Outlier

The Limit

A/N: Who's ready for an update? I'm ready for an update! :D

She'd cleaned her face up as best she could. There'd been makeup and tears all over it, and when she'd left the bathroom she'd looked presentable, but there were eyes on her no matter where she looked. She could have just left her face as it had been if she'd known people would stare at her like this.

She was facing the crowd of people on the grounds of city hall. The Collection ceremony was about to start, and so children and adolescents in their respective age groups ranging from eight to eighteen were waiting to discover their fate. There were so very many of them, and there were more elsewhere in the city. These were just the kids who lived in the area.

In the crowd, she spotted Marty. He wouldn't even look at her. He had his face turned away, jaw clenched, and Venus had half a mind to shout at him- to say, look at me, Marty! Don't you still care about me? And she would have, if it wouldn't have made her look desperate and possibly insane. Not to mention that Jace, the arrogant bastard, was standing right beside her with a hand on her shoulder, letting her know he was there to witness everything with that smug smirk of his. Vaguely, Venus wondered if he looked like he was consoling her, when the situation he had her in was anything but a consolation.

Around them, Collection officials were starting to mill into the crowd, monitoring the situation. They were dressed simply, ominously, in stark black and white. Some of them wore bulletproof vests and carried guns, while others looked as though they belonged in a hospital serving patients. The latter of the two kinds were calibrating tiny little scanners. Venus knew all too well what those were. She'd had them shoved in her face none too kindly for the past ten years. The scanners had screens displaying a metre that was currently green and flatlined. She knew what happened when those scanners detected an Anomaly.

"He's not even looking your way," Jace murmured. The smile was in his voice. "Poor, poor Venus..."

"What do you want?" Venus whispered. "If you're going to torment me some more, I can assure you that you've done enough."

"I'm not trying to torment you," he replied, even as his longer fingers dug into the skin below her collarbone. "You know that I was an archaeologist before I became a delegate, don't you? What are archaeologists, first and foremost?"

"I don't know."

"Surely you've got a better answer than that." He sighed.

Venus remained silent. He put his sunglasses on her face, muttering something about her swollen eyes and how unattractive it made her look.

"Archaeologists are..." He waited for her to finish.

"Obsessed with bones." If she had to look out at this crowd any longer, Venus would run away screaming. If she had to look at Marty any longer, Venus would tear her hair out and then run away screaming.

"No, stupid," Jace reprimanded. "Archaeologists. Are. Scientists."

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah, that much is obvious. Now, what do scientists do?"

"How would I know? I'm not a scientist."

She felt Jace stroke back a bit of her hair, his touch gentler than a feather, his tone derisive. "You've kept on asking me what I want out of all of this, what I want with you. I've given you a really good hint. If you're half as smart as I doubt you are, you might just figure it out."

"Can you stop?" Venus was glad, now, for the sunglasses Jace had covered her eyes with. "Today has been-"

"-the worst day of your life, so you want me to be nice."