“I don’t know what night terrors are, Sam. I don’t know why smoking’s bad. I don’t understand elevators, and until last night, I never laid down in a bed with a guy. Never. So stop being mean to me. This is new to me, too.”
“Blue, I’m so sorry. Please look at me.”
“No. Not until you’re worth looking at.”
“Ouch. I deserved that.”
“More than that. You’re just lucky I have more control than you do.”
“I guess you’re right.” Sam shook his head, unsure how to clean up the mess he made. “Have you ever had a nightmare?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember. Haven’t slept since I was a kid.”
“Well, mine are like bad dreams that you can’t get out of. Like, I can feel everything happening to me in mine. I can taste it. Smell it. Like when you first bathe in the Fountain of Youth and everything’s heightened, or like you’re on acid.” He shook his head. “I’m not explaining this very well.”
Blue moved her head to look down at her lap instead of far away from him. “So you have bad dreams usually? And you scream, so you don’t let people see you sleep. Is that it?”
“Yeah. Kinda embarrassing.”
“Why is that embarrassing?”
“Do you want people to watch you cry for help or suffer through things that… Would you want anyone to see you like that?”
“I guess not. But why are you upset now? You didn’t do any of that last night. I was there the whole time.”
“That’s just it. I scared off the only girl I let sleep next to me a couple years ago. She did it once, then never again. I was expecting you to be gone, too. I was not expecting to sleep like a normal person and wake up still holding you.”
“Did you want me to be gone?”
“No. But if you were going to leave, I’d rather you do it now rather than later, when I get even more attached. Give you a really good reason, like me being partially insane when I’m passed out.”
“Is that supposed to be rational? Because I don’t get it.”
“Do you get that I’m sorry, and I acted like an idiot?”
“The idiot part, sure.” Blue sighed at the complications in their non-relationship. She was beginning to understand why Baird avoided being in one. “Look, if you want to smoke, do it. If you don’t, then stop. If you don’t want me to be next to you, then just say so. I was so…so happy last night, even after everything I did. Then you just took it away because…what? Because nothing bad happened? I don’t understand Vemreaux.”
Sam cocked his head to the side and sized her up. “I guess we’re pretty different.”
Blue hissed humorlessly. “You have no idea.”
He looked her over, then stood, shutting her door and moving around to the driver’s side. He sat down next to her, started the car, and reached for her hand. He took her flinch in stride, knowing he deserved it. He placed her hand on the gear shift and spoke to her with determination to make things right. “Okay. What’s it like in The Way?” When she looked up at him and quirked her eyebrow, Sam relaxed a little and offered a small smile. “What? I don’t know any more about Waywards than you do about Vemreaux. I’m not allowed to try to figure you out? You do it to me all the time.”
“I do not understand you,” she admitted.
“That’s my whole point,” he agreed, his accent thickening. “If this is going to work, we should probably try to understand a little more about each other, yeah?”
“Um, okay.”
“First gear,” he instructed, and she obeyed. She did it so fluidly now that it was almost like he was doing it himself. There was no jarring or trying to fiddle with the proper gear to get it where it should be. She was a quick learner. Still, he deemed it necessary that his hand should rest on hers. “Second. Now tell me all about The Way.”
“Um, well, it’s a lot of the same. We all wear the same clothes, do the same rotation of chores for the most part. We each had a cot on bunks for sleeping. I belonged to The Way West, which mostly did paper pressing, fertilizer, housing bricks, and of course, S-bricks. Baird let me be out in the yard and do fertilizer for a couple years, did a little time in housing bricks, but then he had me go to the Paper Unit with the rest of the girls.”
Sam was beginning to despise the sound of the older brother’s name. “Which one did you like best?”
“Oh, fertilizer. No contest,” she admitted. It felt strange to be asked her opinion, but as soon as he did, she found she had one that no one knew about. “Paper’s pretty boring.” She lowered her voice, even though no one was in danger of eavesdropping. “Have to pretend to not be able to lift really light weights all morning long. Not so fun. With fertilizer, you at least get to shovel the scratch and use the fun tools. It’s a good workout if no one’s watching.”
“Sounds like you had to hide yourself a lot there.” He cleared his throat. “Third.”
“I have to do that everywhere.” Blue shrugged. “Imagine being Grettel who can barely lift one of the weights. Baird was right to put me on paper. Grettel woulda had to eat a lot of scratch if I wasn’t her partner.”
“Eat scratch?” Sam wrinkled his nose. “Is that Wayward slang for something?”
“No. If we drop the weights and they break, we have to clean them up. If there’s any shards left, we have to eat them. The weights are made out of the parts of scratch that are leftover after making the S-bricks. Like how the housing bricks are made. Same thing, different shape is all.”
Sam turned his head so that she would not see him gagging. “I knew you worked in manure, but I thought The Way was mostly a school.”
“What’s manure?”
“Fourth gear. Manure’s another word for scratch, Blue. It isn’t used all that often anymore, though. Doesn’t have the same ring as ‘made from scratch’.”
“Oh, well there’s some school that’s required, but after that’s finished, you could sign up for more classes or you could learn a trade. But scratch duties always come first.”
