Inherit (36 page)

“That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard,” I tell him, but a tiny little shiver of appreciation bolts through me before it disappears, like that magical fragment of a second when a snowflake lands on your tongue, perfect and whole before it melts into oblivion.

“I’m not trying to pick you up.” His eyes are dancing, a jig, the robot, the macarena, and I work to keep my lips in a neat, straight line. “Judge Schwenzer is a stickler for being on time, and we’re two minutes from late.” He swings the door open, and I do my best not to openly admire the clean lines of his long muscles, some etched with barely-covered tattoos. “After you, m’lady.”

Then he smiles, and my nerves unfurl in a long, smooth spin, and I walk in with tiny sparks of silvery light flickering on the outsides of my eyes. It’s probably from nerves. It’s probably because I didn’t eat breakfast. It’s absolutely not because this irritatingly over-familiar hustler is trying to pick me up in the hallway of a courthouse.

I clamp down hard on my judgment pretty quickly. I’m here for trespassing and unintentional arson. He’s probably here to argue a speeding ticket. I murmur a ‘thank you’ and panic petrifies my legs and leaves me blocked in the doorway. He nudges me in, takes my hand as if I’m some new kid he’s been assigned to lead around on the first day of school, and pulls me to a long wooden pew-like bench, where we sit.

I run my fingers over my red leather portfolio cover. Other people have their court documents clutched in their fists or in cheap ten-cent folders, but I have fancy taste in my accessories. Mystery Guy has nothing in his hands. Unlike the other people in the courtroom, he’s not sitting ram-rod straight or fidgeting. He looks perfectly relaxed. I bet it was a speeding ticket. He probably thinks just showing up will get him out of it. I flip my cover open, glance over all the damning evidence pitted against me in black and white, then snap it shut again.

The judge enters the courtroom, and we jump to our feet as a solitary, slightly sheepish unit of criminals. Law breakers. Deviants. Sweat coats both my palms.

When Judge Schwenzer finally sits and we settle back down, she attacks the files on her desk. From her shellacked bun to her sensibly hideous glasses, she’s all about the business, and I feel my heart sink. This woman would never splurge on a red leather portfolio cover for her incriminating court documents. This woman will hate me on principle.

I catch the guy looking at me. No sneaking a look, no flirty attempts to maybe establish eye contact. When I put all my efforts into staring him down, he gives me a clear, wide smile and winks, one slow, lazy flick of an eyelid laced with all those gorgeous lashes. My heart races again, and I turn my attention stubbornly to the front of the courtroom.

Which is a mistake. Judge Schwenzer is chewing some poor girl apart for a DUI charge. Apparently this isn’t her first. And just when she’s finished reducing the girl to blubbering tears, she picks up the next file.

“Winchester Tobar Youngblood.”

The guy stands and says, “Excuse me,” before he flashes one more cocky smile and walks with sure confidence to the judge’s bench.

Judge Schwenzer’s lips are already compressed into a flat, mean line. “Winchester. The charges against you involve disturbing the peace and public intoxication. How do you plead?”

Shock jars my eyeballs right to the front of the room, though it makes no sense at all for me to be shocked. I do not know him, no matter how strangely intimate our little court hallway rendezvous felt. Sweet manners, a few open smiles, and a wink aren’t enough to establish a man’s character. But maybe he’s —

“Guilty, your honor.”

I’m admittedly a poor judge of guys, but the disappointment I feel is uncanny.

Judge Schwenzer also seems…not so much shocked, but disbelieving. “I don’t buy it, Mr. Youngblood. The officer filing the report said the man he observed was shaggy, unkempt. In all the times you’ve come before the court, you’ve never looked that way.”

Winchester bows his head with deference. “My mother made me get a haircut for the court date.”

That is a perfectly reasonable explanation. And, honestly, it makes no sense for the judge to question something that easily explained. Why didn’t she think of it?

“The officer also noted that the man he gave a citation to had a tattoo on his forearm. Very distinctive. A Pegasus.” Her eyes are shark-tank-laser-intense, and they’re trained right on Winchester.

He cuffs his sleeve back and holds his arm out for the judge, out of my line of sight. His words are low and even, almost meditative. “A pooka, ma’am. No wings.”

