Sunset Rising

“So you never loved me?”

“Of course I loved you,” I said, wiping the tear from his cheek. “I just couldn’t be the person you wanted.”

He took my hand away from his face and dropped it.

“I can’t believe I wasted so much of my life on you.” He turned around and walked away.

I let him go, knowing I deserved his hatred. I had led him to believe we would spend the rest of our lives together instead of being honest with him and myself. It was my fault he was hurting. I knew I should feel guilty, so I tried to ignore the elation bubbling up inside me at the realization I was finally free of him. I had so many other things in my life to worry about, and our dead-end relationship didn’t need to be one of them. Reyes would survive this.

I went back into the common room and was pleasantly surprised to see a training session in full swing. Raine and Mica had remained, despite Reyes’s angry exit. Jack saw me and raised his eyebrows. I guessed he was asking me if Reyes was coming back in, so I shook my head. He turned his attention back to the people he was working with.

“If you can’t disarm your opponent, then use his weapon against him,” Jack said to the whole room. “Like this.” He motioned for a guard to join him. The guard stood with his rifle pointed at Jack. In one swift movement, Jack grabbed the barrel of the rifle and struck at the guard’s face with it. He didn’t hit the guard, but the force of the attack made the guard back up a few steps, which left him off balance. Jack seized the rifle and kicked the guard in the stomach, knocking him flat on his back, and in one final movement had the rifle pointed at the guard. Everyone clapped. Jack offered his hand to the guard to help him up. He instructed the guards to work with the people standing at the front of the room and then came over to me.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“You mean besides the fact that everyone in this room knows who we are?”

“When he gets mad he makes it count, doesn’t he?”

“He always had a temper.” I didn’t want to talk about Reyes. I needed to close the door on that relationship. “So do I get to learn how to do this? I missed our session last night.”

“Sure. Let me get a gun, and you can try and take it from me.”

Jack went to the guard by the door and asked to borrow his rifle. I studied the people currently engaged with trying to get the guns away from the three guards working with them. No one was having much success. I saw how clumsy their movements were.

“Ready,” Jack said.

He stood with both hands on the gun. I replayed in my mind how he had taken the gun away from the guard a few minutes earlier. I attempted it, but Jack was too quick, and I ended up on the floor. I jumped up and came at him again hoping to catch him off guard, but he easily pushed me away. I stepped back and thought about it. It occurred to me that as long as the barrel of the gun wasn’t pointed at me, he couldn’t shoot me. So I needed to get around the barrel and close enough to engage him in hand-to-hand combat. If I could do that, he would need to let go of the gun to fend me off.

I went at him as fast as I could, and when I saw the nose of the gun come up, I pushed it down and used it to give me balance. I raised my leg and kicked him in his side. His grip on the gun loosened for a second, and I grabbed it with both hands while swinging my leg in a backward arc that brought me behind him. I brought the gun up under his throat and held it there. I heard people clapping and looked up to see them staring at me.

“You do catch on quickly,” Jack said, smiling.

I loosened my grip on the rifle, and he lowered it. “Am I scaring you, Jack?”

Suddenly Jack’s hands were on me, and he threw me over his hip. I hit the floor with an ungraceful flop.

“A little bit.” He stepped away and left me to pick myself up. “It’s going to be lights out soon so we should wrap it up,” he said to the room.

“Can we try again tomorrow?” Raine asked.

Jack looked around the room to see if anyone else was interested. Most people wanted to come back. Jack asked the guards, and they agreed as well.

“You were amazing tonight,” Jack said once we were alone. “You blew me away.”

“I guess it went well.”

“You were great, but we only had maybe fifty people in that room, not nearly enough to take on the few hundred guards that patrol down here. I told you before, power comes with numbers, and we don’t have numbers.”

“I don’t think we stand much of a chance anyway. I expect someone in that room will gladly turn us in for the four hundred credits Holt is offering.”

When we arrived at our apartment, I sca

“I know. I think that too.” Jack shut the door behind him. Then he picked up one of the chairs and put it under the doorknob. I gave him an inquisitive look. “At least it will give us a little notice if someone comes.”

“I’ve always known we’ll be caught eventually, but now that it might be real, I’m scared.”

I didn’t want to die now that I had found a reason to live. I wanted to see this rebellion through and free Summer from Holt; have the chance to find my father if he was still alive; help liberate the Pit from centuries of slavery. I wanted time to finish what we started.

“You’re scared?” he asked in surprise. “I can’t believe the girl who stood up on a chair and convinced an entire room to start a rebellion is scared.”

“And you’re not?”

“Terrified. Hey, what was wrong with Raine’s wife? She seemed a little out of it.”

“Women get that way after they’re sterilized.”

“After they’re what?”

“Sterilized.” He had an odd look on his face. “You must know about the Sterilization Program. Your government came up with it ten years ago. If a couple doesn’t qualify to have a child, the woman is sterilized and whatever they inject her with makes her go… blank. The injection changes a woman. She’s not as… full of life as she used to be.”

Jack was staring at me with a horrified look on his face when the lights went out, leaving us in darkness. Maybe he didn’t know about that program.

“We should get some sleep,” I said.

“I’ll take the chair.”

“No. We shared last night, we can do it again tonight.” Considering the way I responded to his kiss this morning, it probably wasn’t a good idea. But we both needed a decent sleep. Jack was exhausted from sleeping in the chair, and I couldn’t afford to be tired and sloppy with Madi as my supervisor.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Just stay on your on side of the bed.” But I didn’t really mean it. I walked toward the bedroom.

“That bed isn’t big enough to have sides.” He stumbled after me, knocking a chair over.

“You really can’t see, can you?”

“And you’re surprised? It’s pitch black in here.”

I took him by the hand and guided him toward the bedroom. He took off his t-shirt and flopped down on the bed. Since he was blind in the dark, I stripped off my vest and put my t-shirt back on before I climbed in.

“It’s not pitch black in here. The guards use nightlights, and it leaks into the apartment.”

He opened his eyes as wide as he could and looked around the room. “I guess you have to born in the Pit to find light where there isn’t any.”

I rolled that thought over in my mind and realized just how true it was.

Chapter Twenty-Three

It felt like I had just drifted to sleep when the sound of the bong bongs invaded my dreams. I had barely slept all night because I kept imagining that guards were going to come crashing through the door at any moment and take us into custody. I tried to close my mind off to the a