Metaltown Read online

  Colin had begun walking again.

  “If I was flush,” he said, “I’d buy a separate sidewalk so me and my greenback friends didn’t have to get our shoes dirty.”

  Ty’s shoulders loosened, and she fell into step beside him.

  “If I was flush, I wouldn’t walk at all. I’d make scraps like you pull me around in a cart.”

  He smirked. “If I was flush, I wouldn’t even need a cart. I’d make scraps like you go get me everything I need.”

  “Anything for you, Great One,” she said. But her laughter failed when he lapsed into silence. Most of the time the quiet didn’t bother her. She preferred it actually; there was nothing more annoying to her than mindless chatter. But here, so close to a home she knew he still missed, she felt a strange pressure to keep him talking.

  “Where is Hayden, anyway?” she asked, thinking back to the whole reason they were on this venture. “And why’s he working for slick Jed Schultz?”

  Colin scowled. “He’s not slick. He’s all right.”

  Ty took this answer to mean that he didn’t know where his brother had landed. He was all doe-eyed again, thinking about Jed, and she didn’t like that one bit.

  A couple stiffs in black uniforms walked by, and Ty pulled Colin down off the sidewalk so they could pass. Bakerstown police were as crooked as they came. Word was their chief was owned by big boss Hampton himself, who could use them as his own private army if the mood struck. They wouldn’t take kindly to a couple Metalhead kids with pockets full of cash.

  “Here’s Fifth,” she said when they reached a corner. A bike messenger swept by them, nearly clipping Ty’s arm. She swore and gave him the finger.

  Old rusty cars were parked on the curb, relics from a time when gas wasn’t just for the rich, before the war between the feds. Most people used them now for shelter, though half of them had been dismantled for parts. A parking garage entrance came up on their left, and though their pace didn’t quicken, both of them kept their eyes sharp. A lot of shadows in there. A lot of places for someone to hide.

  Two guys were sitting on the concrete exit ramp and jumped up as Colin and Ty approached. They were both shorter than Colin, and well fed, dressed in hand-me-down wool slacks—nice ones, but not new—and shirts tucked into their waistbands. Their belts were painted green, flaking around the buckles. Muscle, hired by McNulty. Ty thought they looked soft and out of practice.

  Colin sighed beside her, which made her lips quirk into a small grin. But when a girl about their age sauntered out of the shadows with her shirt tied in a tight knot behind her lower back, the scowl returned to Ty’s face.

  “Well hello,” said Colin, eyes traveling from her darkly painted eyes and thick brown curls down her curvy form. She smirked and pushed her chest out, hand resting on one cocked hip. Ty made a noise of disgust.

  “Let’s see,” said the first guy, a dark-skinned boy with dreadlocks. “Holes in their boots, eyes dumb as a dead pig, and the stink of acid. Must be Metalheads.” His friend laughed into his fist.

  Colin smirked, then wiped his grin away with the back of his hand. “Was that an insult, Ty? I … just … can’t … seem … to … catch … on.” He scratched his head.

  “I think so.” She shrugged. The other two looked at each other and laughed, but the lines around the first boy’s eyes had gone tight.

  “Damn,” he said. “That’s a girl. Thought for sure she was a man.”

  “That’s ’cause she’s twice the man you are,” Colin shot back. His hand on Ty’s arm stopped her from smacking those smirks right off their fat faces, even as her skin prickled with resentment. He’d meant it as a compliment, but it didn’t feel that way.

  The girl giggled, maybe at them, maybe just to flirt with Colin. Girls were always losing their heads around him. He sent her a smile blocked immediately by the second boy, whose hair was curled so tightly against his skull it looked like it might break.

  “Why’d you cross the lines, Metalhead? You know better.”

  “Jed Schultz sent us to see a friend of his,” Colin told them, easy as he might’ve said nice weather today or say, you all have matching belts, how ’bout that.

  Ty’s jaw locked. Why was he pulling the Schultz card? They could have handled this on their own. It took a second for her to figure out he probably didn’t want them finding out about the money in his pocket.

