Bad Bloods

by Shannon A. Thompson

  I looked down at the poem.

  The Mermaid by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

  A split cracked down the middle where I’d ripped the page earlier that day.

  That was an accident, but this was a promise.

  In the still quiet of the night, I slipped back into the library and placed the book on Caleb’s lap. He rested while the entire night became a mirage. But not before I tore the last page out and placed the poem in my pocket.

  Even now, as I waited in another bedroom far away from the shuǐ guǐ stories and the sea, all I heard was Caleb’s rendition of the poem.

  “‘And all the mermen under the sea / Would feel their immortality / Die in their hearts for the love of me.’”

  If I were tied to the sea, I could find more than one reason to drown.

  “Why are we here?” Adam asked, though the answer was obvious.

  Known as the Pits, the literally underground fighting ring pitted bad bloods against humans in a fight to the death for others to bet on. For humans, it served as entertainment for those with sick tastes, while giving a “fighting” chance to those poor enough to risk their lives for money. For bad bloods, though, another story unfolded. Some were kidnapped directly from the streets and forced to fight. Others joined when they couldn’t find flocks to dedicate their lives to. But all had one thing in common—spilling blood was as profitable as being born with bad blood.

  It was one of the few places in Vendona I stood a chance at normalcy.

  With a death sentence already on my life, fighting for funds seemed reasonable—sane, even. Anything to be independent of Madam Jia-Li. But after almost cutting the little life I had short, and killing someone I didn’t like to admit, I retired. Honestly, though, getting hurt was the excuse. Physical pain meant nothing. The real reason was avoiding Adam. I found emotional pain to be much worse.

  “I used to come here…” Adam hesitated, probably thinking I wasn’t aware of the one hundred and twelve times he risked himself to try to find me. Where else would a homeless bad blood go? The Pits beneath Vendona’s crumbling streets held more than illegal bad-blood fights. It housed all kinds of criminals. Hence why we stood in front of it on a misty summer night.

  “I know you came,” I said, but refused to meet Adam’s eyes as I knocked on the creaky, curved door to the west-side entrance. Somewhere above us, scouters used radios to relay what they saw to those inside. I made it a point to face toward where they hid in the abandoned building next door. Any minute now, someone would let us inside. “Jeb lied to you.”

  A choking noise escaped Adam’s throat. “He wouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Neither would Maggie.”

  I recalled the brother-sister duo Adam befriended underground—and how close Adam got to being betrayed by them. Jeb liked Adam, sure, but if he had to choose between protecting Maggie—his sister—or a stranger named Adam, he would always pick his own blood—bad bloods be damned.

  “I paid him off,” I said, which was only part of the truth. In all honestly, I had begged Jeb not to turn Adam in, and Jeb only agreed when I told him who I was. As humans, Jeb and I were on the same side. We understood one another. We saw bad bloods as our own blood, though we didn’t share the illegal title.

  We were both related to bad bloods without being bad blooded ourselves.

  Jeb respected that. But he mainly respected the fact that I could keep his sister Magatha—or Maggie—out of the bordels.

  “Maggie didn’t know.” I said the only truth that wouldn’t hurt him. “I kept her out of the bordels, and Jeb kept me out of your reach.”

  Adam’s hand curled at his side, but behind his dark eyes, I watched his memories unravel and redesign all the details. It was a painful process—learning the truth—but it was a necessary one, and it was one Adam deserved to know.

  “I’m glad,” he finally said, but didn’t explain.

  From what Violet had told me about the Northern Flock, I imagined he thought a lot about Maggie. Apparently, the feisty redhead and Adam had become quite close over the years, but she hadn’t made it out of the Northern Flock Massacre. A part of me secretly wondered what would have become of her if I had found out Jeb died before Adam did. I would’ve been able to take her into the herd. Then again, the herd wasn’t created yet. She could’ve ended up fighting in the Pits without Adam by her side. The fact that Adam had fought in there before still chilled my bones to this day.

