Bad Bloods (21 page)

“We have twenty minutes anyway.” She reminded
me of what all the chaos was for. A pre-election party. The first
place I’d appear in public. “Sit.”

I did, she did too, and her hands were on my
hair in seconds. On top of being a political magician, Jane
Henderson could fix hair like a master. Her touch reminded me of
Catelyn’s, and I couldn’t help but close my eyes and pretend my
sister was there. For those two seconds, Catelyn and I were sitting
in my room, her on my bed, me on the floor, as she braided my hair
and giggled about the latest thing Steven did for her.

I wondered what she was doing now.

“There.” Jane patted my back. “You’re good to
go.”

As I stood, my scalp stretched, and when I
went to touch it, she swatted my hand away. A pained smile escaped
me. “It hurts.”

“It will.” She pointed at my shoes. “Those
won’t though when we get you in some flats.”

She made her way to the closet, and in
seconds, she returned with a new dress and sparkling shoes and
everything else I imagined regular little girls dreamed of. All I
could think about was how hard it would be to run in delicate
footwear and how quickly I’d have to find shelter before I froze in
the thin fabric. My mind wasn’t wired for this.

“You’ll be fine, Serena.”

I looked up from the shoes to meet Jane’s
eyes. She wasn’t smiling, but warmth radiated from her, as if she
could hug people from a distance. “Just stick with me,” she said,
“and we’ll take this town down together.”

“Isn’t Alec supposed to…uh…take it down?” I
didn’t understand her phrase completely, but she grinned at my
question.

“No one does it alone,” she said, not
clarifying if she prevented him from being alone or if he prevented
her from being alone. I imagine it was equal for both of them, but
the idea baffled me.

“Even flocks have leaders.” Even the streets
had ranks.

Jane’s red-lipstick mouth didn’t budge. “I
won’t pretend I know what it’s like, dear, but”—she paused to drape
the dress in my arms—“I imagine there was more than one leader in
there.”

Her eyes didn’t flee from mine. She meant me.
And others. I let Catelyn and Steven and even Niki flood my
thoughts. The older kids had their places—Niki next to Robert,
Catelyn and Steven with the kids, and me. I had stood somewhere in
between, a voice on both sides, and that was why Robert always
confided in me. He had taken my opinions and made orders out of
them. “My voice was heard,” I said, trying to explain.

“Good.” She glanced at her watch, signaling
our last ten minutes. “Make sure your voice is heard again and
again.”

***

Alec Henderson rode separately, but he met us
at the doors. The chilly air was ice to my bones, and I cursed the
sheer fabric of the dress. I didn’t warm up until Alec led us
inside. Heaters blasted against my skin, and I forgot all about how
cold November had become.

Jane looped her arm through mine, and we
continued to walk, one slow step after the next. Even though I was
in flats, I worried about stumbling over the ends of my dress, and
Jane kept up our steady pace, pretending as if we were mother and
daughter strolling through the gala together. I appreciated her,
but I loved her even more when we reached the main room.

Dozens—no, hundreds—of people flooded the
hexagonal room, draped in shimmering silk, delicate lace, and
sparkling sequins. Jane taught me all about my clothes, in case
someone inquired, and I memorized it swiftly. I was instructed to
tell others I wore red in honor of bad bloods. I didn’t even know
we had a color, but I suspected we didn’t. It was made up for the
story we couldn’t tell. The one about wearing Stephanie’s favorite
color in her memory. My red dress was Carré, a designer named after
the origins of Vendona, specifically the Highlands before they were
lifted. That was the other thing I learned. There was a reason the
outskirts were sunken into the mud and cobblestones while the
Highlands towered over us. It wasn’t a hill or a mountain. It was
manmade. A section of town lifted over time. Jane didn’t have much
time to explain all of that, but she did say everything that used
to stand in the Highlands was gone. Some of the original buildings
were tucked away in the outskirts, and the teens had made a game
out of them. They’d sneak out at night and explore the outskirts,
teasing one another if they got scared. Everything about it
reminded me of my mother’s fairy tales and stories about moons and
monsters. Except we were the monsters. All of us. Not just the bad
bloods, but everyone in the outskirts. All the poor.

