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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 windows, he wrapped his arms around Mom and kissed her for such a long time. He kept one hand pressed protectively on her stomach. John waited patiently to greet him, hands in his pockets. I was still young enough to hug his leg. Eden wasn’t born yet—he was still inside Mom’s growing belly.
“How are my boys?” my father said after he finally let go of Mom. He patted my cheek and smiled at John.
John gave him a big, toothy grin. He had managed to grow his hair long enough to tie it back in a tail. He held up a certificate. “Look!” he said. “I passed my Trial!”
“You did!” My father clapped John on the back and shook his hand as if he were a man. I can still remember the relief in his eyes, the tremor of joy in his words. Back then, we all worried that John would be the one to fail the Trial, considering his trouble with reading. “I’m proud of you, Johnny. Good job.”
Then he looked at me. I remember studying his face. Dad’s official job in the Republic was to clean up after the warfront’s soldiers, of course, but there were always hints that this wasn’t the only job he had. Hints like the stories he sometimes told about the Colonies and their glittering cities, their advanced technology and festive holidays. At that moment, I wanted to ask him why he was always gone even after his warfront rotation should’ve returned him home, why he never came to see us.
But something else distracted me. “There’s something in your vest pocket, Dad,” I said. Sure enough, a circular bump was pressed against the cloth.
He chuckled, then took out the object. “So there is, Daniel.” He glanced up at our mother. “He’s very perceptive, isn’t he?”
Mom smiled at me.
My father hesitated, then ushered us all into the bedroom. “Grace,” he said to Mom, “look what I found.”
She studied it closely. “What is it?”
“It’s more proof.” At first my father tried to show it only to Mom, but I managed to get a good look as he turned it over in his hands. A bird on one side, a man’s profile on the other. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN GOD WE TRUST, QUARTER DOLLAR embossed on one side, and LIBERTY and 1990 on the other. “See? Evidence.” He pressed it into her palm.
“Where did you find this?” Mom asked.
“In the southern swamplands between the two warfronts. It’s a genuine coin from nineteen-ninety. See the name? United States. It was real.”
My mother’s eyes gleamed with excitement, but she still gave Dad a grave look. “This is a dangerous thing to own,” she whispered. “We’re not keeping this in our house.”
My father nodded. “But we can’t destroy it. We have to safeguard it—for all we know, this might be the last coin of its kind in the world.” He folded my mother’s fingers over the coin. “I’ll make a metal casing for it, something that covers both sides. I’ll weld it shut so the coin’s secure inside.”
