Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) (6 page)

The air cooled, slipping beneath the leafy blanket. The voices faded, replaced by a cyclical hiss and boom. The cart halted. A hand snaked into the leaves, found Rada's wrist, and pulled her upright.

Sunlight beat her head like molten gold. The cart stood on the edge of a forty-foot white cliff. Beyond lay a blazing blue sea, tossing itself back and forth like it was being burned alive by the sun.

Three figures stood at the back of the cart. One carried a pistol. One had a bow. The third held two knives. Their faces were ghostly white, with a black X stretching from brow to jaw. Their lips were hatched with vertical black lines that looked like stitches.

Beside her, MacAdams surged to his feet, leaves cascading from his form. "Is it Crash Day already? Someone forgot to tell me to dress up."

Rada barred an arm across his gut. In response to the motion, the three people raised their weapons.

"What do you want?" she said.

The man with the pistol kept it steady on her. "We know you've spoken to the Swimmers. We will hear what they had to say."

4

Descending the apartment stairwell, Ced's heart thumped as loudly as his feet. His mother was dead and the Red Men had come for him. If they found him, they would take him away and sell him to a crew. Just like Stefen.

Who they'd found even when he was hiding.

Ced got his device from his pocket and dropped it on the stairs. He hit the ground floor and burst into the street. People came and went, laughing, blabbing into devices, buying fried snacks from the vendors. A few tourists were stopping to film the lively street, but mostly they filmed themselves. There were cameras on the corners and in the shops, too. He'd discarded his device, but there were so many other sources the Red Men could use to find him.

He ran to the nearest tube, walking all the way to the end of the platform. The shuttle whooshed in with a rush of damp, warm air. He climbed on, watching the doors at each stop for the two men.

At Hannober Station, he got off and jogged up to the street. There, men and women dressed in crew jackets of all kinds jabbered at each other, joking, pointing fingers. Sometimes one of them got mad and looked ready to hurt someone, but they weren't supposed to do that. They were supposed to keep it clean. That's why they got to police themselves. To keep the cameras off their corners.

In a way, that made him
less
safe. Anyone could grab him up and put him in a crew and no one would ever know. But all he needed to do was find a coat and cut it up to look like he was already enrolled in one. They never stole people from each other. That was about the only bad thing they didn't do.

He'd explored several parks in the area. There was plenty to eat. To save energy or give people seasons, sometimes they changed the station's temperature, but unlike the Earth in the movies, it never got so cold that you could die. He would be okay. If he scavenged enough fallen fruit to sell, or did jobs for the people on the street, maybe he could even save up the money for a new device.

He already knew where he could stay, too.

He walked to Ostler Park and took the paved path toward the east end. A couple of the dealers looked at him, but he kept his eyes straight ahead and walked like he was exactly where he needed to be and no one tried to question him. He moved into the grass, detoured around a low-slung greenhouse, made it to the grove of pine trees, and started climbing. Maybe the branches were too small for grownups to use, or maybe they couldn't stand the stickiness of the sap. For whatever reason, the little enclosed treehouse halfway up the trunk was unoccupied. He rolled inside and let out a deep breath.

He was scared, but he had too much to think about to let it freeze him. He was going to have to make sure he had enough food. To figure out where all the recyclers were so he could throw away his rinds and pits rather than letting them pile up around his secret home. To learn which street vendors he could sell things to, and which he could steal from.

And then he remembered: he was doing all of this because his mom was dead. He curled into a ball and covered his mouth with his jacket so no one would hear him sob.

When he woke, it was dark. Beams of light slashed through the branches. He knew it was them, but he had nowhere to run; if they'd found him here, there was nowhere to hide. When they called his name, he climbed down the tree and let the Red Men lead him away.

* * *

They put him in a car and took him to the back entrance of a blank gray building. A man in a gray uniform with a white cross on the chest brought him to the showers. The soap stung his skin. When he got out, his clothes and pack were gone. A wad of gray clothes waited on the bench. Dressed, he was taken to an off-white room. It had a bed, a table, a chair, and a bathroom with no door. He slept.

