He certainly wasn’t embarrassed to talk to Cara.
I’d brought my tablet to finish slogging through the Burke essays, but instead found myself engrossed in La Morte D’Arthur, trying not to think about David and the way his lips had felt on my hand the other night.
I was so caught up in my world of Arthurian knights that I didn’t even notice the Rootless girl trudging past me until she fell down and cried out. Her lead-lined bag landed with a thud and several spent nuclear charges tumbled onto the grass, their red lights flickering.
What is she doing here?
The Rootless weren’t allowed in any of the parks or public spaces in the city. They could only walk on the roads to the various discreet back doors leading to gentry basements where they collected the charges, and then take those same roads to their part of the city, where the charges were taken by train to be disposed of.
She must have been at least my age, but she was as small as a child. A sickly green tinged her skin, which was mottled with bruises, and her hair was falling out in clumps. I set down my tablet to help, but hesitated a moment. She was still on all fours on the ground, crying softly, bloody mucus dripping from her nose. I could see the sores caked on her hands. I slid back behind the tree trunk so that she couldn’t see me.
With a wave of shame, I realized that I was afraid to touch her. I was afraid of her sores and her blood and her crusted eyes. Even though I knew the right thing was to help her up, I couldn’t bring myself to stand and walk over to her.
“Do you need help?” I heard someone ask kindly.
David Dana was kneeling next to her, taking her by the elbows and gently raising her up. He must have come from the other side of my tree, because I hadn’t seen him. He put a steadying hand on the small of her back, the motion more warm and tender than when he had danced with Cara last night. There was no hesitation in his touch, no revulsion in his eyes.
My heart pounded and I felt heat rise to my face. Why was he in the park? Had he seen me? All I’d wanted to do today was avoid thinking about David, and here he was ten feet away, touching the bare skin of a Rootless girl, without a second thought, something even I, for all my progressive views, couldn’t manage.
She sniffled, clutching his arms for support. “Sorry, sir, clumsy of me.” She let go, but she swayed where she stood.
“Where are you walking to?” David asked. “Let me order you a taxi.”
“A city taxi won’t take me, sir. On account of the radiation.” I could see dried blood on her neck from where it had run out of her ears.
“Then you must take my private car to your home.”
“No, no. I’ll be fine. Please, take no trouble.”
David made sure she could stand, then he bent over. “It is no trouble.” He started to collect the charges and put them back into her bag.
“Please, don’t handle the charges!” She tried to reach for the bag, but stumbled and almost fell.
David finished putting them in the bag. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
He was either brave or stupid. If the charges hadn’t been collected on time, the boxes could already be leaking radiation.
“Can you walk down to the street?” he asked, shouldering the bag. I could see the weight of it drag his shoulder down.
She nodded and took a step, then fell. Without hesitation, he picked her up in his arms and carried her like a child, the bag thumping heavily against his leg as he sidestepped down the hill.
And then they were gone.
I rested my head against the tree. Despite our strange encounters, David still struck me as someone primarily concerned with his own interests and his own image. And yet, when nobody was watching, he’d actually touched a Rootless person. Touched her and carried her and helped her, without hesitation, without thought. No wonder he’d scoffed at my jaded pronouncement that there were no knights errant.
He was one.
The swelling of summer had brought no evidence of who’d vandalized our house, although the reports of arrests and raids on the Rootless grew more frequent. Servants scoured the front of the house, but the paint had eaten into the old stone, and a disturbing shadow still darkened the places where the words had been. Life went on almost as normal, except that my mother now shuddered away from the sight of Rootless charge collectors trudging along the road, and my father spent all his time meeting with the other landowners in the area. Security measures were taken around the house: cameras, motion detectors, guards in gray uniforms, the atomic symbol stitched in red on their backs. The thought of more damage to my home twisted my stomach. I found myself pressing fingertips to paneled walls and rubbing drapes idly, as if reassuring the house.
About a week after I saw David in Liberty Park, Mother and I were invited to a brunch at the Lawrences. The weather was lovely, consistently warm and only occasionally rainy now that we were in June, turning the grass green and forcing slender shoots of the genetically modified crops out of the soil. It was the perfect day to read the chapter in The History of the Last War about the changing weather patterns, and how the rise in temperatures in the twenty-first century had affected the flora and fauna of the Midwest.
Kansas used to be a state of dry plains, ideal for the grazing of livestock and the cultivation of wheat, the book explained. Precipitation was less than half of what it is today, only 26 inches a year. . . .
The adults were strolling in the vast Lawrence pleasure garden, while the teenagers had opted to stay on the patio and drink plum wine. Cara was using her tablet to talk to her friends, and Mark Everly was staring dreamily at the back of Marianne Wilder’s head while she loaded her plate with more crisp spring rolls. One of the Lawrence boys reached over to snap at Cara’s bra strap, and she turned to give him a look of such venom that even I was startled.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “Don’t you ever touch me.”
“Oh, now look who is all too good to be touched,” Stuart Lawrence mocked.
