Death Thieves Read online

  “You mean killed?”

  “You must understand. The government and the people cannot afford another crazy war. If you believe your neighbors to be harboring a possible crazy, you’re rewarded for outing them. People fear the government’s retaliation if they bond too much with their child and become unable to turn them over. And people fear loving a child they might not get to keep. So many have given up on the hope of raising a child. The regents have offered incentives—bigger homes, tax credits—things that will entice people to create a child no matter the outcome. But the people are giving up. Fewer people every year are willing to partake of the nurseries. In another generation, there won’t be anyone left.”

  My mouth had dropped open in horror. “Yeah. What did the government think was going to happen when they make people kill their own babies?”

  He snorted. “The people don’t. The doctors do the euthanizing.”

  With the heel of my hand, I shoved hard at his shoulder. “Are you crazy?”

  Tag caught my hand in his. “Summer, I know it’s in your vernacular to utter the word crazy in reference to many different things, but please, for your sake, try to be cautious in its use.”

  I yanked my hand free of his. “But what you’re saying is insane! You don’t kill your own little toddler just because he might not be as smart as the kid down the street!”

  “You don’t understand. This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about stability. It’s for the greater good.”

  “You’re right I don’t understand. I know a lot of people who aren’t mentally balanced, and I like them. Good people don’t kill their kids. Good governments don’t make them. And you want me to go and be a part of all this?” I jumped to my feet, a little wobbly on my makeshift shoes.

  Tag was quick to his feet, too. “Summer, don’t. Don’t run away again. Remember, you wanted to know the truth. You asked me to tell you, and I am not in a position to deny you that truth you desire.”

  “Okay, fine, so tell me what your infanticide has to do with me.” I still hadn’t decided against running. I wanted to. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and run away screaming, “Naaaaaaa, naaaaaaa, naaaaaaa! I can’t hear you!”

  “Professor Raik created the Orbital so we could seek out those who were untainted, whose blood was clean to make babies that are also clean.”

  Professor Raik. So the one responsible for my nightmare life finally had a name. “What about you? Are you one of the infected?”

  His jaw tightened. “I am.”

  Tag took a step toward me. For his one step forward, I took one back, almost landing myself in the river. Mud squished up and over my aluminum shoes, between my toes. I barely noticed it.

  “Professor Raik had no intentions of altering the past. He’s far too clever to unbalance time in that way.”

  “Clever? How do you know he isn’t a crazy? If he’s from your time then he has the disease.”

  Tag looked horrified I would even suggest such a thing. “He is clever. He took people who died in their prime, who died before they had a chance to really live—people like you. He’s going to build up society by creating a clean, pure-blooded generation—a generation who will never have to turn their children in for testing—one who will grow and develop normally and whose children and posterity can start over with a world gone quite literally mad.”

  Incredulity filled me. “So what’s to keep them from getting the same blood poisoning you guys have? Did you get it from toxins in the air? Or some chemical plant meltdown? Did you get it due to some aftermath of a nuclear holocaust? How are you going to keep my blood clean? What’s to keep me from getting your diseased blood, Tag?” I took a ragged breath, trying to hold back tears, thinking of all those little curly-headed toddlers being led to their deaths.

  “The HTH infection isn’t passed through the air.”

  “Then it’s probably in your water—or your food. You won’t be able to keep me from getting it.”

  “It’s not like that at all.”

  “Then what is it?” I took another step back, splashing into the water.

  Instead of advancing on me as he had been, he also took a step back, as though purposely dividing us. “It’s a sexually transmitted infection.”

  Chapter Ten

  I narrowed my eyes. The current unbalanced me. To catch myself, I plopped my other foot down into the water. “Sexually transmitted? What, like AIDS?”

  “Sexually transmitted as in it is transferred through sexual relations.”

  “I know what sex is, Tag.”

  He waited then, standing back apart from me. He waited while I pieced together the jumbled thoughts.

  “But you said something about being able to have babies. How can I have babies if I’ll just get your disease?” I hadn’t meant to say “your” as in his. I meant it as in the collective people of the future. Tag’s face hardened and he looked away. “You and I will never be anything more than we are. I am a soldier. While we’re together, I am your protector. You are the New Youth, the beginning of a new mankind. You are meant to find one of your own kind to . . .” He turned away and stomped back to his pack.

  I grunted. “Don’t act all insulted. I was so not propositioning you.”

  He didn’t respond. He looked intent on organizing things in his backpack, which didn’t need organizing. I stood in the water until the flash of the Orbital glinted in the sunlight. Without realizing it, I’d slogged my way toward Tag and his Orbital as if the device had its own gravity.

  “It needs to be recharged,” he said, laying it out in the sun next to several other things that he’d pulled out of the pack. I understood then that he hadn’t been organizing things but setting them out to collect solar power. Tag didn’t look at me or turn in my direction. It was as if by telling me the future problems, he remembered that we were not meant to be friends.

