The Almost Girl – ebook edition Read Free Book Online

him.
    Just as I was deciding to press forward – let him tough it out on his own – something niggled at the base of my neck. I couldn’t leave him, it wouldn’t be right. Resigned, I turned around and backtracked, only to find him leaning against a tree calmly chewing on an apple.
    I frowned. “I heard someone cry out.”
    “Yeah, it was a new kind of hologen. It made human noises. I killed it.” His nonchalant words were almost enough to make me miss the blood dripping from his sleeve. Almost.
    “You’re hurt?”
    “That’s mostly the thing’s blood. But it did break my leg. I can’t walk.” He finished the apple, tossing the core near the body of the dead creature. “You should go on, I’ll tell the trainers that I tripped. You should finish.”
    I could feel the guilt at leaving him earlier ripping through me like acid. “No, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left. I broke the rules and you got hurt.”
    “We could default.”
    “No!” I shouted. Defaulting meant quitting, and a strike that would go on your training record, even if something happened that was no fault of your own. Failure was not an option, not for any of us. If you couldn’t defend yourself in the field, you were as good as dead. It was as simple as that. “We’ll figure something else out,” I said confidently despite the hole of anxiety in my stomach.
    “I guess I shouldn’t have teased you.” It was the smallest offer of truce and barely an apology, but I took it anyway. He had been hurt because of me… because I deserted him.
    “I’m Riven,” I said, sealing the fragile truce. “Can you walk if you hold on to me?”
    “You’re half my size; we’ll never make it. Just leave me.”
    “Shut up,” I told him. “I’m stronger than I look.”
    And so, with me half dragging, half pushing him along, we inched through the rest of the course. When we ran out of bullets in my rifle, we stood back-to-back, sword and crossbow in hand to take out our enemies. I admired the boy’s skill with his weapons, switching fluidly from longbow to crossbow and back before I could blink. Anything that got too close, I fought off capably with my sword and, occasionally, a short knife.
    In the end, it wasn’t the most graceful completion of the course, but we came out together panting, winded, and utterly exhausted. The medical team rushed out of nowhere so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to say anything more to the boy before he was hover-ported away, surrounded by a team of elite guards. It was surprising but I didn’t think too much more about it.
    It was only afterwards that I learned that my partner was the son of the Monarch of Neospes. A prince. Mortified, I kept waiting for the soldiers who would surely come to arrest me for my heedless words and thoughtless actions in the holo dome, but I needn’t have worried. From that point on, the boy who I would come to know as Cale always asked for me, and only me, to partner with him.
    One day, when I asked him why he’d always chosen me, he responded flippantly, “Someone needs to protect the little people.”
    But later in a rare moment of unguarded honesty, Cale told me that it was because I’d come back for him without knowing who he was, even after his intentionally provoking words. He’d liked that I had never even considered giving up or leaving him behind. I remember telling him that quitting would never be an option for me. It wasn’t then, and it would never be now.
    And just like back then, Cale knows that he can count on me. And that can’t change, not now, not ever.
    “Riven?”
    I jerk out of my thoughts so quickly that my fingers are on the hilt of a knife tucked into a side pocket of my pants before I can exhale the breath hitched in my lungs. I relax, my brain belatedly recognizing June’s voice and release my hot fingers.
    “Sorry,” I breathe. “Homework on the brain.”
    “The hospital just paged me and I need to go,” June says pulling on her