“I serve only Miss Mia,” I said, trying to keep excitement out of my voice.
“Good,” he said, and he actually reached out and touched my hair, the few locks that weren’t covered by my maid’s kerchief. If I aimed the handle of the duster right, I could get it right through his ear and into his brain. I considered it, now almost shaking with fury.
“I’m glad you’re not assigned to Father.” His voice dropped. He was so close to me now that I could easily have chopped him in the kidney. He’d be pissing blood for weeks. “I hear that serving Father can be… taxing for the maids.”
The blood drained from my face as I got his meaning.
Practically whispering in my ear, curling an escaped strand of my hair around his finger, Master Kirt went on: “But you don’t have to fear the third-floor study. I’m much more reasonable, and I’m practically right next door.”
So the President’s study was on the third floor, not the first, as I’d assumed! For just a second I considered flirting with this gross schmuck to get more info, and in the second I let down my guard, he sprang at me, pushing me onto Mia’s bed.
Becca, you idiot! I thought, as he became an octopus, all hands and mouth. If I used my instinctive fighting skills, he would instantly know I was a trained soldier, which would get me kicked into prison at best, and killed at worst. So I squirmed, ineffectually trying to push him away. The same way I had tried to push my teacher, Mr. Harrison, off me back in grade twelve. Before I was adept at killing people. While Master Kirt writhed on top of me, I dully remembered my horrible miscarriage and how incredibly heartless Strepp had been about it. Cruel to be kind.
I gritted my teeth and tried to fend Kirt off in a normal, outraged girl way, pushing at him, clenching my mouth shut, turning my head.
“Kirt!”
I
t took me a moment to identify the furious voice as Miss Mia’s.
“Goddamnit, not again!” she shouted, and I heard the whiz of a riding crop slicing through the air and landing on Kirt’s back. “Get off!” She whipped him with the riding crop again.
He scrambled off me, red-faced. “Watch it, you bitch!” he shouted. “She’s just the maid! Goddamnit! What’s wrong with you?”
“Get out of this room,” she spat at him, and I was amazed at the different Mia I was seeing.
“Screw you!” he said, but he left the room and slammed the door so hard that a small framed picture fell to the floor and broke.
I sat up and pulled my uniform down, retied the kerchief around my head.
“Thank you, Miss Mia,” I said, surprised to hear a convincing tremble in my voice. “I don’t know—”
“Just don’t let him get you alone,” she said briskly. “Now help me get cleaned up—we’re going out.”
93
CASSIE
I FELT A SMALL BUG crawling beneath my untucked shirt but didn’t move, keeping the binoculars riveted on the action below. I’d been sad to leave our boat at the edge of the hard, cracked desert but once the tall-grass prairie started, it’d been useless. For the last day and a half, we’d waded through sharp-edged grass taller than my head, with Tim breaking a path and me traveling miserably in his wake. The air here was heavy, cool but humid, and we kept being assaulted by horrible clouds of stinging gnats. After the dry, bugless air of the desert, this felt unbearable.
“Here.” I handed him the binoculars, lying in the grass next to me. We were hidden well—the prairie ended here, but three feet into the grass, no one could see us.
He gave a low whistle while I smashed the bug and shook it out of my shirt.
“Right?” I said. “Like the biggest cell in the whole United.”
He lowered the binoculars and looked at me. “It’s not a cell,” he said solemnly. “It’s a city, like what we read about in the attic. Maybe even the capital.”
Becca could be down there! Absently I rubbed my shoulder—it still ached. At least I could use my hand again.
“How far away do you figure?” he asked, and I guessed he was trying to be polite since he could estimate distance as well as I could.
“Three hours, walking?” I said. “Very visible for a lot of it.”
“I’m seeing cars and people lining up to get through the gates,” he said, peering through the binoculars again. “People are talking to the guards? Shaking hands or something? No clue.”
With a hollow feeling in my chest I now realized that all the info we’d learned up in the camp attic had been too old to be useful. We knew how they had done things a hundred years ago—big whoop.