Chapter 1

Scarlet found herself lost in thought looking outside the window of the bus.

It was field school trip day, there were supposed to go to a local forest in a biology assignment. The idea was to take a notebook and try to find and identify local flora and fauna of the place.

She like biology class and these field trips, they usually provided her good inspiration for her drawings and her dreams, she liked and respected nature, so most of what she drew usually had animals of some kind.

Although lately she had been having issues drawing anything at all. It was all due to the “accident”. At least that is what the adults were calling it, but in reality it had been the fault of the stupid bullies at her school.

She hated bullies now more than anything. She used to think that it was just a normal part of school life and even scorn some at people that reported them to the teachers, but now she knew, bullies were evil and should not exist anymore.

John and Mary, bless them, were probably the most kind humans she had ever known, so when she started coming back beat up they were very concerned about her well being. But ultimately there was not much they could do to protect her from her tormentors.

They had gone and talk to the school principal, her teachers, started picking her up whenever possible (which was hard because they both had full time jobs to help with the expenses of the group home), but it was to no avail, she was still being victimized; not only that but the school itself seemed to be protecting the abusers and just trying to hush everything.

Apparently the reputation of the school was more important than the suffering of some students. She hated the principal and the superintended and basically all the teachers at this point, and could not wait to go on to sixth grade in middle school and never see them again.

She decided she would grow up to be an advocate for abused people, man and woman, children and the elder too. She particularly knew that the boys in her school, specially the smarter ones were the most relentlessly tortured; somehow in her misery she felt lucky that she was not one of them.

She also had decided she would learn how to fight since the “accident”, and so she had been practicing, watching tutorials online of how to defend yourself, how to kick somebody, how to move, how to block, how to throw a punch, and most importantly, how to receive one.

She started throwing punches at the air in the backyard of the group home; John had approached her jokingly at first, asking if the air was getting tired of brawling her; after the first week he was more concerned and wanted her to stop, but she didn’t quit; finally after a couple of weeks he seem to have given up and even took up an old punching bag from the basement and some boxing gloves that she had never seen before.

She wondered if John had been a fighter at some point in his life, he would probably had been very scary, the man was more than six feet and built like a brick wall, he oftenly carried two of her… brothers…? One in each arm to their beds.

If he was, she wished he would help her get better at it. She had picked a fight a couple of times intentionally with some of the boys and had been thoroughly defeated.

She understood that boys would eventually always beat her… at least the strong ones, she was a girl after all and that is just biology; but at this point in her life she was still bigger than most of them and was sure that her problem was more on her capacity for violence than her physical strength.

She also had an advantage that nobody else had, the accident had it that her hands would receive damage but not really hurt ever, so she could punch as hard as she wanted no matter what and she would not feel any pain.

On one occasion she had punched a tree so hard that she dislocated a finger and didn’t even notice, it was not until Mary told her that her finger looked like a tomato that she realized she had been hurt; Mary quickly set the finger back and splint it but she also got an earful of how violence was not the answer.

And she was probably right, but in her current world the only way to fight her tormentors was this, so in a way violence was probably not “THE answer” but at least it was “AN answer”.

She looked at her and started touching the tip of her thumb to each one of her fingers, it was an exercise that the doctors have told her she should perform at least once per day to watch for the feeling returning. She knew she used pencils and colors to create but really her main tool was her hands; so when she had lost all feeling on them it was devastating to her.

Scarlet could still draw… but she knew it was not as good as it used to be. The problem was that the act of drawing for her was a complete experience. It started from the smell of new paper and wood from the pencils, the look of the sheet with all the tiny imperfections of the paper pressing process, the sound of the sharpening a colored pencil to return it to its most optimal state.

But most importantly, it was the feel.

The feel of the paper when she caressed the surface lightly to straighten out a new sheet, the shape of the pencil in her hand, the little fidgeting motion when she was taking a break, even the bounciness of the eraser was part of her process.

And now she had lost all of it. All feeling was gone from both of her hands.

The doctors had told her it had something to do with electrical signals being disrupted in her body and that she would be recovered fully in a couple of weeks.

That had been almost four months ago; during her last appointment the story had drastically changed from a couple of weeks to probably never.

She had never cried so hard in her whole life like she did that night.

