Studies are probably the highlight of her day. I prefer drills.
After studies it’s back out into the blazing sun, where the heat makes me dizzy enough that I can almost hallucinate my imagined enemies. I do battle with straw men: shooting them with arrows, stabbing them with knives, or simply pummeling them with my bare fists. But half-blind from the sun, I see them as Mogadorians, and I relish the chance to tear them to pieces. Katarina says even though I am only thirteen years old, I’m so agile and so strong I could easily take down even a well-trained adult.
One of the nice things about living in Puerto Blanco is that I don’t have to hide my skills. Back in Denver, whether swimming at the Y or just playing on the street, I always had to hold back, to keep myself from revealing the superior speed and strength that Katarina’s training regimen has resulted in. We keep to ourselves out here, away from the eyes of others, so I don’t have to hide.
Today is Sunday, so our afternoon drills are short, only an hour. I am shadowboxing with Katarina in the backyard, and I can feel her eagerness to quit: her moves are halfhearted, she’s squinting against the sun, and she looks tired. I love training and could go all day, but out of deference to her I suggest we call it a day.
“Oh, I suppose we could finish early,” she says. I grin privately, allowing her to think I’m the tired one. We go inside and Katarina pours us two tall glasses of agua fresca, our customary Sunday treat. The fan is blowing full force in our humble shack’s living room. Katarina boots up her various computers while I kick off my dirty, sweat-filled fighting boots and collapse to the floor. I stretch my arms to keep them from knotting up, then swing them to the bookshelf in the corner and pull out a tall stack of the board games we keep there. Risk, Stratego, Othello. Katarina has tried to interest me in games like Life and Monopoly, saying it wouldn’t hurt to be “well-rounded.” But those games never held my interest. Katarina got the hint, and now we only play combat and strategy games.
Risk is my favorite, and since we finished early today I think Katarina will agree to playing it even though it’s a longer game than the others.
“Risk?”
Katarina is at her desk chair, pivoting from one screen to the next.
“Risk of what?” she asks absently.
I laugh, then shake the box near her head. She doesn’t look up from the screens, but the sound of all those pieces rattling around inside the box is enough for her to get it.
“Oh,” she says. “Sure.”
I set up the board. Without asking, I divvy up the armies into hers and mine, and begin placing them all across the game’s map. We’ve played this game so much I don’t need to ask her which countries she’d like to claim, or which territories she’d like to fortify. She always chooses the U.S. and Asia. I happily place her pieces on those territories, knowing that from my more easily defended territories I will quickly grow armies strong enough to crush hers.
I’m so absorbed in setting up the game I don’t even notice Katarina’s silence, her absorption. It is only when I crack my neck loudly and she neglects to scold me for it—“Please don’t,” she usually says, squeamish about the sound it makes—that I look up and see her, staring openmouthed at one of her monitors.
“Kat?” I ask.
She’s silent.
I get up from the floor, stepping across the game board to join her at her desk. It is only then that I see what has so completely captured her attention. A breaking news item about some kind of explosion on a bus in England.
I groan.
Katarina is always checking the internet and the news for mysterious deaths. Deaths that could be the work of the Mogadorians. Deaths that could mean the second member of the Garde has been defeated. She’s been doing it since we came to Earth, and I’ve grown frustrated with the doom-and-gloom of it.