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  * * *

  Muldoon was enjoying himself. He had wrapped his arms around the girl’s chest, and now his hands were firmly clamped to her breasts as she struggled beneath him. Her face was pressed into the hard ground, the breath crushed from her by his one hundred and fifty kilos. He brutally squeezed her tender flesh, his fingertips pressing against her ribs just as his throbbing penis bulged against her buttocks. Only once before had he taken one of the children in the open, outside the van; he was normally very conscientious about that kind of thing. He firmly believed that sex was a private matter. But there were exceptions to every rule.

  And this one was definitely an exception, he thought as his hands groped downward and began to work on unfastening her pants, his untrimmed fingernails cutting into her smooth skin.

  The ground beside his face suddenly exploded, with dirt flying into his face. Crying out in surprise and pain, he struggled to free a hand to wipe at his stinging eyes. His vision cleared enough for him to see the gleaming metal sprouting from the earth not five centimeters from his sweating nose. As he watched, the metal spike levered itself out of the ground and rose above his head. He followed its trail until his eyes were drawn to the silhouetted form standing over him.

  “Let her go, Muldoon,” Reza ordered quietly. He held the pickax easily in his hands, hands that were stronger than those of most adults after the years of hard field work he had endured. Its splintered metal end was poised directly above Muldoon’s head. “God knows, I should split your skull open just on principle, but the stench would probably be more than I could bear.”

  “Mind your own business, you little bastard,” Muldoon hissed, his face twisting into the one that he saved for scaring the little children when they did something that really pissed him off. His hands bit even further into the girl’s chest and belly, eliciting a groan of pain.

  “This is your last warning, Muldoon,” Reza said, raising the pickax to strike. He figured that he would almost certainly go to juvenile prison for killing this beast that almost looked like a man, but how much worse could prison be over this place? Besides, for all the suffering this bastard had caused, it would be worth it.

  “You’d never get away with it, you little fuck,” Muldoon warned. “You’ve got too many witnesses. You’d spend the rest of your worthless life in prison, if they didn’t just fry your ass first.”

  Reza laughed. “Look around you, Muldoon. Do you think anybody here is going to be sorry if I ram this thing into your rat brain? And arranging an ‘accident’ would be pretty easy, you know. You don’t drive so well sometimes. It would be a real shame if you hit one of the rock piles and flipped over or something. Maybe even the fuel tank would light off.” Reza smiled a death’s head smile. “Let her go,” he said one last time, his voice hard as the stones they pulled from the ground.

  “Kill him, Reza,” one child said fiercely. Muldoon had been the monster of his nightmares until Reza had taken him in. “Kill him. Please.”

  Several others joined in until it was a chant. Reza knew that in a moment he wouldn’t need the pickaxe to take care of Muldoon: the children would work themselves into such a frenzy that they would fall on him like hyenas and rip him to pieces with their bare hands. And maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, he thought.

  But Muldoon saw it, too. He was many things, but he was no fool. He had heard stories of children murdering their overseers, and he had no intention of letting it happen to him. It was one of the reasons he sought to keep them terrorized, so he could keep them under rigid control.

  With a grunt of effort, Muldoon rolled himself off of the girl. Eyeing Reza with unconcealed contempt, he got to his feet. The girl lay motionless between them like a beautiful garden that had been trampled, corrupted.

  For a moment, the only sound above the dry breeze that constantly swept this arid land was the wheezing of Muldoon’s overtaxed lungs as they fought to support a body that was at least three times Reza’s own weight.

  Muldoon’s eyes flitted from Reza to the girl, then to the others who stood watching him, silent now. Muldoon considered his options, and decided that he would have to yield. This time.

  “Listen, boy,” he growled, his voice barely audible as he leaned toward Reza, “I’m going to get you one of these days. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But I’ll get you.” He nodded to the girl, curled now into a fetal position on the ground. “And then I’ll get your little slut, here, too.” He hawked and spat on her, a gesture of defiance, of promise.

