8. Chapter 8
8
HIM
W hen I spotted her, crouched in the dust, hands streaked with blood and dirt and pulverized leaves, limp, sweaty curls curtaining her face, staring down at my broken phone and her intact one, exhausted and defeated, I forgot everything. That she was a spoiled brat. That she hadn’t seen my side. That she’d threatened me. That she was one of them .
I just saw her—Louisa, my Louisa—lost and scared and heartbroken. And for a second, I was glad I hadn’t left, even if it meant joining Erica’s cause. Maeve’s cause. Louisa’s cause. Anyone’s cause. Maybe as glad as I was to have once almost lost an arm.
Of course that was before I overheard who she was talking to. And about.
When I did, my entire face went up in flames, adrenaline coursing through my veins, still bleeding from the barbs. I yanked off the hat and threw it to the ground. So what if I got a sunburn? It was better than taking even a single thing from the girl I’d been stupid and weak enough to think was different. To think cared. To think considered me a fucking person.
Blinking, I raced across the lawn, vaulting over the low fence and into the neighbor’s property. The horses whinnied and stamped nervously as I ran past them until something as tight as a shackle on my ankle pulled me back. I gasped and turned to see my leg had snagged on a coil of barbed wire coming loose from the fencepost. I tugged frantically, my fingers slick with sweat and panic, but the wire only dug deeper into my flesh, blood soaking through my jeans as I fumbled with the glinty barbs. And now Louisa’s footsteps were pounding across the grass behind me.
“Wait!” Louisa’s desperate voice floated across the yard. “Please, just listen to me!”
“Fuck.” I yanked my leg again, gritting my teeth against the searing pain as the barbs ripped free, taking bits of flesh and denim with them. “Off.”
“Stop! Don’t move!”
She flew into the pasture, her long curls flying behind her like a white flag of parley. But when she got up close, I couldn’t decide if the tears in her gray eyes were sadness or anger. They were still goddamn beautiful, though. Fuck her.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop struggling , you idiot. It’s just going to make it worse.”
I said nothing, heaving like a trapped, angry animal afraid to die. Louisa took a tentative step toward me, her hands raised as if to signal that she wasn’t a threat. When I didn’t move, she reached me and began methodically untangling the barbed wire from my clothes and skin, wincing as it tore at her own hands. “What were you thinking, trying to go through here?” she growled.
“Fuck, I don’t know,” I panted, my voice dripping with the combination of pain, anger, and sarcasm I prided myself on having perfected. “Maybe that I’d rather take my chances with a bit of barbed wire than stick around here, waiting for the cops to show up and cattle prod me before shoving me in the back of a van?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said through gritted teeth.
“You really expect me to believe that you didn’t just call your dad and tell him I ran away?” I decided not to mention the other thing she’d threatened to report.
“Yes, I do,” Louisa said with another twist of the wire, finally allowing me to free my leg with a vicious yank that tore my already raked skin, blood seeping through fresh tears in my clothes.
I stumbled to the earth, picked myself up, and brushed myself off with basically zero dignity. As if I’d ever had any. “What do you mean you do? I fucking heard you! And you call me a liar?”
“Okay,” she said. “I called Daddy. But—”
“No shit you did. You always run to Daddy every chance you get, like the spoiled, selfish—”
“Shut up and let me finish ,” she growled, and if my goal was to turn her clumsy compassion back into anger, I’d succeeded. But it wasn’t my goal, so I’d failed. “I was trying to save … to save Maeve,” she finished with a tight swallow. Ignoring the fresh rivulets of blood dripping down her fingers—whether mine or hers, who could tell now?—she straightened up and met my gaze.
“What?”
“Follow me,” she snapped in a way that couldn’t be less inviting. She swiped frantically at her eyes and left a streak of blood on her cheek, and I had the strangest urge to gently wipe it away, but instead I just petulantly shoved my bloody hands in my pockets as we made our way back through the pasture through a gamut of curious snorts and flicking tails.
Why was I following her, anyway? I was free. Well, free from the wire at least, and if I stayed here any longer, I’d lose the almost-zero-but-maybe-not-entirely-zero chance I had to get free for real. Not to mention that the cynical part of myself that I hated told me this could be a trap.
Spotting the hat I had thrown in the dust, she grabbed it and heaved it toward my chest. I caught it, but instead of putting it back on, I just spun it around on my finger childishly, deciding that if there was any chance Louisa knew a way to save Maeve that wasn’t a suicide mission, I could afford to take a second to find out what it was. I watched her as she started around the side of the house, heading for the four-car garage with its floor-to-ceiling glass display window. She glanced back to see if I was following her, gritted her teeth, unlocked the door, and jabbed her finger toward the passenger side. “Get in the Cadillac. There’s a first aid kit under your seat.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To my overpriced college that I’d be flunking out of if it weren’t for you,” she snapped. “And before you say anything, this is not about us or whatever happened the other day. This is for Maeve, and only Maeve, and if you give a shit about her, you’ll get in the car.”