  Jed Schultz had immunity in Bakerstown, which meant they had immunity in Bakerstown. She wasn’t used to that kind of protection. She wasn’t sure she liked it. A reputation like that came with a cost.

  McNulty’s boys sighed and took a step back.

  “Yeah, all right,” said the boy with dreads, the disappointment thick in his voice. “Why didn’t you say so? McNulty and Schultz go way back.”

  “I’ll bet they do,” said Colin.

  Jed was the white knight of the gray city, the middleman between the people and their wealthy employers at Hampton Industries. McNulty was the king of the underworld—a big Northerner who made his money from the wealth of Bakerstown through girls and gambling and dope. Word was, McNulty used to run Metaltown before Jed came along, but after Jed won the workers over, he booted McNulty across the beltway. There was a truce in place: as long as their interests didn’t clash, their people didn’t clash. But that didn’t mean they liked each other.

  “Shouldn’t you Bakerstown pricks be in school?” Ty asked. “I think I hear your teacher calling.”

  “School?” Dreads’ patronizing tone made her hands curl into fists. “Surprised you know what that is, she-man. Are they teaching factory workers to read now?” His friends laughed.

  She laughed with them, despite the bite of annoyance. She could read. Kind of.

  “We graduated early,” said the boy with the curly hair. “McNulty handpicked us to run his crew.”

  “Least he got it right with one of you.” Colin leaned around them to grin at the girl.

  She twirled her hair around one finger.

  Ty’s eyes narrowed. “Look, interesting as this is, some of us actually got things to do.”

  A long, hard stare passed between her and Dreads, kicking up her pulse. He was the first to back down, bringing a smirk to her face. When he turned away, Curly Hair balked, but followed. McNulty’s clan let them pass without further trouble, though Ty could hear them arguing with the girl all the way down the block.

  “Still think he’s slick?” said Colin when they were out of earshot. “Jed’s even got Bakerstown showing some respect.”

  Ty grunted. If McNulty was letting Jed do business in Bakerstown it could only mean one of two things—that McNulty didn’t see Jed as a threat, or that Jed was even worse than his Bakerstown rival. Either way, she would have rather they’d fought—better than hiding behind some slick’s back.

  The intersection opened to reveal two twin stacks of apartments up ahead, cut down the center by the remainder of Fifth Street. The place was worn by the weather, and by the hodgepodge add-ons that folks had done over the years. Tattered sheets and clothing hung to dry outside the windows, some of which were covered by cardboard or trash bags. Half the place was marked by graffiti—most of it green for McNulty’s clan. Somewhere in the distance, a baby was crying.

  It was good, somehow, to see that even Bakerstown—the middle ground between the empty pockets of Metaltown and the high society of the River District—was just as sorry as where they’d come from. She hoped Colin saw that too. Then he might stop thinking things were so much better across the beltway.

  “We’re here.” Colin stopped before a bar with dark windows and a set of stairs that went down into the entrance. The sign protruding from the door front said “Cat’s Tale” in pale gold letters. Harsh words and harsher laughter filtered outside.

  Beside the stairs was another set of steps, these leading up to an enclosed concrete landing. They climbed around the paper trash and a stray tabby that hissed at Ty, and stopped before the first door: 114 Fifth Street.

>   Colin took a deep breath, reminding Ty to breathe too. She registered the nerves in her belly then—they’d been brewing since she set foot out of her own territory this morning. They needed to get this over quickly and get back where they belonged.

  Colin knocked twice and they waited. Stupid, Ty thought, for them to come now, in the middle of the day. But Jed had said this man hadn’t been to work in a while, so maybe he was home.

  They didn’t wait long. From the inside came the sound of locks releasing, one at a time. Three clicks, and then the door pulled inward. A skinny boy about their age with yellow hair and dark rings around his swollen eyes answered the door. He was wearing a thermal shirt and pants that were too short, and his apartment stunk of boiled cabbage.

