Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (3 page)

Those weeks, or months maybe, with Miss Sayi made up one of the few bright spots in Nikki's childhood.

Miss Sayi had made the world seem beautiful, magical, and far safer than it really was at the time. But she'd been sick. Her colorful head wraps that had given Nikki so much amusement had been hiding the side effects of black market cancer drugs, the kind as likely to kill as save—roulettes, the dealers called them.

When Miss Sayi's luck ran out, Nikki and Michael were lost. They were too young to know what to do, to know how to get help when they couldn't wake her up. They were too scared to go to the neighbors. The San Diego outskirts were just starting to buckle at that time, having the honor of being the last major city to succumb to overcrowding and disease after the conflicts. The atmosphere in the neighborhood was growing more dangerous and less human by the day. Miss Sayi's strong, calming presence had been the only thing keeping the three of them safe.

When someone finally broke into the tiny apartment three days later, they didn't come to check on Miss Sayi or her scared and hungry foster kids. They didn't come to help. They came to loot.

Seeing the dirty men pawing through Miss Sayi's carefully maintained home was more than Nikki could bear. She'd fought back the only way she knew how at the time. She'd wailed at the top of her lungs.
 

When one of the men casually slapped her, she just screamed that much louder. Then he hit her again. The second blow wasn't a swat to quiet a noisy child but a full backhand with all his greater size and strength brought to bear.

That's where it all started. That was the first time Nikki had felt the tingle leave her body and the strength respond in Michael's. When one of them hit Michael, Nikki's own strength responded for the first time. That was the day—the first day she truly felt alive.

She had to get that power back. It was who she was, as much a part of her as her badly dyed hair, hand-me-down clothes, inappropriate belches of humor, and terrible attitude. Michael's description, not hers. The best way to do that, the only way, really, that she could come up with was to do what she'd done that day in Miss Sayi's living room. She had to make somebody mad enough to hit her, and then let them keep hitting her until her power decided to show itself again.
 

That was the selfish part.
 

She wasn't going to pick a fight with just anybody though. She was going to find someone more than deserving of a little knuckle justice, someone out to hurt or screw over somebody else. She was going to find a real douchebag.

That was the hero part.

A solid plan, she didn't mind saying. Michael disagreed. He had a big steamy pile of objections, most of them too boring to recall. Her favorite was the one that included the words "hell and gone from the realm of scientific plausibility, or even basic common sense." He could be a real hoot sometimes.

Nikki waited for a minute to see if Michael would jump in, but it was a pointless wait, she knew. He'd faded back to—wherever. She was alone again, for now.

She stared at the nightclub in silence for a while, watching people come and go, trying her best to be OK with the solitude.
 

That went pretty much like she thought it would. She quickly found herself questioning her plan. She found herself thinking maybe Michael was right. Maybe she should try something a little less risky. But that just wasn't her style, and the whole point was to get back to who she'd been before, not to do things even further outside her comfort zone.
 

Without thinking, she started to pull her knees up against her chest, but the narrow ledge and her center of gravity got in a pushing match that nearly sent her tumbling forward off the roof. She slapped her hands back down and caught herself, but her strained shoulder paid the price.

Nikki grunted at the pain and ground her teeth to keep in the string of curses she so wanted to unravel. Being normal sucked. No two ways about it.

She spun on her aggravated butt to swing her legs onto the roof and stood up to stretch, letting out a long grumbly groan as she did so.

Does this mean you're going back to the transport?
Michael said.

"I thought you'd left."

I'm not going anywhere, Nikki. Except maybe back to the transport, I hope.

That was pretty wishful thinking on his part, but Nikki wasn't about to give Michael another reason to criticize the night's activities. She'd left Coop loading up supplies on his own nearly two hours ago, something the man had to be getting used to from her by now. There was no way he was still waiting around with a transport full of controlled goods.

He would come back for her after he unloaded, of course. She had her run of the city now that the whole mess with Savior seemed to have blown over, but Elias and his crew never left her alone for too long. They didn't push. They never asked where she'd been or what she'd been doing, but they were always there waiting to give her a ride when she was ready to go…back.

Nikki rolled her shoulder to loosen up the stiffness that had built up during her wait and turned back to watch the club.

Why won't you call it what it is?

"I don't know what you're talking about," she lied.

It's your home now. It's not going to kill you to say that.

"It's not home. It's just a place where I'm crashing, for now."

It's a safe place where you keep all your things, and it's full of people who care about you. If that's not home, I don't know what is.

"And?" She knew there was an
and
, not just because she knew Michael as well as she knew herself. She could feel the "and" about to drop. She was good at sensing that sort of thing. She felt ands and buts with the best of them.

And you could ask one of them to help with this "plan" of yours.

She laughed and tucked her hair behind her ear again. "I don't need help picking a fight. You of all people—"

You know that's not what I mean.
She could hear the frustration in his voice, or thoughts, or—thought voice.
I mean you could spar with a friend instead of assaulting a stranger.

She shook her head but otherwise didn't bother responding. He didn't get it, and she didn't feel like explaining. He'd just make fun of her if she did.
 

A handful of girls stepped out of the club. Well, "stepped" was being kind—they'd obviously been partying since happy hour. They were clinging to each other and barely keeping their feet, mostly due to laughter that was hurting Nikki's ears three stories up.

They were townies for sure. Skimpy, spangly dresses, ridiculous shoes—not helping their stability issues—enough makeup to paint a free zone shack, and hair that was nothing short of magnificent.
 

