the scruff.
The smell of roasting meat makes my head spin and my stomach growl, and Bowen glares at me, mouth hard, as if he’s mad that my stomach is making noise. I shrug.
The sun shines into his face and lights up his eyes, and I completely forget about the roasting meat. I was wrong about him. He is not Duncan—not the gray-eyed teenager I’d stare at across the street. Bowen’s eyes are too green, like grass and mint and dandelion leaves. Yet, I know him.
I look away from his guarded eyes and study my brown-stained pants, worn so thin above my knees they are sheer, and try to remember who he is, why he’s so familiar.
His hand is on the spit again, a hard, strong hand, brown from days in the sun. His long fingers turn it, making grease drip from the meat into the flames. I dare another look at him. This time he’s waiting. Our eyes meet. His eyebrows lift, his face hardens, and the remote is pointing at me.
“You planning something?” he asks with a smirk.
Like I can move with my legs and arms locked together. If I even attempted to stand, I’d topple forward into the fire. Not to mention I’m in a camp filled with men who would shoot me if I so much as stepped wrong. I laugh at the absurdity of it.
Bowen leans forward, eyes intent, and I stop laughing.
“Open your mouth again,” he says. I open my mouth and he peers inside. “Huh. Your teeth aren’t rotten. How old are you?”
“Thirteen?”
“You’re tall for a thirteen-year-old, Fec.” He leans back, but his eyes don’t leave me. They slowly cover every inch of my body, as if they can see the secret lying beneath my clothes. I hunch forward, praying he can’t tell I have breasts. “Lift your hands. Show me your palms.”
I bend my arms at the elbow, forearms still locked, and splay my fingers. His hand leaves the spit. Without lowering the remote, he trails a finger over my palm and frowns.
For a heartbeat his eyes meet mine, and then I am forgotten. Turning the meat takes all his attention. More grease drips from it, popping in the fire. For a long time we sit in silence, Bowen intent on the meat, me intent on looking at him without looking at him. Without him noticing, at least.
He looks up and catches me staring again, but I don’t look away this time—not when I almost remember where I have seen eyes the color of summer. But then he says something and I forget that he looks familiar.
He says, “You’re not a Fec.”
I catch my lip in my teeth, heart pounding with fear. “What is a Fec?” I whisper.
His brows draw together. “Didn’t you come here with one? The kid who tried to break that Level Three out last night?”
“The one you shot?”
“Yeah. He was a Fec. A feces dweller—F-E-C. You know, the people with the sign of the beast who didn’t go to the lab, and didn’t go instantly mad, so hide out in the sewers instead of turning themselves in?”
A wave of anger makes me bold, and I glare right into his eyes. “Why did you have to shoot her little brother? He was only eleven! She was trying to save him.”
His jaw muscles pulse. “She? I only saw two boys. And shooting him was the humane thing to do.” His gaze flickers to my hand, to the tattoo, and his mouth puckers in distaste.
“What are you going to do with me?”
Instead of answering, he focuses on the roasting meat again. He lifts the spit away from the flames and sets it on a chipped plaster plate.
“What am I going to do with you?” He says it like he’s asking himself, his eyes never leaving the meat as it drips tiny beads of moisture onto the plate. “I don’t know. I could take you to the lab and get eight ounces of honey. And be well off for a year. Or I can sell you to the black market and get eighty ounces of honey. Eighty ounces of honey would buy me a life inside the wall. I could quit the militia.”
“The black market?”
“Yeah. The black market runs the pit. Where they put people like you to fight to the death.”
Fight to the death? Me? “You’re joking, right?” I ask, my voice disbelieving.
He shakes his head but doesn’t look at me. “The pit is the best form of entertainment the wall-dwellers have.”