Legend

myself for the feeling of a blade against my skin.

“Day.”

She hasn’t moved. Instead, she puts her knives back by her belt and pulls out a canteen of water. Just a display for the soldiers, I guess. She splashes some of the cool liquid on my face. I flinch, but then I open my mouth to catch some of it. Water never tasted so good.

June squirts some water directly into my mouth, then puts the canteen away. “Your face looks awful.” There’s concern—and something else—in her expression. “Who did this to you?”

“Nice of you to ask.” I’m amazed she even cares. “You can thank your captain friend for this.”

“Thomas?”

“That’s the guy. I don’t think he’s very happy that I got a kiss from you and he hasn’t. So he interrogated me about the Patriots. Apparently Kaede’s a Patriot. Small world, huh?”

Anger flashes across June’s face. “He never mentioned this to me. Last night he—well, I’ll take it up with Commander Jameson.”

“Thanks.” I blink water out of my eyes. “I was wondering when you’d come.” I hesitate for a second. “Do you know anything about Tess yet? If she’s alive?”

June looks down. “Sorry,” she replies. “I have no way of knowing where she is. She should be safe, as long as she stays low. I haven’t mentioned her to anyone. She hasn’t appeared in any of the recent arrests . . . or deaths.”

I’m frustrated by the lack of news, but relieved at the same time. “How are my brothers?”

June tightens her lips. “I have no access to Eden, although I’m sure he’s still alive. John is doing as well as can be expected.” When she looks up again, I see confusion and sadness in her eyes. “I’m sorry you had to deal with Thomas yesterday.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I whisper. “Is there any particular reason why you’re nicer than usual today?”

I don’t expect June to take this question seriously, but she does. She stares at me, and then seats herself in front of me with her legs folded underneath her. She seems different today. Subdued, maybe, even sad. Uncertain. An expression I’ve never seen before, even when I first met her on the streets. “Something bothering you?”

June stays silent for a long while, with her eyes cast down. Finally, she looks at me. She’s searching for something, I realize. Is she trying to find a way to trust me? “I studied my brother’s crime scene report again last night.” Her voice trickles to a whisper so that I have to lean forward to hear her.

“And?” I say.

June’s eyes search mine. She hesitates again. “Day, can you say, honestly and truly . . . that you didn’t kill Metias?”

She must have found something. She wants a confession. The night at the hospital flashes through my thoughts—my disguise, Metias watching me as I entered the hospital, the young doctor I’d held hostage, the bullets bouncing off the refrigerators. My long fall to the ground. Then the face-off with Metias, the way I’d thrown my knife at him. I’d seen it hit his shoulder, so far from his chest that it couldn’t possibly have killed him. I hold June’s gaze with my own.

“I did not kill your brother.” I reach out to touch her hand and wince at the pain that shoots up my arm. “I don’t know who did. I’m sorry for injuring him at all—but I had to save my own life. I wish I’d had more time to think it through.”

June nods quietly. The look on her face is so heartbreaking that I wish for a second that I could hold her. Someone needs to hold her. “I really miss him,” she whispers. “I thought he would be around for a long time, you know, someone I could always lean on. He was all I had left. And now he’s gone, and I wish I knew why.” She shakes her head slowly, as if defeated, and then lets her eyes meet mine again. Her sadness makes her impossibly beautiful, like snow blanketing a barren landscape. “And I don’t know why. That’s the worst part, Day. I don’t know why he died. Why would someone want him dead?”

Her words are so similar to my thoughts about my mother that I can barely breathe. I didn’t know that June had lost her parents—although I should have guessed it from the way she carries herself. June was not the one who shot my mother. She was not the one who brought the plague into my home. She was a girl who’d lost her brother, and someone had led her to believe I did it, and in anguish she had tracked me down. If I’d been in her place, would I have done anything differently?

She’s crying now. I give her a small smile, then sit up straighter and stretch my hand out toward her face. The shackles on my wrist clank together. I wipe away the tears from under one of her eyes. Neither of us says anything. There’s no need to. She’s thinking . . . if I’m right about her brother, then what else am I right about?

After a moment, June takes my hand and holds it against her cheek. Her touch sends warmth coursing through me. She’s so lovely. I ache to pull her to me now and press my lips against hers and wash away the sorrow in her eyes. I wish I could go back to that night in the alley for just one second.

I’m the first one to speak. “You and I may have the same enemy,” I say. “And they’ve pitted us against each other.”

June takes a deep breath. “I’m not sure yet,” she says, even though I can tell by her voice that she agrees with me. “It’s dangerous for us to talk like this.” She looks away, reaches into her cloak, and pulls out something I thought I had lost at the hospital. “Here. I want to give this back to you. I have no more use for it.”

I want to snatch it from her hand, but the chains weigh me down. In her palm is my pendant necklace, the smooth bumps on its surface scraped and dirty but still more or less whole, the necklace part lying in a pile in her palm.

“You had it,” I whisper. “You found it at the hospital that night, didn’t you? That’s how you recognized me when you finally found me—I must’ve reached for it.”

June nods quietly, then takes my hand and drops the pendant into my palm. I look at it in wonder.

My father. I can’t keep the memory of him away now that I’m staring at my pendant again. I think back to the day he visited us after six months without a word. When he was safely inside and we’d draped curtains over the