Metaltown

  “He didn’t find it,” Lena guessed. If someone had found a cure to the corn flu, she would have heard of it. Everyone would have heard of it. There would be no fighting over clean food. The war would be over.

  “No.” There was regret in Darcy’s voice. “He thought he had it—he was so confident he tested it on himself, even gave his wife and daughter a vaccine he’d concocted. Horrible stuff, injected right into the belly. Left an awful welt.”

  Lena cringed. She’d had her vaccines against the pox and measles in her youth, but had been fortunate not to scar.

  “None of it worked,” Darcy went on. “Both the doctor and his wife contracted the very illness he was trying to treat. They held on for longer than most, but near the end, his investors began to prowl. The research in those labs was worth a lot of money, and the family’s death provided enormous opportunity. Do you understand?”

  Lena nodded. “The first to find the cure would be the most powerful person in the Northern Federation.”

  “Yes,” said Darcy, lowering her voice to a whisper. “But the first to prevent someone from finding the cure would also be very powerful.”

  Lena couldn’t wrap her mind around that. “Why would someone stop research that could end the war?”

  Darcy breathed in slowly through her teeth. “Not everyone is so eager to end this war, Miss Hampton.”

  Lena closed her eyes, hearing the low voice of her father’s associate return to her: In order to keep our little rebellion in action, we’ll need five hundred units of artillery, delivered by railway, in unmarked crates to Billington. That ought to fuel this damn war for another eight months, at least.

  The business of war.

  She felt the sudden urge to touch the rope doll her nanny had made her all those years ago, but realized she didn’t have it. She’d left it at Shima’s. Before she’d gone with Colin to Small Parts. Before the press.

  “What about the doctor’s child?” Lena asked. His daughter would have inherited her father’s work and income. In her absence, Hampton Industries had been absorbing the profit.

  Darcy gripped her elbows tightly. “When she didn’t get sick, one of the investors hired a gangster from Bakerstown—a man by the name of McNulty—to find her, and kill her.”

  Call McNulty. This note hadn’t been about an unresolved work issue, it had been about a bounty, about a killer looking for his victim.

  “My father was the investor.” Lena’s blood ran cold.

  Darcy nodded. “The woman begged me to take her child away, to hide her, but your father’s men were already watching.” She reached for the tray, began stacking the larger pieces of glass on top of it. “I took the girl to an orphanage. St. Mary’s, I think it was called. And then I caught a train. I thought maybe if I left, it would draw them away from Metaltown. I didn’t know what else to do.” A wedge of glass sliced open the tip of her finger, but she continued stacking, faster now than before. “Your father’s men caught me near the southern border. They wanted the girl, of course, but how could I give her up? She was just a child.”

  “What did you tell them?” Lena asked weakly.

  “That she was sick—that the vaccination in her belly that had killed her parents was killing her, too—and that I’d left her near the river. She’d go easy that way. Numb from the cold.” Her eyes closed tightly. “They didn’t believe me.” She’d stopped stacking now, and one hand lifted absently to the back of her head. Lena wondered if she’d been injured. All the times she’d shied away from Josef Hampton stood out sharply in Lena’s memory.

  “You didn’t go to the police?” But even as she said it, she knew this wasn’t an option. She’d seen the chief of the Bakerstown police in her own house, sharing drinks with her father, who donated huge amounts of money to support the force.

  Darcy gave a wan smile. “And tell them what? That I’d taken a child and left her at an orphanage? You know as well as I do where their loyalties lie.”

  “Why?” Lena pressed. “All these years you’ve been trapped here. Why not run?”

  Darcy gave a watery laugh. “Do you think I haven’t tried? I think they would have just killed me and been done with it if they’d found the child’s body. The fact that she was missing turned out to be the only thing keeping me alive.”

  Lena felt ill. She’d been so preoccupied with her own problems she’d never considered that Darcy was her father’s prisoner. She felt terrible for all the cruel things she’d said, all the times she’d taken out her frustrations with her family on her. Darcy hadn’t chosen to be here, and Lena couldn’t even begin to imagine the fear and abuse she must have received, or the bravery it took to get up each morning and guard her secret.

