Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2)

by Edward W. Robertson

  He laughed. "Why do we live here when we could live there?"

  His mom cocked her head. "Well, we have more freedom here. People don't tell you what to do."

  "What about the Red Men?"

  "What Red Men?"

  "The men who made me sick."

  "They're from Health and Safety. We have to keep your immune system strong. This place is like a petri dish. You had a little reaction to the medicine, that's all."

  "Oh." He scootched down the bed. "Well, I want to go outside. For real."

  "Sure. All it costs is money."

  "What's money?"

  "You know what money is."

  "But what is it?"

  "It's what adults use to prove they're better than each other." She gazed at the faded square of rug. "Do you really want to go to Earth?"

  "The most and the most. I want to go outside and run in a new direction every day and never see the same thing twice."

  "That's because you're an explorer." She reached for his hand. "So I guess we'll have to get you somewhere you can explore your heart out."

  * * *

  A few weeks later, once he was all better, she started to go out flying more. That meant he went to stay with his Aunt Amanda, who got much meaner as soon as his mom walked out the door.

  The fifth time his aunt told him to clean the dirt from his shoes when they weren't even dirty, he snapped. "My mom never makes me clean my shoes!"

  Amanda rolled her eyes. "Your mom's not here, is she?"

  "Well, I hate it. And it smells funny here."

  "You're the reason she's gone, aren't you? So quit complaining. And clean your stupid shoes."

  He stared up at her, momentarily forgetting his anger. "I made her leave? Forever?"

  The heavyset woman sighed, face softening. "Not forever, you silly little boy. On the flights. If she's ever going to get you to Earth, she's going to need a whole lot more money."

  Somehow, he hadn't connected the two things until then—that his mom had started working more because of what he'd said about Earth. Abruptly, he wasn't mad anymore. Well, a little at Aunt Amanda. But after that, he tried to be better.

  There were good things about staying with Amanda, too. Like he got to see Stefen more. Most of the other kids only wanted to play Crews, but the big kids always got to be the captains while the little kids like Ced had to be powder monkeys and swabs. Besides, Crews was boring. Every time, it ended with the captains arguing about who was dead and who'd shot whose ship the most.

  Stefen, though, he'd play the things they saw on the movies. Jack and the Black Hole. Swimmer Hunters. And Ollie and Lisa, who got stranded on an alien planet and had to survive without any grownups at all. Ced liked that movie so much he didn't mind when Stefen insisted he be Lisa.

  Stefen lived right down the block, and every morning, Ced ran out to meet him in the cramped, smelly street. With the lights glaring from the dome overhead, they weaved through the pedestrians, dodging the angry-looking boys and girls who'd been crewed for real, ranging further and further through the maze of apartment blocks. Sometimes they bought spicy curd from the street carts and while Stefen paid, Ced snatched up packets of salty black sauce, which they tried to make you pay extra for even though the curd was no good without them.

  One day, knowing Aunt Amanda wouldn't be home until night, Ced led Stefen all the way west to Brookings Boulevard. The air smelled like the oranges in the trees in the middle of the street. On the other side, the buildings were glassy and shiny.

  "No way," Stefen said. "We can't go over there."

  Ced snorted. "Why not? Think our feet will fall off?"

  "My dad works for the Venters. If anyone from Venters' crew crosses Brookings Boulevard, they get beat up."

  "Do you work for the Venters?"

  "I don't want to work for any crew. My dad says they treat you like a gun treats a bullet. But the people who don't like the Venters don't know that."

  Ced pulled his pack up his shoulders. "Well, I don't care who my mom works for. If they want us to stay out, it must be because it's cool over there."

  Without looking back, he stepped into the road. Open-topped cars whizzed down the lanes, weaving themselves through all the people without clipping a single one. East of Brookings, the men liked to wear dark, glittery jackets, and to put lenses in their eyes to make them red or black or all white. But in the street and on the other side, everyone's eyes looked normal, and instead of jackets, they wore shirts with buttons and stripes.

