The Reject Read online

  THE REJECT

  Edyth Bulbring

  Tafelberg

  For Julia, wonderful Savage

  PART ONE

  1

  THE MESSAGE

  The bird swoops over me, her outstretched claws skimming my head. She pelts the deck of the seacraft with scat, then shoots into the sky. I watch her fade to a speck until my eyes become a blizzard of spots.

  Princess Fanny visits me every afternoon. Some days, like today, the hadeda taunts me. Other times, she brings me news. The last time she told me, crowing with glee, that the state of Mangeria and its Locusts had cornered the rebel Savages. They were packed like rats in the underground sewers of Posh City, starving as supplies ran out. Their only source of water the putrid liquid dripping from the pipes.

  “They will all go to Savage City.” The teller tapped her beak on the deck to mark time. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Mucus leaked from her scarred eyes as she glared in my direction.

  I spat at the bird. She was saying it to torment me.

  The rebels are led by my father, Handler Xavier, and Kitty, my best friend from the orphanage. I look across the ocean to the shores of Mangeria. Slum City is burning, the fires grow every day. The rebels will fight to the bloody end – they will never be taken alive. They know what capture and a sentence to Savage City prison means: torture and then slow death from heat and starvation. Freedom or death!

  I hear a shuffle of footsteps on the deck. “What news from the bird, my beauty? Has the time come for us to leave?”

  I am not alone on the seacraft. Reader, the blind past trader who taught me my letters as a child, is my only companion. He bribed his way onto the craft with a suitcase full of books that would teach me how to sail. But only Reader knows how to read the dots. When I have learnt his blind language, I will turf him overboard and push his head beneath the water. Hold it down.

  “There’s no news, old man. Stop asking.”

  Reader arches his neck and sniffs. “I smell moisture in the air. Tell me what the sky looks like.”

  I peer up. The sun is a smear of pus against the dark sky. It is cloaked in black clouds.

  “There’s not much to see. The sky is full of smoke. And the sun is very faint,” I tell him.

  “The smoke is deceiving us. Rain clouds are lurking. We cannot wait much longer, faithful Juliet. The season has turned and the seas are perilous when the storms come.”

  “Hold your tongue. I’ve told you: I won’t leave until I have news. Go back to your berth. You disturb my peace with your prattle.”

  The old man chuckles. “Oh, my beautiful Juliet. You have no peace for me to disturb. I hear you at night when you cry out in your sleep. It shreds my dreams.” He stretches out his hand.

  I turn away. Nothing can comfort me.

  My beloved Nicolas and I were supposed to run away across the sea to discover what lay beyond. We tricked The Machine and killed the marks on our spines. But instead of sailing away together, I took our seacraft and left him behind.

  I was faced with an impossible choice: My half-sister, Larissa, was dying and Mistress, the woman I recently discovered to be my mother, wanted me to save her. But to do this, I would have had to betray Nicolas by telling Mistress where he was. Nicolas’s father, the Guardian of Justice and Peace, believed the rebels had taken his son hostage – until Nicolas was returned to him, the Guardian refused to let Larissa have the procedure that would save her life.

  Unable to make a choice between Nicolas and Larissa, I have waited for fate to decide. Until I know whether Nicolas is back with his father, or that the Guardian has relented and allowed Larissa’s procedure to take place, I cannot leave these shores.

  Reader sighs. “While we linger, let me read to you from one of my books. You are slow to learn my blind language and there is much you need to know. You have mastered the sails and the tiller, but you have not learnt how the sun and stars can guide us. I have an excellent book in my collection about how Polynesian sailors from the old world navigated the seas without instruments by observing the sky and the swell of the waves.”

  He gives a sly smile, his toothless gums as pink as a baby’s. He knows that for as long as he is useful to me, he has a place on board. He is old and past his time, but he is still cunning.

  During the past three months, while I have waited for news from the bird, we have sailed out of sight of the coastline during the day, dropping anchor close to shore only at night. We are careful to keep out of sight of the Locusts. I have become skilled at raising and lowering the sails; I have learnt how to helm, and how to lash the wheel to hold the boat steady while I sleep, but I am still battling to read the skies.