  Her father had hired someone to kill a child. Another fragile yellow bird in the palm of his hand. And now he would go after Colin, and the Small Parts Charter. He would sell weapons to the Advocates, who would in turn kill Northern soldiers. He was a monster—one who owned gangsters, politicians, and police alike. There was no way to stop him.

  “This girl—Astor Tyson—is she alive?” asked Lena. The dreadful meaning of the note she’d taken from Minnick’s desk took full hold of her then. McNulty may have already found Astor Tyson, may have already been paid by her father to make her disappear.

  Darcy had backed into the door, and was resting against it, worn down by the past.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But if she is, she’ll be worth a lot of money. Astor Tyson is heir to Division IV—the entire Medical Division. She’d be worth more than you, Miss Hampton.”

  31

  COLIN

  It was the coughing Colin heard first. The sticky hacking that turned to a gasp, and then a desperate groan.

  He pushed himself up to his hands and knees. His cheek was frozen from where it had pressed against the floor and when he blinked, his vision stayed blurry.

  Rags. He needed rags. And a wastebasket. A cup of the clean water they saved for Cherish.

  “Shut up and die already!” A man’s voice echoed off the walls, its origin indistinguishable. Colin jolted up, reaching automatically for the knife at his waist. A sharp hiss of pain tore through him. The knife was missing, and in its place was a bruise.

  Panic clawed up his spine.

  He wasn’t at home. His last memory was of the meeting with Hampton. And then Lena, shouting his name. The police, they’d attacked him. They’d brought him here. Wherever here was. Jail, if he had to guess.

  He massaged the base of his neck, an attempt to clear the throbbing in his skull enough to think. His fingertips probed the darkness, inching over the cold, damp cement floor until it connected to a smooth stone wall. He followed it up, rising to his feet. Both arms extended, the heels of his hands flattening against each side. When he stood on his toes, he could reach the ceiling. The room had no windows. No light.

  He tried to control his breathing, but it echoed in his eardrums like waves. Great ocean waves, like the ones he’d imagined at Rosie’s Bay. He pinched his eyes closed and tried to conjure the warmth of the sun, but something bumped up against his shoe, and squeaked when he jumped back. He hated rats.

  He found the edges of the door, blunt nails scraping down the seal. There were bars in the center, spaced widely enough that he could reach his wrist through. The hallway beyond was just as dark.

  “Hello?” he called in a hoarse whisper. His muscles felt weak. Questions he couldn’t answer slammed through his head, threatening his resolve to keep it together: how long he’d been here, and where Lena was, and if his ma and Cherish knew what had happened.

  “Keep it down!” came a male voice from somewhere to his right. A laugh, or a sob, gripped his throat. He’d never been so happy to hear another’s voice.

  “Where are we?” Colin asked. “The jail?”

  “No.” The voice was closer now, and sounded vaguely familiar. Probably wishful thinking. “A facility. For food testing.”

  His stomach dropped. Hampton had bypassed jail
and taken him right to the executioner. He tried to focus. He knew where the food testing plant was. On the outskirts of Metaltown, beyond the beltway.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked, desperate to keep the conversation going.

  The boy hesitated. “I … I don’t remember. Four days? Five maybe? It’s hard to tell in the dark.” He paused when a groan came from a few cells down. “Hey, why’d they throw you in here?”

  Colin succeeded in pushing his forearm through the bars, but he couldn’t go beyond the elbow. He swore as the pain shot up into his shoulder. He swept blindly for the handle.

  “Pissed off the wrong guy,” said Colin. The boy laughed a little crazily. “What about you?”

  “Same thing,” he said. “Guy wouldn’t happen to be named Schultz, would he?”

  Colin hesitated, then continued his search, straightening out his arm to get through. “He was one of them.”

  “I think he killed my dad.”

