UnSouled

“No. It’s my own term of endearment,” Hayden admits. “But if they did start calling him that, I’m sure Starkey would love it. I’ll bet he’d build himself an altar so that the common folk may worship in song and sacrifice. Which reminds me—I’ve been toying with the idea of an appropriate Stork Lord salute. It’s like a heil Hitler thing, but with just the middle finger. Like so.” He demonstrates, and it makes Bam laugh.

“Hayden, you really are an asshole.”

“Coming from you, I take that as a compliment.” He gives her a hint of his condescending smirk. She’s actually glad to see it.

He hesitates for a moment, takes a glance over at his guard, who is dozing on the rice again; then he steps closer to her and says quietly, “You’d be a better leader than Starkey, Bam.”

There’s silence between them. Bam finds she can’t even respond to that.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it,” Hayden says.

He’s right; she has thought about it. And she also dismissed the idea before it could take root. “Starkey has a mission,” she tells him. “He has a goal. What do I have?”

Hayden shrugs. “Common sense? A survival instinct? Good bone structure?”

Bam quickly decides this is not a conversation she’s going to have. “Put down the notebook and start doing your job. There wasn’t enough food yesterday—make sure there is tonight.”

He gives her a middle-finger heil, and she leaves, chucking a potato at the sleeping guard to wake him up.

• • •

It’s that afternoon when Bam’s world, already dangerously off-kilter, turns upside down entirely. It’s because of the Prissies. That’s always been her special word for the kind of girls she hates most. Dainty little things who have lived a carefree life of privilege, whose troubles are limited to choice of nail color and boyfriend woes and whose names sound normal but are weirdly spelled. Even among the Stork Brigade there are girls who qualify as Prissies, ever aloof and pretentious even as their clothes tatter into rags. Somehow, in spite of all the hardships they’ve endured, they manage to be pretty and petty and as shallow as an oil slick.

There are three in particular who have formed their own little click over the past few weeks. Two are sienna, one umber, and all three are annoyingly beautiful. They didn’t participate in either harvest camp liberation—in fact, they never seem to do much of anything but talk among themselves and whisper derision of others. More than once Bam has heard them snarking behind her back about her height, her arguably mannish figure, and her general demeanor. She avoids them on principle, but today Bam’s feeling belligerent. She wants to pick a fight, or at least to make others feel miserable—and who better to make miserable than girls who have a dainty figure instead of good bone structure?

She finds them in the area of the mine designated as “girls only.” It’s where they go to avoid unwanted advances from the hormonal male population when they’ve tired of flirting. Bam hasn’t noticed them flirting lately. She doesn’t think anything of it at first.

“Starkey needs munitions moved deeper into the mine,” she tells them. “I’ve elected you three to do it. Try not to blow yourselves up.”

“Why are you telling us?” Kate-Lynn asks. “Get some of the boys to do it.”

“Nope. It’s your turn today.”

“But I’m not supposed to be lifting heavy things,” whines Emmalee.

“Right,” says Makayla. “None of us are.”

“According to who?”

They look at one another like none of them wants to say. Finally Emmalee becomes the spokeswoman of the clique. “Well . . . according to Starkey.”

That Starkey would give special privileges to the Prissies irritates Bam even further. Well, she’s his workhorse around this place—she can take away any privileges she chooses.

“Every stork contributes,” Bam tells them. “Get off your lazy butts and get to work.”

Makayla whispers something into Kate-Lynn’s ear, and Kate-Lynn throws a telepathic sort of gaze at Emmalee, who shakes her head and turns back to Bam, offering an apologetic smile that’s not apologetic at all.

“We really do have special permission directly from Starkey,” she says.

“Permission to do nothing? I don’t think so.”

“Not to do nothing, but to take care of ourselves. And each other,” Kate-Lynn says.

“Right,” parrots Makayla. “Ourselves and each other.”

Every word out of their mouths makes Bam want to just slap them silly. “What on earth are you talking about?”

They share that three-way telepathic gaze again; then Emmalee says, “We’re really not supposed to talk about this with you.”

“Really. Did Starkey tell you that?”

“Not exactly.” Finally Emmalee rises to face Bam, holding her gaze and speaking slowly. “We have to take care of ourselves . . . because Starkey’s made us unwind proof.” Bam is not a stupid girl. She’s not much when it comes to school smarts, because her attitude always got in the way—but she’s always been a quick study in the school of life. This, however, is so far out of the realm of Bam’s concept of reality, she just doesn’t get it.

Now the other Prissies stand. Makayla puts a sympathetic hand on Bam’s shoulder. “Unwind proof for nine months,” she says. “Do you understand now?”

