The Hive: A Young Adult Dystopian Romance (The Enigma Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Aaron appraised her with wary brown eyes. ‘Really?’

  She nodded. ‘Yep. In fact, when you talked to me a second ago, you actually woke me up- because I’d been sitting there staring at that-’ she nodded down at the tattered copy of The Great Gatsby that was peeking out of her schoolbag by her chair leg, ‘and wondering if I could get away with reading it inside my textbook, like in movies.’

  Aaron sighed and stared down at her book. ‘I miss movies…’ he confessed, then furrowed his bumpy brow. ‘That one sucked though, so I don’t get how you can find the book interesting-’

  ‘Not the point,’ Finn broke in gently again. The fact that they both put Bonnie on a pedestal and sucked at math was pretty much the only common ground they had, so she wasn’t about to let him goad her into a debate over what constituted as being a good movie as well. ‘What I’m trying to say is that if I’ve learned anything, it’s that showing the working in math counts, all right?’ She pointed to her work, which she was pretty sure was only half right, but perfectly set out. ‘I never used to bother with it, because sometimes I could just do it in my head, you know? But I tried doing it their way last year, when I realised that failing math would prevent me from making it to year twelve here, and I’ve improved a bit since. So, I bet if you set it-’

  ‘Forget it,’ Aaron said gruffly, cutting her off again and snatching the textbook out of her hand before he started gathering up the rest of his stuff. ‘I keep forgetting that the fact that you’re a loser who reads all the time doesn’t automatically make you any smarter than me.’ He scowled at her. ‘By the way, my handwriting is unintelligible, not illegible. That’s not even a word, Cling- so good luck passing Maths or English this year!’

  And then Aaron started barrelling his way toward the door, leaving Finn facing his empty chair and looking utterly ridiculous to the rest of the kids in the class, who’d already begun to turn around to stare at her incredulously. Ms Shevington immediately hurried off after Aaron, demanding an explanation, but before she exited the room, she hesitated in the threshold and shot Finn an accusatory look- like she’d just assumed that Finn had been in the wrong somehow, leaving Finn sitting there, feeling like her face was on fire. She didn’t embarrass easily thanks to years of practice at being embarrassed, but she was so agitated that it honestly felt like she was about to combust again!

  Seriously: what does Bonnie even SEE in him?! she thought hotly, swinging away from that judgmental-looking abandoned chair as she made an effort to collect herself. It was all she could do not to stand up to holler that you didn’t have to be an astrophysicist like Stephen Hawking to know that illegible WAS a word or that Math didn’t have an S on the end of it… but she didn’t because she knew that pointing out why they were in the wrong to an arrogant idiot like Aaron Bragg was as futile as arguing with a flat-earther. Crazy people would act crazy, Aaron ‘Ag’ Bragg was a certified numbskull and that conversation had been doomed from the moment she’d dared respond to him- and she’d known it. Therefore, she had no one to blame for feeling burned, but herself.

  Unfortunately, though, acknowledging that fact did little to change the fact that being burned hurt.

  He’s probably just secretly worried that he will get kicked out at the end of the year if he doesn’t make the cut… Finn told herself then, wondering if reminding him about their need to pass that year was what had triggered his outburst. Ol’ Ag liked to act like he was above everything, and he’d gotten away with blowing off classes a lot back when they’d been in the public school system, when being a no-count stoner had made Aaron one of the coolest guys in the lower grades… but education wasn’t wasted on the weak in Laidlaw, and Ag was just a scholarship kid like she was, so if he failed to pass the eleventh grade, then he’d be shipped out to the mines just as his other burn-out friends had been the year before, after they’d failed to pass the streamlined tenth grade course they’d all completed in a rescue tent with just one teacher’s assistance back when Laidlaw Kingdom had still been a camp. But that ought to push him to demand more from himself! Not to sulk and lash out at those that try to give him the help HE ASKED FOR!