“What kind of trade do the Waywards aspire to?” Sam made every effort to be conversational, though he could not stop his stomach from lurching as he pictured the girl with cow pies smeared on her lovely face. Cow pie burger. Cow pie…pie? He shuddered.
“You know, normal stuff. We sewed clothes, assembled furniture, made socks and soaps and stuff like that. We cleaned a lot. You have to. With that much scratch around, you can’t allow even a little dirt. Flies flock to any trace of it. I took all the school they offered for my age group, even though Baird said it was probably a waste of time.”
Sam hissed. “So you don’t always do everything your brother says?”
Suddenly her hand felt wrong under his, so she removed it, sliding it out from under him so that his rested on the shifter all by its lonesome. “No, I don’t. But I do what he says when he’s right. I may not always want to hear the truth, but he tells it to me. He’s got a good view of the big picture, and I sometimes don’t.” She fiddled with the seatbelt across her chest, but then remembered that she was making her nervousness obvious, so she folded her fingers in her lap instead. “It’s good that he’s the way he is. If he wasn’t, then I wouldn’t be going to the island, and all those Vemreaux would keep disappearing. I’d be selfish and do what I wanted instead, which wouldn’t be right.” She sighed. “Baird’s not the easiest to get along with, but he does what needs to be done, even when it’s hard.”
Sam had to go against everything in his nature to speak softly and hold his tongue from spouting off the first sarcastic retort that popped into his brain. “What do you want?”
Her response was quick, robotic and rehearsed. “I want to end the tyranny.”
Sam’s frustration was harder to harness than he would have thought. He blamed it on the early hour and loss of contact. “That’s rubbish, and you know it. If you weren’t the Light, what would you want?”
Blue blinked, showing him that the question made no sense to her. She mulle
d it over in her head as if for the first time, kicking around different possibilities that all seemed as unlikely as the next. “I want to be here,” she finally replied just when he thought she wasn’t going to answer him.
“Here in the Americas or here in the car?” he asked with too much hope.
“Both.” Her thumbs twiddled in her lap as she spoke nervously.
“It’s a good car,” he commented, evading the almost compliment he’d tricked her into giving him. “What else do you want?”
“I want my brother to be happy. Every now and then I see him smile, and it’s nice. I make him so miserable.” She shook her head at her shortcomings. “I wish he could be happy when I’m around instead of always worrying that I won’t be ready when it’s time for me to go.” She looked forlornly out the window at the trees rushing by. “He used to joke around with our little brother, Griffin, and it always made me a little jealous. I mean, I can be fun, too, if he’d let me. We’ll have, like, a minute of fun, and then he’ll come down hard. He’s like you. Being too nice makes him mean. Thinks I won’t be able to leave him, but I will. I want him to enjoy himself someday. He can’t do that with me in his life.”
“I am nothing like Baird. And I told you, I just got thrown for a minute this morning, is all. I’m back, though. For better or worse.” He sighed. “You were talking about Baird.”
“Elle makes him happy when they’re not fighting. Well, sort of happy. Whatever Baird’s version of that is, I guess. I want him to be nicer around her. She deserves at least that. He’s the only thing she wants, other than to keep us all safe.”
Blue thought further when Sam made no attempt to interject. “I want Grettel to stop being so afraid of everyone. I want her to be able to look a Vemreaux in the face and smile like Elle can. She’s seen me black out a few times in The Way, and it scared her. She denies it, but sometimes I can tell that I still scare her.” She stopped speaking then, for the next words that wanted to come out of her carried a hitch in her voice with them, which she would not tolerate.
“Blue, what do you want for you? Not your friends or your brother. For you,” Sam clarified.
“All the rest of that is what I want for me, Sam. If they’re happy, I’m happy. When I leave, they can all try to have a normal life without worrying about me being found out. Elle won’t have to put up the show so no one notices me. Grettel won’t have to be so afraid that she’ll slip up and say something about me to the wrong person.” She concentrated on her short fingernails as she veered closer to honesty than she usually cared to venture. “Baird’ll be relieved when I’m gone.” Though she’d thought the words before, saying them out loud in the privacy of the car was a declaration she’d been trying hard to deny the truth of. Immediately she was engulfed by sadness that punched her in the gut and pushed her spirit down past the floor with the passing of the words through her lips. “Do you think we could talk about something else? If this is what it feels like to talk about myself, I don’t like it.”
Sam mulled over her words, though she still had not answered the question to his liking. “Baird mentioned earlier that you hadn’t had a boyfriend in The Way. Is that true?”
An unexpected short laugh lightened her demeanor. “Yeah, that’s true. I doubt anyone even knew I was there half the time. Most of my life’s been spent trying to be invisible, not that anyone would’ve looked anyway. I had one guy friend who was only around because he was Griffin’s best friend, and you know, had to be around me. Marxus, too, I guess. But he only checked in on me occasionally because Baird asked him to after he got bought. The only other man I really talked to was one of the professors who was nice to everyone. Liam’s Uncle Jack. Baird made sure that I hid my face as much as I could because of my eyes.”
“What do you mean ‘no one would’ve looked anyway’?” Sam shook his head at her berating tone.
