Victory and Bard kept to the back of the group as a bored woman from personnel led them around Palmer Manufacturing’s factory. Victory had exchanged her black leather jacket for a respectable charcoal gray blazer, but she still looked incongruous among the machines that clanked and whirred under the fluorescent lights that skimmed the scratched surfaces of their plastic safety goggles. The factory was so vast—concrete-floored, industrial green-walled—that it hardly seemed to be an indoor space. Palmer Manufacturing machines made parts to make more machines. It was Milton as an industry, Bard thought—men like his father, like Victory’s father, men who made Milton run, siring children whom Milton would claim. But with Milton in his veins, Bard wanted to give it a voice that was not the sound of steel on steel or the roar of coal furnaces, wanted to carry Milton with him, leaving the place itself behind. Someday. For now, he would put in his six weeks here, then return to his life bound by the four walls of his bedroom or anonymous bodies listening beside him in dark clubs.

Bard’s and Victory’s training wasn’t in the factory. They were tucked away in the beige and burnt orange offices where the thin light was filtered through the grime on the windows and the dominating sound was the clacking of the typewriter pool. Bridget had been in that pool, more than twenty years before. Bard imagined her, strawberry blonde and fresh-faced, falling under the covetous eye of Roger Fox.

Bard worked in the cluttered technical writers’ room, a stack of style manuals that would teach him how to write manuals on his desk. The men in the office wore white shirts and ties without jackets, wire-rimmed glasses (as opposed to Bard’s staunchly National Health Service tortoiseshells) and wrote copy on manual typewriters that they then marked up and handed off to Bard to be retyped. He took the finished copy to the art department, where Victory sat on a stool at a drawing board, the only woman in a room full of men who drew with T-squares and rulers. She’d hung a rubber snake on the goose-neck lamp clipped to her desk. There, she and Bard whispered to each other under the suspicious eye of the intern supervisor, Mr. Barkley. 

Mr. Barkley could tell them off but not fire them; their fathers avoided them; and they were fine with that. They took their breaks on the roof if it wasn’t raining, looking out over Empire Street. That’s where, in between Bard’s instruction manuals and Victory’s technical illustrations, they produced a series of “Impossible Machines”—the Poetry Engine and the Flower Assembler and the Music Mill, the Soul Extractor and the Self-Terminator and the Groupthink Gin. And that’s where they were when, three weeks into the six-week internship, Bard squinted through the rare sunlight to look at the record shop on the corner.

“Wait... who is that?”

Victory sidled up to him, shading her eyes. “The ginger? Girl from St. Mary’s skiving off school, looks like. Too young for you, Bard. Don’t be a lech.”

“Really, Vic,” Bard said, cringing. “The girl is my sister, Cassandra.”

“Sorry.” She dug a pair of mirrored sunglasses out of the pocket of her wool overcoat and put them on. “You mean the boy with her? Tall one, dark hair?”

“There’s only one boy with her, so, yes.”

“Ah, so that’s your type, then.”

“No. No. I don’t have a type. I want to know who is hanging about my sister.”

“So ask your sister. I don’t know him. He looks older than her, though.”

Bard peered down again. Cassandra was talking, gesturing wildly, and the boy was leaning against the brick wall, nodding, making a brief remark here and there. He was tall, maybe even taller than Bard. His black hair was a mass of tousled waves; he wore a black leather jacket and cuffed jeans. But he didn’t have the cocky affectation of most boys putting on the postwar delinquent look. Something about his posture and his gestures—his body bent toward Cassandra so he wouldn’t tower over her—seemed gentle.

Victory peered over his shoulder then turned to look him in the face. “You’re licking your lips,” she said.

“They’re chapped,” he replied.

“Likely story. C’mon, break’s about over, and you don’t want Barkley having a go at us with his clacky dentures and horrid breath.”

“Right—Bard said, distracted. “I’m just going to—check on—”

Victory nodded and waved him off. “Right, check on your sister.”

Bard trotted down the staircase, winding his way around a couple of other interns with a muttered “’scuse me.” When he opened the glass door at the front of the building, he realized he had no plan. He just wanted to see this boy up close. He debated turning and going back in, but his feet just kept moving him forward, and a bracing wind even picked up at his back as if to propel him along.

Damn it all. He was coming up right behind Cassandra. The boy shifted his gaze from her, looked right at him, and their eyes met. His were hooded, dark brown ringed in amber below heavy, earnest eyebrows that were slightly drawn together in an inquiring rather than hostile manner. Again: gentle. His mouth, though—seeing the full dark pink lips and the suggestion of a smile in the corners is what made Bard’s knees momentarily wobble, his stomach drop, his palms tingle. Words seemed to stop existing. Without them, he was almost immaterial—a transparent organism wiggling on a microscope slide.