  Some tragedies weren’t ours to direct. But hopefully, we could stop the wall from tearing too much of Vendona down.

  My contact hid in the atrocities of the Pits, after all.

  “Dragon,” a boy said as a skeleton hand wrapped around the door and pulled it inward. “It’s been a while.”

  “Not long enough,” I said, ignoring the nickname he teased me with. “You gonna let us in or what, Skeleton?”

  Everyone in the Pits called the fifteen-year-old Skeleton, for obvious reasons. Supposedly, the bad blood had been born a normal, healthy baby boy, but, over time, his skin unraveled and revealed pieces of bone. Somehow, defying all science, the boy continued to live. The last time I’d seen him, his right arm and chin showed bone, but now, half his face and all his fingers had contorted to the haunting shape. Even Adam cringed.

  “You here to fight?” Skeleton asked, eyeing both Adam and me.

  I attempted to answer, but Adam shouted over me. “You work here?”

  The betrayal Adam felt was one I would never comprehend, even if I wanted to. Adam was a bad blood. To see a fellow bad blood protect the Pits that killed his kind went beyond my human pain. I volunteered to fight. Bad bloods often didn’t. Moments like this reminded me why Kuthun slapped me when I told him I wished I was a bad blood. Just because I sympathized with them and loved them, lived with them and listened to them, did not mean I would ever be one. I could never feel the same emotions Adam did, and Adam couldn’t comprehend mine.

  “The humans aren’t the only ones who see value in bad blood.” Skeleton egged Adam on, and Adam fell for it.

  “You mean, your blood.”

  The boy’s bony fingers rattled against the door. “Of course,” he said, then smiled. The addition of teeth only made the bony boy look worse.

  “You’re one of us,” Adam snapped. “How could you—”

  I stepped in front of my cousin. Thankfully, my actions stopped him. “We’re here to talk to Connelly,” I said.

  The lanky, crass kid looked me over and stepped aside, but as we passed, he gave in to temptation. “If you need a tag for the bad blood, let me know.”

  Adam knocked the boy out cold before I could stop him. That was how fast his powers worked. And, for once, I didn’t feel the need to reprimand him.

  “You know you have to fight if you hurt the workers,” I said.

  “No one will know,” Adam said as he strode past me. “You’re good at keeping secrets, right? You’re a Wilson.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle as we rounded the corner.

  For a Sunday night, the Pits was filled with a chaotic number of cries, shouts, and curses. Rattling cages met the sound of the fighting bell, and four fights began at once. Two had children under the age of ten. Knowing the rules, they were more likely to be bad bloods—and the winners—than the older teens facing them.

  Adam looked over the fights once, but quickly turned his back to the scene. “Where’s Connelly?”

  I tried to unhinge my locked jaw, but couldn’t. I directed him with the point of my head, and he followed me the rest of the way. Still, the smell of sweat, blood, and death filled the air, and I was glad Violet had agreed to stay behind.

  After promising Daniel I’d respect his one wish—to leave Violet out of it—I had asked her to stay with the herd and watch over Plato. She’d agreed, almost too quickly, but I chose not to question it, especially now.

  Who would want to see this side of Vendona anyway?

  Rating the worst sections of Vendona proved impossible, but I imagined the
Pits would be in the top three atrocities of our city.

  Violet didn’t need to see it. No one did.

  “Stay quiet this time, yeah?” I said to Adam, who agreed with one firm nod. We’d be lucky if we got out without trouble after hurting Skeleton, but bad bloods like Adam tended to be skilled and lucky. It took both to survive.

  “I can’t help you,” Connelly said the moment I shouldered the door open and burst inside. “You’re too late.”

  I let our actions speak for us.

  When Adam followed me inside quietly, Connelly looked interested instead of conniving. The tall, blonde woman had a hard time looking like anything but cold and calculating. Even now, with one manicured hand resting on an old radio, her dancing fingertips reminded me of how Kuthun played with fate’s strings. I sometimes wondered if he had the power to change them, rather than just stare at them like he claimed, but I imagined the price for such a change would be too great to even experiment with. Today, though, Connelly looked more than willing to risk us all.

