Summary
Chapter 6: June
June attends Metias’s elegant funeral. At the banquet after the ceremony, she sits next to Chian, an official who mentored her brother when he first became an officer. Chian also administered June’s Trial. He makes a few insensitive remarks, which annoys June. Thomas holds her hand under the table, and reveals that Chian has a major grudge against Day, who is responsible for a large scar on his face.
Chapter 7: Day
Day heads to a bar, hoping to learn more about the man with the plague medicine. The pretty bartender, Kaede, flirts with him and tells him that she’s seen the man. Although many people want to buy medicine from him, he claims he’ll only give the cure to one person, who must meet him at “the ten second place” (71) at midnight. When Day hears this, he knows the man is looking for him. One of Day’s most spectacular thefts was a bank burglary that he committed in ten seconds. Although he’s certain this is a police trap, he believes they’ll bring the medicine anyway to lure him out. He begins to plot ways to get it without being arrested.
Chapter 8: June
Day is right - the man with the medicine is a trap. June has sent scouts to each sector to spread the word for Day to meet her at the ten-second place. She doesn’t expect to arrest him tonight, but she hopes that he will appear and leave some clues that will help her track him. When she arrives, she learns that Day has rewired the bank’s speaker system so he can talk to her without giving away his location. June tries to be coy about who she works for, but Day recognizes her as an officer by the Canto knot she uses to tie her cloak, part of her disguise. Day flees without taking the medicine, but June is able to tell from his accent and his habit of calling her "cousin" that he is from the Lake sector - a valuable clue. However, Commander Jameson is annoyed that she gave away who she works for.
Chapter 9: Day
Tess and Day sleep under a pier by the lake. Day remembers how he first met Tess. He found her picking through a garbage can with some other homeless children, and offered her food and help cleaning her scraped knees. He expected Tess to leave after he helped her, but she followed him around until they developed a kind of partnership.
Tess wakes Day when she hears a strange gurgling noise. Two police officers cross the pier overhead, and Tess and Day hear them discussing how the new plague strain has appeared in the Zein sector. After they pass, Day looks at the ground and realizes they have been sleeping on a large metal plate, engraved with the Republic seal and the number 318.
Chapter 10: June
June’s next assignment is to go undercover in the Lake sector to track Day. Today, though, she is helping Thomas and Commander Jameson interrogate a captured spy from the Colonies. Although Thomas beats the spy brutally, he doesn’t give up any information and only talks about the future, when he believes the Colonies will take over the Republic. June is upset by the “cruel pleasure” Thomas takes in beating the man, who reminds her of Metias (93). However, she forces herself to watch because she knows that torturing prisoners is part of her chosen career. That night, she looks at family photos and listens to a recording of her meeting with Day at the bank.
The next morning, June dresses like a beggar and hangs around downtown Los Angeles listening to homeless people to see if anyone mentions Day. No one does, and June is disgusted by the filthy streets and grinding poverty in this sector. She sleeps in an alley that night. When she wakes up, she is about to continue her search when she stumbles on a Skiz fight.
Chapter 11: Day
A Skiz fight, Day explains, is a fistfight that onlookers can bet on. Anyone who wants to fight can volunteer, but once you win a fight, you can’t stop accepting challenges until you lose. The winner gets a cut of the pot, and they get to choose their next opponent from the audience. Day and Tess are betting on this Skiz fight to raise money to buy plague cure for Eden. The latest champion is Kaede, the flirtatious bartender that Day met in Chapter 7. She wins a few fights and nearly picks scrawny Tess as her next opponent, but June, in disguise, steps in and comments that picking Tess hardly seems fair. Kaede decides to fight June instead.
Analysis
In these chapters, we learn more about the Republic’s geography. It seems to maintain diplomatic relationships with foreign countries like China, and directs all of its resources toward fighting the Colonies. Interestingly, the flag of the Patriots, a resistance group that works with the Colonies, is the same as the American flag. Although the Republic has not been separate from the Colonies for very long, there are already some major cultural differences. For example, people in the Republic wear white for mourning. They also use a pledge of allegiance that is based on the United States’ current pledge, but is tweaked slightly.
It’s worth noting that not everything about the Republic is bad. In some ways, it is more advanced than the United States is currently. For example, it is very culturally diverse, and people from different races are spread throughout the city, rather than being segregated to their own neighborhoods. Furthermore, race doesn’t seem to be a barrier to achievement - the high-ranking characters we meet come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Likewise, women are among the highest ranks of the military and June is referred to as the Republic's "golden girl" - clearly they think she is important to the future of the entire country (181).
These chapters include many descriptions of clothing, which will become an important motif in Legend. The characters pay close attention to each other’s clothes, but not because they are shallow or materialistic. Instead, characters like June and Day scrutinize others' clothes to get information about the person wearing them. For example, Day realizes from June’s Canto knot that she works for the military. For her part, June guesses the Colonies spy was probably caught because his uniform’s brass buttons are fake.
Many of the characters in Legend are morally complex. For example, Thomas is very cruel to the Colonies spy, but he is kind and caring when he’s interacting with June. Metias is also a complicated character. He was a respected captain in the military and a model Republic citizen - qualities that suggest he endorses the government’s immoral policies. However, he showed a spirit of responsibility and self-sacrifice when he skipped his induction ceremony to take care of June. He also shows compassion in June’s flashback, when he urges his sister never to judge poor people. As Legend continues, Metias will become a symbol of innocence and decency, even though his job sometimes required him to do terrible things.
This section also showcases how extreme the poverty is in some sectors of Los Angeles. Although the Skiz fights are an exciting, suspenseful part of the novel, they also show how desperate some people are for cash in the Republic. Lu has said in multiple interviews that the Skiz fights were partially inspired by video games. However, it’s also possible that they are based on the “Bumfights” controversy that occurred in 2006, just as Lu was beginning her career as a writer. The controversy started when videos were released that showed young people paying homeless men to fight for their entertainment. In this incident and in Legend, poor people are driven to desperate, sometimes violent measures to survive.