  A grave pity mingled with his growing sense of urgency. Schultz might go after his ma and Cherish for what Colin had done. Hayden might not be there to defend them.

  The thought of his brother drew Ty’s words from his memory. At least Hayden isn’t the only one in the family selling out for a fistful of green. Whether she’d meant Hayden’s drug debt or something more, he didn’t know. He just wished things had gone differently back at the plant. If Ty had been outside Lacey’s, there’d be no way he would have gotten locked up, not as long as she was still standing. She had his back no matter what.

  At least she used to, before the charter, and the press, and Lena.

  “What happened?” asked Colin, trying to push Ty to the back of his mind by pressing the heels of his hands against his forehead.

  The boy coughed once to clear his throat. “He went to work. He’s a consultant at the chem plant. Anyway, he didn’t come home. I crossed the beltway to find out what happened and woke up here.”

  “Schultz is a bastard,” said Colin. He couldn’t reach the handle, so he withdrew his hand, the sweat pooling in the divots of his collarbone. “I say we get out of here and return the favor.”

  The boy scoffed and the familiarity in his tone struck Colin again. “If I could get out of here, don’t you think I would have done it?”

  “If there’s a way in, there’s a way out.”

  There was a long stretch of silence, and then the boy spoke again.

  “In school we read this book about a man who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family.”

  Colin closed his eyes, despising the darkness and the welling fear within him. He needed to get out, not chat about literature.

  “They threw him in prison,” the voice continued. “And they brought him out of his room only to torture him. Crazy stuff. Water up his nose and everything. But every time they took him, he learned a little more of the layout of the building. And then one day, when they came to take him out for torture, he made a run for it.”

  Colin was pacing the four steps to and from the door, wishing the guy would just shut up about torture. He hoped they hadn’t brought Lena here—the tight space would make her crazy.

  Just thinking about her made him crazy. He had to get out of here.

  “That’s a great story,” said Colin, half listening as his hands felt their way over the cold stone walls.

  “They bring us out twice a day for food testing,” whispered his hall mate. “I think I know where the exit is.”

  Colin froze. He returned to the door, wrapping his fingers around the freezing metal bars. “Tell me.”

  “It’s in the white room, behind the glass. Where the testers sit. The door behind it opens to the outside but you have to get into the testing room in order to see it. I think … I think two of us could get through. You sound like you’re still healthy.”

  Colin didn’t ask what happened in the testing room. He didn’t want to know.

  “I’m healthy enough,” said Colin, a wild, desperate kind of hope thrumming through his blood. “What’s this book called, anyway?”

  “Flight of the Fox,” answered the boy.

  Flight of the Fox. Colin searched his memory for where he’d seen that name before, and then pictured it. Sitting in a pile of papers on the table in an apartment in Bakerstown.

  His insides bottomed out.

  “Gabe?”

  Silence. Then: “Who are you? Who’s there?”

  Colin swallowed. Schultz had killed Gabe’s father, Mr. Wokowski, possibly because of him. Because he’d told Schultz Wokowski didn’t want his money. He grasped the bars so hard his hands began to shake, but his body melted down, until all his weight was hanging onto them.

  “It’s Colin,” he said weakly.

  Gabe didn’t say another word for a long time.

  * * *

  Hours, maybe days later, the lights in the hallway buzzed, then flickered on. Colin, curled in the back corner of his cell to keep warm, shoved himself up, blinking back the brightness. His squinting eyes shot around his cell—no more than a cement closet, the floor damp, the corners marked by black mold. It may not have been a jail, but it sure looked like one.

  He was so hungry his stomach hurt.

  A guard in a beige suit came to the front of his cell and told him to put his hands between two bars. They were cuffed; the cold steel bit into his wrists.

  “You got a visitor,” the guard said. The cell next to Colin’s was silent. Whether that meant Gabe was sleeping or listening, he didn’t know.

  Colin had a hard time keeping his steps even and measured as he followed the guard through a maze of halls. There were no windows, no signs posted. He looked for something to track his progress—to learn the layout of the building as Gabe had suggested—but he was surrounded by white-painted bricks.

