Bad Bloods (24 page)

Logan was not my enemy. Vendona was.

I nodded to Alec and then to Logan and then
to his wife, a tight-lipped pompous woman who didn’t seem capable
of speaking, but she was the first to say anything at all. “How was
your home these past few years?” Her voice was smooth, like the
silk I wore, but I blinked at her question.

“Ah, yes,” Joshua Logan II agreed, smiling as
if I missed a joke. “Your courageous endeavor is humbling.”

I did not understand a word he said. Jane’s
expression told me it wasn’t good.

I stood my ground. “I—”

“It must have been awful, living in such
conditions,” Mrs. Logan interrupted me, and my entire façade came
crashing down. They weren’t talking about my fake story about South
Africa at all. They were talking about me—about Serena—the girl who
escaped a blood camp.

“Now, Joshua,” Alec interrupted them like
interruption was a game for the wise and rich. “We can be gracious
about this, or we can be honest, but we cannot be both.” He smiled,
but it was less of a smile and more flashing of teeth.

Logan returned the gesture, and although
Logan’s smile was whiter in most places, his canines were speckled
with yellow. “I’ve always preferred kindness.”

“I didn’t know you had that in you.” The
words left me before I thought them, and both Logans blinked at me,
startled, as if they had forgotten I could speak. I flashed my own
teeth to remind them that I could do much more than that, and if
the lighting were better, I would have sworn I saw Joshua Logan II
pale.

“I’ll go first,” he decided, facing Henderson
with whatever pride he could muster, which, to my dismay, was a
significant amount. His silver hair shined beneath the lights, and
loud applause erupted through a curtain I was told not to peek out
of. We’d be ushered out any moment. The speeches were coming.

“As you wish,” Alec agreed, nodding once
more, and then, the curtains were moving, and we were moving, and
Jane’s hand was on my wrist where Daniel’s bracelet was, and I
wondered if they’d be watching me tonight as I took my seat on
Henderson’s side for all of Vendona to see.

I thought of them and hoped my memories would
help me outshine a city I had spent my entire life attempting to
hide in the shadows of.

***

Joshua Logan II’s speech lasted fourteen
minutes, fifty-nine seconds, and fifty-eight milliseconds. At
least, that’s what the giant timer said on the pearl-white wall. He
was one millisecond short of going over the fifteen-minute mark.
And he was damn proud of himself. His beam said it all, and the
crowd applauded him for it. I even forced myself to clap, small
little claps, something Jane had told me was necessary, and I hoped
my flock wouldn’t hate me for it.

Logan’s speech was nothing new, nothing
exciting, just rambles about crime rates, poverty percentages, and
diseases that came out of the outskirts. The murder statistics even
surprised me, but I tried not to let it show. Dozens—if not
hundreds—of bad bloods had killed their own families. But I
wondered how many wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t been forced
to. That, however, wasn’t a stat. To end his speech, he cited the
first bad blood, the little girl who murdered an entire
congregation of people who worshiped her. He concluded that was all
bad bloods would do. If we worshiped them again, we’d kill again.
It was up to Vendona to prevent more death. We were an
uncontrollable disease. And by that, I suppose, they justified
their own killings. No one mentioned the money parts.

Jane leaned across me to whisper to Alec.
“They fixed the clock.”

He nodded, his jaw locking into place.

I had missed something I wished I hadn’t.

Logan already had an advantage.

“Keep your eye on yours.” Jane fanned a smile
as if she had told him something encouraging instead of the
truth.

It was his turn now, and he took one second
to kiss her on the cheek. When he also kissed me, on the forehead,
I didn’t know what to do in return. Smile? Frown? Stay neutral? Was
anyone even looking at me? How was I supposed to matter in any of
this?

“Dear,” Jane’s voice, as quiet as the
November breeze, met my ears. “Be yourself.” It was her mantra.

I nodded, tearing my eyes off Alec to survey
the room. The crowd stole my breath away every time. The amount of
people was unfathomable; little faces, round bodies, big hair,
ruffled clothes, and independence everywhere. No one looked like
the person next to them. No one tried to blend in. No one tried to
hide themselves in the shadows like I had been taught. One hundred
stories of people went above me, and I couldn’t find myself in a
single one of them.

