by Alex London
Knox, Marie, and Syd tensed.
Through the dust, they could only see the silhouettes of figures emerging from the hovercraft. A tall figure with an EMD stick stepped down first. It looked like he wore a wig of snakes on his head.
Behind him came a flock of small figures, children spilling from the hatch and scurrying through the hot dust to rummage in the debris.
“Just kids,” Marie whispered and lowered her weapon.
“Keep it raised,” Syd hissed at her. “You’ve never seen what scavenge mobs can do.”
“Yeah, but little kids?” Knox was as puzzled as Marie. After everything they’d endured, it didn’t seem possible Syd would be afraid of some sickly kids in a raggedy hovercraft.
“Kids can sell your organs just as well as adults can,” said Syd. “It’s a free market.”
Marie raised the gun.
The dust began to settle and they made out the children. Their clothes were assembled like the hovercraft itself, from a patchwork of spare parts and mismatched pieces. The man with the weapon did not have on a wig of snakes; he had long dreadlocks, tied back with a bandana so that they cascaded over his shoulders and down his back. His skin was darker than Syd’s and he had a thick scar that ran from his eye straight down his face to his neck and disappeared beneath his shirt. He watched over the band of scavenging children, taking an occasional glance at the morning sun rising higher in the sky.
One kid found a sealed bag of EpiCure pills and shoved it into her pocket. Another boy saw her and rushed over. Without warning, he smacked her across the face. In seconds, they were brawling, kicking up a whole new cloud of sand and dust in a riot of screaming and kicking and hair pulling. The other kids had circled around, goading them on.
The man with the dreadlocks waded out into the middle of the fracas, and the children scattered like hissing cockroaches when the lights went on. He tucked his EMD stick into his studded belt and lifted the boy and the girl off the ground by their collars.
“She took foodstuff!” whined the boy in some sort of accent Knox had never heard before.
“Nah me din’t!” the girl objected, but the man just tilted his head at her and she melted into tears and confessed, presenting him with the bag from her pocket. The man set the kids down on the ground and knelt in front of the girl, looking her firmly in the eyes, holding the baggie out for her to see, her shame dangling in front of her face.
“Foodstuff gets shared,” he said firmly but not cruelly. “Nobody go it alone out here, savvy? We share alike.”
The girl nodded. The man gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze and stood. She and the boy ran off together to keep scavenging, their fight already a distant memory.
Groups of kids gathered around the dead horses with bits of broken glass and metal. Knox cringed and looked away as they started carving up the animals, peeling the skin back and cutting the meat from the bone. He kept swallowing to keep from throwing up.
Syd tried to ignore the throb in his side and the ache in his throat. He focused on the annoying spot where a rock dug into his thigh. A minor discomfort replacing a major one. Just a question of focus. You could endure anything if you could figure out how to distract yourself. He tried not to breathe too deeply. Every breath felt like another rib cracking.
The man with the dreadlocks studied the scene around his feet. He picked up the tattered emergency blanket and a ruined ChemiFlame package, looked them over, then he turned to look at the canyon. He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked right at the bend in the rock where Syd, Knox, and Marie were crouched.
Syd yanked Knox down and they lay there, staring at the dust, waiting. Listening. Syd’s heartbeat pounded in his ears. Knox imagined the ransom call to his father, when these nomads figured out who he was. His father might reward them if they killed Syd, but as for his own son . . . his father didn’t negotiate.
Marie peeked up. “He’s gone,” she whispered.
“What?” Knox lifted his head. The man no longer stood with the children. He wasn’t around the hovercraft at all.
“Did you see him go back in?” Syd asked.
“We better pull back into the canyon,” said Marie.
“If we leave all the stuff, we’ll die out here,” said Syd.
“They’ve already got all our stuff,” Marie answered. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“We can’t just retreat,” Syd told her. “It’s suicide.”
“There’s too many kids to fight off,” Knox said. He agreed with Marie. They had to retreat and wait for the scavengers to leave.
“You could surrender, no?” a voice from above them shouted.