  He turned away and headed back toward the van, conscious of the two dozen sets of eyes boring into his back. Once safe inside the vehicle, having slammed the driver’s door shut, he leaned his head out the window. “You’d better have this section of the field cleared by sundown, boy, or your ass is gonna be in a sling with the headmaster!” As if noticing the other children for the first time, he bellowed, “What are you gawking at, you little shits? Get back to work!” Then he started up the van, gunned the engine, and drove off in a swirl of dust and choking exhaust.

  “Go on, guys,” Reza urged the others. “Get back to work. We don’t need him back again today.”

  Heads down, the group began to break up as the children reluctantly made their way back to their work groups.

  Reza was about to turn his attention to the girl Muldoon had been mauling when he suddenly found himself facing a child whose drawn face could have been mistaken for hundreds, thousands of others throughout the orphanage houses that dotted Hallmark.

  “You should have killed him,” she said quietly. Then she was gone, trailing after her two teammates as they trudged back to their designated spot. Like lifeless rag dolls, they collapsed onto their hands and knees and got back to work.

  Reza turned his attention to the girl, who still lay on the ground, weeping. Three of the biggest boys from his own team stood around her like guards, waiting for his orders.

  “It’s all right,” he told them. “You guys get back to work, but keep your eyes open. I’ll take care of her.” Kneeling next to the girl, Reza said softly, “How bad are you hurt?”

  Almost unwillingly, she turned over, and Reza helped her to sit up. His face flushed with anger at the sight of the scratches and bruises that were already rising against her porcelain skin. She said nothing, but shook her head. Since hardly anything was left of her pretty blouse, Reza took off his shirt and offered it to her, careful not to touch her. She had already been touched enough for one day.

  “Here,” he said gently, “put this on.”

  She looked at him with her dark eyes, brown like a doe’s, but with the spirit of a leopard’s. There were tears there, but Reza saw no weakness.

  “Merci,” she said, wincing in pain as she reached for the shirt. He caught a quick glimpse of her exposed breasts and quickly averted his gaze, blushing with embarrassment at seeing that part of her body and anger at the mottled bruises he saw there. He turned his back to her as she stripped off the torn blouse and put on his shirt.

  “Sorry it’s so dirty,” he said about the shirt, suddenly ashamed that he did not have something clean to offer her. “It probably doesn’t smell too good, either.”

  “It is fine,” she said, her voice quivering only slightly. “Thank you. You’re very kind.” He felt a light touch on his shoulder. “You may turn around, now.”

  He found himself looking at a girl whose skin was a flawless ivory that he knew from long experience would have a hard time under Hallmark’s brutal sun. Her aristocratic face was framed by auburn hair that fell well below her shoulders, untrimmed bangs blowing across her eyes. Reza felt his throat tighten for no reason he could explain, other than that he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

  “I’m Reza,” he said, fighting through the sudden rasp that had invaded his voice, “Reza Gard.” He held out his hand to her.

  Smiling tentatively, she took it, and Reza was relieved to note that her grip was strong. This one, he could tell from long exp
erience, was tough. A survivor.

  “I am Nicole,” she said, her voice carrying a thick accent that Reza had never heard before, “Nicole Carré.”

  * * *

  Wearing a blouse loaned from a sympathetic girl, Nicole sat next to Reza that evening at the mess table that Reza and his group had staked out as their own. Many of the boys and girls here, Nicole noted with disbelief, had formed alliances to protect one individual or group from another, almost like a system of fiefdoms, replete with feudal lords. Those who did not belong to one of the gangs sat alone or in very small groups at the fringe tables, their eyes alert for intruders. Sadly, from what Nicole had seen today, she thought that the loners would not stand a chance without mutual protection. Truly, she thought, there was safety in numbers.

  What she found even more surprising was that the groups were not necessarily led by the oldest or strongest. Reza clearly led the group she now found herself in, although there were at least four others here – not including herself – who were older or stronger.

