Hall Girl Found

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-3290-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 337 Seiten

Ellen can see the past with a touch of her hand. Every past but her own. Her parents are dead and she's been exiled, raised apart from a family she barely remembers, her focus on a future of her own creation. Ellen is busy building a life, one that sets aside her past, burying it for good in the same grave everyone thinks she's in. It's a good plan, but she isn't the only one with an eye to the future.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hall, Lisa

Leseproben

Girl Found

It was a beautiful morning. The sky above the shield was clear, bright sunlight hit the concrete blocks of the buildings, turning them a crisper shade of grey. The rail was on time, and as I followed the walkway to the civilian services plaza, the rich, enticing aroma of coffee filled the air. Good things were going to happen today, I could just feel it.

Mrs. Chan had been running the coffee stand that stood outside the rail platform for the Central City train for as long as I could remember. She was a small woman. Silver roots were beginning to show in her dark hair, but there wasn’t a single wrinkle in her face. She had three sons, the youngest a couple years older than me. I’d never met anyone who could recall Mr. Chan.

“Ellen, how are you doing this morning? The usual?”

“Yeah, thanks.” I’d been flattered when the woman had bothered to learn my name, until I found out Mrs. Chan made it a point to know everybody’s name. She was the local source for all information undocumented. There wasn’t a scrap of gossip that got past her.

“So,” Mrs. Chan began, “you graduate this year. What are you going to do now?” It sounded like small talk, but her eyes looked me over sharply as she talked. There was more to this than casual conversation. It was a good guess she not only remembered I graduated university prep this year, but knew about the scholarship and my field of study. Graduates meant jobs, which meant access.

“Depends on whether I get the scholarship or not. I meet with the advisor today.”

Mrs. Chan’s eyes widened as she congratulated me. It was overkill, but I found myself smiling along with her anyway. “Good for you,” she told me. “Your father must be very proud. I will pray to the fates for you.”

More like pray I got the degree and then access to cutting edge tech one of her sons would be happy to sell for me. “Thanks Mrs. Chan.” I took the cup she handed me and moved off to the side of the cart, out of the way of the next customer. Feeling chatty, I asked. “So, how’s Jimmy doing?”

Jimmy Chan was the youngest of her three boys, and the only one of the Chan brothers I knew. We’d only been separated in school by three years, but that was a chasm inside the Pittsburgh educational system. My best friend Katy’s brother ran around with Jimmy. That’s how I knew him.

Mrs. Chan’s face brightened. “He was just promoted to manager,” the woman said proudly. “They moved him to the main resource distribution center. He is in charge of all the delivery routes for six neighborhoods. You don’t get your ration delivery, you call me. I’ll make sure he sets you right.”

If I didn’t get my rations, it was likely because Jimmy sold them. “Tell him I said hello, and congratulations,” I told her and went to wait for the train.

My first memory of Jimmy Chan involved, and this was no coincidence, a delivery hauler of food packets. He’d been planning his career even back then. Stealing from the people inside the neighborhood was considered poor form, but taking a few packets off the back of a hauler making the rounds to Republic service centers and schools was a rite of passage inside the neighborhood. Jimmy had been present for mine.

Between Jimmy Chan and Eric Moreno, my friend Katy Moreno’s older brother, I could pretty much get anything I wanted in the way of legal or contraband goods, either one, but if it was your monthly rations you wanted increased, Jimmy was your man. Having Jimmy working for the resource distribution center was like leaving the back door open.

I moved away from the vendor stalls. All the seats on the platform were filled with upper level students like me waiting for the train into Central City, the business portion of Pittsburgh located inside the rail loop. The city had been planned to handle masses of people with the highest degree of efficiency, same as all the cities that had been rebuilt after the quakes. Davis, my guardian, told me that there had only been one city plan developed and that it had been copied, with minor changes, in every city built during the reformation.

