“So, what’d you get?” he asks.
“We were looking for some people in a picture Nali’s mother had and we were chased by The Fury.”
“DEETA!” Robin shouts. Deeta startles and I touch the picture in the pocket of my hoodie, as if something just took it away from me.
“What?” Deeta turns on Robin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Deeta look serious until now. “We can trust him. Principal VanWeider vouched for him.”
“Jeez, I’m Simple and I know you don’t trust anyone with everything.” Zaneen says. She tips her head to Milo and blasts him full force with the hungry cheetah. “Even if he is adorable.”
“He’s Alo,” Deeta’s face, her words, and her tone—all blunt.
“All the more reason we should lock our doors and watch our mouths. Because we don’t know of any Alo that’s ever gone to The Fury before,” Robin snaps. Then she turns her own signature stare on him, launching icicle spears. “Like his mother.”
Milo’s shoulders twitch back. A grin comets across his face and sizzles out in the scorching glare he levels on Robin.
“You really need to lay off my mother,” he says. Zane moves beside Robin, but Garrett moves right between Robin and Milo.
“Everybody needs to cool off,” Garrett says. “Milo, maybe you want to take a walk around the courtyard?”
Milo doesn’t hesitate. He goes out the glass door, leaving it wide open.
“Why do you have to be like that?” Deeta turns on Robin. “Van ok’d him. He’s safe. And he’s right that it’s not his fault what his parents were. He’s trying to be different and we should be supporting that.”
“We. Don’t. Know. Him.” Robin drawls.
“And we’re not trying to get to know him either.” Deeta shoots back.
“You don’t do that when everything’s all jacked up.” Zane says. “Robin’s right. We don’t know him, we can’t trust him.”
“I don’t see the point in being mean,” Deeta says and she goes for the front door.
“Aww, come on,” Mark says as she stuffs her feet into her shoes. “We finally get to hang out and everyone’s gotta fight?”
“Catch a grape, Deeta!” Brandon whips a grape at Deeta, but she doesn’t pop up her head or open her mouth. Instead, it bounces off her head and she clutches her temple with a sniffle.
“Later,” she says and lets herself out into the hall. Robin sighs.
“I’ll make sure she gets home,” she says.
“I’d go, but I’ve got to be up on the roof in about ten minutes.” Garrett says. Zaneen groans, but follows after Robin.
“I’ll go with you, then,” she says. It’s Zane’s turn to groan.
“Well, if you’re going, I’ve got to go too,” he says. Brandon’s shoulders drop and he dumps his bowl of grapes on the coffee table.
“Some party,” he says. “I could’ve just stayed up top on guard.”
“That an offer?” Garrett asks, but both Mark and Brandon shake their heads at once, jumping to their feet.
“Forget it!” Mark says. “It’s our night off. We’re out of here.”
They bob off to the door and slip out into the Courtyard and back to their own room. Garrett gives me a long look.
“I could come up with you,” I say hopefully, but Garrett just shakes his head.
“No guard duty for you until you’re completely trained,” he says. His eyes are on my lips. “As much as I want you with me, I’m kind of glad you’re staying down here. Maybe we should slow down your training after all.”
He takes a step toward me and I take a step back.
“Not a chance,” I tell him, but when he grins and turns away from me, it makes me feel like I’ve been pulled under by a huge wave.
Once Garrett’s gone, Sean and I stare at each other a couple of minutes before he says, “Game of Scrabble?”
“Nah,” I say. He looks as tired as I feel. I don’t ask him what it’s like to train with Addo. It seems like one of those mind-your-own-beeswax kind of things, so I just tuck my hands into the pockets of my hoodie. My fingertips brush against the picture and I sigh. I wonder how I’m ever going to figure out who the rest of the people are in the photo with the Fury following us around like black clouds. And knowing who they are might not even matter if it can’t get me any closer to finding my grandfather’s Memory.
