Rebel

by Rachel Manija Brown

  “No. With explosives. I wouldn’t have had any idea how to do that, but Ross did. He was bleeding through his bandages and he couldn’t use one hand at all, but he sat there calm as could be, doing calculations on a slide rule.” Kerry kept her expression cool. Letting Summer see that the story was intended to impress her would ruin everything. But from her wide-open eyes and even wider open mouth, “bleeding through bandages” had been the perfect touch.

  Kerry went on, “I helped him set up the explosives. When the dam collapsed, it took out the power for the entire city, and the flood ruined the entire stock of gunpowder. My father had no way to control the rest of his cities, and they all rebelled. Before he made the mistake of messing with Ross, my father ruled an empire. Now he only has Gold Point.”

  Summer said slowly, “My brother did that? But he looks so . . . well, he doesn’t act like the sort of person who could bring down an empire.”

  Kerry nodded seriously, hiding her satisfaction. “The most dangerous people are the ones who brag the least.”

  Chapter Seventeen: Ross

  When Summer left the stable, Ross was waiting.

  Once the barn fire had been doused, Sheriff Crow had come to the surgery to talk to her privately. When they were done, Summer had slammed out and not returned until Ross had gone to sleep. She’d avoided him entirely until martial arts training, when she’d jumped into the tree without a word. Ross couldn’t bring himself to question her in front of everyone, and after the training she’d gone off with Kerry.

  She had to be hungry and she liked Dr. Lee’s cooking, so he figured he could walk with her to the surgery. But as soon as she came out, her lips curled into a familiar annoyed sneer. Like he was the last person in the world she wanted to see. How did Jennie manage in a house full of siblings? He couldn’t even deal with one sister.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  Her expression became slightly less hostile. “Starving.”

  That was reasonably polite, so he decided to get to the point. “That fire the other day—”

  The sneer returned, angrier than ever. “I didn’t start it.”

  “I know. I just wondered where you were when it happened.”

  “You and half the town,” she retorted darkly.

  “Half the town?” Ross echoed, appalled. He remembered distinctly how nasty and even threatening some people had been when they thought he was a claim jumper. “Mr. Horst? Mr. Preston?”

  Summer shot him an odd look. “The sheriff. Dr. Lee. You. I was running. I was mad. When I’m mad, I run. When I saw the smoke—everybody in town saw it—I went to help. I thought I could put it out from the roof.”

  “I believe you.” Ross did. She might make up stories about killing more bandits than had ever existed, but this sounded true. And setting a fire didn’t seem like her. If she’d been mad around the barn, she’d have kicked the door down and yelled a lot. But she was his responsibility, so he’d felt he had to at least ask. “Dr. Lee has dinner waiting. Let’s go.”

  To his relief, either she forgave him or the idea of Dr. Lee’s cooking distracted her. She gave a little bounce, floating forward a few feet. When Ross caught up with her, she said, “Did you know a foal can gallop within a day of being born? And that its legs are almost as long as they’re going to be when it grows up? I didn’t get to see Penny’s colt born, but maybe I can see Acushla’s. Mrs. Riley says the mare will drop any day now. Two foals! I hope they play together.”

  She chattered on until they reached the Lees’ kitchen, where Dr. Lee and Mia waited at the table. Mia instantly fell silent. Frustration welled up in Ross. He loved talking to Mia over dinner, and Summer made her too nervous to speak. All he could do was look at her.

  Mia wore her best white shirt and freshly ironed pants, and she’d brushed her hair until it shone with blue-black highlights. There wasn’t a speck of dust or smear of engine grease anywhere on her. He remembered then that it was their date night. He hadn’t dressed up, but Mia wouldn’t care.

  Once dinner was over, they’d go to her cottage just to be together. That gave him a strange feeling, intense but unidentifiable. It wasn’t fear, and it was more than simple affection or even the rush of heat at the prospect of touching her. It felt . . . deeper. Whatever it was, it made him smile at her as he sat down at the table.

