That had been super creepy. I hoped they were keeping him locked up tight.
It was when we were scavenging leftovers for breakfast that Calypso suddenly looked at me, her eyes round. “Soldiers,” she said.
Soldiers meant one thing: they were coming to get us.
“Okay, guys, scatter,” I ordered.
And just like rats, they did.
Moke pulled a bookcase away from a wall to reveal the hole we’d chipped out of the cinder blocks. He shooed Calypso and Rain through it and pushed the bookcase back. That small space was full now, so he climbed up on the table, jumped, and pushed one of the big ceiling tiles out of place. Another jump and he was through and setting the tile back down.
The sound of marching feet was loud now, and I watched as Clete went back in our nest, pulled some bedding aside, and opened a trapdoor in the floor. He crawled through and closed it, pulling on a thread so that bedding would cover it again.
Two seconds later one of our doors opened with a clang, hitting the wall behind it. Four soldiers stood there, hands clutching automatic rifles.
“Hey,” I said calmly, and popped the rest of my peanut butter cracker in my mouth. “I didn’t know there was a parade today.”
A man wearing the black lab coat of a doctor stepped around the soldiers.
“Where is everyone?” he asked, and I shrugged. “Don’t just stand there,” he snapped at the soldiers. “I know there’s some kids left around here. Search the place!”
I stood and casually started drifting toward the doors to the outside. They were here because we were lab rats, after all. Some experiments were better done on kids instead of prisoners or some poor Ope. Sometimes they needed a healthy body in order to get the results they wanted. The McCallum Children’s Home used to have more than five of us in it—years ago there had been maybe twenty-five or thirty. In twos and threes, kids had been taken away by one doctor or another. Usually they didn’t come back. The few who did come back were in bad shape and didn’t last long.
Which is why we had come up with a bunch of escape routes—the three the kids were using this time weren’t the only ones.
The soldiers clumped around and I tried not to laugh as they looked under tables, in shelves, behind broken furniture, like maybe we thought it was a game, like hide-and-seek. We knew better. It might be a game, but if you were found, you died.
One soldier, a mean-looking woman with scars on her face, went into our sleeping closet and kicked at piles of stuff, stabbing the end of her rifle down into the pillows and sleeping bags. Like maybe they were hiding by lying really flat in the one place that made sense.
“Where are they?” the doctor asked me angrily.
“Who?” I said, rocking back on my heels. Any second I was going to have to bolt—there was no way the doctor was getting between me and the door.
The doctor nodded to the soldiers. “Take this one, then search outside.”
That was my cue. I spun and bolted through the heavy glass door, hearing pounding boots behind me.
“Get her!” the doctor howled, and I raced for the one tree in the yard, a decrepit wreck that was going to fall over any day now. I leaped up into its brittle branches and climbed till I could spring on top of the twelve-foot concrete wall, this one place where I’d cut the razor wire. Bullets sprayed around me, taking out stone chips as I dropped lightly down outside.
“Open the gate, you idiots!” the doctor shouted, and almost instantly I heard the rusty, scraping whine of the metal gate being pulled to one side. I was halfway down the block by then but could still hear the soldiers running after me. A quick left, and then the old, broken sewer grate was right there. I slid sideways feet first, fitting neatly through the narrow opening, then braced myself for what I knew was a ten-foot drop.
Silently I chuckled as the boots above slowed in confusion. I didn’t wait around, but headed quietly down the dark tunnel, a tunnel I knew as well as my own black eyes.
CHAPTER 11
There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of kilometers of sewer tunnels beneath the City of the Dead. I’d been down every one. Despite all the crazy people on the surface, I was the only bird-kid I’d ever seen. So I’d made sure that no one but the lab rats saw me fly.
It had been a lot easier to map the tunnels when I was smaller. Now I was fifteen, almost two meters tall, and my wingspan was just about four meters wide. Only the biggest, main tunnels were wide enough for me to still fly through them. But running was almost as easy as flying, and I could still cover a lot of ground fast, even if my shoes did get all kinds of stuff on them that I’d rather not think about.
In less than fifteen minutes I was right beneath my corner. When I realized that I had instinctively come here I punched the wall, my knuckles coming back smeared with mold and dirt. I’d been coming here so long my feet took me whether I wanted to or not, whether I was aboveground or below, muscle memory so ingrained I didn’t have a choice. I had promised myself I would never come back, yet here I was.
But I had promised them, too.
Anyway. More important stuff to worry about: there were a lot of abandoned buildings in the wheezing, dying downtown of the City of the Dead. I liked to explore them, steal what I could, sell it on the street to buy food for the kids. There were also huge trash heaps to go through, people to spy on—my days were just packed.
But then it would come time for me to be on my corner. Again. Giving the ghosts of the past their half hour. So stupid.
“Ask yourself, what have I done to make my community better?” McCallum was booming on a vidscreen when I surfaced. “In the City of the Dead, you are given everything you need for success! But what are you doing to earn your success?” As usual his voice was much too loud, inescapable, his broad face pixelated like he gave off interference himself.
By late that afternoon I had done a lot to earn my success. The morning had been great—I’d broken into a forgotten locker near one of the old, unused underground train tracks. Got all kinds of neat shit. I’d taken it to market square and sold all of it. Bought food. Now it was just about time for my vigil. Even though I’d said I wasn’t doing it anymore, my body took me there anyway. How could I fight that? Might as well be there for the usual time. If nothing else, I could scope out the people. Sometimes it helped to know what people needed, to better judge what I should steal. I might even see Pietro.
But no, I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about Pietro and the dead Chung prince, lying broken on the sidewalk, even though he had survived the duel. I sighed, scratching at a flea bite on the back of my knee. At least I had Ridley to keep me company.
“Got any money?” The Ope’s dirty, desperate face came at me from a shadow.
“Nope,” I said. “You want a banana?”
The Ope’s eyes turned crafty and I instantly realized that she would take the banana and sell it to another Ope, then save the pennies for her next fix.
“Yes,” she said eagerly, holding out two shaking, freckled hands.
I held it out of reach. “You can have it if you eat it right now, in front of me,” I said. “Otherwise go bug someone else.”
The Ope frowned, thinking, then held out her hands. I gave her the banana. Once she started eating it, she wolfed it down, cheeks puffing out. I gave her some stale bread and she ate that, too.