Page 33 of The Last Love Story

It’s both harder and easier to get into the server room now. As I feared, Ms. Astor has been replaced by a wide-angle lens and a speaker that sits atop the desk. So it’s extremely easy to slip out of the classroom. However, the halls are still filled with Hammers, who seem to enjoy projecting their obvious misery on everyone else.

One of them—a shorter, stockier one with a surprisingly deep voice—stops me and asks, “Where do you think you’re going?” Thankfully, all it takes is me putting my hand lightly on my stomach and saying something about monthly issues to get him to hold his arms up and back away like I’ve showed him that I’m holding my guts in my palm.

Big bad fascists are scared of periods. Noted.

Now, I sit in front of the screens, my boots up on the panel as I rip at an old piece of licorice with my teeth. One screen is dominated by raw footage of a draft dodger beingdragged out to the data mines, eyes wide and almost animal in their fear, blood trickling from a wound in their mouth.

I look away quickly. The display in front of me is swallowed by Callum Graves’s face and my heart jumps into my throat. I can’t hear the sparkly music, but they’ve added hearts and slow-motion effects to his war footage. He runs, brushes a hand through his perfect golden hair. His lips pull into a smile, with animated glitter appearing over his perfect teeth. The clips transition to slow-motion struts in a perfectly cut suit. And then—my heart stops—blurry beach footage, where he tugs a shirt off and jogs along the sand.

I cover my mouth at the ridiculousness of it, even as another thought bubbles in the back of my mind.

Callum is stateside? It must be a furlough—maybe for political reasons? His father can’t run again, so it’s not like he’s here for the campaign, but maybe he’s endorsing that senator from South Texas? I’m not sure why it makes me smile, to know he’s not on the front lines anymore.

A flash in the upper right corner of the screen catches my eye. Orange flames engulf a yacht, the heat of the fire distorting the air.

I don’t even notice that my boots have fallen to the floor, or that I’ve slowly pushed myself up to my feet as I rake my eyes over the footage of the wreckage. The yacht is ripped open, lolling to one side as the ocean slowly reclaims it in real time. Smoke billows upward, roiling and spinning up into the sky.

In the ocean, divers bob. Coast guard vessels. They only send those for search and rescue.

I hate that I lean closer, my eyes scanning the choppy waters as though I will be able to find a survivor out of sheer will. Instead, the camera zooms in on the New Florida coastline.

My gut pitches. Hux pulled metadata from a file that looked just like this.

Battery acid, mercury, lead. Seven million tons, Hux said.

And two children.

A stillness fills me as I watch the yacht dip lower and lower in the water.

I hate that I feel a tug of conflict, like there are little metal hooks on my ribs and reason yanks on one side while empathy pulls on the other.

The news will show this destruction, but I know full well that it would gloss over the massive damage these men do. If the accusations are true and they were looking to dump poison into the Gulf of America, it would never reach anyone’s DopaMine channels. I wonder if—when—they find the bodies, if they’ll call it an accident, or use it to demonize the rebellions even more, to enact more laws that chip away at what world we have left.

Suddenly, I am overwhelmed by the need to find him. Hux. If we could talk—if I could explain, show him what Lyceum is doing—I could get him to see that. He said himself he hasn’t killed anyone, and he doesn’t want to.

Once I’m sure the coast is clear, I slip out into the hallway and march back toward the classroom. It’s about time for weapons practice, so it should be easy enough to grab Hux.

I make a left just as two Hammers turn down the opposite end of the hallway. They walk in step, eyes set forward. The one on the left is the one I saw before—the one who is terrified of menstruation. But as I clear the corner, their eyes snap to me, and it feels like I’ve missed a step.

“I have a pass, if you need to see it,” I lie, hoping that they just take my word for it and keep walking. But they’re marching toward me.

“Ripley Hart?” the smirking one says, and I’m caught. Animal terror seizes me.

They don’t wait for confirmation before they put their hands on me, one grabbing each arm.

“What the hell is going on?” I start, trying to keep the panic out of my voice—and failing.

“You’re coming with us,” the stocky one says.

I know resisting doesn’t matter. I know that.

But there’s something instinctual that happens when they dig their fingers into the flesh of my upper arm. I struggle, but my flailing only makes them grip harder as they haul me down the hallway. Before I can say another word, I’m outside, the bright light hitting me with a wallop.

I shut my eyes hard against the pain, an overload of sensation and panic that almost feels loud.

Thwacka thwacka thwacka—

I squint, chancing a look around. Ahead of me, a giant hovercopter sits perched on the dead grass outside the training ground. It looks out of place, a jet-black beast of war sitting where a playground once stood. Where I met Nef, where I first told her stories about my life Before, a blend of fact and fantasy, about saving the world and falling in love with a boy.