So he slid up next to Cassandra, bumped his shoulder into hers, and hoped she’d take pity on him.

She did not.

“Bloody hell, Bard!” she shouted. “You want to give me a heart attack?”

“Aren’t you meant to be in school?” he blurted, amazed that his voice worked.

She looked at him, bemused. “Since when do you care? Anyway, aren’t you meant to be at work?”

“I’m taking a break.”

“Where’s that blonde you’ve been spending so much time with? Conquest? Triumph?”

“Victory,” Bard said, glancing nervously at the boy. “She’s just my work friend.”

“Sure.”

They stood in awkward silence for a beat.

“Is... is this your brother, Cass?” the boy finally said.

“This sodding busybody is. Drawn out into the daylight—which you can see from his pasty visage he doesn’t get much of—by the Machiavellian machinations of our dear pater.”

Bard sighed inwardly. She was showing off, so she must like this boy. 

Cass sighed and then changed her demeanor to one more formal. “Kai, may I introduce my brother, Bard. Bard, this is my friend Kai. He’s from Hawaii.”

Bard expected a nonchalant poking out of the chin as acknowledgment, but the boy straightened his posture—he was indeed taller than Bard—and held out his hand. 

“Good to meet you, Bard. Cass is a smart girl, yeah? Bit of a brat, but smart.” His voice was deep, almost as if the words were coming from inside a cavern, resonating in his chest before reaching the outside air. His accent was American. “I’m not actually from Hawaii. Well, my mother is, but I was born in California—San Francisco. My name—Kainoa—is Hawaiian, though.”

“Erm... yes,” Bard stammered.

Kai’s hand around his was so big—enveloping, soft, callused on the fingertips. Gentle, just as he thought. Bard held on a fraction of a second too long while Kai spoke. 

“Are you—do you go to school with Cass?”

“I go to an all-girls’ school, Bard,” Cass said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, well... what I meant.... You can see how it would be easy for me to forget, seeing how infrequently you attend,” Bard said, finally finding words again.

Kai laughed, his face lighting up in a lopsided smile, his pink lips spread to show impossibly straight American teeth, his eyes crinkling into half-moons.

Bard was completely charmed.

“Yeah, he has you there, Cass,” Kai said. “I’m out of school—I graduated in the States—but now I’m just hanging around, as you can see. Getting a job here is tricky when you’re not a UK citizen. I don’t really know what to do with myself.”

“Ah, yes, same here.”

“I thought I saw you come out of the Palmer building. Don’t you work there?”

He noticed me, Bard thought.

“Just an internship our father lined up to me in hopes it would mold me into a company man.”

“And has it?” Kai tilted his head, squinting into the sun, to listen to Bard’s answer—as if it mattered to him somehow.

“No, that’s not what I’m meant for.”

“What is it you’re ‘meant for’ then?” Kai imitated Bard’s British wording with a renewal of his soft smile.

Cass cut in. “You’re going to be a star, aren’t you, Bard?” She laughed. “A legend in his own time.”

Bard felt the blush rising from his collar. The old ginger curse. He could never hide how he felt.

“We all have dreams like that, don’t we?” Kai said. “All of us worth knowing anyway.”

Bard felt himself smiling but could think of not a single thing to say. 

Kai looked down at the scuffed white toes of his Chuck Taylors. “I suppose you’re here to tell me I shouldn’t be encouraging truancy, huh?” he asked Bard.

“Yes, Bard, why are you here?” Cass asked.

“My sister doesn’t need any encouraging in the delinquency department, I know that. Can’t a brother say hello to his sister without arousing suspicion?”

Bard regretted the word—arouse. Words, his milieu, his consolation, were failing him.

Cass narrowed her eyes. The sun had given her a smattering of freckles across her nose. “Not when the brother is you. Go on, get back to work. You want to lose your job?”

“It’s not a job, it’s an internship, remember? Right, though, got to get back.” He rocked back and forth on his heels, smiling uncomfortably. “Well, goodbye. Good to meet you, Kai.”

Kai, he repeated under his breath as he trotted back across the street. He tried to ignore his heart, the caged bird thrashing against the bars of his ribcage. Stupid. He had promised himself not to get like this again. Nine months ago, after the fire, after his relief had made him forget his fear as he stood in the street in front of Wilthrop for all to see, after his father had beat that fear back into him, he had made himself believe as he could never believe the when he recited the Apostles’ Creed in mass with his mother: Love was just a stop on the way to greater misery—and he was miserable enough already. Who was this American boy to come between him and his convictions? It was as if Bard were being drawn in, and he fought to want to resist. As he ran, he put his hand over the medallion that hung over his heart: St. Christopher Protect Us.