The Color of Rain (15 page)

I press my ear to the door. Nothing. I open it without knocking. A bulging, hairy man sleeps on a small bunk. His head droops upside down over the side, issuing snores. I step in and almost trip on Lo's legs.

She's passed out on the floor, facedown in a puddle of watery vomit.

I pull her body against mine. “Lo,” I whisper. “Lo!” I clean her mouth with my sleeve, checking her breath. It's shallow, but it's there. Her thin body flops like it's boneless when I try to shake her awake, and the bulge of a man grunts in his sleep.

I lift her up over my shoulder, my feet knocking against a pile of empty bottles and sending them into a cascade of clanking and rolling.

“Girl!” the man roars from his cot. “No noise!” He shifts on his filthy mattress, making it croak the annoyed sound of exhausted springs.

Please don't open your eyes
, I pray as I take small steps to the door with Lo slung over my shoulder.
Please—

“Get me a drink,” he calls. I grab for the doorknob, knocking over several more bottles. “Girl—
WHAT'S THIS
?”

He's on me too fast and slams me into the door. Lo drops, rolling along the ground like she's just another one of those bottles. He presses my face to the back of the door with a giant hand. “Pretty one,” he says. His breath is putrid. “Too pretty.”

I struggle as his hands grope my hips and chest. He rips my arm up and slides back my sleeve—and jolts away.

“Re-red!” he stutters. “Get out! Get out now!” His wide, hairy face turns all over the ceiling like he's checking for a secret pair of eyes. I get my arms around a now groaning Lo and lift her by the waist. “GET OUT!” he roars again.

I trip into the hall only to hear yelling voices at the far end.

A mass of men coming our way.

I jog from their drunken calls, gripping Lo and ducking into a room labeled
STORAGE
. I drop her on a pile of rags and close us in, holding the door shut until I hear the crew members passing. I slide a crate against the frame.

Then I go to her.

Of all the times that I've found her passed out or beaten up, this is the worst. Her face is as colorless as the Earth City sky, and the greasy filth across her hair makes me gag. I fill a bucket of water from the utility faucet and kneel before her, scrubbing her skin. Her forehead is aflame with fever, and she moans.

“Rain,” I think I hear her say.

“Right here.” I tie her hair back with a rag; the dyed pink underneath has lost too much of its brightness. “You knew I'd come.”

Her eyes tilt open, and I gasp. One of her irises is rimmed with blood. Like someone stabbed it. “Lo! Your eye!”

“Hit it,” she tries. “Jeb hit it with bottle. Can't see out of it.” She scoots a little higher on the pile of blankets, her eyelids suddenly flying wide. “Rain! It's you!”

“
Shhh
. I'm right here.” I hold her shoulders to settle her back, but she fights me.

“Thank the stars! I've been trying everything to get up to you,” she says. “I tried to sneak in the elevator, but Jeb . . .” Her voice falls away, making my stomach twist with guilt. Why hadn't I tried harder to see her before now? How could I be so blinded by needing to see Walker that I didn't realize that
this
was bound to happen?

Lo shakes me. “But I found them! I found them!”

“Lo, you have to calm down. You're a mess.”

She pushes my hands away and takes a few rough breaths. “I was trying to get to you, and I found them in the cargo.”

“Found
who
?”

Her bloody eye pierces my gaze. “The missing Touched.”

“Shit, Lo. I don't have time for your paranoid stories.” I prop up her shoulders. “Sleep, and we'll talk in a little while.”

She springs forward faster than I would have believed possible and squeezes my face between her thin hands. “
Listen
, I found them. The Touched are here. On this ship. That asshole captain keeps them in cargo.”

I pull her hands away. “Why would Johnny have the Touched in his cargo hold?”

“Because he sells them.”

I laugh again, and Lo slaps me. Hard.

My mind spins as I refocus. “You hit me!”

“They're sold, Rain! Like slaves. Sweet freakin' mess, girl! They're locked in! They're starving!”

“You've had conspiracy ideas about the Touched since I met you,” I say, “but I think this place has really screwed with your head.” I glance around the dingy storage room. “Mine, too.”

She kicks the crate away from the door. “If you won't believe me, I'll show you.” Before I can stop her, she's streaked out into the hall, and I have to run to catch up.

Lo throws up twice on the stairway. I try to hold her shoulders, but she keeps pushing forward. “Never seen you this bad. Let's stop for a minute.”

“We don't have a minute. Jeb will be looking for me, and I'm assuming that the captain didn't just let you down here.”

“I came to warn you, Lo. That Kaya girl—”

“She dead?” Lo glances at me from the side.

I nod.

“Figured. She got bumped down to yellow before you came back from meeting the captain, and then we were forced down here. I saw her once, and then, not again.” Lo wipes her nose on the back of her arm. “This really takes the cake of all the freakin' messes I've been in, Rain.”

