by Rebecca Rode
Millian paused at that, then corrected the thought. It wasn’t that she felt out of place here. It was just that everyone wanted to live on the mysterious island that, until weeks before, had only been accessible by boat. Legacy and Kole had recently claimed one of the more modest homes for their own, though a modest house on the island could fit several families in the city.
As for Millian . . .
She could have snatched up a huge island manor for her own. Even now, if she decided to do it, she could. The homes had been abandoned for decades. It sounded like a fun challenge, restoring the buildings to their former glory. But a sick feeling inside wouldn’t allow her to do it, and she couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps that icky feeling in her chest, or perhaps the wrenching hole in her gut that grew larger every day she felt disconnected from her family and her past.
Millian no longer belonged in the tiny Shadows apartment where she’d grown up, but she didn’t belong in a mansion on the island, either. She had a foot in each world but hovered between them. Where would she fall, in the end? The world Legacy offered—money, fame, attention? That felt like the one Virgil had left behind. It felt wrong. But the Shadows would never feel like home to her again, either.
Clarice was staring at her now, and Millian realized the woman had been speaking to her. “What?”
“I’m concerned about your living quarters,” Clarice said carefully. “You aren’t getting the rest you need. If this continues, I’ll need to inform Her Honor of the problem.”
Millian groaned inwardly, wishing she’d spent more time on her appearance this morning to hide the exhaustion. “The hotel rooms upstairs are more convenient than a manor. I can be down here in seconds if I’m needed.”
Clarice didn’t look surprised by her answer. “Pardon, Director, but you aren’t likely to be needed anytime soon. You’ve already ensured that everything runs smoothly, and I doubt you’ve stepped outside since your arrival. Why don’t you take a walk? Some ocean air would do you good.”
Millian started to shake her head, but a male voice floated from the front doors. “That’s a great idea. I have just the thing for our Director Commondor.” Legacy’s assistant, Foster, strode in and met them with a grin.
Millian’s stomach flopped, but not in a good way. The last thing she’d spent any length of time with the guy was an hour-long argument about the Rating system a couple of weeks before. She’d caught him staring at her twice since then, but she had no time for men—particularly men bent on climbing the political ladder like Foster did.
He must have seen the reluctance on her face, because his grin faded a bit. “I thought I’d show you a bit of island history. Might get your mind off the election. Would you spare me a few minutes?”
Clarice gave Millian a nudge on the shoulder. “I, uh, believe Director Commondor was about to take a break anyway. Right, Ma’am?”
Millian sent her assistant a glower, which the woman returned with a sweet expression. If only the Clarice of their early days, the bowing, scraping version, would return.
Foster clapped his hands together once. “Perfect. I’ll have you back within the hour, Director. Don’t you worry.” He offered her an elbow.
She stared at his elbow in disbelief. Muttering a curse under her breath, she brushed past him and stalked through the doors. The constant island wind immediately made her hair flop against her face, making her wish she had a handkerchief to tie it back.
“Good luck today, Director!” a driver called, waving out of a passing transport as Foster reached her side.
Millian gritted her teeth. Didn’t a woman of her position deserve to choose her own destiny? She wanted to strangle whoever had nominated her for a political position in the first place.
“Wow,” Foster said. “You really aren’t happy about the election, are you?”
“I don’t see what business it is of yours.” She felt a little bad for the words, but being manipulated to leave the lab made her feel sour. Here at the lab, she was Director Commondor. Out there on the island, where people had begun to settle, who was she? Legacy’s best friend? A young scientist obsessed with her work? A new settler in a very old area of the world?
Foster seemed completely unbothered by her rudeness. “I have to admit, that was easier than Legacy said it would be.”
Millian rolled her eyes and nearly walked back inside. “Of course. I should have known.”
“Give her a break. Everyone knows you’ve been working too hard, and unless you intend to resurface the floors yourself, there isn’t much you can do inside. Not sure why she sent me, but I’m not complaining.” A hint of red dotted his cheeks. He turned away before Millian could determine what it meant. “I’m serious about the tour, though. You seem like the type who would love this.”
Wonderful. Just what she needed today. “Tour? You said it would only take a few minutes.”
“It will. I’d call a transport for you, but they’ve only fixed the main roads and this is a little out of the way. We’ll have to walk. You have good shoes, right?”
Millian glanced at her shoes, the same white—or rather, once-white—sneakers she’d worn for years. The left sole pulled free with each step, revealing part of her sock, and the other flopped a bit at the bottom. Maybe it was time for new shoes.
Foster followed his gaze and pursed his lips. “I think you’ll be okay, but let me know if we need to turn back.”
I already want to turn back, and we haven’t left yet. She didn’t say it aloud, though, because for the first time in days, that crawling feeling in her chest was gone. Something about the warm wind lifted the cares she carried ever so slightly. She could spare a few minutes, couldn’t she? Besides, Legacy’s assistant seemed charming enough. In an odd, country-boy kind of way. Perhaps the wind and wild grass had affected him too.
