The Renegades (The Superiors) (32 page)

Chapter 44

Draven
and Cali spent a good deal of time huddling in the tent, its top sagging under
the weight of snow, waiting. Though fuel was scarce, when Draven procured fire
biscuits or other flammable items, they built small fires during the day. Draven
found a few broken bricks in the endlot and heated them in the fire so Cali could hold them at night for warmth. Although less snow fell here than in the
mountains, enough fell to completely bury the tent and collapse it several
times.

Draven
excavated the tent on these occasions, packing snow around the bottom and
working his way up the walls to partially obscure the tent without the weight
of snow crushing it. Finding anything to burn in the endlot became impossible
as the snow piled higher, one fall after another with very little melting. Scouting
for fuel and food without leaving a trail in the snow also became impossible,
and sometimes Cali had to go several days without eating. Once the snow had
lain several days, Draven could risk losing his footprints among others or use
paths cleared by snowplows. But in freshly fallen snow, he could not risk
leaving a trail to and from the tent, no matter how circuitous a route he took.

When
he ran out of packaged sap from the trackers, he resisted drawing from Cali unless
she ate. He could not risk losing her, and already her condition worried him. Her
form, once healthy if not exactly voluptuous, had grown thin. Though he piled
layers of clothing on her, as well as the sleep sack, still she shivered
through the night.

As
snow piled high on the endlot, Cali’s project came to a standstill. One night she
showed Draven what she had built so far, piling up rubble to make a three-walled
structure without roof or door. She had meant to carpet the floor.

“I’ve
never had real carpet,” she said. “It’s like your apartment. We’ll live like
Superiors.” Then she looked away, at the shanty she’d built, as if remembering
that he was a Superior. He could understand how, for a moment, she might have
forgotten. He was far from what she would hope for in a master. Perhaps she
didn’t mind too much, though. Perhaps she’d not imagined such freedom. Aside
from drawing from her, he rarely treated her like a sapien. He rarely thought
of her that way. She had become his companion, his charge. He took
responsibility for her, and her safety, and her many needs. When they spent so
many days lying in the tent together, the importance of remembering their
places faded away.

They
spent hours talking in the dark, making plans, dreaming, fantasizing about the
life they’d never have. Draven attempted to read Cali the books he had, despite
the frustration on both their parts. Cali didn’t understand much of the text,
and she pelted him with an unending stream of questions that he found so
distracting that he often stopped reading altogether.

Cali
especially had trouble with the oldest books, the ones written by humans. In
the first book he read, she didn’t understand how the woman got the baby—she
missed the subtleties of language and the implied sexuality. She didn’t
understand why the writer didn’t simply say ‘they had sex.’ She could not grasp
the concept of sex or illegitimate childbirth being a taboo subject or shameful
in any way. “Why is she hiding?” she would ask. “Why are people mad that she
had a baby? They should be happy for her. Why is she doing that? Which man does
she love? What happened to the baby she just had? Why are they talking about
someone else now, I thought the book was about her? So it’s two different
stories? Then why doesn’t one come after the other? How can two stories be told
at the same time?” Although Draven tried to explain that world to her as best
he could, sometimes he understood it no better than she. He had never been a
part of it, either.

During
their stay in the endlot, Draven also began to take out Cali’s scars. Each time
Byron had drawn from her without closing the bite properly, he’d left two tiny
beads under the skin. The bites riddled her arms and wrists, the sides of her
hands, the backs of her legs. Though the protective slime that formed around
the tiny droplet of venom tasted foul, Draven swallowed it just the same. He
could not afford to waste the bit of sap he’d spit out with it. Mindful always that
the poison could escape the beads if his teeth pierced them, he drew the beads
from her skin with surgical precision.

Cali
dreaded the procedure even more so than Draven did. While he had only to suffer
the unpleasant taste, she bore the intense pain that came with tearing the
beads from where they had grown into her flesh and skin and forcing them
through the pinprick puncture his teeth made. Despite the pain, she never asked
him to stop. He continued until Cali’s breathing became ragged and he could no
longer bear her agonized moaning.

