Rebel

  REBEL

  Book Three of The Change

  Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith

  Book View Café Edition

  May 16, 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-567-0

  Copyright © 2017 Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Authors’ Note

  This is book three of “The Change” series. If you’d like to read the series in order, the first book is Stranger and the second is Hostage. It will conclude with Traitor (forthcoming.)

  If you'd like to be alerted when new books in the Change Series come out, click here: http://eepurl.com/Tzv25

  Chapter One: Ross

  Ross Juarez scanned the townspeople in Las Anclas’s main square as warily as if they were an anti-Changed mob ready to run him out the gates. He’d know how to handle that. But his first holiday in his new home was unexplored territory, and far more nerve-wracking.

  The square had transformed overnight into a holiday marketplace lined with decorated booths selling gifts for Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year and winter celebrations he’d never even heard of before. The entire town was shopping, selling, or trading.

  Ross was the only one who had no idea what he was doing.

  Then he spotted Kerry Ji Sun Cho, who had once been Kerry Voske, crown princess of Gold Point, poised as if waiting for a battle to begin. She must have celebrated holidays before, so she couldn’t be worried about doing that wrong. But he knew she was as certain as he was that someday King Voske would return to Las Anclas. And the two of them—Voske’s renegade daughter and the prospector she’d helped to bring down his empire—would be first to get their heads put on pikes.

  Kerry whipped around as if she’d felt Ross watching her. Like a pair of magnets, they drew together.

  “Expecting assassins?” Kerry’s slanting eyebrows rose, adding to her tone of offhand joking.

  “I wasn’t.” Ross scanned the crowd for weapons. “Are you?”

  She dropped the light tone, leaving only raw honesty. “Always.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Ross broke off, frustrated. She’d been teasing, like normal people did, and he’d replied way too seriously. Now she probably felt as weird as he did. “You’re right. Your father will send some eventually. But probably not today. Anyway, that wasn’t it. I’ve never given a gift before. I don’t know how. And—”

  Ross stopped himself before adding, “I feel stupid.” She could probably see that for herself.

  The sardonic twist to Kerry’s sharp features smoothed into genuine sympathy. They’d only known each other for a few months, but they’d learned a lot about each other in that short time—first while Ross had been Voske’s prisoner, and later when they’d fled through the desert after she’d broken him out and helped him blow up the Gold Point dam. She’d given up her life in Gold Point to save his, but she hadn’t done it for him. She’d made that sacrifice for Mia, if she’d made it for anybody, but mostly she’d done it because it had been the right thing to do.

  What did you even call that sort of relationship? Friendship seemed both too much and not enough. Ross and Kerry didn’t make arrangements to spend time together, like Kerry did with Becky, Mia, and Meredith. But in those seven nights in the desert, they’d learned what haunted each other’s dreams. He bet none of her other friends knew that.

  Kerry tucked a strand of hair into her braided coronet. The blue-black gloss reminded him of Mia’s carelessly clipped bangs, just as the shape of Kerry’s eyes made him think of Mia’s eager gaze from behind wire-rimmed glass. But while he could often guess what was on Mia’s mind by watching her face and body, Kerry’s cool expression was less a window than a mirror of polished steel. She might be thinking about him or friendship or gifts or assassins, or something else entirely.

  “Giving holiday presents isn’t that complicated, Ross,” Kerry said, simply but without condescension. “If you’re going to a party with the person you have a present for, it’ll have a time for gift-giving. If you’re not, give it to them alone on the day of whatever holiday they celebrate.”

  “Right,” Ross muttered. “Got it.”

  It was obvious once she’d explained it. But the whole idea of holidays, of crowds, of families—of all those things at once, of how important they were in Las Anclas, and of how he was the only person who was experiencing them for the first time—made his brain lock up like a rusty engine.

  “And if you don’t know what they’d like to get, ask someone who knows them well,” Kerry advised. With that, she lifted her chin high and stepped into the crowd. People cleared a path for her without seeming to notice that they were doing it. If Ross had plunged in like that, he’d have collided with six people at once.

  Ross looked for someone who knew Jennie well, and spotted Yolanda Riley at a booth selling potted plants. He made his way through the crowd, gritting his teeth against the ever-present murmur of danger, danger, danger thrumming through his body and mind.