I need to see that tattoo. It’s like a foil-wrapped birthday gift on the table in front of me that I can’t open.

She tilts her head and lets out a sigh heavy with frustration. “That tattoo looks very fresh.”

“My skin takes a long time to heal, ma’am.” His voice remains even-keeled and patient, and that just seems to dig like splinters in Judge Schwenzer’s ass.

She puckers her lips, shakes her head, and swipes her pen. “Five thousand dollars, probation, and community service.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Winchester says, and picks up the paperwork. I watch his confident swagger all the way to the back of the courtroom, but I never get to see him leave, because Judge Schwenzer, angry as a warthog that’s been poked with a sharpened stick, calls my name next, venom practically dribbling over the syllables that fall out of her mouth.

ARC Excerpt

Blue Rebellion

YA Dystopia

By

Liz Reinhardt

Coming 2012/2013

Chapter 1: The Hunt

Regulus

Well-trained Eka soldiers follow orders that are so coded in our brains they’re like reflexes. We don’t listen to our own weak fears; that’s exactly the reason why we drill and train without a break, relentlessly, for years on end. It’s for times like this, when our own insecurities make us question what we’re supposed to know for sure. I want to stay true to my training, my blood, my rank, my post, but the reflexes I’ve worked so hard to make automatic are failing me.

My heart is pumping, the sweat is pouring off of my skin and something deeper than my Eka solider reflexes is screaming that I have to ditch this mission and get far away before something bad happens. I try to push what I feel away; I have to cling to logic. Facts. Training. Because I know who I’m trained to be inside out; I don’t know the untrained me, and I’m not sure I want to.

As a recessive, a weak blue-eye in a sea of strong, perfect brown-eyed Eka soldiers, I already know I march to the beat of my own drum more than I’d like to. I’ve seen a lot of my comrades go down in the field because they didn’t know when to walk away, and I don’t plan to join them in the ground. But I have to convince my comrade to get out with me so I’m not labeled a deserter, a traitor to our Eka blood. I want to stay where I belong, and that means I have to shut down what I feel in my gut, even if the alarm bells in my head are going off like crazy.

I look at my partner on this mission, but he’s focused on a routine on-the-hour weapon check, oblivious to the unease that’s making the sweat pour from my face, neck, armpits. I wish I knew what it was that made my entire body react to this place, this situation, but everything looks in order, the same way it’s looked since we made our camp in the dust and low scrub brush outside the Catur village.

Scaeva and I have been baking in the sun on the cracked banks of the Erie River for three days. The tilt of the planet at this location is sharp enough that we get a sweltering dose of a small, second sun’s light right around the primary sun’s setting time every day and for four hours after. The sky stays a pale dirty green, thick with the smog from factories burning crude sludge to power the turbines that run incessantly behind the village. It’s a Romul government standard Catur village, surrounded by a fence that was once made of neat planks, but is now falling down, reinforced with odd bits of plastic or crumbly mud clay, tattered pieces of rag-cloth, pieces of rusted scrap metal or woven wires. The gate is secured by a series of odd chains, mostly rusted, but it’s hardly necessary since there are so many gaps in the fence, anyone or anything could find a way through.

I wipe the sweat off of my forehead with my sleeve and take a pull from my canteen of river water, bitter from the sterilizing pellet I dropped in a few hours before. Everything here is filthy. The water is thick and sluggish, the air swirls with dust and grit. The homes beyond the mangled gate are supposed to be neat and boxlike, in formation according to Romul building strictures, but there are caved-in walls, torn roof sections, improvised waterwheels, scraggly garden plots that don’t seem worth the effort of breaking up the sandy soil. Chimneys badly in need of cleanings belch out smoke that burns sour from the Catur habit of burning anything and everything; animal bones, old rubber, dried dung. The people we see in the distance scuttle around the village, nothing more than dirty, matted creatures hurrying through their sad routines.

There’s nothing to hunt, there aren’t any rebel insurgents, and I’m tired of listening to Scaeva’s rambling about ‘bagging a dirty Catur.’ There’re a lot of Eka warriors who go rogue, come back to Romulus with some kind of war memento from a bagged enemy, and Scaeva’s desperate to come home with some sign that this mission was all about glory. I have a feeling the heat of the suns and his own stupid ideas are going to lead to trouble. He fidgets and scans the horizon through the scope of his rifle with a desperate hopefulness that makes my blood cold and peaks that internal fear I can’t seem to get a hold on.