This time, I let the color drain out of my
face. I let my hands shake. I allowed myself to touch Daniel’s
bracelet and to think of Melody’s laugh and Robert’s hugs and
Steven’s lectures. And I pretended I saw them instead.

“This photo has never been seen by the public
before.” Alec’s voice rose over the crowd, and every face turned up
toward a fall-out ceiling panel. As I faced it, the picture
appeared, solid and familiar. Daniel’s photograph. The one that sat
on his desk. The one with all the kids on it. I had avoided looking
at it for too long.

“Every citizen of Vendona is aware of the
story, of the tale we try not to tell, of the truth we hide from
ourselves.” My eyes moved over every child, every face and body.
They, like me, looked nothing like the crowd Alec spoke to. “I want
you to choose one child and look at them, look at them in the eyes
as if they were right in front of you.” I picked a boy with blond
and brown curls. “What do you think their eye color is?”

Chills went up my spine. The kids weren’t
close enough to see their eye color, but a color came to mind
anyway. Green. Like Daniel’s. Because of this, I pictured Daniel
instead. Henderson’s mind trick must have worked on others as well,
because a few gasps went through the crowd—just not enough
gasps.

“Now look at all of them,” Alec said, and I
obeyed. I skimmed over the kids in the front, the ones right next
to the boy I chose, and the older girl standing next to him. Her
long, brown hair was as straight and flat as she was tall, but she
held the biggest smile. It was the two on the right that caught my
attention the most. The black-haired girl with the rainbow-haired
one. I knew them. I knew this.

“This photo was taken one week before the
Western Flock was ambushed and killed.”

Alec’s words almost made me fall out of my
chair. Jane even gripped me, as if she knew I would faint at any
minute. Knowing it was one thing, but hearing it was another.
Having it confirmed as a fact was more painful than smiling at
Logan.

The Western Flock—all fifteen of them—looked
like normal, happy kids. Well-fed kids. Kids capable of smiling.
Nothing like the kids of the Northern and Southern Flock. Actual,
honest-to-goodness children who enjoyed grinning for a
photograph.

But these kids. These faces. As young as
five, as old as twenty, died. All of them.

Alec pressed a button, and the photo zoomed
up on the tall brunette girl I noticed before. “As far as the
records go, this is Abigail Litman, the leader of the Western
Flock. She was nineteen.”

Someone threw trash on the stage, and Alec’s
speech halted as a stagehand ran out, grabbed the can, and vanished
backstage. My eyes followed the noisy crowd as one police officer
handled the disgruntled man, and time was added to Henderson’s
clock. Even then, something about the crowd wasn’t right. Something
I kept searching for.

“Abigail was also the eldest of the
children,” Henderson added as I continued to search. “The youngest
was four.”

When another person booed, the same officer
dragged them out, and during the commotion, I recognized what was
missing. Cops. There weren’t as many in the Trident on election
speech day as there were on any given day in the outskirts. Only a
handful was visible, and most of them looked focused on the speech
instead of the people.

“Some of you may have children in this age
range. Some of you might be planning on having children. After
all,” he paused, waving toward the photo and catching my attention
once more, “these children had parents, as everyone does, and now,
they are dead.”

He gripped the podium and leaned forward. “Is
this the society you want our future generations to live in? A
society that teaches our young people to hate what they do not
understand? Because that’s the message we are giving; that’s the
world we are building. A world where we kill children who are
different than others.”

“They’re monsters!” someone screamed.

A glare escaped me, right at the crowd, and a
pair of widened eyes met mine. I didn’t know who they were or if
they had been the ones to shout, but the crowd silenced as if I had
glared at them all.

“Monsters,” Alec Henderson repeated the word,
and I turned back to him, his eyes on me. “Monsters are the ones
who torture and kill the innocent.” His stare traced the crowd.
“And even if my own daughter was born as a monster, I would love
her and try to teach her how not to be one.”