“If I give a shit about her?” I opened the door and slumped reluctantly into the creamy leather seat of the vintage luxury car, then reached under the seat for the box full of antiseptic wipes and flimsy bandages, while she wedged herself behind the wheel. “That’s fucking rich that you’ve now appointed yourself the undisputed expert on my family situation.”
If we’d been behaving normally instead of like bickering arch-nemeses, I might have taken this opportunity to confess that I’d always been secretly fascinated with cars. I’d driven exactly three times in my life—each time in the south of France, where the professor had a country home, a vintage Citro?n, and was pretty much constantly drunk, which provided the perfect opportunity. My mind naturally had a feel for machines and how they worked, and driving was freedom. I’d in fact enjoyed it more than—for liability purposes—I generally liked to admit enjoying anything other than sex. I’d already admired this sprawling American classic, having washed it several times and even poked around under the hood once or twice when no one was around. I might even go so far as to say that I wanted one like it someday, although, judging by the storm cloud on Louisa’s face, I should’ve learned by now to stop wanting things. Look where it kept getting me.
“Oh, I understand the situation perfectly,” she seethed, blood-streaked fingers fumbling clumsily on the seat belt as she buckled herself in. “The situation where I tried over and over again to prove that you could trust me enough to help, but you wouldn’t let me. But then again, I guess no mere mortal could possibly understand the unfathomable depths of your vastly superior brain, the one that gives you the right to go around conning and misleading people with no consequence.”
“Oh,” I said. “Speaking of misleading people, aren’t you afraid to get in a car with the slave who brutally violated you? You know, the one you’re going to tell Daddy all about?”
Fuck, what was wrong with me? She’d just wrenched bits of jagged wire out of my bloody flesh by hand and was now voluntarily driving me somewhere to help my sister, and I was still too much of a stubborn fucking asshole to apologize to her. Instead, I was making it worse .
She started up the car with a roar, forcing herself to wrap her bloody hands around the steering wheel. If anywhere, we should’ve been headed to the fucking ER.
She backed out of the driveway with a lurch, then slammed her foot on the gas pedal, then the brake, sending both of us flying forward and the first aid kit smack into the dashboard, its contents spilling all over the passenger side. “Don’t you understand that I never would have threatened to say that if you hadn’t left me feeling completely humiliated?”
At the first intersection, she braked violently again, this time forcing me to brace myself with a bloody handprint on the dashboard. “ Humiliated ?” I repeated incredulously. “ You ? Before you go around claiming that, you might want to consider who you’re talking to.”
“Given how this conversation is going, who I’m talking to is unfortunately the last person I’d like to be talking to,” she shot back.
“Oh, in that case, right back at you. You know, you were so close to having me convinced that you weren’t a spiteful, vindictive brat.”
“Yeah, well, you had me believing that you weren’t a pretentious, manipulative dick!”
“Oh, but I thought this wasn’t about us.”
“Shut up,” she growled. “Just shut up. I don’t want to hear anything else out of you for the rest of the drive. And before you ask, yes, I will whip you this time.”
“The hell you will.” I leaned back in the seat defiantly. “You don’t have it in you.”
“Wanna bet?” She gritted her teeth and prodded the accelerator further, her eyes in tunnel vision. The car fairly leaped forward as we flew down the highway on-ramp. She stayed in the far left lane, weaving her way around slower drivers as if daring them to try to pass her.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve won every bet we’ve ever made, so, um … yeah?”
“Ha. You just fell for the gambler’s fallacy!” she said, hair whipping in her face as she turned to look at me in demented triumph. “Surprise! I’m more logical than you are.”
“Oh really?” I scoffed. “Because there’s not a whole lot of logic in the way you’re driving right now.”
“Then stop fucking stressing me out! Do you want me to crash this car?”
“You know, at this point, I—”
“Fuck!” we both exclaimed. She’d missed her turn and overcorrected, whipping the Cadillac violently across two lanes of traffic and toward the side of a grocery delivery van. Just in time, I reached over and grabbed the wheel, veering us out of the shadow of the van driver, who angrily laid on the horn as we sped away up the exit ramp.
“Do you even know how to fucking drive?” I demanded.
“I do when I don’t have someone in the passenger seat screaming at me!” She tried to get her breathing under control as we rolled off the freeway and onto University Boulevard. I was doing the same, though not as loudly. “So if you value your life, shut your goddamn mouth!”
