Truancy City
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I dedicate this story to Vito Bonsignore, Rembert Herbert, Eric Grossman, Michael Waxman, and every educator who earned my respect against all the odds.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue: Newfound Freedom
PART I. STUDENT
1. The Successor
2. Unleash the Beast
3. Darkest Childhood
4. A Legend Returns
5. Her Revenge
6. The Truancy City
7. Second and Fourth
8. Sundown
PART II. SOLDIER
9. Shattered Enigma
10. Fight or Flight
11. Silhouette
12. Government Triumphant
13. What All Leaders Are
14. Mea Culpa
15. The Mutiny
16. Brother Against Sister
PART III. FUGITIVE
17. The Ties of Blood
18. Waking Nightmares
19. Rothenberg
20. Old Wounds
21. Full Circle
22. For Your Own Good
23. Fathers and Sons
24. The New Mayor
PART IV. CITIZEN
25. Two Weeks Later
26. Model Student
27. Liberation
28. Fade to Black
29. Order and Chaos
30. In Dreams
31. The General’s Resolve
32. Hour of Reckoning
33. Break the Cycle
34. Illusions of Good and Evil
35. Penance Tower
36. Live
37. A Happier Time
38. The End
Also Available from Tor Teen
About the Author
Copyright
PROLOGUE • • • NEWFOUND FREEDOM
The tent was sweltering as the young woman opened the flap and ducked inside. It had been particularly humid in the area, and her gray combat uniform was woven out of nylon cotton, a fabric that didn’t perfectly insulate against the summer heat. Her troops liked to joke about the clothing getting hot enough to roast meat, but the woman herself showed no sign of discomfort as she sat down at her desk and thumbed on one of a series of monitors around her.
As the monitor flickered to life, a gaunt and disheveled man appeared onscreen. Upon seeing the woman, the man scowled and squeezed a chrome lighter with one hand.
“You. I should have known.”
“It’s been awhile since we last spoke like this, Mr. Mayor,” the woman said. “That was nearly four years ago, correct?”
“Not long enough. I would have preferred never to see you again.”
The young woman smiled faintly at the monitor, her stormy gray eyes glinting.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t been expecting a visit from us, Mr. Mayor.”
“Actually, I’m wondering what took you so long.” The Mayor flicked his lighter open. “Nearly a year since the war went public? The rebels are already knocking at my front door. You’re much slower than I’d heard … Iris.”
If the young woman was annoyed by the mocking use of her name, she hid it well. Unperturbed, she leaned back in her chair and ran her fingers through her dark, wavy hair, neatly trimmed to regulation length.
“If the decision were mine alone I would have come four years ago, at the first sign of trouble,” Iris said. “Things are a bit different now. I had to make sure to bring an army with me.”
“I heard you were made a General of some sort,” the Mayor said. “Shouldn’t you have that army in your back pocket?”
“If only.” Iris sighed. “I more often feel like it’s the other way around.”
The Mayor clicked his lighter shut. “Why are you calling?” he demanded. “Why now?”
Matching the Mayor’s shift in demeanor, Iris sat up straight. Her voice, once politely neutral, now turned cold and hard.
“I didn’t wish for this conversation any more than you, Mayor,” she said. “Protocol requires me to warn you that you have until sundown to surrender and yield whatever control of that City you have left.” Iris smiled wryly. “If you refuse—and I expect that you will—then you will be forcibly detained and the military will achieve control by itself.”
“Good luck with that. You’ll need it,” the Mayor said. “I take it that you’re camped just across the river, then?”
“I’m afraid that’s none of your business.”
“Well then,” the Mayor growled, leaning forward, “all I have to say to you and your wretch of a father is this—come and get me!”
Iris brushed her forehead with her knuckles in a mild show of annoyance. The Mayor sat stoically, clearly expecting an additional outburst of some kind. But when Iris spoke again, her voice was oddly hushed.
“Where are the boys? Are they still alive?”
At that, the Mayor’s face flushed red with anger.
“I’d die myself rather than tell you anything about that.”
The screen went dead. Iris slammed her fist against the desk.
“Yes,” she muttered. “You will.”
* * *
“Who was that?”
The Mayor sighed and turned to face his guest, a boy sitting on the other side of his mahogany desk.
“A representative of the true Government of this City,” the Mayor replied, “and someone I had hoped you would never meet. It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“But the City doesn’t,” the Mayor said sharply. “It’s too late to explain the entire history of the Government, and frankly I don’t know it all myself. What I can tell you is that they cannot be crossed. They are powerful beyond your imagination; their rule encompasses hundreds, perhaps thousands of cities. Their military makes our Enforcers look like a joke.”
