Free Ninth City Burning by J. Patrick Black Page A

to kiss me again, and while she’s doing it, I take the envelope from my satchel. “So I guess I’ll have to give you this now.”
    She kind of goes still, then glares at me. “That better not be what I think it is.”
    â€œYou probably shouldn’t think about it, then.”
    When she sees what’s inside, you can tell she’s trying hard to stay mad. “You’ve got to stop doing this, Torro. There’s a war on, in case you didn’t notice, and we’re all supposed to be doing our part.”
    â€œDoes that mean you don’t want them?”
    â€œOf course I want them, you idiot.” She’s holding the pages now, and she looks like she’s ready to cry. It always seems crazy the way dots and lines on a page can do that to her. She’d never let you know it, but Camareen is really sensitive as anything. “But there are better things you could be doing with your time.”
    To see her now, though, I don’t think there are. The pages I got from Cranely are supposed to be music. To me, the marks look a little like stick people sitting on some mostly empty bleachers, but Camareen can read them as easy as normal words. She plays with our settlement orchestra, even though she sort of hates the music. Prip music is just a lot of booming noise that makes you think of battles and whatnot. It’s all about how we’re part of this big struggle and how heroic we all are and everything. That sort of music really gets some people. Like during official concerts, you can always see bureaucrats just crying their eyes out. But Camareen hates it. The only reason she plays anything at all is because when she was little, she heard a song that wasn’t Prip-approved. It was an old song. Artifact music. So when I found out Cranely had a book of old music, I knew I had to get it from him. He won’t trade artifacts for anything except more artifacts, though. That’s why I needed the glasses. He’s been trading me the book seven pages at a time for a while now.
    â€œSo is it any good?” I ask.
    Camareen is going through the pages, wiping her eyes with the cuff of her shirt. “Really, really good.”
    â€œSing one for me.”
    She looks over her shoulder, toward the hallway door. “Not here. Later.”
    â€œJust sing a little.” I know she will if I keep asking her.
    She knows it, too. “All right, just a little.”
    I don’t get to hear the song, though, because just then the muster alarm goes off, so loud I wouldn’t have heard her even if she’d screamed.

EIGHT

TORRO
    M ore or less everyone in Granite Shore is part of the settlement militia. You don’t go on active duty until you turn fifteen, but as soon as you start school, you’re learning to assemble a rifle and stab things with bayonets, all that stuff. People don’t mind the training, though. It’s not like shipping our quotas to the Prips, because we all know
why
we need the militia. Everybody here’s seen a hellion before, or knows someone who has, and we know without the militia, the hellions would be in here just hacking us to pieces in no time.
    With that great big war the Legion’s supposed to be fighting for us, you sort of wonder sometimes. What they tell us, like in school and telecasts and whatnot, is there’s this big empire out there planning to take over the entire world and fill it up with their own people. Anyone else—meaning all of us here at Settlement 225—just gets the old summary execution. Those empire people have some name in their own language, but as far anyone around here’s concerned, they’re just “the Enemy.” Sometimes they’re also “wanton aggressors” or “implacable foes” for the purpose of official speeches, but in the posters and murals and whatnot, they’re usually just big, creepy, shadowy things with long claws and lots of teeth. The