The man with the dreadlocks stood on a boulder, his EMD stick pointed down at them. Knox glanced back to the hovercraft. The kids had formed a wall, shoulder to shoulder, each of them holding something heavy or something sharp, and the weapons turret on top of the hovercraft had turned, a fracture cannon aimed straight at them. There was no escape.
Marie looked at Syd.
Knox looked at Syd.
Syd looked back at them. He didn’t know what to do either.
“Well.” Marie sighed. “We do need a ride.” She set her weapon down on the rocks in front of her then stood and raised her arms over her head.
Syd shook his head and exhaled, then he heaved himself up, raising his arms above his head. He grunted as he did it, and Knox wondered how long Syd could keep going with broken ribs and how good either of his companions would be in a fight against a dozen starving children, if it came to it. He stood last, close enough for Syd to lean his raised arm on Knox’s shoulder so he could take some of the strain off his ribs. Syd got the hint and leaned on Knox.
“Thanks,” Syd whispered.
“You’d do the same for me,” Knox answered and Syd wondered if that were true.
“We mean no harm!” Marie pleaded. “We’re stranded.”
“Who you?”
“We’re . . . uh—” Marie started.
“Refugees!” Syd declared. His voice cracked with the strain of speaking. “Come from the Mountain City.”
“You runnin’?”
“Bad debt,” said Syd.
“No patron cover you, eh?” The man understood the system, it seemed. If the guy knew Knox and Marie were patron kids from the Upper City, he might get curious. If he didn’t know about the reward for Syd’s death, they might just have a chance of hitching a safe ride in the hovercraft. Or at least, of being left in peace to die of thirst on their own.
“No patron,” said Syd. “Just swampcats, all three of us.”
“Swampcats? All three?”
Syd nodded. Marie nodded. Knox nodded. The man looked them over. Filthy, bloody, alone . . . they sure looked poor enough. Nothing lux about them. Lux was a distant memory for Knox.
“More like citycats.” The man snorted. “This you stuff?” He nodded toward the wreckage spilled over the ground.
“It was,” Marie said. Knox worried she’d given them away. Three swampcats wouldn’t have EpiCure pills and ChemiFlames and horses, even if they had come from the city.
“Was?” the man considered what she said. “You steal it, eh?”
Marie nodded.
“Who you steal from?”
“Smugglers,” said Syd. “From Maes.” He wondered how far the criminal networks from the city spread.
“Maes,” the man repeated, and for a moment Syd thought the word hadn’t meant anything to him, but then, he turned and shouted at the children: “Maes!”
Suddenly, they all scurried, grabbing what they could grab from the road, tossing what they’d found and what horsemeat they’d already cut into sacks and bundles and loading them into the hovercraft. It seemed even in the wilderness beyond all trace of civilization, Maes’s smugglers had a reputation.
The man slid down from his boulder, keeping the EMD stick pointed their way the whole time.
“You got big trouble,” he said when he hit the ground in fro
nt of them. He bent down and picked up Marie’s weapon. He looked her up and down and then held it out to her.
She hesitated.
“You’ll need this,” the man said and Marie took it from him. He looked at Knox. “Where you runnin’?”
“Uh . . .” Knox wasn’t sure how much to tell the man.
“He dumb-dumb?” the man asked Syd. “Brain glitch?”
“Brain glitch,” Syd confirmed. “Dropped baby. He don’t know much, but he’s my brother, so . . .”
Knox had the urge to break another of Syd’s ribs. Not only wasn’t he brain-dead, but Syd had also just called him his brother. No way the guy would fall for that. They didn’t look anything alike. Wrong skin color, wrong bone structure, wrong hair.
The man raised his eyebrows. “Your brother?”
“I promised his mama,” said Syd. “Debt brothers.”
The man nodded, no more explanation needed.
Syd figured the best lies were the closest to the truth. What were he and Knox, if not brothers in debt? A proxy was just a replacement, a substitute, but a brother was something else, a debt that ran in two directions.