  Jennie’s adopted sister looked up from the writhing scarlet eater-rose she’d been teasing with a fingertip. Its hungry petals snapped shut on empty air. “Need a guard flower? This one’s nice and lively.”

  Ross shook his head. “I want a present for Jennie. Do you know what she’d like?”

  “You picked the right person to ask!” Yolanda looked as delighted as if he were doing her a favor rather than asking for one. “She could always use a good weapon. Or maybe jewelry. But she can’t wear it in training, so that would be a special occasion thing.”

  Something for special occasions made sense for a Christmas present. But he didn’t want to saddle Jennie with a gift she had to be so careful with that she couldn’t have fun wearing it, like the embroidered shirt of Paco’s that Ross had borrowed for the dance, only to spend the night worrying that he’d spill something on it. That wouldn’t be a problem with a weapon. But she’d gone through a lot of bad times recently and they’d all involved fighting. He didn’t want to risk a present that might come with unhappy memories attached.

  “She trains wearing hair beads,” Ross said. “Do those count as jewelry?”

  “Absolutely. But if you want it to be a surprise . . .” Yolanda peered around the crowd.

  “Jennie’s at the schoolhouse, reviewing lesson plans. Oh, and I want something for Mia, too. She’s working on an anti-raccoon electric fence at the Vardam orchard, and she’ll be there for at least another three hours.” Then, remembering how intent she’d been, he added, “Or till I drag her home for dinner.”

  “I can’t help you with Mia,” Yolanda said with a shrug. “I mean, obviously something mechanical, but I don’t know anything about that stuff. But I can make sure you don’t buy Jennie beads she already has.”

  Yolanda jostled her way down Main Street. Ross followed more cautiously. He could stifle his impulse to flee, but he couldn’t stop wanting to. It wasn’t just the crowd, it was the tension he sensed in low, angry murmurs and the quick arrows of glares. For once, none of the hostility seemed aimed at him. But it was a disturbing undercurrent to the holiday cheer, especially since he didn’t know what it was about.

  Ross stopped at a booth where Dr. Lee’s girlfriend, Anna-Lucia, was selling jars with contents bright as jewels. He bent to read the labels: prickly pear jelly with rosemary, grapefruit marmalade, pomegranate jelly, spiced apple butter, habanero-honey barbecue sauce. It had been more than six months since he’d come to Las Anclas, but he was still impressed by its wealth and variety of food. And though he could now read with ease, his ability to look at writing and know its meaning still felt almost magical.

  Yolanda waved up a gust of wind to ruffle his hair. “Jennie doesn’t want jam. That’s something you’d get for
your grandma, not your girlfriend.”

  “My girlfriends could get it for me,” Ross said. “I’d like it.”

  At least he knew better than to buy people something he wanted himself. But he wasn’t sure what to get Mia, who was picky about food, and could invent anything she’d need or want. And he’d never seen her wear jewelry, even to a dance.

  Then he spotted Mr. Rodriguez, the retired town mechanic, manning a booth.

  “Wait, Yolanda,” he called.

  She turned impatiently, then smiled. “Oh. That’s Mia stuff, all right.”

  Fireplace tongs, household and kitchen implements, gardening tools . . . and there, hanging from the ceiling, was a revolving tool rack. Mia was constantly hunting for and tripping over her tools. The rack would save her time and stubbed toes.

  Ross fingered the scrip in his pocket. He’d saved most of the payment he’d gotten from Mr. Preston in exchange for his ancient book. For the first time in his life, Ross could walk into a shop and buy anything in it. He was used to spending only what he absolutely needed to survive. But now he had enough scrip to buy a small house. Thinking that he couldn’t afford anything but bare essentials was a habit, nothing more. He wasn’t poor.

  That realization should have made him happy, but instead, it unsettled him. It was like everything else that day: the friendly smiles, the abundance, the gifts, having people to buy gifts for. It was good, but so different from his previous life that it felt unreal. As if he might touch something solid, only to feel it dissolve under his hands. And then he’d open his eyes and find himself lying alone in the desert, with Jennie and Mia and his entire life in Las Anclas nothing but an incredibly vivid dream.

