Living with the Dead - By Kelley Armstrong Page 0,37

had grown up planning to marry Hugh. He was five years older than her and she’d been adopted by the kumpania for breeding, so naturally they’d pair her off with the only unmarried male close to her age. The fact that he was big and broad-shouldered and, in the right light, reminded her of a young Hugh Jackman only added fire to her fantasies. As for Lily, she was no competition. A silly ditz who had yet to successfully complete an assignment. Apparently, the kumpania disagreed.

Even after Lily and Hugh married, Adele hadn’t given up hope. Kumpania law said that couples had a year to breed. Then they moved to “stage two,” and if that ended with no pregnancy, the fault would be presumed to be the woman’s. Lily would become a drone, and Hugh would be married off to the next available girl, which would be Adele.

For the last year, Adele had been feeding Lily birth control pills in her morning coffee. Ironic, then, that Adele herself should become pregnant. But when she did, she’d looked at her options and decided, as fine as Hugh was, there was a better life out there for her. Yet she’d kept giving Lily the pills. It never hurt to have a backup plan. The downside, though, was that the longer it took Lily to get pregnant, the harder they tried and the more Adele had to listen to it.

That soundtrack made watching Robyn at the computer all the more frustrating. What the hell was she doing? Her client was dead. She was wanted by the police and there she was, calmly working like it was any other day.

After another fifteen minutes, Adele stood, the vision evaporating.

Enough of this bullshit. It was time to take a shortcut.

ON SATURDAYS, sandwiched between their two busiest nights of the week, most of the others slept. There would be activity only in the main building, where the drones worked.

Drones was Adele’s word for them. When Neala once overheard her using it, she’d been sentenced to the worst punishment inflicted on kumpania youth: a month caring for the seers.

The drones were those whose clairvoyance never developed enough to take their place as full-fledged members. So they’d been given the menial jobs that kept the community running—cooking, cleaning and caring for the children.

The chores with children were most popular, especially with the women, probably because drones were sterilized—the surgery performed by a human doctor who, like his father before him, was paid very well to service the kumpania and ask no questions.

A drone’s offspring were certain to have powers even weaker than their parents’ and there were only so many menial tasks to go around. Just last year, when the phuri finally agreed that twelve-year-old Suzanne would never be a true clairvoyant, the leader—their bulibasha, Niko—had declared there wasn’t enough work for seven drones. So fifty-four-year-old Lizette, showing signs of rheumatoid arthritis, had quietly passed in her sleep. Everyone knew what had happened. No one complained. It was in the best interests of the kumpania.

Adele snuck out back to the tool shed. She moved aside the barrel in the corner, found the keyhole in the floor and inserted the stolen key. The trapdoor sprang open, steps below disappearing into the darkness.

She turned on her flashlight and started down, closing the hatch behind her. At the bottom, she inserted a second key, then pressed the buttons on the ancient code lock. The lock disengaged, and she opened the inner door and headed down the tunnel.

Inside was the bomb shelter. Or that’s what the kumpania had called it in the fifties when they’d taken advantage of nuclear hysteria to hire a group of workmen who thought nothing of building a fully operational shelter under the old farm.

The hum of the generator was the first thing Adele heard. A few more steps and the raucous shouts and musical sound effects of a cartoon seeped through the next door. Tom and Jerry, Adele guessed. That was Thom’s favorite.

When she opened the final door, it was still almost dark. They kept the lights low to save generator fuel. The seers didn’t complain. They’d never known anything brighter, and would scream in pain if they stepped into the sunlight. Or Thom and Melvin would. For the third, Martha, the world was eternally dark.

Martha’s crib lay just inside the door. She reminded Adele of the grubs she’d sometimes turned up doing garden work, white and wriggling, blind and limbless. Martha didn’t wriggle much—only when her diaper