She kept her face fixed away from him and went back to staring out the window. “I don’t look like Elle. I’m not deluded or anything. I know what I look like, Sam.”
Frustration flared up in the man, forcing only words of ire into his brain. Sam took a deep breath. He reached back over the console and picked up her hand, not to place it on the gear shift, but to run his fingers along her palm once again so he could see her spine straighten.
Sam turned to her and took in the beauty she could not see. “I seriously doubt that, Blue.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Peace Day
Age of Peace Law 3, Subset 2a
No musical instruments may be played in public.
Age of Peace Law 3, Subset 2c
Privately owned establishments may play prerecorded music, but televised events must play only the preferred, government-approved prerecorded music.
The next few days were the last Blue would spend with her makeshift family in the confines of the hut and the diner, yet they seemed to blur by. It was Tuesday, and her last day of work in the diner. She would leave on Thursday.
The paperwork that had taken months when Baird tried to buy her from The Way took no time at all for Prince Liam and all of his connections. Another waiter was already picked out and would be working at the diner by the end of the month to replace Blue. Baird still would not say who, but by his evasion, Blue had a guess which Wayward it would be.
“Is it Androo?” she asked as she helped her brother put new bottles of absinthe behind the bar. “Please don’t say it’s Marxus.”
“How will it matter to you at all? You’ll be gone.”
“It would be a mistake only you would make to buy Androo. Don’t think I’ve forgotten the three fights you got into in The Way with him. I don’t care if he’s the next biggest Wayward. It’s a bad move.” She wiped off her table. “And Marxus? Well, he needs to be in The Way. The whole structure you two set up would fall apart without one of you there. He’s the one they’re all afraid of. He’s the one keeping the peace in there. Keeps them in check. Who knows who’ll rise to power if you take him out of there. Could undo everything you two worked for.”
“Who I pick is none of your business.” He still would not confirm her theory.
“Baird?” Her lowered voice caused his head to raise. “When I was out on your assignment, after I was done, the guys wanted to rest, so I watched some television while they slept.” She conveniently left out the part where she laid in Sam’s arms. Her eyes darted around the diner to reconfirm that they were alone. “Back in The Way they let us watch the Peace Day celebration on TV every year, and the king would make some big speech at the end, right? You know how we always kinda suspected something was off about King Sinclair?”
Baird nodded, moving closer to her so the conversation could remain quiet. “I saw a short report with him talking about the island. Baird, I figured out one of his tells.”
Baird stopped working and sat down at the table she was cleaning, and then motioned for her to do the same. “Tell me everything.”
“He does this thing when he’s talking about someone or something that he’s trying to distance himself from. He pauses right before saying their name. He did it three times in the news announcement. I’m sure of it.”
“Who’s he trying to pretend he doesn’t know?”
“Not just doesn’t know, but like, he wants to make sure he’s separate from that person. It was Emperor Boniface, then the king’s own son, Everest Sinclair, and the A-blood island. He either is close to them and doesn’t want the world to know about it, or he wants it clear he isn’t in the loop with whatever’s going on with them, which means he knows more than he’s letting on.”
Baird mulled over this new information. “Good to know. Huh. I’d be careful around Liam’s dad, then. Either he’s doing something he shouldn’t that the king knows about, but it hasn’t been made public yet, or the king wants us to believe there’s a united world power, but there really isn’t.”
“That’s where I landed with that, too.”
“Watch yourself when you go out there.
He can’t know about you if he’s involved in something shady, or if the king’s gunning for him.”
“You realize I could get in a lot of trouble for saying all this, right?”
“Yeah. So don’t mention it to the guys.”
“Okay.”
“Just keep it to yourself and maintain your distance. The emperor comes into a room, you leave it.”
“Okay.”
“Under the radar, Blue.”
“Okay.”
Peace Day arrived the following morning, but the four were more relieved and excited that the diner would be closed for the entirety of the day. So rare was it to work a five-day week that they did not know what to do with themselves.
Grettel scrubbed the hut from floor to ceiling while Elle thoroughly washed every bit of fabric they owned, which wasn’t much. Baird worked on a leak he hadn’t had the time to fix in the bathroom, borrowing tools from the diner. Blue kept herself busy assisting Baird by bending things into place for him to fix that were almost beyond use at their current angle. She also lifted the major appliances so Grettel could clean under them.
By noon, Elle hit her limit. “I can hear the music from in here, Baird. There’s nothing more for us to do inside. Could we please go to Capital City?”
“Oh, fine.” Baird consented with a sigh, as if the notion of enjoying their day off was wasteful.
They ventured out to Capital City on foot toward the already crowded streets. No cars drove on Main Street, for there were simply too many people. A long route that went through several large towns was blocked off so that everyone who wanted to could join the largest celebration in the Americas. The entire parade would travel on for most of the day, ending very far south by nightfall. The most energy was at Capital City, where the parade began.
All the Vemreaux were decked out in their partying best. The brightly colored clothes were almost blinding to look at in such a wide smattering. People were hugging, dancing, kissing and shouting joyfully, as if they were at the first Peace Day that ever was. If there had been inhibitions before, there were next to none now.
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