In the morning, a different man in an identical uniform brought him food. After Ced finished eating, and the man had taken his tray away, a woman's voice piped in from the ceiling.

"Good morning, Cedrick." Her voice was soothing and it had a nice accent, like she was smarter than most people. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yeah."

"Would you stand for me?" the woman said. He did. "Thank you. Would you like to do some jumping jacks?"

Ced glanced up at the ceiling. "Huh?"

"Jumping jacks. Twenty of them. Count down, please?"

He did as he was told.

"Very good. Now pushups. Ten, please."

He got down on the floor, but he wasn't used to exercising and his arms gave out after his seventh one. "I'm sorry."

"That's fine," the smart-sounding woman said. "Jog, please?"

Feeling stupid, he jogged in a circle around the table. After a few more exercises, the woman said, "Thank you. You may be seated."

His heart calmed. A few minutes later, her voice returned. She ran him through the same set of exercises as before. At the end, she thanked him again and instructed to sit.

"What's going on?" he said.

"We are merely monitoring your health. Everything will be fine, Ced."

As the day progressed, she repeated his exercises over and over. After eight or nine times, he could still run and do jumping jacks okay, but his arms were tired from pushups. Once in a while, a second voice would ask him a few questions, but these voices were always different from each other.

After a few hours, he was given more and more rest between sessions. Finally, the woman said, "Thank you, Ced. That will be all for today."

He'd done everything she asked. But for some reason, she sounded disappointed.

The second day started off a lot like the first. The exercise sessions thinned out much faster, though. By noon, they stopped altogether.

"Thank you, Ced," the woman said. "You won't have to exercise again."

"I thought you're supposed to exercise every day."

She laughed, weary but surprised. "That's right, Ced. Every day. But I'm sad to say your time with us is up. After today, you'll be reassigned to…" She trailed off. He waited. "Actually, it turns out we'd like you to exercise one more time. Do you mind, Ced?"

By now, he knew the routine well enough to go through it without being prompted. He finished, tired and sweaty, gazing straight ahead.

"You're kind of scrawny," a new voice said. He was a man and he sounded like he'd just heard a good joke.

"Sorry," Ced said.

"Not much spirit, either."

Ced said nothing.

"Listen, kid, you got any other tricks? You like flight sims? Can you do long division in your head? Tap dance? Shake paws?"

"No," he said.

"Everyone can do
something
. What can you do? Besides bounce around this cage like a trained monkey?"

"Well." Ced stared at the place in the ceiling the voices were coming from. "I know the Locker better than anybody."

"That so?" The man chuckled. "Where's the Twig Building?"

"That's easy. Hart Street. Right on Pitts Park."

"That
was
easy. Try this one: Mario's Cantina."

Ced thought a moment. "I've seen that one. It's near Drent Station."

"Bzzt, wrong. It's a couple blocks away."

"I said
near
."

"Partial credit." The man continued to quiz him. Ced didn't get every question right—he suspected some of the places the man asked about weren't even real—but he knew most of them. After a few minutes, the man said, "Does he have a device in there?"

"I assure you," the woman said, "such things are not allowed."

"Well, I'll be. Thanks, kid. See you soon."

* * *

He never saw the woman with the smart-sounding voice. A few hours later, a husky man came for him, led him to a car. Ced asked where they were going, but the man didn't answer. The car drove itself through the Locker's streets, pulling to the curb outside a beige apartment building that looked slightly nicer than the ones around it. Ced's door opened. The man got out too.

On the sidewalk, Ced reached for the husky man's hand. The man looked surprised, but didn't pull away. They entered the white doors. Inside, boys and girls dressed in blue and white stared at Ced, gazes dropping to his hand. Ced released his grip.

They took an elevator to the sixth floor. The husky man left Ced in a reception room and went into the office beyond. Ced sat in a chair, swinging his feet. The man walked back into reception and jerked a thumb at the office door.

Ced slid off his chair and entered the office. A young man with slicked-back hair sat in the windowsill, feet propped on his desk. He wore a blue shirt with two white stripes running up the left side of his chest.