  The corners of her mouth lifted in answer, making the feeling intensify. Then Mia gave a nervous jerk of her head toward Summer and avoided his gaze. Then any other feelings were washed away by the helpless worry that had become all too familiar ever since his sister had walked into his life.

  Summer didn’t seem to notice that Mia didn’t talk when she was there. If she was in a good mood, like now, she did all the talking. If she was sullen, Dr. Lee would speak quietly about easy topics, as he had when Ross first arrived. Ross recognized now, and hoped his sister wouldn’t, how similar Dr. Lee’s tone was to Mrs. Riley’s when she was calming a wild, plunging horse.

  Summer rattled on about the royal horses as she shoveled in her dinner, pausing only once, her mouth full of daikon kimchi, to say, “This is really, really good!” At least, Ross assumed the last word was ‘good;’ it was lost in a very loud crunch.

  The moment her plate was clean, she got up. “I’m going back to see Acushla,” she announced as she ran to the door, and then she was gone.

  “Sorry,” Ross felt obliged to say. “I don’t want to say anything about manners, or she might . . .”

  “That’s all right, Ross,” Dr. Lee said. “She’s a smart girl. When she settles down, she’ll learn. Or remember what she was taught. I think her manners are a way of maintaining her distance until she feels she can trust us.”

  “Is that it? I thought she was doing it to get back at me for not being that gunslinger she imagined.” With Summer gone, the room felt very quiet. Ross took a deep breath. He was alone with Mia and Dr. Lee, and he trusted them both. He still couldn’t look either of them in the eye as he muttered, “I think she hates me.”

  “She may be angry and disappointed, but I’m sure she doesn’t hate you,” Dr. Lee said. “But also, being a rebel can be a normal part of being a teenager. Did you know that no one is allowed to move into Singles Row until they graduate from school?”

  Ross considered that. “Oh, so it doesn’t fill up with kids who got mad at their families.”

  Until Summer came along, he’d never thought he could get mad at a family member—or that one could get mad at him. When he’d been a lone prospector sleeping beneath the stars, sometimes he’d imagined a family for himself, and they had always been like the Rileys.

  “If there’s a serious problem at home, we have fosterage,” Dr. Lee replied. “But yes, we don’t want kids bouncing in and out of Singles Row because they are squabbling with their families.” Then, as if speaking to himself, he murmured, “And sometimes it’s not the obvious ones who need help.”

  Mia piped up, “Like Becky?”

  Ross hadn’t expected that. From Dr. Lee’s expression, neither had he. Immediately, he turned to his daughter. “Is there something you know about her?”

  “Not exactly,” Mia said. “But before Grandma Wolfe left, every now and then she’d ask Becky how she was feeling, though she didn’t look sick. Becky always said she was fine. And once she asked Becky to stay after school. I came back because I’d forgotten my lunch pail, and I heard Grandma Wolfe asking her if everything was all right at home.”

  “What did Becky say?” Dr. Lee asked.

  “She said everything was fine.” Mia shrugged.

  Dr. Lee tapped his chopsticks against his plate. “Mia, Ross, please don’t repeat this conversation. But if either of you hears or observes anything . . .”

  Ross doubted that he would. Despite all the time he spent in the surgery and how often he encountered Becky at the stable, the longest conversation he’d ever had with her had been on his very first day in Las Anclas, when she’d put aside her shyness to be kind. If something bad was happe
ning to her, he hoped Dr. Lee would find out and fix it.

  “I don’t know her that well.” Echoing Ross’s thought, Mia said, “Which is funny, since she’s your apprentice! But she was always part of Felicité’s crowd, coming to school in party dresses. I never had much to do with her, though I like her. Especially now. She’s the only other person at our practices as terrible as I am, but you should see how hard she tries.”

  “That’s true,” Ross said, thinking of Becky’s red, determined face as she took fall after fall. But she always got up again.

  Mia leaned forward, her eyes bright and curious. “Dad, is this why you took her as your apprentice?”

  Dr. Lee held up a hand. “Whoa, whoa. Don’t gallop down the wrong road! I have no proof that anything is wrong with Becky, and she apprenticed with me because she wanted to heal living things.”