  Ty heard Colin’s quick intake of breath and braced defensively, but he didn’t make a move. A second later the stranger’s eyes rounded with recognition.

  “Colin?” the boy said. “What are you doing here?”

  3

  LENA

  Lena set down her electronic reader and stared out the study window at the stone steps that led from the great room downstairs to the gardens, and then to the dock. The river was bright blue, as it always was after a recent color treatment. An illusion, of course; the water was filthy. The street people from the surrounding districts bathed and laundered in it—and, disgustingly enough, fished in it as well—leaving it even more sludgelike than the sticky black oil water of the Whitewater Sea.

  “Is there a problem, Miss Hampton?” asked her tutor, an angular, birdlike woman with a hooked nose. Her dark hair had become speckled with gray over the last year, and she wore it in a short cap around her skull.

  “I’m tired of this, Darcy,” said Lena. She rubbed her eyes, the satin fingers of her gloves making the perfect blue water disappear behind her fine lids. “If I have to read one more word of this nonsense I’ll be forced to throw you in the river.”

  Darcy flattened any expression she might have had, and adjusted her simple black dress.

  “Now Miss Hampton, there’s no need to be hostile.”

  “Not according to the Advocates,” she argued, pleased to have elicited a sigh from her tightly strung tutor. “Hostility seems to be working quite well for them.”

  Just last week she’d read that the Advocates—Eastern Federation radicals, desperate for food—had taken out a supply train headed toward the southern border. The contents, not rations but Hampton Industries weapons, had all been stolen, a large painted A marking the side of the empty boxcar. For a group who claimed they wanted peace, they seemed to have no problem killing Northern Federation soldiers to get it.

  She glared down at her reader again. Poetry was useless, especially poetry in a foreign tongue. If the purpose was to make her worldly, she’d rather learn about the war, and what news there was from the front lines. She certainly wasn’t getting any information about it from her father and brother, who rarely included her in business discussions.

  “The Advocates are misguided,” said Darcy, looking out the window now as well. “Hunger makes people dangerous.”

  Hungry or not, they were ignorant if they thought there was enough food and clean water for everyone to share. Resources were thin. Just last week the Hamptons’ cook had run out of bread for her morning toast. A flour shortage, he claimed. The effects of the crisis were felt even in the River District.

  “Well, crates of military-grade weapons make people dangerous too,” said Lena. “Maybe they should try eating them if they’re so hungry.”

  Sometimes her father liked to say that it wasn’t a war about resources, but a war about entitlement. People fighting for what they thought they deserved, rather than what they actually needed. Even the North, who claimed defeating the Eastern Federation’s military would enable them to offer aid to the poor starving citizens there, really just wanted their enemy’s land. She wasn’t naïve. More than once she’d heard her whispers during her father’s parties at the house of what Hampton Industries could do if they expanded their factories into the Eastern territories.

  “You’ve been doing some extra reading, I see.” Darcy’s thin brows pulled inward. There was a fine line between geography and politics, and her father’s orders were that Lena only study the first.

  “I read that their leader—Akeelah something—wants a seat on the Assembly,” Lena pressed. The article about the supply train attack had mentioned as much. Apparently he’d lived on the streets, and worked in the cornfields. There were no pictures of him. Perhaps he was hiding, just like his Advocates.

  She could hardly imagine a laborer from the East serving on a board entirely composed of Northern citizens. Her father had served his elected, six-year term alongside military commanders, police chiefs, and other businessmen and women when she was a child. Every other month they’d met to discuss Northern Federation issues, to govern the North. Including anyone from the Eastern Federation, much less the leader of a rebel group, would have been like inviting a traitor over for dinner.

  “Perhaps he just wants their voice heard,” said Darcy.

  “Then perhaps he should tell his people to stop stealing our weapons and ambushing Northern troops.”

