Read Thrice Uncharmed (Wynne d’Arzon) for Free Online Page A

grades back.
    Bridge and Auntie Sea were at breakfast, with her cousin being as sullen and her aunt being as gregarious as usual. They didn't volunteer what Bridge's questioning had been about, and Wynne dared not ask. She'd never asked before, and her mother and aunt would notice if she did now, so she spent breakfast researching uses of bamboo and tablet alternatives. She hadn't known the colony had an entire bamboo habitat and that the bamboo was used for everything from clothing to food.
    She found some ideas to toy with for producing off-network notes, too. Now, to figure out how to spin them so they don't make me sound worth watching as a potential traitor.
    Otherwise, the day progressed fairly normally, although Wynne was getting her homework done right before class started and Hector didn't show up until midway into Culture Studies class, bleary-eyed and tottering as if he'd not slept all night.
    Seeing Hector exhausted was as weird as the previous week's fit of temper had been. Wynne caught herself staring as he lowered himself into his seat, and she looked away. Most of her other classmates were still goggling at him, but Josiah Cleanuman was among the few who was politely minding his attention elsewhere.
    She smiled at him. He flushed and looked away from her.
    Even Instructor Smith was studying Hector, his usual irritable scowl replaced by a pitying frown. Their instructor noticed her watching him and cleared his expression, sending the usual scowl her way.
    Wynne smiled at him, too. He snorted and resumed class.
    ****
    At recess afterwards, Wynne intentionally followed Hector into the same niche in the sound-blocking settings of the wallfield. She waited for him to sit, pull out his tablet, and rest it against his knees before she asked, "You okay?"
    He stared at his tablet for a long moment and adjusted his glasses, not looking up.
    He didn't answer, either.
    Rather than pry, she sat nearby and waited. He'd pulled the silent-waiting game on her in the library, the previous week. Turnabout was fair play.
    Even if he hadn't ever given her the just desserts for dubbing him with that 'Four-Eyes' nickname.
    Attention still on his tablet — and starting to tap the screen to do something — he sighed quietly, just a breath of air. "Don't make a habit of commandeering Bridge's tablet," he murmured.
    "Oh, I won't," she promised readily, though she found herself wondering what connection there was between that and his current fatigue. "I was thinking, last night."
    He paused, then resumed whatever he was doing on his tablet, one hand fiddling with his glasses. "I'd expect you to be thinking every night."
    The joke nonplussed her at first, then she decided against sticking out her tongue at her future governor. "Sometimes, a person needs to scribble something that would be better kept off the network. A Layuman drafting out blueprints, for example — keeping the drafting process off the network would prevent accidental uses of the wrong blueprint." It wasn't common, but it happened on occasion, and the resources to fix such errors were expensive. It made a decent argument.
    He adjusted his glasses again. "We don't have enough wood for paper, and the bamboo gets used elsewhere."
    Wynne found it interesting that paper was the first possibility he thought of, but that he immediately came up with suggestions probably meant that he liked the way she'd spun it, though she didn't think it enough of one for her suggestion to actually be authorized for production.
    "What about whiteboard?" The plastics involved seemed easy enough to make, and the resource expenditure to get one would be obvious enough to maybe keep the powers-that-be happy, because they could track whoever had one.
    Hector blinked at her, then resumed fiddling with his glasses.
    She bit her lip so she wouldn't smile, pleased that she'd actually managed to surprise Hector Primuman the Fourth . "Bad idea?"
    "Good one, actually. Come up with that today?"
    She