  “Everybody,” Reza said to the dozen or so sitting at their table, “I want to introduce Nicole Carré, the latest addition to House 48 and the one who put those neat scratches on Muldoon’s ugly face.” Reza had found out through the grapevine about the questioning Muldoon had been put through by the chief administrator about the scratches, scratches that would leave scars, Reza had noted with glee. But, as usual, Muldoon had explained it all away. Not all the administrators were bad and not all of them were idiots, Reza knew; it just seemed like the ones who were in positions to influence things were. It was just tragic fate that the children had to pay the price.

  A little cheer went up from the group at the thought that someone had struck a real blow against Muldoon and lived to tell about it, and it was accompanied by a chorus of spoons banging on the metal table in celebration.

  “Story time! Story time!” called out a young girl, maybe six, with lanky blond hair and a large purple birthmark across her chin. The others joined in, chanting “Story time! Story time!” while looking expectantly at Nicole.

  “What is this?” she asked Reza, unsure of what was happening. She wanted to trust this boy and his friends, but her once bright and loving world had become dark and dangerous with the coming of the Kreelans, and had not improved with her arrival on Hallmark.

  “It’s just a little tradition we have,” he said easily, gesturing for the others to quiet down. “Whenever someone new comes, we like to have them tell us how they came to be here, what rotten luck landed them on Hallmark.” He noted her discomfort and shook his head. “It’s totally up to you. It’s just… it helps people sometimes to talk about it. But if you don’t want to, it’s okay.”

  She looked at him a moment, unable to believe that a boy his age could have such bearing and strength. The children around him were tired and unhappy about their fate, yes, but they were hopeful, even proud, and obviously stuck together because they cared for one another. It was a sharp contrast to many of the other faces she saw about her: frightened, angry or hateful, dead. She had not realized before how lucky she had been to fall into this group.

  “There is not much to it, really,” she said at last, embarrassed at the rapt attention the others were giving her and saddened at having to recount her recent past, “but I will tell it to you, if that is what you wish.”

  She paused for a moment, her mind caught on the realization that she had never really related to anyone what had happened. No one had ever asked or seemed to care, outside of establishing the simple fact that her parents were dead. The adults saw Nicole as just one more burden to be tended by the state until she was old enough to take care of herself or serve in the government or the military. The looks and rote lines of compassion she had received from the endless bureaucratic chain had once been sincere, she thought. But after hearing the same stories and seeing the same young faces thousands of times over, the orphans had become a commodity of war, and the compassion the administrators might once have felt had long since given way to weariness.

  Yet here, in this group of children, total strangers with only tragedy to bind them together, she found an audience for her grief, and it was almost too much to bear.

  “I come from La Seyne,” she began, her eyes fixed on the table before her, “one of the provincial capitals of Ariane. It is a pretty place,” she said, briefly glancing up at the others and giving them a quick, shy smile, as if they would hold the claim of her homeworld’s beauty against her. But their attention was rapt, their minds already far away from Hallmark, imagining to themselves what such a place might be like, a place that to them was equivalent to the paradise of the gods. “The Kreelans have never successfully attacked it, though they have tried several times.

  “Papa is…” she bit her lip, “…was a master shipfitter, and he decided that we should have a vacation away from home this year, to get away from the yards for a while. He told Mama that we should go to Earth. He wanted us to see Paris, a place he always talked about – he had grown up there – but we had never seen it, Mama and I having been born on La Seyne. He never stopped talking about the wonderful tower, La Tour Eiffel that had been built before the days of artificial gravity and load lifters. He spoke of the lights at night, of the buildings that dated back to the times of great kings and queens. And so we boarded a starliner for Earth. There were three other ships in our little convoy, two merchantmen and a light cruiser.”

  Reza saw her eyes mist over, her gaze somewhere far away. God, he thought, how many times have I had to see this? And how many more times before I can leave this godforsaken place? Under the table, he sought out one of her hands and took it in his. She held it tightly.

