The Select's Bodyguard (Children of the Wells - Bron & Calea Book 1) by Nick Hayden Read Free Book Online Page B

We’re all extraneous, accidents. Men live and die. Their names sometimes linger a few generations. For what? I’ll be forgotten soon enough, even if I change the whole world with my mind. I’ll hang on as a name in a book and a picture on a wall, if that.”
    Bron nodded. “Then why do you do what you do?”
    “They think they need me. It’s a lie. Someone else would do what I’m doing, if not now, then within a decade. But I might as well do it. It gives me a way to spend my time, and it pleases them.”
    “Well, protecting you gives me something to do as well. Let’s leave it at that.”
    Calea wanted to scream at him. She had rattled off that little speech to make him uncomfortable--and from some uncomfortable emotion of her own. He had accepted it without question. He was either an unthinking brute or he was mocking her. It was possible both were true.
    Her destination was a retailer she’d recently partnered with, a bicycle shop she was using to sell the new motorcycle she’d help develop. With the newest battery, streamlined, magic-powered vehicles were now possible. Most cars were still clunky and over-large, but that was slowly changing. Calea wanted to shock the people with her compact two-wheeled vehicle. She hoped to do some interviews with customers today.
    “This is going to be a nice place to live,” Bron said. He did not often start conversations.
    “The metrics of happiness and prosperity have been rising steadily in this section. Technology is the most efficient means of changing a person’s position in life.”
    “Not the only way.”
    “The most efficient.”
    “Will you spread your work to the rest of the city?”
    “I don’t have much say in other sections. In time, others might borrow from my work, as long as it doesn’t contradict with their own experiments. The technology will spread to Thyrion before it’s publicly released, if history teaches us anything. They’re tech-grubby, and it causes them more than a few problems. The minor villages will get it in time. But my work needs tested over years, and verified by others, then repeated, before the socio-economic blueprint will be made officially available.”
    He did not respond. He was a normal, a native of routinely poor Section Three. He likely disagreed with the process. The non-Select always took the short view of things. “We’re doing this for your own good, you know.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    He seemed to tense up. That encouraged her. He had been hurt in some way.
    People and traffic crammed down the street. This section had more cars per household than any other, not a particularly difficult feat considering how few civilian cars had been allowed in the city. By her estimation, in three years nearly half of all households in Section Four would own one. Her newest battery was more compact, efficient, and long-lasting than any before it, and the method of creation safer. Manufacturing costs would drop, and the retail price to civilians would fall. Previous administrators of Section Four had run a moderately open economy. Calea didn’t plan to make any changes. Let the people work, earn money, and purchase what they would. They’d purchase her work.
    Bron leaned over casually. “We are being followed.”
    So perhaps his earlier stiffness had not been from affront but paranoia. “It’s lunch hour in the busiest part of downtown. You’d have to work not to follow someone.”
    And if she was being followed, what did it matter? She could handle it. It didn’t concern her much.
    She felt a sense of pride walking among the people--people who did not know that she was making their lives better. It wasn’t a sense of identification with these people; she felt as if she were invisible, walking between them as they lived whatever lives these people lived. She did not look down on them. Not much, anyway. She simply regarded them as agents in her experiments, blind beneficiaries of her work. Driving, as many Guides were wont