This meant that every city in North America had a train that circled the business section with neighborhoods stretching out from it in lines served by a rail car that moved up and down between two rows of living quarters. Some of the neighborhoods were nicer than others, and then there were those that we’d all heard about, but few of us had actually seen. You needed a special pass to get inside them. The higher-ups of society lived there, members of parliament, city organizers, and the controllers of industry.

I took another sip of my coffee. Beverages weren’t allowed on the train, and I wouldn’t be tossing half of it. As my eyes glanced over the rim of the cup I saw a woman across the way from me, trailing her fingers along the edge of a cart where a man sat selling woven jewelry.

There was no way this woman was interested in his wares. The woman had pale hair that glittered gold where the morning sun struck, rendering it almost the same color as the heavy gold encircling her neck. I watched as the woman milled aimlessly among the collection of vendor carts surrounding the rail platform, staring up at the nondescript concrete buildings circling the plaza as she moved between the carts as if there were something special about them. There wasn’t.

I wasn’t sure what it was about her exactly, but my interest was piqued. I pushed off the railing I’d been leaning against and moved closer to her, watching as she milled aimlessly through the plaza. The jacket she wore definitely wasn’t a handout from the local resource center, and the oversized bag hanging from her shoulder could be real leather. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen real leather, but the bag looked expensive. When she stopped at a vendor cart that sold small plastic ornaments and purchased one—they sold for a credit each—her hand went into that bag and pulled out a memory stick to pay for that small treasure.

Most people banked using their civilian implants, the biogenetic devices required by the Republic. People with the kind of money that required separating your wealth from your person or risk losing half of your left arm in a robbery weren’t regulars in this neighborhood, which was why the young man wearing the dark blue jacket now shadowed the woman as I did. That memory stick had drawn the wrong kind of attention. He wouldn’t be finding a better mark today.

I tugged up my sleeve and tapped a spot on my forearm. A small piece of skin cleared, and the screen of my implant jumped to life, displaying the date, time and the condensed schedule I’d programed for the day, which consisted of a single entry labeled “advisor”. Today was the day I found out whether or not I had a future, and I had just over an hour before I was supposed to check in at the office. I couldn’t afford to be late for that.

But if a citizen the Republic cared about was mugged in this neighborhood, the entire block would be in lockdown until the authorities found the culprit, or in this case, the guy in the blue jacket. This was seriously going to screw with my plans for the weekend, possibly my plans to get to school on time if this went down quickly enough. The Civil Security building sat across the plaza. Response time to a report would be swift.

The guy in the blue jacket had been leaning against the railing. I moved to the same place he’d occupied and put my hands to the metal. People touched surfaces all day long, never thinking about what was there before them or after. That was a luxury I didn’t have. While the average citizen wasn’t aware it was happening, with each touch to a conductive material they were leaving a piece of themselves.

To anyone watching, I was merely waiting for the train. I knew from experience the railing was constructed of steel, and normally I would have avoided it like the plague, but today I needed to stop a mugging, or worse, and some information would be helpful.

Everything about the woman being stalked screamed upper class, and I wondered vaguely who she was or what she thought she was doing here. She wouldn’t be the first relative of a Parliament member to go sightseeing around the city, doing something they called checking in on the working class. I remembered slender fingers trailing along the edge of a metal surface. I could go back to that later, if there was time.

Right now I needed to make sure the guy in the blue jacket was really doing what I thought he was doing. I reached for the railing. Steel and iron sucked up mental ponderings like a sponge sucked water. Whatever the young man had been thinking as he touched the metal had been laid into it, and as soon as my hand registered the sensation of cool metal, a slew of pictures flashed in rapid succession inside my head; bits and pieces of every person who had touched this handrail filling my mind.

This was the part I hated, the massive overload of random nothing. Floating among the chaos of information was a snippet from a girl who thought a guy across the hub was cute. She posed, pushing out her chest, hoping he would notice her, and then she was gone. A man stopped to check the time, leaving behind a harsh impression of irritation at his friend before moving on. Another woman who’d stopped to grip this handrail had been aware she was being followed, but left no clue as to the identity...