“You know what else could help keep us safe?” I asked. “Giving us actual power. Letting us work or own businesses. Do research, and have a career. Make us all equal, not just Upper men. Can you imagine?”
She scoffed at me and curled her lip up in disgust. Her blue eyes filled with anger and suspicion. “Why are you talking like this? Do you know what happened when everyone was equal? The great wars, that’s how we lost half the planet and got Lowers in the first place. God, Willow, where have you been?”
“How did we get Lowers?” I asked because I’d always wondered, but none of the women’s history books covered any history of importance. They were all about events that women had hosted to encourage us to strive for greatness as housewives.
“They came from the ruined countries,” she sighed. “You know this. Why are you asking?”
“I want to hear you say it,” I told her. “I want to know how much you understand.”
She sighed again and let out a low groan of impatience. “The Lowers came from ruined countries. Upper families let them in, but they had to agree to servitude to pay off their debts. To leave their countries and come to our stable parts of the world. That’s how the two-tiered format was developed.”
“I guess that would make sense since it’s not divided on race,” I said, looking down at my own dark skin and her bright, smooth white skin. There were all shades across Uppers and Lowers, and I’d always wondered how they’d found a way to divide them.
“Of course not,” Victoria snorted. “Why would you be weird about somebody’s skin color? Their social standing is so much more important, and how close they are to that primitive ritual stuff they cling to.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said, but I did remember how it had made me feel. Like I was being pulled apart at the seams but in the most exquisite fashion. “I do know I saw you with Alexander, though.”
She froze, not just her movements but her facial expressions and breathing. After a moment, she drew in a breath and exhaled, blowing out air against her golden bangs. “What do you mean?”
“You set me up at the party,” I said. “I’m not as dumb as you look, Victoria.”
It took her a second, but she got it. “Wait, did you just call me stupid? Fuck, never mind, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her voice had gone from arrogant and cruel to thin, high-pitched, and anxious. I kept pressing the matter.
“I saw you with him at the fight, but you didn’t expect to see me,” I smiled. “That was funny. It was even funnier because there was my Alexander fighting right in front of me, and then your discount Alexander on your arm. He looked just like mine, though. It was eery.”
“I didn’t think you saw...” her voice trailed off, and I could see the gears turning in her head as she tried to formulate a story to free her of the net I’d cast and captured her in. “It was a mask. Just some make-up and prosthetics.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “But then you ran in here, of all places. So why would you be in here with some man wearing an Alexander Remington mask? I have an idea what’s happening, but I want to hear it from you first.”
She pursed her lips and pressed them so tight I thought she might stop breathing. She opened her mouth to speak at last, but just as she started, Doctor Norris came strolling in.
“What’s this about, then?” he asked, looking at his clipboard. He did this on occasion. He would feign disinterest and nonchalance just to draw you in and keep you wiggling on the line as he gathered information from the most innocuous stories.
“Nothing,” Victoria said a little too fast. Her cheeks had a red blush creeping up them, and her eyes refused to raise higher than the table near the door, the one with the cliche outdated magazines. The magazines showed me a world beyond Crimson that was even more disconcerting and confusing than the one I’d learned to inhabit here on campus. “We were just talking about school.”
“I heard you were talking about Alexander Remington,” Doctor Norris said pointedly. Then he looked over at me, his dark, too small eyes glittering as he realized he’d caught us in something, and it was up to him to find out what. He loved the hunt for information almost as much as he loved pulling it from a reluctant young woman. There was something deeply fractured in him, but he was Mr. Remington’s hand-picked right-hand man, so of course, he would be broken.
“He is my fiancé. There’s nothing out of the ordinary when I discuss my fiancé with my friend,” I said, taking on an irritated persona as if he was an annoying, persistent fly and not the kind of man who could hurt me.
“Yes, that’s all,” Victoria said, her words tumbling out breathlessly. “We were talking about what Willow can expect when she attends the spring formal. When she and Alexander are presented to Upper society as a sealed promised pair.”
I jerked my head to look at her. I had no idea what she was talking about and feared she was leading me into a trap somehow. I always felt like Victoria was setting me up, though it was impossible to tell with her. She had that same sing-song, mocking tone that she had with most situations. The one that let you know she was judging you with each word that left her mouth.
But in this situation, it didn’t make sense. She was afraid of Doctor Norris, fake Alexander could come back to bite her in the ass, and I wondered if she had done something without the express permission or knowledge of Doctor Norris and his medical team.
“Yes,” I said at last, after enjoying a full minute or two of her fighting the urge to squirm under the weight of the silence that hung just above us. “Victoria knows more about such things, and I can’t seem to remember rules and regulations with this swiss cheese brain of mine.”
Norris didn’t buy it, but he let it go.
“You’re still experiencing dead zones of knowledge?” he asked me. “Go through to your treatment room and make sure you tell Nurse Flora all about it for our notes. I need to ask Miss Layton a few things.”
I nodded and stood, scooted out of the room, and paused at the door as it shut.
I heard Doctor Norris raise his voice, and I would have died had I been on the receiving end of such dark vitriol. Their voices were muffled, and I couldn’t make anything out that would make any sense. I did hear Norris raise his voice in anger, and he bellowed, “It’s none of your fucking business where he came from, do it again, and you’re out of the program! Let’s see how your schoolmates react when they find out all about you!”
“There you are,” Nurse Flora said cheerfully from down the hall. “I have everything set up and was just about to come and get you.”