Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Mission
It’s hard to watch when Atlas takes Miko and Atina’s profiles and folds them to display only their photos beside his bed.
Their discovery has brought him comfort, but their absence seems more torturous with the confirmation that they’re being detained.
His silence is haunting, while his eyes tick through his mind.
Now he’s been given more ammunition to imagine their situation.
And then there is the betrayal of President Beckett—leading our country under the mask of a firm but fair leader.
It’s easy to let anger fester, but I’ve been able to get this far without letting resentment control me, so I won’t allow my friends to be ruled by it either.
Being a woman and the bosses’ daughter gives me incentive to prove myself.
My strength and endurance need serious work, so I’ve been training like crazy, ensuring that I’m part of the team because I’ve earned it, not because of my status.
Between training, we do shift work, helping patrol the perimeter, releasing teams to move beyond, and checking abandoned towns for supplies and useful materials.
After being present for only a couple of sightings of other communities outside the fence, I ask Kris why the camp is so elusive.
It turns out that the government never expended resources on policing or rebuilding the west on the other side of Missouri, leaving the Cornerstone undetectable, allowing us to reconstruct America under President Beckett’s nose.
I wince with my first movements of the day, groaning with a painful stretch in my bed.
Aches and burns run through my muscles like radiation pulsing from my core.
My grumbling stomach is enough to entice me out of bed.
My appetite is growing, and I tuck into food at every given opportunity.
Zeke becomes my running partner, and I always look forward to the cool air rushing past my skin when we run early in the morning, before the day’s heat.
Over time, the burn in my chest lessens, and the thud in my step eases to a bounce.
Atlas relishes helping build my strength, so we work out together, but I lift a tenth of what he does, laughing as I struggle beside him.
Leon even attempts to quit smoking, making him utterly intolerable for the first thirty-six hours, so we keep our distance, while feeding and watering him seems to help.
He’s taken a special liking to apples, so to soften the blow, we share our rations of fruit to help his withdrawals.
The slow, methodical peeling with his knife to make one consecutive spiral of apple peel mirrors the contentment of finishing a cigarette.
The fine slices he cuts, drag its consumption out for a half hour, and I can’t help but smile at his efforts.
“Now, when you’re ready, baby girl. Hit me with your best shot,” Roscoe says.
We stand in an open patch of land beside the orchards, the dry, yellowing grass crunching beneath my boots.
Roscoe has always been cooler than cool while laying his baseball cap on a barrel, and with the click of a button, he presses play on a beaten-up boom box held together with duct tape.
The static stretches before the echoing blast of an opening guitar riff, and he does a shimmying dance to make me laugh before he gets into position.
We always trained to music when I was younger, as he claimed the rhythm helps, and I wholeheartedly agree.
He sweeps his hand over his bald head, grinning his famous taunting smirk as he gestures me towards him.
For as talented as he is, his expertise has always been rattling people’s nerves.
He could spend five minutes with a person before knowing exactly what buttons to press to provoke their temper.
I keep my eyes locked on him, trying my best to ignore the surrounding crowd.
Some have come to train, while some are just plain nosy bastards.
I bounce between my feet, tasked with laying one convincing hit on my father.
He provokes me, swiping his hands past my face, while I duck and jump back, evading his punches.
They skim past my skin, and I know my limits.
I don’t have the power, so I move again, agile and low.
As a teen, I had fun engaging in combat with my fathers, but now I feel the pressure to get it right before the soldiers who gather to judge.
He grows impatient—a trait I can always rely on with Roscoe—and as he throws one swing with his left, he follows through with his right, and his momentum shifts.
I hook my leg around the back of his, pivoting behind him as he falls to his knees, and from behind, I lightly jab his cheek with one hand to claim my hit, and then playfully slap him on his other cheek.
I wrap my arms over his shoulders. “Sorry, Dad,” I say before walking away to join the guys, who are smirking at my victory.
Combat sessions become my favourite, as I’ve only sparred with friends, while the rest of the team is less willing to go up against me—probably nervous about me being a woman or the bosses’ daughter.
Neither works in my favour, but I’ll take what I can get.
