by Devon Hughes
As they drifted closer, the city looked like some well-ordered forest, the buildings like sleek dark trunks reaching skyward. Their sides lit up with a million bright colors, a zillion tiny images. The auto-hele landed on the roof of the tallest of all the tall towers, and Leesa could see the tops of the other smaller, lesser towers in Lion’s Head, and the cables of the aircars zigzagging between them.
And the sun! Instead of being blotted out by buildings, it was right there staring at her, and it was so bright, so beautiful, that she could hardly look at it. It was too bad this was probably going to be the last time she saw it—they were going to throw her in jail for the rest of her life.
The men marched Leesa and Marcus into the mayor’s office, and everything looked clean, and expensive, and new. Leesa didn’t have to crouch beneath the ceilings, or squeeze between the furniture.
Mayor Eris sat on a plush sofa in front of a giant glass wall overlooking the city. The mayor was as pale as the white furniture that adorned her office, despite her proximity to the sun. She had dark red hair and dark red lips to match, and she moved like she had spent her whole life floating.
Despite the big space, it was starting to feel crowded as the mayor’s posse of thugs filed in, along with Marcus’s jerk of a stepdad, who actually worked for the place that tortured the animals. Everyone seemed to have backup. Leesa was the only one on her own.
“Where is your mother?” the mayor asked.
“My mom?” Leesa repeated, her voice rising nervously. “She’s, um, working.” Her mom was always working.
“See if you can locate Mrs. Khan,” the mayor told one of her men.
“You don’t have to tell her yet,” Leesa said quickly. She had never been in trouble before, and the thought of her mom’s disappointment was almost worse than the thought of being locked away forever.
“I think she’ll want to know about owing millions of dollars sooner rather than later, don’t you?” Eris asked, raising one red eyebrow.
Leesa felt the blood drain from her face. “What?”
“You kids caused a lot of damage today. My Dome was destroyed, my star mutants lost, not to mention all the extra work my staff had to put in. Who did you think was going to pay for all of it? I’ll have to add it to your family’s debt.”
Leesa felt sick. That debt was the whole reason she was in this mess. Her father owed the mayor for their Sky apartment, and when he couldn’t pay, he started to gamble, and Leesa’s Chihuahua had been turned into an Unnatural to fight. Because of the mayor, Leesa had lost her home, her dad, and her dog, and her mom was still trying to pay off the debt so they could move out of the Drain. Now, because of Leesa, that was never going to happen.
“Eva, they’re just kids,” Bruce said, leaning forward. “They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know any—”
“We knew exactly what we were doing!” Marcus shouted, his cheeks flushing.
Mayor Eris pursed her lips. “Just tell me why you did it. Was it something someone told you? Was it your father?” She eyed Bruce, and Leesa saw Marcus’s face twitch.
“My father’s dead,” Marcus answered flatly.
The mayor was undeterred. “Or your brother, the veterinarian?” she persisted. “What’s his . . .” She turned to one of the cops, who whispered something. “Pete. Was it something Pete told you?”
“Pete? No.”
Leesa knew the whole reason Marcus had changed his mind about the animals was because Pete told him they were real, live mutants, and not some kind of robot.
“We just did it because the animals deserved to be free,” Leesa explained.
“Do you even know what happens?” Marcus asked the mayor. “How they run them until they collapse in the gym? How they whip them until they have no spirit? Have you been to where they keep them in those dirty cells?” Marcus was shouting in the mayor’s face.
“Shhh,” Leesa hissed. She agreed with what Marcus was saying, but she wished he wasn’t saying it quite so loudly. He was only going to make things worse.
Bruce held him by the shoulders, rooting him down in the chair. “Marcus, you don’t know how important the mutants are, what they could mean for—”
Mayor Eris shot Bruce a look. “They’re important,” she said carefully, “for morale. We’ve had some hard times in Lion’s Head. The people need something to look forward to. Something to root for.”
