I took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching and darted behind the curtain with her.
She turned around and arched an eyebrow at me, a little smile at the edge of her mouth. I blushed as I took a step back, hitting the curtain.
“Hi,” she said. It was more of a question, and her smile grew as she hiked her towel farther up her chest.
“There’s something wrong with you,” I blurted out.
“What do you mean?” Her smile faded.
“You . . . you’re having nightmares or something. You’ve been screaming at night and you attacked me.”
A gasp escaped her throat just before she hit the ground. Huge sobs racked her body as I stood there frozen. I didn’t know what to think of that response. It seemed a gross overreaction.
Unless she knew what was going on.
I knelt down beside her. “Ever.”
She continued to cry, rocking back and forth on her knees with her hands over her face. The sound made me uncomfortable, made my chest tight. I didn’t like it.
“Ever,” I repeated. “Do you know what’s going on?”
She took in desperate gasps of air, lowering her hands from her face.
“It’s . . .” She collapsed into sobs again, falling against me.
I almost pushed her off. No one had used me for comfort, perhaps ever (unless I counted the times my mom leaned on me when she was too high to walk). This was an awkward time for me to start, with her being almost naked and all, but I beat down the urge to nudge her away.
Instead I awkwardly patted her back. She pressed her face into my shoulder and cried like a human.
“It’s . . . them,” she choked out. “They do something to us.”
“To who?” I asked.
“To the Under-sixties.” She took a deep breath and straightened. Her bright green eyes were tinged with red. “They started giving us shots and it makes us . . .”
She didn’t have to say it. I knew what it made them.
“I thought maybe I had slipped by because I was so close to sixty. They must have given me the shot in my sleep while you were on assignment,” she sniffled.
“Why would they do this?” I asked.
She shrugged, wiping at her nose. “We don’t know. It started a few weeks ago. Some people have said it makes them stronger, but others get all weird and hostile.”
Weird and hostile was an understatement.
“Fifty-one was starting to go off the deep end last week,” Ever continued. “But she said they gave her another shot and it made her all normal again. Everyone thinks they’re doing some sort of experiment on us.”
Everyone? Who was everyone? I’d never heard of this.
“We don’t talk about it with Over-sixties,” she said quietly, obviously noticing the look on my face. “We’re not supposed to. They tell the roommates they can’t say anything.” She tilted her head. “They ordered you not to tell me?”
“Yes.”
This brought on a fresh wave of tears, although I wasn’t entirely sure why. I thought she choked out a thank-you, but it was hard to tell.
I started to get up, but she grabbed my arm. “What did I do? Did I hurt you?”
“No. You screamed a lot. You attacked me. I broke both your legs several times last night. Sorry about that.”
She looked down at them. “Oh. That’s okay.”
“They gave you a shot the night before last, but they never came last night.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “That’s why you look so tired.” She wiped at her face with a corner of her towel. “What am I supposed to do?”
I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”
“What if I hurt you?”
“I’m stronger.”
She closed her eyes and nodded slightly, fresh tears running down her cheeks.
Apparently that hadn’t been a comforting thing to say.
SEVEN
TWENTY-TWO HIT THE MAT AND DID AS I HAD REQUESTED—he didn’t scream.
He pressed his face into the black plastic and his fists clenched the material of his shirt, but he didn’t cry. His afternoon had been littered with injuries, but he was doing a decent job of not screaming or crying.
I knelt down and pushed his pants leg up. The bone stuck out from the skin.
“In this case you have to shove it back in,” I said.
He moaned and shook his head.
“You have to. You’ve got to get the bone closer to where it’s supposed to be or it won’t heal right. Your skin is going to close up around the bone and then I’m going to have to slice the skin open again.”
“That is so gross,” he mumbled against the mat.
“Sit up.”
He slowly pushed himself to a sitting position, grimacing. The training teams around us had turned to stare. Across the room, Hugo was muffling a laugh with his hand.
“Just shove it back in.” I focused on Twenty-two again.
“That’s it?” he exclaimed. “Shove it in?”
“Give me your hand.” I held mine out.
He slipped his hand into mine. It was warm and not as perfect as I had imagined. I thought rich people must have soft hands free of any marks. They didn’t have to do hard manual labor like the people in the slums. I was certain Callum had never built a fence or worked a cotton farm in his life.
But his hands were rougher than mine, and when I turned his palm up I saw little scars on his fingers. The scars from human life never fade.
“Like this,” I said, placing his palm on the bone. I pushed it in, hard, and he clapped his other hand over his mouth to stop a scream.
He collapsed on the mat again, a soft whimper escaping his throat. I felt a pang of guilt. That guilt again. I didn’t know if I liked it.
I hadn’t meant to break his leg. It was a good learning experience, one he would have needed eventually anyway, but it had been an unfortunate side effect of him not moving as quickly as I’d told him to.
“You’re going to have to learn to move faster.” I think I had meant that as an apology. It didn’t come out right. “I mean, I didn’t—” Wait. I didn’t apologize to newbies. I was here to teach him. He needed to know how to pop his own bone back in.
