We don't have practice today, and Liam told me last night that he would not be going to the creek until next week. I don't have any plans, so I decided to go back to sleep since I need it more than doing any physical activities. My legs were sore from running through the woods last night.
I was already asleep when someone banged on my door. My eyelids fly open instantly, and my heart skips a beat from the surprise. I can get jumpy sometimes.
"Go away!" I yell from my bed, refusing to move an inch away from it.
"Why is your door locked?" shouts Lucas from the other side of the door. I should've known it was him. Who else would bang on my door like that?
"If you want a cuddle, go ask Daisy!" I shout again, still from the same spot. But he keeps banging on my door until I can't take it anymore. "What the hell, Lucas?! What do you want?"
"Do you even know what time it is? How long are you planning to sleep?" he is fully equipped with a sword, armor made of leather, bows, and arrows on his back. Where are those weapons from? I did not know we had it in this house.
"For the rest of my life," I answer him after calming my anger.
"That is practically dead."
"Exactly," I swing my door closed, but he sets one foot between the gap. "What?" I'm starting to get so annoyed right now. I can kick him in the shin to teach him a lesson. Nobody dares wake me up from my sleep!
He takes my hand and pulls me out of the room. He grips my hand so hard, and I think it will leave a red mark on my wrist. I struggle to let his hand go, but it is no use. I will never be able to get away from him, even in his loosest grip. I scream out so loud, begging him to let me go. I am not really into practicing. I only need proper sleep for one day.
Lucas brought me to the top of a hill I never knew we had in this Camp. I had stopped yelling and struggling in the middle of the way because I didn't see the point anymore.
He finally lets my hand go, and I contemplate running away for a moment. But he will always catch me before I even lose my breath. A part of me is curious about all this too.
He sets all the weapons from his back to the ground, takes the bow and several arrows, then passes them to me.
I groan, "do you want me to go hunting right now? In this weather? You don't even let me wear my jacket!" But I take the bow and arrows from him anyway.
I have learned archery since I was eight years old. Liam and I usually practiced archery every weekend in the lake. Lucas sometimes joined us, so he should've known how bad I am with these. Why would he still want me to do it anyway?
We walk a little deeper until we find an opening.
"What are we hunting? Birds? Bears? Elk?" I ask in a low voice. I don't know why, but we're sneaking on something.
Lucas does not answer me as he carefully walks from one tree to another. "We're going to hunt whatever comes near... or shall I say whoever gets into this forest without my permission," he says, sounding so calm and without any worry.
"Lucas, don't joke around! It's not funny!"
"Hush," Lucas covers my mouth with his hand, pulling me closer to him. I don't hear anything. It is too close to the Camp, and finding intruders in this forest will be a cold day in hell.
I don't hear anything besides his heartbeat, which surprisingly beats so fast. I push myself out of his arms but still stand close to his side. "Nobody's here but us!" I say in the slightest whisper I can make. But then I hear something now. It sounds like footsteps.
My eyes widen when I finally catch a silhouette of a moving creature several feet away. The first thing that pops up in my head is Liam.
The footsteps grow louder as it gets closer to us. Lucas walks to the other side of the tree and raises his bow with an arrow, ready to shoot. My heart goes wild inside my chest, and I can barely move my feet. I am so clueless and tensed I can only move my eyeballs to look around.
My breath becomes faster as smoke comes out of my slightly open mouth. I am gripping the arrow so tight, preparing to defend myself if Lucas decides to bail on me last minute. But how am I supposed to shoot if I have never even been in a fight face-to-face with someone who might kill me? Probably ditching practice is a bad idea after all.
A branch cracks only several meters away from where I stand, and I accidentally let out a gasp. The intruder is even closer to me, and I slowly step back. I hear a swoosh sound and the sound of a knife stabbing through the skin and meat and cracking the bones.
Did Lucas just shoot the intruder? Oh my God, did Lucas just kill them? I have never seen a dead body before. Oh my God, I think I'm going to vomit.