  His pulse had doubled by the time they reached a small room, large enough only for a single metal table and two chairs. His Ma had come. Or Ty. Maybe even Lena. Someone was going to get him out of this place.

  The guard told him to sit, then fastened his cuff to a circular ring at the edge of the table and left the room.

  A frantic kind of hope exploded in his chest. The terror of what lay behind him seemed so much worse with even this little separation. He couldn’t go back into that cell. The cold floor, and the thick darkness, and the fear that no one was coming, had all been seared into his memory. So what if he was yellow about the whole thing. This was a place of nightmares, worse than he could have imagined. If leaving was a matter of telling Hampton he was sorry, he would do it. He would kiss his damn shoes if that’s what the man wanted. He didn’t care, as long as he didn’t go back.

  His hope was crushed by thoughts of Gabe, and Mr. Wokowski. He couldn’t leave Gabe behind. No one deserved to rot here.

  Colin waited. And waited. His nerves wrenching tighter with each passing minute. After a while, he began to think this was some kind of trick. They were going to tease him with the prospect of getting out, then crush his relief by throwing him back in a cell.

  He stood, but couldn’t extend to his full height with his cuffs locked to the table. Just when he was about to call out, the door opened, framing a thin man in a suit with a tail of slicked-back hair. A thick wool coat draped over his arm, and Colin shivered just looking at it.

  “Colin,” said Jed with a smile—the same smile Colin had once been warmed to see. He turned to the guard. “I’ll knock when we’re finished.”

  The guard nodded and closed the door. Jed laid his coat over the back of the chair opposite Colin, then took a seat. Overhead, the harsh yellow lights buzzed.

  Jed kept smiling. Colin’s hope dried, and turned sour, and burned in his chest. Slowly, he sunk into his metal chair.

  “How do you like your new place?” Jed held his arms out.

  Colin didn’t answer.

  “It’s a little drafty,” Jed said. “But I hear the food is wonderful.”

  Colin’s eyes narrowed.

  “Have you sampled any of
it yet?”

  “What are you doing here?” Colin asked.

  “I thought that was obvious,” said Jed. “I came to visit an old friend. We are friends, aren’t we, Colin?”

  He wanted, more than anything, to wring Jed’s neck. To tell him what a liar and a crook he was. To call him out for being Hampton’s pet, and maybe even killing Mr. Wokowski. But Colin was cuffed to a table, and Jed was not. He could go back outside, with Colin’s ma, and Cherish, and the charter, and leave Colin inside this festering pit, wondering what was happening to them.

  “You made a good run of it out there.” The sudden drop of Jed’s voice took Colin off guard. If it had been anyone else, he might’ve thought the sentiment was real. The People’s Man looked down at his hands, folded on the table. The sleeves of his suit jacket covered his wrists.

  “In this world, you have to fight to get to the top, or get crushed by the heap, am I right?”

  Colin’s fists bunched, and the chain between his cuffs clattered against the table. Much as he didn’t want to go back to that cell, he’d rather be there, alone, than out here with slick Jed Schultz. He hadn’t come here just to reminisce about the press, or philosophize on life. He had a purpose. He needed to get to it.

  “You nearly did it,” Jed continued. “You just forgot one crucial step.”

  “Yeah?” said Colin. “What’s that?”

  Jed spread his hands over the table. “You have to take out the competition.”

  Colin snorted. Of course it was too much to press for his own charter’s rights while the Brotherhood was around. Two separate charters couldn’t possibly exist in the same place at once. Not when Jed wasn’t getting paid for both of them, anyway.

  He forced his shoulders back, and his jaw to stop grinding.

  “Is that what I am, Jed? Your competition?”

  Schultz met his stare evenly, and despite himself, Colin was humbled. The man was conniving, but he’d survived Metaltown a lot longer than Colin had. Even if he’d gone about it the wrong way, he’d built himself a small empire, and that was nothing to sneer at.

  “Not mine,” said Jed. “Hampton’s.”