Vin's Rules (Outer Settlement Agency) (6 page)

“Are you okay, Vin? You’ve gone quiet.”

“Thinking about what to wear on our date. Something svelte.”

“Do you even know what that means?”

“No. Sounds rubbish, don’t it? Something manly, then. Sexy. Debonair. And yes, I know what it means. Debonair, not svelte.”

“Oh, Vin.” She laughed and kissed his bicep. That small action grounded him and he entered that building with a lot more hope than their environs commanded. He held on as tightly to the memory of Allie’s laugh as he did her hand.

People stood around them in an orderly fashion, one behind the other in a fast moving line.

One of the Tans, using local phraseology, tapped him on the shoulder. “Married men don’t have to wait. You two can go in through that door over there.”

Credit to Allie for not freaking out.

Credit to himself for not bursting into a ball of flames at the mention of him and marriage in the same sentence.

Vin grabbed his
wife
by the arm and led her through a silver archway decorated with potted rose bushes.

They followed others like them, coupled Tans and Reds, to a set of tables draped in white cloth, illuminated by mechanical candles. Not that you could see much of the white. Plates and bowls overflowing with various meats and fruits occupied every bit of usable space.

They found a set of seats next to the young soldier they’d met by the doctor’s home. The man smiled broadly at their approach and mouthed something to the red-dressed woman next to him. As soon as their butts hit the chairs, a plate of food was silently served by a Blue.

“Sorry about earlier,” he said as Allie dove into their meal. “I was on duty, you know? I’m Mike.”

Vin reached for the wine and ignored the lack of an outstretched hand. “Vin and believe me, there’s nothing I appreciate more these days than regulations. This is quite a spread here. What are we celebrating?”

“Celebrating?” Mike turned to his wife, who giggled at his whispered words and looked in their direction. “This is every day.”

Allie kicked him beneath the table. He followed her eyes to the lines of second-class citizens standing with trays. Each person received a greenish-brown loaf and a ladle full of soup.

Waiting in a queue for food wasn’t anything he hadn’t done on base. But this was so very different. The opulence of being served meat at a table within spitting distance of people waiting for slop, killed his appetite.

“What do they eat, Mike? The Blues and the Greens.”

Mike’s pretty (and still yet unintroduced) wife looked down into her lap. Her husband’s hand covered hers before bringing it to his lips. He turned back to Vin a breath later. “Crickets.”

Allie choked so violently that he pounded on her back and waved over a servant for water. “You good?”

“Crickets,” she mouthed.

“Yep, caught that. Hey, Mike, how does that work?”

“Some settlements see them as pests, but they’re good as a cheap protein supply and tasty too.”

So why aren’t we eating them?

“Plus,” Mike continued, “They help with the compost. Right, Poppy?”

Mike’s wife finally spoke up. “Yes. Very good.”

“And they can be fried and roasted and flavored. They have flavor, or so she tells me.”

Poppy flushed from her displayed cleavage to the top of her head at his words. She went back to staring at her plate.

“So you, Reds and Tans I mean, eat every meal together? The others do the same thing over there, and no one cooks for themselves?”

“It’s how it is. It keeps us solid and reminds us that we’re a community.”

A community of what? Haves and have-nots? Every society ran that way, but c’mon. This was blatant classism at its worst.

Vin was a realist. Classes kept people in check. For all the power of the wealthy, one worker’s strike could see the loss of billions of credits. And hell, hadn’t OSA started partly due to dozens of revolutions on Earth centuries beforehand?

Classes? Good.

Classism? Danger.

Problems arose when one class felt so comfortable as to flaunt what they had over others without fear of reproach. That was dictatorship, or least signaled an oligarchy. Yet, he’d not seen anyone here with near as much power as King Freaking Graham.

Allie’s knife and fork clinked across the plate. She held up a piece of meat, twisting it in the air. “So, if you can’t cook, does that mean someone else controls the food?”

Thank God no one sat on the other side of her. He shot her a look before swooping into damage control mode. “Mike, she didn’t mean...”

The kid’s low voice trembled, and he scooted his chair away. “Don’t let her say things like that,” he said, between bites and furtive glances around the room.