“So our City is just one of the many under their control?”
“Yes and no,” the Mayor said. “This City is special, one of a few that the Government isolated decades ago. A sort of societal petri dish.”
“Why?”
“Because of a wave of civil unrest that nearly destroyed the Government.” The Mayor flicked his lighter open. “They have since purged all records of that incident, and even I don’t know the details. What I do know is that in the bloody aftermath, the Government decided to take extreme measures to make sure that nothing like it would ever happen again.” The Mayor smiled now. “The only problem was, no one could agree on which extreme measures to take.”
The boy inclined his head. “So they created the Cities as experiments.”
“Not exactly,” the Mayor said. “The Cities were already there. The Government merely isolated them from outside influence and tested a different philosophy in each. Until four years ago, this City was considered the most promising of all.”
“And what was the philosophy behind this City?”
“It was simple.” The Mayor clicked his lighter shut. “The founders believed that education was the key to controlling a population.”
* * *
Strapped across Iris’ back was a black pole about three feet in length, which she removed as she emerge
d from her tent. She pressed a button on the handle and two metal ends instantly extended from either side of the pole, resembling a staff. Tapping one end against the ground, she glanced over at the shade where a colonel, a member of her staff, had been waiting.
The Mayor’s guess had been correct—her tent was one of hundreds that formed a temporary encampment at the riverside. A mercifully cool breeze rolled across the water and over the camp as Iris approached the saluting colonel.
“All units are ready for immediate deployment, General,” the colonel said. “Will we observe the grace period, or has the Mayor rejected it?”
“The Mayor rejected it, but I don’t intend to let him set our schedule,” Iris replied. She watched a beetle crawl across the ground. “We will attack at sundown to take full advantage of the darkness.”
The colonel frowned, but nodded anyway. “Yes, ma’am.”
Iris glanced at him. “Something on your mind, soldier?”
“I was wondering why we didn’t just overwhelm them to begin with. We could have put an end to the fighting sooner.”
Iris watched the beetle stumble over a rock. Some commanding officers did not tolerate having their orders questioned at all. Never the most orthodox leader, she personally made the distinction between disrespect and curiosity. It was an approach that cultivated loyalty.
“There was no reason to interfere while the Educators and the rebels were so conveniently expending resources fighting each other,” Iris said. “Remember, we have only twenty thousand troops to subdue any resistance and secure all fifty-seven districts. Had we rushed recklessly into the crossfire there’s no telling what losses we may have suffered.”
“So why don’t we wait a little longer for both sides to completely collapse?”
“There is nothing more to be gained by waiting now. The outcome of the war was decided last night. The Mayor’s last fortifications have fallen, and the Truancy is advancing upon District 1 even as we speak.”
Iris gestured towards the river. Across the glittering water, the ominous shapes of skyscrapers loomed like giant tombstones. Many of them showed obvious signs of damage, and rising smoke plumes indicated that fighting was ongoing in the City.
“What you are looking at now is a failed society,” Iris continued. The beetle examined her shoelace. “That City was based upon a bedrock of education. Now that that foundation has been shattered, those people don’t know what to do with their newfound freedom, and so they run wild like the unruly children they are.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, General, that wasteland doesn’t look much like freedom to me.”
“Anarchy, then,” Iris said dismissively. “Whatever you want to call it, that City has just about finished tearing itself apart. Now that both sides are exhausted, we can move in and pick up the pieces at our leisure.”
“So what are your orders?”
“Keep all forces on standby. No flyovers, nothing that risks giving away our presence,” Iris said. “I want everything to be quiet right up until the moment we move in. Remember, most of the City is still unaware of our existence.”
The man nodded. “And what about our assets within the City?”
For the first time, the General hesitated. The beetle began skittering away. “Is there still no sign of our primary objectives?”
“None.”
“Then tell the assets to keep looking. They have until tonight to find something or I will be deeply disappointed.”
“And what happens if they are found?”
With precise restraint, Iris swung her staff, pinning the beetle to the ground without crushing it. She pressed a second button on the handle, and the staff discharged an electrical shock that instantly fried the insect.
“If either one of them is spotted,” she said, “inform me immediately.”
* * *
“That woman was my sister?”
The boy sounded much calmer than the Mayor had expected.
“Iris is half related to you by blood, if that’s what you mean,” he said wearily. “She betrayed you before you were born. It was because of her that you were sent here, to live with me.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Who knows?” The Mayor shrugged. “I suspect it might be because she saw you as a threat to whatever ambitions she harbored at the time. As you saw, she’s come a long way. She has the full military might of the Government behind her now, and she hasn’t forgotten that you exist.”