It brings us all closer together, including Ren and Kris, who regularly visit our trailer to refuel and chat.
After a sparring session between me and Leon, we retire to our trailer.
“Shit, Lee,” Leon says, “I’m sorry!”
“Leon, I’m absolutely fine. Don’t you dare hold back on me moving forward. And I swear to God, if you say ‘sorry’ one more time, you’ll get a fat lip to match.”
I reach into the freezer and pull out an ice cube, which stings as I set it against my swollen lip, numbing the pain, but setting a nice chill against my overworked body.
Leon twists the peak of his cap to the front, and I collapse horizontally on the couch, letting the ice cube balance upon my pout.
My feet wedge under Leon’s thigh as he sits at the other end of the couch. I snap my fingers at him.
“Just pass Ren’s book, please?”
He follows the line of my pointing finger, grabbing the copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas resting on the arm of the couch. The book takes flight with a spin, and I catch it with one hand.
Leon thumps his feet on the coffee table, strumming his guitar. I could listen to him play all day, letting the notes soak into my ears. He says, “I’ve not read that one. Is it any good?”
“Yeah.” I smile while opening the pages. “It’s one of Ren’s favourites. I never got around to reading it before.”
“Is he a big reader?”
I nod, looking towards him. “The biggest. I went by his and Kris’s trailer, and when you go into his room, there are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with loose stacks here, there, and everywhere. It’s more library than bedroom.”
And I can’t help the smile that emerges at the memory of the smell.
Even before I left for the city, his room had that woody, smoky scent of old books, as if the flaxen pages emitted a scent like a candle, and even his fingers and clothes would faintly smell of pages and ink.
But I shouldn’t be thinking about what he used to smell like, and I shut the thought down, forcing the open book above my face.
Leon gives a look of approval. “I’ll have to see if he’s got anything for me.”
“He’ll love that. He takes pride in finding books for people. When I was there, he had this tattered sheet of lined paper, with about fifty books he’d been making a note of for me.”
“That’s cute.”
I spot the teasing smirk on his face, but I can’t bring myself to match it. Instead, my jaw tightens as I admit it. I try to hide my guilt-ridden face in the pages of the book.
“Yeah… He is really cute.”
“Hey, kid?” he says while still playing the guitar. “What’s the deal between you and Ren?”
“How do you mean?” I mumble, knowing exactly what he means, but I don’t really want to divulge, even to Leon.
“He can barely stand to look at you one day, and then the next, you’re closer to him than Kris.”
I thump the book to my waist, since there’s no reading happening anyway. Leon waits for my response, and I reluctantly tell him, to make sure he knows the truth rather than whatever suspicions he’s formed.
“Kris, Ren, and I were like this inseparable trio. And like you guys, we did everything together. Grew up, learned to fight, got into trouble… Then we all got to a certain age. Kris was fooling around with Justin Castillo, and then Ren and I were on our own more than usual … so we decided to fool around too.” I blush when Leon chuckles, and I rush to justify it.
“He was my best friend. The sweetest guy. We had so much in common between movies, music, and reading. It just seemed to make sense that we experimented with that. I know he’s this brooding, stern man now, but he would make daisy chains with me, and we’d lie in the fields for hours, and he’d read to me.
Everything about him was gentle, but I guess I mistook his true feelings for me.
And I guess I was waiting to see if I would feel the same way.
It was never supposed to be anything more than mutual fun.
We repeatedly agreed we were just friends, but of course, he was only ever hoping it would become more, and when I didn’t want to—it got awkward. ”
Leon offers a sympathetic smile while plucking at the strings.
“I felt so guilty, I almost stayed with him out of pity, but I called it off. Anyway … we didn’t get a chance to really resolve it before I left.”
Leon is silent for a long while, and I’m glad he hasn’t jumped into teasing me.
I rub the ice cube over my lip, smudging it over the peaks of my warm cheeks.
I chuckle to myself with a memory. “Kris told me that when Ren found out I left for the Independence Interval, he marched straight up to Rex and took a swing at him for letting me leave.”
He laughs. “Ohhhh! How did that go?”