I stared longingly after the girl when Baylen sidled up next to me with a smile on his face. He followed my eyes, snorting. “‘Frivolous items are not for the True of heart,’ Sister Sephania.”
A passage from our Book of Truths. I wasn’t sure Baylen had ever quoted the Book to me.
I rolled my eyes. “A girl can look, can’t she?”
Over the past couple years, as I grew closer to Baylen and started to see him as a brother more than anything, I also started to snap back more.
“That was easy as sin,” he said, reaching under his tunic as we wandered away. He pulled out a small bag that jangled with coins. “You make a good distraction.”
Guilt and shame filled me when I stared down at the small satchel. My heart hurt knowing Baylen had just thieved from women who had been nothing but kind, and had even given me a copper before departing. They had probably worked for weeksto procure that small bag of coins, with the express intent on purchasing something from the trading bazaar.
Baylen had snatched away their dreams just like that.
I scowled at him before we disappeared into an empty alley, climbed atop a trash barrel, and heaved ourselves up onto a shop roof. From the slanted roof, we watched the adjoining street below, which fed into the bazaar.
My feet dangled over the lip of the roof. I quoted my own passage from the Book, saying, “‘Those True of heart do not steal.’ Remember that one?”
He tucked the coin purse into his ragged, holey tunic. “You’re right, they don’t . . . if they want to be sorry sacks all their life.”
I clamped my jaw and shook my head.
I considered myself a good influence on Baylen’s wicked tendencies, but that didn’t mean I could stop him from executing them. More often than not I even partook in his schemes, chastising him for it afterward.
“Don’t you want to leave the House of the Broken some day, Seph?” He scooted closer to me. “This is a way to do that sooner rather than later.”
I was well aware how his bony shoulder brushed against mine. I fought back a not-unpleasant shiver. I wasn’t sure where the sensation came from or what it meant.
“The House is all we’ve ever known,” I said. “Yet we break their rules day in and day out. You’ll get flogged for that, if anyone finds out, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Mother Eola gets a twisted kick out of punishing us sinners. Which is why you aren’t going to tell her, are you?”
I shook my head curtly. “No. But someone might if you start buying things with money you’ve stolen.”
“Then I won’t buy things people can see.”
My brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
He angled his head away from the street, toward the bazaar. Through the thinning cloud of dust, he nodded at a fruit-seller’s crate filled with brown-skinned melons. “No one needs to know if we treat ourselves.”
I tried to hide my smile, turning away.
His grin was dashing, his eyebrows bobbing expectantly. “Whatever we don’t spend, I’ll hide safely away in a hole somewhere.”
That evening, sitting atop the cobbled rooftop at sundown, with our legs dangling over the edge, we ate like kings for the first time in our lives.
It didn’t take long for my skinniness and bony gait to vanish. The more Baylen stole, the better foodstuffs we bought. I started to gain a healthy appetite.
The other children made nothing of my growing size, or Baylen’s, though I noticed a few dangerous stares from the vowagers and Mother Eola at our burgeoning height and stature.
Eola had warned me I was on the cusp of becoming a woman, and with that would comechanges. She didn’t specify what sort of changes, yet I started to see it in the way my body grew in various ways. Baylen wasn’t too far from reaching the start of manhood, either.
Starting to eat right could not have come at a better time. Malnourishment would have permanently stunted our growth like so many other Brothers and Sisters of the House.
We feasted on food we could never afford, and we didn’t share it with any of the other Housemates. That, of course, would have been the quickest way for our secret to get out and get back to Mother Eola or Father Cullard.
One day, we were making our rounds in the bazaar. It had been slow pickings because of a religious holiday that saw many people fasting and not spending their hard-earned coins.
With a kind smile, I managed to pull a young lad about five years my senior away from the street. I noticed he stared at my smile for far too long.