Nikki's hand almost made it to her own hair before she stopped herself. She would NOT envy townies. There was nothing wrong with her style, which was why she'd had Coop help her maintain it for months. The only thing about it she'd changed was the color, and even there she'd kept it close to what Michael had done after Sky City. The black he'd put in had almost grown out completely, but she'd dyed the platinum underneath a blue so dark it was almost black, in the right light. Her roots were already starting to show, but that was an easy fix.

The gigglers stayed put outside the front door to chat, much to the bouncer's amusement and Nikki's annoyance. Watching the townies fed a growing wave of contempt that could have been hers or Michael's. When he was in her head like this, she had trouble telling his emotions from hers. They felt the same to her now, which irritated her enough to make her question and battle everything she felt when he was around. Still, she didn't want to complain. She didn't want to risk pissing off the universe enough to make it snatch away what little of him she had left.

Michael was quiet all of a sudden, but she could tell he was still there. Nikki could feel him, almost like he was staring over her shoulder. Something had shut him up, and whatever it was started a trickle of unease creeping through Nikki's belly.

It didn't take her long to spot what was bothering him. She'd noticed the kid lurking in the alley earlier, but a skinny, dirty teenager seemingly half-conscious next to a dumpster, was white noise to a zoner like Nikki. Her eyes had moved past him without a thought. But looking at him now set off her trouble alarms. He was on his feet against the wall of the alley and looking all manner of shifty, his gaze glued to the townies. His body language practically screamed
creeper
.

On the plus side, it also screamed malnourished, strung out, and altogether harmless. The kid was probably as tall as Nikki, if not taller, but she would bet hard cash she outweighed him. On the threat scale, he barely registered, especially against four well-fed women, even if they were townies.

Still, that wasn't stopping him from eyeing them like they were a charity food drop. Definite creeper. Watching him reminded Nikki of the hunting lions she'd watched during her halo years. He stood motionless in the tall garbage, seemingly watching and waiting for a weak or injured member of the herd to fall behind before he made his move.

Good old halo years. Fun times. If Nikki ever met the gal who'd come up with the halo plan, she'd give her a big wet one. Sheer brilliance, that scheme, even if it didn't work the way they'd intended.

The idea had been to clean up the free zones from the inside out, by "educating the stupid out of the troublemakers." Nikki's description, of course. So they issued adaptive cerebral education bands to every kid in a few of the free zones and made wearing the things mandatory. They even kept up monthly checks to go over the onboard logs and ensure no tampering.

Of course, getting kids in the free zone to do anything that smacked of official was like trying to herd cockroaches, but the geniuses in charge accounted for that. They set up a reward system. Every month you showed up to the checks with your halo intact and used as directed, you got a stash of fresh food. Brilliant.
 

They'd started the halo initiative not long after Nikki and Michael turned seven, and it lasted an impressive four years before the powers that be gave up on it. Turned out the system worked a little too well.

The halos were connected to the global net to gather educational content and beam it directly into the brains of the little zoners. The brilliance of the halos, and their downfall, was their ability to adapt to the learning pace and interests of the individual. It turned out more than a few zoners were interested in learning how to hack the halos. The content they could access was filtered and restricted, of course, but not enough to keep a few hungry little minds from learning enough to start bypassing the safeguards and falsifying the logs. Those few wasted no time setting up shop to do the same for others, in exchange for goods and services, of course.
 

Zoners might not get top marks for ambition and obedience, but when it came to creativity and ingenuity, they were unbeatable, in Nikki's opinion.
 

By year two of the program, every kid in the pilot zones knew how to beat the system. Find your nearest hacker, stockpile their currency of choice, pay up to get past the initial lockouts, and then settle into the routine. You had to spend about half an hour a day on legit learning to give your hacker something to replicate at the end of the month, but after that, you were free to burn brain cells on whatever garbage you could find on the net, while snacking on your free rations.

It was a sweet life while it lasted, assuming you could afford one of the decent hackers. Nikki never could. After her initial bypass, all she could access outside the legit stuff was a reality show following a group of South African poachers and a buttload of Japanese cartoons. Consequently, her Japanese wasn't half bad, as long as she stuck to Oni lore or sailor lingo, and she was pretty sure she was the world's leading expert on lions, rhinos, and bribing corrupt African border officials.

Michael, no surprise, had refused to hack his halo, and when they decided to shut down the program, he'd been one of the first to protest, albeit for completely different reasons than the rest of the zoners. He'd gotten all the nerd genes, for sure.

Distracted by her boredom-induced tangent, it took Nikki a second to realize the situation below had taken a turn for the worse. One of the ladies, arguably the least inebriated, had separated from the group to a chorus of ear-splitting complaints and started her slightly weaving climb up the road, while her friends started their raucous stagger downhill.
 

The high-heeled loner passed right by the grubby teen's alley, not noticing him or his hungry stare, and continued up the street, singing to herself.
 

Nikki stared at the teen staring after the townie, half of her begging him to make a move, the other half willing him not to. She didn't have to work to figure out which feelings were hers this time. Even so, when the teen slipped out of the alley and started following the girl, her desire to go after him was doubly strong. Michael was suddenly onboard with the hero plan, as she'd known he would be once he saw someone in trouble.

But his sudden resolve to play hero didn't stop him from second guessing her plan, unfortunately. Even at a run, she didn't make it halfway across the roof before he started in.

Nikki, don't do this on your own. Call for help.

She didn't bother with a response.
 

She slowed as she reached the fire escape. She could see the water on the steps and rails reflecting the moonlight, and she had no desire to do a repeat performance of her graceless dumpster drop, especially not from three stories up. She started the climb down trying to ride the line between fast and careful, erring a wee bit on the side of fast.

Michael was wise enough not to distract her on the climb down, but as soon as her feet hit the alley pavement, he was back at it.

Did you hear me? Call for help, Nikki. Please.