Philip Wilder snorted nearby. Cara’s fingers twitched, but so did her chin, as if she was holding back tears. She abruptly stood, sweeping her tablet and stylus into a crocodile-skin purse, and left the patio without a word. Stuart giggled while Philip grinned and stretched his long legs under the wrought-iron patio table.
Despite summers warm enough to breed thunderstorms and microbursts, the average temperature has been dropping steadily over the past two hundred years while snowfall increases.
Still pretending to read, I narrowed my eyes at the thought of the boys across the patio, trying to remember everything I could about the night of Cara’s attack. I thought I remembered the Lawrence boys laughing in the ballroom after we found Cara, but Philip Wilder hadn’t been there, unless perhaps he was hiding from the constables and my father after committing his crime.
I mentally added Philip and the Lawrence boys to the list of people I needed to talk to, right after Cara and David Dana, the strange and unexpected savior of fallen Rootless. He stayed on my mind for the rest of the brunch and for the rest of the afternoon, even while I wandered the dusty stacks of the university library. It was like the thought of him had leached the color out of everything else, him and how unflinchingly he’d helped that girl while I cowered behind a tree. It didn’t escape my attention, however, that he’d believed himself unseen. I doubted he would have helped her if Cara or I had been standing next to him.
I gave up on the books after an hour of mostly unproductive browsing at the university library. I started the two-mile walk home from the campus, ignoring the clouds dragging their soggy bellies across the sky. Heavy raindrops splattered the stone walk, here and there, with increasing frequency. Soon the downpour would begin in earnest. I dug out an old book from my bag and held it over my head, but the rain was falling in sheets and curtains, drenching everything. The thin white dress I wore quickly became heavy and dripping, soaking me to the skin. A car pulled next to me and David leaned out the back window. “Get in!” he called over the noise of the rain.
It was too wet to argue. I climbed in the car.
For a moment, my leg was pressed against his. He nonchalantly slid over to give me more room in the seat. Goose bumps raised along my arms, and not only from the sudden chill of being wet in an air-conditioned car.
He pressed a button. “Back to Landry Park, please,” he told the driver. He caught my look. “I was just over at your house to call on you, but then your mother told me you sometimes go to the university in the afternoon.”
“Yes.” I ducked my head, worried he’d see the thousands of questions I had for him written on my face.
“But clearly you are not there, you are here in my car.”
“Yes.”
He settled into the seat and folded his arms, giving me an amused stare. “Don’t just say yes to everything I say. That is not how a conversation works.”
“Sorry,” I said, and looked out the window. So many strange thoughts and ideas burned at my throat, but I didn’t know how to give voice to them, how to ask a person I barely knew—but shared such intimate moments with—about his real motivations. Was he privately kind and publicly cavalier? Or just as subject to his own sudden whims as I was?
He threw up his hands. “Madeline! It is impossible to get anything out of you!”
“Sorry,” I said again.
“You’re shivering,” he observed. “How rude of me not to notice.” He slid closer again, so that his knee was nudged against the wet skirt of my dress. He shrugged off the cardigan he wore over his button-down shirt and tie and draped it over my shoulders. I could feel the warmth of his fingers through the wet fabric of the dress, branding my skin. He smoothed the thin sweater against my neck and shoulders.
“Warmer?” he asked quietly.
His hands still rested on the sweater, on my collarbone. “Yes.”
“Good.”
He was still so close, so close to me. Dancing in crowded ballrooms being the exception, I had never been this near to a man I wasn’t related to, and certainly not in a wet and clinging dress. I wished I could name what effect David had on me, what it was that both made me nervous and vaguely irritated and made me think strange and bold thoughts about the way his lips were shaped and the way his waist narrowed into his hips.
His fingers trailed from the sweater to the hollow of my neck, where he took my necklace between his fingers. He lifted the heavy cameo away from my chest, studying the black and white silhouette of Genevieve Landry, the atomic symbol rendered in pearl at the bottom. “This is beautiful.”
“It was my grandmother’s.”
“She looks so sad.”
I thought of her portrait in the gallery and of the forlorn expression both she and my uncle shared. Someone told me once that my grandfather never let her leave the house, not even to visit family. After a while, she’d faded away, like a rose left too long in a vase.
I coughed and looked out the window. He—reluctantly it seemed—pulled his hand back and reached for a tumbler of gin sitting near his seat.
“How are you enjoying Kansas City so far?” I asked politely, pretending that my neck wasn’t still tingling from his fingers.
“Oh, it’s fine.” He waved a hand at the window. “Lovely houses, birthplace of the gentry, et cetera, et cetera.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“About the city? I am not. But the people—there are some that I will truly regret leaving when I take up my post in the Rockies.” His words were relaxed, but his fingers betrayed him, tapping quickly against his glass.
Who was he talking about? There was no doubt that I wanted him to be talking about me, if the hammering in my chest was any indication, but he could also be talking about Cara or even some other girl I knew nothing about.
Or maybe he was simply being polite, and I was behaving very stupidly right now.
He took a drink and then offered his glass to me, as if he was used to such casually intimate gestures. As if we were.
