Toys

Chapter 29

She told me her name as we hurried along to her place. It was Shanna. I asked a few harmless questions, trying to keep her mind off the pain-and the blood-as best I could.

Turns out, Shanna had been on her own since she was ten, living with various destitute groups of humans until Betas, disease, or hunger forced her to move on. Shanna didn’t know where she’d been born, who her parents were, or even who her baby’s father was. She said that she was a “Southerner” and a “Baptist” and a “Bible-thumper,” none of which meant anything to me.

“How old are you, Shanna?” I finally had to ask.

“Fourteen,” she told me. “I’m fourteen. Old enough.”

As we went farther into the human neighborhood, the air became rank with the sickly sweet stink of rot. All manner of insects buzzed, fluttered, and scurried around Shanna and me. I was coming to realize that I’d taken several comforts of Elite life completely for granted. Also, that I’d given almost no thought to the terrible living conditions of humans. This place was unendurable.

“Here,” Shanna said. She weakly raised a hand to point down an alley that had patches of high weeds thrusting up through its cracked concrete.

As we entered the alley, the voice of a lookout shouted, “Betas! Two of ’em.”

I heard fast shuffling, like a pack of huge animals scurrying closer to us.

I bent to set Shanna down so I could fight them off.

“It’s OK,” she managed to call out. “He helped me. He’s a good man!”

The shuffling sounds stopped. Then, pale faces came slowly into sight, peering out of a dark building at the alley’s far end. There could have been a dozen of them, or twice that many. They were hard to tell apart-all so thin and furtive. Even the very young ones radiated extreme fear and suffering of the sort I had never encountered before.

“It’s a trick! Why would a Beta help ya?” a tall woman demanded, stepping forward defiantly. She was older, but far from infirm, and gave off a sense of intelligence and self-possession that I was surprised to see in this slum.

“Oh, I’m not a Beta-I just borrowed some clothes… after I fought a few of them,” I said. “Look here, Shanna’s in a bad way. She’s bleeding a lot. Where do you want me to take her?”

“He’s telling the truth. I think the baby’s coming, Corliss,” Shanna said in a trembling voice. Then, very softly, the girl started to cry like, well, a little girl.

Concern spread across the older woman’s face. “This way,” she said, and led us quickly into a small room in a run-down warehouse. There was a mattress of rags on the floor and a table covered with rancid food scraps. Human photographs were pinned on the walls.

I’d studied the biological phenomenon of human birth, even seen footage of it on the Cybernet, but I’d never witnessed it in person. Chloe and April-as with all Elite babies-were born in synthetic wombs in government-regulated natal centers.

The difference was one of the most fundamental between humans and Elites.

Or so I believed at the time.