Reggie roared with laughter. “I please itnow.I please it very much,” he said—and the next second they both took off running.
The rest of us laughed.
“Well, I guess that’s ago.What are you waiting for, everyone—start the first lap, and we’ll take it from there,” said Hector, smiling and shaking his head as he moved away to leave room for us to pass.
We did.
I didn’t mind running, though I didn’t exactly prefer it. Walking was more my style. Walking and sparring. I’d been sparring with my father since I was about ten years old, at least four times a week in the evening before bed. We’d bonded over it, and we began to understand each other while he taught me how to protect myself, how to fight, how to move my body to its full potential. He’d started teaching me because of his own nostalgia for the time he’d been a soldier, but when he saw how much I grew to love it, he began to take it more seriously, making plans, creating movement patterns, watching what I ate and how I slept, too. He came alive in our backyard, in our little training corner we’d built for it. Jinx had sometimes joined us, too, but she wasn’t into movement as much as she was into reading and singing. Most of the time it was just my father and me.
But here, in this arena, I loved the feel of the wind blowing my hair back, the taste of it, the scent, the heat of the morning sunlight on my face. I doubted I’d smiled this much for this long ever in my life before. Whatever magic was in the air here in the Labyrinth (I couldn’t quite believe I was thinking it myself, but—) I wanted to be a part of it forever.
Then someone fell into pace beside me, and his shadow shielded me from the sunlight for a moment.
“They’re gone again.”
I looked up at March, a mountain of a man compared to my five feet six—or maybe it was just his presence that was so massive to me.
I burned all of a sudden with an invisible fire that started somewhere within me. A miracle I didn’t lose my footing and fall, and it did take me much longer than I liked to admit to make sense of his words.
“Who’s gone?” I asked in half a voice and made a point to look around. All the other Hands were still there, running a lap all around the grounds.
“Your freckles,” said the Heart boy, and the gears in my stomach malfunctioned again. “They always disappear when you’re flushed.”
Impossible not to smile. “I had no idea.”
He looked down at me and grinned. “Now you do.”
I pulled my lips inside my mouth to stop the giggle that wanted out of me. I wasn’tthatpathetic, was I?
“You’re very…observant,” I ended up muttering, a thousand things crossing my mind at once. I wanted to ask him to stop so I could see his eyes better in sunlight—are they really that red, or is it just me? Touch his hair for just a moment—it cannot possibly be as smooth as it looks, can it?Smell him, too—why do you smell like rain and roses?Pretty sure that was just my imagination, but I would really like to find out.
Then he went and said, “Only of beautiful things.”
Just like that, my train of thought disappeared somewhere down the railways of my mind like it had never even existed in the first place.
“Halt!”
Hector’s voice made me jump. I had already slowed my step, and March was already three feet ahead, stopping with the crowd.
Beside me was Mimi with the gorgeous, kind eyes, and a smile that must have mirrored my own.
She leaned in and whispered, “I think the Heart boy likes you, Spade,” before she ran ahead with a hand over her mouth to cover her smile.
“Rest for two minutes, then we go again,” Hector said, pressing the winder on the clock he held while I brought both hands to my chest to make sure my heart wouldn’t fly out of me. With the way it was beating, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Meanwhile, March was talking to Russ and Silas a few feet to the side, hands on his hips, breathing deeply, but Iknew he saw me through his peripheral. I knew he saw my goofy smile, and so I turned my head the other way, went to join Mimi and Cook in their conversation.
My fingers pressed against my cheeks, and I wished I had a mirror in front of me just to see if my freckles were still gone. Just to see whathesaw when he looked at me.
What a silly, silly thought, but in my mind (only) I whispered back to Mimi,I think I like the Heart boy, too.
6
Thank you, you silly snake,I thought to myself later on, when I was exhausted from running laps, then climbing up and down ropes for over an hour.
Exhausted, yes, but I hadn’t felt like I wasglowingfrom within in forever, and that was all I cared about.
We’d gone back to our dorms to change and to rest before lunch and our next lesson, and when we did, March had stayed by his door and had watched and waited until I was all the way inside mine.