"Are you okay?" Lucas is suddenly beside me, gripping my arm before I can fall and throw up.
I nod, even though I know, I'm far from okay. I am not prepared for what I am about to see, but I follow Lucas anyway. I suck in the oxygen and hold it in the back of my throat while holding the barf.
When I reveal myself behind Lucas's back to see the fresh corpse, I gawk in surprise. I'm like a fish out of water, looking around to make sure my eyes are not playing a trick on me. The intruder has four long skinny legs and two antlers.
"It's a deer!" I say, walking towards Lucas, who's crouching down next to the dead animal.
"Yes."
I don't see any arrow sticking to its body, but I can see a pool of blood around the deer's neck.
"But you said we were hunting humans," I feel so relieved knowing I don't have to see a dead human body before my eyes today.
"I never said that," He puts his hands on his hip and turns his head towards me. He smirks, and I have this adrenaline to punch him and make him suffer for what he did.
I hate him.
While we struggle to return with the dead deer to the Camp, the first falling snow lands on Lucas's shoulder. He looks up at the sky, and more snow falls to his face and melts away when they touch his skin. My cheeks suddenly blush, and I feel heat protruding from them when I see Lucas smiling at the sky.
"Look, it's snowing!" he says like a ten-year-old witnessing his first rainbow.
Oh my God, I never realized until now that Lucas has grown fine.
So fine.
***
This cottage can be a little too cozy sometimes, and that feeling helps me forget home.
Daisy left Lucas and me to talk while eating our venison stew before the fireplace. This is my first time eating a deer's meat, not to mention the one I caught... well, Lucas killed it, but I was there.
Venison is chewier than beef, making my jaws hurt halfway through the plate. I try swallowing every bite with water, but it makes me full after my fourth bite. On the other hand, Lucas is almost done with his stew.
He seems distant tonight. He keeps staring at the hearth, spacing out as if I'm not even there.
"Okay, that's it!" I say from my seat. "I don't know what's happening inside your head... and I bet nothing much, but you can't ignore me all night! Say something... anything!" I put down the bowl in my hand on the coffee table and sigh.
"Curiosity killed the cat-" Lucas answers while doing the same thing I did.
"But satisfaction brought it back," I cut him off. "Stop using proverbs and just talk to me!"
"I've known about this camp a year before I ran away," he suddenly says. Why does he keep telling me the time when he ran away as if I wasn't there when it happened?!
But I ignore it as I make myself comfortable on the sofa beside him. I didn't know it would be one hell of a story.
"A friend told me about this place one afternoon. His brother, Ben, told him about this Camp, where Rebels are trained to be Fighters, to fight the Monarchs. Ben was a runaway Rebel before Daisy found him and offered to stay here."
"He regularly visited my friend back in Suburbia until he stopped coming after a year. The last time Ben visited my friend, he told him he met a girl at this Camp and fell in love. She was pregnant. Then the Monarchs found him one day, so he had to run away with the girl."
"After that night, I drove around Suburbia, trying to find this Camp for days. I had no clue where to find this Camp, and I almost gave up. I was so desperate that I didn't notice how recklessly I was driving... but I was so angry with myself. It was dark, and I remember crashing into something, probably the tunnel. Well, the last thing I knew, I woke up in Daisy's house."
Lucas stops to catch his breath, so I take this opportunity to ask him. "Why were you trying to find this camp?"
"Because I'm tired of the Monarch and what they have done to Suburbia." He clenches his hands into tight fists, and I think he can break this house down with them. "And I have nowhere else to go," a twinge of pain in his voice shatters my heart.
I never really know what is happening inside the Monarch, but Aiden told me that the Monarch was doing everything they could to stop the Anaral from ruining Suburbia. Some professors on campus mentioned the Monarch demolishing Rebels' political rights in Suburbia and that this country no longer has democracy.
