Displaced

Wicken - Sixty-Three

"I'm going back!" Justice practically pounced on me the moment I walked into our shared room.

I grabbed a fresh pair of underwear to change into, about the last clean article of clothing I had for the time being that wasn't sopping wet. "Going back?"

"To the surface!"

"Oh." I blinked. "Cool."

He scowled. "Don't sound so excited, buddy."

Shaking my head, I motioned for him to follow me to the bathroom. "I am, just stunned. To be honest, you were going to be the hardest thing to leave behind here."

"You're not getting rid of me easily, no way. I'd have still found a way to bug you regardless."

"Instead you're coming up to the Surface with me, huh?" I asked Justice, as I rung out the water from my shirt into the bathroom sink. We had a little bit of downtime until lights out. There was no way my clothes would dry before work the next day. I'd be wearing an old, grungy, dirty, set of clothes tomorrow. A small price to pay.

Justice nodded. "I never thought it would happen. That's how I got my name, you know. Patriarch told me some day justice would be mine, and I needed to hold onto it. Three years have passed, and it's finally coming true."

"Want to tell me more about it? Or is it not my business?" Since he'd flat-out told me not to talk to people about their past down in the Pit, I'd not bothered to swap histories with him.

He leaned back against the wall, folding his arms in front of his chest. "I told you how I was up there before and came down because I was accused of something I didn't do, right? How Paul, the representative of the humans, didn't believe me when I told him I hadn't done anything wrong?" I nodded, he continued. "He believes me now."

"Gotcha." Still didn't tell me a whole lot of what was going on, but I'd take what I could get.

Justice, thankfully, decided to elaborate. "I was taken when I was working at the zoo. I've got this thing for animals, so when I got here, that's where I gravitated. The animals in the Garden. Working there was amazing, and there was a guy who was going to teach me how to do veterinary stuff. That's the kind of thing I'd have studied if I went to school. At the time I was sixteen. The work was awesome, and sometimes required me to come down to the Pit to unload some of the animal feces. It was gross, but it was work. Comes with the territory. When I was down here, I got a little curious."

"This whole ship is curious." I hung up my shirt to dry on one of the towel racks.

"There's a lot to see, and while I was down here I met a girl. Her real name is Mary, but they called her Rumor."

Did he just say..? My jaw dropped. "Rumor?"

"Yeah, you know her?"

"I know of her."

"So her reputation still reigns." Justice gritted his teeth together. "Her and I met, I fell for her, and through me she made her way up to the Surface with me. She got pregnant, and things were good. Motherhood wasn't something she took to well. The Pit had poisoned her mind over social norms and standards. Sometimes I wondered if she ever had any of them to begin with because she was a thief on Earth. That should have been my first clue she was bad news. Stealing is just another form of lying."

I nodded, not sure what to say. The way Chevelle and Timber described her, she should have had a bold neon sign over her head broadcasting she was bad news. Justice should have been smart enough to see it. Then again, Rumor was apparently a great manipulator.

Justice waited to see if I was going to respond, before averting his gaze to the floor. Shame leaked out of him and filled the room with a whole lot of tension. "She believed that because she was a woman, she could have anything she wanted. A kid wasn't something she wanted, and being left alone with our son always stressed her out. Every chance she had, she would pawn him off on me. I told her I'd stay home so she could relax. Parenting is hard, I get that. We were both so young too. Teenagers. It's a lot to take on, but I accepted it for what it was. I didn't mind too much, anyway. He was such a beautiful kid. You know?