(Lists of names were always displayed on the screens so everyone would know just who had been singled out.)
Hoarders will be punished and re-cleansed.
Our beloved Premier Villinkash will post a list of people to be carefully watched for the next month. Look for that list tomorrow. Your neighbors may be on it. You may be on it.
The voice droned on and on as the words scrolled across the screen until . . .
And now, today’s Special List, which appears only once a year. Thirteen names have been chosen. One from each building in The Ring. These are the very courageous young men honored to represent our city in The Race. Remember: the families of these boys should rejoice and give thanks to our beloved Premier for this chance to participate in this year’s Race.
Every year since The Collapse, a list of thirteen names had showed up six months before the day of The Race. No one could know which number would be the year’s winner, but Niko understood the odds were against him. They were against everyone. Unless you had an edge. In this city, if you wanted to survive, you needed an edge for just about everything.
As he stood in front of the screen, staring at the list of names, he tried to think who he could call on to get that edge.
There’s not one damned thing in this city that isn’t fixed, so why not The Race? Question is, how far up would I have to go to fix it in my favor—and what would I have to give up in return?
Niko had learned ways to beat the system. Always in small ways. That was best because the small scams usually went unnoticed, or if they were discovered, they were easy to bribe your way out of. Then someone else had something to hide.
After he’d run away from Center Number Five, no one looked for him. He’d fallen in with one gang after another, grown tough, learned how to survive, made his way. Now this.
There was something about Niko, though. Some quality that none of the other street kids had. People listened to him, hung around him, did what he told them to do. He was confident. Not arrogant. Not a blowhard. Not a bully or a braggart. He was the guy everyone picked to lead the team, even though, in the streets of Infinius, there were only gangs for survival.
Even the older guys who lived in The Hovels and the roamers who never stayed anywhere more than a few nights looked up to Niko. So, as he stopped outside The Hovels to study the lottery list, a group of young men gathered and waited for his reaction to the news. If he’d told them to tear it off its base and crush it against a concrete wall, they would have done it for him, knowing the Detainers would round them up and beat them senseless.
“Number seven,” one of them said. He was a powerfully built youth, older than Niko, sporting a stubby black mustache and wearing spiked boots that protruded below black denims. “That’s a good number, man. You’re gonna crush it out there. Crush them all, man.”
The others mumbled and nodded.
“Last year, number eleven won it,” Niko said with characteristic calm. He poked the curb softly with the toe of a scuffed boot, as if kicking off dried mud. “Seven could be it,” he added.
All they knew for sure was out of thirteen starters, there would be only one survivor. The Race was stacked against the others from the start.
Up in The Globe, Watchers sat in shifts. The Globe used to be the place where they’d guided airplanes in and out before The Cleanse. Now there was no need. No one except the Overseers and Protectors were allowed to travel. The Watchers observed people scurrying here and there, searching, working, wandering with nowhere to go.
It was said they saw everything, everywhere, all the time. From inside the glass bubble, screens monitored the scarred and crumbling high-rises. The monitors watched the one- and two-story Prefabs, constructed after The Collapse, and The Hovels where Scroungers scraped by on whatever they could steal or pillage.
One of these was named Gruen. He lived at the very edge between The Hovels and The Shanty Alleys where the most unfortunate, known as the Leftovers, barely survived. Gruen didn’t spend much time in The Hovels since he was always on the move, scrambling for a score of any kind he could turn into a barter for something bigger or more valuable.
After Niko left the Holding Center, he’d fallen in as Gruen’s runner for a time, but he’d moved on when Gruen asked him to be his bagman.
“It’s the best you can hope for,” Gruen had said. “And I’ll protect you. As far as I can.”
“Hey, man, you know I trust you,” Niko had told him. (Of course he didn’t. Not entirely. You couldn’t trust anyone a hundred percent.) “But I got my sights on running my own operation, you know? And, anyway, bagman is not my style. I’d get stuck somewhere on a bottom rung with nowhere to go.”
Gruen was a lumbering, oafish sort of guy with only one good eye and one milky-blue one that seemed to have a will of its own without focus or direction. Niko never asked him about it, assuming something must have happened to Gruen during The Collapse. After that, The Cleanse would have wiped out his memory of whatever had caused it, so what would be the use of asking?
“That’s okay, man,” Gruen had said with a shrug. What did it matter to him? He could get a bagman any day. But the kid was an asset. He was smart. And not afraid of the street.
So Niko had kept up with Gruen, and their alliance had turned into a kind of street gang with tentacles that led as high as the Watchers, who eventually got a piece of whatever game Niko and Gruen were running on any given day. Niko ran the gang while Gruen dealt with the street people and the Watchers. He also passed the proceeds back up the chain.
But life was not easy in The Hovels, an endless sea of huts with dirt paths where Scroungers attempted to survive in row upon row of dwellings. Cobbled together from whatever could be found from day to day, the huts would be blown to bits by hard rains and blistering winds, and Scroungers would rebuild using whatever they could gather until another storm rained down on them.
So, although new dangers would confront him even there, Niko had been determined somehow to move to The Ring.
El was twelve when she first met Niko. She had no birth record. Even her name—Elenora—had been given to her by The Sisters of Mercy the day they’d discovered her after The Cleanse, left in a sack at their convent, which had been set up in a spacious, abandoned garage that had once been a major hub for taxis near high-rise number six. A note hidden in bunting made of old paper bags begged the nuns to harbor this precious baby and keep her safe. The sisters took her in and cared for her and other babies as best they could. There was no medicine, little food, and only black-market baby formula.
Furtive Scroungers would appear at the garage with bundles of torn cloth tied around cans and small bottles. The sisters provided refuge for a few nights, cleaned and fed the Scroungers before they left to search farther and farther out for whatever scraps were left. Many babies died in their first months. But El was strong. She wailed for food louder than the others, lifted her head before the others, crawled and stood and grabbed at what she wanted.
When one of the sisters held her, she rested her head and hummed as if satisfied just to be alive. The sisters doted on El. They gave her goat’s milk that had come from somewhere beyond The Perimeter, where only night Scavengers dared to go during The Collapse and The Cleanse that came after it, when few adults over twenty remembered anything outside the city limits. Anyway, by then, you weren’t allowed to venture past the walls, gates, barbed wire, and electric fences that were known as The Protections. No one ever said what they protected against.