UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

o;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.”