Bad Bloods

by Shannon A. Thompson

  Adam may have blushed, but the bruising made it too difficult to tell. I felt my own face heat up at the scene.

  “Hellooooo…” Britney exaggerated her tone, then slanted her body until she bent at a ninety-degree angle. “Caleb.”

  “Hey, kid.” I forced myself to focus on her, then laid a hand on her hair. She giggled, jumped up on the bed, and began to hum. My mind started to clear.

  “We didn’t go to Mama Jia,” she confessed, her cheek warm against my arm, but I already expected that. In fact, I expected a lot. As I stared at Violet across the room, I could tell she looked at me differently than she had before. Her normally curious eyes had darkened, her stare tensed, her movements deliberately slow and in control. But she couldn’t hide the way her shadows twitched and twirled.

  “Why don’t you go meet Stephanie with Kuthun?” I asked Britney.

  The little girl lit up at the suggestion. “That’s Stephanie? The Stephanie?” she asked. When I nodded, she begged Kuthun with her eyes.

  He relented, but shot me a look that told me to hurry up whatever plan I had conjured up in the two minutes I’d come back to life again.

  “Are you really Stephanie?” Britney asked Catelyn from a distance before Kuthun took her hand.

  Catelyn looked back over her shoulder and nodded.

  Britney still wasn’t buying it. “I thought you were Serena.”

  “Smart girl.” Catelyn smirked. “I’ve heard we look alike.”

  “Are you twins?” she asked, then Kuthun stepped in.

  “Enough questions from a distance, bunny,” he said before walking her over to talk to Catelyn properly. I’d have a couple of minutes at best. Without me having to voice my thoughts, Violet seemed to understand. She walked right on over, but when I shifted so she would have space on the bed, she didn’t sit down.

  “I thought you should know,” Violet began, her voice as cold as a grave, “that she went out…on her own terms.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “What’d she say?” I asked.

  Violet’s left eyebrow arched as she cocked her hip out to the right. “That she’s your mom, for one.”

  I flinched.

  “And you were born with stilts,” she continued, sitting down this time. “I already told Cal. So, he’ll get tested when he can.”

  I followed her stare to Calhoun, Adam, Catelyn, and the others. We might have been looking at the same people, but we saw different people entirely. To Violet, Calhoun was her savior—a leader to the Northern Flock’s leader, and the man who provided shelter in her time of need. To me, Calhoun had been nothing but a disappointment. A drunk. A customer who happened to give me life. But between both sides of our stories, one person remained. An identity with too many complexities to define. Perhaps parts of him were dislikable, but that meant other parts of him were likable as well. The impossible part was deciding which side mattered more, or if both sides were essentially the same.

  I sighed. “If he hasn’t shown by now, he probably doesn’t have it.”

  “It took you thirteen years.”

  “And it’s been twenty overall,” I pointed out.

  Her lip quivered, but her questions didn’t stop. “You’re not a hooker.”

  “I never said I was.” Though, I felt gratitude for her more realistic approach than the cop’s escort definition. “The cop assumed, and so did you.”

  Violet squinted, studying me as if we had just met today. “What about the scratches?”

  “Connelly.” I shrugged. “We got into a fight.” I cringed as I realized how that sounded. “It was more like a heated argument.” Connelly had grabbed me, not the other way around, but I doubted it made much of a difference to Violet. She looked upon me skeptically.

  “And the shirt?”

  I recalled how I had unbuttoned it in front of her, half playing on her fears and half out of honestly needing to take it off. “It’s easier to play when I’m not chained up to my neck,” I explained, but I was done explaining myself for now. “Do you mind if I get some air?”

  Surprisingly, Violet didn’t fight it. She waved her hand toward the now-open jail cell, and I walked out before Britney, Kuthun, or any of the others could notice.

  I beelined for the bathroom I’d seen when originally being led into the cell, and entered with the expectation I would return soon. But I couldn’t.

