The Renegades (The Superiors)

by Lena Hillbrand

  Dusk had fallen by the time Draven came back, carrying a folded tarp under one arm and a stack of clothes in the other. When he reached the open end of the shelter, he dropped to his knees like he couldn’t stand for one more second. He crawled into the shelter next to Cali and Leo. While Draven undressed at the end of the shelter, Cali kept her back to him until she heard the leaves crunching when he lay down. A black body-shaped bag encased him, leaving only his face visible.

  “There are two foldable water bottles in the front pocket of that backpack,” he said, nodding towards the new bag. “Refill them from the stream when they are empty. You know where the food is. Do not awaken me unless you hear someone or something approaching.” He spoke without opening his eyes, and when he had finished, he pulled the bag tight around his head, and a zipper slid closed from within, covering his face and hiding him completely from sight.

  Chapter 33

  Byron paced the floor of his apartment, not realizing how tightly he gripped the can of sap until it crumpled in his hand. He stopped, threw his head back and finished it off, then slammed the crumpled can onto the counter so hard it bounced off and skittered across the floor.

  He stomped back to his desk and checked his pod again. No new messages, no attempts at contact. Where the hell had his trackers gone? He hadn’t heard from them in two nights. This was unacceptable. He tried to contact them again, but got no signal to Lapin’s device. He tried Lathan. “Invalid code,” his screen blinked back. He checked it again, swore, and strode to his desk.

  He touched the desk screen and jiggled his leg impatiently while the start-up ad informed him of the joys of surgical facial contouring. He didn’t care if he looked perfect right then. He just wanted his damned saps back. This time he’d really teach the bitch a lesson.

  The iridescent blue screen prompted his ID to activate. He slid his pod into its station and pressed his hand to the handprint on the screen until it welcomed him. He accessed the database and put in Lathan’s name. He chose the Lathan Perkington of Princeton—there were only three in the database—and waited. He’d put in the correct ID. He tried it again, and again he got the message “Invalid code.” So Lathan had somehow broken his pod. But Lapin’s still worked, although it didn’t connect when Byron tried it again.

  He slammed out of the apartment. Never before had one of his shitty moods lasted so long. He noted the stormy cast of the sky. Looked like snow again. Just what he needed to improve his mood.

  He’d been so angry he’d forgotten his pod, and he had to turn around at the car and go all the way back to his desk to get it. He drove to the sapien farm with the breeder he’d meant to try next. The woman who ran the farm had lost a sapien once, and he’d interviewed her as part of the current case. She’d seemed simple and honest and plain. He inspected the livestock, asked about their health, looked through her records. After renting a trailer, he purchased an older sap who had already given birth to five live saplings. The sap’s chart said she had less than average intelligence but was strong and obedient. She didn’t say anything to him except ‘Yes, Master,’ every time he spoke to her.

  Byron drove back to his apartment and led his new sap to the room with Shelton. He had no need for a chain anymore. He’d locked the door to the garden after the last bitch escaped, and he would probably never unlock it again. After watching the sapiens make acquaintances, he told them to start making babies or he’d pronounce them deficient and send them to the blood bank. Then he went back to his desk. Still no messages from Lapin.

  Damn trackers. He probably could have found the renegades himself by now. But of course he’d never take such a demeaning job as tracking saps through the woods. He was an Enforcer, for evolution’s sake. An important man who had better things to do.

  Except really, he didn’t. The case was at a stand-still.

  He’d taken the two newly assigned Enforcers to visit the partially-burned ghost town where he’d thought, after the massacre, the case would end. But they’d never found the bodies of any more saps or Superiors after that night, never found a trail leaving the area, never found another clue. And the two people who might have led him to a clue had somehow escaped.

  It was his fault, and that was what ate him up the most. He should have taken Angel and Draven back with him that night. But he’d paralyzed them. That had always been enough. How could he have known they’d escape somehow? How could he have known Meyer was in the area to take the steel rods out of their brains?