That did the trick. I gathered up the antiseptic and bandages from under the seat and passed a handful over to her. We cleaned ourselves up as best we could, riding the rest of the way to campus in silence.
HER
If we’d been capable of communicating in any way but screaming, I would have taken the opportunity to explain that the Cadillac used to belong to my brother—one of his two most prized possessions, along with his guitar. When he left, he’d initially taken both, but in some drug-induced haze, he’d abandoned the car in a washout in the desert. The police returned it to my father, whose name was still on the title. Ethan knew where it was but hadn’t been back for it. And even though the car had been mine by default for over a year, driving it still reminded me of him.
And after that, I would have explained that as soon as we stopped, I planned to call my father again but only to explain that I was bringing my boy to campus to meet a professor who was “interested in his background,” which wouldn’t be a lie. My plan was that my hopefully judgment-impaired father would then call the housekeeper to explain the situation, meaning we wouldn’t have to worry about being missed. For a while.
As it was, though, we pulled into the campus in silence, while I gripped the steering wheel like a vise so he wouldn’t see my hands shaking as I wedged the Cadillac into a spot in the top-tier parking zone that matched the sticker on the windshield I’d convinced my father to pay for as consolation for disallowing me to live on campus.
As usual, throngs of backpack-laden students trudged to class or zoomed by on bicycles. Still more swarmed in and out of the student center, juggling sandwiches and smoothies, or spread out on picnic tables or in the grass under the shadow of the lane of towering date palms standing like soldiers on either side of the campus mall. If I’d been alone, it would have been so mundane as to be beneath notice.
But with him next to me, it was like landing on Mars. The biggest tragedy was that I wouldn’t have any idea what he was thinking, other than that I was a spiteful brat and slightly insane, which wasn’t too far off the mark after that drive.
“Shit,” I muttered without looking at him. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Yeah, we do,” he said without looking back.
One-third of the people on campus were slaves—the grounds and cleaning crews and most of the service workers. But they wore uniforms, which was helpful in letting students and faculty know from a distance that they could ignore them, abuse them, or simply shove them out of the way. Personal slaves got brought to campus, too, and allowed to stay with their owners in classrooms, sitting or kneeling as per the owner’s preference, but there were rules governing their behavior, too—starting with always walking a couple of steps behind.
I sized him up out of the corner of my eye. If only he hadn’t tangled with the wire fence. In his college hat, T-shirt, and jeans with rips in the leg that could almost pass for deliberate, he’d otherwise be indistinguishable from the crowd of other college boys milling around, except for one thing, of course. We’d either have to hide it and pray no one noticed, or show it, have him behave the same as every other slave on campus and pray he didn’t slip up. Sure, there were a few Erica Muller-type radicals, but there were far more rich snobs coasting through college on their parents’ dime, and if some pro-slavery asshole caught on and made a scene, we were fucked no matter what.
Hiding it would be easier. I threw open the trunk of the Cadillac and scanned the space until I found a potential solution balled up in the corner: an old denim jacket of Ethan’s, with a shearling wool lining. It had at one point been luxe-looking, though it was now stiff and wrinkled. I tossed it at him. “Here.”
“Do you know how hot I’m going to get walking around in this?” He glanced at the jacket warily, then up at the sun.
“Yeah, well, tough shit,” I said. “It’s either that or play the good slave. I don’t care either way, but it will cost us time that I don’t think you want to waste.”
We glared at each other until he gave in, shook it out, and slipped it on. Immediately, my face flushed rose-red. God, those broad shoulders looked incredible in clothes, the few times anyone gave him anything decent to wear. And now all I could think about was ripping the damn thing off him. I jerked my head away before he noticed. Not now.
And anyway, he was already halfway down the sidewalk.
“Hey, it’s—what are you doing?” I exclaimed, chasing after him. “You’re going in completely the wrong direction.”
“Maybe it would help if you actually told me where we’re going.”
“Maybe it would help if you’d listen to anything I said!”
He crossed his arms impatiently. “Well?”
“The Harris Mirror Lab,” I said. “To meet someone named Milagros.”
To my shock, his whole expression transformed. “Wait. Mirror lab? As in the mirror telescope? The Zenith telescope?”
“Yeah, it’s made out of liquid—”
“Liquid mercury in a paraboloid shape. Yeah, I know,” he continued eagerly. “It’s the biggest in the world outside of the Himalayas. They’re now testing the same technology in microgravity to see if they can build one like it in a crater on the moon. Hell, when I started researching Phoenix, it was the only thing about this place that sounded halfway interesting.”
If I weren’t still so angry, I might have actually smiled at how his eyes were glimmering like the binary stars of Sirius. Instead, all I asked was, “Is it still?”