  After a long, hungry look at the Orbital, I wandered off a few feet and sat down, crossing my arms over my chest and glaring at Tag and all his future wonders soaking up sunlight. “It’s not like I wanted to be friends anyway. I’m not going Stockholm, Wineve.” I mumbled the words under my breath, and even though I felt certain Tag couldn’t hear them well enough to understand them, I felt better having said them out loud. Out loud . . . and not true. Over the last twenty-four hours, Tag had become the only human I could depend on. A lump of disappointment welled up in my throat at the understanding of how completely cut off I’d become to the world. You had to be cut off when you started to consider your kidnapper your friend.

  Alone.

  No Winter . . . and now no Tag—not if he was only to be my protector, if he wasn’t really allowed to even consider himself my friend.

  Alone.

  They killed little kids, kids who could walk and talk, who were learning to tie shoes and wash their hands before dinner.

  Alone.

  Crazies.

  I pulled my knees up under my chin and wrapped my arms around them. At the moment nothing made sense. Would they consider me crazy just because I disagreed with their actions?

  “What did the crazies do that was so bad that they deserved to die?” I asked loud enough for Tag to hear.

  “Their crimes are more numerous than the stars in the skies. You could look at a crazy the wrong way and he’d scratch your eyes out with a pencil just to teach you a lesson. They didn’t blend into society but stood apart from it and in many ways considered themselves above it. They were detached emotionally so that it didn’t bother them to kill an animal on the street or another child or even their own parents. Crazy.”

  I shuddered and hugged my knees tighter. The confusion of such things battled inside my mind. On the one hand, I couldn’t imagine living in fear of people who might harm you just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. My sense of justice battled with my belief in mercy. Killing little toddlers because they might grow up to be frightening? I shuddered again.

  How could they know the child
tested for instability would be instable in a harmful way? What if they were instable like an eccentric old aunt—crazy but harmless, and maybe even endearing?

  I couldn’t do this. I had to go back home. “So is the Orbital working now? Will we be able to jump to your future?”

  I called it his future in the same way he’d labeled it mine. Neither of us felt any inclination to lay claim on it.

  “It seems like it will be fine. It needs to be recharged, and I wasn’t able to do that at the house since the electrics were off. We’ll see after it charges.”

  Tag smoothed out the sides of the wristband so that every centimeter of the Orbital received full sunlight. He then went and found a place under a tree to rest. As his eyes drifted closed, I shifted to view the Orbital better. Tag was far enough away that I could snatch it and jump out of this time to another one—all before he’d even have time to sit up. I would have to wait a little bit so he’d fall asleep, so it had time to recharge . . .

  “Summer?”

  I jumped upon hearing my name. “What?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” The innocence in my voice sounded exactly like the lie it was.

  “Don’t touch my Orbital. I coded it. You can’t make it work. It’ll only work when it reads my ring and hears my password, which you wouldn’t guess in a million years. And even if you did guess, you’d have to steal my ring off my finger, and my finger with me still attached to it since it needs my living tissue to be effective. And then you’d have to figure out how to make your voice sound like mine.”

  “I don’t know why you’re telling me all this. It’s not like I—”

  “I’m telling you to save you the trouble of trying. Now we can both relax and get a nap. Don’t think about wandering off, either. Crazy law hasn’t been implemented yet. You wouldn’t want to run into someone who doesn’t like the way you look and decides to rearrange your face. Especially since you can’t seem to stop yourself from calling people crazy.” He rolled to his side, away from me.

  I glared at the Orbital. Stupid Tag and his stupid ring and stupid password. I crossed my arms over my chest, determined not to sleep just to spite him. Imagine him telling me what to do. Who did he think he was?

  Not too long after that decision, the sun warming its way to my bones lulled me into drowsiness. I finally succumbed and lay down on the ground, curling into a ball, and giving in to the darkness behind my eyelids, part of me grateful not to think about the babies being handed over to the doctors with smiles and syringes of poison.

  Fitful dreams interrupted my nap. I awoke with a cry, but once awake couldn’t recall anything from my dreams.

  “Day sleep must not suit you. You slept far better in the night than you did just now.” Tag said. He’d created a little fire pit and had lit a small fire. My first thought was that it was far too hot to be worrying about fires until I smelled the aroma. He was cooking. My stomach rumbled. We’d missed breakfast due to our hasty exit from the house. I edged closer to him, almost feeling like we were starting over from the beginning.

  “What are you cooking?”

  Without meeting my eye, he shrugged and ground several green leaves between his fingers into the small pan. “Mushrooms. I could only find sage for seasoning. I hope you don’t have allergies.”

  “I don’t.” Wild mushrooms sautéed in nothing but sage leaves didn’t sound like something I’d order from a restaurant, but at the moment, food was food. Anything was fine. He partitioned off a portion for himself and poured it into one of the empty tin foil packets. He handed the pan to me. Handle side out so I didn’t burn myself on the metal.

  “You didn’t split it fairly. Why should you give me more?”

  “It’s my job to ta—”

  “I know. To take care of me.” I pushed the pan back in his direction, but he refused to take it. “You can tell your Professor Raik that I can take care of myself.” I put the pan down at his feet and stalked off, wondering if I could catch a fish in the river with my bare hands. Nathan had a couple of friends who could do it.