Knox looked over at Syd. He’d never had a brother. He didn’t know what was expected of brothers. He kept his expression blank. Pretending to be brain-dead wasn’t so hard at the moment. He didn’t know what to make of this new turn of events.
“Where you come from?” Syd asked him, trying to see if they could form some kind of bond.
“Mercy Camp,” the man said and gestured at the other passengers. “Up in smoke.”
“Mercy Camp burned?” Syd asked.
“Burned.” The man nodded.
Mercy Camp was one of the biggest Benevolent Society displacement camps, somewhere down on the edge of the swamps near the coast. Refugees had been coming to the Valve from it for years, and with them they brought stories of famine and sickness, giant snakes and rotten housing. It made the Valve look like a paradise. They also brought rumors that the Society planned to burn the whole place down to clear it out. Mercy Camp hadn’t been profitable for a long time and shareholders were getting restless. Guess they finally did it.
“You’re not heading to the Mountain City,” said Syd. “You going to Old Detroit?”
The man rubbed his chin. Then he nodded.
“We’re headed that way too,” said Syd. “Any chance we can ride along?”
The man sighed. “You bring Maes, you bring trouble,” he said.
Syd didn’t respond. He let the man think.
“You ride with us, eh? You fight, if we need?” the man said.
Syd, Marie, and Knox nodded eagerly.
“Good, we take you.” The man jogged over to the hovercraft and motioned for them to follow.
“Hey,” Marie called out to him. He stopped in the hatch and turned around. “What’s your name?”
“Gordis,” he said.
“Gordis,” Marie repeated, like she was taking possession of it, storing it someplace safe. Knox hadn’t even thought to ask the man’s name.
Gordis did not ask their names. Scavenger survival didn’t require such niceties.
“Thank you for rescuing us, Gordis,” Marie told him, just the same.
Knox was amazed with this girl, crazy enough to fake her own death and ruin Knox’s life, but thoughtful enough to say thank you to some filthy desert scavenger. Knox wanted to know her better.
“Looks like we got a ride,” said Syd. “Three swampcats on the run to Old Detroit, got it?”
“I got it,” said Knox. “And I’ve got brain damage, huh?”
“Shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.” Marie smirked and rested her weapon on her shoulder, strolling to the hovercraft like an old-time outlaw.
“Don’t worry,” said Syd, “I’ll watch your back, brother.”
Knox found he liked the sound of that.
He followed Syd and Marie toward the hovercraft.
That’s when an explosion blew the weapons turret off in a ball of fire.
[43]
THE TWO BANDITS TROTTED their horses from the mouth of the canyon. The bandit with the rocket launcher slung it back onto his shoulder and the other slid his sword into the sheath on his belt. Then he pulled out a small black ball, no bigger than a fist, and tossed it from hand to hand. A combat-certified meltdown grenade—a SecuriTech bestseller.
“Why’d we leave them water?” Knox wondered aloud.
“Because we’re better than they are,” Marie said. Knox was glad to know her idea of “we” included him, but he would have preferred if they’d let the bandits die in the cave. Or if they’d remembered to take away their weapons. Oops.
“You’ve got something that don’t belong to you!” the bandit with the grenade announced, cocking his arm back to throw.
The other bandit reloaded his rocket launcher. “Turn it over or we’ll blow all of you to hell.”
Gordis turned slowly toward the riders on horseback. Without a word of instruction, the children scattered in a wide arc around him, armed with sharp objects still wet with the blood of horses.
Knox looked around and knew that this was madness. A bunch of children with broken glass and rusted metal were no match for mercenaries with high explosives. They’d all be dead before they could even raise their arms.
The scavengers stood in the glaring sun, about fifteen yards from the riders. The tips of Knox’s ears and the back of his neck ached with what he assumed was sunburn. He’d never felt it before. Syd could barely keep himself on his feet. He leaned more and more weight onto Knox. Marie noticed. Worry for Syd etched lines into her face. Knox figured it didn’t occur to her to worry for herself. That’s what faith could do. He didn’t have faith and he was very worried for himself. And for Syd. He found that worry was a completely renewable resource. The more he had, the more he got.
