Thrice Uncharmed (Wynne d’Arzon) (3 page)

Hector glanced her way and adjusted his glasses again, expression serious.

He
definitely
didn't like their Culture Studies instructor.

And Wynne was
definitely
going to find out why.

****

As the first step in her plan, she
skipped
lunch. That was… risky, with her metabolism, but all Layumen carried snack bars with them so they could readily have an emergency meal when necessary, without disrupting others.

She then used that lunch halfie to approach her Culture Studies instructor directly. He sat at his desk in his office, eating a mush that smelled like vegetables and reading something on his tablet.

Wynne knocked lightly on his entryway.

He started, glanced her way, and scowled, though his posture changed into something stiff, uncomfortable. "Yes?"

She indicated with her tablet. "May I ping you the revised script, sir?"

His eyes narrowed. "The what?"

She shrugged, reminding herself that it had been
Hector's
idea, and the governor's son certainly ranked their instructor. To her surprise, her hands didn't shake as she tapped the order to send him a copy of the new script. "Primuman decided to revise the play for the modern audience, sir."

Her instructor looked even more dour, which she wouldn't have thought possible. "And you have a complaint about how he cast you."

Wynne blinked. "Um. No, sir."

"Then what are you bothering me for?"

He looks
angry,
she thought, with his glare and the muscles working in his jaw.
But why?

"Take the play. Do as he likes with it. Nothing I can do about it, unless it enters M-class."

M-class
? At first, Wynne thought he meant planets, but she quickly realized he meant content rating on the galaxal scale, which wasn't used in the Arzon colony. Her cheeks burned. "Oh, no, sir. We kept it…" What were the galaxal ratings? "T?" The Arzon 'T' was the galaxal 'M', so her memory could've been off.

Her instructor studied her, and his glare seemed to soften a little. He let out a sigh. "Ping me a copy. Might as well know what Primuman's up to."

"Sir," Wynne said hesitantly. "You and Hector seem to dislike each other."

He snorted. "That boy's an example of everything that's wrong with this colony."

That didn't help her understand, though she felt that his comment held a significant clue. "Sir?"

He shook his head. "Worth my life to tell you, Layuman."

She parsed those words to mean her instructor could be executed for telling her, which he seemed to give her enough credit to figure out, but the only crimes that warranted the death penalty were ones that could be construed as treason. "Oh."

That seemed an… unpromising note to leave the meeting on, and the first rule of dishing out negativity was to sandwich it between… less negative things. Wynne took a breath and, poised to type out the answer on her tablet, admitted something embarrassing: "Sir, I'm sorry, but I never seem to be able to remember your name."

"S-M-I-T-H," he said promptly. "Like the apple."

She frowned. "What's an apple?"

Instructor Smith just shook his head.

****

As the second step in her plan to figure out what in Arzon was causing the bad blood between Instructor Smith and Hector Primuman the Fourth, she skipped the first class after lunch and headed for the library, eating her emergency meal bar. The instructor would notice her absence, but she figured she was a good enough student that she'd get a verbal reprimand, at most.

While she was thinking of it, she looked up
smith apples
, and she wondered why anyone would like a tart fruit. Fruit was
supposed
to be sweet.

The name, though, was incredibly common, both as a matername and a patername, which confused her until she remembered that galaxal naming systems didn't necessarily indicate job positions — and anyway, smithing
had
been a job, centuries ago. Wynne stuck the name on the desktop of her tablet, so she'd keep seeing it and hopefully remember it.

"Studying?"

Wynne jumped and jerked her tablet towards her, hiding the screen. She stared at Hector, who watched her calmly and adjusted his glasses.

Silence followed, implicitly pressing her to answer the question.

She resented the manipulation, but she couldn't help breaking it first. "Shouldn't you be in class?"

"Shouldn't
you
?" he returned, and she caught a wariness in the way he watched her.

Remembering the danger that could be found even in mere comments about treason and death, Wynne determinedly set her tablet back down and quickly tapped open her copy of the colony's charter, which she'd annotated with jargon translations and case references, through the years. She would
not
feel guilty. She had nothing to feel guilty about. "Yes?"

He smiled briefly, and it softened the angles in his face. "Are you asking me if you should be in class?"

She re-thought through the conversation, and her cheeks heated. "I'm doing research."

His gaze stayed on hers. "Planning on switching families to be a Lawuman?"

The heat fled from her face, cold replacing it.
When did he check my tablet screen?
He was good. She hadn't spotted his glance, and she'd been watching him except for a few glances of her own at her tablet. "No. If anything, I'll join my paterline."

Cheer brightened his expression for a moment, then vanished, leaving a steady expression that reminded Wynne frighteningly of the time two years prior, when her cousin Bridge had been cussing him out. She swallowed hard, remembering yet again that Hector was the governor's heir and could easily bear a grudge for the Four-Eyes thing, which still persisted among the more foolish of their classmates — which was most of them.

There would be poetic symmetry in revenge enacted four years after inflicting a detestable 'four' nickname on a man.

"You'd be an Imaguman?" His tone sounded interested, not censoring, but it brought to her attention how presumptuous her claim was. Layumen were tier three families, and Imagumen were tier two.

Her face warmed. "If they took me, of course. I mean—"

"I'm sure they would." He fiddled with his glasses. "You have the intelligence for it." He paused. "Not saying Layumen aren't intelligent — you have to be, to construct things well — but
Imagumen
…"

Imagumen were the inventors, the ones who created the new things and processes and techniques that would be used by the colony.

Hector settled his glasses on his face once more, and she realized he'd been taking that motion to hide his check of their surroundings. He took a seat beside her — too close for her comfort, but his expression stayed focused on their surroundings, so she assumed there was good reason for it.

