FIRST LOVE ♛ The Selection

4 ♛ Avoiding the Frenzy

THOMAS

"This is ridiculous," Mother spat, tossing the file onto her neat desk. My heart beat oddly, as it had since General Yiu rushed in with the unfortunate news: a prison riot somewhere in the outskirts of Angeles, with one escaped prisoner. Cary something, a rebel who planned some kind of unsuccessful attack on the palace a billion years ago. I hadn't gathered many details, only that he worked here for some time before he was arrested (a camera operator or a tailor or something of that sort), and that Mother was unusually pissed. She looked at General Yiu with the kind of glare she almost exclusively reserved for me. "How could this happen?"

The general cleared his throat. Mother's dark eyes could make anyone nervous. "We're not sure. It could have been a rogue guard--"

"Well, here's a suggestion, then. Find out."

He hesitated. "Your Majesty, we're doing everything we--"

"You're clearly not doing enough."

He spoke slower, practically the only thing he could do to make my mother angrier. "If he's been gone for more than three hours, he could be well out of Angeles. Well on a boat in the middle of the ocean."

"So find him."

"And without a proper search party, we're lost."

"I'm not negotiating with you, General. It was your men that let him escape, it'll be your men that find him."

The general exhaled through his nose. "I'm not one to argue, Your Majesty, but with the Selection, we're at a very high risk. I can't be moving half of our guards just to find one man."

"Can't we relocate some from outside?" I tried, attempting to add something to dilute the thick discomfort in the air. "From a rural area, or--"

"It's not as simple as that," Mother replied, waving me off.

"I don't understand why not--"

"And I don't have the time to explain it to you, Thomas." She met my eyes. "Go."

"We were having a meeting."

"This is more important. Go."

Embarrassment washed over me. I stood and left, taking The Illéan Weekly with me from her desk. "I want Dr. Malley straight away," Mother continued. "Call on Bennett, see if you can reach him. Vanessa should find the twins, send them to me, as well as..."

Her voice faded once I shut her office door behind me, huffing and heading down the hallway. Our meeting wasn't important, just going over the list of events again, but it was still my time with her, and she normally gave me so little of it that I had to cherish what I got. I wanted to find Davey, whose father was the general and who was a guard himself, and see if he had heard anything, but I was a little sick of him always talking about his new boyfriend (some palace cook he met through his mother), and I certainly didn't want to risk running into the boyfriend, who I didn't care for because he acted strange around me the first time I met him, the way servants usually did. I went to my room alone.

As I walked, servants flocked around me, moving noticeably faster as I passed, as if I cared how swiftly they did their jobs. As if it mattered to me what color walls the Selected rooms had or what food would be served or how quickly and perfectly that all would be done. I still had a few more days to myself before my life began, before the dining room had thirty-eight seats filled instead of three (my ideal number was four, though what good are shooting stars anyway), until I slowly but surely became a game show host for the public and a remote control for my mother, until I was subject to scrutiny on a national scale for any frown I gave or choice I made. Tradition had cooked up my own personal hell.