  As Reader fumbles his way across the deck and disappears into his berth below, I hear the cry of the teller again. She has come back to provoke me. Princess Fanny spins wildly around the mast and suddenly dips towards the seacraft, crash-landing onto the deck.

  She is not a beautiful bird. Not anything like the pictures I’ve seen of other birds in books Reader has lent me over the years. But now Princess Fanny looks more hideous than usual. Her feathers are covered in oil and her talons are stained with blood. She pulls herself across the deck, dragging a ragged wing behind her.

  I give her some water – she is no use to me dead. The bird drinks, and dunks her head into the bowl. She searches her feathers. She finds a fat louse and crunches it in her razor-sharp beak.

  “Do I have to wring your scrawny neck to make you speak? Tell me about Larissa and Nicolas. And don’t lie to me.”

  She scowls at me with scarred eyes. The Muti Nags who make magic in Slum City blind the chicks when they hatch so they have sight of the future. The tellers are unable to lie. But I do not trust this ugly bird. Her loyalty is tied to Larissa.

  Larissa found Princess Fanny as a chick and promised she would never blind her, but gouged out her beloved bird’s eyes when she thought the rebels had kidnapped me, the drudge carer she had grown to love. She wanted the blind teller to help her find me.

  The bird has not forgotten my part in this betrayal.

  Princess Fanny’s voice is hoarse. “Your sister will have her procedure tonight. The Guardian of Justice and Peace has given his blessing. They have found a Savage girl who is a perfect match. My Little Miss will be well again.” She empties her bowels on the deck and utters a strangled howl.

  A slab of concrete lifts off my chest. Larissa will live!

  And after the procedure, the Savage donor will die. Tomorrow, some mother and father will wake up in Slum City to the news that their daughter has been sacrificed to make a Mangerian miss well again. The girl is probably a drudge like me. Someone of no value.

  “And Nicolas? Is he alive? Is he still free? Tell me.”

  The teller stares blindly across the water. “Nicolas is alive.” She probes her bloody talons with her beak, picking, then spitting out bits of flesh. She senses how much news of Nicolas means to me.

  The bird hobbles towards the edge of the deck. “The Locusts have laid down their weapons, the Savages too. The fighting has come to an end.” She vomits on the deck and releases an ear-splitting honk.

  The war is over, and perhaps the Savages have won. Nicolas is alive, and possibly free. And my sister will be well. I have been tormented by a nightmare that my refusal to choose between them condemned both to die. But fate dealt the cards kindly and favoured them both.

  “You must set sail across the sea. The tellers have foretold that you are the one. There is a journey you must take. Until you leave, you cannot return. The clock is ticking. Go now and fulfil your destiny.” Princess Fanny launches herself into the air and is swallowed by the billowing smoke.

  Destiny! Prophecy! The one! The tellers have been squawking this nonsense about me before I was born. But they are wrong. Kitty is the one. She fought the war to free the traders of Slum City. All I wanted was to leave with Nicolas and have a new life, not fulfil some foolish prophecy. I do not fight other people’s wars. I fight only for myself and for Nicolas.

  Reader totters onto the desk clutching a book. “I heard that noisy bird. What is the news?”

  I cannot help myself. I laugh. “The teller says my sister will be well again and Nicolas is alive. The war is over.”

  “If you are sure, my lovely. You are certain the bird never lied?”

  The old man is ignorant. Tellers do not lie.

  The seacraft lurches as a wave beats against the beam. Reader clutches the book in his arms and grabs the railing. “We must anchor close to shore for the night. Tomorrow we will sniff the stench of our homeland for the last time and say goodbye.”

  “No, at first light tomorrow we’re going home. There’s something I have to do. Then we can go on our journey.” I will find Nicolas and ask him to come away with me as we planned. There is no one else in Mangeria for me to stay for. Not Mistress, my mother, who as a young girl took up with a Savage boy from Slum City and bore his child. I do not trust that she’d believed I had died at birth, that she had not abandoned me. She would have been at the forefront in the war against the rebels, fighting my father, Xavier. The man she once loved.