She originally said she would wait for the feeling to return to start drawing again, but once the medic had changed his tune she decided she could not wait anymore and started. She very quickly realized that she was missing something, something that she had never paid attention to until she lost it.

I guess it was true what they say, you really never know what you have until you have lost it.

But then again, her life had started with loss, as an orphan she had lost her parents even before she knew she had any, her whole life she had been living in a group home managed by John and Mary Sunrise, and although she considered them her family and loved them deeply, she always wondered what her life would have been if she had parents of her own.

And then of course, there was the other thing she had lost alongside her ability to draw.

Somebody in the group home was a secret provider of materials and goodies for her art… or at least it was until the accident. It seemed that since she had stopped painting, well, the supplies had also stopped, she figured that if she started painting again the cycle would resume, but now so much time had passed since the last time, that she wondered if that would actually be true.

She knew the supplies were not free, every now and then, a drawing would go missing from her room, or taken from the window in the living room where she put them to the sun to dry the watercolors faster.

At first she didn’t know how to feel about the stolen art. It was not really about the drawings, in fact she enjoyed the fact that somebody liked her paintings so much that he (or she) would go to the extent of straight up going into her room to steal it, not only that, but she had found a bag with art goodies that she could use to produce more art. At the same time, she felt like that was an unforgivable privacy violation.

Of course she had told John and Mary, and they talked to the rest of her foster siblings, but nobody would take ownership for the theft. She then tried catching the culprit by herself, leaving some of her favorite pieces in the living room and then spying hidden behind the plant at the top of the stairs. That day did not go so well, she must have dozed off and when she came too her painting was gone and there was a bag of goodies hanging from her door. Damn you art thief! She thought to herself and immediately felt bad about it.

Eventually she dropped it, but she did start leaving most of her art in the living room to “dry on the sun” if her paintings were going to be stolen anyway, might as well protect her privacy at least a little.

She caught her eyes swelling at these thoughts and memories, she wanted to suppress them, to not feel, to be tough. But she knew, thanks to her foster mother, that human feelings were also a kind of toughness, if you could take your feelings, understand them, control them and then let them go, you would be the master of your own destiny and nobody you would meet in your life would faze you.

Well, that was good and all, but she did wonder how long it would take for this process to happen, so far she felt like she was still just Scarlet with a bit more understanding that she felt like life sucked right now.

Perhaps it was time to look outside the window and enjoy the view for the rest of the trip.

The bus started slowing down.

He saw the driver start to shift down the gears with the shifter and wondered why were so many movements required for a bus?

He was curious by nature, always had been, learned how to be cautious later on in life when curiosity had gotten him into trouble… more than once… or twice… maybe he was not as cautious as he thought he was. But the thing was, he enjoyed learning, he enjoyed understanding how things worked and trying to figure out how to use them to his advantage.

You see, Ashton had a plan.

He had lived most of his life in foster homes, had to be moved a couple of times too. Turns out that when you are constantly trying to escape the people trying to make money of you are not that happy about it. Something about the social worker and inspections and who knows what.

His plan was still the same, get out of the system as soon as you can, and for that you needed money.

He had understood very early on in his life that money was the way of the world. No matter who you were, if you didn’t have money you might as well be a nobody. Thing is; for an orphan like him, making money was not really a simple task, specially when you are in 5th grade.

He did have an advantage though, people underestimated him because they saw him as a kid, which was true, but was also a grave mistake.

You see, Ashton was a very accomplished little thief. So far that had been the only sure way he had found to actually make some real money (which he kept hidden in his stash). Of course that meant he was taking some things from other people, but he always tried to go for targets that looked like they would not really care if their pockets were a little lighter.

And of course he also liked to swipe a chocolate bar or a soda bottle every now and then from one of those chain stores that basically killed all the small stores around them. He liked to thing of himself as some kind of Robin Hood, stealing from the wealthy to give to the poor. Except of course, in this case, he was the poor.

Well, there was one exception, but he saw it as more of an “involuntary sale” than actual theft.

In the group home he had a strange relationship with one of the girls, her name was Scarlet and it was very strange in the fact that she probably didn’t even know who he was. You see, one day he had been bored around the house, he had recently almost been caught and had decided to lay low for a few days before going out again. It was during this time that Scarlet, the orphan with the red hair, had decided to leave some of her paintings out to dry.