“I think I’ll just get some sleep,” I say and Sean’s face smoothes over in relief.
“Good plan,” he says, walking me to the glass slider. “If you need anything, just bang on the door.”
“Will do, and if you need protecting, just let me know,” I tell him with a smirk.
“I’m never going to get used to that.” He laughs as I let myself out. He locks the door behind me. I don’t turn back, but the little snap of the lock sends a weird twinge of loneliness through me. It’s stupid, of course. But being locked out makes me feel like I’m a threat. And then I spot Milo, seated at one of the stone benches beneath a lemon tree.
Robin’s words replace Deeta’s, like a bad song in my head. We don’t trust him. We don’t know him. I try to slip past him to my door, but he catches me with a glance over his shoulder as I pass. It would be rude not to acknowledge the little wave he tosses my way.
“Hi.” The word slips out of my mouth.
“Hi,” he says. His eyes dart to Sean and Garrett’s door wall. From the outside, the sliding doors reflect like dark mirrors instead of glass. Milo half-laughs. “So, you drew the short stick?”
“What short stick?”
“The mighty Contego sent a girl out to question the big bad wolf,” he says, shooting another bitter glance at Sean and Garrett’s door.
“No one sent me out,” I say, but the insult flares a blast of steam straight through me. I stop before I spill everything: that the party has broken up, that there were only two Contego in there and Sean’s not even one of them, that Garrett’s gone up on guard duty. Robin’s words: We don’t know him, we don’t trust him, keep burbling in my head.
“Besides,” I say, the steam doubling inside me. My nerves stand up like metal shavings to a magnet. “I’m Contego and just in case you’re wondering? I can totally take care of myself.”
But he kills my boil and flattens my nerves with how he drops his eyes to the ground. He’s not much of a threat, sitting there, rubbing his knuckles with his thumb. His shoulders droop.
“No doubt,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m just sick and tired of always having to prove myself because of what my parents did.”
He meets my gaze and the last of my steam evaporates in the mocha swirl of his eyes. He doesn’t give me floaty tingles that Garrett does. Not at all. What happens inside me when I look at Milo is like walking through the halls of Simon Valley High and hearing Waste whispered behind me. It’s like being at my first Impressioning ceremony, where several of the Ianua members didn’t want to accept me because they questioned what kind of person I would end up being, because my father was a murderer. It’s like when I thought Roger was just my father and then finding out the whole truth, all the things he was, and hating it and still being tied to it at the same time.
I remember the exact feeling of what it was like to be judged for my father’s mistakes. And when I look at Milo, I plug right into him, a direct line into his despair.
And Principal VanWeider said Milo was safe. It should be more than enough. And no one’s named anything Milo had done that was untrustworthy, besides having parents that made mistakes. I mean, the scary thing is, Milo’s not really any different from me.
“You want to sit?” he asks. I don’t, but not for the reason he thinks, so when he scoots over, I sit.
“I’m sorry for how everyone acted in there,” I say.
“It’s alright. I can usually blow it off.” He continues to rub his knuckles. “You just can’t imagine how much it gets to be sometimes.”
That makes me laugh.
“Do you even know
who I am?” I say. “I thought everyone in the Ianua knew about my father. Roger Maxwell? I mean, hello.” I put out my hand to shake Milo’s. “Murderer’s daughter, nice to meet you.”
He only looks up momentarily to give me a fleeting grin.
“Murderer,” he whispers with a frown.
“Yup.”
“So how come they don’t seem to mind you?”
“Maybe because of Garrett,” I say. Even though I feel like I should stay in serious mode with Milo, I can’t help the smile that spreads across my mind when I say Garrett’s name. It doesn’t help that the smell of the lemon tree reminds me of his kiss. “But it could be because the Addo set everyone straight at my Impressioning. Or it could be that they all feel sorry for me, because my father was in the Fury and my mom,” I think of the tiny diamond she hung in my heart. “She was a dedicated Alo when he killed her.”