“Fine,” Millian said, thinking about the hotel room she was leaving behind. Maybe Clarice was right and the time had come for her to put down roots somewhere. If there were ever a time to decide where she belonged, it was now. “Lead the way.”
“This was your childhood home?” Millian asked, trying not to sound as surprised as she felt. Foster stood in front of a stacked wooden fence in a state of such severe disrepair that she could barely tell what it was. Behind him lay a field of wild grasses that extended to a hill where the remains of a one-room stucco structure stood. Decades of island wind had taken their toll. With its roof collapsing on one side and an entire wall missing, it looked far older than the hotels and mansions she’d seen since her arrival. She turned her gaze to Foster again, really looking at him for the first time. He was only a couple of years older than her…wasn’t he?
“I know,” Foster said sheepishly. “It doesn’t look like much, but it was the perfect place for an active boy. I spent many an hour on that roof, plugging leaks from the rain. It hardly ever worked.” He chuckled. “My grandfather refused to replace the roof with better materials. Said our home deserved to remain in its original condition, just like when his own parents lived there.”
Millian gaped at him. “Wait. He didn’t arrive here as a child?”
Foster smiled and shook his head. “Nope. He was already here when the citizens of Old NORA arrived. He fell in love with one of them and they started a family, but she died in childbirth. He raised my mom alone.”
Millian examined the structure again. “I’m guessing your mom didn’t stick around.”
“Left as soon as she could. She preferred the noise and community of the bigger city. The cost of living was too high, though, so when she and my dad split, she sent me to live here.”
Millian couldn’t imagine such a life. An empty island, all this unused land with its wild animals and ocean wind and . . . silence. It’s the silence, she realized. It unnerved her. She wasn’t sure she could live here forever when the only sound was the wind rustling through the grass.
Bothered by the thought, Millian considered his words and then realized something. “Hold on. Didn�
��t you tell Legacy you stumbled upon this island once?”
Foster’s cheeks turned a little pink again, and suddenly he looked like a little boy caught in an innocent lie. It was kind of cute. “I didn’t tell her that exactly. I just let her think that.”
“Why?”
“People know me as a big-shot city politician in the making, not the grandson of a llama farmer. I’m awkward enough as it is.”
Now Millian laughed. “Wait. Llama farmer?”
“I’m not kidding. Tourists in Old America used to take a ferry across the channel just to see the llamas. Why are you looking at me like that? It was a good living and llamas can be great pets.”
Millian lifted her hands in surrender. “I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . I don’t even know what to say to that. You win.”
The defensiveness faded and Foster grinned. “I didn’t know this was a competition.”
“If it were, I would find a way to win. I can get pretty competitive.”
He watched her, his grin softening into something calculating, considering. “I can see that.”
They spent a few minutes in silence, looking over the quiet scene before them. Foster sneaked a few glances at her, but Millian barely noticed. All she could think about was the difference in their respective childhoods. One, a quiet farm far from the city. The other, a cramped apartment in a crowded part of the city. He wanted public office and she wanted her own lab, both dreams having seemed impossible just weeks before. Surely Legacy would help Foster rise in the political ranks once she won the election, and Millian had already won what she wanted.
Hadn’t she?
“How about you?” Foster asked quietly, as if reluctant to disturb the silence around them. “You’re one of the most recognizable faces on the island, yet nobody seems to know anything about you. What’s your family like?”
It was an innocent question when directed to anyone else, but in her case, it felt like a cage tightening around her. She shoved her hands into her pockets, noting that her name tag had gone crooked again. “I don’t want to talk about them.”
He blinked. “Oh. I wasn’t trying to intrude.”
“It’s fine. They’re still alive and all.” At least, she thought her father was still alive. She hadn’t seen him in months. “It’s just that my sister isn’t doing well, and I’m not sure how to help her.”
Foster nodded slowly. “That explains the work ethic.”
Millian felt a wall rise between them, her defenses suddenly on alert. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just that you’re driven,” Foster said too innocently, leaning against a fence post that miraculously seemed to hold his weight. “I get that. I’m driven too. But I’ve discovered something about driven people like us. Sometimes you have to ask what is driving them, the future or the past?”
“I’m not haunted by my childhood, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“I don’t think ‘haunted’ is the right word, exactly. The way we’re raised, the relationships we’re born into? They shape us. Like sand. Did you know that there are islands in the world with sand as soft as powder? Yet our sand here is coarse and durable and even sharp when you step on it with bare feet, a fact I discovered quickly as a child. Before we can understand why the sand is that way, we have to understand the environment that shaped it.” He turned his blue eyes on her, and suddenly she felt as if the ground beneath her was indeed sand, giving way at her feet, melting and reshaping and not quite solid.
She knew what his words meant. Foster wanted to know her better. Legacy hadn’t sent him. He’d sent himself.
“My home environment was sharp,” she managed, trying to get a grip on her emotions. What was it about this guy that sent her heart racing? “As sharp as they come.”
“I thought it might be.” He hadn’t pulled his gaze away yet, and she found herself captured.
Until something bleated.
Foster yanked his eyes away and scoured the field. Then he grinned again. “A sheep. Huh. Didn’t think there were any of those left.”