  I will not stay for him either. He does not even know I am his daughter, and would probably care rat scat if he did. As for Kitty, she would not thank me for refusing to join the rebels.

  But … there is my sister. Larissa does not know we share blood, and Mistress will make sure I never see her again. I shake my head. In time, Larissa will forget me.

  “This is not wise, Juliet. I do not trust the b
ird. It might not be safe. Sometimes lies are told not in what is said, but what is not said. We must hoist the sail tomorrow and leave as the sun rises.”

  The old man cannot stop me. I have to go back. If Nicolas won’t forgive me for deserting him, I will go on the voyage without him.

  Reader wets his finger and holds it in the air. “We do not have much time to dilly-dally. I fear a storm is coming to these shores.”

  I wake suddenly in the middle of the night. I cannot breathe. A dead weight sits on my chest and my arms are pinned down.

  A hand smothers my mouth and nose. I am suffocating.

  A monster peers down at me, its face cut in half by the faint light of the one-eyed moon. Black eyes stare into mine.

  “Don’t make a sound, else I’ll slit your throat.” The voice is male. His eyes are round. His hair is a savage mop of barbed wire. Not a monster: a boy from Slum City. He presses something cold against my neck.

  I kick out, but my legs are tied. I try to bite his hand, but it presses down harder, grinding my head into the deck. I force a harsh sound out of my throat, stripping it raw.

  “Stop messing around and shut your gob-hole,” he says.

  A foul smell fills my nose. The boy stinks of rot, and oil. I make my body slack and he pulls away a rusty knife. I run my tongue over my lips and taste the filth from his hand.

  “Who else is on this seacraft? How many of you? And don’t lie to me else you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  Lying is one of my natural talents, one I have nurtured these past fifteen years. It has saved my skin in many tricky situations.

  “Five others. Scavvies. They’re sleeping below,” I tell him. “When they catch you, they’re going to rip you apart.”

  Scavvies – the Necromunda who scavenge for relics in the city that was drowned when the seas rose after the conflagration. They are the toughest scum from Slum City; burnt black by the sun, their skin salted from the sea.

  He grabs me by the hair and drags me across the deck. I am trussed up to the mast like a piece of meat ready for the fire. Fit for some Posh’s dinner. He tucks away the knife in his satchel, his grin mocking me. His teeth are jagged and sharp like bits of bone.

  “And the old man I found wandering around below, babbling to himself? Did you forget to tell me about him?”

  If the boy has hurt Reader, I will claw that smile off his face and make him eat it. “He’s just a past trader, a useless piece of rubbish. I hope you pushed him overboard.”

  The boy chuckles. “He said the nine Locusts on board would break me in two and use my spine to beat me before dragging me off to Savage City.” He saunters around the mast, checking the knots on the rope and pulling it tighter around me. He grins when I wince.

  “So, I’m right in thinking it’s just the two of you on this sloop. No Scavvies, no Locusts. It’s a big seacraft for one skinny girl and a blind old man.”

  He could not know that the sloop belongs to Nicolas’s father, that he sails it in summer to the pleasure resorts along the coast. If the boy swam out in the dark, he will not have seen the family emblem, a gloved fist, branding the front of the bow.

  But the seacraft is mine now. I will not allow this Captain Hook and his stinking knife to steal it from me.

  “What do you want? I’ve got food and water. Take what you need and get off my sloop.”

  “Yours? I don’t think so. I’ve always wanted to be a captain.” He limps over to a container of water, dragging his foot. He is injured. Weak.

  I could fight him. If I could untie my hands.

  The boy sprawls out on the deck and massages his foot. No, he is not wounded. His foot is a bunched club. He takes off his shirt and uses it to clean the oil off his body. His skin is brown, covered in a fine pelt of black hair. Scars criss-cross his bony back. They are old scars, like red twine bulging through his skin. The base of his spine is clear: there are no six numbers marking him.