  “Sometimes people feel opposition is the only way to get attention.” A vein appeared on Darcy’s forehead. She appeared as if she might say more, but her mouth snapped shut at the creaking of footsteps in the foyer. They both turned toward the front of the house, but the noise had stopped. It was probably a maid, dusting the hallway paintings.

  “Let’s return to task,” Darcy said quickly. “Did you encounter a problem with the poem?”

  “I just want to know—”

  “The poem,” she said firmly, ending their previous talk.

  “Yes,” said Lena. She leaned forward in her desk chair; the bolts of fabric tightened around her waist and made it difficult to breathe. “The problem is it’s pointless to learn the ancient languages when they serve absolutely no practical purpose in the real world.”

  “And what would you know of the real world, my dear?”

  Lena stood sharply at the sound of her father’s voice from the study door. Josef Hampton was statuesque as always, his face clean-shaven, smooth as bronze, his black hair neatly combed. The gray suit he wore had been pressed to crisp lines. Its gray vest was open at the front, an indication that he’d just finished his morning meeting. She hadn’t expected him home so soon; he normally kept to his office, a separate cottage on their estate, until the evening.

  Lena smoothed down her hair, tucking a flyaway into the tight knot at the back of her neck. She cleared her throat, noting the way Darcy’s hands had folded in front of her hips and her head had fallen forward in respect for her employer.

  “Good morning, Father,” said Lena, unsure yet if his cool smile meant he was pleased to see her. She hoped he hadn’t overheard too much.

  “Good morning, Lena. Please, continue,” he said. “You were just telling the tutor about the faults in your curriculum.”

  Lena’s neck warmed. She lifted a gloved hand and waved off the comment. “I was just trying to lighten the mood.” She laughed. She couldn’t hear Darcy breathing. Lena hoped she didn’t plan on passing out.

  “I only meant,” continued Lena, “that I wish I could study something more useful. The old languages get their best use as party tricks these days. Everything now is in the common tongue.”

  Josef’s face did not change. “And what if I told you an education in the arts is one of the few things that separate us from the working class?”

  Lena turned back toward the window, wondering how it was possible that her father, the most brilliant man in the Northern Fed, could be so impractical. “Then I would say that Hampton Industries rests on the backs of the workers, not the back of the arts. And that there are a great many other things that separate us beside that. Circumstance, for instance.”

  “Circumstance?” chided her father. “Is that what children are calling money these day
s?”

  She wouldn’t know. She rarely socialized with others outside of committee parties, and her father didn’t approve of her mingling with the families of their subordinates. The Hamptons remained untouchable, leading the Northern Federation’s Tri-City area—the River District, Bakerstown, and the factory district—in revenue. But they hadn’t always been so fortunate. Her great-grandfather had worked his way up from poor means, living in a space smaller than her bathroom while he built the foundation of their empire. She often imagined him alone, tinkering with various forms of ammunition in his tiny shop while the people who would one day make him rich squabbled outside on the streets.

  Because of his diligence, her family had a legacy, one that thrived on a bloody violence they would never see up close. Their various factories manufactured military supplies—bombs, guns, all grades of weapons and ammunition. A necessary business, according to her father. The survival of the Federation depended on it.

  “Miss Hampton,” piped Darcy. “Perhaps we should study outside today? It’s quite lovely.”

  Lena chewed the inside of her cheek, unable to turn around and face her father for fear of the disappointment in his eyes. She didn’t know why her mouth ran away with her sometimes.

  But Josef had begun to laugh, a deep, honest sound of amusement. Lena faced him then, consciously holding back a smile.

  “Such a sweet girl,” he said, dark eyes gleaming. “Darcy, perhaps you should be teaching Lena a trade of some kind. Welding perhaps. Or sewing. There are always open positions in the kitchen.”

  Lena acknowledged the chill in the room and forced her chin to stay level.

  “I meant no disrespect, Father.”

  He smiled at her, and approached slowly, stopping a few feet away.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s in your nature to question. I sometimes wonder, if you had a mother…” He trailed off, eyes focusing on the river outside.