The Always War Read Online Free PDF Page B

She jerked her arms back, tilting the computer crazily.
    A thin sheet of paper fell from in between the keyboard and the folded-down screen.
    Tessa immediately crouched to pick it up and read it:
    I scrubbed this clean. (The computer.)
    Forget about me.
    Destroy this note, too, of course, and then there will be nothing to link you to any of this.
    I’m sorry.

CHAPTER
9
    Tessa crumpled the note in her hand. Then she changed her mind—that was too much like obeying. She smoothed the paper out again on her desk.
    … then there will be nothing to link you to any of this….
    That’s it?
she thought.
That’s the end?
    She had been so pumped for confrontation—and for seeing Gideon again. It was hard to switch gears, to think of having an ordinary evening instead. Just another ordinary evening in a completely ordinary life. Ordinary, dull, tasteless, colorless, pointless …
    What did you expect?
she asked herself angrily. Gideon had told her that very first day to stay away from him.
    Because he was protecting me,
she thought.
Like he was protecting me telling me not to watch the video of the war.
    But wasn’t she linked to him and the war, no matter what? Because wasn’t the whole point of the war to protect people like her?
    Tessa looked up from the note, because she couldn’t stand to keep staring at the brusque words, which might as well have said,
You are nothing to me. You are nothing
. Had he spent ten seconds scrawling out this note? Twenty? Was she worth that little? Couldn’t he have even signed his name?
    Tessa stared out the window. The streetlights were out again. This happened a lot—with the war on, there wasn’t even enough money for spare lightbulbs. And some people said the sudden blackouts were a test, a trial run of what the city would do if the enemy’s bombers made it this far past the border.
    “Why would anyone bother destroying Waterford City? How could it look any worse with bombs dropped on it than it does now?” was one of the jokes that people told.
    Even without streetlights Tessa could make out shapes moving in the shadowed darkness down on the sidewalk. With infrared cameras and night-vision instruments, the enemy would have no trouble picking out people to kill. They could be in some airplane high overhead and then—
    Stop,
Tessa told herself.
Don’t think about the war.
    It had been going on her entire life, her parents’ entire lives, her grandparents’ entire lives. The oldest person Tessa had ever heard of—Mr. Singleton from the first floor—was more than seventy, and even he didn’t remember a time before the war. It was always there, as ever-present as air. The most talented children were selected for the military academies andsent away by the time they were ten; only rarely did any of them ever come back. But even people who weren’t directly involved in the fighting were part of the war. They assembled bombs in factories; they packed food for the soldiers; they scavenged parts from damaged fighter planes.
    For a moment Tessa felt like she could see the way the war weighed on everyone walking by in the darkness. People walked bent over, crouched down, defensive—looking defeated just by all the years of fighting. One figure in particular practically clutched the building, as if ready to dart in at the first sign of danger. Every few steps he’d whip his head around, as if every noise spooked him. Between steps he stood with his entire body tensed, watching.
    That’s Gideon,
Tessa thought.
He’s escaping.
    At this distance, with all the shadows, she couldn’t see his face, could barely even make out his form. But she was still certain. Maybe it was because he was the only person on the sidewalk who didn’t move groggily, in a stupor—with all the other people, she could tell that whatever pain they were in had been with them for so long they were numb to it.
    Gideon moved as though his pain were fresh and raw and throbbing. He moved like a dying animal leaving a