  He laid his palm on the booth wall, rubbing his fingers along the rough cloth over hard wood. Everything was solid and real. “I’d like the tool rack.”

  Mr. Rodriguez smiled as he lifted it down. “I think I know who this is for. In fact, I had her in mind when I made it. So, Ross, how are you enjoying the market?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Ross replied.

  Mr. Rodriguez snorted. “It was better in the old days. When the traders sailed in from Catalina, then it was a sight to see.”

  A passerby chimed in, “I miss the actors even more than the traders.”

  Mr. Rodriguez wrapped the tool rack in old newspaper headlined TENTACLED TOMATO TRESPASSES ON PEACEFUL PUMPKIN PATCH! Ross bet Jennie had written that. She liked matching letters. And exclamation points.

  “That’s why I’m voting for Noah Horst for defense chief.” Mr. Rodriguez gave Ross a weirdly intense stare, as if he were making a speech, not having a conversation. “Regardless of his personal opinions about Changed folk, he’s promised to set those aside and go talk to the folk at Catalina. If he gets elected, the traders and musicians and actors are coming back.”

  Then Ross knew the source of the tension beneath the holiday cheer: the upcoming election.

  In which he, as a new citizen, could vote.

  It would be his first election—yet another first—but it didn’t seem as meaningful to him as it obviously did to the people of Las Anclas. Mr. Horst and the current defense chief, Mr. Preston, both hated the Changed. Mr. Horst had threatened Ross, and Mr. Preston had sent the bounty hunter to kill him. Ross had asked Mia if he had to vote, but she’d looked so horrified at the idea of having the right but not using it that he’d dropped the subject.

  An earnest man stuck his head out from a booth selling bright-moths in decorative terrariums. “Safety is more important than fun. As long as Tom Preston’s defense chief, we’ll never see Voske again.”

  Mr. Rodriguez pointed dramatically at Ross, making a number of passersby stop and stare. “That’s because of this young man here, not Tom Preston.”

  Ross tried to take his package, but Mr. Rodriguez held it tight as he spoke to the crowd. “Ross Juarez saved Las Anclas! And he did it with his Change power. If he’d been run out of town like Tom Preston ran out the Catalina folk, this square would be filled with Voske’s soldiers. And instead of holiday banners, it’d have our heads on pikes!”

  Ross fought the memory of staring at the ground in Gold Point, lest an upward glance confront him with a smooth white skull. Desperate to get out of there, he shoved a handful of scrip at Mr. Rodriguez. To Ross’s relief, the old mechanic released Mia’s gift.

  Ross bolted back to Yolanda. Much as he didn’t like touching people he didn’t know well, he grabbed her elbow to hurry her away.

  Wistfully, she said, “I wish I was old enough to have a vote.”

  I wish I could give you mine, Ross thought.

  Mrs. Callahan’s voice blared out, loud enough to make him jump. “Embroidered silks! Fine ribbons! Party dresses! Everything altered to order!”

  Her booth was filled with fancy dresses and coats, shirts and pants, skirts and blouses, even scarves and hats. Especially scarves and hats.

  It’s like Felicité Wolfe turned into a place, Ross thought.

  “Oh, do you mind if I take a quick look?” Yolanda begged.

  “Go ahead.” Ross squelched his urge to dodge Mrs. Callahan. Fair was fair. Yolanda had waited for him.

  Yolanda rushed in to sort through the ribbons. Behind her back, Mrs. Callahan’s upper lip curled in disgust. Ross wished Yolanda could go somewhere else. She had to know exactly what the dressmaker thought of Changed people, but no one else sold ribbons.

  Mrs. Callahan turned her glare on her son, who had been yawning over the coat display. “Henry!”

  “Silk embroidery,” Henry announced with the enthusiasm of a seller of week-old fish. Then a sincere grin split his face. “Felicité!”

  Felicité minced in, her curls bouncing. The last time Ross had seen Felicité, her hair had been bright red. It was now a rich brown, a shade or two darker than her skin. She flipped up her curls in a dramatic gesture.

  Henry caught the hint. “Oh, your hair! It’s so pretty.” He wound a lock around his finger as she kissed him.

  “I had it dyed the exact shade of Grandmère’s ancient mahogany chiffonier,” said Felicité. “It came from France in the time of my ancestress, Queen Marie Antoinette.”

