Bad Bloods (5 page)

“Henderson has a daughter?” I repeated,
barely able to get it out in a whisper. “Since when?”

Everything I knew about Henderson was what
I’d heard on the news. He was born to a prominent family in the
Highlands and even served Vendona during the Separation Movement.
He was honorably discharged after a bad blood almost killed him. It
was that bad blood that inspired him to become a politician. In his
first political campaign, he told everyone about the little boy who
attempted to kill him and how another soldier killed the child
before he got a chance to finish what he started. Henderson told
everyone about how—in that moment—he realized why the kid was doing
what he did—because he was forced to—and he wished more than
anything for that child to still be alive instead of himself. He
barely won his seat on the council, but his marriage to Jane
Mackey—the daughter of a powerful councilman—increased his
visibility ten-fold. Now that they supposedly had a daughter in the
mix of it all, they appeared less sincere for their reasons. I
didn’t even know if Henderson’s tale was true anymore, and I knew
all of Vendona was thinking what I was.

“She’d be eighteen if she was still alive,”
Cal said as if he knew Henderson’s daughter was real—and dead.

“This can’t be true.” I whipped around to
face him. “It has to be a setup.”

Cal leaned his lower back against his desk.
“I’m afraid not, kiddo.”

I stood up only for Cal to tell me to sit
back down. I obeyed, and Cal’s eyes kept me there. Even when I
placed my head in my hands, I felt his stare on me, heavy with
honesty. I bounced my knees up and down as if I could run away.
“This isn’t happening.”

The repercussions were boundless if it were
proven true.

“Yes, hello, this is Calhoun Wilson, citizen
of Western Vendona.”

I peered between my fingers as Cal spoke into
a phone I didn’t even know he had. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
He continued to say sir and ma’am for five minutes before he fell
into a patient silence. In my twelve years with him, I’d never
heard him say either word, but I recognized the polite but firm
tone. Military. Who Cal was talking to, I didn’t know, but I knew
it wasn’t good. He could’ve been giving up—trying to pull some
strings to get me out of Vendona—but that’s as far as my thoughts
went.

I attempted to picture myself outside of
Vendona, but couldn’t. I was born in Eastern Vendona and raised in
Western Vendona. I lived in Northern Vendona, and now, the girl I
kissed lived in Southern Vendona. Every bit of my identity was
Vendona, Vendona, Vendona, and even though it was a horrible
place—down to the back alleyways and bordering ocean—I knew I would
rather die trying to see it become a better place than flee and
live somewhere else. I didn’t even know what other places were
like. After all, it had been illegal to leave your city-state
without permission since 2041. That was the year the United States
fell apart, but Cal said they called it something else, a
“reformation of unification” or something like that. According to
Cal—the only educator I ever had—Vendona’s council was a piece of a
larger council, the Council of the States, and it was made up of
every president from each city-state. We were individual but
united. Thus, each city-state had its own president, not governor,
but president. They were supposed to make decisions together—one of
which included closing off borders—but they could always make their
own decisions. Either way, the general citizen population was left
out of it. You had to serve in the military or come from a
prominent family to be educated on it. Nothing was free. Most of it
went over my head.

“Daniel.” Cal’s voice was stern as he set his
phone down on the desk. It buzzed, and I realized he had put it on
speakerphone so he could riffle through his desk.

Before I could ask him what he was searching
for, a woman’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Mr. Wilson,
we’re putting you on hold. Please wait.”

Classical music began to play as Cal handed
me a photo. A single tear went through the left corner, but the
rest of the photograph was in fairly good condition. It was old. I
could tell by the crinkles. Modern paper didn’t crinkle at all. And
the coloring had faded. That never happened anymore either. Just by
glancing at it, I could tell it was older than even the photos I
had on my desk. Much older.

“I trained two hundred boys for our first
mission,” he said, and I realized what I was looking at. A troop.
“This is just a part of it.”

My eyes scanned the small crowd, and I found
Calhoun immediately. He was practically Adam’s twin. But he had
both arms in the photo, and his currently missing one was draped
around another boy’s shoulders. I didn’t recognize him at all.

“I was only a trainer because of my father,”
Cal said. “That was how the new way of things worked. You did what
your father did, and respect came from your bloodline, not your
work ethic.” Cal pointed at the boy next to him. “That guy saw me
for who I really was. And he still stood by me. No one else did.
Not truly anyway.”

I stared at the photo, at the boy with dusty
brown hair and eyes to match. He was scrawny for a solider,
especially when he stood next to a stockier Cal, but he held
himself with prowess. The guys around them barely looked like they
were paying attention to the camera.

“Most of those men are dead, Daniel.”

I swallowed. I didn’t have to ask what
happened. This was the Separation Movement. This was the battle—the
mass murders—that took place on Vendona’s streets in 2051 when bad
bloods were declared enemies of the city-state. These men had
killed bad bloods and been killed by bad bloods—and Cal was among
them. Even worse, he was their leader.

“That man,” Cal continued slowly, “That man
is the one I lost my arm for.” He inhaled and exhaled a shaky
breath, and as he met my eyes, his forehead wrinkled as if he were
forcing the words out. “He’s also the reason I killed the bad
blood, the one who reminded me of you.”

I nearly dropped the photo. “I don’t
understand.”

“He can help us with the election,” he
explained. “You can help him.”

Before I could ask for clarification, the
phone clicked, and a groggy voice split through the silence. “Who
is this?”

Cal never looked away from me. “It’s me.”

A loud exhale came from the other end.
“Cal.”