  Ced got to the median and turned around. As Stefen watched in horror from the sidewalk, Ced bent down and picked up one of the oranges you weren't supposed to take. He put it in his bag and finished crossing the street.

  Compared to the people there, who were as bright as their buildings, Ced knew he looked dingy. But he just kept walking. Half an hour later, no one had so much as looked at him funny.

  That was when he learned one of the biggest secrets there was: as long as you looked like you knew what you were doing, even the shiny-looking people would believe you belonged.

  * * *

  His mom kept working and he kept exploring. He was supposed to watch school lessons on his device, but that stuff was easy. Twenty minutes on the net, and he could learn what they took three hours to explain. He liked to do his studies while he and Stefen were riding the tube to a part of the Locker they hadn't been to before. As soon as they got out and aboveground, he put his device away.

  When he got older, he would call that year—the year when he and Stefen mapped out a ring across the entire Locker, poking around new neighborhoods every day—the best year of his childhood. Then again, besides the early years he could barely remember, it didn't have much competition.

  Sixteen months after the vaccine that had made him so sick, with his mom out on another flight, Ced rounded up Stefen for a trip to Gecko Park, about a quarter of the way around the Locker. You weren't supposed to take fruit from the parks—the government said it needed to sell it for heating and lights and stuff—but a few weeks back, after being hassled by a cop, Ced had done a net search and discovered it wasn't actually illegal to take fruit that had fallen down by itself.

  That gave him a new idea: travel from park to park, gathering fruit, and sell it to food carts. Stefen took to the idea at once, and even pitched one of his own: hire little kids to do the gathering in exchange for a cut of the booty. Very oxford. Especially since it meant they'd get to keep traveling while the other kids did the hard work.

  They hopped off the tube and climbed up to street level. The neighborhood wasn't much different from theirs, with blocky apartment buildings and lots of balconies gobbling up the space between them. They headed into Gecko Park, ignored by the dealers and the buyers, keeping an eye out for cops. Ced could already smell the citrus in the air.

  It was a quiet morning and they soon found themselves alone in a stand of lemons and grapefruits. Only a handful speckled the ground—somebody else must have been onto the same game—but it would at least be enough to cover the cost of the tube.

  "Hey," Stefen pointed. Across the park, two Red Men strode beneath the trees, eyes scanning the growth.

  A shot of electricity snapped up Ced's spine. "We gotta move."

  "I thought you said this was legal."

  "It is. But they won't care."

  He hustled through the grass, Stefen beside him. The Red Men were heading their way, but they weren't hurrying the way they could have if they'd seen the two kids. The trees thinned, leading to a patch of grass and an empty playground. Ced pointed to an enclosed slide. They ran to it and climbed inside its mouth, stopping halfway up, bracing themselves against the plastic sides with their shoes and palms. Static electricity stirred Ced's hair.

  His breath echoed in the tube. A minute later, a man muttered something. Footsteps rasped on the soft rubber surrounding the slide. Two pairs of black shoes appeared at the exit to the slide.

  "Stefen Rozaro?" a man said.

&nbs
p; Beside Ced, Stefen winced. "Uh…yeah?"

  "Can you come outside, please?"

  "Is something wrong?"

  "We need to talk to you, Stefen. It's about your father."

  Stefen's arms quivered. Ced understood, too. Quietly, they extracted themselves from the slide and listened to the Red Men tell Stefen about the accident that had killed his dad.

  * * *

  Ced went to the funeral with his mom, but the accident had happened in space and there was no body to see. When the ceremony finished, Ced tried to find Stefen, but his friend was already gone.

  "Where's he going to go?" Ced said once they were home. "His mom's gone, too."

  His mom sat on the couch and nudged off her shoes. "He's going to live with a relative. His cousin Mort."

  "Will I still get to see him?"

  "Of course. He might live further away, but he's not going anywhere."

  Ced stood in the middle of the room. "You're on a crew. Like Stefen's dad was. What if something happens to you?"