I shook my head. He resumed gazing out the window, his head braced on his hand. “Yes, I will miss the people here quite a bit. I hope to see much more of them before I leave. I hope to see much more of you, Madeline.”
I felt like I had been plunged in ice water. I searched desperately for something to say—anything—that would demonstrate, to him and to myself, how completely unaffected I was by this.
“And Cara?” I knew as soon as I said it that no answer he could rejoin with would give me any pleasure, but it was as if every unhappy thought about David and Cara had crowded into my brain, making it impossible to think about anything else. He wasn’t allowed to make offhand comments that made me fight for composure when he spent his evenings brushing cheeks with Cara on the dance floor.
He glanced over at me without moving his head.
I gazed back without answering. I had significant practice at being silent.
“Yes, I will be sad to leave Cara, too,” he finally said. “Tell me, have they found her attacker or does your father just plan on arresting all the Rootless in Kansas City until there are none left?”
I tensed. Yes, I had criticized my father’s actions, had witnessed their direct result at the Public Hospital, but having a stranger disparage my family was completely different and it made me defensive. “You know about the vandals at Landry Park. It’s hardly surprising that it would further my father’s desire to find the attacker at any cost.”
“At any cost,” he repeated softly. “Spoken like a true Landry.”
“Well, I am a Landry first and foremost—”
“And what, a Madeline second? Don’t you ever want to be something other than a vessel for your family’s legacy? I thought you felt trapped by that place, by all the stupid rules set down by your father. What changed?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I told him, my voice cold. “You aren’t going to inherit an estate and the responsibility that comes with it. My father has a duty to his fellow landowners and to this city to keep the people safe—”
“But no duty to the Rootless,” David interrupted. “Right? They do not need safekeeping because they are not really people.”
“You know that I don’t believe that.”
“No, Madeline, I don’t know what you believe. Apparently, I don’t know anything about you except that you care about your house and your family more than anything else. We are here, by the way.”
And with that, he reached across me to open the door, his entire torso in my lap. I breathed in sharply at the contact, and David jerked upright. “Keep the sweater,” he said. “I’m sick of it anyway.”
I stepped into the rain and the car sped away, the tires hissing on the wet drive.
• • •
A week passed. I kept waiting for David to seek me out, like he had before, to gallantly apologize or even to bait me into another fight—I would have welcomed either. What I couldn’t stand was this vacuum of contact, this week without a single dinner party or dance or anything. David preoccupied me more than finding out the truth about Cara’s attack or convincing my father to allow me to study—and it infuriated me to no end that he had infected my mind in such a way.
One of the servants poured me another glass of tea, while another mimosa arrived for Mother on a silver tray. I realized she had been speaking to me.
“Pardon?” I asked.
Mother tilted her face up to the sun, the light catching hints of silver in her dark hair. “I just love lunch out on the terrace. Don’t you?”
I did normally. Solar-powered coolers pushed away the worst of the crushing pressure of the storm on the horizon, so I could enjoy the wild colors of the flower garden and the rustling of the nearby apple orchard in peace. A light fruit smell drifted toward us. And in the dead space between my graduation and the deadline for applying for the university, I could devote more time to reading whatever I chose, though I kept coming back to Arthurian legends, wondering what David was reading. Which, of course, invariably led to agonizing
meditations on our disastrous car ride last week.
“I saw Christine Dana yesterday,” Mother said after a long drink, beginning her weekly rundown of the best gossip. “Do you know she was at a luncheon with your father and several of his business associates? She said they were just discussing the possibility of her investing in some of the Landry lumber industries, but it galls me that Alexander allows her at business luncheons. Whenever I want to come, he insists on my staying away. As if he’s embarrassed by me.”
I’d opened a book and was reading while picking at a plate of fried dumplings and coconut sweets, but I paused. I was reminded of my own thoughts about David and Cara.
“Nasty bit of business about Philip Wilder losing his temper during a boxing match. Why they claim it is a gentleman’s sport is beyond me.”
“Who was he fighting?” I asked idly, still trying to read and not to think about David.
“Your cousin Tarleton. Philip is taller, but Tarleton is quicker. All of us Lawrences are.”
“Tarleton probably cheated.”
Mother agreed and closed her eyes. “How my young cousins can be so wild when my uncle is so genteel, I will never know. Could be Aunt Lacey. She’s a Lyons, and they made their money smuggling from the East. They are natural thieves.”
I rolled my eyes. “Half the families in America make money from smuggling or from investing in smuggling.”
“Well, you just know everything, don’t you?” Mother adjusted herself to get more sun, then continued. “The constables are out in force after the Rootless ration station was robbed last night. Our driver could hardly see the road for all the Cherenkov lights. And now that the mayor is sick . . .”
“The mayor is sick?”
“Madeline,” Mother chided. “Don’t you read your wall screens or your tablet? He has been sick for over a week. Everyone says cancer, but I do not know how his doctor wouldn’t have caught it before now if it was. I would say food poisoning. He was visiting Lake Chicago, you know, and they have all sorts of strange food there. . . .”
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