UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,19
said.”
He wipes grease and mayonnaise off his mouth with his hands. “I said . . .” He speaks with exaggerated clarity. “Weird about your rifle malfunctioning.”
“Yeah. Weird.” She doesn’t want to talk about it. Even thinking about it makes her sweat.
“No one else’s did. Well, Shanda’s weapon jammed a couple of times, but hers always does. You used your own rifle, right?”
“Yeah, I did.” Then she thinks about it. She was the last one in line, still shaking from the encounter with Pecs and the long walk alone with the sarge. A plebe had unlocked her weapons locker before she arrived. Had he switched it with someone else’s—or worse, had someone tampered with her rifle somehow?
Thoughts swirl in her head like furious hornets.
• • •
After lunch Logan slopes off to watch one of his nonboeuf friends in a jazz recital. A kid who tutors him in math.
“You should come,” he says. “Get yourself a little culture.”
She’s about to say she likes classical better than jazz but decides against it. “Sorry, music isn’t my thing.” Then one of the other kids mimes the breaking of her recorder—which is apparently legendary—and it gives her all the excuse she needs to slip away and find Thor. But once she’s alone, her natural paranoia rises. Had the plebe at the weapons cart given her a bad rifle? Before she knows it, she’s turning for the stairwell that leads to the basement weapons cage. She keys in the digital lock, which she always knows, no matter how often they change it, and takes the stairs three at a time.
A different code opens the door at the bottom of the stairs, and through long practice, she ducks her head to avoid the camera. The basement is a warren of storage areas. An atmosphere of old paper, decaying rubber, and petroleum permeates the place. It’s colder than upstairs, but not by much.
The armory is in the back. She passes the freight elevator and the long row of file rooms behind more locked doors. She’s used information in those files in trade for goods and favors. She could probably find something in there that would save her now, but there’s not enough time. Too bad she hadn’t found a hideous scandal that could keep her safe until she turns eighteen. If she survives this harvesting, that will be her new priority.
The weapons are stored in rows behind a rigid cage of steel bars and chicken wire. She stalls on the north side of the armory, hearing a rattling inside. Between the third and fourth rows she sees someone standing at a workbench; an overhead lamp lights him and the bench. His back is to her, but he looks like the plebe who was responsible for the weapons lockers at the rifle range, a wiry kid with nasty knuckles and large ears. He was also part of Kip’s entourage at lunch. Two lockers are open on the bench. The plebe is disassembling a rifle.
She’s too far away to identify either of the lockers as hers. She clutches the cage bars, straining to see. In its concrete foot, the steel squeaks against her weight, and she reflexively backs away into the shadows.
“Who’s there?” the plebe calls. His voice squeaks like the cage bar.
Soundlessly she flees down the long corridor, then ducks down a side hall when she hears the ponderous opening of the cage door. She finds a second stairwell, not daring to return to the main one. She fumbles the exit code and is sure the camera caught her profile leaning closer to the keypad. Can they identify her from a dim silhouette? Just one more thing she wishes she didn’t have to think about.
She heads for Thor’s small bedroom and is grateful he isn’t there. He might have talked her out of her rampant paranoia, and she wants to let it range free.
Her thoughts buzz angry and bewildered. Did the plebe sabotage her gun and is now hiding the evidence of his tampering? And if it was sabotage, who ordered it? A plebe that age wouldn’t act alone. This would have to have been planned long ahead of time, so it couldn’t be Kip. Or could it? He’d never liked her, even before his catastrophic fall on the track. Maybe it was the sarge. The man always seemed to have it in for her. He treats her as if she’s not a true boeuf, no matter how well she scores on tests and performs on the field. And