“I know. Which is why we shouldn't be crawling deeper into the shadows. There are cameras everywhere.” Lo has taken me to the level where Ben stabbed that man. To the very spot. “I've already seen what happens down here.”

The huge cargo doors are closed, but an eerie sound slips
through them like the hum of penned animals.

“There's a window over here.” She shimmies up a pile of metal crates and beckons to me. I climb, pulling onto my toes to look through a slit of a window.

“See now?” Lo spits.

I almost lose my grip.

Inside the huge cargo hold, hundreds of people stand in jumbled heaps and lie in sickening piles. Men. Women. Elderly. Even kids. Hundreds of them.

“Rain, there's another hold just this big and just as full!”

I open my mouth but my words are broken into sounds. I swallow and try again. “How is this real? I mean, these people . . . are those Earth City people?”

“Those are
Touched
people. The ones stolen by the cops.” Lo crosses her arms. “Well? Say something. Who's paranoid now?”

I shake my head. Inside, I'm blank. I'm floating as though someone dropped
me
out the airlock.

“You told me that you didn't have time to care about the ones who disappear,” Lo says. “You care now?”

The people are strewn all over one another, calling out and wailing.

Every one of them could be Walker.

“Mom and Jeremy.” I scan the crowd as though I might find my mom or big brother's face among them.

Lo touches my cheek. “You're thinking about your family. I can't stop thinking about Mom. Who knows how long the cops have been shipping them off planet. I have a feeling, Rain . . . this is just the lip's tip of something huge.”

“You said sold. You said slavery. How could they get away with that?”

“We're not on Earth City. We're in the middle of space freakin' nowhere. And there are no rules. No right and wrong.” The width of her eyes shows off the bloodied one, and she taps her yellow bracelet against my red one. “There are no laws out here. Just deranged people with power. Like that Johnny.”

“Who are they sold to? And for what purpose?”

“No one could tell me that,” Lo says. “This is a huge secret. Most of the crew don't know anything, but Jeb talks when he's drinking. Still, he doesn't know much. But I bet I know someone who does.” She jams her finger against the glass pane. “That Mec.”

I follow where she's pointing.

Ben stands at the edge of the Touched crowd. He holds a tablet and scrolls down it, counting heads like he's running the whole. Damn. Thing.

T
he rag slips from Lo's hair and
smacks
on the ground, and I remember the filthy, balding man that Ben stabbed. He was Touched! Helpless! Like my mom and Jeremy . . . and Ben—the guy who proclaimed to want to help the Touched—he killed him?

White-hot questions flare inside me as I watch a small girl claw at his pant leg. He pushes her back to slip through the door.

“I'll kill him,” I say, already shimmying down the pile of crates.

“Whoa, whoa, Rain!” Lo charges after me, but she's not fast enough. Ben closes the cargo doors behind him, and I crash into him. He sprawls on the floor, his tablet skidding away.

I straddle his chest, pinning his shoulders with my knees, and punch him in his steel eye.

“Stop!” he yells, bringing up his forearms and grunting as my fists pummel his chest and shoulders. I connect with his mouth and blood spots my knuckles.

Ben gets his solid arms around me and rolls us so that he's on top. He squeezes my hips with his knees and pins my wrists.

“Rain?”

“Who else?” I grapple my legs up around his waist and pull so
that I'm on top again, but he doesn't let go of my arms. One of his eyes swells with the onset of a bruise, and the other reflects the light of the ceiling strips. I twist out of his grip and slide off him.

He touches the blood at the edge of his mouth. “What in the hell was—”

“What is this? What is all this?!” I point to the cargo door. “There are
people
in there!”

He gets to his feet and offers his hand. “Get up fast. We have to move. The alarms will be back on in minutes.”

“You can't explain this away!” I yell. “Are you that powerful and amazing, oh Mec?”

“Course not. But I have a few answers.”

“You better have a lot of them.” I ignore his offer of a hand and get to my feet. He's annoyingly calm after the way I just mauled him, and I rub my twisted wrists and call out for Lo.

She peers from around the corner.

Ben looks from her to me. “Hell, Rain. You really know how to complicate things.”

Ben leads us to the docking bay where I first entered
Imreas
. We pass the hover cab in its airtight chamber along with several other heavy doors with small portholes. A rolling clank sounds from one, and I pause to look through the glass as the noise builds to a sharp
snap
. Doors tear open at the back, creating a roar of rushing air and revealing the Void beyond the ship—an airlock.

Ben has paused to watch, too. “Automatic air dump. It releases the pressure between the outer and inner hulls.”

“Great.” I grip myself, shaking away the idea of a person flying out of that room. At the far end of the catwalk a small space vessel hangs from the high ceiling by a chain net like a souvenir. The word
MELEE
is stenciled on its side.