“Jane.” A man about her age approached us, a
child at his side. “I’m glad I caught you before we left.”

The little boy held a blood-crusted rag
against his nose. “Sorry, ma’am.” Even rich people could bleed.
Even they could apologize.

“No need. No need,” Jane said, drifting away
in a conversation I could barely pay attention to, and before I
knew it, they were gone.

“That was the president of Elsinare,” she
said like I should know where his city-state was. When I didn’t
respond, she clarified he came from the north. It reminded me that
Vendona was in the south of the country.

“I’m about as southern as you get, I guess,”
I mumbled, thinking of my flock, but Jane pulled me to the
side.

“It’s not that simple.”

“What—”

“The compass…well…they moved it.”

“Moved—”

Her sad smile silenced me. “We are
technically in the south, dear, but your education…your location
has been led to believe you’re in the east now.” She shook her
head, like she knew how nonsensical she sounded. “It was an
adjustment to show how different we are now from the past. It’s a
name, really, not a technicality. We still use the poles to
indicate direction during travel, and…”

She continued to ramble, but my thoughts
locked onto one particular piece. “That means I lived in the west
this whole time.”

Her eyes moved across my face. “Yes.”

“And the Northern Flock—”

“In the east,” she clarified. “The Western
Flock was in the north.”

My stomach sank. I did not like the
comparison. Everyone knew what had happened to the Western Flock
twelve years ago. They were killed—massacred—without a single
survivor. Fifteen kids had died.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said.

She raised a brow. “Don’t you?”

It was another reason the outskirts were
looked down upon. We didn’t even know where we stood or what we
faced. We were uneducated and naïve. And if we ran, we wouldn’t
even know where to go and how to do it. It was easy to keep us,
forget about us, and dehumanize us all at the same time.

The information was dizzying, and even worse
was the fact that Jane had tutored me most of the evening on
various topics in order to fit in, and there was already something
else I didn’t know. I would get caught.

Jane bit her lip as if she could sense my
thoughts. “Just,” she sighed, “be yourself.”

“That might be the worst advice I’ve ever
heard.” It left me before I realized I said it.

She giggled like a child, and I realized half
of the room watched us. From the smiles following hers, I knew they
loved her—admired her enough to mimic her even—but the remaining
stares were cold and hard, and on me. I was taking up too much
attention. I wanted to shrink away, hide in the shadows like I’d
been taught, but Jane whispered in my ear, “Outshine.”

She’d spoken with Adelio.

I thought of his dead family, of Jane’s
missing daughter, and of all the kids in the flocks I loved. I even
thought of the kids in the blood camp who probably never saw love.
I remembered Charlotte and her russet stare, and for a moment, I
swore I saw her eyes again. And then, I realized it was Alec, dusty
hair and light brown eyes to match.

“How is your night going?” he asked Jane
before kissing her on the cheek.

“Well,” she said, but her tone held a
question mark.

“I’m working on Vespasien,” he mumbled to
her, only to look at me. “His family invented the technology
to—”

“Lift the Highlands on a massive scale,” I
answered, relived to know I remembered something. His name was
actually where Vendona derived from, and apparently, he was on
Logan’s side. He wasn’t even against bad bloods. He was against the
repercussions of what giving bad bloods’ rights would be, mainly
taking down the gate. To my surprise, it was much more than a gate;
it was a mechanism that helped uphold the Highlands. The amount of
money it would cost to change it didn’t land in his company’s
favor.

My eyes searched the room for the man—the
head of the party who wanted to kill everyone I loved rather than
spend a few dollars—but I found nothing.

“He already left,” Jane said, but her words
barely reached me. I found someone else.

Her lilac, floor-length gown caught my
attention first, but it was her sharp features I remembered, the
way her taut skin shimmered in the light. She looked as if she was
incapable of smiling, of speaking even, but I knew better.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Alec glanced over his shoulder, and I
wondered if they’d put pads under his suit to make him look bigger,
stronger, like the veteran he was. “Marion Lachance.” I had heard
that name before. “Her family owns most of the oil on the coast.
Funds nearly all of Logan’s campaign.”