“Sorry,” Milo says quietly. “Van mentioned it.”
“I get why you’d want to leave your Cura,” I say, to change the subject. I don’t want to start thinking of my mom and where she is now and how I’m not helping her enough. And I can’t talk to him about it. “But why now?”
“Lots of reasons,” he says, but when he doesn’t offer any of them, I feel like maybe he’s taking Robin’s advice too and locking his own doors too. His shoulders dip even lower, as if he’s carrying the entire Cusp on them. Then he says, “It wasn’t such a big deal, me leaving, until all this happened and everything went haywire. I was lucky Van took me in. With my family’s black sheep status, I was a prime target from the start.”
“Target for what?” I ask.
“It’s not settled out there like it is here. All the Outer Curas are backstabbing and accusing each other, and it’s not even just one Cura against another. Everyone’s suspicious and plotting against the other members in their own Curas.”
I knew, from the Totus, that the Outer Curas were worried that we were keeping the Addo from them, but I figured it would be resolved pretty fast—once the leaders in the Outer Curas were authenticated. Maybe it’s a lot worse than any of our Cura knows. Or maybe Milo doesn’t really know.
“Why would they fight?” I ask.
Milo looks up at me then, his eyes wide with shock. “Because each of the other Addos were assassinated by members of their own Cura,” he says. I almost choke on my own tongue.
“No,” I say, but my voice shakes. “It was The Fury that assassinated the Addos.”
“It definitely was them,” Milo says. “But The Fury has sewn themselves right into the Ianua, Nalena. They’re in so deep that it’s getting hard to tell who’s Fury and who’s Ianua anymore.”
The sick thread spins in my gut. If what he’s saying is true, then he’s pretty much telling me that Robin is right. We can’t trust him. We can’t trust anyone. But I trust Principal VanWeider and he said Milo is okay. And I’m more frightened to stop trusting than to take a chance on Milo.
I blink and Milo does this awkward little laugh. His brow goes soft as he says, “Don’t worry, Nalena, I’m not the one you have to look out for.”
He says it so simply it should feel reassuring, but instead, his words spin another dark thread in my stomach. I squint at him. “Oh yeah? Then who is?”
“I wish I could tell you.” Milo shrugs. “I wish I knew myself, but no one tells me anything. Things are such a mess, I don’t know how we’re going to fix it all. All I know is that I’m the black sheep and my parents were a waste.”
Waste. I meet his mocha gaze, but his eyes have changed color. Now they are the color of sand, trapped beneath the ocean. I think of what Addo said about the Alo under pressure. Even though Milo’s a head taller than me and even though he looks like he could hold his own in a fight, he’s still Alo. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s the new guy in a new Cura that doesn’t want him any more than his old Cura did. I get that sometimes it’s just too much.
So when he drops his head, I don’t leave. Instead, I sit beside Milo Frangere as he tries to pretend that he’s not crying quietly into his hands.
We sit a while and, somehow, it makes it even more awkward that Milo is not just a stranger, not just handsome, and not just a boy crying in front of me, but that he is all of these things, all at once. And even though I don’t know where to look or what to do with my hands or what to say, I still feel like I understand him in ways that make me the only person that can really sit here beside him. So I stay.
“Sorry,” he finally says, wiping his eyes like he wishes he could dig them out. He won’t look me in the face.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. I don’t try to touch him. It seems like that would make it creepy, even though I think it’d make him feel better. More connected. I sit on my hands.
“Thanks.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know why that happened.”
“No big deal,” I say. He still won’t look me in the face and I think it’s my cue to go. Maybe he’s not done crying. Maybe he needs to have one of those moments, where he can bury his face and sob so hard that it’ll feel like his ribs are hitting his spine. I get it, so I stand up to go and decide not to even look back until he says, “You dropped something.”