Bruce sighed. “Look, Eva, are we done here? I have to get the boy home to his mother.”
Leesa noticed how Bruce called Marcus “the boy,” like he could be any boy, anyone’s son. Leesa hadn’t seen Baba in months, and he certainly hadn’t always been the father she’d wished for, but at least he wasn’t Bruce.
Mayor Eris pressed her red lips together. “Go. We can sort out your debt later.”
“And Peter?”
“A few of our stars need medical attention.”
Leesa watched Marcus stand. She stared at him as he grabbed his bag. She could not believe he was just going to leave her here. When he met her eyes, he looked sheepish.
“Maybe we could, um, take Leesa home with us?” Marcus said. For all his macho talk about standing up to Bruce, his voice sure did sound small.
“We can’t release her until her legal guardian comes,” Mayor Eris said.
With a nod from the mayor, the goons shuffled out behind Marcus and Bruce, and Leesa suddenly felt very small and very vulnerable. Trying to avoid Mayor Eris’s piercing look, Leesa looked down at the dumb decorative pillows, across the room at the pointless fake flowers, and finally out the window.
She could see inside some of the Sky apartments, and thinking about how hard her mom worked and how they would never get out of the Drain now, Leesa felt her eyes welling with tears.
“Impressive view, hmm?” The mayor’s tone was mild, but Leesa bristled. Was she making fun of her?
“I thought there would be clouds,” Leesa answered. Antonio and everyone she knew in the Drain had said that the rich were so stupid because all they ever saw was clouds, and their brains became airy balls of fluff. But from where she sat, looking out of the windowed walls of the mayor’s office, Leesa saw clear blue.
“Not for a while now.” The mayor walked close to the glass and hugged her arms around her willowy body. “The sun is too hot. It burns away all the moisture.”
“It’s pretty, though.”
Leesa hadn’t meant to say that aloud, but the mayor nodded vigorously. “Maybe one day we’ll all be able to go out there and feel it on our skin.”
And maybe one day I’ll live in this penthouse, Leesa thought.
“My daughter used to love the sun,” the mayor said absently.
Leesa was curious, despite herself. For years, Leesa could remember watching the mayor speak. Her husband, a droopy little man, always stood behind her like an afterthought, but Leesa couldn’t remember ever seeing any kids. And why had she said “used to”?
“You have a daughter?”
“Mmmhmm.” The mayor drifted over and took the seat Marcus had left, next to Leesa. She clicked a button, and a hologram materialized in front of them.
A waifish girl was strapped into a hoverchair, but she was laughing. A small lizard perched on her head, and a white tiger was licking her face.
“She’s just about your age,” Mayor Eris said. “Maybe you could meet sometime. I know she’s lonely, and I bet you two would get along, especially since you both love animals—”
“Does she love watching them suffer, like you?” Leesa spat before she could help herself.
The mayor’s face tightened. “Look, I’m willing to look past the damages,” Eva Eris said. “But I want us to understand each other, Leesa.”
“Okay. . . .” Leesa felt uneasy.
“Your friend Marcus means well, I can see that. But he sees things as good and bad. You’re smarter than that, aren’t you? Those of us who have lived through tough things, we know that life is a little more complicated, don’t
we?”
Leesa thought of her father’s gambling—how he believed he could get Pookie back for her, even though it had cost him the house and then his marriage. She thought of Antonio—how he could be so sweet to her, but he was so desperate to impress his brother that it made him turn into a jerk. She thought of Marcus—how he saw one real Unnaturals match and just instantly flipped from an ultra-fanboy Moniac into an animal-rights activist, literally overnight. How he couldn’t understand how she’d needed to see so many matches over the years—every single match Pookie was in—even though she thought the whole business was wrong.
Leesa thought of how she didn’t regret freeing the Unnaturals for a second, but how she had her mom to think about, too.
Complicated was an understatement.
