Hann looks grave at my pale expression. “Some of us aren’t born with the luxury of a good childhood. Isn’t that right, Eden? Some of us know what it’s like to carry a burden on our shoulders for the rest of our lives, something that no one can understand except those who have experienced it for themselves.”

And in spite of everything, I find myself drawn to what he’s saying, like he knows me from the inside out. I wonder what had happened to Hann in his past, and why he sounds like he has a chronic condition of the chest or the lungs. He looks so sharp and proper now. It’s impossible to imagine him as a young boy hiding behind a trash bin.

“I’m not trying to hurt your brother,” Hann says quietly to me now. “But I know talent when I see it, and I don’t like wasting it. Your brother is only my way to you. You don’t have to work for me forever. If you don’t like it, I swear that I will let you leave. And your brother will be unharmed.”

In this moment, I am a small boy again, and every word Hann says brings me back to the dark years, and I hear John’s shouts in my mind, I hear the shaking of my mother’s voice, I am strapped down to the gurney and being taken away from my family. I am blind, helpless against the onslaught.

So I hold up my hands, and when I speak, my voice comes out quiet.

“Leave him alone,” I hear myself say. “Don’t hurt my brother.”

Hann frowns at the tears blurring my vision. “And in return?”

“We can talk about what I can do for you. Just talk, no guarantees. All right?”

He doesn’t answer at first. All he does is give me a steady smile. “A good start,” he says.

DANIEL

 

I can’t remember how many hours or even days might have passed. The lack of windows down here is disorienting, and a lack of water is making me weaker than I should be. Guards change rotation around me.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m just delirious now, but I find myself continuously thinking about June. This time it’s a recent memory, of the night when Tess first set up a dinner between June and me.

I’d seen June walking toward me at a train station in Los Angeles, right after Eden had finished interviewing for his Batalla Hall internship. Eden and I had been in a good mood that day—he was chatting up a storm beside me, explaining all that he wanted to do, while I’d walked quietly and listened to him, grateful that we were walking down the streets of a peaceful Republic. Then I’d looked up and seen her heading toward us.

It’d been the briefest, most significant meeting of my life. A glance, a flash of a memory. Her dark eyes had locked for a second on mine, and I’d stopped in the middle of the path, overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia. I’d looked back at her, and then decided on a whim to introduce myself to her.

June Iparis. A girl I’d loved for a long time. Someone who, despite the flaws in my memory, I’d managed to hang on to all those years.

That night, we sat down in a restaurant at the top of a newly constructed Republic building. Tess and Eden sat across from us. I sat next to June, trying to figure out what to say to her.

I asked her how Anden was doing. Word was that June had been in a long relationship with the young Elector, that they had even moved in together.

“We’re not together anymore,” she told me. There was a small smile on her lips as she said it, as if she was embarrassed to tell me. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I knew to smile back.

“Ah,” I tried to say. “I just got out of a relationship myself.”

We spent the entire dinner stumbling through our words. Tess found it so entertaining that she kept throwing questions our way, forcing us to bring up specific memories from the past.

Afterward, we walked together in the late, quiet hours of the Ruby sector. The air had the clean chill that comes after a good rainstorm, and we steered carefully around the puddles that dotted the streets. June stayed a small distance away from me, and I did the same. We walked as if we’d just met each other. In a way, I guess we did.

When we finally reached her front door, I faced her with my hands in my pockets, trying to find a good way to say goodbye.

She gave me a small smile and tilted her head. “You’re not staying in the Republic, then,” she said. “You’re heading back to Antarctica soon.”

Everything in me wanted to ask her to come with me, so that I could show her the new city where I lived. But I held back because she held back. “Tomorrow morning,” I answered. “Eden needs to finish his degree before he comes back here for his internship.”

“Are you going to move back here with him?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know yet. My work is in Ross City. But I’ll come here, at least for a little while. I’d rather not leave Eden alone.”

She nodded. “Don’t worry. He’ll have friends in town.”

I smiled at her. “That’s a relief,” I replied, taking a step closer to her. She didn’t pull away. She leaned toward me too, with such an earnest expression that it took everything in me not to kiss her right there and then.

I looked down. “I was wondering…,” I started to say. “Tess told me that when you came to the hospital ten years ago, to see me off to Antarctica, you didn’t mention who you were. I didn’t recognize you, either. It was the worst of my memory loss, that year.”

June hesitated, her eyes far away for a moment, and then nodded. “That’s true,” she replied.

“Why’d you do that?” I shook my head. “Just thank me and walk away without telling me your real name? Why’d you let me go?”

June stayed quiet. Then she turned to me and said, “I once made a promise to myself that if it meant it would help you survive, I would never step back into your life.” She smiled faintly. “And you did survive. So I kept that promise.”

For me. She had done this, made this sacrifice, for her heart as well as mine. I closed my eyes for a second, overwhelmed by her gesture, and then looked at her again.

“Are you happy here, in the Republic?” I asked her.

She shrugged. A rare uncertainty came into her gaze. “Yes,” she said after a pause. “We’ve had such a time together, haven’t we? I still don’t know what it all means. But you have your life in Ross City now. And I have mine here in the Republic. We’re moving forward and leaving our past behind.”

Up until that moment, I would have broken down at her feet and pulled her in for a kiss. I would have wrapped my arms around her and let myself fall madly back in love with her.

But her words pulled me up short. You have your life in Ross City now. And I have mine here in the Republic.

It was true. We were completely different people now, living completely separate lives. We had just sat through an entire dinner and barely managed to exchange a handful of sentences with each other. My memories of her were still so fragmented, a million broken shards of a once-intact window.

She had been the one to let me go.

Did she ever love me as fiercely as I loved her? How fiercely had I loved her?

I didn’t know if she read the hesitation in my gaze first, or if she just reacted the same way I did. But she seemed to retreat from me then too. Her smile was guarded, as if she was also afraid of being hurt.