“Shut up!” I glared at him, then at the back of the house. There was no sign of the copper, thank fuck.
“Like, I would do him,” Button John said thoughtfully, “because beggars can’t be choosers, but he’s not that hot.”
“Shut up,” I said again, and attacked another branch of the oleander.
He was an idiot. He was also wrong. Okay, so the copper wasn’t hot like some of the guys we’d watched online, swearing at the lag in the videos because the internet on Dauntless was patchy at best, and nonexistent most of the time. Maybe he wasn’t a porn star or a movie star—we watched both—but he was something neither of those guys were: he was here. And I liked that he looked real. I liked his smile. I liked the way his forehead had scrunched up when I’d been short with him. I liked that he had an expressive face that looked like he’d be absolutely slaughtered in a game of poker. He was cute, and he looked like he’d be fun too, if he wasn’t an outsider and a copper. But I was allowed to look.
We worked a while longer, the sun beating down on our backs, and then the back door to the house opened and the copper stepped outside. He was still wearing his uniform, which made it easier to remember not to talk to him.
“Hey.” He was smiling at us, but that smile wavered and vanished back into nothing as neither of us answered him. “You guys have been working hard. It looks great.”
It didn’t. It looked like a total mess, but we’d made progress.
The copper waited for us to say something, but we still didn’t. “Okay, I’m gonna head out for a bit. Do a patrol or something. Do you need a drink before I go?”
We shook our heads.
“Okay,” the copper said, and vanished back inside again. I heard the lock turn in the kitchen door.
“We should have asked for snacks,” Button John said as we got back to work. “What sort do you reckon he’s got?”
“Dunno.” I swallowed down my guilt. I felt bad for the guy, and not just because he was cute, but because shutting people out was a shit of a thing to do, even if it was the Dauntless way. We didn’t like outsiders, and we didn’t want them here. Tourists were fine, but not people who wanted to stay. People who wanted to stay didn’t understand our ways and wanted to change them. Even Eddie, who loved Dauntless as much as if he’d been born here, sometimes pushed too hard for things to be different. Well, they didn’t need to be different. We’d done just fine for two hundred years without mainlanders sticking their noses in, especially mainlanders from the government.
Except I remembered what it had been like at school in Sydney. I remembered how afraid I’d felt the first time I walked into a classroom, and twenty boys turned around and stared at me and then didn’t make any room for me at their tables at lunch. Not until Button John, who’d started a year before me, dragged me to sit at his table. We’d been the outsiders there, with our weird accents and our weirder ideas. Also weird because we didn’t fall into the same categories the other boys did: either rich enough to go there, or smart enough to get a scholarship. The government had paid our school fees because we were remote students. We’d never fit in properly. I’d been so homesick, even with Button John there, that I’d cried myself to sleep every night for months.
I wondered if the copper was homesick. I wondered if he felt just as hurt as I had that day when nobody had talked to me, just looked me up and down and decided that I didn’t fit in with them, and that if I wasn’t one of them now, then I never could be.
I hacked at another oleander branch, avoiding the poisonous sap that oozed out of the wound I left behind.
I felt bad, but it didn’t change a thing. Even if I wanted to be nice to the copper because he was cute and was trying to be friendly, and even if the whole of Dauntless Island wouldn’t shun me because of it, I couldn’t. Because if the copper found out what Button John and I were doing when we weren’t hacking oleander bushes out of his yard, he’d have to arrest us.
So I had no choice but to keep my distance from him.
Chapter 5
DOMINIC
My second morning on Dauntless started much the same as my first, where I paraded around the village with a dumb smile on my face and everyone either ignored me or glared at me like they wanted to murder me. Mavis Coldwell glared at me like not only was she going to murder me, but she was going to make sure it was especially gruesome, and I raised my travel mug at her with a grin as I continued on my way.
Victory tasted like coffee with a dash of fresh milk.
When my foot patrol of the village lasted all of ten minutes—there was only so long I could drag my feet—I followed the curve of the dirt road as it turned east at the end of the houses and led up the slope of a hill to the lighthouse. It was beautiful, its white tower framed by the stark backdrop of the brilliant blue sky. About halfway up the hill I turned around to look back at the village. From this distance it looked like something off a postcard, the sun gleaming on the walls of the sandstone cottages, the yards and roofs and bits of road a patchwork quilt of colours, and the sea glittering beyond the harbour wall. I breathed in a few deep lungfuls of sea air, and felt all the tension I’d been carrying in my body leave me. Maybe Dauntless wasn’t so bad after all.
Which was right when a labrador retriever violently took me out at the knees, and I pitched forwards and face-planted on the track. “Ow.”
The labrador stuck its black snout in my face and huffed excitedly.
“Ow,” I said again, and rolled over onto my back. This was a tactical error because the dog sat on my chest. I watched as the long sliver of drool that hung from the dog’s mouth lengthened and lengthened and lengthened, and then—splat. It hit me right on the chin. “Ugh.”
A silhouette loomed. “Are you okay?”
I shoved the dog off me and got to my feet. Squinted at the guy. He was tall and broad, with scruff on his face that was a brighter shade of ginger than the hair on his head. He was wearing yellow high-vis pants, boots, and a grimy blue T-shirt that had more holes in it than the last season of Game of Thrones.
“I’m fine, yeah.” I wiped my gritty palms on the arse of my pants then held out a hand. “Dominic Miller.”
“Red Joe Nesmith,” he said, and actually shook my hand. “I’m the mayor.”
“Yeah, nice to meet you,” I said, and it actually was, since he was the only islander who knew how to smile, apparently.
