“Thank you, Emmy, you’re a real friend.” My mutterings were getting a little out of control but I’d been on my hands and knees for forty-five clicks scrubbing a single spot that a sol had complained about. A spot, by the way, which was part of the natural stone that made up these bathroom floors. But apparently I could not leave until that spot was gone. Very funny, dweller-dicks.
Atti had given me my initial task, but then he had left the smaller details up to a few other more-senior-than-me dwellers. Hah! Who was I kidding? Everyone was more senior than me. I’d pretty much done zero dweller-duties since I had started at Blesswood.
“You’d better hurry along, Chosen One.” The low feminine voice had me jumping and sloshing half my bucket of water across the floor. I’d thought I was alone there but apparently someone decided that seeing my misery was much nicer than whatever else they had going on. “You have at least five more tasks to do before your sols will expect you for dinner.”
I wanted to groan. I really wished she hadn’t mentioned dinner. In my haste to storm away from the guys, I had totally forgotten to eat any food. “Just for curiosity’s sake … how long is it until dinner?”
She laughed, and it wasn’t even an unpleasant sound. It was all nice and sweet. Mean people should sound mean. It would be easier to recognise them that way.
“I wouldn’t expect to get fed anytime soon,” she said dryly.
This time I couldn’t stop the groan. Half of my body slumped forward into the spilled dirty water, while the other half of me continued scrubbing at the spot which would never disappear. Her footsteps thumped on the floor as she marched away, and I was about five clicks from giving up altogether and slinking back to the protection and food that accompanied the Abcurses when the ache in my chest eased considerably. I was no longer alone. Flipping over, I slipped a little and landed hard on my back, cold water seeping in through my clothes.
This is ridiculous.
It was Siret. He stood casually propped in the doorway, his huge shoulders practically filling the entire entrance. “Come on, Soldier. You don’t look like you’re having any fun. What happened to wanting to do your part?”
“You’ve been listening in my head again, haven’t you?” I kicked out with my boots, splashing a bunch of water in his direction. None of it even came close to touching him. “There has to be a way for me to block you guys out. After that little talk, I don’t think I want any of you in my head.”
Siret laughed then: the laughter of someone who was highly amused. “The look on your face when my brothers started … it was the stuff of dreams.”
I pulled myself up, thankful this time that I was not wearing a shirt where water was going to be a problem, since dark cotton kept mostly everything hidden. Stomping through the water toward him, I paused about a foot away. A thought had just come to me and I wanted to see if I was on the right track.
“If you find this all so amusing,” I began hesitantly. “Perhaps you and I can come to an agreement on what we should do to create a little more chaos in your brothers’ lives.”
Siret straightened then. The amusement was still in his eyes, but there was also something else there. Intrigue. He wanted to know what my plan was … which made two of us. All I knew was that he could help me. He had been the only one opposed to the sex talk, which meant that he was my best chance at a revenge plan to beat all revenge plans.
Game on!
Three
The tension within the walls of Blesswood was building. I could feel the stares as I trudged back to the dorms with Siret. I opted to skip dinner, since every single muscle in my body was aching, and Siret was forced to stay with me. Not that he minded at all, since he was a special sol and all a special sol had to do to get dinner brought to his room was shout ‘someone bring dinner to my room!’
Which was exactly what he did.
“You should have just pulled one of the dwellers aside instead of shouting it into the hallway,” I told him, as we stood in the centre of his room, staring at the dishes piled onto the giant rug that blanketed his stone floor. The rug spanned almost the length of the room, but there wasn’t any space left to sit down on it.
There was too much food.
Apparently five dwellers had heard his shouted order, and five dinner trolleys had turned up to the door a rotation later. They had piled on extra food, since the Abcurses were notorious for messing with dwellers. And sols. And teachers. And the gods. Heck, even the Original Creator himself. Not that anyone here knew that, but it was the reason they had been exiled to Minatsol for a life-cycle in the first place.
“What would have been fun about that?” Siret asked, giving me the look that he gave me a lot. The look that danced between a taunt and the kind of amusement that you didn’t want aimed at you.
“The fun would be theirs. When they don’t have to wash a thousand dishes later.”
“You could always do it for them,” he remarked, the amusement kicking up a notch. “Since you’re all about dweller duties this sun-cycle.”
He sat down on the stone, poking around amidst the sea of food for what looked like a bread roll, except it had melted cheese in it, and it crunched when he took a bite. My mouth started to water. I quickly kneeled beside him. He finished it in three bites, his eyes on me the entire time, and then he brushed his hands along his pants, tearing his eyes away.
“Keep looking at me like that.” His voice had turned rough, and I frowned, confusion breaking me from the hunger trance that had momentarily descended.
“What?” I managed.
“It’s a warning, Rocks. Keep looking at me like you can’t decide whether to steal the food out of my hands or climb into my lap—and you won’t like what happens.”
“Gods!” I threw my arms up. “I was not—” I paused, the protest lurching to a stop inside my throat. Now that I thought about it, I had been a little torn. “Wait just a moment. What would happen?”
He rolled his eyes, wrangling some pasta from one of the many dishes to an empty bowl. “I’d throw you onto this rug and you’d have food in places you never thought you’d have food before. And not on purpose. There’s just a lot of food lying around and no other appropriate surfaces.”
Now I was even more torn, because what he was saying barely made sense, but my body didn’t seem to need it to make sense. My body was definitely signing me up for whatever messiness would come of Siret tossing me onto pretty much anything—and that was confusing enough in itself, without the other two issues that were snaking through my mind.
The first was hunger, because I was still hungry, and if there was one thing that was going to come up against any base urge, it was going to be another base urge.
And the second thing? Well, it had four names: Coen, Rome, Aros, and Yael. Because the Abcurses were the most competitive beings in Minatsol—at least out of the few hundred beings in Minatsol that I knew on any level—and I wasn’t ready to burn our haven of friendship to the ground.