A boy from my homeroom, Chris Thompson, smiles warmly at me as we pass in the corridor, a cute dimple forming in his right cheek. Color floods my cheeks, just like last night when I saw Ash Fisher at Day’s house. My skin tingles at the memory. I rub my arms, forcing the sensation away. I don’t want to remember the attraction I felt toward Ash, no matter how fleeting it was.
I manage to find the cafeteria, where Day’s already waiting for me.
“I need to take my medicine before I eat,” I say to her, then add in a lower voice, “I’ve got the drugs for MJ, but I don’t want to give them to you here. I’ll get in trouble if anyone catches me with them.”
She nods, and we go to the girls’ restroom.
“What are those for?” she asks as I wash some tablets down with tap water.
“I was born with a hole in my heart, and I needed a heart transplant when I was eight. I have to take these pills every day and try not to get ‘overexcited’ about things. It’s no big deal.” I put the medicine back in my satchel, and take out the painkillers. I pass them to Day.
“Thanks. You don’t know how much this will help MJ—he’s always in so much pain,” she says quietly.
“That’s what friends are for,” I say.
She smiles. Her glasses slide down her nose, and she impatiently nudges them up again.
“You don’t happen to have any new spectacles in that laboratory of yours?” she teases.
I laugh. “Nope, sorry. Hey, do you want to come over to my place tonight? I can’t guarantee my mother will be there, but if she is, I’ll introduce you. You can sleep over too, if you like.”
“I’d love to,” she says.
We exit the girls’ restroom, stepping into the stream of students. I’m so busy chatting to Day that I don’t spot Ash Fisher crossing our path and almost smack face-first into him. I manage to flatten my back against the door just before we collide.
He glares down at me with sparkling black eyes—eyes that could be considered beautiful on anyone else but him. My heart wrenches, the feeling more intense than ever before. Why does it always do that when he’s nearby?
We’re standing so close, his cool breath spills over my skin, sending frissons of pleasure down my body until I’m tingling all over. Heat rises up my neck—I’m horrified by the way my body is reacting to him.
“Watch where you’re going, blondie,” Ash snarls.
That brings me crashing back to reality.
“You’re the one who should watch it,” I snap back. “It’s not my fault your gigantic Darkling body gets in everyone’s way. You should come with hazard lights or something.”
He growls, flashing his fangs.
I recoil, my mind bursting with images from the night Father died: fangs dripping with venom, a pool of dark blood, my father’s face contorted with pain.
I hear someone whimper and realize it’s me.
Ash steps back, alarmed. “I wasn’t going to bite you.”
I nod, unable to speak. Day puts a comforting arm around my shoulder.
“I think you’ve frightened Natalie enough for one day, don’t you?” Day says to Ash.
He takes the hint and leaves, muttering curses under his breath.
Day leads me to the cafeteria and gets me some food, although I don’t have much of an appetite. The sensation of Ash’s breath against my skin still lingers in my mind.
“You all right, Nat? You look a little flushed,” Day says.
“I’m fine, just flustered about what happened with Ash. He scared me pretty good,” I say, telling a half-truth.
“You don’t need to be afraid of Ash. His bark’s worse than his bite, no pun intended,” Day says, tucking into her meager lunch. “He may be a Haze dealer and a total jerk, but he’s never attacked a person, even when they’ve been beating the living daylights out of him.”
“Do people attack him often?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Not so much now that he’s bigger, but when he was younger? Sure.”
I find it hard to understand why Ash wouldn’t defend himself when he’s being attacked. He can’t possibly care about injuring a human, can he? He’s a Darkling. Since when did they care about hurting humans?
After lunch, we head to our next period: history with Mr. Lewis.
“Hey, where are we going?” I ask as Day leads me outside.