I always needed clarification on what they all meant. But now I know why the Royalist bloodline controls the Monarch more than the Riotist. More Riotist families have gone missing, and the Alloyist bloodline has almost gone extinct.
They don't want Rebels to rule Suburbia, and I'm scared they might do something to stop the Riotist bloodline from getting Veto rights. It's only the Councils of Monarch from the Royalist bloodline that possess the power of Veto. That's why the Councils of Monarch from the Riotist lineage don't take the pledge in voting for every decision making this country.
All final resolutions are in the hands of the Obels. The Rebels are only some parts of the undertaking of enactments and solutions. Don't forget about violence. The Obels are hare-hearted, too weak to be responsible for the bloodshed they invoked.
"When Daisy first took me in, I thought this Camp was less secure and dynamic than it was told. They needed more people to be trained and lost a leader, Ben. She made me promise to help and protect this Camp, and in return, she offered me a home, a family, and soldiers. I did not know why she asked me to help her, knowing that I was powerless and had no capabilities in political defenses. But her eyes, words, gestures... she believed in me."
"For weeks, I tried to figure out what this place needed. This Camp needed powerful Rebels with real physical abilities and built-up anger toward the Monarch. All I needed to do was to hone their skills to be great soldiers. We started to gather more runaway Rebels and started training immediately. Sometimes, the four of us helped Daisy go to town, buying everything we needed, like weapons and other supplies."
It is hard to imagine seeing Lucas buying guns and ammo somewhere in town. If I had ever encountered him in town, I would have run to him and slapped him so hard on his face for leaving home.
"Do you remember those times when a ferocious storm hit Suburbia for months?" asks Lucas, turning his face towards me.
I nod.
"I remembered something from the day when you said Liam went missing to find me. One day before the storm, one of the Warriors got severely hurt, so Daisy and I had to call in for our friend, a Doctor in Suburbia. We took our unusual route: the river inside the forest behind Suburbia Private Hospital because they had already closed the highways, so we had to take the boat. Don't ask me how we got there because it was the scariest journey I have ever taken in my entire life."
I nod once again.
"Before Daisy and I departed from the hospital, my gut told me to wait a little longer for no reason. But why would I risk everything we were doing for an uncertain emotion? So I just had to ignore it and continued. When we were almost far enough from the hospital, I heard someone shouting.
Someone called out my name, but the storm was too wild that night, so I thought I was hallucinating. When we reached our boat, I saw something. Someone I recognized well in my life. I saw Liam running for his life to get to me. He was close enough to us. I could see him very clearly. I was too petrified and shocked and didn't know what to do. I thought it was only my imagination because I knew Liam was safe at home, so I didn't stop and turn back."
I can feel my cheeks wet and hot from the tears. Lucas's voice trembles at the end of his sentence. He is trying hard to keep his stony façade, but he's probably aching inside.
"Ever since then, I kept asking myself, what if it was him? Is he even okay now?" his voice comes out breathy. It almost sounds like a whimper.
Is that supposed to be a rhetorical question? Even if it was not, I still couldn't answer him. I know Liam is okay, but I promised him to keep his well-being a secret. But seeing Lucas like this, I hate myself for keeping it under my hat.
I am caught between two stools. What do I do now?
I can't do this to Lucas. I have to tell him that Liam is okay. I know this might not be the best thing since sliced bread, but I can't let Lucas live longer in torment.
"Lucas, I have to tell you something-" I stand up abruptly from my seat and knock my bowl to the floor before it shatters into sharp pieces.
I jumped in response to the shock and accidentally cut the sole of my left foot. Red ooze starts to seep out through my sock.
"Don't move," Lucas says. His body stiffens when he crouches to my feet to touch the lacerated fabrics. "Ava..." Lucas slowly removes the sock from my foot and lets the blood drip to the floor. "Your blood-" He looks up at me with horror.
"Lucas, there is something I need to tell you."