“What did you do?” he asks in a strangled voice.
I don’t know how to answer that without making it sound even worse than it was.
“Jesus, Fleur. Did you—?”
“No! And it’s none of your business if I did!” I rip a dandelion from the ground. It’s no one’s business who I kiss, or who I want to be alone with. And it’s definitely no one’s business who I fall in love with, if that’s even what it is.
“I was going to ask if you stopped to think about how close you are to the red line!”
“Thank you!” Poppy exclaims in my ear. “I’m glad at least one of you is being sensible.”
“Calm down,” I whisper as the last of the tourists give in to the shifting weather. “You’re making a scene.”
“Only because I care about you.”
A faint string of profanities streams from Julio’s transmitter. His Handler, Marie, has zero patience for our annual chats. She hates me, and I can’t say I blame her. She and Poppy are the ones stuck covering for us after conversations like this—destroying feeds, editing surveillance photos, fudging reports...
I try to wipe away a tear before Julio sees it, but my reflexes are slow.
He pulls me to his side, careful not to touch my skin. I want to take comfort in it—to bask in a touch that doesn’t hurt for a change—but this close, I hear every muffled reprimand Marie shouts in his ear, echoing all of Doug’s warnings.
Julio ignores her. “What do you say?” He squeezes my shoulder gingerly, as if he knows where all my bruises are. “You’ve got at least a month left in you, and your rankings are probably in the toilet. Let’s drag out the hunt like old times. We’ll make it long and bloody! I’ll even give you a head start.”
“Fighting is stupid,” I mutter into his jacket.
“So is slipping below the red line,” he whispers against my hair. “You’re better than that.”
I sniffle and exhale a shaky sigh. The thunder’s gone quiet and the hostile winds have calmed. The last of the fallen blossoms drift limply to the shore. The river basin is full of them. Peak was a few weeks ago, when people came from all over the world to admire them, but now the pale pink petals are brown at the edges, clumped on the ground in exhausted wet piles. I don’t have the heart to tell Julio I’ve already slipped below the Purge line. If Marie’s aware, she’s smart enough to keep it to herself. If Julio knew, he’d disappear and drag out my death for weeks, making me work like hell to find him. He’d sacrifice his own rankings in some futile attempt to save mine, but I don’t have the strength to hang on long enough to fight with him.
A bumblebee alights on a clover blossom beside us, and I tear my head from Julio’s shoulder. I watch it, wary of how long it’s been hovering around our conversation.
“Damned snitches,” Julio mutters. With a casual wave of his hand, he gathers a swirl of mist from the air. It coalesces into a floating bullet of water and hovers in front of his pointed index finger. With one eye closed, he takes aim at Gaia’s spy, pulling an imaginary trigger and squirting the bee off its perch. Julio’s grin is smug as the bee zips away. But I worry about how much the bee saw and if Julio will be the one to pay for it.
“What’s wrong?” Poppy asks. She’s been paranoid and clingy since Doug reconnected my transmitter and she got a glimpse of my face in my hotel room mirror.
“Nothing. Just a bee,” I tell her. “It’s gone.”
“You should get out of there, Fleur. A commuter bus just stopped at the corner behind you. If you’re fast, you can make it before the doors close.” Julio glances over his shoulder at the bus, too. Marie’s probably suggesting he push me in front of it.
Poppy’s right. Gaia’s spies are close, and I should at least make a good show of it for Julio’s sake. But I don’t want to.
I rest my cheek in my hand. “What do you want?” I ask, looking sideways at Julio.
“I want you to buy me a box of Jujyfruits and take me to the new Tarantino movie.”
“Not now. I mean, what do you want to do with your life, more than anything in the world?”
“More than anything?” He scrunches up his nose, as if I’m asking a trick question. He stares out across the water, thinking. Nostalgia touches the sun-kissed creases around his eyes when he finally answers. “I just want to catch one big wave, one more time. East Coast swells in the summer are nothing compared to the winters back home.”
“So what are you doing hanging out here with me?”
His knee knocks gently into mine, and the sun peeks through a cloud to warm me. “Saving your life, one double feature at a time.”
I laugh, my first time in months. It feels good, even if it stretches the split in my lip and makes my bruised ribs ache. “I’m serious.”
“I am, too. Someone has to keep you above the red line. You’re doing a lousy job of it.”
“So put me out of my misery and send me home now. It’ll be good for your ranking. You could earn a relocation to California.” The answer to Julio’s longing seems so obvious. I’m an easy target.
