Brooklyn has a role on a blockbuster teen TV series, but she's the overlooked sidekick who never gets the good lines. Cade is the brooding star all the girls swoon for, and of course it's just when he starts to notice Brooklyn that democracy in Amer...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I'm running so hard I can feel every shock of the ground slamming up through my exhausted legs. They want to wobble and fall but I gulp down more oxygen and keep going. Is Violet still running, back at the Gray Party stronghold where we left her? Or have they already executed her?
I'm so tired I hardly notice when I don't have to dodge tree trunks anymore because they begin to grow in perfectly straight lines. Orchard, not forest. Dangerous, not safe. If these trees bear fruit, it means we're within a few minutes of a city.
Ethan jerks me to a stop. "Jessie, wait." He pulls the sling of my stolen gun off my back before he shrugs out of his and drops to his knees. I grab a tree branch and just sag there, sucking air as he pulls up giant clods of soil and grass with his bare hands. He buries the guns, marking the tree with a ripped-off slash of bark.
"You okay?" He stands, and it's so hard to look at his face right now without thinking of the gunshots that rang out after we abandoned Violet.
"Thirsty," I gasp out, because I'm too afraid to say anything else.
He grabs my hand. "Come on. In the city, we can get supplies. Blend into the crowds until we can find Lucien and make a plan."
He leads me through the trees, but even after I catch my breath, I'm still stumbling and can't seem to catch my balance. Not even when we pass through the gate, the tall gray wall blocking any view of the orchard from the city. Smoothly, we fall in with a group of workers hauling baskets of fruit.
We enter a big, open square with black benches ringing the smooth gray stone, facing the Media Screen that is reporting tomorrow's weather.
"Why did Violet run?" It's barely a whisper, but he hears me. "She could have come with us but she gave herself up so we could get away."
Ethan turns to face me, all the confusion washed out of his face and replaced by something more wistful and melancholy.
"She saw. I was afraid she would, with both of us there together."
"Saw what?" Beneath my clothes, my sweat-damp skin flushes hotly. There's nothing for her to see. I haven't kissed him, not once. My hand hanging in his suddenly feels too heavy, and I pull it away. He lets me, but his green eyes don't release me, and I can't move away.
"I didn't understand before. About why she had to kiss Lucien." His voice is so quiet that people move around us like we exist someplace separate from where they are. "All I thought about was her betrayal of me. I had no idea how much more there was to feel for someone."
His hand comes up, a few grains of soil still caught in his calloused fingertips. He cups my jaw, so gently that it makes the bones feel like something more beautiful than my face.
My overworked heart pounds.
I can't move, not when he's leaning nearer. But this can't be right. Ethan belongs to Violet, to the girl with the flame-red pin, not to the girl whose only rebellion to the uniform code is a braid of rags showing all the different shades of gray. A boy like him belongs with the girl who fights. Not the one who made a weak attempt to rescue her best friend, only to run away when the bullets started to fly.
When I hear Violet's name, Ethan's lips are a whisper of sin away from mine, and it feels like the echo of my own guilty thoughts. But he jerks back too, and that's when I know it's real. We spin to face the Media Screen above the square as everyone else does the same, drawn by the urgent sound of a news bulletin.
"The Gray Party has apprehended the person responsible for the breach in the wall, and the war that ended the Party's Peace. Violet Duvall is a traitor who refused to keep her country healthy by taking her Party Prescriptions. Instead, she conspired with the Alopecian government to violate her homeland." The screen changes to the old footage they always use, of blue uniformed soldiers swarming up a break in the gray cinder block wall of the capital city.
But all I can see is my own memory: of when Violet and I were hiding in Party Headquarters. After we changed our career assignments, we ducked into a storage closet so the guards could pass.
It was full of bright blue uniforms.
We didn't know what they were at the time. Figured maybe they'd been taken off enemy soldiers in the last great war, even though they looked too clean and modern for that.
But that was a week before the attack. A week before the wall came down. A week before the war that changed everything.
"Ethan." I grab his arm. "It wasn't Violet who started the war."
"Of course it wasn't. They just want something to pin on her, so they blame her for what those Blue Coat scum did."
"No, you don't understand. They faked the attack to give themselves an excuse to start the war. The Gray Party did."
He flinches a little. "What? But why would they..."
"I don't know, but I saw the evidence myself. We have to stop them. We have to prove that it wasn't Violet, where everyone can see so they have to let her go."
He's already nodding, but his face has gone pale. "But the Party is the only one with access to the Media Screens."
"It doesn't matter, Ethan. She gave herself to them so we could get away. We have to find a way to save her."
The screen interrupts us, this message somehow seeming louder than all the others before it.
"Violet Duvall will be executed on Patriot's Day."
My knees wobble, but Ethan catches me. His square jaw has gone hard as gunmetal.
"They think they have all the power because they have the screens," he says. "But we know the truth, and we have voices, too."
