Champion (Legend #3)

Just as Tess pushes Frankie through the entrance, a soldier steps out of the shadows near the door. I recognize him instantly. It’s Thomas, a gun dangling from one hand.

His eyes are fixed on Tess and me, and his expression is dark, deadly, and furious. For an instant, the world seems to go silent. I glance at his gun. He hoists it. No. Instinctively, I move toward Tess, shielding her with my body. He’s going to kill us.

But even as this thought races through my mind, Thomas turns his back on us, facing the oncoming Colonies soldiers instead. His hand quivers with rage and tightens on the gun. Shock pulses through me, but there’s no time to think about that now. “Go,” I urge Tess. We stumble through the side door.

In that same moment, Thomas raises his gun—he fires one shot, then another, then another. He lets out a bloodcurdling yell as each bullet hurtles toward the enemy troops. It takes me a second to make out what he’s screaming.

“Long live the Elector! Long live the Republic!”

He manages six shots before the Colonies soldiers return fire. I hug Tess to my chest, then cover her eyes. She lets out a cry of protest. “Don’t look,” I whisper in her ear. At that very moment, I see Thomas’s head snap violently back and his entire body go limp. An image of my mother flashes before my eyes.

Shot through the head. He’s been shot through the head. Death by firing squad.

The blast makes Tess jump—she utters a strangled sob behind my shielding hands. The door swings shut.

Pascao greets us the instant we’re safely through. He’s covered head to toe in dust, but he still has a half grin on his face. “The final evacuation wave is waiting for us,” he says, nodding toward two parked jeeps ready to take us back to the bunker. Republic soldiers have already started toward us, but before any of us can feel relieved, I notice that Frankie has collapsed to the ground and Tess is hovering over her. Pascao’s half grin vanishes. As soldiers seal off the side entrance, we gather around Frankie. Tess pulls out a kit of supplies. Frankie has started to convulse.

Her coat’s stripped completely off, revealing a blood-soaked shirt beneath. Her eyes are open wide in shock, and she’s struggling to breathe.

“She was shot as we were getting away,” Tess says as she tears away the cloth of Frankie’s shirt. Sweat beads along her brow. “Three or four times.” Her trembling hands fly across Frankie’s body, scattering powder and pressing ointment into the wounds. When she’s done, she yanks out a thick wad of bandages.

“She’s not gonna make it,” Pascao mutters to Tess as she pushes him out of the way and pushes firmly down on one of Frankie’s gushing wounds. “We have to move. Now.”

Tess wipes her brow. “Just give me another minute,” she insists through gritted teeth. “We have to control the bleeding.”

Pascao starts to protest, but I silence him with a dangerous look. “Let her do it.” Then I kneel beside Tess, my eyes helplessly drawn to Frankie’s pitiful figure. I can tell that she’s not going to make it. “I’ll do whatever you say,” I murmur to Tess. “Let us help.”

“Keep pressure on her wounds,” Tess replies, waving a hand at the bandages that are already more red than white. She rushes to make a poultice.

Frankie’s eyelids flutter. She chokes out a strangled cry, then manages to look up at us. “You’ve—got—to go. The Colonies—they’re—coming—”

It takes a whole minute for her to die. Tess keeps applying meds for a while longer, until I finally put a hand over hers to stop her. I look up at Pascao. One of the Republic soldiers approaches us again and gives us a stern frown. “This is your final warning,” he says, gesturing toward the open doors of two jeeps. “We’re heading out.”

“Go,” I tell Pascao. “We’ll take the jeep right behind you.”

Pascao hesitates for a second, stricken at the sight of Frankie, but then hops to his feet and disappears into the first jeep. It tears away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.

“Come on,” I urge Tess, who stays hunched over Frankie’s lifeless body. On the other side of the Armor, the sounds of battle rage. “We have to go.”

Tess wrenches free of my grasp and flings her roll of bandages hard at the wall. Then she turns to look back at Frankie’s ashen face. I stand up, forcing Tess to do the same. My bloody hand leaves prints on her arm. Soldiers grab both of us and lead us toward the remaining jeep. As we finally make our way inside, Tess turns her eyes up to mine. They’re brimming with tears, and the sight of her anguish breaks my heart. We pull away from the Armor as soldiers load Frankie onto a truck. Then we turn a corner and speed toward the bunker.

By the time we arrive, Pascao’s jeep has already unloaded and they’ve headed down to the train. The soldiers are tense. As they clear us past the bunker entrance’s chain-link fence, another explosion from the Armor sends tremors through the ground. As if in a dream, we rush down the metal staircase and through the corridors flooded with dim red lights, the sound of pounding boots echoing dully from outside. Farther and farther down we go, until we finally reach the bunker and make our way onto the waiting train. Soldiers pull us on board.

As the subway flares to life and we pull away from the bunker, a series of explosions reverberate through the space, nearly knocking us off our feet. Tess clings to me. As I hold her close, the tunnel behind us collapses, encasing us in darkness. We speed along. Echoes of the explosions ring through the earth.