  Meyer Kidd. The bane of his existence. He should arrive in Princeton any day now. Then the fun would really begin.

  Until then, he had nothing to do but stare at his computer screens and scan records he’d already studied until he knew them without having to turn on his computer at all. He turned on his desk screen and looked through the case files one more time. Then he switched over to the Enforcement feed and waited for something interesting. Of course that didn’t happen. But he did find the closest thing he’d had in a while, though it did not relate to the case. Someone in the Green Zone, the label Enforcers used for an area so full of illegal activity that they could go to make arrests when they had nothing else to work on, had reported a man had bitten him and drank some of his blood.

  Byron claimed the case, snatched his jacket and hurried from his apartment. He had been meaning to use his Deactivator on someone, and this proved an opportunity too rare to pass up. He ducked into his car and started off towards the seedy part of town where the altercation had taken place. In the two years he’d lived in Princeton, he’d never had occasion to visit this side of town—he had his own saps of higher quality than anything offered in the Green Zone, he didn’t want a whore, and public pornography made him squeamish.

  He arrived at the crumbling apartments where victim and perpetrator both lived. The buildings here, old army barracks from the War, made the Spartan apartments of most Thirds look like castles for Firsts. He knew from other cities how these buildings operated—the owners didn’t check identification and accepted questionable goods and services in lieu of rent. If he announced his presence, the residents would scurry out like rats from a sinking ship. But he wasn’t looking for that sort of entertainment tonight.

  Instead, he followed the directions on his pod and arrived at the cannibalistic Third’s door. He rapped three times and was answered by a voice telling him where he could go and what he could do to himself once he arrived. He drew both his guns and shouldered the door in. It crashed to the floor. A naked mistress with enough surgical alterations to appear cartoonish leapt from the sofa, where she’d been attempting to remain mounted atop the bucking cannibal beneath her.

  The man looked like a typical Third, thin but soft, with slightly pudgy arms he no doubt hated, but which he lacked the means to enhance with surgery, and a bit of extra padding around the middle. His cannibalistic act had filled him with rampant energy, which he now worked off in the manner consistent with Thirds everywhere. What a mistake it had been to evolve an entire generation of nothing but teenagers and young twenties. They were so sexually charged they could barely function. If it weren’t for Seconds creating laws to govern them, their conception of an ideal society would consist of participating in one giant, unending orgy.

  The mistress had gathered her scant clothing and was now struggling to wedge her sizeable breasts into a pair of seashells fastened with elastic bands to form a top of some sort. “I’m just leaving,” she assured him as one of her breasts escaped the confines of the clam shell. She stuffed it back in just as the other one popped free. “I don’t live here,” she said. “I’m going.”

  Instead of growing angry at the destruction of his door, the man only lay grinning on his sofa as if displaying himself. “Oh, come on now, Lucinia, don’t be in such a hurry,” he said. “Maybe he’d like to join us.” He grinned disgustingly at Byron.

  “Sorry,” Lucinia said as she squeezed past Byron, holding her top in place with one hand while carrying her glowing golden heels in the
other. He let her go. She hadn’t done anything more than her job, distasteful as that was.

  “Aww, now you gone and chased off my Luci,” the man on the sofa said.

  “I have a report that you bit someone.”

  “That bastard reported me, did he?” the man asked. He groped around on his end table and wiped his finger in some white powder, which he rubbed along his gums. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

  “He did,” Byron said. “And I’m here to arrest you for cannibalism. Are you going to run?”

  “Why would I run? I didn’t do nothing. You can’t prove I did nothing. I ain’t gonna run. Then you’d have something to arrest me for.”

  Byron did want him to run for that exact reason. Then he’d have an excuse to use the Deactivator. He rarely had the opportunity, but he’d been meaning to since Draven escaped, though he was fairly certain Meyer had engineered the whole thing. Still, it never hurt to double check. Thoroughness was one of Byron’s strong points.

  Unfortunately, Thirds rarely fought back during arrest. They usually groveled and begged like the pathetic dogs they were. But today, Byron needed one to resist arrest, and he had ways of making that happen.