Vin responded in the same low tone. “I don’t
let
her do anything, but you’re not disagreeing.”

“It’s true,” a tiny voice said on the other side of Mike. Vin leaned over at this first open sign of challenge. Poppy’s face didn’t read as scared.

Or hurt.

Or shy.

Or unsure.

The girl was pissed.

Good.

This place needed more angry women.

“If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?”

Mike closed his fingers in Poppy’s face, the universal sign for “kindly shut up,” before answering Vin’s question. “How? I mean, no. People can come and go as they please, okay. Don’t talk to anyone about this and don’t speak to me anymore at all.” Mike jabbed his fork into his meat and cracked his neck. “Just don’t.”

Maybe the boy was right. Their quiet conversation hadn’t gone unnoticed. As Vin shoved a spoonful of soup into his mouth, his eyes landed on Graham. The mayor smiled and pointed to the Amazonian next to him with a lecherous smirk.

The brunette didn’t so much walk as stalk over. With every clack of her heels against the floorboards, the train of her dress swished and her boobs jiggled in time.

She was beautiful with the build of a fighter. Physically, she looked as though she could snap Graham’s neck like a twig. But where was her heart? If Graham owned that, size didn’t matter at all.

“I’m the Missus. Welcome. I’m glad to put faces to all the whispers around here. And you must be Allie.”

He and Allie shared a look before she shook the woman’s hand. “Pleasure’s all mine.”

He saw it. The glint of crazy in Allie’s eyes.
Ah, damn.
He squinted and tapped beneath the table, but she raised her chin and folded her arms before turning back to Graham’s wife. “It’s good to meet another strong woman.”

Allie’s voice hadn’t been raised, but she hadn’t exactly whispered either. He heard it.

The groaning Mike heard it.

Poppy gasped.

And Missus Mayor grinned. “Yes, it is. How about we get together for a little girl time?”

“She stays with me. Don’t you dare leave your seat, Allie.”

Bless her, she didn’t.

“Missus...” Vin held out his hand, waiting for the brunette to fill in the blanks.

“Mama. Everyone here calls me Mama.”

Mama?

Graham angered him, but Mama scared the shit out of him. There wasn’t anything about her that Vin was able to read, and he wondered if he’d fingered the wrong person as leader around here. “Right, Mama. Thank you for your hospitality. Everything’s been great for us.”

“But you’re ready to leave.”

It didn’t sound like a question, so he didn’t answer it. “It’s been a nice break from OSA. A shocking break but a relaxing one. This is...”

“Unexpected,” Allie said, still seated and with her eyes wide open and full of challenge. The fake smile that so many women here wore was plastered on her face.

Mama’s head snapped with the speed of a pit viper. “And you don’t care for what is unexpected?” she asked, voice rising in inflection. “We don’t either.”

Allie shrugged. “I don’t know, but it...”

“Fits,” Vin finished.

Mama’s lips parted in something he couldn’t quite tag as a smile. She reached into a pocket of her red gown and pulled out a small canister. “Everyone works here, even me. I manage a group of girls in one of the shops here. We make the lotions and soaps for town.” She wiggled the jar in the light then dropped it in Allie’s cupped hands. “This is our latest batch of cream. It helps with the dry air. Consider it a welcome gift.”

Allie popped it open, smile still locked in place. “Thank you, Mama. Smells amazing.”

Actually, the opposite, but he repeated Allie’s gracious words under Mama’s impenetrable gaze. The woman clapped her hands and joyous Venetian music started to play. “Eat and drink. Mama’s orders,” she said with a laugh and
click-clacked
away.

Mama’s call to drink was taken with unbridled zeal. The more the Reds and Tans drank, the louder the room got. One by one, Blues and Greens started slipping away, carrying the cricket loaves with them, leaving the poor souls serving drinks behind. Fake smiles fell, replaced by longing glances toward the exits.

Vin waved away drinks every few minutes. “Time to leave.”

“Mama,” Allie spat through clenched teeth, “is watching you. When she doesn’t think I’m looking, she’s nodding for someone to bring us more drinks.”

“Poison?”

“No. They’re using the same tankard to pour it. Maybe they just want us drunk.”

“Not drunk so much as incapacitated. Let’s go.”

