Bad Bloods Read Online Free PDF Page B

boundless if it were
proven true.
    “Yes, hello, this is Calhoun Wilson, citizen
of Western Vendona.”
    I peered between my fingers as Cal spoke into
a phone I didn’t even know he had. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
He continued to say sir and ma’am for five minutes before he fell
into a patient silence. In my twelve years with him, I’d never
heard him say either word, but I recognized the polite but firm
tone. Military. Who Cal was talking to, I didn’t know, but I knew
it wasn’t good. He could’ve been giving up—trying to pull some
strings to get me out of Vendona—but that’s as far as my thoughts
went.
    I attempted to picture myself outside of
Vendona, but couldn’t. I was born in Eastern Vendona and raised in
Western Vendona. I lived in Northern Vendona, and now, the girl I
kissed lived in Southern Vendona. Every bit of my identity was
Vendona, Vendona, Vendona, and even though it was a horrible
place—down to the back alleyways and bordering ocean—I knew I would
rather die trying to see it become a better place than flee and
live somewhere else. I didn’t even know what other places were
like. After all, it had been illegal to leave your city-state
without permission since 2041. That was the year the United States
fell apart, but Cal said they called it something else, a
“reformation of unification” or something like that. According to
Cal—the only educator I ever had—Vendona’s council was a piece of a
larger council, the Council of the States, and it was made up of
every president from each city-state. We were individual but
united. Thus, each city-state had its own president, not governor,
but president. They were supposed to make decisions together—one of
which included closing off borders—but they could always make their
own decisions. Either way, the general citizen population was left
out of it. You had to serve in the military or come from a
prominent family to be educated on it. Nothing was free. Most of it
went over my head.
    “Daniel.” Cal’s voice was stern as he set his
phone down on the desk. It buzzed, and I realized he had put it on
speakerphone so he could riffle through his desk.
    Before I could ask him what he was searching
for, a woman’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Mr. Wilson,
we’re putting you on hold. Please wait.”
    Classical music began to play as Cal handed
me a photo. A single tear went through the left corner, but the
rest of the photograph was in fairly good condition. It was old. I
could tell by the crinkles. Modern paper didn’t crinkle at all. And
the coloring had faded. That never happened anymore either. Just by
glancing at it, I could tell it was older than even the photos I
had on my desk. Much older.
    “I trained two hundred boys for our first
mission,” he said, and I realized what I was looking at. A troop.
“This is just a part of it.”
    My eyes scanned the small crowd, and I found
Calhoun immediately. He was practically Adam’s twin. But he had
both arms in the photo, and his currently missing one was draped
around another boy’s shoulders. I didn’t recognize him at all.
    “I was only a trainer because of my father,”
Cal said. “That was how the new way of things worked. You did what
your father did, and respect came from your bloodline, not your
work ethic.” Cal pointed at the boy next to him. “That guy saw me
for who I really was. And he still stood by me. No one else did.
Not truly anyway.”
    I stared at the photo, at the boy with dusty
brown hair and eyes to match. He was scrawny for a solider,
especially when he stood next to a stockier Cal, but he held
himself with prowess. The guys around them barely looked like they
were paying attention to the camera.
    “Most of those men are dead, Daniel.”
    I swallowed. I didn’t have to ask what
happened. This was the Separation Movement. This was the battle—the
mass murders—that took place on Vendona’s streets in 2051 when bad
bloods were declared