  “I remember that,” Mia said. To Ross, she explained, “When we were kids, if anyone found a wild animal that was hurt, they’d bring it to Becky. She’d do her best to fix them, but she mostly tried to tame them and make pets of them. The one who was good at the fixing part was Alfonso Medina. Especially broken bones. Even dead bones. Once I saw him putting together an old bleached snake skeleton like it was a jigsaw puzzle. Weird.”

  “Bones are the cogs and struts of the body,” Dr. Lee pointed out. “Not so different from a machine. And you love putting those together.”

  “And blood is like oil!” Mia said excitedly. “Or, no, probably food and water is like oil used as fuel, and blood is oil used as grease. Okay, I guess the snake bones aren’t that weird.”

  Ross laughed.

  “Alfonso,” Dr. Lee said, rubbing his chin. “The only word that boy has ever said to me was after I set his collarbone when he discovered that he’d grown too heavy to stick to ceilings. It was, ‘Thanks.’ Now there’s a boy who never had a rebel phase. Hmm.”

  “Don’t call Summer a rebel to her face, Dr. Lee,” Ross said. “She’d love it way too much.”

  Dr. Lee laughed. “She might regard it as a challenge to live up to. Don’t worry. I’ll treat her as the adult she seems to want to be.” His smile disappeared. “But Ross, if you don’t mind some advice, listen to her. I think there’s a reason she’s so distrustful. I think something very bad happened to her, and not so long ago. She talks and brags a lot, but it’s always about people or events when she was younger. I’ve never heard her mention anything in the last year or so, except that she found out about you.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” Ross admitted, feeling as ignorant as he had when he’d first come to Las Anclas.

  “There’s no reason why you should have,” Dr. Lee replied. “This is your first time dealing with a sibling. Whereas I’ve had lots of experience with that.”

  Dr. Lee has lots of experience with a lot of things, Ross thought. Especially people.

  If anyone could tell Ross what was wrong with him, Dr. Lee could.

  Before he could lose his nerve, Ross made himself say, “Dr. Lee. You know—you must have noticed—there’s a lot I don’t talk about either, but it’s because I don’t remember it. And the memories I do have are in bits and pieces.”

  Even saying it aloud made him feel like he was about to have a building collapse on top of him. Like it had already collapsed. A band of pressure around his chest made it hard to get the words out.

  Mia reached out across the table, slowly so she wouldn’t startle him, then closed her warm hand over his. He held it tight, then managed to pull in a deep breath.

  “Yes, Ross, I’ve noticed.” Dr. Lee spoke gently, but not in his horse-taming voice. “Do you know when your memories that are in one piece begin? Approximately?”

  Ross hadn’t thought of it that way before. It wasn’t something he liked to think about at all. “I’m not sure.”

  “Try going backwards,” Dr. Lee suggested. “You remember everything that’s happened since you came to Las Anclas, don’t you? And you seem to recall your own solo prospecting days.”

  “Yeah, I do. I had some apprenticeships before that. I remember them.” Ross tried to picture how his first one had started. He’d used his grandmother’s map to find the nearest town. And before that . . .

  Walking across the sand, leading Rusty. His clothes were soaked with sweat, and his arms and back ached. He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to see the grave he’d dug with a shovel taller than he was.

  “My grandmother died,” Ross said. Mia squeezed his hand. He looked at her, not her father, as he went on, “I think after that is when things stop breaking up. Nothing killed her. She was old, and one morning she didn’t wake up. But I don’t have a memory of that. I just know that’s what happened. Somehow. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

  “I understand,” said Dr. Lee.

  “If someone asks me something, sometimes I know the answer. But I don’t know how I know. Or I’ll get a piece of a memory I didn’t have before.”

  “Like a disassembled engine,” Mia said softly. “Only not laid out nice and neat. Like bits you’d find prospecting, all jumbled together and half of them buried. Right?”

  “Yeah. It’s exactly like that.” Ross turned back to Dr. Lee. “Do you know why?”

  “I have an idea,” Dr. Lee replied. “Several people have told me that their memories of the battle of Las Anclas are like yours: out of order, with pieces missing. Most of them had something particularly bad happen to them: they lost a loved one, or they killed for the first time.”

