I tried to find her face as the noise of the crowd swelled—a wave of disgruntled murmuring passing through the room and settling with a sickening feeling low in my stomach. I couldn’t make her out, but I was distracted from my search by a boy who was standing not too far away from my hidden position.
“It’s disgusting, the way they treat her,” he announced, his tone hard with disapproval. “Even for the best sols in Blesswood, this is still too far. They pass her around like she’s their personal toy, and I’ve heard that she even sleeps in their dorms. A different one each night. She probably doesn’t even know that sexual service isn’t one of our duties. They snatched her up as soon as she got here and now none of us can speak to her; she’s always with one of them. They’re making it impossible for us to reach out. Elowin should never have allowed this to—”
“Elowin is still absent,” Evie interrupted. It was pretty clear now that she was the one in charge. It didn’t fit with her image, though. She needed ass-kicking boots like all the other important people at the academy. She also needed a hairbrush. “And the dweller-relations committee is in chaos right now,” she continued. “Elowin’s first assistant, Heath, is trying to smooth things over while she’s gone, but I don’t think he’s prepared. I don’t think she told anyone that she was leaving.”
“Elowin assigned her to the Abcurse brothers,” the boy shot back, not even faltering for a click. “And don’t tell me it was because her name was Will Knight on the signup sheet like the others are saying. Elowin knew what she was doing. She was tired of those sols terrorising every single dweller that she assigned to them, and she thought she’d try something different. She knew exactly what would happen if she gave them a pretty young girl to wait on their every need. I mean seriously—”
“Oh come on,” another girl spoke up, sounding amused. “You make those brothers sound like sexual predators. I don’t think there’s a single female in Blesswood—dweller or otherwise—who wouldn’t be tempted by an Abcurse brother. If Elowin’s plan was to distract them with sex, she would have offered to clean their rooms herself.”
The girl broke off when a ripple of laughter spread through the gathered dwellers. I felt myself tensing up, but I wasn’t sure why.
Oh who the hell was I kidding? They weren’t allowed to talk about how hot my Abcurses were. It was bad enough that the stupid god-siblings had made a pact to be nothing more than friends with me, but if I wasn’t allowed to flirt with them, then other women weren’t even allowed to notice that they were the most attractive things in Minatsol. That was probably an irrational expectation, but I was sticking with it.
“It’s not like that,” a familiar voice declared, after the laughter had died off. I tensed up even more, and Coen’s arm snaked out around my waist from behind, anchoring me half to his side and half against his front. I hadn’t even realised that I had taken a step forward—not that I’d fit through the gap between cupboards anyway.
What was Emmy doing at the secret dweller meeting?
“Stupid question,” Coen muttered, his low words whispered right into my ear. “She’s a dweller.”
The other dwellers fell silent, and I followed the direction of their turned heads, completely ignoring Coen’s jab at my intelligence. It was almost as if they had been waiting for Emmy to speak, because now the room itself seemed to be sucking in a preparatory breath.
“What’s it like, then, Emmanuelle?” Evie asked. “You would know. She’s your sister. You’re the only one who can get close to her.”
“They’re friends.” Emmy wasn’t sounding outwardly concerned by the pressure of so much attention, but she was fantastic at putting on the perfect public face, and I knew her well enough to hear the subtle tone beneath her spoken words.
Resentment.
If it had been any other girl—any other sister or any other friend—I would have started to doubt our relationship. I would have assumed that the resentment was for me, because I was causing her trouble, but I had a pretty good feeling that Emmy was angry at the other dwellers for making assumptions. It was exactly the kind of do-gooder thing that she’d be angry at.
“That’s it?” someone pressed, and I finally caught sight of Emmy’s face.
She was standing against the wall, looking like she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be there or not. Atti was beside her. I wondered if he spent all of his time following her around now.
“What were you expecting?” Emmy turned her head up in the smallest of tilts—the posture she always used when I asked her dumb questions. I really enjoyed seeing her use it on someone other than me, for once. “Do you really think they brainwashed a recruit to allow herself to get special treatment?” She broke off on a sardonic laugh, and even though I knew that her sarcasm had been meant to sting the other dwellers in the room, I couldn’t help but feel a little of the sting myself.
“No dweller would actually want that kind of attention,” the boy replied, his sarcasm deepening to match Emmy’s. “Five troublesome sols—who, by the way, have a reputation for torturing dwellers—all focussing their attention on one single dweller? A dweller who isn’t allowed to see any of us or speak to any of us? Yeah, that doesn’t look like a choice to me. That looks suspicious as fu—”
“Let’s try and stay on topic,” Evie interrupted him, raising her small hands as a wave of murmuring spread through the room again.
Some of the dwellers seemed to be in agreement with him, while others were arguing along with Emmy. There were a few that didn’t share an opinion at all. They just looked nervous.
“Guards!” someone up the back of the room yelled, and the dwellers all scampered from the room with the speed of mice in the night, disappearing through doors and sections of the wall until only the faintest hint of something still hung in the air of the empty room.
Guilt, I thought. I actually felt as though I could feel the guilt that they all left behind in their bid to escape. Or maybe the guilt was mine, because I had been peering through a crack in the wall and spying on them like a pervert.
“Where are the guards?” I asked Coen, attempting to turn around so that I could face him.
“Right behind us,” he said, his arm solid around my midsection, locking me in and restricting my movement. “Trickery is masking us.”
Since he was speaking normally, I assumed it was fine for me to also speak normally. “Will we get into trouble for being here?”
I cringed, because the ‘normal’ tone that I had been hoping for had come out as a squeak—evidently a side-effect of the hug that my brain was trying to trick me into thinking that Coen was giving me. He was warm and solid behind me, and his fingers were playing with the bottom of my shirt. Casually tugging it, almost too gently for me to notice.
“What was that?” a voice asked, only a few feet away. It definitely wasn’t the voice of an Abcurse.