He wiped the sweat from his brow. “Either
way, one should love their children, shouldn’t they? After all,
children are only duplicates of your own genes. What did these
children ever ask for? They wanted love, family, and support. But
we kicked them out onto the streets like animals just because we,
as adults, were scared of a situation we weren’t used to.”

My eyes went back up to the photo.

“These children are our future. We were
children once. All of us were. Bad bloods are an evolution. They
are a mutation, not a disease, and we will all have these special
abilities one day. Are we going to kill all of our children then?
Are we going to kill our future? Because that is what we are
heading toward. A dead future.”

“There’s no proof of that!” A voice from the
crowd. I hadn’t heard a single shout during Logan’s speech, and
every shout during Henderson’s speech caused Jane to hold my hand
harder. I didn’t even know shouting during a speech was legal. A
part of me wondered if it wasn’t, but the police that were present
weren’t stopping it. Where the other officers were, I had no idea.
I imagined it was a protest.

“You’re right.” Alec’s voice soared over the
crowd. “There’s no scientific evidence that we will all be the same
one day, but there is other evidence out there.” He pressed a
button, and the photo went from Abigail to the blond and brown
curls of the boy I picked. “This is Nicholas. He had teeth like
razors, but his abilities could’ve saved our dental healthcare
system. His own teeth might have frightened many, but he could heal
anyone else’s to perfection.” He clicked the remote, and the photo
flipped to a little girl with pigtails and thick glasses. “Emery
could work with bees, a vital aspect of our world’s agriculture
needs.” He clicked once more, to a young boy with blond hair like
Blake’s. “And Luke. The youngest member of the Western Flock. A
human boy that shouldn’t have been on the streets at all.”

Human. Four years old. His front teeth were
missing, but his grin was huge. And he had a name. Luke.

Not a single shout came out. Through Alec’s
clip-on microphone, everyone heard him press the remote again. The
photo zoomed out only a little and revealed the two boys on either
side of him.

The two others were brunet, but their
resemblance was unsettling. The boy on the left even had the same
grin, but the eldest—the one with the smallest smile—was looking at
the other two with a love one could only wish to have in their
lives. All three of them had dimples on their right cheek.

I thought I was going to puke.

“They’re brothers,” Alec said, “and just
because the older two were bad bloods, the youngest one met a dire
fate.” My world spun as I waited for the next sentence. “The only
other difference between Luke and his older brothers is life.” The
Trident building creaked, as if every soul had leaned closer to
hear. “Those two lived.”

“No one lived!” a crowd member shouted, but
this time, the crowd policed her.

Henderson didn’t even blink. “Please, do not
think these boys escaped easily,” he continued as my vision began
to blur. “Luke was shot in the chest, and his brother was shot in
the shoulder while trying to save him.”

It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.

The photo zoomed up on the brother with the
same, giant smile as Luke. Now no one had to guess the color of his
eyes. They were emerald green. “This boy—like the others I
mentioned earlier—had abilities every doctor wishes they had,” he
said. “He can heal.”

My heart stopped.

“So when Luke was shot, his brother tried to
save him—only to be shot himself.” The scar. I could see it. “This
boy did not have the ability to save both of them, and Luke could
not be saved.” The photo flickered out to show all three of them
again. The eldest one. His brown hair and eyes to match. I knew
those eyes so well. “Survival took over, and the oldest brother was
forced to run, leaving the younger two to die.

“Luke succumbed to his injuries seconds
after, only four years old. A human and an innocent child.” As
Henderson continued, I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t care who saw
me or who saw the photo. I couldn’t see either anymore. “But the
middle child survived and went on to live his life, knowing what
had happened to his younger brother and to his older brother and to
everyone in that house.”

He inhaled a breath, and I pried open my
eyes, only to meet Alec’s stare. “This is the true story of the
leaders of the Northern and Southern Flock.”

Robert. Daniel. They were brothers. They were
brothers in the Western Flock.

Every story—every conversation—I had with
either one of them crashed into me like the bullets that killed so
many. Daniel had said both of his brothers were dead, and Robert
had never spoken about his family. But I remembered the red glue,
the blood on him the night we met, that night twelve years ago
while it snowed.