I glanced back down at the photo, scanning
the man next to Cal again, but nothing sparked my memory. I racked
my brain, trying to figure out what Cal was thinking, but the age
difference was throwing me off. Cal couldn’t have been older than
twenty in the photo—and if I remembered correctly, he was only
eighteen—and that meant the boy next to him was just as old as Cal
was now. I didn’t know many older folks. Only Cal and Old Man
Gregory. But something about the boy etched out my thoughts as I
slowly added wrinkles and receded his hairline.

“Cal,” the man repeated, and his voice aided
my photo-editing mind. “I can’t believe it. I—”

“I didn’t call to catch up,” Cal said. “I
called to help.”

“Ah.” The sound lingered. “You can’t help me,
old friend. I’ll find a way—”

“I already have a way,” Cal interrupted as I
recognized the uncanny facial features. They had been a mystery due
to the smile. He almost never smiled now. A modern politician
rarely did. “I think I can solve this rumor about your daughter,
Alec.”

The morning
light spewed into my bedroom, and it lit up the large, white
T-shirt Melody wore as pajamas. She stood on her tiptoes behind a
seated Timmy, and he cringed as she tugged his white hair up. With
tiny fingers, she threaded his thin mop into tiny braids, and I
watched the youngest member of my flock in sleepy silence. How long
they had been awake, I didn’t know, but now that I was awake, I
couldn’t take my eyes off the two children. Melody was only four,
ditched on the streets one year ago until I found the toddler
walking around in an invisible panic. Timmy was only nine—and a
human at that, ditched by his parents because his sisters were bad
bloods. Niki had saved him. At least she had saved someone. But I
wondered how the Northern Flock’s stories compared to ours.

Did they have any humans in their flock? Who
saved who? Why were they abandoned on Vendona’s streets? How old
was Blake?

The little blond boy couldn’t have been older
than five, and the images I had seen through his mind lingered in
my memory like they were my own. Daniel went fishing with Adam.
Maggie—the redhead—watched them from the lake. I even knew where
the lake was. In return, I wondered how much Blake had learned
about me by reading my mind and how much he understood from the
images he saw. I wondered if he’d tell Daniel. I wondered if Daniel
wondered about my flock as much as I wondered about his, and now
that I had met an entirely new flock, I wondered even more about my
own—how our stories compared, how our lives interlocked, how our
situation was similar. The Northern Flock had the same amount of
members, after all, and their ages even ranged around the same
numbers.

It seemed too strange to be a
coincidence—almost as if Daniel and Robert had the same plans when
they formed the Northern and Southern Flocks—but I couldn’t draw
any conclusions by comparing. When I did, Blake became Melody.
Timmy became one of the dozen kids I’d met, the ones I couldn’t
remember the names of, despite the fact that he was a human and
they were bad bloods. Catelyn and I could’ve easily been Michele or
Maggie, and Steven could’ve been Adam. We all blended into one
another, even though we had different stories, even though we were
in separate flocks. Why we were separate was beginning to make less
and less sense. Together, we stood a stronger chance at reaching
the future.

“Melody?” Her name left me before I even
realized I was speaking to her.

“Hmm?” She hummed as she continued, this time
yanking Timmy’s hair.

I rolled over on my stomach to catch their
eyes. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I expected her to say a hairdresser, like
Catelyn had been before I told her to quit, but Melody’s lips
pushed to the side in thought. “A flower.”

“A flower?”

Melody nodded, and her long hair swished near
her waist. “They smell nice.”

“Like Ami,” Timmy added.

Melody agreed, “Just like Ami.”

Ami smelled like flowers somehow—like people
born in the Highlands were made of perfume—but I half-suspected
that Ami stole perfume from the town square. It was a rare
commodity, something hardly bought by those in the outskirts, but I
had an inkling Ami remembered where she came from, where her mother
probably still lived, and wanted something from it for reasons I
couldn’t begin to understand.

Before one of the kids could question why
they didn’t smell like Ami, I asked, “What kind of flower do you
want to be?”

“A pink one.” Melody stretched her arms over
her head and wiggled her fingers. “A really tall pink one.”

Timmy watched her with disinterest, but then
his eyes lit up. “I’d be a thorny one,” he said it as if the
thought had just occurred to him. “And I’d only bloom in fire.”

Melody’s pudgy arms dropped with her smile.
Timmy ignored her reaction and grabbed the comb from the floor
instead. “My turn.”

Melody opened her mouth to protest when a
soft rapping interrupted her. The door cracked open before I had a
chance to welcome the person inside, and Robert poked his head in.
“Serena,” he started to whisper until he saw that we were all
awake. “Oh. Melody. Timmy. You’re . . .”

“I’m a flower,” Melody finished.

“When you grow up,” Timmy reminded her, and
she nodded like that’s what she meant in the first place.

Robert’s lip twitched, but he forced a smile
as he leaned against the doorframe. “A flower, huh?”

“We’re all going to be flowers,” Timmy said,
still trying to get Melody to sit down so he could play with her
hair. “But I have thorns.”

“And I’m tall,” Melody said.

“Like a garden of flowers,” Timmy added,
finally getting Melody to sit in front of him.

“A garden, eh?” Robert looked at me, and I
shrugged before he turned back to the kids. “Well, I need to make
plans with Serena about that,” he said, softer than usual. “Do you
mind if I borrow her for a minute?”

My heart skipped, but Melody didn’t hear what
I heard in his tone: worry.

“We’re playing right now,” Melody said,
obviously distracted by Timmy’s hairstyling capabilities.

“Melody,” I said her name as a warning. She
knew not to argue with Robert, but she pouted, puffing out her
cheeks like she was preparing to scream. Timmy stopped her.

“You can play with my hair again.”

“Okay,” she cheered, leaping to her feet,
only to turn around and stare at me. “But you can only be a
minute.”