  “If I divide it evenly, will you come back?” His voice called after me.

  Instead of responding, I returned to his little fire and sat down. I divided out the food again and dumped his remaining portion into his packet. I held the pan up by its handle. “Cheers,” I said, scooping the mushrooms with my fingers and slurping them into my mouth. The mushrooms burned both my fingers and my tongue, but I felt too famished to care. We’d hiked far to get to where we were—not that I disagreed with putting distance between us and civilization—not when I now knew that civilization had so many issues.

  We ate in relative silence. When we were through, I stood and brushed off my skirt. “Let’s get back.”

  We took our time gathering things up and making our way back to the house. And we kept conversation to a minimum. What could we say? With his new password protected Orbital, I resigned myself to no escape. Running away seemed pointless. Where would I run? I was trapped in a life-threatening time with not one friend to my name. Perhaps in the time Tag planned on dragging me to, I’d discover a way home.

  Tag’s silence seemed to stem from a different source. He held himself rigid, kept himself in check. His silence felt like a billboard announcing that there would be no more socializing between us.

  Darkness had fallen before we made it back to the house. I tripped several times due to the makeshift shoes and my toes jamming into rocks. Once back at the house, Tag jimmied the window open with his knife without my help. I did help with dinner, regardless of his protests. The minimal communication killed me until, during our actual meal, I couldn’t handle it any longer. “So how long were you watching me?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?” His fork hung in midair, and I swear a blush came over him in the green glow-stick light.

  “You were there in the cave. But I’d had creepy being-watched feelings about a week before that. How long were you watching me?”

  “Eight days prior to your death.” He took a huge forkful of beans into his mouth as though finalizing that discussion.

  “What were you watching me for?”

  He swallowed and fiddled with his fork on his plate before answering. “There are specifications that qualify a person to be recruited to the New Youth. Your blood had to be tested, obviously. A recruit must be resilient, strong, adaptable to new environments and changes, and . . .” he paused for long enough that I raised my eyebrows at him. “And they have to be of a particular aesthetic beauty—genetically superior in frame, height, that sort of thing.”

  “Who decides who is aesthetically beautiful?”

  He blushed. “Each soldier is trusted to make that determination.”

  So, Tag thought me beautiful? The notion made me blush as well.

  “I’m not dead.” I reminded him. “Where’d you get a body to use in place of mine?”

  He winced, but seemed resigned to march forward through my questions. “Professor Raik oversees those details. I merely stopped time and made the necessary changes.”

  “How do you know he didn’t kill the girl just to make her my surrogate body?”

  “Summer, Professor Raik is a noble man. He did not murder anyone.” He took another huge bite—rice this time—and looked away, pretending to be acutely interested in the swirled blue designs on the table.

  “I’m doubting that a whole lot right now. Has this professor of yours been checked for mental stability? Because he sounds insane to me.”

  “Summer!” Tag’s chair scraped back as he leaped to his feet. “Use caution!” He took his plate of food and left.

  I didn’t think my questions were so reprehensible as to merit him wanting to eat alone in the dark rather than with me by glow-stick light. All of my questions were reasonable. And if he thought moving to a different room was going to stop me . . .

  I picked up my plate and the glow sticks and followed him out.

  “Don’t go walking out of a c
onversation with me,” I said once I found him sitting on the end of the bed he’d claimed as his. His plate sat balanced precariously on his lap. His lips twisted in irritation when he saw me.

  “You didn’t need a whole eight days to see I was genetically fit. Why were you spying on me the rest of the time?”

  “Every soldier is required to view the subject until they feel satisfied that the future will benefit from their presence.”

  “So if I hadn’t passed the test, the car wreck would have been the end of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means you think I’m not so bad.” I tried to smile as I sat next to him, balancing my plate on my knees.

  He scooted away so as not to actually be touching me. I took the challenge and scooted close enough that our legs were touching. His body went rigid, he could have been stone.

  “What if I get to the future and don’t like the boys your professor handpicked for me?”

  “Any of them will be far preferable to your last relationship.”

  “Hey!” I knocked his knee with mine, upsetting his plate. He caught it before it flipped to the ground. “What’s your problem with Nathan? Nathan was a good guy. Don’t dis on the dead.”

  “His blood was already bad, already tainted. I checked him as well—to see if he would have been a suitable fit for the future of mankind. He was a level-one infected.”

  “How do you know that?” My mind raced. Nathan—bad blood? He’d had a couple of girlfriends before me, but none of them had been serious, not serious enough for . . .

  “He’d injured himself working on his father’s vehicle. I tested the cloth he’d used to clean his hand.”

  I interrupted there. “What’s a level one infected?”

  “HTHBI, or the shakes as people on the street call it, started when several sexually transmitted infections mutated. Human cells mutated. HTHBI is a level five. Level one is a basic infection. Syphilis, chlamydia, HIV, herpes—those are all level one.”