"What's up, kid?" The man's voice was familiar. He was the one who'd grilled Ced on the Locker's geography. Ced had pictured him much older; this guy was barely grown up. "Have a seat."

Ced sat in a chair that was much too large for him. "Where am I? If something happened, I was supposed to go to my Aunt Amanda's."

The man scrunched his face in a wry smile. "Bad news, kid. Your Aunt Amanda is broke. Either that or she just doesn't care."

Ced had once seen a man fall in the street for no good reason. He'd cracked his skull on the sidewalk and blood rushed out like it had been waiting to be set free. That's what it felt like now. Except the sidewalk was his mom, and the blood was tears. He didn't want to cry, but he couldn't do anything to stop it.

In the windowsill, the man's grin ran away. "Hey. I'm sorry, kid."

"My name—" Ced choked. The back of his throat was salty. "My name isn't 'kid.' It's Ced."

"Hello, Ced. I'm Benson. As to where you are, you've been crewed. Do you know what that means?"

Hiccuping, Ced shook his head.

"You have been successfully bid on by the South Street Dragons. You're working with us for the duration of your contract. Contracts last for six years or until the employee is eighteen years old, whichever's longer."

"But that's eleven years for me."

"Excellent, you're a mathematician as well as a cartographer." He tapped his nails against the windowsill. "Is it fair, this system we've got? I don't know. I do know our crew is absorbing a significant financial burden to keep you off the street. Providing invaluable job training, too."

Ced shifted in the chair. "But after my contract's up, I can leave?"

Benson shrugged. "On your eighteenth birthday, if the Dragons want to extend your contract, you'll have the option to join as a full member. At that point, you'll draw salary. You'll also need to repay the Dragons for the costs of living you accrued during your pre-employment. It's called a care debt."

"And if I don't want to stay?"

"Then you'll have the option to join another crew, or to leave the business altogether. If you do
that
, however, on top of remunerating the Dragons for your care, you'll take on the responsibility of paying them to find and train your replacement." Benson swung a foot off the desk and smiled toothily. "But that's a long ways off. Right now, your only worry is learning the ropes."

"Am I going to have to do crimes?"

"Listen, kid—Ced—I'm not going to pretend like every crew is squeaky clean. But you don't have to worry about that for a long time, either. How about we get you settled in?"

He hopped down from the window and showed Ced where he'd be staying, a two-bedroom apartment currently housing three other boys. There was a screen in the common room, but not in the bedrooms. At least it had its own bathroom. After that, Benson took him down to the cafeteria, a sprawling room that took up most of the north face of the third floor. Last, he showed Ced to studies, a bank of rooms on the fourth floor they could use to work on their assignments. It had net access, too, but the devices were set into the desks, and Benson said there was a lot of stuff you couldn't get to.

He took Ced back to his apartment and withdrew a tiny device. "This is your ID. It'll give you your schedule and assignments. Don't think you'll have any of those for a few days. In the meantime, get used to your new digs. If you've got any problems, come see me, okay?"

Ced accepted the little device. "Okay."

Benson smiled down at him. "You might be thinking you don't want to be here. That it would be pretty easy to run away. You're right—it would be easy to run. But you will be found."

He clapped Ced on the shoulder and walked away.

His roommates were all gone, and there was nothing to do in his room, so Ced went down to studies and fooled around on the net. Other kids came and went. Some wore blue and white, some wore street clothes, and others wore bland gray stuff like him. Nobody paid him any mind.

His device pinged. Dinnertime. He walked downstairs and into the cafeteria, which was now crowded and noisy. He got in line and picked up a tray. The workers made him scan his ID, then gave him a pile of yellow stuff, a pile of green stuff, and a sausage sandwich. No one invited him to sit, so he plunked down at an empty table.

A hand darted in and plucked up his sandwich. A boy walked away, chowing down. He was about ten years old and his head was shaved on the sides. A few people were watching Ced, faces blank. The boy didn't look back. Not wanting to cause trouble on his very first day, Ced ate his sludge and went back to his room.