Millian felt the moment she’d just shared slip away in the wind, and she suddenly felt raw. Exposed. She didn’t like it. “I should probably head back.”
He didn’t try to stop her, instead falling into step beside her as they headed down the hill toward town. “Your sister wasn’t an update victim. You would have made sure she was healed by now. It’s something else.”
No way would she be telling him Nadia and the sacrifices she’d made. Nobody would understand what living in the Shadows did to a person, the desperate hunger that left her mother defiled and beaten and eternally angry. No one could know how Nadia had stayed up at night to keep watch over them, brushing Millian’s dark hair out of her face and whispering lies about things being all right. No, Millian didn’t know what disease had taken hold of Nadia, but she had an idea, and the horror of it filled her with a constant, relentless, invisible pain.
She brushed the scars on the inside of her wrist and tried not to think about what Nadia may have succumbed to in her absence, what their mother would have insisted she do. She tried to ignore the guilt that whispered Millian was responsible, that she’d failed her sister, that she should have taken Nadia with her when she left. That she shouldn’t have put Legacy Hawking ahead of her own family. That she should have gone with that physician and beaten down the door and made Mom let them in.
“I’m not going to tell you that there must be something you can do to help her,” Foster said, watching her carefully. “If you believed that, you would have done it by now. So I’ll ask you this—is there anything I can do instead? Bribe someone, kill someone, whatever.”
He was joking. She knew that. But there was only sincerity in his eyes, and it touched her. She realized that they’d stopped walking and now faced one another, alone and quiet and so very still.
“Very tempting,” she murmured.
He lifted his hand, ever so slowly, and brushed her cheek with one tentative finger. It made her shiver inside, but she didn’t pull away. Something kept her rooted in place. It was, coincidentally, the same thing that filled her with a kind of sudden clarity.
There was something she could do, and she was tired of waiting on other people to get it done.
“I need a transport,” she said. “Now it’s your turn to come with me.”
Just as Millian expected, her mom answered the door. Millian didn’t wait. She shoved the door the rest of the way open before her mother could shut it in her face, forcing the woman to back away with a murderous expression.
“How dare you come barging in here like this?” she snapped, although it wasn’t Millian she glared at, but Foster and the medical team behind her. They trotted past Mom to the bedroom. Millian followed.
Nadia lay on their bed, but she wasn’t the beautiful, happy young woman Millian remembered. Her round cheeks had turned sharp, her eyes sunken and shadowed, her collarbones visible above the white tank top she wore beneath her thin blanket. Her black hair had been shaved recently, making her forehead look too wide. She stared at the door with a dazed look. She didn’t even blink as the four medical team members set to work, taking her vitals and stabilizing her for the journey.
“Don’t you touch her,” Mom hissed from the doorway.
Millian turned to face her. “I’m taking Nadia with me. You’re welcome to come if you’d like.”
“Neither of us are leaving, but you are.” Mom grabbed Millian’s arm and tried to yank her backward.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Foster said, appearing at Mom’s side. “The penalty for hurting an Honorship candidate is steep. You may want to steer clear until the election is over.”
Mom released Millian’s arm and stared at him, then her daughter. “Honorship candidate?”
Millian wanted to strangle the woman. Now that she had a good look at her, it was clear the drugs had taken their toll over these past weeks. No wonder she didn’t know what was going on. “Someone nominat
ed me, but I’m not taking it. I have a lab, Mom. I’m going to create new technologies and make a name for myself. I’m pulling us out of all this.”
The medical team counted, then lifted Nadia onto a stretcher. Seconds later, Millian stepped aside with the others as they rushed past. One woman lingered, but Millian simply said, “Go. We’ll find our own way.” Then they were gone, Nadia in tow.
“It’s my turn to take care of you,” Millian whispered. “I’ll see you soon.”
The drive to the hospital wing at the island would take forty minutes, but at least her sister finally had the care she needed. Millian would make sure it was the best care she could possibly have. Now that the deed was done, she felt several centimeters taller.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Mom said, blocking Millian’s exit, looking at her and Foster with challenge in her gaze. “What do you mean, you’re an Honorship candidate?”
“The most I would ever win is a spot on the cabinet,” Millian said, shooting Foster a warning look. “Apparently people liked the speech I gave the day of the turnover. But I don’t want that position either. It’s like I said—I’m going to run the lab.”
“What speech?”
“If you still have access to the IM-NET,” Foster said, “search for your daughter’s name. It’s all over the place. People are very impressed.” He shot Millian a meaningful look. “And she’s wrong about the cabinet thing. Millian is one of the most popular people in New NORA right now. She’s made a huge difference, and if she wins, she has the power and the intelligence to make some powerful changes. You should be very proud of her.”
Millian managed not to squirm at the unwanted praise. “I didn’t do it to make anyone proud. It needed to be done.”
Her mother’s deep brown eyes turned pink around the edges for a minute, her gaze going slack. They watched as the emotions played out—first shock, then amazement, then utter awe. By the time Mom released the video, she gazed at Millian like she was a stranger.