“Do
you want me to go on?” he would ask. Though she always said yes, he never
withdrew more than five or six at a time.

More
than her suffering, he worried about taking too much sap. Already she grew
weaker with no help from him. He grew weaker, too, and resisting the offering
that lay beside him grew more difficult each night. The week she bled provided the
worst torment. Though her fluids differed from sap, they were similar enough to
call out to his ravenous thirst every moment he lay inside the tent with her.

That
week, he spent most nights outside, moving restlessly through the city, unwilling
to return without food or fuel. Three nights in a row he returned with food,
and on the fourth, he stole a small sack of fire biscuits from a store and
nearly ran into an Enforcer as he hurried out. He had just gained the roof when
he heard the commotion below and knew the store’s clerk had alerted the
Enforcer. Still, no one had seen him ascend the building, and he managed to
leap from the building to another, where he remained the rest of the night. By
morning, the search had ceased and he could make his way back to the endlot and
make a fire to thaw his immobile fingers.

After
settling Cali by the wisp of fire given off by a single fire biscuit, he drew
from her arm, sucking out the beads and swallowing the tainted sap before
spitting the clean, hard pellets into his palm. As he worked, he thought of the
nights when he had lain beside her and pressed his mouth to her warm, pulsing
throat.

“Where
are you getting all this food?” she asked when he had finished the nightly
extraction and seated himself beside her.

“From
other sapiens.”

“You’re
stealing their food?” Cali asked, looking up from the half-eaten jar of corn
she held.

“Yes.”

“But
they might be starving.”

“Unlikely.”

“But
how do you know? I mean, I know how hard it is to grow all this stuff, and pick
it and can it. And that’s just to have barely enough for the dry season.”

“Would
you have me watch you starve?”

“No,
but maybe you could take something from…I don’t know, a store or something.”

Draven
shook his head. “It’s too risky. I was nearly caught tonight. I cannot take
that risk again.”

“Well,
you have to try. I can’t eat this, knowing someone else might starve because of
me. Bring it back.” She pushed the bag of food towards him.

“What
do you think will happen to you if I am arrested?” he asked.

“I
don’t care,” she said. “You have to find some other way. I can’t steal food
from my own people, and hurt them, so I can stay here and eat.”

“Would
you go find your own food?” Draven asked. “Or would you lie here waiting for my
return until you grew too weak to move? Would you rather starve, or risk the
chance that someone goes hungry a few nights?”

Instead
of answering, Cali finished the corn in the can. When she’d scraped the last
kernels from the sides of the can with her finger, she looked into it and
sighed. “There has to be another way,” she said.

“There
is,” Draven said. “I can turn you in, and you’ll be sent back to your rightful
owner, and you’ll have as much food as you need, and no one will go hungry
because of it.”

She
drew herself inwards and shifted closer to the fire. “No. Not that.”

“Promise
me… if I am ever gone for more than one night and the following day, you will
find someone to take you to the Confinement. You will be cared for there.”

“What
are you going to do? You better not be planning something so I’ll have to go
back. You know I won’t go.”

“If
I am caught, I want to know you’ll be alright.”

“I’ll
be okay.”

He
took her hands in his and captured her gaze. “Promise me.”

“I
do, I promise. But don’t try to steal from a store, okay?”

“I
thought you wanted it.”

“Don’t
be smug,” she said, pushing her shoulder against his. She retracted one of her
hands but left the other in his. “I don’t want you to. I just…I hate the
thought of those people being hungry if their masters wouldn’t get them more food
or something. But I hate the thought of losing—I’d rather they go hungry than
not have you here.”

“To
protect you.”

“Well,
of course. I don’t want to go back. And I don’t think I’d do very well by
myself.”

He
had the sudden urge to kiss her, to kiss her hand and then her arm and then her
throat and put his teeth into her and suck. He dropped her hand.

She
sandwiched her hands between her knees and glanced at Draven and away again, as
if she guessed his thoughts.

“So,
shall I…read to you?” he asked, twisting around to crawl into the tent. The
slippery sleep sack scooted under him.