  She nodded as her mind sifted through the images of times she wished she could forget. “We were only two days out from La Seyne when the convoy was attacked. I do not know how many enemy ships there were, or exactly what happened. I suppose it does not matter. Our ship, the Il de France, was badly hit soon after the alarms sounded, and Papa went aft to the engineering spaces to try and help them.” Her lower lip trembled as a tear streaked down her face. “We never saw him after that.”

  She paused a moment, her eyes closed as she remembered her father’s parting hug to her and her mother before he ran down the companionway with the frightened young petty officer. “The ship kept getting hit like it was being pounded with a great hammer. Either the bridge was destroyed, or perhaps the speaker system was damaged, because the order to abandon ship never came, even though we knew for sure that the hull had been breached in many places. Mama, who herself had never been on a ship before, did not seem scared at all, like she had been through it all many times in her head as she worked in the kitchen at home, making Papa’s supper. When the normal lights went out and the emergency lights came on, she said only, ‘We are leaving,’ and took me by the hand to where one of the lifeboats was still docked.” A sob caught her breath, but she forced herself to get on with it. “But the boat was already filled, except for one seat. But the aisle down the middle was clear. ‘Look, Mama,’ I told her, ‘there is plenty of room for us.’

  “But I did not know that these boats had no artificial gravity, and that anyone not in a seat might be killed during the launch. I did not hear the warning the boat was giving in Standard. There was so much noise coming from our dying ship, and Mama spoke only French. She made me take the seat and she knelt in the aisle, praying, when the door closed. I… I blacked out after that. And when I woke up, she… she…”

  Nicole collapsed in wracking sobs, the guilt and loss that had been eating away at her heart finally exposed. But a part – be it ever so tiny – of the burden had been lifted from her shoulders. She felt the comforting touch of caring hands as the others extended their sympathy, and Reza wrapped his arm around her shoulder, drawing her to him.

  “It’s all right,” he said softly. “It wasn’t your fault–”

  “But the warning,” she gasped angrily. “I knew Standard! I should hav
e listened! I could have saved her!”

  “And where would that have left your mom?” asked Tamil, an acne-scarred girl with hair cropped close to her skull. “Back on the ship to get spaced when the hull gave way?”

  “I would have stayed with her!” Nicole shouted defiantly. “At least we all would have been together.”

  Tamil shook her head. “She wouldn’t have let you, girl, and you know it.” While she was not very old when her own mother had died, Tamil remembered her mother well, and how she had saved her daughter’s life at the cost of her own. “She would have knocked you over the head and strapped you into that last seat to save you, if it came down to it. She loved you. She wouldn’t have let you die.”

  That remark was met with nods and murmurs of agreement from the others.

  Nicole suddenly understood that a consensus had been reached, and the look of sympathy in their eyes was joined by something akin to forgiveness. It was a tacit understanding that Fate was to blame. There was nothing she could have done to avert the tragedy that had taken her family away. More than that, they had accepted her. She was one of them now, if she wanted to be. Thinking back to what Muldoon had done, she gave thanks to God for her good fortune.

  “Listen,” Reza told her, “the pain… never really goes away. But you learn to deal with it.” His voice was nearly lost in the background banter and clatter of nearly a thousand spoons scraping the remnants of the evening meal from the trays of House 48, her new home. “You have to, if you want to get out of this lousy place in one piece. If you don’t, people like Muldoon and some of the kids here will use you and throw you away like a toilet wipe. And you’ve got friends now to help.”

  “Besides,” said a short, stocky red-haired girl two seats down from Reza, “you’re a short timer. What are you, fourteen, or so?” Nicole nodded. “Jesus, Nicole, you’ve got less than a year here until you’re fifteen and you can apply for one of the academies. You look like you’re pretty sharp and in good shape. They’ll probably take you. If you don’t,” she shrugged, “you’ll just have to wait it out until you’re seventeen.”