Page 8 of Lawless (Dauntless Island #2)

The copper was standing in the doorway holding a big plastic jug of milk.

“I think it is.” I nodded at the copper and tried not to notice how hot he was. “This is my cousin. He’s gonna help out.”

Button John saluted the copper with his shears. I definitely needed to take them off him before he hurt himself.

We headed around the side of the house to the back yard.

It really was a mess. The oleanders had taken over since Short Clarry died; the yard was a jungle.

I took the shears off Button John and leaned them on the back fence, and then we took the saws to the oleander on the back of the house.

Would have been a hell of a lot quicker with a chainsaw, but I wasn’t going to be responsible for putting one of those in Button John’s hands.

Button John had some music downloaded on an old MP3 player, so he turned that up and we worked as it played.

The wind took most of the sound away, sweeping it straight out into the harbour where the gulls could hear it.

There was a speck of a boat on the horizon, and I wondered if it was the Adeline , though it was impossible to tell from this distance.

Gulls circled it like flurries of smoke.

It was a warm day despite the wind that came straight off the sea.

Button John and I stripped our shirts off after a while and worked in just our jeans.

We took a break for lunch, jumping the sagging back fence to my house. I left Button John washing the worst of the grime off him in the outside sink and went inside to check on Mum.

“Mum, it’s me,’ I called out, even though she never answered. Half the time I didn’t even know if she heard me.

She was sitting in the living room, old records spread around her.

The turntable on the record player was spinning, the needle scratching over nothing.

Static crackled in the speaker. The record player had belonged to Dad’s parents back when the house was theirs.

So had the records. I lifted the needle, put it back, and turned everything off.

Mum didn’t notice. She was still humming along to music that had never been playing in the first place.

I crouched down in front of her. “Do you want some lunch, Mum?”

She smiled at me, but her gaze was distant. “Oh, Will, I love this song.”

She wasn’t mistaking me for my brother, I knew, but for Dad. I’d never looked anything like my dad, but it wasn’t like that mattered. Half the time she talked to him there was nobody there at all.

“It’s a good song,” I said, my heart aching. “Come on, it’s time for lunch.”

She let me draw her up and lead her into the kitchen, where Button John was rattling around in our fridge like he owned the place, pulling out whatever we needed for sandwiches.

“John,” Mum said with a smile, and Button John straightened up and looked at me, like maybe I could tell him if she knew it was him or thought it was her brother Big Johnny.

“Hi,” he said. “Hi, Aunt Susan.”

She blinked at that, and then said, in a tone that sounded almost wondrous. “Button John! You’re getting so big!”

Like it had been years since she’d seen him, instead of days.

He grinned and puffed out his chest. “Almost as big as my dad!”

Even Mum laughed at how ridiculous that was, and Button John led her into a conversation about how we were doing yard work, and making ourselves useful for once by borrowing Big Johnny’s tools.

He didn’t say whose yard we were working in, but Mum probably wouldn’t have followed if he had.

Sometimes I thought that when Dad died, something in her mind had stopped, like a piece of clockwork had cracked and jammed up all the other bits so that nothing moved right anymore.

Most of Mum had drowned with him, and what was left was just a ghost.

I took over making the sandwiches, and then made sure Mum remembered to eat hers before Button John and I hopped the fence again and went back to work.

We worked in silence for a while. Button John was good like that.

He knew when I needed silence. Then, when he must have figured enough time had passed, he said, “He’s not that hot. ”

“Shut up!” I glared at him, then at the back of the house. There was no sign of the copper, thank fuck.

“Like, I would do him,” Button John said thoughtfully, “because beggars can’t be choosers, but he’s not that hot.”

“Shut up,” I said again, and attacked another branch of the oleander.

He was an idiot. He was also wrong. Okay, so the copper wasn’t hot like some of the guys we’d watched online, swearing at the lag in the videos because the internet on Dauntless was patchy at best, and nonexistent most of the time.

Maybe he wasn’t a porn star or a movie star—we watched both—but he was something neither of those guys were: he was here .

And I liked that he looked real. I liked his smile.

I liked the way his forehead had scrunched up when I’d been short with him.

I liked that he had an expressive face that looked like he’d be absolutely slaughtered in a game of poker.

He was cute, and he looked like he’d be fun too, if he wasn’t an outsider and a copper. But I was allowed to look.

We worked a while longer, the sun beating down on our backs, and then the back door to the house opened and the copper stepped outside. He was still wearing his uniform, which made it easier to remember not to talk to him.

“Hey.” He was smiling at us, but that smile wavered and vanished back into nothing as neither of us answered him. “You guys have been working hard. It looks great.”

It didn’t. It looked like a total mess, but we’d made progress.

The copper waited for us to say something, but we still didn’t. “Okay, I’m gonna head out for a bit. Do a patrol or something. Do you need a drink before I go?”

We shook our heads.

“Okay,” the copper said, and vanished back inside again. I heard the lock turn in the kitchen door.

“We should have asked for snacks,” Button John said as we got back to work. “What sort do you reckon he’s got?”

“Dunno.” I swallowed down my guilt. I felt bad for the guy, and not just because he was cute, but because shutting people out was a shit of a thing to do, even if it was the Dauntless way.

We didn’t like outsiders, and we didn’t want them here.

Tourists were fine, but not people who wanted to stay.

People who wanted to stay didn’t understand our ways and wanted to change them.

Even Eddie, who loved Dauntless as much as if he’d been born here, sometimes pushed too hard for things to be different.

Well, they didn’t need to be different. We’d done just fine for two hundred years without mainlanders sticking their noses in, especially mainlanders from the government.

Except I remembered what it had been like at school in Sydney.

I remembered how afraid I’d felt the first time I walked into a classroom, and twenty boys turned around and stared at me and then didn’t make any room for me at their tables at lunch.

Not until Button John, who’d started a year before me, dragged me to sit at his table.

We’d been the outsiders there, with our weird accents and our weirder ideas.

Also weird because we didn’t fall into the same categories the other boys did: either rich enough to go there, or smart enough to get a scholarship.

The government had paid our school fees because we were remote students.

We’d never fit in properly. I’d been so homesick, even with Button John there, that I’d cried myself to sleep every night for months.

I wondered if the copper was homesick. I wondered if he felt just as hurt as I had that day when nobody had talked to me, just looked me up and down and decided that I didn’t fit in with them, and that if I wasn’t one of them now, then I never could be.

I hacked at another oleander branch, avoiding the poisonous sap that oozed out of the wound I left behind.

I felt bad, but it didn’t change a thing.

Even if I wanted to be nice to the copper because he was cute and was trying to be friendly, and even if the whole of Dauntless Island wouldn’t shun me because of it, I couldn’t.

Because if the copper found out what Button John and I were doing when we weren’t hacking oleander bushes out of his yard, he’d have to arrest us.

So I had no choice but to keep my distance from him.