My headache flares up.

Pascao tries to say something to me, but I can no longer hear him. I can’t hear anything. The world around me dulls into grays, and I feel myself spinning. Where are we again? Somewhere, Tess screams out my name—but I don’t know what she says after that, because I lose myself in an ocean of pain and collapse into blackness.

   2100 HOURS.

ROOM 3323, LEVEL INFINITY HOTEL, ROSS CITY.

ALL OF US HAVE SETTLED INTO OUR INDIVIDUAL HOTEL rooms. Ollie’s resting at the foot of my bed, completely knocked out after an exhausting day. I can’t imagine falling asleep, though. After a while, I get up quietly, leave three treats for Ollie near the door, and step out. I wander the halls with my virtual glasses tucked into my pocket, relieved to see the world as it really is again without the onslaught of hovering numbers and words. I don’t know where I’m going, but eventually I end up two floors higher and not far from Anden’s room. It’s quieter up here. Anden might be the only one staying on this floor, along with a few guards.

As I go, I pass a door that leads into a large chamber that must be some public, central room on this floor. I turn back and peer inside. The place looks whitewashed, probably because I don’t have my virtual glasses on and can’t see all the simulations; the room is partitioned into a series of tall cylinder-like booths, each one a circle of tall, transparent slabs of glass. Interesting. I have one of those cylinder booths in a corner of my hotel room, although I haven’t bothered trying it yet. I look around the hall, then push gingerly on the door. It slides open without a sound.

I step inside and as soon as the door slides shut behind me, the room declares something in Antarctican that I can’t understand. I take my virtual glasses out of my pocket and put them on. Automatically, the room’s voice brightens and repeats her phrase, this time in English. “Welcome to the simulation room, June Iparis.” I see my virtual score go up by ten points, congratulating me for using a simulation room for the very first time. Just as I suspected, the room now looks bright and full of colors, and the glass walls of the cylindrical rooms have all sorts of moving displays on them.

Your access to the portal away from home! one panel says. Use in conjunction with your virtual glasses for a fully immersive experience. Behind the text is a lush video depicting what look like beautiful scenes from around the world. I wonder whether their portal is their way of connecting to the Internet. Suddenly, my interest piques. I’ve never browsed the Internet outside of the Republic, never seen the world for what it was without the Republic’s masks and filters. I approach one of the glass cylinder booths and step inside. The glass around me lights up.

“Hello, June,” it says. “What can I find for you?”

What should I look up? I decide to try out the first thing that pops into my head. I hesitantly reply, wondering whether it’ll just read my voice. “Daniel Altan Wing,” I say. How much does the rest of the world know about Day?

Suddenly everything around me vanishes. Instead, I’m standing in a white circle with hundreds—thousands—of hovering rectangular screens all around me, each one covered with images and videos and text. At first I don’t know what to do, so I just stay where I am, staring in wonder at the images all around me. Each screen has different info on Day. Many of them are news articles. The one closest to me is playing an old video of Day standing on top of the Capitol Tower balcony, rousing the people to support Anden. When I look at it long enough (three seconds), a voice starts talking. “In this video, Daniel Altan Wing—also known as Day—gives his support to the Republic’s new Elector and prevents a national uprising. Source: The Republic of America’s public archives. See whole article?”

My eyes flicker to another screen, and the voice from the first screen fades. This second screen comes to life as I look on, playing a video interviewing some girl I don’t know, with light brown skin and pale hazel eyes. She sports a scarlet streak in her hair. She says, “I’ve lived in Nairobi for the past five years, but we’d never heard of him until videos of his strikes against the R-oh-A started popping up online. Now I belong to a club—” The video pauses there, and the same soothing voice from earlier says, “Source: Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. See whole video?”

I take a careful step forward. Each time I move, the rectangular screens rearrange around me to showcase the next circle of images for me to peruse. Images of Day pop up from when he and I were still working for the Patriots—I see one blurry image of Day looking over his shoulder, a smirk on his lips. It makes me blush, so I quickly glance away. I look through two more rounds of them, then decide to change my search. This time I search for something I’ve always been curious about. “The United States of America,” I say.

The screens with videos and images of Day vanish, leaving me strangely disappointed. A new set of screens flip up around me, and I can almost feel a slight breeze as they shift into place. The first thing that pops up is an image that I instantly recognize as the full flag that the Patriots both use and base their symbol on. The voiceover says, “The flag of the former United States of America. Source: Wikiversity, the Free Academy. United States History One-oh-two, Grade Eleven. See full entry? For textual version, say ‘Text.’”

“See full entry,” I say. The screen zooms in toward me, engulfing me in its contents. I blink, momentarily thrown off by the rushing images. When I open my eyes again, I nearly stumble. I’m hovering in the sky over a landscape that looks both familiar and strange. The outline of it appears to be some version of North America, except there’s no lake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and the Colonies’ territory looks much larger than I remember. Clouds float by below my feet. When I reach a hesitant foot down, I smudge part of the clouds and can actually feel the cool air whistling beneath my shoes.