  My mark is still on my spine, the same as all citizens of Mangeria – Posh and Scum alike. It determines what trades we’ll have and who our fate-mates will be. But The Machine cannot track me now. My mark is dead.

  As the boy scrubs his face I see his features. His face is dark and gaunt, hungry like a rat. Squatting above his eyes are growths like two small horns. My stomach knots with disgust. A club-footed devil with horns on his head, and no mark on his spine. A Reject: the worst scum. The Machine would have found him useless at birth. He would have been dumped in the landfills outside Slum City. And then, because he survived, he would have been bonded as a slave to another Reject. The scars on his back tell me he is an obstinate piece of trash.

  “Duh! I’m a Reject. You can stop staring at me with those big eyes of yours.” He fills a bowl with water and drinks. Burps. “Now, where’s the food, Cow-Eyes?”

  Cow-Eyes. It’s a name I have been called many times. My eyes are too big on my face, my body too long and skinny, my hair too Savage, my skin too pale. I am the ugly friend of Kitty, the beautiful pleasure worker. But Nicolas found me beautiful. And when I was with him, I felt beautiful.

  “Juliet! Juliet, my lovely. Are you alright?”

  The Reject turns as he hears the cry from below deck and groans. “I think I’ll take your advice and push the old rubbish overboard. Gab-gab-gab, gab-gab-gab, the whole time I was tying him up. I had to punch him in the head to get some peace.”

  I hiss at him. He will regret using his fists on Reader.

  “Hang on.” The Reject stares at me slyly. “Juliet? That’s a name I’ve heard in the market. There’s a price on your head, Juliet Seven.” He rubs his fingers together. “A large number of credits.”

  I strain against the rope. Rejects are loyal to no one – the traders of Slum City treat them with as much cruelty as the Posh do. The boy would sail the sloop back to Mangeria and trade me to the Locusts.

  I look towards the horizon. Reader was right, a storm is brewing. The sun is rising in the grey sky, and clouds are massing above Slum City. But it is not smoke – the fires have died down. The bird did not lie.

  “The war is over,” I say. “No one will pay credits for me. I’m worth nothing to you. Let me go.”

  The Reject laughs. “The price on your head stands. There’re a few Guardians who want a piece of you. You must have pissed off a lot of people.”

  Mistress, my mother. She will not have forgiven me for sabotaging the procedure and endangering Larissa’s life. And Nicolas’s father. He will want to teach me a lesson for kidnapping his son, or so he believes.

  “What’s your name?” I ask. If this Reject is going to sell me for credits, his name will be the last curse on my lips.

  He shrugs. “I’ve been called lots of things by my masters. A name means scat to me.”

  I smile through my teeth as I bunch my fists. “I think I’ll call you Gollum. It’s a favourite of mine.” Gollum, the hideous creature from a book Reader once lent me; despised and cursed for stealing a precious ring. “You look like a Gollum. A handsome, sweet-tempered boy with goodness in his heart.” My words drip with honey. “If you release me, Gollum, I’ll show you where we keep the food. I can cook you porridge. And maybe you’d fancy some banana?”

  And when your back is turned, a knife between your shoulder blades.

  The Reject nods. “Gollum’s a strong name, better than most. And maybe I will let you cook and serve me before I hand you over to the Locusts. But if you burn my food, Cow-Eyes, I’ll beat you.” He grins. “I think I’ll beat you anyway.”

  The noise of banging comes from below deck. “Juliet, please answer me. Tell me that you are alive. The storm is coming. We are not safe. We need to raise the anchor and set sail before it is too late.”

  “Raise anchor? I can do that. Then I’ll take you home. There’s a cell in Savage City with your name on it.” Gollum crosses the deck and begins to winch up the heavy chain. He has no meat on his bones, but as he secures the anchor on deck, I see that his arms and back are strong. “Time to head on back to shore.”

  Suddenly a rogue wave smashes against the hull of the seacraft. Gollum falls and scrambles to his knees, but the sloop broaches and water sweeps him along the deck. The mast groans against the rising wind.