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He shook his head again.
“Tristan can’t complain if I’m not—”
Tristan pointed to himself. Me, he mouthed. Not again.
“You don’t want to go back?”
Dixon turned off the main highway and stopped at a red light. Dry weeds lined the street, brown and dying and patchy, no houses or structures in view. He put the truck in park and scribbled a quick note on his pad. I can’t take it there anymore.
“You don’t even have your things.”
I don’t care. I’m taking a vacation for a few days. A week. A month. Who knows.
“A vacation?”
Dixon scrawled faster and faster upon the page. Last night, Tristan tried to tell me who I can and can’t have in my own home. Fuck him. I might not live with the highborn anymore, but I was born one. I still love and care for some of them deeply. He forgets that when he rails on and on about them. I’m tired of feeling guilty for my birth.
“I know that feeling.”
You and me, we’re the same now. We’re exiles. Let’s run away and start our own damn compound!
Lila laughed, and Dixon grinned his lopsided grin once more.
A dimple appeared on each cheek.
Oh Gods! Dimples! Dixon had dimples?
When had that happened?
Perhaps she’d never seen them before for a reason. He looked happy, and he seemed to give just as many fucks as she did at the moment.
“Well, I don’t have anything better to do. I do need to get the rest of my things at some point, though.”
Dixon put his notepad away, then continued their drive. Gas stations and crumbling houses lined the streets, scattered like flowers in the wind.
At first, Lila wanted to ask where they were headed, but she soon realized that she didn’t care. Not enough to play a guessing game while Dixon drove, unable to scribble an answer until they hit the next light.
For the first time in a month, she felt like everything was going to be okay. She wasn’t going to be executed or tossed into slavery. She owned her mark. She wasn’t under her mother’s thumb. She even had a friend with her, perhaps the only person she really trusted at the moment, the only person who had no ulterior motives lurking in the back of his mind.
All she needed now was her money.
She fiddled with the radio, tuning it to an oldies station she’d found at the cottage, overjoyed to hear the same music she’d listened to as a teen.
Back when music was still good.
Dixon grinned as “Running Down the Street” came on, a punk anthem that had topped the charts fifteen years before. He bobbed his head in time to the beat as Lila yelled out the chorus, chuckling harder with each line. With every song they thumped their heads just a bit harder, screamed out the lyrics just a bit louder, though Dixon had no breath to add to his words.
“Road trip, gas up,” they sang, punching their fists.
Lila stopped chanting as the lines coursed on. “Oh shit, I just figured out what this song is really about.”
Dixon snickered.
“Shut up,” she grumbled, finally paying attention to where they were going. The gas stations and homes had begun crowding together again, and she spied a lake up ahead. “The oracle’s temple? I don’t have any leads yet.”
But Dixon avoided the turnoff, marked by an arrow-shaped sign half a meter across. Someone had recently repainted the oracle’s mark: a pair of wings attached to an all-seeing eye.
He stopped the truck a kilometer up the road, engine sputtering twenty meters from a metal gate with the same design. The stone wall extended in each direction, the top so wide that a grown man could walk upon it. Six stubby watchtowers rose above the wall, with peaked wooden roofs and guards keeping watch. Each purplecoat gripped a rifle.
