Free Pale by Chris Wooding Page B

on. “His father doesn’t know where he is. He’s very worried.” He looked at me and Kyle. “I don’t suppose you two had anything to do with this, did you?”
    Now I knew who Grayson was talking about. He meant the kid we’d beaten up on the way to school. I was in some classes with him, but I never knew his name. He was just a Pale.
    “David Bloom,” Kyle said. “Don’t know him, Mr. Grayson. He sounds like a pansy to me.”
    Everyone cracked up at that. Except Mr. Grayson, of course. He snorted in disgust and walked away.
    “I heard what happened to that kid,” said
    Sadie, after Mr. Grayson was gone. “They were a rich family, once, with a huge house. But there was a gas leak in the kitchen. Everyone died from the fumes. They brought back David and his dad, but not his mom. She didn’t have the right blood type.”
    “He’s rich? No kidding?” Kyle asked. I could tell he was thinking of stealing the Pale kid’s lunch money.
    “Not anymore,” said Sadie. “The lawyers took everything. In the end they had to go and live in the Graveyard with the rest of the Pales.”
    “Bet it was your dad that took the money!” one of the twins said to me.
    “Bet it was,” I said. I was so proud.
    There were a lot of lawyers like my dad. Afterlife lawyers, they were called. Their job was to take everything they could from the Pales. You see, the law said a Pale was dead even though they were still walking around. They didn’t have any rights. That meant their relatives could take all their stuff. A good lawyer could take everything a Pale owned from them. And my dad was a great lawyer.
    Even if a Pale managed to keep hold of their stuff, they soon ended up poor. Not many people wanted to give a Pale a job. No one wanted to do business with them. Sooner or later, they all went to the Graveyard, where they belonged.
    I lifted my head and saw a group of Pales on the other side of the schoolyard. They stood in a cluster, keeping their heads down. The Pales at school all hung out together. It was creepy.
    “Don’t they make your skin crawl?” asked Sadie. She shivered and pressed herself up close to me. “The way they sneak around in gangs like that?”
    One of the twins gave her a nudge. “That might be you, one day,” he said with an evil grin. “After all, you’ve got the right blood type, haven’t you? So has Jed. You’ve been tested like all of us.”
    He was right. Everyone got tested to see if the Lazarus Serum would work on them. Me and Sadie had the right blood type. The other three didn’t. I wondered if that was the reason Kyle hated Pales so much.
    Sadie made a face. “Eww! No! I would never want to come back as one of them.”
    “What about you?” Kyle asked me. “What if you had to make a choice?” He was staring at me hard.
    “Me? A Pale?” I said. “I’d rather die.”

Chapter 4
Falling, Like in a Dream
    I was walking with Sadie after school when my dad pulled up in his car. It was a shiny new BMW.
    “Need a lift?” he asked.
    “No, thanks,” I said. “We’re going to see a movie. I’ll be back home later.”
    “Sounds good,” he said with a smile. “Hi, Sadie. How’s everything?”
    “Everything’s great,” she said. She held my hand and looked at me.
    “Oh, Jed, I forgot,” said my dad. “I got us those tickets for the game on Saturday. Box seats, of course. Best in the stadium.”
    “Nice one, Dad,” I said. “You’re the best!”
    My dad winked. “You just have to know the right people,” he said. “See you later.” And he drove off.
    “You’re so lucky to have a dad like that,” Sadie told me. “My dad’s just embarrassing. I wouldn’t be seen dead with him.”
    “Yeah,” I said. My dad was pretty cool. We did a lot of stuff together. All the other dads I knew were like Sadie’s – boring and old. But I thought the world of mine. He was more like a friend than a dad.
    As we walked on down the road to the movies, Sadie chatted about school and