At first he didn’t care. But the more he saw the paints, the more and more he liked them, he specially liked the one with the cat and the moon. He always had wanted to have a pet, a dog really, but any pay would do, unfortunately there was a strict no pets rule in the group home. According to Richard and Olive having to take care of all the kids and an animal would be just too much for the house they lived in.

Which sure, sounded logical, but pets had never been about logical choices. And he thought a dog would be a cool companion for everyone in the house.

Anyway, the paintings, yes, he had liked the cat and the moon so much that he had swiped it one day from her room. She later heard her asking Olive if she had seen anyone with the painting around the house. Of course, she would not, he had taken it to his stash, maybe she would grow up to be an amazing artist and then the painting she made that one day in the orphan house would be worth millions.

He still fell pretty bad though, Scarlet seemed genuinely upset about the fact that her painting had disappeared and nobody seemed to care that much about it. Ashton was a thief, but he was a principled thief and stealing from an orphan was not really sitting well with him.

So he resolved to pay for the painting somehow.

He knew he couldn’t get her any money, she would probably would immediately go to the Allegro and that would raise questions, questions that he did not want to have to answer. So he decided to take a different approach.

He would pay her on materials, colors for her paints and paper and whatever else artists required these days. There was a store he passed whenever he decided to walk back from school instead of taking the bus; which lately, he had been doing it a lot.

The first time he had gone into the store, he realized just how many options there really were, and of course he had no idea of what was good or what to buy, but he was prepared for that, as he approached the clerk, he very carefully unrolled “the cat that stole the moon” and placed it on the counter

• “I need whatever was needed to make this please.”

The woman behind the counter looked at him with an amused look and asked.

• “Did you make it? Is pretty good.”
• “Pfff, I wish, it was a gift from a friend and now I want to return the favor.”
• “Did you mom give you her credit card? Things here tend to be a little pricey, boy.”

He knew better than to tell the truth and tell her that he had money of his own, he was used to that kind of treatment at this point, any adult that saw a child with money immediately assumed it was the doing of the parents; and for the most part they would be right, but sadly in his case… he had none.

He pulled a couple of fifty dollars bills from his pocket and put them on the table, then tried to put on his most innocent voice and said.

• “Is this enough? My mom didn’t really know the price of the thingies either.”

He knew it was more than enough, when he entered the store he quickly scouted labels for the priciest items, something he had picked up how to do at a glance thanks to his experience as a petty burglar, and the most expensive items where really big ticket items, and only a couple of them were more than sixty dollars by themselves.

She looked at the money on the glass surface of the case that worked as a counter, then looked at Ashton (which was still trying to look as innocent as possible) then examined the painting for a bit. She did a gesture that he recognized as some form of “wait here don’t steal anything” and wait to the back, fitting really, as he had thought about it, but as stated before he had principles,

Not only the small art store was a local business instead of a big terrible conglomerate, there was also the fact that he wanted to PAY for the painting, if he stole himself out of that it would feel like a tarnished transaction; and he didn’t know Scarlet that well, but he knew that would not sit well with her if she knew about it.

So here he was, spending actual money from his savings stash destined to be the fuel to leave the group home just to pay for some supplies and paper with no real world usage.

After a couple of minutes the woman (which in subsequent interactions he learned her name was Chloe and her grand parents had come from France during one of the big wars) came out with a bunch of bottles, some brushes and what looked like a legal pad of fancy thick paper.

She placed all the items in front of him and then took one of the bills that he had procured for the transaction (which had been a couple of fifty dollars bills), she opened what Ashton would later describe as “the oldest till in history” with mechanical buttons and a very particular bell, took out some change and started to bag all the goodies.

Ashton just stood there, a little dumbfounded, he had expected her to ask him if he would take all the items, or if the price was acceptable or really anything, but then again, he had asked for the materials to do exactly something, and for all that he knew she was providing exactly that. Still, she could at least have let him know the total.