  “Blood relation?” she guessed.

  “Cousins,” I answered.

  “Do you have stilts?” she asked.

  Adam choked, but shook his head.

  “Bad blood then?”

  He nodded. I added more information. “And a Northern Flock member. He worked at the cabin on the eastern wall.”

  The same cabin Connelly’s group attacked. She had informed me of the plans at the beginning of July, weeks after she spent the spring trying to convince me to join her equality group. After she tracked down those with stilts, she believed I would join in to tear down the wall in the hopes of getting more doctors on our side of Vendona, but I refused to partake without all the details. In a last-ditch effort, the woman had warned me of the first attack. It only happened to be Adam’s cabin—or so she wanted me to believe.

  “Oh.” Connelly raised a bored eyebrow. “How personal this has become.”

  I slammed my fists on the rickety table in front of her. “You told me your group wanted my help.”

  “Help is a strong word.” She kicked her feet up on the tabletop, showing off her spiked sandal-boots and weathered legs. “Besides, you’re old news, Dragon.”

  She used a nickname that started in the Pits to note my Chinese origin. I both hated it and felt guilty for hating it. When it came to my genetic background, I only knew what Jia-Li did—which was very, very little. After Vendona closed off their city walls fifty years ago, history was lost except for word-of-mouth stories. For that reason alone, Jia-Li hadn’t given me a Chinese name, though Nuo’s mother gave her one. Even worse, Jia-Li let my father name me after him, and according to Nuo’s mother, that meant I had to follow his footsteps or fail trying. I hated both options and envied Nuo for years. I still did. I wanted more from both sides of my genetic line, and got none—not from my mother or from my father. Still, Vendona citizens judged me for both when I felt born from air. Even then, Vendona only recognized one person as born from the wind.

  “They want the ghost now,” Connelly said, and my stomach sank.

  Violet.

  “No deal,” I snapped.

  “So you do know her,” she continued. As she eased back in her chair, my stomach dropped further.

  Connelly had to be reaching sixty, but she acted as if she had a lifetime of rebellion ahead of her. And she reveled in it.

  “I knew I could rely on you, Caleb.” The woman smiled, and I recalled the first time I met Connelly.

  She’d been a doctor in the Highlands. One who happened to be visiting the outskirts on the very night the Highlands put up the barbed wire for the start of the inner wall. Overnight, the city chose who would live on what side, and she was stuck on ours, away from her friends, family, and career. Originally, she’d tried to embrace the change. She went around and helped those in need with her medical experience. But over time, the destruction ate at her. Now, supposedly, she had found a way back inside, and the truth about both sides of the wall was worse than any of us could imagine.

  I had yet to ask her for intel, and I wasn’t about to start now. Not when it meant sacrificing Violet’s safety.

  “You’re not getting her,” I said.

  “And why not?”

  “You’re keeping her out of this,” I said, but the last voice I wanted to hear joined in on the debate.

  “Keep who out of what?”

  Violet.

  She materialized out of the shadows—dressed in all black, from her leather boots to her long, twisting hair. Even her eyes seemed darker than usual.

  “You promised me you weren’t going to come,” I started, but the second she folded her arms and cocked her hip to the side, I knew I had lost whatever argument we were about to have.

  “You also told me to stop listening to people.” To be her own leader.

  “That’s different, Violet,” I said. “You promised.”

  “What can I say?” She smiled ruefully. “I’m still learning the new rules.” When she took a step forward, her chin nearly rested on my shoulder. “It’s not Daniel’s job or your job to decide my fate,” she whispered. “I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions, thank you.”

  Stubbornly, I turned to Connelly. “She’s not doing anything for you.”

  Connelly twisted her gray-blonde ponytail around her fingers. “Sounds like she doesn’t take orders from you.”