  Instead, I stood at the sink, my hands on the linoleum, my feet on the tiled floor, and my eyes burning. Every tear brought on another memory. Jia-Li teaching me the alphabet. Jia-Li buying a new book for me to read. Jia-Li and the shadow puppets. Jia-Li pushing me into the sea, only for the shadows to save me.

  My heart pounded at the thought.

  Could Violet be more than she seemed?

  With that thought, I splashed water on my face and rushed out into the hallway. I had questions of my own, after all. Questions that seemed impossible to ask and worse to answer, but I was determined—until I neared the corner.

  “They’re cute.” Kuthun’s voice curled around the hallway, but his tone made the words sound as if he had said something completely different. An insinuation, I realized. One directed at Violet of all people.

  “They’re not together,” Violet clarified.

  I pictured Adam and Catelyn—a Northern Flock boy and a Southern Flock girl—who both lost loves in the Northern Flock Massacre. But Kuthun saw what others couldn’t. Kuthun could see all connections—past, present, and future.

  “You see so little of love,” Kuthun said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “I see enough,” Violet snapped back, then she spoke the last words I expected to hear. “You love Caleb, don’t you?”

  I pressed my back against the wall, listening and wishing I wasn’t listening at the same time. How could I move, though? My heart was as attached to Violet as it was to Kuthun, but Kuthun didn’t have strings. It was an aspect of his reality I always wanted to understand, but he continuously ignored my wishes for an explanation. Now, out of all the people in Vendona, he opened up to Violet instead.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” he asked. When I peered around the corner, I watched his fingers dance at the invisible strings he could see but couldn’t change. “If you knew something wouldn’t work from the beginning, would you try anyway?”

  The burden of the future hung heavy on his shoulders.

  I imagined Michele—Violet’s friend—felt the same way.

  “Why wouldn’t your feelings matter?” Violet countered.

  “Because,” Kuthun said, “they don’t matter to anyone else. Not in the end. Not really.”

  “You don’t get to decide that about people,” she snapped. “Especially not Caleb.”

  Kuthun sighed at my name. “I suppose we have something in common, little ghost.”

  Then, silence.

  After, something worse than silence.

  “I don’t love him,” Violet said.

  “No,” Kuthun agreed as I inched away. “Not yet.”

  “You don’t understand,” she continued, “I’ve never loved anyone that way. Not once.”

  A painful pause worse than the first fit the space between them before Kuthun asked, “Aren’t you lonely?”

  “No,” she said simply. “I have secrets to keep me company. And my shadows.”

  I watched as they laughed. Together. Naturally. Like Kuthun and Violet understood one another more than I understood either one of them.

  I held my breath and kept my eyes shut as I tiptoed back, painstakingly counting every second as I walked backward so I could walk forward again. In a way, I wished I could rewind time if I tried hard enough—maybe even find a bad blood who could do just that—but Britney’s abilities were enough for me, weren’t they?

  After a breath, I forced myself to walk forward. I turned the corner, pretending to be surprised by Violet and Kuthun’s presence in the hallway. However, neither of them seemed surprised to see me. Like one entity, they stared
back, nonchalant. Maybe Kuthun had seen my strings and told her what he’d seen—how she was tied to the sea and I was tied to darkness, while Kuthun lacked a string completely. But maybe neither of them cared as much as I hoped. I would never have a chance to ask.

  Catelyn took center stage. “Good,” she exclaimed as she clapped her hands once for attention. “You’re back.”

  I stared between her and Adam, hoping to see whatever Kuthun could, but then I concentrated on Catelyn’s big blue eyes rather than the scar on her cheek. No matter how much makeup she put on it, a hint of the injury peeked through, another mystery.

  “Listen,” she began, “while you were…detained, another wall exploded.”

  “It’s flooding the eastern side,” Calhoun confirmed.

  I stared at Violet, who hesitated. “The bordel had an inch of water on the floor.”

  “Good thing we moved,” Kuthun said under his breath.

