A Ruler in Disguise novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Forty Veterans

At five in the morning, a bus pulled up in front of my broken shop window.

It was a plain white charter bus with the name painted out.

Forty men and women climbed down in jeans and work boots, carrying toolboxes and a pane of glass as tall as a door.

They did not talk much.

They lined up on the sidewalk in a way that was somehow already a formation.

I stood in the doorway in Dev's shirt with a broom in my hand.

"Absolutely not," I said.

The colonel stepped out of the line and gave me the faintest nod.

"Good morning, Miss Broadnax. Where would you like the glass?"

"I would like you to go home. All of you."

"Ma'am, the Commander sent for us."

"The Commander is a delivery boy," I said, loudly, for the sake of the sidewalk. "And I told him no soldiers."

Dev came out of the back room, buttoning his shirt over the burn on his shoulder.

He looked at his colonel, then at me.

"They're not soldiers today," he said. "They're glaziers."

"Dev."

"A man throws a brick through a florist's window at night.

"By morning her neighbors see a bus full of volunteers fix it.

"That's all Savannah sees."

"They look like an army."

"They look like volunteers," he said. "Please."

It was the first time I had heard him say please.

I looked at the forty faces on the sidewalk, straight-backed and polite and waiting.

A young man at the end of the row, maybe twenty-five, was holding a push broom like a rifle.

I sighed.

"Rules," I said. "Nobody throws a punch for me. Nobody carries a weapon on this street. Nobody calls him Commander in front of a customer."

"Understood," said the colonel, who looked as if she'd been waiting for the speech.

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