The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) by Saruuh Kelsey Page A

myself,
opening the box before me to rifle through the contents. Unlike the
women, I don’t have to be here. This isn’t my job. But what would I
have done otherwise? Wasted the day away staring at the smooth
silver walls of our room, contemplating my uselessness and my
misery? I’d much rather be here, doing something productive.
Besides, organising brought me a strange clarity in my father’s
attic, when everything was trashed and scattered and I had no
option but to sweep everything into order.
    I’d like to feel
clarity now. Well, what I really want is to be curled up in the
window seat in Bennet’s bedroom, her shoulder resting against mine,
listening eagerly to whatever cheap paperback I’d picked up that
week. But since that’s about as possible as growing wings and
flying away from my loss, I’ll accept being in this box room with
two girls who are fast becoming my friends. I lean around a
cardboard tower to find Priya. “How exactly do we catalogue
this?”
    She traps her lip
between her teeth, casting a look about her. She moves a few boxes
to make a circular space on the floor, but a skyscraper chooses
that exact moment to topple over, sending a hundred Guardian gloves
sailing across the room. Priya tucks her face low, assaulted by a
snowfall of kid leather. She laughs a quiet, hopeless laugh. “I
have no idea.”
    Marie adds to the
chaos by making a loud crash. I watch her tip four boxes over,
Priya’s clear circle now entirely ruined. Intent on her task and
oblivious to mine and Priya’s bewildered stares, Marie uses the
side of her body to push a whole group of box towers all at once,
backing them against the wall. When she’s satisfied, apparently
having fulfilled her mysterious purpose, she wades back to us and
holds four empty boxes up high.
    I frown, still
confused.
    She explains, “One box
for books and paper, one for anything we can kill a man with, one
for medicines, and one for everything else. Well, for now at least.
When these are full, we’ll just empty others.”
    Priya regards Marie
with awe.
    “I know, I know.”
Marie plunks to the floor and delves into the pile of objects she
unseated. There’s a real mountain of bric-a-brac now, each of us
sat at a point of the squashed triangle of mess. I pick up a silver
metal tube with thick glass on one end, contemplating it.
    “I’m brilliant,” Marie
goes on, flicking curls out of her face with unique flair. “A real
genius. You can repay me in kind.” She tosses a fork into the box
for miscellany and looks up suddenly. “Not you, Branwell. I desire
no ‘kind’ from you.”
    “Okay? I think?”
    She grins. “That’s the
spirit.”
    I hold up the strange
object. “Could this kill a man?”
    Priya shuffles around
to me, laughing through her nose when she catches the hopeless
expression I wear. “That’s a torch, sweetheart.”
    “It’s fairly
heavy.”
    She
hides her smile behind her hair. “In an emergency it could hurt someone, but
usually we use it for light.”
    “Does it work?” Marie
asks without looking up. She’s sorting things at a fast pace.
“Won’t the battery be dead?”
    Priya checks. The
battery does indeed turn out to be dead, which sparks a question in
me. “Does this ship not run on a battery of some kind?” Everything
seems to be fuelled by electricity here.
    Marie makes a neutral
noise. It sounds very much like ‘meh’ and comes with the
one-shoulder-shrug she does often. “It was dead when we found it,”
she tells us, her head in the depths of a brown box. “It had to be
jumpstarted. I heard Liss complaining about it yesterday.”
    “Who’s Liss?” I ask.
It’s impossible to remember everyone’s names, no matter how hard I
try. There are just too many new faces, new names, and new people
to keep track of. I’m doing the best I can but sometimes it doesn’t
feel enough.
    “The loud one,” Priya
and Marie answer in unison, startling a laugh from deep within
me.
    Ah. That one.