‘Hand it over,’ Rice demands.
Glaring around him, the boy spots the Rat who blinks and launches himself at the weakness in the wall. A punch to the face drops the Rat. Someone tries to grab the boy, but he produces his little cosh and breaks the man’s skull.
‘You can’t run,’ Rice shouts.
Yes, he can. It’s one of the things he does well.
Head down and shoulders forward, the boy heads for the far edge of the dump, knowing he has been here before.
‘Out of the way,’ shouts Rice.
Something hisses past the running boy, and the boy is still grinning when the next dart hits. The first blast of electricity takes him to his knees. Stumbling upright, he manages five steps before an aftershock drops him. Every nerve in his body burns along its entire length. He has pissed himself, then he realizes he’s done worse.
‘Gross,’ Rice says.
A boot catches the boy in the gut, but it’s nothing to the agony in his muscles and the cramp in his limbs. After a while, Rice stops kicking.
‘Fuck,’ says a voice. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘Traded it,’ Rice says proudly.
‘Who with?’
‘None of your business.’
A voice mutters its apologies.
Even in the middle of his pain, the boy has the sense to curl around the spring-loaded club. The longer he can keep Rice from finding out about the Rat with the bubbling throat the better.
‘Hey, freak . . . Can you hear me?’
He says nothing.
‘Of course you can.’ Rice laughs. ‘We don’t want you here,’ he says. ‘Next time, stay away.’
He’s forgotten already, the boy realizes. The Rats all have their heads turned to Rice as he outlines the gang’s next job. Smash up a bar, break into a cargo ship, go down to tax the brothels. The list is limited.
Someone will kill Rice eventually.
But it isn’t long since Rice killed the boss before him and the Rats are being careful. The boy wonders if they’d let him be boss if he killed Rice. Even as he thinks it, he knows they wouldn’t.
On a slope stands a hut.
Well, what is left of one. Wreckers have stripped the roof, gutted the inside and cut rusting walls into strips and sold them on. All that remains is a floor with a lip around its edge. The floor is made of something too hard to cut and too heavy to lift. Rain fills this makeshift pool.
Stripping off, the boy splashes himself clean. Having scraped his soiled trousers, he rinses them and tugs them on. The thorn-vine scratches on his ankles are already starting to heal. It’s one of the reasons the Rats call him freak. That, and the shape of his skull, which is a little wider than everybody else’s.
It is time to go home now.
As the boy reaches the peak of a trash mound, he sees a high curl of smoke in the distance. This is wrong. Everyone knows smoke comes from the dump. So he looks harder, because his eyes are good, and realizes it’s his village burning.
The Rats are slung along a road below him now. So close, he could hit them with a stone if he threw it hard enough. And soldiers are heading up the road towards the Rats in the opposite direction. The reason the Rats can’t see the soldiers is a bend in the road.
Except the soldiers can obviously see the boy, because a small man points and the man next to him raises a rifle . . .
The small man shakes his head.
They’re wearing camouflage. Sandy uniforms, with grey patches that make them stand out on the dark strip of compacted rubbish that makes up the road from the dump. The boy could warn the Rats. All he has to do is shout, or toss that stone. Or start making his way down the slope, that would get their attention soon enough.
Only why would he bother?
When he can’t find a proper answer, the boy asks himself the question he always asks when he can’t find an answer. What would Maria want him to do? Only the smoke rising from his village says that what his sister wants probably doesn’t matter much any more.
As the Rats near the bend, the small man nods to the man beside him who says something to someone else. The man he talks to drops to his knees and sights along a scope above a barrel. His weapon is longer than those of the others.
His first shot takes Rice through the head.
Brains and bits of bone spray out as a passing slug sucks sticky matter and splashes it onto the face of a girl behind. The boy sees it happen, although he knows that has to be impossible.
Rice dies still holding his stun gun.
The girl falls still trying to wipe jelly from her face. After that, everything happens too fast for the boy to follow. Although the result is never in doubt. Smoke from the gunfire drifts uphill, adding its acid stink to the smell of the dump. When it clears the boy can see clearly what has happened. All the Rats lie dead and one of the soldiers is taking the stun gun from Rice’s hand.
A trick, the boy realizes. The machine probably told them exactly where Rice was.
When someone shouts, the boy looks up. It takes him a couple of seconds to realize the soldier is shouting at him. Instead of hiding, he stands. His sister is dead, his village is burnt, and the soldiers are back.
Doesn’t much matter what happens now.
The boy remembers little from the time before Maria became his sister. He only knows it wasn’t good. She found him, she took him in and she fed him. All he had to do in return was obey her rules. Don’t lie. Keep your promises.
They weren’t even that difficult.
A dozen rifles track him down the slope. When the boy reaches the road, one of the soldiers gestures him closer. The man has blue eyes and sandy hair and smells of alcohol. As the man steps forward, the boy notices he is swaying.
‘You’re drunk.’ The boy says it without thinking.
Behind the man, someone snorts.
‘Yeah,’ the man says bitterly. ‘Some of us have consciences to anaesthetize.’ Pulling a silver flask from his pocket, he flips its lid with a practised flick of his thumb and swallows a large gulp. As an afterthought, he wipes the top and offers the flask to the boy. ‘Want some?’
‘It’s OK.’ The boy looks puzzled. ‘What’s a conscience?’
‘Something that’s meant to stop me doing this.’ The man takes a pistol from his belt and puts its muzzle to the boy’s head and pulls the trigger. A dry click tells them both that the gun’s misfired.
‘Third-rate technology,’ the man says.
The boy is not sure what it means, so he shrugs. He could try to run, he could try to fight. He is as big as the man shaking the pistol. In fact, he’s bigger than half of the men standing around him. But what’s the point?
‘You killed my sister,’ he says.
The man nods. ‘We killed everyone. That was our job.’
Behind him, the soldier who snorted begins shaking his head. As if knowing this, the man with the pistol turns. ‘You saying it wasn’t?’
‘You’re here to re-establish the rule of law.’
‘By killing people.’
‘That’s not . . .’
‘Yes it is,’ said the man. ‘We get to kill people. You get to watch. That’s what observer status means, doesn’t it? All the excitement, none of the guilt.’
‘ Lieutenant.‘
The one talking wears a flak jacket. He isn’t armed, and something about his voice puzzles the boy. It sounds foreign. Of course, they all sound foreign. But it also sounds . . .
‘You’re-’
Yanking off her helmet, the U/Free shakes out her long fair hair and removes a pair of dark glasses that have been hiding her eyes. ‘Well,’ she asks Lieutenant Bonafonte. ‘Are you going to shoot him or not?’
The lieutenant scowls. ‘You have operational control,’ she reminds him.
‘In that case, no . . . I’m not.’ Paper Osamu nods slowly.
‘Interesting choice,’ she says
.
Chapter 25
The creek is wide and muddy and an ancient tideline reveals that the sea was once higher. Steps have been cut in the side and jetties lashed together. A system of buckets drags water to a slide at the top. From here, irrigation channels carry it to the fields on Hekati’s valley floor.