It hits her like a mortar blast. She actually stumbles back into the wall. “You’re lying! You have to be!”

But now that it’s out, their eyes take on a strange ecstatic look. They’re telling the truth! My God, they’re telling the truth!

“He’s going to be a great man,” Kate-Lynn says. “He already is.”

“We might all be storks, but his children won’t be,” says another. Bam doesn’t even know which one it is. They’re all the same to her now. Three talking heads on a single body, like some horrible, beautiful hydra.

“He promises he’ll take care of us.”

“All of us.”

“He swears he will.”

“And you don’t know what it’s like.”

“You can’t know what it’s like.”

“To be chosen by him.”

“To be touched by greatness.”

“So we can’t carry munitions today.”

“Or tomorrow.”

“Or ever.”

“So sorry, Bam.”

“Yes, so sorry.”

“We hope you can understand.”

• • •

Bam storms through the maze of the mine in search of Starkey, losing track of where she’s been, her thoughts and emotions in such a tailspin, it’s all she can do not to blow up like a clapper.

She finds him at the computer looking over Jeevan’s shoulder at their next target, but right now, there’s no room for that on Bam’s radar. She’s out of breath from running through the mine. She knows her emotions are on her sleeve, staining as brightly as blood. She knows she should have just run deeper into the mine and paced and stewed and broiled until her anger and disgust had faded. But she couldn’t do it.

“When were you going to tell me?”

Starkey regards her for a moment, takes a sip from his canteen, and sends Jeevan away. He knows from the look on her face exactly what she’s talking about. How could he not know?

“Why do you think it’s your business?”

“I am your second in command. You don’t keep secrets from me!”

“There a difference between a secret and discretion.”

“Discretion? Don’t you dare talk to me about discretion after scoring your little hat trick.”

“This is a dangerous thing I’m doing out there. I’m not entirely blind to that. I know it might be messed up, but I want to leave something behind if I don’t survive—and it’s not like I forced them.”

“You never force anyone, do you, Mason? You just hypnotize them. You dazzle them. And before you know it, people are willing to do anything for you.”

Then Starkey slices through to the one thing hanging in the air between them—the one thing that shouldn’t be said.

“You’re just pissed off because you’re not one of them.”

Bam slaps him so hard he stumbles, nearly knocking over the computer. And when he comes back at her, anger in his eyes, she’s ready. She grabs his ruined hand and squeezes it. Hard. The reaction is immediate. His legs buckle beneath him, and he falls to his knees. She squeezes harder.

“Let . . . go . . . ,” he squeaks. “Please . . . let . . . go . . . .”

She grips his hand a moment longer, then releases it, prepared for whatever he does to her next. Let him throw her to the ground. Let him spit in her face. Let him hit her and hit her again. At least that would be something. At least there’d be some passion from him launched in her direction.

Instead of retaliating, he just grabs his ruined hand, rises, and closes his eyes until the pain passes.

“After all I’ve done for you,” she says. “After all I’ve been for you, you go off with them?”

“Bambi, please—”

“Don’t call me that! Never call me that!”

“If it were you instead of them, you couldn’t be out there with me changing the world, could you? It would be too dangerous!”

“You could have given me the choice!”

“And then what? How could you be my second if that’s between us?”

Bam finds she has no answer to that, and Starkey must know he’s having an effect on her, because he takes a step closer. His voice becomes kinder. “Don’t you know how much you mean to me, Bam? What we have is something I’ll never have with those girls.”

“And what they have, I’ll never have.”

He regards her. Gauging. Assessing. “Is that what you really want, Bam? Is that what would make you happy? Really?” Then he steps deep into her airspace. She’s so tall that standing this close, he seems even shorter than he really is.

He cranes his neck to kiss her, but their lips are still an inch away, and instead of suffering the indignation of rising on his tiptoes, he reaches behind her head, pulling her down into the kiss. That kiss is like a conjurer’s act. It’s artful, it’s worthy of applause, it is everything Bam ever dreamed it might be . . . but nothing will change the fact that it’s only a trick, and today there is no audience to applaud it.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Bam. And you’re right; you deserve something real from me.”

“That wasn’t real, Mason.”

He offers her something between a grin and a grimace. “It’s as real as I get.”

• • •

Bam wanders the mine, feeling spent in every possible way. Her fury at Starkey no longer knows where to go. Neither do any of her emotions. She feels the longing for something unnamable that’s been lost. If she were more naive, she’d call it her innocence, but Bambi Ann Covalt has not been innocent for a very long time.