  Ross caught Mia and her father exchanging glances. Dr. Lee didn’t even ride out on patrol because he wouldn’t take a life except in mercy. But Mia had killed in that battle. He’d seen her shoot an enemy who’d been about to attack him.

  “I remember it,” Mia volunteered. “Well, not every single moment. But all the important parts.”

  “And what was the most important part of the battle to you, Mia?” Dr. Lee asked.

  A radiant smile lit her up like a bright-moth. Instantly, she said, “Saving Ross’s life.”

  Dr. Lee gave her a proud pat on the shoulder. “And an excellent job you did of it.” Then he turned back to Ross. “And that’s probably why she didn’t forget anything. The battle wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to her. It had terrible moments, but the most important part was good.”

  Ross couldn’t believe he was saying this, after he’d experienced the deaths of Voske’s soldiers and nearly died himself, but he replied, “It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me, either.”

  “No,” said Dr. Lee. “I didn’t think it was. Sometimes people’s memories break up when they have such painful experiences that they feel unbearable to recall. It’s as if part of their mind is trying to protect them, but doesn’t quite know how: they might lose some memories that wouldn’t have bothered them, but keep some of the ones that do.”

  “Yeah.” The vise around his chest made it impossible for Ross to say more. But Dr. Lee had to be right. Why else would Ross have forgotten most of the ordinary moments of his childhood, but remember finding his father’s body? He pictured a person wildly swinging a club at a roach in a kitchen, and smashing half the dishes while the bug scurried free.

  Dr. Lee went on, “Also, think of your age. Everyone’s earliest childhood memories are fragmented anyway. Remembering our lives is something we learn how to do, like we learn how to speak. Ross, my guess is that your worst thing was losing your family. And because it happened when you were so young, and still learning to remember anyway, your memories just kept on breaking up and getting lost. When your grandmother died, that was probably the next worst thing. But by then you were much older and better at remembering, so that was the last thing you forgot.”

  Ross nodded slowly. When he tried to take a deep breath, he found that he could again. “Thanks, Dr. Lee. That makes sense.”

  He still didn’t know if he’d ever remember his parents’ faces. But that was all the talking he could stand do on that subject for on
e day. At least now he knew that there was a reason for the way he was.

  More importantly, he wasn’t the only person with holes in his memory. Dr. Lee hadn’t mentioned who in Las Anclas had forgotten parts of the battle; he’d never repeat anything told to him privately. It could be anyone. The next time people stared at him for not knowing something about himself, he’d remind himself that maybe he wasn’t the only one there with missing memories.

  Mia gave his hand another squeeze, then picked up her plate. Grateful for the excuse to end the conversation, Ross stacked up his dishes and Summer’s too.

  “Let’s go,” Mia said in a low voice, glancing around in that sneaky way that always started a flutter of laughter behind Ross’s ribs. “I want to show you something I made.”

  As they headed out, hands clasped, Ross felt better with every step he took. Soon they’d be alone together. He’d have something to focus on other than Summer and what he’d learned about himself. But more than that, he couldn’t wait to be with Mia, whether they’d finally spend the night together or whether their date would consist of trying out a weapon she’d made. Ever since the ruined city, they’d barely been alone together. He’d missed her.

  She opened the cottage door with a flourish. Ross stepped in, then stopped in surprise. For the first time ever, nothing was scattered across the floor. All her tools and scraps were hanging from her new tool rack or stacked on the table or crammed into bins.

  Mia pointed behind him with a grin, indicating a set of iron bars she’d bolted on either side of the door.

  “What are those?” Ross asked.

  She lifted a board leaning against the wall and dropped it into the bars. “A lock. Now nobody can push their way in.”

  Mia drew him further inside. “I have something else, too. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I usually work until I get tired, and I just curl up wherever I am. But some of the Lees sleep in a yo on the floor during summer, because it’s cooler than a bed. It’s a Korean mattress. But when we, um, tried the bed I put together, I thought, hey, this is comfy. And so, well, I rigged this.”