  ‘It’s okay Finn…’ a voice whispered then, and Finn glanced sideways at Jade Cobbler-Ray, who was the only other girl bad enough at math in their age group to be in the remedial class with them. Jade was unusual looking because her features lacked symmetry and her ears stuck out of her bronze hair, which couldn’t seem to decide if it was curly or straight… but she had a muscular surfer’s physique and bright, sky-blue eyes, and looked much better in a bikini than she ever would in the school’s uniform, even though she had scored one of the short, straight skirts that showed off her toned legs. ‘No one heard anything he said but me, and I won’t tell anyone. And I’ll even tell Ms Shevington that he was asking for your help, in case she tries to get up you for talking.’

  Finn smiled weakly. She and Jade had been close as kids back on the Peninsula, before her parents had divorced and moved to North and South Broadsound respectively in the fifth grade… but they were hardly what you would call friends those days, so she couldn’t help but wonder what Jade’s angle was. Finn had hoped to reconnect with her when they’d ended up at North Broadsound High together, because Jade had been a bit of a loner too, but Jade had been so intimidated by Georgia that she’d cut ties with Finn a few weeks into the eighth grade, swearing that it wasn’t personal- just that she just didn’t want to end up on Georgia’s warpath by association. That had wounded Finn, but she had appreciated Jade’s honesty and had let her go much easier than she had Mischa, knowing that a friend that wasn’t willing to fight for you at all wasn’t a friend worth having anyway.

  Despite her best efforts though, Jade had managed to get on Georgia’s bad side over a boy before the end of that same year regardless, so she’d ended up being a bit of a Cling too- only she’d had more cliques to drift between than Finn had, because she’d known people from two primary schools. And also, because she had a habit of clinging to boys, not girls, who tended to look the other way on social status if a girl’s rack was decent enough.

  ‘Really?’ Finn asked, glancing nervously over toward the door in anticipation of Ms Shevington storming back in. ‘Um, thanks.’

  ‘No problem,’ Jade turned back to her own notebook, which was covered in swirling wave patterns that she was in the process of rubbing out- not numerals. Again, that was to be expected because Jade had never been much of a student, but unlike with Aaron the orphan, Jade’s father was paying a steep price to have his daughter educated, so it made Finn cringe to see that education going to waste on someone that didn’t care about it, when girls like Maya Sutton, her neighbour, would have given anything to have been able to afford to attend school again. ‘And don’t be embarrassed. For all intensive purposes, I didn’t know that unintelligible was a word either so…’ she leaned over and blew her eraser shavings away, looking at Finn behind a lock of limp, bronze hair and winking a bright blue eye at her as she said: ‘I’m as dumb as you are.’ She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean we won’t both be okay though. I mean, there’s way more to life than being smart, right?’

  Finn returned her smile but let her eyes drift back down to the spine of The Great Gatsby again, a quote ringing through her head as she contemplated what it might be like to be Jade, who was content only to have good waves and cute boys in her life because she wasn’t smart enough to realise how fleeting those things could be, and how vital it was to be smart in that sharp new world now:

  ‘I hope she'll be a fool—’ Daisy had cried in the novel. ‘That's the best thing a girl can be in this world- a beautiful little fool!’

  And then Finn rested her head on her desk and thunked it gently a few times, thinking that she was screwed, because despite what her math results communicated about her- she was neither.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jade had come through for Finn after class by assuring the teacher that the argument had been all Aaron’s fault, but Finn h
ad ended up with a fifteen minute after school detention all of Laidlaw’s teachers consistently held the students accountable for. After all, the academy only had five certified teachers on staff, so if they wanted to keep two hundred and thirty-two students and twelve grades in line, they had to govern them strictly.

  Finn understood the reasoning behind her detention, and she’d been silently grateful that Aaron had gotten forty-five minutes for his offence... but Finn had more to do in the afternoons than Aaron did, so, as she rushed across the common at quarter past two, she was feeling both irritated and flustered- a feeling that only intensified as she stepped out of the building and saw the Hive girls sitting on the castle steps across the forecourt from her, probably waiting for Aaron.

  Cara looked her way and saw her, before turning around to whisper something to the others, and knowing that they’d already heard that Ag was in detention because of her, Finn ducked her head and hurried across to the promenade before they could flag her down and demand to know what had happened or worse- lecture her about being tough on ‘poor Aaron,’ who’d been through so much.

