reached for her knife, but the weakness in her dominant wrist forced her to switch hands.

  “Please,” whispered Hiro, placing his pointer finger over his lips. “Quiet.”

  He made his way back through the curtain toward the front of the store, while they stayed behind the thin bed and the cluttered countertop.

  “More people trying to get off the streets,” she guessed.

  “Think he’ll let them in?” Adam’s voice was strained.

  “He let us in, didn’t he?”

  Another bang, and then a loud crack, like someone was trying to break down the door. Marin jumped, bracing her knife before her. In the main room, she could hear Hiro arguing, and then another thump against the door.

  “Please! Please be calm!” Hiro begged. “There is nothing here to take!”

  She searched for an exit, finding a door on the wall behind Adam lined with five locks down the seam. A tilt of her head, and Blue Eyes grabbed Adam’s sleeve, dragging him toward it. But Hiro’s cry stopped them, stunted by a crash in the front room, and she jolted toward the curtain without thinking.

  Before she reached it, the thin fabric fluttered and began to draw back as if moved by a ghost. The room beyond was jarringly quiet; the roar of the riots outside muffled the space between.

  A terrified curiosity froze in her chest, solid and heavy. The curtain opened, revealing a burly man in a suit. His head was shaved clean, and in his hand was a gun.

  He took one look at the two guys, and then at Marin, and raised his weapon.

  CHAPTER 8

  “TERSLEY, WAIT…” Ross felt the world catch up to him in one hard lurch. Everything had happened so fast. The riots, those patrolmen, and then this Shoreling girl who looked a little too comfortable with a knife in her hand. Who was shielding him for the second time tonight.

  “What’s this?” his bodyguard demanded, gun aimed at the girl’s chest. “What’s going on here?” He kicked aside the small table, making them all jump, and took a quick glance under the bed.

  “Nothing,” the girl said quickly.

  Ross saw everything. The droplet of sweat that cut a line down her dusty jaw. The number “86” branded below her ear. The holes in her paper-thin, sleeveless shirt and bulky pants, and the scuffs on the toes of her boots. He could feel her fear, hot and frantic, or maybe it was his own. Of all the things that had happened tonight, this was the worst. Because this girl had helped him. Because it was Tersley, and Tersley was his, and if Tersley hurt her, it was on him.

  “We just wanted to look,” he explained quickly. “Things got out of hand.” Questions slammed through his brain. What are you doing? How did you find us? What took you so long?

  Adam had called him. Or activated the tracker in his comm. He must have done it before they’d arrived at the shop.

  “We can’t be here,” Adam said quickly. “Do you know what this looks like? Us, here with her? Like this?”

  Ross’s heart pumped harder. He hadn’t even considered it, but Adam was right. Four men—three of them kanshu, or whatever people kept calling them here—and a Shoreling girl with a gun aimed at her chest. If any of the protesters saw this, there wouldn’t just be riots, there’d be a full-scale war.

  “Tersley, stop,” Ross said, voice unsteady. “Listen, this is a—”

  “Hey! What’s going on in there?” a man, not Hiro, called from the front of the shop. Tersley had attracted the attention of the people outside.

  “Drop your weapon and lay facedown on the floor.” His bodyguard’s words were flat, low. Ross had never heard him talk like this. He spoke in sighs, and grunts, and suppressed eye rolls. It occurred to Ross he’d been given this job for a reason. Not everyone in the president’s watch had the duty of guarding his only child.

  “You first, cabrón,” said the girl.

  They may not have taught that word in his world language class, but he had a pretty good idea what it meant.

  “Last chance,” Tersley said. “I won’t ask again.”

  She stared at Tersley, gaze like fire. Don’t do that, Ross wanted to beg. Back down. B
ut she didn’t. She pulled back her shoulders, and lifted her chin. Her wild curls spread around her face, and her cheeks took on a hard, red glow.

  Ross edged to her side. “Just do what he says. Please.”

  The girl bent her knees. Her eyes flicked to his. The knife clattered to the floor.

  Okay, Ross thought. Okay.

  There were more voices outside now, and another from the main room.

  “Stop, both of you!” Hiro was somewhere behind Tersley, hidden by the man’s giant frame.

  Another crash came from the front room. Tersley, only five feet away, pressed the trigger.

  The shot echoed through the room. Ross could feel the force of it in his teeth, in his skull. It shook through his whole body. It felt like something was tearing inside of him.

  The girl was on the floor. Facedown. Unmoving.

  Dead.

  Tersley had killed her. Ross had killed her. Adam had killed her, because Adam had called for help.

  “Come on.” There was a hand in the back collar of his shirt, a voice in his head. He was jerked backward. He blinked, dazed, at Adam. He was saying something else. Ross saw his mouth moving. He couldn’t think.

  Dead. The Shoreling girl who’d taken a hit for him. Who had a number on her neck and a six-inch blade on her hip. She’d been light when he carried her, or maybe the rush of it all had made him twice as strong. He hadn’t thought twice about it when he’d picked her up off the pavement and run.

  “She had a weapon,” Tersley said, looking down at the girl again. “You saw her.” He swiped the sweat out of his eyes.

  She was unarmed, Ross wanted to shout. You disarmed her! But he couldn’t, because Tersley grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him into a crouch.

  “Follow me. Keep moving,” he said. “There’s a car outside.”

  With a heave, Tersley kicked the door outward, and Ross caught sight of half a dozen faces whipping by as he was dragged through the front of the shop. Tersley roared and plowed past two, three bodies in the way. He was knocked back and forth between them before finally punching through. Another shot. A scream. Someone yelled, “¡Corre!” Just as they’d told him hours before at the riots.