“I don’t see nothing belong to you,” Gordis told the men.
“We just want the proxy,” one bandit said. “The rest of you can go in peace.” He paused and scratched his chin. Then he nodded, like a new idea had struck him. “We’ll even buy the patron kids off you, if you want. A good price too.”
Gordis cocked his head to look over at Knox, Syd, and Marie. He pursed his lips, considering this new piece of information he’d been given. His eye lingered on Syd a moment longer, then he turned back to the bandits. “I don’t see any patrons here. Proxies neither.”
The bandits laughed. The surface of the grenade flashed with blinking lights, armed. “Whatever you say,” the bandit said, smiling. “But living or dead, the dark one there in the middle is ours. Payment for an outstanding debt.”
Gordis slapped his EMD stick on his palm and looked Syd up and down. Syd stiffened. His cover story hadn’t lasted ten minutes. Gordis turned back toward the bandits.
“No debts out here but what you can collect,” he said.
Knox liked the sound of that. It was something a scripted badass would say. He filed it away to reuse if he ever got in another fight, if he lived to.
“You make us collect, we’ll do it.” The bandit kept tossing his grenade from hand to hand. “We can blow this hovercraft and these kiddies of yours to vapor before you can fire off the EMD stick you got there. And as for the girl . . .” He winked at Marie. It made her skin crawl. “Her gun ain’t good for much from this distance. And she won’t shoot it anyway. You took on some bad passengers, friend. Just turn ’em over and go on your way.”
“Maes gang won’t let you live. They don’t negotiate,” Syd whispered to Gordis, his voice jangling with nerves. Knox flinched. He knew what happened to people who didn’t negotiate. Syd couldn’t read Gordis’s face, didn’t know if he was tempted by their offer.
“Listen, friend,” said the other one. The sun glared off his rocket launcher, forcing Knox to squint. “It’s hot out here on this road and we’ve been riding hard. I know you’ve seen those drones flying over and trouble’s coming with ’em close behind. So why don’t we make
this easy? You kill that boy there, right now. You just turn your little stick on him and make him dead, and then we’ll take the body on our horses and ride away. It ain’t much to do. One dead swampcat to save all these lives. You won’t find a better deal.”
“So they do negotiate,” Gordis said.
“Hey, kid!” The one with the grenade spoke to Syd. “You really gonna let all your friends die for you? All these little kids? Egan wasn’t enough? You gonna kill everyone just to hang on to that precious life of yours? What’s so great you gotta live for?”
“Maybe he ain’t got laid yet,” the other bandit suggested and laughed a wheezy laugh.
Syd looked to Gordis and to the line of children braced for a hopeless fight. He looked to Knox and Marie. They were ready to fight for him too, each for their own reasons, but the reasons didn’t matter. The willingness was all.
Syd had never been willing to die for anyone. He’d spent his whole life up to now being punished for other people—well, one other person—and he spent the whole time wanting to be free of it. No more connections, no more debts. But here he was, free as he’d ever been, and he had more debts than ever: Beatrice, Baram, Egan . . . he owed them all. They deserved better than this.
He knew he should do the noble thing here and step up, let them kill him so the kids didn’t have to die, so Marie and Knox could survive, get back to their lives, maybe use their wealth and power to make the system a little better from within. His life wasn’t worth more than theirs; it couldn’t be, no matter what Marie believed about him. If he didn’t want their blood on his hands, he had to give himself up. One life for all these other lives. Such an obvious deal to make.
But his feet stayed firmly planted on the pavement.
It’s not easy to throw your life away, even for a good reason, even when it’s the right thing to do. It was simple enough. Debt or no: Syd did not want to die.
Nobody moved.
Marie held her weapon and Gordis his EMD stick. Syd’s stick had been lost in the flash flood, and he stood beside Knox with his fists clenched. Knox did the same. He felt stupid, but he did it anyway. He’d imagined being in a battle before, of course. All boys did at some point, right? But he hadn’t imagined it would be like this, surrounded by kids, standing beside his proxy and worrying about looking stupid.
