Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
“Hmm. Is Prisha your only child?”
“Oh, god, no.” Rodge laughs. “She is my baby of nine. But they have all grown and left us behind. That’s why I am perpetually understaffed.” He pauses to make another astonished face. “Oooh! I almost forgot. I need to send Prisha up to clean Tyse’s room. Do you think you could take orders now?”
I nod. “Yes. I can do that. But… maybe I could clean Tyse’s room? I mean, I am living there now. Plus, it would be a shame to disrupt the flow in here with my inevitable mistakes.” I nod my head towards Prisha. “There’s always a learning curve, isn’t there?”
Rodge is not convinced. “Tyse instructed me to keep you within my sight. If you go up and clean his room, I would not be able to see you.”
“But I’d just be in his room. I would close the door. No one will come in, it’s Tyse.”
Rodge laughs. “He’s quite intimidating, isn’t he?”
“He certainly can be.” But my mind flashes back to Tyse standing over the bed last night, looking down at me. I’ve got no chance at all, have I? He didn’t look intimidating at all in that moment. He looked almost vulnerable.
And the fact of the matter is, I’m stuck here. After walking outside yesterday and realizing that there is really no way back, I’ve come to terms with it. This is my new life and, by luck or destiny, Tyse is now the man in it.
Which means he does have a chance. I mean… Finn sent me into the tower. He literally gave me away. It wasn’t to Tyse, it was to the god. But it might as well have been Tyse. Because he’s what I found on the other side of those black tower doors.
“Well.” Rodge has been considering my offer, and now he lets out a sigh. “It would be more practical to have you clean, since you live there. And I do believe you would be safe. I will walk you up and drop you off, and then I will have fulfilled my promise to Tyse.”
I beam a smile at him. “Perfect.”
Rodge hands the filled bag over to the resident, collects his coins, and then points to the next resident in line. “Be right back.”
I am loaded up with a rack across my shoulders with buckets hanging off the edges, perfectly balanced so I can carry them. Each bucket contains cleaning supplies, plus fresh linen and towels.
Then Rodge walks me back up to ten and deposits me inside Tyse’s room. “I’ll be back in three hours to walk you back down and close out the day. Good?”
I nod. “Very good. Thank you, Rodge.”
It’s not that I’m eager to clean—god, it’s been a decade since I’ve done that too—I just want to snoop. I did, after all, get permission to do that.
This permission also came with a warning: Ya better be careful, you might not like what you find. But there’s not much in this place.
Whatever personal items I find, they will be small.
So how bad could they be?
Maybe I haven’t cleaned my own rooms since I moved into the Little Sister dorm over a decade ago, but I have been watching the maids that whole time. Which doesn’t make me an expert or anything, but I have a general idea of how to start this whole cleaning-a-room process.
I am not a snoop by trade or habit, so I don’t start there. Discovering things should happen organically. While dusting, probably, since I will have to pick up every trinket, personal item, and scrap of paper in order to clean under it.
So I begin with stripping the bed and replacing the sheets. Then I sweep the floor, wipe up the ‘kitchen’—which is really nothing but a countertop—and then wipe down the bathroom.
Once all the gross stuff is out of the way I start on the fun stuff—all the little things he’s collected over the years. Which is a considerable time if he’s lived in this same room since he stopped soldiering.
Unfortunately, there’s really not much to find. He’s not messy, per se. There are no old food bags lying around or anything like that. His personal items are mostly useful things. I find quite a few dead phones. Two lost in the cushions of the chair alone. Also, a lot of notes. Not anything fun, like a love note. Mostly they are just scraps of paper with a few words or numbers scribbled on them. Appointments, I think, because they often have times attached.
I don’t throw any of the notes away, just find an empty jar on a kitchen shelf and stuff them all inside just in case he was saving them on purpose. But I don’t think he was. I think Tyse has his room cleaned by Rodge’s daughter, Prisha, quite regularly because there’s not even a lot of dust.