He rolled over onto his back and looked at me in amusement. Well, amusement tinged with searing pain.
“If you apologize every time you hurt me, you won’t be doing much of anything else.”
A laugh bubbled up in my chest and I quickly turned away so he couldn’t see the smile on my face.
“Get up,” I said, jumping to my feet.
“My leg’s still broken.”
“I don’t care. Get up. If you just lie there in the field they’ll break your other leg and then you’re screwed.”
He unsteadily got to his feet. “Is it really that bad out there?” he asked, trying to keep all his weight on his good leg.
“It depends,” I said.
“On what?”
“Who it is. If you’re just extracting a sick person it’s fairly easy. If it’s a criminal with a big family you might get ambushed getting to them. Depends on how scared they are. If they’ve gotten cocky and think they can rebel.”
“What if they didn’t do it?”
“What?”
“Whatever crime we’re snatching them for. What if they didn’t do it?”
“They always say they didn’t do it. It’s our job to bring them in. HARC takes care of the rest.”
“They let them go if they’re innocent?” he asked.
I hesitated. As a Reboot, I was never informed of what happened to the humans I captured. As a girl living in the slums, I knew the truth. Once they took someone, he never came back.
“They’re sure of their guilt before they take them,” I said.
“How?”
“It’s not our concern.”
“Why not?” he asked. “We’re the ones catching all these people.”
“Our job ends there.”
>
“Where do they go?”
I had wondered that myself once. Some sort of prison? I doubted it. “I don’t know.”
He frowned. “Do they tell anyone? The families?”
It figured the rich boy had no idea how this worked. I did one assignment in the rich area of town for every hundred I did in the slums.
“No. I don’t think so, anyway.”
“But—”
“How’s the leg?” I interrupted.
He looked down, shaking it out. “Getting there.”
“Get your arms up, then. Let’s keep going.”
He met my eyes almost every time I swung at him. I wasn’t sure what to make of the way he looked at me, like he was intrigued by something. The little flutters it caused in my chest were distracting.
“Let’s stop for today,” I said after his jaw had healed from its second break of the day. Dinner was in ten minutes; everyone else was clearing out of the gym.
I held out my hand to help him off the mat and he took it. As he pulled himself to a standing position, he put his hand lightly on my arm and leaned so close to my ear his breath tickled my cheek.
My first instinct was to jump away. No one came that close to me. Even as a human, I didn’t remember anyone being so near I could feel the warmth of their skin. But he began speaking, so softly that I wouldn’t be able to hear him if I moved away.
“Do they listen to us all the time in here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I know they do in the field. There are cameras everywhere in here, so probably.”
He straightened but didn’t step away. I think I meant to put a more appropriate distance between us, but I got distracted by the way he smiled down at me. I’d always lived in a world where I had to look up, but for the first time I wanted to rise up on my toes and bring my face closer to his.
I heard a throat clear and I quickly took a big step back. Whether or not they could hear us, they could most certainly see us. The guard in the corner, the cameras on the wall, the other Reboots passing by—they could see us just fine.
“Good night,” I said, turning to quickly walk away.
EIGHT
“YOU’RE JUST OBSERVING THIS TIME,” I SAID TO TWENTY-TWO the next night as we stood on the roof of HARC. “Remember that.”
He nodded. He kept rubbing his hands up and down his arms and bouncing on his heels. The newbies were always nervous, but I had thought he might stroll onto the roof with his usual smile. He hadn’t, and I almost missed it.
Ten Reboots stood on the roof of HARC in the dark, waiting for the shuttle. Five were newbies with their trainers. Lissy cast a scornful glance at Twenty-two as he bounced, then looked at her Forty-three smugly. Forty-three, with his tiny arms and odd facial twitch, didn’t seem like much to be smug about.
“Don’t speak unless spoken to,” I continued, ignoring Lissy. “Do everything the officers tell you to in the field. Otherwise, they will shoot you.”
He nodded again as the shuttle landed on the roof with a bang, the gust of wind it brought blowing up my ponytail. The side door slid open and Leb stood there, his black sleeves rolled up to his elbows even though it was a chilly night. He was a tall, well-built guy, and he often looked uncomfortable in the stiff HARC uniform.
He waved his hand, gesturing for us to get on. We stepped inside, the metal clanging underneath our boots. Since there were ten of us going out tonight we were in one of the midsize shuttles. The small black plastic seats lined the side of the shuttle, facing the one bigger chair for the officer. The door leading to the driver’s seat was still open, and I glimpsed the back of a human’s head. The drivers never left the shuttle under any circumstance, and didn’t interact with the Reboots in back.
Twenty-two stood next to me motionlessly, as I had instructed, and Leb grabbed his arm and turned it over to look at his bar code. He chuckled, the lines on his hard square face more pronounced when he smiled.
“I heard you picked Twenty-two,” he said. “Had to see for myself.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. I nodded slightly and he smiled, the only guard to smile at any Reboot, much less me. He was a weird human.
