Once An Eve Novel

You could be sent to jail just for coming in here.” He picked up the napkin he’d been playing with. It was twisted into a small white rose. “Well, maybe you wouldn’t get arrested, Genevieve .” He smiled, tucking it behind my ear.
    I put my hand on his right leg, where he had been stabbed. I could feel the scar through his thin pants, the line that slanted inward, toward his opposite knee. “What happened to you?” I finally asked. “All that time before you came here. I thought of you every day. I shouldn’t have let you leave. I was so scared …”
    “You did the right thing—we both did.” Caleb inched closer and wrapped his arm around me, massaging the aches from my neck. “It’s strange, but I always knew you’d come back to me. The how and when of it wasn’t clear, but I knew.”
    “I hoped,” I said, keeping my hand on his leg.
    Caleb shook his head and smiled. “Could any day have been more perfect than today?” He kissed me once, then twice, his lips settling by the hollow of my ear. “I woke up and the City was talking about the new Princess, the King’s daughter who’d returned from the Schools. I ran all the way from the Outlands to the City center like a complete idiot. Everyone thought I was just another one of your fans. I kept thinking, she’s come back to me.”
    I pulled myself closer to him. “Tell me what happened when you left Califia. I need to know everything.”
    Caleb squeezed my hand. “I stayed in San Francisco, in a house just over the bridge. It was hard for me to walk, even with the wound stitched up. For a while I lived off figs and berries from the local park. But then a day passed, and another, and I was too weak to walk anymore. I was trapped.
    “At some point, when I was really desperate, I tried to go just a block to find food. I collapsed on the sidewalk. I’m not sure how long I was there—one day, maybe a few. I just remember a horse coming toward me. I tried to crawl into a storefront, to hide myself, but it was too late. A man was hauling me onto the horse, and then I passed out. I woke up hours later. He was giving me water. Then he finally mentioned Moss.”
    “Moss?” I asked, remembering the name. “The one who organized the Trail?”
    “He’s operating from inside the City now,” Caleb said, his voice barely audible. He looked quickly around the room before speaking. Just one couple was dancing, the woman’s hand resting on the man’s heart. “He was working on the inside when the report came in about the troops killed at the base of the mountain. That soldier said where he’d last seen me, how I’d been stabbed, who I was with. Moss knew I must’ve been taking you to Califia. He came and found me. He forged my paperwork to make it look like I was just another Stray seeking refuge in the City. He’s been organizing people inside the walls, the dissidents.”
    “The dissidents?” I kept my voice low, thankful when the trumpet blasted a few loud notes. Everyone around us was absorbed in their own conversations, clinking their glasses together in cheers.
    “There’s opposition to the regime. Moss brought me here to lead a build—we’re constructing tunnels under the wall to bring in more people to help fight. Eventually we’ll smuggle weapons in from the outside. There are three tunnels in all. Moss is talking about a revolution, but without guns we’re helpless against the soldiers.”
    Caleb kept his lips close to my ear as he told me about the Outlands, the vast, barren blocks beyond the City’s main street, where old motels were being used as housing for the lower class. Some lived in warehouses, others in run-down buildings without hot water or even plumbing. The regime had designated housing based on the assets individuals were able to contribute after the plague. Jobs were assigned by the government. Most Outlanders worked cleaning the luxury apartments and office buildings in the City center, staffing the shops in the Palace mall or running the new amusements that were opening up throughout the City. The King had established endless rules: no drinking, no smoking, no weapons, no trading without his consent. No one was to be out after ten o’clock. And the City was enter-only—no one could leave.
    “All of the workers here are trapped. The regime decides their weekly allowance, what jobs they have. They keep telling everyone that the conditions will improve, that the Outlands will be restored just like the