bones fit together like someone hammered them out of precious metals, blew them out of glass.
“Hey—” Ro shouts. He raises the gun high over his head, ready to strike. I pull my eyes away from the Sympa, my hand away from his face.
“Stop it. You don’t have to. He’s hurt enough.”
Ro lowers the gun. Then I realize he isn’t listening to me. He’s aiming.
“Please,” says the Sympa, though half his head is underwater, and his mouth bubbles, choking when he speaks. “Don’t kill me. I can help.”
“Why would you help? You’re the one hunting us.”
The Sympa has no answer for that.
I splash closer to him in the water, careful to stay between him and Ro’s gun.
“Dol, come on. Get out of the way and let me do this. He’s playing us. It’s a trick.”
“How do you know?”
He looks from me to the Sympa. “Can you get anything off him? Feel him out?”
I lean closer to the Sympa, picking up his cold hand from the water.
I close my eyes and try to feel what he is feeling.
For the first time, I feel something equal to Ro’s spark—equally strong.
I feel both of them, and it’s not hard to sort out the emotions.
Hatred and anger, from Ro.
Fear and confusion, from the boy.
And another thing.
Something I encounter very rarely.
It bubbles up and out, radiating from him, filling the cave. I can practically see it.
I recognize it for what it is, only because I have felt it for Ro, and felt it in Ro. Ro and the Padre. Sometimes in Bigger and Biggest.
Love.
My head is pounding. I drop the boy’s hand, pushing my palms against my temples, as hard as I can. I force myself to breathe until I can get the feelings back under control, just barely. Until the bright whiteness recedes.
Then I open my eyes, gasping.
“Ro—” I can barely speak.
“What is it? What did you get?” Ro moves next to me, but his eyes don’t leave the Sympa.
I don’t know what to tell him. I’ve never felt anything quite like this, and I don’t know how to put it into words, not in a way Ro will understand.
Not in a way he wants to hear.
I look more closely at the Sympa. I pull a button from his jacket, yanking it free of the threads that have bound it there. It’s stamped in brass with a logo even a Grass could recognize. A five-sided shape, a pentagon, surrounding Earth. Gold on a field of scarlet. Earth trapped by what looks like a birdcage.
The button changes everything.
“He’s not a Sympa.” A sick feeling roils my stomach—and even though I’m speaking to Ro, I can’t rip my eyes away from the button in my hand.
“What are you talking about? Of course he’s a Sympa.Look at him.” Ro sounds annoyed.
“He’s not just a Sympa. He’s from the Ambassador’s office.”
“What?”
I nod, twisting the button between my fingers. Shiny as a gold dig, and worth more than everything I own. The closest we’ve ever come to seeing Ambassador Amare is her face plastered on the side of a car rolling down the Tracks.
Until we met this boy.
The wounded Sympa opens and closes his eyes. They roll back in his head. He’s too beat up to speak, but I think he knows what we are saying.
Ro sits on his heels in the water next to me. He draws his short blade from his belt, the one he only uses to pelt rabbits and split melons at the Mission.
He wavers, looking at me. I kneel next to the boy—because that’s what he is. He may be a Sympa, but he’s also just a boy. Not much older than Ro and me, by the looks of it.
“So this thing—this thing matters to the Ambassador?” He holds the knife to the Sympa’s chin. The Sympa’s eyes open, now wide. “That’s funny, because anything that matters to the Ambassador is pretty much worthless garbage as far as we’re concerned.”
He traces a line along the Sympa’s throat.
“Right, Dol?”
I swallow and say nothing. I am finding it hard to breathe. I don’t know what I think.
Ro doesn’t have that problem. Ever.
He raises the blade and brings it slashing down, again and again.
I can’t look, until Ro turns to me, holding out the proof of his latest violence. A handful of brass Embassy buttons.
“What?”
“Evidence of what we’ve got. Now we decide. Do we kill him here, or take him back to La Purísima?” Ro isn’t talking about the Mission. He’s talking about the Grass rebels.
Spluttering, the boy tries to sit up out of the water. I pull his head forward and lean it against my knees.
“How could we get him back up the Tracks? Did you see how many Sympas were out there? It would be impossible to hop a car without them seeing us. If the Tracks are even running.”
Ro thinks, tracing his blade against his leg. “Yeah, and if you’re right about Brass Buttons here, it’s only going to get worse.”
“Grass and Brass. It’s not a good mix.” I try not to think about what will happen to the boy when we get back to the Mission. If we get back to the Mission. What Ro will do to him. What I will let Ro do to him.
I shake my head, pulling the boy closer up into my lap in the water. “No.”
“Get away from him, Dol.”
“Don’t.”
“Now.”
His voice is cracking. I can see the changing situation is overwhelming him. He loses control as we lose control.
Which we have.
We did when I saw that button.
“Please.” I’m talking to Ro, but I look at the boy.
His eyes fix on mine, just for a moment.
He moves his hand toward me, a desperate gesture, like a raccoon caught in one of Biggest’s traps, flopping against the metal door one last time before it surrenders.
I start, and Ro shoves the weapon closer.
A dot of red light—the targeting mechanism of the boy’s own Sympa gun—dances at the bridge of his nose.
The boy doesn’t react.
Maybe he doesn’t think that Ro will do it.
I know he will. He’s done it before. Sympas are a personal threat to his existence. And mine.
The hand stretches again, nearer to me. “I’m warning you. Don’t move.” Ro growls the words, and as usual, it’s his tone that tells you everything.
The boy’s fingers uncurl, slowly, touching my knees in the water.
“Sweet Blessed Lady.” It’s all I can think to say.
There, beneath the half-undone leather wrist cuff, beneath the ripped sleeve of a muddy Embassy military jacket, beneath the bloodstained uniform shirt soaked with ocean water—
Four blue dots, forming a perfect square.
In that