She just hoped that reason wasn't anything she'd later regret.

"If I may be presumptuous…" His breath was warm on her ear, and she feared to look at him. "Dobbs vs. Smith, d'Arzon."

She jerked away and stared at him. That sounded like a court reference, but she couldn't imagine about what. "What?"

He smiled, pulled away a little, and continued quietly — as if repeating something he'd already said — "I think you could be whatever you wanted to be."

"Even a Primuman?" Wynne tried to joke, feeling self-conscious about his comments — particularly with all the care he was taking to hide them.

She'd meant her question as a joke, but the sharp stare Hector seared her with was anything but amused.

And he didn't say anything.

'That boy's an example of everything that's wrong with this colony,'
Instructor Smith had said, and he'd been raised elsewhere, by his offworld father.

But if
Instructor
Smith
hates the Arzon colony so much, why is he even here? Why does he stay?

Hector moved away from her. "I can't say I'd recommend a coup," he said, tone light. "You would
not
like my job. I suspect you'd like bearing Primuman children even less."

Wynne stared at him for several seconds. The first answers that came to mind were too dangerous to say aloud, if his caution in having the conversation was any indicator — and the ones that followed were so risqué, it made her blush to
think
them.

Finally, she thought of an appropriate response: "So you're saying I wouldn't be able to handle super-smart children able to run circles around my intelligence?"

He snorted, fiddling with his glasses as he kept an eye on the room. "It's not that," he said quietly. "You keep up with
me
." He paused and reluctantly amended, "Sort of."

"Thanks," she said dryly, not sure if she should feel more flattered or insulted.

"It's true," Hector said frankly, which didn't help his case. "It's just, if you had Primuman kids, you'd have to—"

His body jerked and his eyes lolled back, his knees buckling.

Wynne gasped as he hit the floor and started shaking.

A seizure
, Wynne finally recognized from the classic literature she'd read.

She stared at the shaking governor-to-be for a long moment.

By the time she remembered enough about seizures to try to help, he stopped jerking and glowered at the ceiling. His glasses had stayed on, but he had to adjust their position on his nose as he angrily hauled himself to his feet.

Hector looked furious. "I know. Curse it all to a black hole. I
know
what I can't say." He whirled on the nearest security camera and yelled, "I
know
!"

Wynne flinched.

Her eyes were surely wide as she watched Hector take his tablet,
smash
it against the table, drop it, and storm out.

She swallowed uncomfortably, staring at the remains of his tablet. She wouldn't have thought him strong enough to break it, but she supposed he could be stronger than he looked. Or maybe his seizure had released an adrenaline rush.

Well, now she could say she'd seen Hector Primuman the Fourth lose his equanimity. Not that she understood what had caused the fit of temper.

Wynne looked at her tablet and made a new annotation on her copy of the charter. Dodd vs. Smith? No, that wasn't right. Dobbs.
Dobbs &
S
, she scribbled, and she'd have to be sure to research it before she forgot what the note meant.

She made the note and started looking up seizures and strength-boosters. She wasn't sure if her searches were usually monitored, but after she'd seen the governor-to-be have an inexplicable seizure and throw a tantrum? She'd be shocked if they
weren't
.

Wynne considered her options for how to research the court reference he'd given her and reluctantly decided to borrow Bridge's tablet that evening. Nobody who knew her cousin would believe that she'd been the one researching law, but that was the only relative Wynne could think of who would be leaving her tablet unattended and who was dumb enough that she wouldn't be able to figure it out, if there were an inquest.

Did she
want
to know?

Wynne stared at her tablet, remembering Instructor Smith's disdain for the colony where he chose to live, despite having an income and a way to pay for space travel — despite being
from
another world.

And as the governor's son, Hector would've had the best genegineering possible, which should've removed any predisposition to seizures from his genetic makeup.

"Yes," she whispered. She wanted to know.

She
needed
to know.

Because if she needed to save up resources to be able to flee offworld as soon as she had the savings, well…

She needed to know that, too.

****

One nerve-wracking week later, Wynne sat in Culture Studies beside Hector as everyone read over their lines. By then, everyone had studied their copies of the revised play, which could've been thought insulting of Arzon culture, except the governor-to-be had written most of it, and he'd not spared himself in the good-natured lambasting.

"Four-Eyes, I do believe there are four eyes betwixt us," Wynne read, trying to sound lighthearted, though she never had called him that on purpose. Was he trying to say that he
liked
being called 'Four-Eyes' — in which case, she
still
didn't want to, because they were rivals, not friends — or just that he didn't mind the joke?

"Six," Hector corrected, "since I wear two on my face. But if you pass me that cardboard box, I might have a place to set those two down, and you can examine them separately to determine which two you like best."

"Oh?" She glanced warily at the half-meter square box he'd somehow managed to find. When they'd written the script, she'd thought
cardboard
was something he'd coined, not an actual substance, though she'd since researched and found it to be related to
paper
, which had never been used in the Arzon colony, so far as Wynne knew.

But knowing that made the lines all the more ludicrous to Wynne as she continued, "Oh! This." She set the box on her desk, studying the box as if puzzled. "Board card! You wear those in the 'lanes, you know."

"
Cardboard
—"

"I've always wanted to travel the 'lanes." She stuck the box on her head. "Do you think it fits?"

A few classmates groaned at the silliness, but most snickered to see top-of-the-class Wynne and Hector bickering like idiots, which was rather the point of the entire play. The revisions had converted
Romeo and Juliet
from two lovers, star-crossed by family feud, into two would-be lovers, star-crossed by their mutual inability to understand one another's flirting.

She waited for Hector to say his line — which would be followed by Josiah Cleanuman pulling the box off her head and tossing it into the bin for waste processing, which would get the two of them mutually indignant — but silence followed.