He opened his mouth, but before he could answer, I spotted a figure frantically waving from the other side of the mall, long platinum-blond hair unmistakable.
I groaned. “Shit. It’s Juliette.”
“Oh, great. Is it safe to assume she’s a typical friend of yours?” A rich, slave-abusing jerk, was what he meant.
“She’s one of the better ones, though I know that doesn’t mean much to you after the examples I’ve provided. Also, she knows who you are. Well, what you are.”
“Thanks for that.”
“But she’s also a girl, so just flash her a smile and she won’t ask too many questions.”
“Oh, that’s the plan, believe me,” he said, watching Juliette trot toward us across the lawn.
I rolled my eyes. “Isn’t it always?”
“Hey, I—”
“Hey,” said Juliette, blissfully interrupting our sniping. We both said “hey” back. But only one of us, when he smiled at her, made Juliette flush, stumble over her words, and completely forget to demand what the hell was going on. “What—what have you heard from Corey?” she finally asked me. Her tone was concerned.
“Nothing repeatable,” I said grimly. I’d almost forgotten the vile message I’d received from him this morning, with everything else going on. Of course it had made me momentarily ill to see such disgusting things written about me by someone I used to consider a friend. I’d blocked him immediately and decided not to tell my boy, even though he’d been mentioned in it, too.
As for Juliette, she might not know precisely what the problem was with Corey, but she probably had her suspicions. After all, she had just fallen into a pair of amber-gold eyes and barely made it out alive. “The last time I saw him, he was stumbling out of yet another bar on University with some sketchy characters I’d never seen before. Then he sent me a message today. Tomorrow is his party, by the way. I hope you don’t mind that I gave him your regrets.”
“Not at all.”
“Then I got his response.”
I felt as ill as Juliette looked. “I don’t want to read it, do I?”
“I wouldn’t. It was really disgusting, Lou. I’m not telling you this to cause drama. I just want to warn you.” She glanced quickly at him again. “Both of you.”
So it wasn’t just a suspicion then. Shit. This needed to be addressed. But so did a lot of things, and I wasn’t even sure where to start with most of them. In the end, I just thanked Juliette and told her we’d catch up soon. We both knew it was a lie.
“And to think I was planning to leave without even saying a proper goodbye to my old buddy Corey,” he said carefully after we left Juliette and bounded up the stairs of the mirror lab. “How insensitive of me. Poor guy sounds devastated.”
“Yeah, sounds like he’s really weeping into his beer,” I replied just as carefully as he pushed open the door.
“Can I help you?” interrupted the balding male volunteer behind the front desk. A question I had noted was rarely offered with any intention of helping.
In a second, I saw the problem.
His haste to gape in wonder at the ten-meter-long disc of rippling liquid mercury suspended on the wall was understandable. However, entering the building, he had inadvertently pushed up the sleeves of his jacket. I couldn’t blame him, since he must have been boiling after the rapid walk across campus in the blazing sun. But the world could blame him, of course, and did.
“What are you doing?” I hissed. I pushed his arm down, which was totally pointless since it had already been seen, and the fact that I was so freely touching him would just get us in more trouble. Would the guy kick us out? Would he call the campus police? Would it get to my father ? Panic settled quickly in. I could see it on his face, too. Right now, it was looking like our best shot was to make a break for it. But then what about—
“I’ll deal with this, Teague,” broke in a woman with petite, delicate features, freckly ocher skin, and tousled hair dyed in cotton-candy streaks of aqua and electric blue.
Milagros—so her name tag said—continued to stare at Teague politely but pointedly until he disappeared into the back office as if he’d never been there. She waited to speak until he had closed the door. “I used to do that, too, when I got distracted,” she said, nodding toward his wrist. “My neighbor used to take me to campus with her, but she threatened to stop if I couldn’t learn to hide it better. But I just wanted to go to the planetarium to learn about black holes and quasars, and I didn’t care whether anyone knew I was a slave. To me, it was easier not to hide it. She wanted me to be her equal, and I didn’t know how.”
Well, that got his attention away from the telescope.
Normally, the last thing a former slave would ever bring up in conversation was being a former slave—that’s why I hadn’t met many of them, at least knowingly. Blend in and keep quiet was the name of their game. In fact, of all the things Milagros could have turned out to be, that hadn’t even been on the list. Maybe it had been on his, though.
“In the end, she had the right idea, though,” Milagros continued.
“Why?” he spoke freely now, his attention riveted.
“Because I’m now a graduate student in astronomy. And she’s now my wife.”
For the first time in over forty-eight hours, he and I met each other’s eyes in something other than white-hot rage.
“Your wife?” I asked.
Milagros nodded serenely. “Erica Muller.”