Mayor Eris pet Leesa’s arm, her nails brushing against Leesa’s skin like some sort of insect, and Leesa flinched.
“What I’m saying is that sometimes we need to do things that other people might see as questionable, but that we know in our hearts are for good. And everything I do, I do for Francine.”
The mayor sat back, her face pinched, and Leesa thought how much she would’ve loved this big, clean room, if the mayor hadn’t made it feel so dirty.
11
IN THE UNDERGROUND ROOM, THE ALARMS WERE WAILING. The mutants hurled themselves against the fences in a frenzy, and next to them in the pen, the dog was still cowering low with its tail between its legs. That was Kozmo’s fault.
She felt that strange urge to comfort Runt again, to tell him that it would be all right, but Kozmo knew better. She was strapped to a harness with her wings splayed, Runt was locked in a cage, and the humans would be back eventually. It was only going to get worse from here.
Suddenly, there was a crash from across the room. Kozmo struggled to see what was happening, but the clamp around her neck restricted her movements.
“What is it?” she called out to Runt, but the dog’s attention was focused away from her.
The H-Ward door was wide open, and a giant lizard slithered into view. It must’ve snuck in there during the commotion.
It crept past all the cages with the animals snarling and hissing and stopped in front of Runt’s pen. Instead of paws like Kozmo, the lizard had long, green digits. It began to work at the latch on the pen, and there was a soft click. So that was how it must’ve gotten out of the cage.
Kozmo could smell the fear coming off Runt’s fur in waves as he waited for the lizard to charge.
Instead she just pulled the door to the pen open and she scurried over to Kozmo. The lizard picked at the clamp around her neck with her nails.
Runt barked a sharp warning. “Don’t! She’s dangerous! Bad like the others! She almost attacked me!”
“I think she’s trying to help,” Kozmo answered, but then Runt flashed his teeth, and she realized he was talking about her.
The lizard didn’t listen, though, and soon she had the clamp open. The moment Kozmo could open her wings, she shot up into the rafters, away from all the other animals. It was only when she was safe in her nest that she thought to check on Runt.
The dog trotted out of the pen with a floppy-tongued grin, and he let out a little yip of surprise when the lizard grabbed him with its powerful tail, dragging him past the vicious mutants snarling from behind the fences, and toward EXIT.
“Hey!” Runt barked, his eyes bugging out in fear. “Let me go!”
Kozmo zoomed down after them, but she was too late. She saw the green flicker of the lizard’s tail as it disappeared with Runt into the world of humans, and then she slammed into the locked door, crumpling into a heap on the linoleum.
“Wait,” Kozmo squeaked. “Wait . . .”
12
WHEN THEY LEFT THE MAYOR’S OFFICE, MARCUS THOUGHT he was in for a lecture, but Bruce didn’t say anything. He held the back of Marcus’s neck, not hard, but firmly enough that Marcus hunched forward, his long hair falling into his eyes as his stepfather steered him toward the aircar. Bruce had to punch in the coordinates twice, irritation making his fingers clumsy.
“I didn’t—” Marcus started, but Bruce held up a hand, cutting off any discussion.
Fine. Marcus slumped down in the seat and stared out the window. As the aircar zipped along the cables across Lion’s Head, the view soon erased any concern about lame old Bruce. The Sky Towers were packed close together, so from his own room, all Marcus could see was the dark glass sides of other buildings. But from all the way up here, even in the dusk, he could see clear across the river to the hazy mass of trees on the other side.
The Greenplains.
Had the Underdog and the other mutants made it there yet? Marcus hoped so. The thought made him giddy, and he knew that no matter what the mayor said, or how long he was grounded for, helping the animals escape was totally worth it. He had done what everyone else was too chicken to do—pretty rad, if he did say so himself.
