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

on purpose, so he could take advantage of them to hide what, exactly, he was up to. "Are you allowed to tell me that?"
    He snorted, still smiling, but his raised eyebrow said, 'You know the answer to that .'
    No, then. Wynne swallowed around the lump in her throat. "Am I allowed to know that?"
    Hector shrugged easily and picked up his tablet. "You would've noticed eventually."
    He moved further down the row, behind another niche in the soundfield, where he could work without listening to her, leaving her alone in her fear and worry about what might be done to her if anyone realized what she now knew.
    And for the first time, she felt a teensy bit scared of Hector Primuman the Fourth for himself and not for who he'd someday end up.
    ****
    Thanks to their leading parts on the play and their diligence as students, they ended up together in the study annex after classes that day to go over their lines for the first time. Wynne might've worried about the gossip fodder if not for the detail that they were the top two in just about every class but math, wherein Wynne kept flip-flopping into third and was on her way into dropping to fourth or fifth once they hit full calculus. Class seating was determined by class placement, for reasons she still couldn't fathom, though Hector's attitude meant she should've been able to puzzle it out — though after the earlier revelation about the security cameras, she wasn't sure she wanted to — so their classmates wouldn't think anything of the two of them working together on some school project.
    "'O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?'" Wynne read, frowning. "What does that even mean?"
    Hector seemed to hide a smile behind his tablet, then lowered it. "I believe 'wherefore' means 'why,' in that context, and if you notice the following lines, she's fretting over how one of them will need to denounce their family for them to Partner together, because their families are in a feud."
    Wynne gave him a sour glare. "I figured that out. But this language was archaic centuries ago. Most people won't even understand what we're saying." Including most of the classmates in the play, she thought. She scowled at her tablet.
    He was definitely smiling now, if his eyes were any indicator. He kept the precise curve to his lips hidden behind his tablet — as if he didn't want her to know she could make him smile, or maybe he just didn't want people in general to know he smiled. "You know," he commented, "we could… translate… the play."
    She narrowed her eyes at him. Yes, he did seem to mean that the way she was thinking. "Translate," she said.
    He shrugged, mischief glimmering in his eyes.
    Wynne turned her tablet longways, splitting the screen to be half play and half fresh document. "I like how you think."
    Hector let her see that smile. "Thank you."
    ****
    Between their prompt tackling of their homework and their quick wits — the latter of which were, to be honest, skewed in Hector's favor — by their next Culture Studies class, they had a revised play to offer their classmates. Wynne had fun pinging it to everybody's tablets without the instructor noticing, though she wasn't sure how necessary the precautions were, considering she had Hector Primuman the Fourth on her side.
    In the middle of the next Culture Studies class, everybody else was still working through reading the play for the first time. The bewildered ones were doubtless reading the original play, and the gigglers and gawkers were likely substituting the new one.
    "You know," Wynne commented while surreptitiously revising the costume orders via her tablet. "We could probably prank the entire colony and get away with it."
    Hector froze.
    She abruptly remembered how he'd obliquely accused her cousin of treason two years before. "In a harmless way, of course," she quickly clarified. "Something like… painting all the light switches bright yellow-orange."
    He frowned, but something about his poise told her that he was trying to