“Her sister is also married to Vespasien’s
son,” Jane added.

Marion Lachance, the sister-in-law of
Vespasian junior, and she was now looking at us. She even smiled as
she began to walk over.

My throat ached. “She hates bad bloods?”

In my peripheral vision, Jane nodded. “Very
much.”

“Why?”

Marion took two more steps.

“Stephanie—” Jane started, using my name to
warn me. She could hear my nerves in my tone, but she didn’t know
why.

I turned to face Jane. “I need to know.”

Jane looked over my shoulder, as if counting
how many more steps Marion had before she was close enough to hear
us. “A bad blood group took her daughter as a hostage,” Jane
muttered quickly. “Never returned her. They say it might have been
the Eastern Flock.”

Even the Highlands knew of the mystery flock
that disappeared overnight. But they had the dates off. The Eastern
Flock disappeared years before Marion’s daughter was allegedly
kidnapped; they also didn’t know she wasn’t missing at all.

“Her daughter was killed,” Jane finished,
fixing a smile on her face for Marion.

“No,” I whispered. “She wasn’t.”

Ami. Ameline Marion Lachance. I had never
realized her middle name was her mother’s first name.

Jane eyed me, unsure of what to say, but her
beaming smile stayed as she spoke to Marion, “How are you,
Mari?”

A nickname. Jane Henderson had a nickname for
Marion Lachance, bad blood hater and worst liar in history.

I inhaled a deep breath before turning to
face the woman. Her sharp eyes focused on Jane. “Janey.” I was
starting to think the nickname wasn’t a nickname at all, but a
condescending, proverbial jab.

“Marion.” Her name left my lips, and the
woman’s cold eyes slid over me. They were darker now, emptier than
what I recalled. I expected the black irises to light up when she
recognized me, to howl out, to expose what happened that fateful
day at the Southern Flock home, but the wicked mother clucked her
tongue as she sized me up. She didn’t recognize me at all.

“Stephanie,” she said my name slowly. “How
very nice to see you again. It’s been…what…”

“Nine years,” I finished, retaining the dates
Jane forced upon me.

“Yes,” Marion agreed. “You were only nine
then. Now, you’re a woman.”

“Eighteen,” I confirmed, feeling strange that
the real Stephanie Henderson was technically a year older than me,
feeling worse that Ami was nine when she was left at our doorstep
five years ago. I wanted to slap the woman. “It’s tough to leave
home at nine years old.”

“I can’t imagine.” Marion’s too-thin brows
twitched, turning back to Jane. “I saw Alec speaking with Don.”

“Yes, Mr. Vespasien,” Jane filled in the
blank spaces. “They had a great chat.”

Marion scoffed. “You don’t actually believe
he’d let up the gate, do you? It’s been there for generations. The
Separation Movement allowed our city to stand where we are.
Abolishing it risks placing us back down at sea-level.” She took a
sip of champagne and batted her eyelashes, too long to be real.
“Who’s to say what would happen? The Highlands could fall straight
into the ocean.”

Jane didn’t budge. “The levees have kept us
dry for much longer than the lift.”

They bantered back and forth, with me
standing in the middle, wondering if they’d ever talk about bad
bloods, which they didn’t. Not once. It was almost like the
election was about more than us. And with sickening realization, I
realized it was. Bad bloods hardly hit the radar with the
councilmen. Money was the real concern.

“Surely, Vespasien can afford to invent
something new,” Jane probed.

“Perhaps,” Marion agreed to disagree, but her
eyes traveled to me. “What are your thoughts on the matter?”

A test.

“Stephanie remains neutral on all accounts,”
Jane said at the same time I said, “I hardly see what the gate has
to do with the laws surrounding the Separation Movement.”

Jane squeaked. Marion flashed all her teeth.
“My, you have been gone a long time,” she said, tilting her head.
“Didn’t your mother tell you? The Separation Movement wasn’t for
bad bloods. It was for all the poor people, hence the gate.”
Everything I knew was a lie. Everything. “Bad bloods were just good
to pin it on, especially after that girl.” The one who killed the
religious congregation. “Almost too good.”