“To the library. We have to enter via the fire exit, since the normal entrance got blasted during the raids last year. Twelve people died. It was horrible.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, like it’s my fault. But in a way it is: guilty by proxy. The raids were a “desperate move by a desperate man,” at least that’s what Craven told me once. The Darkling rebellion—the Legion Liberation Front—was gaining control of Black City. They were winning the war, and the Sentry was about to lose one of their most important strategic strongholds. If Black City fell, the next stop would be Centrum, and then all would be lost. Something drastic had to be done. So Purian Rose ordered an airstrike on the city. It didn’t matter whom he killed—men, women, children—just as long as the Legion Liberation Front was crushed and the Darklings surrendered, which they did. Rose’s plan worked, but at what cost? Black City and everyone in it were in ruins.
I pull Ash’s oversized jacket tighter around myself. Across the town square, several Darkling guards watch us from the Boundary Wall. I shudder.
We’re running a bit late by the time we get to the library. The room is enormous, crammed to the rafters with Sentry-regulation books. Above each shelf is a sign indicating what type of books they are. It’s the only way to tell the difference, as all the covers are the same, black and red.
There are only two available seats left: one next to Beetle, the other beside Ash. His jaw tightens as he spots me.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Day mutters.
She drags her heels across the room and reluctantly sits next to Beetle. I groan, scanning the library for an alternative place to sit. Lacking any other options, I sit beside Ash. He looks around the room, at the floor, the ceiling, everywhere but me. I take out a packet of mints from my satchel and pop one in my mouth. I roll it around, letting it clank against my teeth.
“Could you stop that?” Ash hisses, finally acknowledging my existence. “It’s annoying.”
I bite down on the mint and munch it loudly. He mutters a curse under his breath.
The Thompson twins, Gregory and Chris, sit at the table next to us. Chris leans toward Day, his wavy brown hair falling over his gorgeous hazel eyes.
“Hey, babes, do you have a pen I can borrow?” he says.
She flushes, fumbling around her pencil case for a pen and handing it over. Beetle rolls his eyes. It seems no girl is immune to Chris’s charms.
Chris then turns to Ash, his voice low. I try not to eavesdrop, but it’s hard when Ash is sitting next to me.“Hey, have you heard about this new Golden Haze doing the rounds?” Chris asks.
Ash shakes his head. “That’s a new one on me, but I’m not really interested in the crap the dens are dealing. Why are you so interested in it?”
Chris looks sheepish. “I just heard it was meant to give you a really pure high, with no Haze Headaches afterward. I thought you might’ve heard of it.”
“I only deal Haze straight from the fang. You can’t trust those street blends; they could’ve been mixed with anything. You shouldn’t touch that stuff with a barge pole,” Ash says.
Chris nods, sitting back. “Yeah . . . yeah, you’re probably right.”
Gregory turns his liquid hazel eyes on Ash, hatred burning in them.
At that moment, Mr. Lewis—a mousy man with a big bushy mustache—enters the library, a projector wheel under his arm. He sets it up at the front of the class.
I shrug off Ash’s jacket and sling it over the back of my seat. Ash leans toward me, his lips right next to my ear. My heartbeat quickens.
“I want my jacket back, blondie,” he says quietly.
“Tough luck.”
“I’m warning you, give it back or—”
“What? You’ll kill me? You know that threat’s really starting to wear thin.”
He shakes his head. “Keep it, I don’t care. It reeks of you now anyway.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way I smell,” I say.
He cocks an eyebrow, saying nothing.
I don’t know why this upsets me. Why should I care what he thinks about me?
Mr. Lewis turns off the lights, and everyone in the room giggles and goes ooh as we’re plunged into darkness. I can see Ash’s eyes sparkling from the corner of my vision. I try and concentrate on the lesson, the origins of the Blood Wars, but I’m finding it hard with Ash so indecently close, his knee almost touching mine.
Ash picks up a pen and taps it against the desk—tap tap tap—watching the screen at the front of the class, his face somber.
Click: a photo of the city prewar, the filthy streets lit by neon lights.