  Catelyn’s voice rose over his. “A mob formed this morning,” she said, “and that’s not the worst of it.”

  I rubbed my head. “What could possibly be worse than that?”

  A woman cleared her throat behind me. When I turned, I faced Marion Lachance and her daughter. Both thin. Both regal. Both very, very tired.

  “Come quick,” Marion said, her French accent thicker than usual. “There’s something you need to see.”

  Footage of the southern wall crumbling spanned three screens in Marion Lachance’s office. Even though we had been caught talking to her illegally, she had a hand in releasing us as much as Henderson did, and though Henderson couldn’t make it, Catelyn brought his news with her.

  “Connelly is succeeding, whether we like it or not,” she said, and Adam agreed.

  “And we helped her, whether we like it or not.”

  Catelyn sighed, but her eyes lingered on Adam a little too long.

  Beyond Kuthun’s strings, I thought he saw more than I did because he stood at a distance.

  Sometimes, like with paintings, distance meant seeing the whole picture rather than the memorized segment. Whenever anyone was up close and personal, it was easy to forget that we only knew segments of a person—the pieces they wanted us to see rather than all the parts of their life they lived.

  My life, for instance, was divided between my loyalty to Calhoun, Daniel, and Adam—while trying to figure out if that loyalty fit in with my magnetism toward Kuthun and Caleb. How could a shadow be split between two people? How could I see myself as a person when I wasn’t? When would any of it make sense? And all of this was happening during a storm.

  “What is that?” Adam asked, pointing at the weather map Marion uploaded to a nearby screen.

  She tapped her pen against the neon green blur rotating over the ocean. “That,” she emphasized, “is the formation of a tropical storm.”

  Though storms had hit Vendona a hundred times, the unfamiliar term shook me, and my mind raced with answers that would never come. “What’s a tropical storm?”

  Marion frowned, and only then did I notice her smudged lipstick and frayed hair. I doubted she’d slept at all. “Tropical storms can form into hurricanes.”

  That word I knew. That word I had experienced.

  In the sixty-four years I had lived as a shadow, I had watched hurricanes hit the shore of Vendona a hundred and one times, but I had never been whole when they happened. Most of them moved away on their own. Sometimes, they dissipated. Other times, they pounded the outside wall so hard I thought that it would fall. But never had I considered what it would feel like without the wall’s protection.

  “Fifty years ago, they could detect these a week or so ahead of time and estimate where they’d hit,” Marion explained. “Unfortunately, we’re only a little bit better.”

  “Our trajectory might not be accurate, but…” Catelyn cut in only to press a button and let the technology speak for her.

  The green blur grew, stretching out and taking over. Once it seemed to consume the ocean, it began to circulate, change colors, and charge toward the shore. Vendona’s shore. It hit with vengeance. And it continued to rain down long after initial contact.

  “It’s a Category Three, maybe Four.” Catelyn spoke scientifically, as though she were disconnected and it wasn’t headed straight for us.

  “Which means what, exactly?” Caleb asked.

  “Well…” Catelyn tilted her head back and forth as if to assess what to say and how to say it. “If it stays as a Category Three—which I hope it will—we’re talking major home damage. Leveled power lines. Whole roofs ripped off. That sort of thing.” Before anyone could find their own words, she added one last stipulation. “Vendona’s been hit by a hundred hurricanes before, but…”

  “This is the first time without the eastern wall,” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  In Vendona’s entirety, only the eastern side shared their inner and outer wall, the one that led to the ocean. The same one that would’ve killed Adam if Caleb hadn’t been there.

  “That explosion damaged the levees, too,” Marion said, “and levee breaches will lead to massive flooding.”

  “We predict the surge will do the most damage,” Catelyn explained, but everyone blinked.

  “What’s a surge?” Kuthun asked.

  “It’s a wall of water,” I answered, but Marion tsked.

  “That’s a misconception.”

  “Thank god,” I muttered. When everyone stared at me, I raised my hands in surrender. “What? I’m tired of walls.”