  She looked up, blinking. "I'm not going anywhere."

  "You don't know that. Nobody plans to get blown up!"

  "If something happens to me, Health and Safety will come for you, just like Stefen. You stay right where you are and they'll take you to your Aunt Amanda's. I know you don't always like it there. But you'll always have someone to look out for you, okay? Always."

  He sent a message to Stefen, but a day later, Ced's device said it still hadn't been opened. He wandered the streets, but Stefen wasn't there, either. No matter how far he went on the tube or his own two feet, Ced was alone.

  Six weeks later, when a girl named Kady invited him to play Crews, he said okay. They made him be the janitor. The game broke up two hours later when the captains argued about whose ship had gotten blown up until they quit yelling and started punching.

  On the days he was too bored to play Crews, he still went exploring, building out his personal map of the Locker. Alone, the city no longer felt like a secret inviting itself to be revealed. It just felt cold.

  One afternoon in Veetown, a neighborhood halfway around the city, a gang of four kids tore down the sidewalk. The oldest of them was twelve, but even grownups swerved out of their way. They wore green jackets with a diagonal yellow stripe. Ced stopped to stare. One of the boys plowed smack into him, knocking them both to the street.

  They helped each other up. Ced's palm was skinned, but he hardly noticed. "Stefen?"

  Stefen glanced past him. "What are you doing here?"

  "I sent you messages," Ced said. "Why didn't you write back?"

  "I'm with a crew," Stefen said. "They don't let me talk to other people."

  "A crew? I thought you were going to your cousin Mort's!"

  Stefen shrugged, gazing down the street. "Mort got outbid."

  "How long do you work? When you're done, you want to go exploring?"

  "I can't, Ced. I'm never done. I—"

  "Stefen!" An older girl in a green jacket yelled down the sidewalk. "Move your ass!"

  Stefen gave Ced a pleading look. "Sorry."

  He turned and ran to join the others.

  * * *

  He kept sending messages, but none of them were ever opened.

  For a while, he stopped going out as much, staying in to watch movies instead, but all the good ones cost money he didn't have. After a few days of watching crappy old stuff, he got his pack and went out to collect fruit from the parks. Without Stefen to help look out for older kids, it was tough, but he made a few bucks. Enough to watch the movies of Earth, and of people breaking out of the Solar System to explore places no one else had ever been.

  Late one afternoon, with his mom gone on a flight, he came back to Aunt Amanda's building and climbed the stairs to her floor. Down the hall, she stood outside her door. Two Red Men spoke to his aunt in low tones. She was crying. One of the Red Men said Ced's name, then his mom's.

  Ced turned and ran down the stairs as fast as he could.

  3

  "Son of an orc!" MacAdams said. "Is there anywhere in the System we can not get shot at?"

  "Hang on!" Rada put her hands up high, waving them back and forth. "We're not here to—"

  Webber grabbed her shirt and pulled her back. "Move. Now!"

  Glass glinted from the top of the gates. Webber gestured back at the woman on the wall, two fingers held up in a V. Rada didn't recognize the gesture, but there was no second gunshot. She stumbled behind Webber, MacAdams right beside her.

  "We're going to just turn around?" she said. "Is that what a pilgrim to this place would do?"

  "Yup." Webber strode back up the road. "Because a real pilgrim would know that if you stick around after they've warned you off, you get shot."

  "Why would they want us to go before we had the chance to talk to them?"

  "Maybe because someone in the village saw the car and radioed ahead. Or the city's hit its yearly immigration quota already. Or maybe she just didn't like our faces. Doesn't matter. We have to hit the road."

  "And you know this how?" Rada tore her gaze from the gates and gawked at Webber. "You've been here before, haven't you? That's why Toman needed us here."

  "I did some reading, that's all."

  "Really? And which file was that gesture of yours in?"

  He rolled his eyes. "Back when I was trying to figure out where to start over, I spent a long time looking at Absolution. There's no better place to disappear. But that's because only a crazy person would want to live here."

