Free Brothers to Dragons by Charles Sheffield Page A

for his life.
    — The Book of Job, Chapter 2, Verse 4
    In the month that he had been away, Cloak House had changed enormously. Job noticed some things at once. The hundreds of dead and the handful of surviving children had disappeared, but even more new ones had taken their place. Colonel della Porta had gone. Father Bonifant was not even a memory. The doors of Cloak House had been changed, replaced by strong metal ones with double locks, and the lower floor windows were now barred.
    Those were the superficial changes. It took a little longer to discover the big one: Cloak House was no longer a simple orphanage. It had been converted to a detention center, and it was a center with a hidden agenda.
    On the first morning, Job was taken to the first floor apartment where the colonel used to live. He was assigned a number. It was painlessly and sub-cutaneously marked on his forehead and on his right wrist in an invisible but indelible ink.
    "Don't complain," said the woman who did the marking. "That's your meal ticket. You get no food without it. Use that number to find your assigned duties each day. Today you're free, but you start work tomorrow. Make sure you get a sign-off from me when work's done. No food without that, either. Lunch at twelve, listen for the bell."
    She was muscular, short-haired, and wore a gun and a thick truncheon on her hip. She was also frighteningly casual about everything. She gave Job a chit to take out a bedroll and a blanket from stores, assigned him a dormitory, and told him to go. It took him a while to realize that this was all the indoctrination he was going to get.
    Job knew his way around the building. That was just as well. The other children, all boys, showed no interest in talking to him. He spent the rest of the morning wandering around Cloak House. Although it was cleaner than it had been under Colonel della Porta, access to some floors and to all the exits was now forbidden. Not even a trickle of hot water came from the bathroom faucets, and the whole building was freezing cold.
    He had been given a full breakfast in the Mall Compound, so when the bell rang at midday he was quite ready to eat but not ravenous. He wandered down to the dining room. It had not changed, but it was more crowded than it had ever been. Half a dozen adults, each one armed, stood around the walls watching. Everyone else was already seated. Job found a place, sat down, and stared around.
    He was probably the youngest at his table, and certainly the smallest. The skinny boy on one side of him gazed straight ahead and ignored him completely. The boy on the other side was equally gaunt, but tall and strong-limbed, with a massive head, heavy brows, and big red ears. He returned Job's stare but did not speak.
    The mutual inspection ended with the arrival and distribution of plates of food. Job hardly needed to look at what was set in front of him. The rancid smell rising from the dish was enough. A small wedge of slimy fat meat floated in thin gray gravy, surrounded by a few small lumps of soggy pasta and a spoonful of amorphous bright-orange vegetable.
    Every one else was gulping down the food and spooning up the greasy gravy. Job pushed his plate way.
    "Not going to eat that?" The red-eared boy spoke for the first time. "Can I have it?" Job hardly had time to nod before it was being wolfed down.
    "Is it always like this?"
    "Like what?" The other boy did not stop eating, and he did not seem to understand the question. Job knew he had been spoiled by the quality and choices at Bracewell Mansion, but surely Cloak House food at its worst had never been this bad?
    "It's terrible," he said. "Smells rotten. And even if you could eat it, there's not enough to feed a rat."
    The boy had finished, and he turned to look at Job. "You'll get used to it," he said. "My name's Skip. Skip Tolson. You don't sound like a dimmie, so you must have been jaded. What you here for?"
    "Dimmie?"
    "Like Guppy, on the other side of you." Tolson