Toys - James Patterson [22]
“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.
Chapter 30
HOW STRANGE IT was—being among these humans, pretending to be one of them.
After I settled Shanna on the mattress, she began to tell her friends what had happened with the Betas, speaking haltingly in a human street dialect I could barely follow.
Their looks toward me became cautiously admiring. “How can we repay you?” Corliss finally asked.
“I just need to rest awhile. That’s thanks enough,” I said. “I’ll be on my way soon.”
“Stay here as long as you wish,” said Corliss. “You’re a friend now. And I can see you’ve been injured yourself.”
“I’ll be fine. Honestly.”
I walked farther back into the building—an abandoned warehouse with the doors and windows long since gone. There was no electricity, no running water, but at least it was shelter from the rain and wind that had started outside—not to mention any Elite satellites and drones that might be scanning the city for signs of me.
I stepped into a large room nearby and found ragged children huddled there—playing with, of all things, Jessica and Jacob dolls. It seemed ironic that these street urchins had been able to steal the most sought-after toys of the season—but that wasn’t what bothered me. When I really thought about it, there was something just wrong about dolls that acted out everything we did… but were only a foot or so tall. It was just weird to me. Also, dolls used to be about children exercising their imaginations, about real play. How were children going to exercise their minds if the dolls did the playing by themselves?
“Those things aren’t good for you,” I told the kids. “They’ll rot your brains.”
“If you’re so smart, what are you doing here?” one of them snapped back.
The others giggled and muttered in their coarse slang, insulting me. It was disturbing to see people so hard-edged at such a young age. No doubt some of them would go on to become Betas—if they survived that long.
But I was actually heartened by the kids’ smart-aleck reaction. There was surprising verve, an underlying vitality, in this human ghetto. The skunks were a little more clever, and more rational, than I’d formerly believed. I was also detecting kindness alongside the cruelty, passion within the desperation.
Strains of music drifted through the air—and I caught, in the shadows, the whispering, giggling sounds of lovemaking.
I finally found a quiet corner to settle in. I needed to rest and regenerate. A few minutes later, Corliss brought me a basket of food