  Catelyn sighed, “Well, it can be a wall of water, but it’s generally water that increases in height over time. In a very little amount of time,” she emphasized. “Before you know it, four inches of water can turn into four feet. Or more.”

  Tension filled the room.

  Caleb eyed the approaching disaster. “How much water are we talking, exactly?”

  “Five meters,” Catelyn said, but with one look, she could tell we didn’t understand. “We’re talking sixteen feet of water.”

  “The outskirts will drown,” I said. Just like Vespasien warned. But Catelyn shook her head.

  “That’s not true,” she said, then explained. “The outskirts are connected to the outer wall.” The original border that was built when the country crumbled. “And because of the eastern opening…”

  “The outskirts have a wider drain,” Adam filled in.

  Catelyn nodded solemnly. “Essentially, the entire purpose of the outskirts was for waste.”

  Not for people. Not for animals. Just for trash.

  “Add on the destruction of the inner wall, the one between the Highlands and the outskirts, and you’re turning the city into a massive drain,” Catelyn said. As she said it, I imagined the buildings I’d seen a million times from the sky before.

  Two concentric circles encasing a city, like a target. I’d built a replica on the island.

  Caleb met my gaze as if remembering the contraption, then he turned to Catelyn. “What are you insinuating?”

  For the first time all night, Catelyn hesitated to answer, but after touching the scar on her face, she decided on a simple explanation.

  “The outskirts won’t drown,” she said. “The Highlands will.”

  A caravan of twelve cars, four trucks, and one limo escorted our crew back to the inner wall, and then parked around us in a circle so no one could see who was leaving. So many walls. So many barriers to break. So many that might be underwater one day.

  “Are we seriously going to leave them after this?” Violet asked, folding her arms as she eyed Adelio, Marion, and Catelyn.

  Behind us, Kuthun played with Britney. In front of us, Adam spoke with Ami. And now, it was just Violet and me. Even though we were surrounded by people, I always felt we stood alone in a room when we were together.

  “They have more resources than we do,” I said. “They’ll be fine.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Violet said, but her unspoken words were stronger.

  The
storm wasn’t the only threat. Connelly was one, too, and we had caused that. Ever since we brought her into the Highlands, the police had been searching for her. The Highlands were on high alert, but it turned out that the Highlands lacked security lights like the outskirts did. There was no way to warn regular citizens except the news, and most Highlanders didn’t watch the news.

  What a luxury it was not to worry about politics.

  “Politics isn’t the place for little girls,” Violet had scoffed before she cursed the higher-ups. “It wouldn’t be if they watched. If they took responsibility.”

  If, if, if.

  So many questions popped up, and few answers were given.

  Despite being unable to find Connelly, she made her presence widely known.

  In fact, she broadcasted a report that she’d tear down another part of the inner wall tomorrow. The northern part. And she called upon others to help, especially those from the inside.

  Logan II was nowhere to be seen.

  Whether he took his sister back remained a mystery, but one thing was clear.

  Connelly was prepared for destruction, and she had no idea what kind of damage she could cause.

  Between what Vespasien claimed and what Catelyn explained, Connelly believed she was wrecking the outside, while—in reality—she was dooming her own city. But we had other problems to fix before we tackled that.

  I turned to leave, only to hear my name. “Wait.” Ami brushed my arm and sent chills up my spine. I knew how she ripped skin off with her touch, but not always. Today, I was lucky she wasn’t nervous. “Can I talk to you both?”

  Violet nodded as if she could speak for both of us.

  “They said we’ll be fine,” Ami continued. “Just a little more damaged than the outskirts.”

  “That’s good,” Violet said, but her voice lacked enthusiasm. “Be careful anyway.”

  “You, too,” Ami insisted, but when Violet went to leave, Ami touched her arm, too. “And Vi?”

  Violet tensed at her alleviated tone.

  “I’m glad I got to see you again,” Ami said, her brown eyes welling with unshed tears. “Tell the others I miss them.”