  Yes, Finn knew that Aaron had been through a lot, he’d also been a jerk who’d gotten himself detention on the daily and had found a way to make Finn feel small and irrelevant before he’d lost his parents, his home and his Ritalin too- and she was sick of people using the Strike to excuse away a crummy personality.

  There are people with cancer on the other side of this fence that are nicer to strangers than Aaron Bragg is to people he knows well… Finn thought, untying her necklace and re-fastening it around her bra strap inside her shirt as she passed under the stone arch of the main gates, and then began to trot over the drawbridge that connected the main road into Laidlaw to the moat. So, it is so crazy to assume that if they can try to get along with others, then he can too?

  As always, there was a crowd of desperate-looking people clambering for the guards’ attentions near the wrought iron gates on the other side of the moat- most likely newcomers- and Finn tightened her hands around the straps of her canvas backpack until she’d wriggled through them and made it out the other side, trying not to turn and look as people begged her for a chip, (which she didn’t have to spare anyhow) or demanded to know if she thought it was right that she got to wear a clean, pressed uniform while they were in rags. Their grievances were valid, but she was on her way to go and help them the only way she could already, and there was no point in wasting time trying to explain that because they wouldn’t hear it- not from a girl who looked clean and healthy, who’d just excited the gates of a castle so glorious that it actually appeared to sparkle in the afternoon sun: like it was a sandcastle had been enchanted into existence via someone’s wildest fantasies. No, all she could do was lower her head and move as fast as she could, sighing when she rounded the corner near where she’d parked her bike and saw that it was blessedly still there.

  ‘Most people wouldn’t believe that you could get me from here, to the tip in ten minutes…’ Finn drawled as she dropped, fetched out her key and began to unwind the chain from the first tyre. Then, she moved to the rear tyre and began to unlock that one as quickly as she could too. ‘But they don’t know you like I do, do they Rusty?’

  Once Finn had freed her bike and packed her heavy chains away, she popped on her helmet, swung her leg over the frame and then pushed off down the hill, using that momentum to tuck her long skirt tightly under her butt so it wouldn’t get caught in her spokes. Both the bike and the helmet were too big for her so she’d yet to master a way to ride the thing gracefully, but the dirt road was more downhill than uphill for that particular leg, so she coasted along with relative ease for about three minutes before she had to stand in order to begin pumping the pedals, waving to some of the familiar faces she saw at the first Outsider camp she passed before pressing on.

  No one had bothered officially naming the immediate area outside of Laidlaw’s fences, so after years of people referring to the valley around them as the Outside, the name had stuck so now, that was what it was called. It wasn’t much more than a collection of shanty towns that had been assembled tent by tent, shack by shack, over the course of two years, but there was close to six hundred people living out in the wild between the kingdom and the Outskirts by then, which made it too significant a set-up to be ignored.

  And why had so many people settled there? Well, basically, when the refugees that had been fleeing their obliterated homes had heard that someone had set up a bona-fide rescue centre in the midst of all of that chaos the previous April after Amory’s initial refugee camp had really begun to take form, they’d packed up their things and their families and had made a break for that part of the state the way others had flocked toward the capital cities- hoping that once they’d arrived in the new area called ‘Laidlaw,’ they’d be welcomed in.

  In some instances- say when the refugee had some special skillset or circumstance- that had been the case, but most were informed that there was no way that the settlement would be able to accommodate them yet, so they were asked to put their names on the waiting list at the gate when they arrived instead, so they’d be next in line to move in once the set-up had expanded enough to be able to include them.

  Of course, no one had anywhere else to go, at least on foot, so most had just stayed exactly where they were on the side of Reliance Creek Road, watching the camp slowly evolve into being a kingdom, deciding that it was probably safer to settle for living adjacent to a functioning city again than it was to try and find another community that might take them in elsewhere. And because King Amory hadn’t wanted to end up with hundreds of unwashed masses as resentful enemies after Miriam had built him his castle the previous September, he’d even granted the first few waves permission to camp right there in the foothills of the western side of the Peninsula on land that he owned or had claimed but had yet to utilise.

