Free Fractured by Sarah Fine

grimace, showing all his crooked teeth. A weird wheezing sound was coming from his throat. I was about to ask him if he needed Raphael, but then realized he wasn’t in pain.
    He was laughing.
    Malachi leaned down and offered his hand, which Henry accepted. Once Henry was on his feet, the two of them stepped apart, both breathing hard. Malachi gave Henry a genuine smile as the older Guard wiped his face on his sleeve.
    “Henry’s a very crafty fighter,” said Malachi.
    Henry grunted. “Doesn’t matter much when your opponent is both stronger and more efficiently brutal. You have some things to teach me. I’ve always been better at a distance. In the Wasteland, I used a crossbow.”
    “What do the Guards in the Wasteland do if there aren’t Mazikin to fight?” I asked.
    Henry turned to me, his face serious. “We protect anyone who needs it. There are creatures there. Wolves as tall as a man and twice as broad. Vultures with twenty-foot wingspans. Humans who have lost touch with anything that made them human. In a place where everyone’s a murderer, there are still different kinds of evil. Lots of ’em.” It seemed like he was avoiding my eyes.
    I looked him over. Henry’d basically just confirmed he was a killer, but then again … technically, all of us were. And he’d been chosen as a Guard and then chosen for this mission—where he had yet to disobey an order, unlike Jim. I was beginning to believe Henry might prove useful. “What’s the range of your crossbow?” I asked.
    Henry’s eyebrows rose, like that wasn’t the question he expected me to ask. But then his thin lips formed the faintest smile. “Sixty yards, maybe?” His gaze flitted cautiously to mine.
    “In other words, you can shoot to kill from far away.”
    He nodded.
    “That could be really important,” I said. “Maybe you have something to teach us , Henry.”
    He bowed his head. “I’m going to go wash up before we go,” he said quietly, and marched up the stairs, that faint smile still on his face.
    “That was good, Lela,” Malachi said when the door to the basement clicked shut.
    “What?” I tore my eyes from the stairs to look at him. He was wearing warm-up pants and a sweaty T-shirt that clung to his lean torso.
    “Henry thought you would judge him for his past crimes. But you showed him that you value what he can do now. You’re earning his loyalty. It’s a good thing to have as his commander.”
    “If only I could do the same with Jim,” I said.
    He nodded, his jaw tightening. “I don’t think Jim has been a Guard for very long.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    His eyes met mine. “Because when Guards are first sentenced, they often don’t … accept it.”
    “Did you?”
    He rubbed his hand over the hair on the back of his head. “I tried to escape at least three times before I realized it was impossible. Worse than that, I attacked my Captain at the time, Philip, and Takeshi, who was my Lieutenant, on numerous occasions, unable to control my anger about the situation.”
    “How long did it take you to adjust?” I asked.
    Malachi considered this. “It took me over a year to resign myself to my new existence.”
    “A year?” I asked in a choked voice.
    Malachi folded his arms over his chest. “Hopefully, Jim will learn faster than I did.” The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “You certainly have.”
    “I’m trying, but I’ll be honest: part of me wants to blow off my responsibilities and go to a movie or something.”
    He smiled and closed the distance between us. “Could I go with you?”
    “Of course,” I whispered, suddenly breathless as his fingertips skimmed along my neck.
    “There are so many things I’d like to experience here,” he murmured.
    “What would you do if you could do anything?” I asked, remembering how he had looked when he was at school: like he’d hit the lottery. “If you were free. If you weren’t a Guard.”
    He pondered that for a few moments. “I think