  “Put yourself away before I shoot it off,” Byron said, aiming his gun at the man’s genitals. He strode to the sofa and stood over him.

  “Man, you’re crazy,” the Third said, jumping up. He had a wild look to him now, like an animal that might bolt at any moment. Depending on how much Superior blood he’d ingested, he’d be experiencing a burst of energy that might even match his strength to Byron’s, if only temporarily. The danger came when he realized it.

  Byron did not intend to let him find out.

  “It’s ‘sir’ to you,” Byron said, knocking the man’s feet from under him with one swift kick. He bent and pushed the muzzle of his Deactivator against the man’s temple. “This will only hurt a bit,” he said.

  “What the fuck,” the man on the floor said, his voice nearing a whine. “I didn’t do nothing. My neighbor, he’s lying, man. Sir. I swear it.”

  Byron moved the gun, feeling for the exact spot. He always hit it. He’d trained to use the gun for years, though he rarely had to. But he’d paralyzed many, many Thirds during his training.

  He squeezed the trigger and felt the satisfying crack as the bullet burst forth and stopped in the soft bed of brain matter within the man’s skull. His eyes stared up at Byron, aware but unable to move or even blink. “That’s better,” Byron said, kneeling beside the living corpse. “Doesn’t that feel good, being completely relaxed? Just surrender. Not that you have a choice. Probably doesn’t feel much different to a Third. You are never in control, not even of your own bodies. Disgusting, the way you carry on.” He leaned over and spit in the man’s open eye, which fluttered with involuntary reaction.

  Byron laughed and stood to walk around the apartment. It was a shithole if he’d ever seen one. The floor was bare and dirty, like an animal’s hovel. The sofa looked like rats had spent more time on it than people had. The bedroom contained nothing but a bare mattress patched with wide bands of tape in several places and piled with a few filthy rags. Men who debased themselves this way were less even than typical Thirds, more like saps than Superiors. Byron spit on the mattress and stalked from the bedroom. A man like this did not deserve even animal sap, let alone human sap. And he’d taken it upon himself to draw the sacred blood of a Superior?

  “You’re a pathetic smear of sapshit,” Byron said, stepping over the vagrant. At least his paralysis had rid the Third of his erection. Now all of him lay limp and soft on the floor like some kind of bloated corpse. “You’re a slimy, rotting leach on the testicle of society. And I’d bet my life you’re an Illegal. It’s not even legal for you to be alive. You’re a waste of life, of sap, of every resource this government gave you that you pissed away like some disgusting animal. And now you’re going to start eating your own people, like some kind of savage?” He kicked the man’s soft belly. It sank in, and his lips emitted a puff of air. “You don’t deserve to live. You don’t even deserve the time for a trial, you sapsucking cuntivore.” He kicked the man again, this time in the groin.

  With cold fascination, he watched the lack of expression on the man’s face as he began to kick him again and again. The thing was revolting, worse than a sap, worse than anything Byron could imagine. He’d been given all the advantages and opportunities of eternal life, and instead of appreciating his beneficent government’s generosity, he’d crawled into a filthy hovel like a cockroach and fucked his life away, quite literally, while taking advantage of the very society that had nurtured him for a hundred years, betraying the people who spent their time and energy finding ways to feed and clothe him and offer him employment, preferring instead to steal his food, rather than earn it like a man, if by some stretch he could have been called such, when he couldn’t even bother to register when he arrived in Princeton but instead skulked about, sneaking suckles from the dredges of society, participating in evolution-only-knew-what debauchery to earn his keep, waiting for Byron to turn his back for one second so he could sneak in like a weasel and snatch the very sap Byron had once shared with him as a gift, out of the generosity of his heart…

  Byron stopped his foot mid-strike and turned away, breathing hard. He’d forgotten himself for a moment, and the man he’d begun kicking hadn’t been the man he’d continued to beat far longer than the excusable length for a criminal resisting arrest. But he could always say the man had fought back, that he’d used the Deactivator after the fight. Who would believe an Illegal over an Enforcer? He turned back and looked at the man. Blood had begun leaking from his flaccid penis.