“Sit,” he said, slamming the driver’s door closed and plopping down in his seat. He hadn’t even taken his gun out of its holster. He was one of the few officers to leave it on his hip when Reboots entered the shuttle. Most of them stuck it in our faces, trying not to let it wobble.
I sat first and Twenty-two followed, pulling the straps down his chest and fumbling as he tried to snap them. He was shaking now. The newbies were always scared of the shuttle; in their human lives they had never been inside anything that moved so quickly or lifted off the ground. Most hid their fear. It was only Forty-three who let his terror show openly, his breathing heavy and unsteady. Lissy smacked his head.
I stared at Twenty-two as we rose into the air. He closed his eyes. He looked almost human with his black eyes shut. He hadn’t developed the speed or agility or predatorlike quality that defined a Reboot yet. He still had so many clumsy human traits. Yet as he stretched his legs out in front of him and ran his hands down his thighs I could see the Reboot in him—the slow, controlled movement, how he seemed to take up every inch of space in a room by the way he held his body. It was a subtle difference, the one between humans and Reboots, but it was unmistakable.
Leb caught me staring and raised his eyebrows. I quickly focused my gaze on my hands.
“You can speak freely,” he said.
Twenty-two remained silent as the other newbies whispered to their trainers, his fingers gripping the bottom of his seat every time we jerked.
“There’s no reason to be scared,” I said. “Even if we crash, chances are we’d be fine.”
“Unless we’re decapitated.”
“Well, yes. But that seems unlikely.”
“Or if the top comes down and crushes our heads in.” His eyes flew to the black metal above us.
“Trust me when I say a shuttle crash is the least of your worries tonight.”
“Thank you. I feel so much better.” He looked at Leb. “How long have you been doing this? Have you ever—”
“Twenty-two,” I said sharply. He looked at me and I shook my head. The shuttle had gone silent again.
“What? He said we could speak freely.”
“He didn’t mean to him.”
Twenty-two rolled his eyes and I felt a spark of anger in my chest.
“He could punish you for that,” I said, looking at Leb. I glanced at the stick next to his hand. A shuttle officer had never used one on me.
“Do you want me to?” Leb asked, eyeing Twenty-two. He didn’t reach for the stick.
I took in a sharp breath. He’d never punished any of my newbies, but he’d never had to. They all did exactly as I said.
Asking permission to hit my newbie was odd, though. I knew that. The other trainers knew that.
“No,” I replied. Every Reboot in the shuttle stared at me. I focused on Twenty-two again.
“Should I be insulted that you hesitated?” he asked with a smile.
“I can still change my mind.”
“How will you tell him? He stopped talking. Apparently that means we’re only allowed to talk to one another again.”
“I will find a stick and beat you myself when we land.”
“Promise?”
I heard a sound like laughter from Leb’s direction and I looked over in surprise. He ducked his head in an attempt to hide his smile. Twenty-two grinned at me.
“Focus, Twenty-two,” I said.
“Can’t you call me Callum?”
“Focus, Callum,” I said quietly, firmly.
“Sorry,” he said, putting on a more serious face.
The shuttle landed and Leb motioned for us to stand. He slid the door open and we marched out into the dark, a soft breeze ruffling my ponytail.
They named the city Rosa after the woman who built it. I had always liked the na
me, had even been excited to hear I was to be stationed in Rosa.
Twenty-two stared, his lips parted, his neck pulsing strangely. His horror was palpable, but when I turned, I saw nothing unusual.
“What?” I asked.
“What is this? Where are we?”
“Rosa,” I said, glancing back as if to make sure. Of course it was Rosa.
“But . . . this is the slums?”
“Yes.”
“Are they all like this?” he asked, his voice strained.
“Like what?”
He gestured and I looked again. The slums of Rosa were similar to the slums of Austin, but perhaps a bit worse.
Maybe the very worst. Rosa was a city built by the sick. It was a surprise they survived at all after they were run off from Austin. As I understood it, even the rico side of Rosa wasn’t much compared to the other cities of Texas.
The buildings were wooden structures erected after the war. The little homes sat close together, one story and two bedrooms and barely standing in some cases. The humans with houses were lucky. The apartments on the other side of town were not as nice.
“We’re lucky to have any roof over our head,” my mom had said the day we’d been kicked out of yet another apartment. We ended up sleeping in an abandoned building until they got the money together for a shared apartment. We’d never had a house.
I glanced at Twenty-two and was almost tempted to horrify him further with that story, but his eyes were still fixed straight ahead. I followed his gaze.
The roads were mostly dirt, but the two main streets were paved. They were full of holes, though, abandoned after it became clear the slums were nothing but a disease-ridden Reboot breeding ground.
Trash piled up on the side of the street and the stench of rotting food and human waste filled the air. The plumbing system in Rosa was a work in progress.
“They’re not all this bad, are they?” he asked.
“Not quite this bad. Similar, though.”
“In Austin?” he asked. Silly question, as I could tell he already knew the answer.
“Yes. I’ve forgotten a lot. But yeah, it was like this.”
“And you grew up in . . .”