Chloe finished bagging everything and extended both of her hands, one holding the art goods and the other his change (which contained one of his original fifty dollars bill), Ashton didn’t say anything and just looked at her, still kind of expecting an explanation; she looked at him for a few seconds, rolled her eyes and then said:

• “All the products have tags with prices on them for your mom, I also added a couple of paints that I think she will like.”
• “OK, thanks…”
• “Thanks for not stealing anything.”

Ashton froze at that last comment. Did she know something about his way of life? Was it just a general comment? Should he press the matter?

He decided to let it slide and just nodded silently, he then smiled and left the premises, it was probably just a random comment, there was no way she would know what he was up to.

He did pass by that store often thou… He tried remembering all the times that he might have had any stolen good with him on times that he had passed the art store. Could this woman be observant enough to realize?

Nonononono, he decided it was definitely not that as he was closing the door from the outside. While leaving he looked back at Chloe and she offered him a grin and that classic sign of pointing you eyes that meant “I see you”. She definitely knew…

As Ashton mind continued day dreaming, the buses came to a stop.

He had a pet peeve for the particular sound buses made when stopping, it was that kind of screechy grindy sound whenever they came to a full stop and that kind of pressure relief afterwards. He had always wondered why he disliked the sound so much, he didn’t really hated school or anything like that, and it was not like he had issues with any other kind of weird noise; but the bus stop, well, it just got him every time.

The teacher stood up in front of the bus and addressed the group.

• “We have arrived, you can leave your backpack but please take your important and valuable belongings with you.”

Ashton never carried anything of value other than some cash just in case. He had seen the richer and spoiled kids with phones and tablets, he had never envied them, after all they looked like dumb zombies glued to the tiny screens, and if you tried to talk to one, they kind of talked like dumb zombies too.

The Allegro had a very strict policy of no screens after certain hour and a limit of two hours of tv per day. This actually worked really well for him since he wanted to be outside getting money for his plans.

He also had always thought that tv made people dumber, he saw adults gathering around sports and acting like caveman often. He preferred books, you could imagine all you wanted with books; the characters had cool voices and a lot of times the authors described not only what was going outside, but also what the characters were thinking, which is something you just could not do in tv or movies.

He turned to pay attention to the teacher, he was mentioning something about the forest, ecology, blah blah blah. In reality he really just needed to know when to go back the bus to leave this middle of nowhere park; they had drove for like two hours and he had no idea how he would go back if he ended up being left behind by one of the buses. Not that that would happen anyway thou, there were plenty of teachers around and he was good at finding himself, at least while backtracking.

He noticed Scarlet close by, also listening to the explanations by the teachers, “There might be bears but we are not going deep enough to encounter one”, or “If you see a snake get away from it and don’t try to pick it up”, or “Wild boars are very aggressive, if you see one go back to the group and let a teacher know immediately”. All things that were purely common sense; so obviously they needed to be spelled out in excruciating detail.

He then also noticed something really unnerving.

A teacher he has never seen before was locked on Scarlet, not only was the woman watching her foster sibling, but her eyes revealed a hatred that he had rarely seen in any person. He decided to stay close just to make sure this woman was not going to suddenly lunge at Scarlet and try to hurt her; not that he could do anything if she did anyway, he understood that adults, even women were still a lot stronger that he could be at his age; but still, maybe he could try biting if push came to shove.

They started splitting the kids in groups and assigning a teacher to them, he got a group with miss Leonor as the chaperon and Scarlet got one with miss Marie; crisis averted… or so he would have thought, the unknown teacher approached miss Leonor and after a brief exchange she was apparently in charge of Scarlet’s group now.

Ashton thought this was highly suspicious, and also noticed that Scarlet had not noticed this was happening at all, she seemed to be lost in thought and mostly going through the motions. She had been for a while, he didn’t know the details but she was in the hospital for a little bit and then had some follow ups. He remembered to see her cry more than once after that and then she had stopped painting.

Regardless, he slipped from his group and into hers, he didn’t really know why, is not like he had a real relationship with her, they were not related by blood, or were even real friends. Other than the occasional paint “purchase”, he really had no contact with her; but somehow he felt strangely inclined to at least try to look after her this time.

Maybe the philosophy of always helping your other foster siblings from the Allegro was starting to stick to him… how annoying.

The groups started walking away with their respective chaperons and as they were entering the forest Ashton could not lift his eyes from the new teacher.