Scarlet

Chapter Five

Scarlet’s thoughts seethed a s she hauled the empty crates out of the back of her ship and through the hangar’s yawning doors. She’d found her portscreen on the floor of the ship and it was now in her pocket, the message from the law enforcement office burning against her thigh as she mindlessly traipsed through her evening routine.

She was perhaps most angry with herself now, for being distracted, even for a minute, by nothing more than a handsome face and a veneer of danger, so soon after she’d learned that her grandma’s case had been closed. Her curiosity about the street fighter made her feel like a traitor to everything important.

And then there was Roland and Gilles and every other backstabber in Rieux. They all believed her grandma was crazy, and that’s what they’d told the police. Not that she was the most hardworking farmer in the province. Not that she made the best éclairs this side of the Garonne River. Not that she’d served her country as a military spaceship pilot for twenty-eight years, and still wore a medal for honorable service on her favorite checkered kitchen apron.

No. They’d told the police she was crazy. And now they’d stopped looking for her.

Not for long though. Her grandma was out there somewhere and Scarlet was going to find her if she had to dig up dirt and blackmail every last detective in Europe.

The sun was sinking fast, sending Scarlet’s elongated shadow down the drive. Beyond the gravel, the whispering crops of cornstalks and leafy sugar beets stretched out in every direction, meeting up with the first spray of stars. A cobblestone house disrupted the view to the west, with two windows glowing orange. Their only neighbor for miles.

 For more than half her life, this farm had been Scarlet’s paradise. Over the years, she’d fallen in love with it more deeply than she’d known a person could fall in love with land and sky— and she knew her grandma felt the same. Though she didn’t like to think of it, she was aware that someday she would inherit the farm, and she sometimes fantasized about growing old here. Happy and content, with perpetual dirt beneath her fingernails and an old house that was in constant need of repair.

Happy and content—like her grandmother. She wouldn’t have just left. Scarlet knew it.

She lugged the crates into the barn, stacking them in the corner so the androids could fill them again tomorrow, then grabbed the pail of chicken feed. Scarlet walked while she fed, tossing big handfuls of kitchen scraps in her path as the chickens scurried around her ankles.

Rounding the corner of the hangar, she halted. A light was on in the house, on the second floor. In her grandmother’s bedroom.

The pail slipped from her fingers. The chickens squawked and darted away, before clustering back around the spilled feed.

She stepped over them and ran, the gravel skidding beneath her shoes. Her heart was swelling, bursting, the sprint already making her lungs burn as she yanked open the back door. She took the stairs two at a time, the old wood groaning beneath her.

The door to her grandma’s bedroom was open and she froze in the doorway, panting, grasping the jamb.

A hurricane had come through the room. Every drawer was pulled out from the dresser, clothes and toiletries had been dumped onto the floor. The quilts from the bed were piled haphazardly at its foot, the mattress at an angle, the digital picture frames beside the window all pulled from their brackets, leaving dark spots on the wall where the sunlight hadn’t managed to fade the painted plaster.

A man was on his knees beside the bed, tearing through a box of her grandmother’s old military uniforms. He jumped up when he saw Scarlet, nearly hitting his head on the low oak beam that spanned the ceiling