No sooner had he stood up than Mama stomped over. She got in close with her breath humid and fetid from the feast. “Stay. Drink. It’d mean the world to us.”

Graham came from nowhere, mere inches from Allie. “Please don’t hurt my wife’s feelings by refusing her generosity. I hurt when she hurts. Wouldn’t you hurt if Allie hurt?”

There it was. The first unveiled threat. Phrased with a smile and light words, it was the sort of threat one could almost fool themselves into believing it didn’t exist.

Nothing but grins and soft gestures.

He’d been wrong to label one as more evil than the other. He’d gone headfirst into the trap of ranking evil. That kind of thinking slowed you down. You don’t rank evil.

You just don’t.

You fight it or run from it.

They were two twisted people ruling their own dodgy world. The society here wasn’t based on gender. Nope, another trap he’d fallen into. This wasn’t an issue of identity, rather power and separation. Like others before them, they may have used gender as a means to an end, but their purpose was domination.

A broken spirit.

The loss of will.

He doubted
who
mattered to these bastards so much as
how
.

Vin slapped a smile on his face and snatched a bottle from the nearest woman in blue. After a jaw-swelling swig of the burning stuff, he wrapped his arm around Allie and kissed the top of her head. Whatever happened next, he’d take the burden for her.

Vin tried to give the bottle back, but Mama shoved it against his chest. “We’ll be devastated if you don’t finish it. If you need to head to bed right after, we’ll understand. Such a tough journey you’ve had.”

Vin nodded his thanks, sat down, and pulled Allie into his lap. The King and Queen of Crazy left them alone after that. Sort of. He felt their gaze and knew they were being watched. Allie’s whispered words confirmed his suspicions.

She draped her arm around him and tucked her head at his neck. It was a lover’s hold, one working so well that Mike turned away to afford them some measure of privacy.

“There’s no way to avoid drinking that without being obvious,” Allie said in his ear.

“Yep. I’ll drink all of it.”

She shimmied back to face him with her eyebrows raised sky high. “You drink that whole thing and you’re toast. I can smell it from here—that stuff’s too strong for one person to finish.”

“Too strong for two, to be honest. I’m still downing it.”

“We’ll split it. I can handle my liquor.”

“I think one of us should keep a clear head all night.” Vin angled her chin until their lips nearly touched. “And one of us needs to be able to fight. Two people drunk or one very drunk and the other very sober. Go with the latter. I need you sober.”

He reached around her for the bottle and guzzled the stomach-rotting stuff for as long as he could before taking a break and slamming the bottle on the table. “This shit burns your lips.”

“All the more reason for—”

His hand closed around hers when she reached for it. “No. You’ve gotta be aware and coherent for the both of us. This isn’t a pissing contest, and you have nothing to prove.”

“What good are you to me if you’re too drunk to help?”

“If push comes to shove, fight your way out.”

“Alone? Be serious. They’d kill me.”

“Then take as many of them to hell with you as you can.”

A
llie dragged a juice-splattered napkin across the latest stain on Vin’s shirt. He held a fried wing in one hand and his wine in the other. “You’re a mess.”

“I’d thank you for cleaning that, but I can’t let go these,” he said, slurring his words and downing another swig. “Wait. That makes no sense. I’m like, drunk.”

“Yep.”

“Stuff’s strong.”

“Mmhmm.”

Mike and Poppy left some time ago, giggling and whispering to one another. Their presence had been a barrier of sorts, but in the alcohol-induced haze, she and Vin had all but ceased to exist for them. A part of her had a feeling that Mike had done a better job of
playing
at drunk that Vin. While the esteemed OSA officer was legitimately tossed, Mike had the good judgment to drink a little, drink a little more, and then get his very drunk wife out of there.

That was what she and Vin should have done. Instead, she was stuck with a too large man burdened with too little sense.

Vin popped the poor piece of poultry in his mouth and sucked, extracting nothing but the bone. “I don’t feel so good. Hand me some more of that green stuff.”

He wasn’t the only one about to get sick. All the hurling and grease-slinging going on around the room twisted her already queasy stomach. She’d lost her dinner about an hour ago but dry heaved each time some slobbering man pounced on his wife or burped his satisfaction.