I turn and he’s holding the photo of my parents and their friends. But he’s not just looking, he’s really studying it.
“Where did you get this?” he asks.
“Why? Do you know them?”
“Yes,” he says. He taps a finger over the couple on the left, the ones Clint called Minxy and Rustacuffs. “Those are my parents, Elaina and Rhus. That’s my mom’s ring. I’ve never seen what my dad looked like this young. I wish my mom’s face wasn’t smudged out.”
“Are you sure? Clint called them…”
“Minxy and Rusty Cuffs?” Milo says. He separates the second name so it sounds more like a name than a thing. “They called my mom that because she was…popular. But I guess she could never shake what she felt for my dad. She had an on-going affair with him, even while she was married to Steven. That’s how I came about. And they called my dad Rusty Cuffs because he was always in trouble. I guess the joke was that the handcuffs would be rusty before he ever got out of them.”
“Wow,” I say. I drop back down on the bench beside him. I point to the girl beside Clint. “Do you know who she is?”
“Sure,” Milo nods without taking his eyes off the picture. His voice goes dull. “That’s my aunt. Ignatia.”
Chapter 15
I CAN HARDLY GET THE words out. “I.G.? Ig? She’s your aunt?”
“My dad, Rhus…it’s his sister.” He nods. “She’s Simple, but once my dad went to The Fury, it didn’t matter.”
“Did the community do something to her?”
“No, not the Ianua. But the Simple folks don’t really want you around either, when your brother is a thief and a womanizer. It was hard on my aunt. And it got even harder when I got dumped on her.” He rubs his forehead and I wait for him to continue. “I don’t remember anything about moving there, besides the huge bed where I slept. I was little, so I used to roll off it sometimes when I was sleeping.
“My father got custody automatically when my mother died. He pawned me off on my aunt. She was only about sixteen years old and stuck living off my dad and all his crooked schemes and panhandling.
“She agreed to take care of me because she was in love with a guy who was crazy about kids. When he was around, she was great to me.”
“What about when her boyfriend wasn’t around?” I ask.
“She didn’t beat me or lock me up or anything,” he says. “She just acted like I wasn’t there.”
“That can be just as bad.”
“Sometimes it was. Sometimes I think it was better that way,” he says and then he shakes his shoulders back and straightens up, holding the picture out to me. “At least we’re both at peace now.”
“When did she die?”
“Die?” he scoffs. A cloud passes over the skylight above us and it turns the mo
cha shade of his eyes a deeper brown. “She’s not dead. She went to the Fury and it drove her insane. So now you know my secret. The real reason why I needed to get out of my Cura. Aunt Ig finally gave in, years ago, and followed her boyfriend into The Fury. She would’ve followed him anywhere, even though he never loved her. He called her his favorite distraction. He never really lied to her. He always said he was passing time until he got back with his real family. She just never believed him.”
Milo holds out the picture to me and I glimpse the little girl with the pointed face, inclined toward Roger.
And I see it.
Milo’s fingers touch mine and Clint’s words come blasting back to me.
That bastard she’s with.
Roger helped himself to what was mine.
I hope they kill you faster, instead of leaving you around to rot, like he did to her.
I stand up, sit down, stand up again.
I want to run away from Milo.
I want Garrett. Instead, I meet Milo square in the eyes.
“Milo?” I say, “was Ignatia in love with my father?”
Milo drops his gaze and rubs his knuckles again.
“He was good to me,” is all he says.
Stunned.
Walking away.
Opening the slider to my apartment.
Milo behind me.
Turning.
Telling him to go away.
Closing, locking my door.
Good to him?
“Nalena,” Milo’s voice comes through the glass. “Nalena, please…”
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Roger?”
“Why do you think?” he says. “My parents. My insane aunt. Your dad. I’ve come from the worst of everything. Your dad was my dad’s best friend. And my aunt’s boyfriend. I just wanted to give you a chance to get to know me first.”
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