  Yolanda stifled a snicker. Felicité claimed descent from every royal person Ross had seen named in the Las Anclas history textbooks. He bet if he prospected a book that mentioned some new queens, she would suddenly remember that she was related to them, too.

  “It’s exquisite, dear,” Mrs. Callahan cooed to Felicité. “But then, you always are. You have such impeccable taste. Are you shopping for your parents or your friends?”

  “Don’t tell, but I have some of your lovely dresses in mind for my friends. And a greatcoat for Daddy. But not on this trip.” Felicité’s voice set Ross’s teeth on edge. It was so sweet—too sweet. Like a handful of sugar crammed down your throat.

  She stooped to pet her golden rat, Wu Zetian. Ross edged another step back. Felicité had used that rat to spy on Jennie and Mia and Yuki, and gotten them thrown in jail for weeks. Though Felicité had denied it, Ross was sure she’d trained Wu Zetian to spy on the entire town. And he wasn’t the only one who’d figured that out. When he’d first come to Las Anclas, everyone had stroked Wu Zetian and tried to coax her into their laps. Now people eyed her suspiciously and stepped out of her way.

  Felicité stiffened as Kerry strolled up. The former princess turned a razor-edged smile toward Felicité, then offered a hand to Wu Zetian.

  Of course Kerry doesn’t care that the rat’s a spy, Ross thought. She’s used to much worse spy-masters than Felicité.

  The golden rat tipped her head, giving Kerry the perfect angle to scratch between her round pink ears. “Hello, Wu Zetian, you delicate darling.” Kerry spoke in a weirdly sweet voice.

  It wasn’t until Ross caught a flash of rage tightening Felicité’s face that he realized Kerry was imitating Felicité. It was subtle but clearly deliberate.

  Felicité scooped up her rat, then gave Mrs. Callahan a
charming smile. “May I borrow Henry?”

  “Of course, dear.” Mrs. Callahan replied pleasantly, but her expression hardened into contempt as her gaze fixed on Kerry. But when Kerry picked up a lace frill, the nastiness wiped off Mrs. Callahan’s face like she’d used a dust rag.

  “Come on in!” Mrs. Callahan said with a huge smile.

  The dressmaker’s grin bore an unpleasant resemblance to the fake smiles the Gold Point townspeople plastered on because they feared King Voske’s spying. Felicité’s smile was more convincing; Ross would never have known it wasn’t sincere if he hadn’t happened to be looking at her for the single second she’d let her fury show. His skin crawled.

  Felicité set Wu Zetian down out of Kerry’s reach. Then Henry and Felicité marched off, arm in arm, the rat scampering after.

  A couple people glanced from Wu Zetian to the sky, probably checking for Voske’s spy hawks. Ross couldn’t help glancing upward as well, but his view was blocked by the booth’s cloth ceiling.

  When he lowered his gaze, he caught Mrs. Callahan staring at the fingerprint scars on his throat. He ducked his chin, letting his hair fall forward to hide them. Fake smiles, spies, the burn of Luis’s fingers—everything reminded Ross of Gold Point. His heart was pounding and he felt slightly dizzy. As if he were trapped in the hell cell, with the thick granite walls closing in on him. A painful weight compressed his chest. He had to run, get out of the crowd, get somewhere safe under the open sky—

  “Hey, Ross.”

  He jumped, but it was only Kerry. She pointed to some embroidered blouses. “I want to get one of those for Jennie. What colors does she like?”

  Ross forced himself to breathe. He’d come to buy a present for Jennie, and he wasn’t going to run away without one. He wasn’t in Gold Point. He’d flooded the hell cells himself, with Kerry’s help. He was in Las Anclas. He was safe. He was home.

  “Bright ones,” Ross said. “Orange, yellow, red.”

  “Thanks.” Kerry lowered her voice. “I’ve got another question for you. Should I get a gift for Paco? Brisa said I shouldn’t because he won’t get one for me, and then it’ll be awkward. Becky said it’ll hurt his feelings if I don’t, since he’s my brother. Meredith said I could try but he’d probably throw it in my face. You go diving with him, and I wanted to ask another guy. What do you think?”