Page 22 of Mud

Yes. “No.”

“Splendid,” he told me. “You’re a natural.”

A natural what?

I bit my tongue.

“David,” said Madeline, and anybody who knew her could hear the threat in her voice.

Hill was done analyzing my face with that strange smile on his, so he turned to her and put his hands in the pockets of his pants.

“She’s the one, Madeline.”

The one for what?!

My grandmother paused. Just…paused. No muscle on her face moved. Her eyes didn’t blink, didn’t show anything. That was the example I’d had when I first started to teach myself tokeep it in—her. Nobody hid better than Madeline, and she was doing it right now.

“She’s untrained,” she finally said, her voice calm, but I knew she was losing it because she was playing with her ring.

When she wasreallypissed off, she always played with the ring on her middle finger, a gorgeous blood-red ruby that was her anchor, and she spun it around with her thumb. Slowly. In controlled movements.

“She doesn’t need training. She’s better than most of my agents already,” Hill said.

“She has no clue what goes on in the IDD, David,” Madeline said, but her voice didn’t rise. She didn’tsoundpissed off at all—just the same as always.

“All the better—she’s not going to the IDD. She’s simply going to a new school in Columbia, not even that far away from home.”

What-what-why?!

The words were at the tip of my tongue.

“And you think she’s trustworthy?” said Madeline, bringing her glass to her lips again. The stain of her lipstick all over the rim looked like blood.

David Hill began to laugh, and the two of us waited. Mycheeks were heated, but I stayed put, hands folded behind me, eyes ahead.Please, please, please,I was praying, though I couldn’t really tell you what for.

“I don’t know!” said Hill at last. “That’s the thing, Madeline—I don’t know. I can tell what you’re thinking. I could tell what Penelope was thinking with perfect accuracy—buther?” The guy beamed. “She didn’t bat an eye, Madeline. I watched her. She didn’t bat an eye.”

Because she’s here!I shouted in my head.Because Madeline is here and she doesn’t like me to remind her that I have feelings, too, that she has a responsibility to me just as she has a responsibility to Poppy.

She doesn’t like to be reminded, damn it!

“And you’re saying that’s enough,” said my grandmother, and she was no longer playing with her ring. Like she’d suddenly calmed down.

When her eyes fell on my face, I could have sworn she was looking at me with a new light.

“It is, for now. The rest we’ll figure out in the next week—together,” said David, and again, he put both hands on my shoulders. “Tell me, Rosabel, how would you like to be an undercover agent for the IDD? I won’t ask for much, only that you live away from your home and go to a different school until you graduate, that’s all. It’s a simple job, I promise.”

With those words, everything changed.

Six months.

I still had six months left until graduation.

Six months away from this place that was most definitelynotmy home.

Six months away from Madeline.

By Iris, the fear I’d gathered since I stepped into thisoffice was fading away. Suddenly it all sounded like a dream.

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