  Most of the terrain in the region was too hilly or densely forested to be colonised, but one of the farmers that the king had bought out just before the Strike had left his property more or less intact in the middle of the broadest roadside valley, complete with a large, freshwater dam, a rickety old house that was now used as an infirmary and a set of stables that had been turned into a public washroom by the more innovative squatters. The property also had access to one of the estuaries that led down to a rocky section of beach on the Peninsula’s coastline that they could fish in too, so it wasn’t a bad camping spot. And so long as they stayed on the shoulder of the road on the rear side of the Peninsula, outside of the wrought iron fence that surrounded the kingdom, and away from peoples’ private properties on the Peninsula, then most everyone who lived in the region were content to let the squatters be.

  The majority of the first wave of people had stayed right there in the main camp since they’d come, but they’d run out of room after a few months, so the newcomers had started settling nearby, forming makeshift villages in other parts of the region. Some nestled in the foothills of the mountains on the other side of the creek near the perimeter fence, and some lived out on the other side of the quarry in Cutrock Hills, but though many of them had been living there for long enough to be considered locals by then, anyone that didn’t have the clearance to enter into Laidlaw’s boundary fences was referred to as an Outsider, and anyone who tried to breach them without permission was taken for an Outlaw and shot on sight.

  Outlaws were different to Outsiders even though sometimes, the two could be confused. As a rule, Outsiders wanted nothing more than to belong to a society again, so they were content to wait patiently en-masse, proving how well they could play with others, until the Castle gates were finally opened to them. They made friends, they shared supplies and skills- and some had even started families and though they did sometimes show resentment towards the Loyalists, they were too terrified of losing their chance of ever calling Laidlaw home themselves, to cause the king or his people any real trouble. And as a thank you for their patience and understanding, King
Laidlaw had started accepting four new Outsiders into the kingdom every month according to the list he had of who’d been waiting there the longest, so as long as the people behaved themselves and refrained from becoming Outlaws, they were guaranteed to get a roof over their heads in Laidlaw eventually.

  Outlaws, on the other hand, were a different breed of people entirely. They were the ones that had zero respect for Laidlaw and its laws, and had gone to great lengths to either give King Amory grief, or take something from others that they believed that they were entitled to by force or deception. They were rebel-rousers, thieves, rapists and highwaymen, and those that had been foolish enough to get caught red-handed had paid for it by having a member of the Tutelary cut off one of their fingers. It was a steep price to pay, but it was done with the Outsiders in mind: a way of marking people that weren’t to be trusted in a world devoid of lawyers and courtrooms.

  Not wanting to be painted as being a cruel man, Amory had only ever allowed his Tutelary to cut off an Outlaw’s pinkie finger, so they’d still have decent range of motion in their hand after, but word had it that the tribe that now held most of the power in the East Cape (in the far northern part of the state) had started cutting off the ring finger of any Outlaws who caused trouble in their territory, so if you ever met someone with two fingers missing on their left hand, you knew to run.

  In the new local social hierarchy, there were actually eight major castes of people: The Royals (Members of Amory’s family), The Enigmas, The Potentials, The Tutelary (The Royal guard) The Loyals (Citizens of Laidlaw) The Outskirters (people from The Pen, the Shards, and any other functioning colonies in the region that were self-sufficient but allies of the kingdom) the Outsiders and finally, the Outlaws and the Outcasts. The Outlaws and the Outcasts were similar, but the Outcasts were the people that had been evicted from a community for behaving badly. Maybe they’d spoken ill of the king too many times, or maybe they’d stolen from their neighbours in the Outside, but at the end of the day, they’d paid for what they’d done by being shunned, and now, were either trying to survive independently, or make amends. They weren’t necessarily dangerous or evil though, and because King Amory didn’t like leaving people out in the cold, he’d arranged a rehabilitation program of sorts to those that had burned their bridges which was why, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Finn was obligated to head down to the main Outsider camp, and ask for volunteers to help her with the ‘Regional Beautification Project,’ which was just a pretentious way of asking people to help her clean up trash for credit and a pittance.