“I think I still hate Tri the most, even after seeing how these barbarian Caturs live,” Scaeva muses, suddenly breaking the silence.

“Every level exists for a reason,” I remind him, even though he knows it. I think it makes for bad blood to dwell too much on the divisions. Each level has a place in Romulus, and, hard as that is to realize when you’re staring at a falling down village full of people who need nearly constant supply trucks from Romulus in exchange for sporadic brute labor, it’s the truth that’s been decided by people with far more intelligence and power than Scaeva or I have.

“But the Tri are so lazy, and they don’t have the disability thing to go with that surly attitude they seem to have. Did you notice the way the garbage carriers don’t even salute unless you practically hold a gun to their heads? And the care workers are letting those damn kids run wherever they want on the streets. It’s like Romulus is suddenly an open nursery. And I noticed my Tri maid is doing subpar work in my room. I found dust under my bed again. Standards are slipping.”

“What were you doing under your bed?” I scan the distance with my binoculars, and feel a sudden justification of my panic. Little whorls of sand are kicking up, which could very easily turn into a vicious sand storm. “Keep your respirator out.”

Scaeva ignores my last comment. “Or maybe I hate the Dvi more? But that would be love/hate, since I bed so many of them. What would be worse? Spending a life picking up someone else’s garbage, wiping snot-nosed kids’ asses, and generally cleaning up after people who are better than you, or singing and dancing like a mindless idiot for your entire existence, only stopping to lie on a pallet and spread your legs?”

“Both necessary.” Logic. Facts. Training. I repeat it like a mantra. I’m not about to take his bait and argue about his inflammatory comments. I put my goggles on after a few grains of sand flick into my eyes. “Get your respirator out in case this wind picks up.”

“It’s already dying down, and you’re so wrong. What’s so
necessary
about a Dvi girl? I can roll on the pallet with an Eka and at least have a conversation about something other than the song she sang before I flipped her on her back.”

“Then bed Ekas,” I shrug. I have to keep my voice bored and nonaggressive, because Scaeva loves an argument, and I’m not about to discuss the relative merits and shortcomings of the three underclass groups when we might be about to face a full blown sandstorm. Plus that, the feeling in my gut hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s getting more persistent, and I want to know why I’m feeling it so insistently.

“That’s not the point. Plus that, Ekas are too much work to bed. Too competitive. Dvi girls know how to do what they’re told. I just can’t imagine a life so empty of any meaning. It seems unfair that we have it so good.” His dark hair is coated with a light speckle of sand, but he isn’t making a move put his goggles over his eyes.

“As Ekas we have the weight of Romulus on our shoulders, and we’re bound to protect it at any cost. That’s the price we pay for living so honorably.” I sound like a stiff, no-fun soldier, but Scaeva has never brought out anything good in me. Of all the people I could have been assigned to field assignment with, he’s the worst, hands down. Scaeva is one of those Ekas who doesn’t really understand what’s honorable and good about our blood level, and he abuses his power position. I’m all for force when needed, but Scaeva takes it to a darker level, and I don’t want to go there.

He’s stopped talking to me, his focus is intense, and there’s a wide, sick smile on his face. I grit my teeth and will the sandstorm to become so intense we have to leave this area. All of my internal worry suddenly makes sense to me, and I feel a nauseous clench in my stomach. Scaeva is about to go haywire, and I know all the signs. I’ve seen them often enough to be sure.

I’ve seen Scaeva get this exact look before, mostly when we were boys together in training. During outdoor survival, among the cool shade of the greywoods and whispering leaves shed by Romulus’s ancient trees, he always separated from the rest of the crew during rest time or recreationally sparring to prowl the forest. Sometimes I followed his trail and found animals, staked and panting with panic, their skin split, their eyes bulged, the carrion already circling. The only thing I’d been able to do back then was slit their tiny throats quickly. When he sat next to me at fire hour, the blood caked under his fingernails made me shake with a rage that never really left me. When I look at him, all that old anger surges back, and now we’re so much older, all alone, no one watching our every move.