LEON STUDIED THE MAP that Bonebreak had scribbled on the torn-out page of a paperback novel. The lines were as shaky as the creature’s voice behind the mask, jerking and twisting and sometimes ending randomly, supposedly showing him the way safely through the supply tunnels from Bonebreak’s shop to the sector that housed the Axion delegates.
Deliver this provision pack to them, Bonebreak had said, handing Leon a damp wrapped package. And don’t open it.
Well, no danger there. From the faintly rotting smell emanating from the package, Leon was the opposite of curious to know what was inside. He’d heard rumors of the Axion’s penchant for body parts—pretty depraved beliefs for a supposedly highly evolved species.
The air in the tunnels was so thin his lungs ached. He wheezed hard and shoved the map in his back pocket, then crawled down the tunnel, following a track that blinked with faint lights. His left shoulder still ached from where they’d sewn on that rubbery shielding to brand him as one of them.
Bottom-feeders, he thought. This kind of sneaking-around-in-ducts shit was meant for someone small, like Rolf. Leon was as cumbersome as a rhino and about as loud and—
He stopped.
Ahead, a thin line near the bottom of the tunnel shimmered like sparkly fishing wire. He inched closer and adjusted the headlamp Bonebreak had given him. It was attached to the upper half of a Mosca mask, and it smelled like death. The light shone on the shimmering wire. Not wire, exactly. It was clearly broken in places, more like a hologram or laser beam catching the chalky air.
It had to be one of the cleaner traps Bonebreak had warned him about. Trip it, and he’d combust in a ball of fire.
Slowly, he eased a leg over the trap, his muscles shaking. If only there were more air to breathe. As it was, he felt so light-headed. Pull yourself together, he ordered himself, easing one hand over the trap, then the other. A bead of sweat rolled off his forehead and fell toward the trap.
He cringed, bracing for an explosion.
But the drip landed a fraction of an inch to the left. Dizzy with relief, he eased his other leg over, and then collapsed against the tunnel wall, breathing hard.
“Try to clean me,” he muttered. “You can clean my ass, is what you can clean.” He dug in his pocket for a shard of chalk and marked the wall on either side of the trap with a cartoon bomb. He shone the headlight to admire his artwork.
Not bad.
After more crawling, and two more cleaner traps that he marked with pictures, he reached a point where the tunnel changed to roughly hewn rock, though the bluelight track continued on unabated. The surface was dusty against his hands. Ahead, the tunnel led past a handful of small metal doors.
“Well, shit. This isn’t right.”
He pulled out Bonebreak’s map but didn’t see anything that indicated little doorways in a row. The map was useless. Bonebreak was probably trying to lead him straight to his death.
A whirring sound made him look over his shoulder. A square package was coming down the tunnel, guided by the bluelight, just high enough off the ground so it wouldn’t trigger any cleaner traps. He knew the Kindred had all kinds of crazy powers, but seeing a floating box hurtling toward him was still too weird to process, until he realized the tunnel was so tight that there wasn’t enough room for the package and for him. He crawled faster, sweeping the headlight left and right to search for any of the nearly invisible traps. He finally reached the indentation for the first small doorway and threw himself into it just as the package hurtled by.
He pressed his back against the door, waiting for the package to pass. Okay, hurtled might have been an exaggeration. The package still hadn’t even passed by yet. FedEx was faster than this.
He settled back against the doorway to wait, and sniffed the thin air. Was that . . . horse shit? And were those . . . voices? Yeah, voices. Coming from behind the door. He pressed his ear against the crack. One voice was masculine and almost familiar. Leon made out a single word.
Zebra.
Zebra? Well, why not. By now he was used to weird shit. At least the voices were speaking English. He sniffed again, and it smelled stronger. He pressed his ear against the door, trying to muffle the sound of his wheezing.
“I’ll put the zebra back in its cell,” the voice said. “Mali needed your help anyway.”
Leon’s hands started shaking. He recognized the voice now. It was Lucky. And Mali must be close too. Mali, the crazy girl with stringy braids and ninja moves who, somehow, though he’d never have imagined it in a billion years, he actually kinda liked. Liked liked. He’d refused to acknowledge it in the cage, but that was what happened when you had weeks with no one to talk to but Mosca: You accepted tough things about yourself, like an undeniable attraction to a weirdo.