  “Or you,” Violet pointed out. “So you might as well tell me what you want now.” She stood taller than she ever had before. “I’ll consider what you have to say, but as you can see, I don’t like to make promises. Or keep them.”

  Connelly’s cocky grin faltered. “Is it Violet or something else? Like Vi?”

  My heart pounded at the knowledge.

  “It’s normally Vi, isn’t it?” Connelly asked, then leaned back and soaked in the tension. “Girls like you—and me—we always get shortened.”

  Violet shrugged.

  “So many wanted me to go by Connie,” she continued, “but I like Connelly better.”

  “It’s a first name?” Violet asked, less intrigued by her story and more interested in her identity.

  Connelly flinched. “How about I ask you something?”

  Before Violet could agree, Connelly stood and loomed over us all.

  “Why protest Western Elementary?” she asked. “Why not go to school anyway?”

  “I don’t want to go to a bad-blood school.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Connelly said. “I meant…” She hesitated to explain. “You’re a shadow. You could do anything.”

  Violet could watch the classrooms without them even knowing

  “I shouldn’t have to hide myself,” Violet said. “I should be able to follow my dreams without having to conceal them from the world.” A sigh. “I’m tired of hiding.”

  Connelly’s wicked smile returned. “That’s what inspired us.”

  The school incident. After it happened, the mindset of Vendona citizens shifted, and Connelly came to the bordel to warn me. Her group had been waiting for an opportunity like this for years. Something to unite those on both sides. The first attack would be one of many.

  “Your little mishap exposed the overreaction police have,” Connelly continued. “It reminded everyone of how little has changed, how unfair it all is, and it sparked its own revolution.”

  “Like Serena’s escape,” Adam said.

  “Not everything is about Daniels’ girlfriend,” Violet muttered.

  “Or us,” Connelly agreed. “This is much more complicated than schools, pain, and the rights for bad bloods.”

  Violet became hazy with anger, and the shadows of the room reacted to her emotions. “How so?”

  Connelly watched the prepping darkness, but kept talking, “That wall has a rich history,” she said, “and it’s not what they taught you in school.”

  “I didn’t go to school,” Violet pointed out.

  “That’s why everyone likes you,” Conn
elly said, and then, she explained.

  In 2041, the United States dissolved, and all the city-states built walls to mark their boundaries. Even worse, Vendona constructed theirs overnight. While everyone slept—including visitors from foreign lands, like China—Vendona enclosed the population. While people fought to get out, their protests were buried in the discovery of bad bloods. Within ten years, the Separation Movement happened, and a new wall was built. Overnight, a new division arose, this time between the Highlands and the outskirts. Supposedly, it was meant to protect most of the citizens from the bad bloods and the war-torn people caught in between the crossfire. But Connelly thought it was more than that.

  “Our economy was slipping, because of internal war,” she said. “Terribly.” At the time, she was a grad right out of medical school. “By cutting down the population on the inside, the government could open more jobs, like mine, and redistribute the wealth.” Connelly sat down and reclined with her hands behind her head. “That was fifty years ago. What do you think has happened since then?”

  Adam remained silent. Violet didn’t. “You’re saying that wall isn’t even about bad bloods?”

  Connelly nodded once. “And now the economy is slipping again.”

  The rich were becoming poor. Even those on their skyscraper thrones were falling.

  “But the outskirts’ economy is rising,” Connelly added with a flick of her finger. “There are new opportunities everywhere for everyone. It’s a plethora of money and funding, and it’s the future.”

  The rights of bad bloods had created new teaching jobs. New adoption centers. New therapies, studies, and medical necessities.

  “But it’s not about equal rights,” Connelly said, almost chiding. “It’s not. It never was. It’s about opportunity.” Opportunity from those on the inside, just as much as those on the outside. “It’s about everyone.”

  And Violet’s actions at Western Elementary only sped up the changes. It showed those on the inside how quickly the economy was changing—and how everyone on the inside could miss out on the wave of potential.

  “And I should help, why?” Violet asked, her voice taut.