“Sure,
ah, maybe the little book today?” Cali said from the mouth of the tent. Draven
had lit the fire half a meter from the tent so they could sit in the opening
while they warmed themselves.

“Yes,
I think so,” he said. “Why don’t you finish eating while I read, and I will eat
before taking sleep.”

“Do
you think…” Cali started, and then shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What
is it?”

“Do
you think people—I mean humans—will ever write or read again?”

He
let out a little laugh. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well?
Do you think they could or not?”

He
paused, thinking of Sally, of himself. “I don’t imagine so. We’ve tried to
breed homo-sapiens with lower intelligence. Many of them, of you, I mean, are
hardly bright enough to feed themselves, let alone read.”

“Am
I brainless?”

“Of
course you’re not.”

“Would
you still think of me…the same, if I was?”

Draven
retrieved the book and slid into the cold sleep sack. Once cold, it did nothing
to warm him. “I don’t guess I would,” he said. “You’re strange and…you
fascinate me.”

Thinking
of her appeal made his teeth sing with urgency, made the inside of his mouth
draw in as if he could still salivate, made him want her again. He may have had
food for the last several days, but that did nothing to quench his thirst for
her. Perhaps nothing could.

He
longed to roll in her until her scent saturated him to his very bones, to lie full
on her and put his teeth to her throat and let the natural weight push down on
them until he could feel her skin stretching taut under the points of his
teeth, the tiny dimples in her skin puckering inward until the pressure broke
the skin and he pierced her, penetrating into the wet, warm flow of her life.

“You
look hungry,” Cali said, drawing into herself a bit. She pulled back from him
at the mention of it. If only she knew how much he wanted, how much it would
take to satisfy him. He’d never known how much he could eat until he’d eaten
from the dead, the night he’d lost Cali to Byron the second time. He’d never
known how much he could want until he had Cali in front of him every moment.
The constant craving wore at him. The substance of his addiction lay within
reach, taunting, waiting for his first sign of weakness, ready for him to let
go, to give in. How he wanted to, needed to.

But
only for sustenance, he reminded himself. He needed more because he had lost
more strength, missed more meals than ever before. Since evolving to a Superior,
he’d thought he only needed five rations a day, that it kept him strong and
healthy and normal. But he could eat much, much more than that, and he could grow
stronger than he’d ever imagined. He knew that now.

Had
a lack of food kept him weakened into submission all these years? Or something
else, some witlessness in him to never question it? Those five rations, his
menial jobs, his pathetic apartment had kept him in his place. He’d be grateful
to have them again. But now he knew too much to go back, as Cali did. Now he
knew that if he ate until he was satisfied and kept eating, he’d gain strength
beyond possibility, be able to leap across buildings effortlessly and scale
walls in seconds. Now he knew that the government, made up entirely of Second
Order Superiors, kept him and all his Third brethren in this state of need,
this weakened state of basic survival where they thought of little else.

And
why not? When people thought only of food, they were less likely to cause
dissention, discontent, unrest. The government kept Thirds in ignorance, like sapiens.
Seconds told them to be grateful for their meager handouts. They made Thirds
think that was the only way, that food shortage allowed each person only a few
rations per day. And how would Thirds learn otherwise? They could not break the
laws without dire consequences. They owned no livestock, so they wouldn’t know that
Seconds ate much more than they did. They knew Seconds were stronger, but they
didn’t know why. They were told they would get stronger with age. But Cali was
right. They were little more than slaves.

Draven
had broken free of the system, and now he was…what? A runaway slave, relentlessly
pursued, hiding in an endlot. Because he was dangerous, an outlaw and a traitor.
He knew too much, had done too much, had seen and learned and questioned too
much and gotten too close. He’d killed another slave, two more, whom the
Superiors in command had great use for. Slave hunters. Still hunted, Draven ran
onwards, clutching the only thing he’d gained in betraying his people. Now that
he’d achieved some measure of freedom, it didn’t look much better than slavery—fragile
and frightening and dangerous and tenuous. But it was freedom nonetheless.