  They had reentered the trees and the shadows of the boughs were a welcome relief. Out of sight of the walls, Rada stopped, not quite ready to hop back on her bike.

  "Why didn't you tell me this beforehand?" she said. "Do you think preparation is cheating?"

  "It's like the monk said: either they were going to let us in, or they weren't. Nothing we knew could make a difference."

  MacAdams swabbed sweat from his bald head. "So what's the plan now? Happy hour?"

  Webber shrugged. "Sneak in. Find a villager who knows his way around to smuggle us in. There's a lot of factionalism in the city. If we can find a way to help one side, they might help us run down our man."

  Tired, sweat-soaked, and recently chased away at gunpoint, Rada was all set to do a lot of yelling at him. Up the road, though, a man was walking toward them. His wooden walking staff tocked with every other stride.

  Fell came to a stop twenty feet away and leaned on his staff. "Have they turned you away that quickly, Mr. Webber?"

  Rada reached for the pistol she often carried with her, but they'd left their guns with their devices in the car. After the response from the city, she was starting to think that had been an incredibly dumb idea.

  "How do you know his name?" she said.

  Fell smiled, eyes crinkling. "As I told you, I like to know my neighbors."

  MacAdams drifted forward like a musclebound planetoid. "And I like to know who's spying on us."

  "I am just as I appear: a monk. Specifically, a monk of the Ever-Changing Way." Fell favored them with his wise smile. "And if it is true that you work for Toman Benez, then I believe we can help each other."

  "Don't care," Rada said. "Not until you explain how you know who we are."

  "Facial recognition. And when I shook Mr. Webber's hand, I took a DNA sample. When I consulted the net, it informed me you three had recently come under Mr. Benez' employ."

  Webber crossed his arms. "So what do you want with Toman?"

  Rada smirked. "Easy. Fell's a follower of the Way. He wants to tap Toman on info about the Swimmers."

  The monk bowed. "Please, check my credentials. A search will confirm I am exactly as I say. Once you're satisfied, I'll be happy to make my proposal."

  Lacking devices of their own, they had to borrow Fell's to search the net, which Rada wasn't entirely comfortable with. Nothing about the search results appeared to be altered, however, and Fell's footprint was both wide and deep. Could be he was a political assassin
as well as a jungle-bound monk, but other than simple paranoia, Rada had no reason to doubt him. Identity confirmed, he smiled and led them down the road toward his monastery.

  "I know people within the city I can convince to sponsor your entry," Fell said. "And all I require is that Mr. Benez provide me with a book."

  "Good news," Webber said. "He's rich enough he can probably afford to send you three books."

  "He might find that more challenging than you think. To the best of my knowledge, the book I'm after hasn't existed in a thousand years. But if anyone has a surviving copy, it would be your employer."

  Rada glanced over. "What's the book?"

  "Are you familiar with Mauser's Three Treatises on Chaos?"

  "Do I look like I'm wearing a swishy green robe?"

  Fell chuckled. "Mauser was a political figure who came to prominence after the Swimmer invasion. In the Treatises, he argues about the inescapable nature of chaos, highlighted by his experiences during the end of civilization, and provides a framework for how we might deal with this inevitable instability. His texts provide a significant basis for one of the major branches of the Way. However, they make heavy reference to another text—one that appears to have been lost in the Plague Years. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. If we had this book, it could greatly deepen our understanding of Mauser's work."

  "No deal," Rada said.

  Fell's head swiveled. "It's simply a book. There's no trickery afoot."

  "Do you take photos of every traveler who comes to Absolution?"

  "We don't watch the road every second. But between me and the others of my order, I believe we see most visitors."

  "Then I need pictures of everyone who's come here in the last twelve months."

  The monk's eyebrows collided as slowly as two icebergs. "Getting you into the city is quite a favor by itself."

  "And you're asking for a holy book that's been lost for a thousand years," Rada said. "You're lucky I don't make you throw in your monastery, too."