Prodigy

close beside mine. She taps my chin once. “That’s what you do too. And it’s just asking for a knockout.”
    I try to focus on my own posture by putting two fists up. “How do you punch?”
    June gently touches the tip of my chin, then the edge of my brow. “Remember, it’s all about how
accurately
you can hit someone, not how
hard.
You’ll be able to knock out someone much larger if you catch them in the right spots.”
    Before I know it, half an hour’s gone by. June teaches me one tactic after another—keeping my shoulder up to protect my chin, catching my opponent off guard with fake moves, overhand hits, underhand hits, leaning back and following through with kicks, leaping out of the way with speed. Aiming for the vulnerable spots—eyes, neck, and so on. I lunge out with everything I’ve got. When I try to catch her by surprise, she slips from my grasp like water between rocks, fluid and constantly moving, and if I blink, she’s behind me and twisting my arm up behind my back.
    Finally, June trips me and pins me to the floor. Her hands push my wrists down. “See?” she says. “Tricked you. You’re always staring at your opponent’s eyes—but that gives you a bad peripheral view. If you want to track my arms and legs, you have to focus on my chest.”
    I raise my eyebrow at that. “Say no more.” My eyes shift downward.
    June laughs, then turns a little red. We pause there for an instant, her hands still holding my arms down, her legs across my stomach, both of us breathing heavily. Now I understand why she suggested the impromptu sparring—I’m tired, and the exercise has drained my anger. Even though she doesn’t say it, I can see her apology plainly on her face, the tragic slant of her eyebrows and the slight quiver of unspoken words on her lips. The sight finally softens me, albeit only a little. I’m still not sorry about what I’d said to her earlier, true, but I’m also not being fair. Whatever I lost, June has lost equally. She used to be rich, then she threw it away to save my life. She’d played her part in my family’s deaths, but . . . I run a hand through my hair, feeling guilty now. I can’t blame her for everything. And I can’t be alone at a time like this, with no allies,
no
one I can turn to.
    She sways.
    I prop myself up on my elbows. “You okay?”
    She shakes her head, frowns, and tries to shrug it off. “Fine. I think I picked up a bug or something. Nothing big.”
    I study her under the artificial light. Now that I’m paying closer attention to the color of her face, I can see that she’s paler than usual, and that her cheeks look flushed because her skin is so wan. I sit up higher, forcing her to slide off. Then I press a hand to her forehead. Immediately I pull it away. “Man, you’re burning up.”
    June starts to protest, but as if our training session has weakened her, she sways again and steadies herself with one arm. “I’ll be fine,” she mumbles. “We should be heading out, anyway.”
    And here I’ve been angry with her, forgetting all she’s been through. Trot of the year. I ease one of my arms around her back and wrap the other under her knees, then scoop her up. She slumps against my chest, the heat of her brow startling against my cool skin. “You need to rest.”
    I carry her into one of the bunker rooms, pull off her boots, lay her down carefully on a bed, and cover her with the blankets. She blinks at me. “I didn’t mean what I said earlier.” Her eyes are dazed, but the emotion’s still there. “About money. And . . . I didn’t—”
    “Stop talking.” I smooth stray hairs from her forehead. What if she caught something serious while under arrest? A plague virus? . . . But she’s upper class. She should have vaccines.
I hope.
“I’m going to find you some medicine, okay? Just close your eyes.” June shakes her head, frustrated, but she doesn’t try to argue.
    After upending the entire shelter, I finally manage to hunt down an unopened bottle of aspirin and return to June’s bedside with it. She takes a couple of pills. When she starts shivering, I grab two more blankets from the other beds in the room and cover her with them, but it doesn’t seem to help. “It’s okay. I’ll manage,” she whispers right as I’m about to go hunting for more blankets. “Won’t really matter how high you stack them—I just need my fever to break.” She hesitates, then reaches for my hand. “Can you stay here?”
    The