  Byron shuddered and turned away again, crossed the room and stood at the window. He wished he was back home, where he could retreat to his study to have time to think, or even at his Princeton apartment where he could look out over the city glittering before him. From this tiny window, he could see only the wall of another old barracks building. He stood for a few minutes considering his next move. Then he found the man’s clothes, a stained and greasy shirt missing most of the buttons and a pair of ragged shorts. Though he didn’t relish the thought of dressing the filthy man, he didn’t want to waste clean government-issue clothes at the jail, so he shoved the man’s limp legs into the shorts and dragged them up.

  The man would be executed, so it didn’t matter what Byron had done to him, or that it hadn’t been meant for him at all. The government couldn’t risk a cannibal in its midst, one who might realize his true strength. Even this one, who hadn’t yet discovered his added strength, had enjoyed the energy too much. He would do it again, thinking he could use it as some kind of high, like a drug. And if he did it again, he might realize the strength it gave him. Thirds couldn’t know that. Mistresses had to report any such request for that very reason. And the men who made those requests quietly disappeared on their way home.

  Since this cannibal might realize his strength before his trial, it was Byron’s duty as arresting officer to make sure he never had such an opportunity. He would take back the man’s stolen strength. Maybe he’d take all his strength, leave him as limp and lifeless as he was now. Of course, once he drew from the man, he would have to kill him. Otherwise, the scum would scream it all over the jail as soon as he was reactivated. He would carry on about the injustice, protest that he was being put to death while Byron, who had done the very same thing, received no punishment.

  He would be executed one way or another, though. It didn’t matter how he died. Byron was saving the government the expense of calling a panel of Seconds to judge a trial, and ridding them of one more piece of Third garbage. Illegals weren’t even people, according to the government. They had no papers, and therefore did not exist. So what did it matter what he did to one? He couldn’t very well murder a man who didn’t exist.

  Chapter 34

  The pain upon waking was still considerable. Draven had slept a night and a day, waking the evening after h
e’d gone to sleep. He pulled the cord to open his sleep sack. Cali sat with her back pressed to the rock wall of their shelter. Blue-lipped and shivering, she clung to the blanket wrapped around her.

  The light had nearly gone from the sky.

  “Come,” Draven said, and Cali came to him with Leo in her arms. “Wrap the baby in the blanket and set him down.”

  Cali did as told, trembling all the while. Draven unzipped the bag and beckoned for Cali, who squiggled into the sleep sack with him. He zipped it after her entrance. The sleep sack, made to hold one person, strained over the curves of Cali’s body, but he managed to close it to her shoulders.

  “How are you warmer than me?” Cali asked through chattering teeth.

  “I warmed myself at the fire before sleep. This is a mummy bag. It has a layer of foil inside that lets no heat escape.”

  “So I’ve been freezing for two days, and you’ve been all toasty inside here?”

  “It was only a day. You had a baby to warm you. Why didn’t you light a fire?”

  “I tried, but it went out, and I was afraid you’d get mad if I used all the fuel. I tried about ten times before I gave up.”

  “I would have been upset,” Draven said.

  The soft solidity of Cali’s body pressed against his stirred something within him. He could not remember the last time he’d touched someone so thoroughly, been so close to another being. “I must eat,” he said, focusing on that hunger.

  Cali lifted her chin. Letting his lips linger on her skin for a moment, he released a warm breath upon her neck, moving his mouth over her throat and inhaling her irresistible scent. Sap pulsed beneath the delicate membrane of her skin, just beyond his lips. Her cold skin under his warm lips, the strange reversal of their usual temperatures, disconcerted him slightly. Added to his pain and hunger, it fogged his mind with a distant desire. His breath caused the fine hairs at the nape of her neck to rise with a chill, and he smiled before penetrating.