“So all this time…”
“I was protecting you, and the City, from the Government.” The Mayor flicked his lighter open. “It’s funny, you know. When this City turned into an experiment it was proposed that we do away with the idea of parents and children altogether. All children would have been raised by the Government. You see, they knew that the bond between parent and child is instinctual.”
“Why was that proposal rejected?”
“I’d like to say that it was because they were worried about losing sight of humanity altogether, but it was really because they believed that the parents could be a useful tool,” the Mayor said. “The Government’s goal was to suppress the troublesome instincts of children early on, to curtail their independence, their spirit. They sought to use the parental bond towards that end, to make parents agents of the Government.”
“But still they feared that bond.”
“They did, for they knew that if uncontrolled it could mean the undoing of all their hopes.” The Mayor smiled. “As indeed it was, you know.”
The boy shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize; neither you nor your brother had any way of knowing the truth.” The Mayor waved a dismissive hand. “I, however, do not have the excuse of ignorance. If I had been the parent the City expected me to be, if I hadn’t cared about you two so much, none of this might have happened. But I don’t regret it. It means that I was human after all.”
“Can anything be done to stop them?”
At that, the Mayor lifted his lighter and lit it. A tiny flame danced between the two figures.
Boy and man. Father and son. Student and Educator.
For a moment they looked at each other through the flame.
“I’m afraid that it’s too late.” The Mayor clicked his lighter shut and the flame vanished. “They are already here.”
12 Hours Earlier …
The Last Day of the War
Between the Truancy and the Educators
PART I
STUDENT
1
THE SUCCESSOR
“They say that every classroom is a battlefield.”
The teacher was facing away from the class and towards the blackboard as he spoke.
Some students took advantage of this inattention to scribble notes or make faces at one another. From his seat at the front of the class, however, one boy with red hair listened with rapt attention. His desk was clean, his uniform crisp, his hair cut precisely according to school guidelines. His hands were clasped behind him and his eyes strayed not once from the front of the room.
“You are all soldiers of a sort, you who sit before me,” the teacher said. “I cannot see you, of course, but I do not have to. You are no different from those that have come before. You have promise and potential, but without education you would only know how to waste it.”
A girl in the front row stirred uncomfortably. The teacher lashed out backwards, slamming his ruler on her desk. The redhead smiled smugly as the girl snapped back to rigid attention. Still the teacher did not turn to face the class.
“You see, unshaped and unruly creatures as you are, you are by nature wayward and wild. You do not even recognize me yet as your benefactor,” the teacher continued. “The task of an Educator is thankless in this way, but it is also essential. It is not mere rhetoric when our Mayor says that students are the future, but it is our job to determine what sort of future it will be. Such matters are too important to leave in the hands of children.”
“I cannot hear your complaints,” he warned them, “for I have no ears. Of course I expect many of you to resist. It is the way of students to flee from their own salvation, to struggle against their saviors. You are drowning in a sea of ignorance, and it is up to us to pull you up from its depths. We will do this by force if we must.”
With that the teacher finally turned towards the class. For the first time Cross could see that the man had no face. There was only a blank oval of smooth flesh.
“This is the nature of education,” the teacher said. “It is and has always been a war waged against you young monsters—a war to rescue you from yourselves.”
The redhead blinked. The man had no mouth. How could he speak? Was he speaking? Were these even his words?
The man drew closer.
“Well, Cross? Which side of the war are you on?”
Cross stood slowly and regarded the faceless man. He could feel the eyes of his peers upon him. He opened his mouth and the answer flowed easily.
“Your goals are my goals. I have no purpose but what you give me. Only through education can I find that purpose.”
The faceless teacher nodded with approval.
“A fine answer. Music to my ears. I can see that your mentor Edward has been a very positive influence on you.”
Cross smiled at the praise. He could feel the resentment of the other students in the room, but he didn’t care. Nothing he did ever seemed to make them happy. Teachers, at least, could be pleased.
“Thank you, sir.”
From somewhere far away a bell began to ring. Without waiting to be dismissed, the other students got up and began to file out the door. Cross stayed where he was, until only he and one other boy remained in their seats.
The other boy looked at Cross with emerald eyes.
“Good boy. You’re not going anywhere just yet.” Edward grinned. “After all, there’s so much yet to be done for my legacy.”
Edward held up a mirror. Against his will, Cross looked into it.
He tried to scream, but he couldn’t.…