He raised a fist to bang on the door, but stopped. The last time he’d seen Lucky and Mali was when he’d abandoned them, unconscious and sopping wet, on a control room floor. There was a strong chance they wouldn’t be thrilled to see him again.
But still. It was Mali.
He raised his fist to knock.
He stopped again.
What if there were Kindred on the other side too? It didn’t seem likely; Kindred didn’t seem the type to hang around manure, zebra or otherwise. Lucky and Mali were probably locked in some jail or fake world behind that door; they probably needed him. He should knock.
But again, he didn’t.
Sweat dripped onto the chalky rock floor. What was he thinking, anyway? Rescuing them from some zoo-themed jail was a heroic thing to do—and he only looked out for himself. Back in Auckland, when he was just a tyke, his dad had taken him aside right before they’d locked him in prison. There’s nothing in the world more important than kin, he’d said, and pointed to the tattoos on his face that told the history of their family’s achievements. Your brothers steal, you steal with them. They fight, you fight with them. They go to prison, you go to prison too. Everyone else in the world can go to hell, but not your kin.
And Leon’s only kin on this station was Leon.
Slowly, heart pounding, he drew a zebra-stripe symbol next to the door with chalk, so he wouldn’t mistakenly stumble upon them again. Then he crawled away. He turned one way, then the other, trying to get away from the voice in his mind urging him to go back and help them. He crawled past the next few doorways, sniffing. He swore he smelled campfire smoke, and then later, strawberries, and stopped to make marks next to each of the doorways. He continued crawling down random tunnels, just barely avoiding another cleaner trap. Screw the map. And screw Lucky and Mali and the others. They aren’t kin, he told himself again. He just wanted to breathe some fresh air. Gulp it down, like a man dying of thirst would drink water. These tunnels were so tight. Were they getting smaller? Chalk was getting everywhere. It tasted ashy, almost like something burning. The air had taken on the smell of smoke, not the pleasant campfire smell from before, but like something roasting and rotten. He pressed a hand to his nose, his eyes bleary with the smoke, and took a corner too fast.
Something zapped his arm.
A cleaner trap!
There it was, that thin sparkly line, and his hand right smack in the middle of it. His throat closed up, but no ball of gas came. No flames.
And then he saw why.
Just ahead in the tunnel, curled in a ball, was the charred body of some kid who had already triggered the trap—it must not have been reset yet.
Leon jerked his hand out of the trap’s laser light, eyeing the charred body with a grimace. Judging by the smell, it had been there a few days, at least.
He crawled closer, shining his light on the body hesitantly. A black kid about his age, arms covering his face. Most of his clothes were too charred to be recognizable, though they were made of a khaki material with a lion emblem on the pocket. Leon nudged a pair of half-melted goggles around his neck. Part of the boy’s skin oozed off, and Leon gagged and stumbled toward the closest door.
“Gross gross gross.”
He shoved the door open a crack. Blessedly, it led to an empty hallway.
Fresh air came pouring in, smelling like ozone, and he gulped it greedily, trying to get the smell of burned skin out of his nose. He should climb out, figure out where he was, deliver this reeking package, and go drown himself in vodka until he’d forgotten everything he’d just seen.
He started to open the door farther.
But then he thought of that lion emblem.
The boy wasn’t far from the door where he’d drawn the zebra-striped symbol. Lions, zebras—it didn’t take a genius to guess the dead kid probably came from the same place where Lucky and Mali were being kept. What if Lucky and Mali ended up in the tunnels too? Would he be crawling over their charred bodies next?
He slammed the door closed. In the cage, he wouldn’t have hesitated to leave them behind. But something had changed. He had changed. For the first time in his life he had . . . friends. Friends who he’d rather not have die in a ball of fire. And in a way, he realized, his dad had been wrong. Friends mattered too.
Grumbling, he turned around. He retraced his chalky marks through the maze of claustrophobic tunnels, back toward the door with the zebra-stripe symbol.
Maybe—just this once—he could be a damn hero.