Marcus grinned, but then he felt his stomach drop. Usually Bruce was a real stiff, obsessed with rules and cautious in the extreme. But today, not only had he switched off the aircar’s auto settings, but he seemed to have unclamped the cable break, too. The car was gaining speed as it sloped down, dropping stories by the second.
Marcus liked a little risk—he had enough skateboarding scars to prove it—but he could see the cable throwing off sparks from the friction, and the way Bruce was staring straight ahead with his jaw all clenched up was really starting to freak Marcus out.
They fell faster, and faster still, and though Marcus would not let himself cry out to Bruce, he had to bite hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming. Just when it seemed like the car might snap right off its track and send them tumbling to their deaths, Bruce hit a switch and they jerked to a sudden stop at the 247th floor of their Skyrise.
“Home safe and sound,” Bruce said in a flat voice verging on disappointed. He stepped out of the aircar unceremoniously, and Marcus stared after him with bug eyes, waiting for his heart rate to slow back to normal.
When they walked into the apartment, it was a sharp contrast to the silence of the trip. Marcus’s mom screamed his name, yanked him into a stifling hug, and then launched into five minutes of constant, weepy scolding.
She cared about rules, too, but for different reasons than Bruce did. It was mainly because, since his real dad had passed away a while back, Marcus’s mom had become convinced that any time he or his brother left the apartment and ventured out of her sight, they were at imminent risk of death, too. It had taken Marcus years to convince her to let him skate, and even then she made him wear a bubble suit and totally lost it when he’d sprained his wrist attempting a kick flip a few weeks back.
Hearing that her youngest son had not only been below the 100th story skyline, but had been in the proximity of deadly monsters and exposed to unfiltered air and the full force of the sun? Well, that sent her completely over the edge.
“What were you thinking? What if something had happened to you? You could’ve gotten hurt! Or worse!” She checked his face for bruises, his body for broken bones. She kept tilting his head back and looking up his nose, like his brains were about to start gushing out or something. “You’re grounded, young man. Do you hear me? Until you’re eighteen. Until you’re thirty!”
That was pretty much what Marcus had expected. Still worth it.
He went to his room to turn on his simulink, anxious to see what the media was saying about the big escape. Flipping through the headlines, Marcus saw that people were mostly complaining about the issues that the reconstruction of the Dome was going to cause, since the next Unnaturals season would likely be delayed. There were think pieces on the new void in virtual distraction, videos of kids complaining about their season tickets, and hysterical articles about match-withdrawal-induced depression in tweens.
Only one person was looking at the mayor and Mega Media critically or talking about the animals at all, and that was Joni Juniper.
Joni was the former
Matchmaker—the announcer and commentator at every Unnaturals match. Marcus had known her face well from warping into matches, but now Joni was actually dating his brother, Pete, and Marcus suspected she was the one who’d talked him into standing up for the animals.
His brother had caught Marcus and Leesa breaking into the Dome, and rather than turn them away or even turn them in, Pete had actually helped them, which cost him his job as the monster medic, at the very least. It took guts. Joni was notably absent from the Matchmaker’s booth, her own small form of protest. Yet here she was, digging up dirt!
It was just a self-posted channel, but Joni was acting like a real reporter, and it looked like she already had a lot of followers—most of them probably Moniacs, but still. And while every other commentator had been talking about how this affected their own lives and what this meant for the future of entertainment, Joni was actually talking about the corruption.
“Many here in Lion’s Head are shocked at the notable veil of secrecy surrounding these events. Access to NuFormz island has been cut off, and while Mega Media had assured the public that the mutants were in a highly controlled environment and citizens were not at risk, we have recently obtained information to suggest that the animals were being injected with a serum designed to make them ultraviolent for matches.”
Marcus sat up straight. It was good that people thought the mutants were dangerous—it would give them a better chance at escaping if no one went near them—but was the thing about the serum true? He’d have to ask Pete.
Where was his brother, anyway?
“Is Pete still helping the injured animals?” he asked, walking back into the living room.