“The United Sentry States was drowning in corruption,” Mr. Lewis says. “Drug and crime rates were at their highest since records began, and overcrowding was fast becoming an issue as more Darklings migrated to the cities in search of work and food.”
Mr. Lewis looks around the class. “Does anybody know what the biggest killer of humans was during this troubled time?”
Day’s hand shoots up. “Haze addiction.”
Mr. Lewis nods. “Over seventy percent of the human population of the United Sentry States was hooked on this highly addictive drug. It was a very dark period of our history.”
Gregory scowls at Ash.
Click: a partially built concrete wall.
“Purian Rose, as the newly elected head of the United Sentry States, realized the nation’s best chance of rehabilitation and recovery was to segregate the Darkling population from the humans, and in every city across all nine megastates, he ordered that Darklings be relocated into walled ghettos.”
Click: thousands of Darklings being led at gunpoint by Sentry guards into a ghetto.
“Relocation was successful, with minimal casualties to the Darkling population, although some rebel factions refused to leave their homes—mainly those who had cohabited with humans and borne twin-blood children,” Mr. Lewis says.
Ash stares at the screen, his face set like stone.
“Purian Rose graciously allowed the twin-bloods to stay with their human parents,” Mr. Lewis continues. “However, a law was passed shortly after this that prohibited relationships between Darklings and humans, to prevent any further twin-blood offspring being born. Anyone found violating these terms was sentenced to death.”
Click: a Sentry General with blond hair and piercing blue eyes.
Grief spills over me in waves.
Father.
“However, even with segregation, overpopulation was still a massive burden on the state, so General Jonathan Buchanan put forward the Voluntary Migration Scheme, which saw over five million Darklings relocated to migration camps in the Barren Lands—”
“That’s not true,” Ash says.
Everyone turns to look at him.
“Would you like to teach the class?” Mr. Lewis says, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“If you’re offering,” Ash replies.
“You’re treading on thin ice, Fisher.”
“Why? If you’re going to teach us ‘history,’ at least you should get your facts straight. There weren’t any migration camps in the Barren Lands.”
Mr. Lewis’s mustache twitches irritably. “So I suppose all those Darklings just vanished into thin air?”
“No,” Ash says.
“Then where did they all go?”
Ash looks directly at me. I swallow hard, my world spinning. He knows. The truth is they weren’t migration camps; they were concentration camps. Purian Rose sent those Darklings to the Barren Lands to die, cut off from any blood supply.
If he’d had his way, he would’ve sent all the Darklings to the Barren Lands, but politically that would’ve been disastrous. People wouldn’t have been able to ignore the migration of the entire Darkling population. Father once told me it was like boiling a frog. If you drop it in boiling water, it’ll hop straight out of the pan. If you put it in cold water and very slowly turn up the heat, the frog will happily swim around the pot until it boils to death. Purian Rose was slowly turning up the heat on our society, making sure the humans came around to his way of thinking without ever realizing they were doing it.
The first stage of his plan were the ghettos, which were just a means to dupe the liberals into believing things weren’t really “that bad” and that the other Darklings who were being sent to the Barren Lands were going there out of choice. The government made it sound like the camps in the Barren Lands were a holiday resort, and people were willing to believe it, because it’s much easier to believe a lie than face a terrible truth. Purian Rose committed genocide right under their noses, and they didn’t even blink.
Then one by one, the Darkling survivors in the Barren Lands got sick with a strange new virus, the Wrath. Now the only Darklings left in the Barren Lands are mindless monsters infected with the virus. I know all this because my father witnessed it firsthand; he was in charge of the relocation program. That experience changed everything; that was the reason he turned sides and tore our family apart.
“Well?” Mr. Lewis demands.
The rest of the class turns to look at me, curious. My heart hammers in my chest. Don’t say anything, please, please, please. I don’t want the whole class knowing what my father did to those Darklings. They may not understand. All that’s left of my father is his reputation. I have to protect it.