The Color of Rain (3 page)

“Fish,” I correct. “My dad gave us biology lessons. He was always trying to get us to look at things, but my brothers and me just wound up looking at the starships. We used to pretend to be Runners. Even Jeremy did, until he got old and cranky.”

“Yeah, well, I ain't never seen something like your matching-head family. All together and looking like you loved each other. You just don't see that. Not on Earth City, anyway.”

“Yeah.” The memory fractures into little, lost pieces, just like my family. My mom and Jeremy taken. My dad murdered. Walker and me, the last of the Whites.

“You know what?” She scoots forward, her gray eyes growing sharp. “A guy I banged last week heard some space Runners say that the Touched are sold off planet and sacrificed to some kind of Void god. A black hole or something.”

“Don't be gullible. There's no such thing.”

“They go somewhere, don't they? And it's not to an asylum in the south or whatever the cops say.” She pokes her photo back into her cleavage. “Don't get itchy. I'm just saying.”

But I am itchy, and I have been since that girl almost fell on us all those weeks ago. I slip off the command panel, fixing the torn part of my shirt toward the back. I'd rather think about being in that alley with Hallisy than the whereabouts of thousands of
missing Touched people, my mother and older brother among them. “I can't worry about what happens to the rest, Lo. I've got my hands full with just the one,” I say. “Speaking of, what's he doing?”

“He's
fine
.” She leans out the window. “Wait, I take that back. He's made a run for it.”

I sprint from the ship, almost losing my footing on the pier's loose boards. I scan the walkway, but Walker isn't where I thought he'd be.

He's dangling over the edge.

A man in a black suit holds his small body by his jacket while his feet jerk in the air. I run faster, screaming, “STOP! Don't hurt him!” I yank his arms, bringing my brother's struggling torso against mine.

“The boy was trying to jump. I stopped him,” the man says. He's lean and striking, and his flinty eyes examine me chest to face. Face to feet.

“Well, I've got him now, and I'd thank you if it weren't for the blatant ogle.” I pin Walker's squirming wrists in my hand. “You can go your way.”

“He's Touched.”

“He's my brother!” I wrestle Walker farther from the edge. “And he still has lucid periods, so if you were going to call him in, you can save your breath.”

The man's laugh is slick. “I don't bother with this earth's laws.”

This earth?

Walker twists free, sprinting toward the ship where Lo tackles him. I turn back to the man and pull at the windblown hair crisscrossing my cheek. He's younger than I thought. Simon's age—and with the same sort of wave to his hair. But he's better looking than Simon by far.

“You're a Void traveler?” I force my stare away from the spot where his throat slides beneath the unbuttoned V of his collar. “You're a Runner?”

“Yes.” He picks at a curl on my forehead, and I'm mesmerized enough to let him. “And you're a redhead. A
true
red.”

His fingers skim my bare shoulder, and I lean away. The rip in my shirt was tossed to the front when I dashed to Walker and now reveals more side-cleavage than I thought possible.

I straighten it. “You've never seen a redhead before?”

“Natural red is considered extinct in the known universe.” The slightest scowl twists his lips. “It's less of a flame color than I imagined . . . more of a perfect rust. No one's told you that before?”

“Extinct? I've never heard that one before, but I don't know many Runners.” I fold my arms over my chest to keep them from twitching through my hair. “Not many of you wandering these parts of Earth City.” We glance around at the rundown pier and the horizon of chipped skyscrapers as though we're sharing a thought. What
is
he doing here?

“True,” he says. “I'm a little lost. Maybe you can help me.” His hand slips into his pocket, bringing his jacket away from his trim waist. I wish that the move didn't make me glance at his belt . . . and a little lower. But it does.

“Do you know the Blackstar Bar?”

“Huh?” I'm too distracted by the warm color of his skin to follow. “Wait, how can you live in the black of space and have more color than me?”

“Excuse me?”

“I just meant—” I feel heat in my cheeks and speak fast. “I don't have a door between my brain and my teeth, at least that's what my dad used to say. Everything just kinda falls out.”

His smile is the open kind, revealing rows of polished teeth. “What's your name?”

“Rain. . . . Who are you?”

“I let my friends call me Johnny.”

“Johnny.” The name slips from my tongue to my thoughts and back again before I remember the original question. “Well, the Blackstar is up on Trade Runners Row.” I point to the street beyond the pier. “That way about three blocks, but don't pass through the alley with the wire mesh. That's where the Bashers set up camp, and you'd be a rich surprise. And keep clear of the girls on the corner of Downer and Glam Streets. They're not prostitutes; they're bait, if you catch my meaning.”

His eyes are on me intensely. “Why don't you show me? I'll buy you a drink and tell you about my skin.”

For a second, he's so tempting that I almost forget where I am. Simon could do that to me, too—make me forget everything—and that embarrassment is still fresh enough to sting.

“I have to take care of my brother. And if you're looking for a date, I'm not interes—” I stop and take a leveling breath as I reassess him. A
Void traveler
. “I'm not cheap.”

“I wouldn't guess so,” he says without missing a step. The darkness of his eyes reveals a deep brown, and I swear he's suppressing a pleased smile. “And I bet you're just desperate to jump planet.”

I fight to hold my shirt together as the wind picks up. “How do you . . .”

“You're not the only one who can throw the truth out there. Besides, everyone on Earth City would love to leave, wouldn't they?” He brings a stone-handled knife from his pocket and snaps it open. In a flash, he's cut tabs in my ripped shirt and ties the pieces together. He flips the knife closed and returns it to his pocket. “Better?”

I adjust the now mended neck of my shirt but can't keep the question out of my voice. “Thanks?”

He points above himself to the starships in the sky. “Rain, that is my ship,
Imreas
. I take passengers of all sorts. Think it over and bring your deal to me by tomorrow.”

“My deal? What kind of deal?”

His lips twitch with a frown. “Whatever you have for whatever you need. You'll find that I'm open to all sorts of
worthwhile
trades.” He lifts his sleeve and glances at a strange silver communicator on his wrist. The metal gleams like a shining mirror. “But now I'm late. I hope to see you before tomorrow. Remember, the Blackstar Bar.”

I find myself nodding. I've dragged a drunken Lo out of that seedy joint more than a few times.

“And Rain.” He says my name like he's already paid for it. “Remember, I have whatever you need.”

I open my mouth, but he's turned, his black outfit cutting against the pale cityscape. I glance at the ship he pointed to; it's shaped like the head of an arrow with three of the largest blue thrusters that I've ever seen. A fast ship, no doubt, but
his
ship?

“Who was that tasty tower?” Lo tugs Walker along behind her by the front of his jacket.

“He said”—my tongue feels thick as I watch Johnny turn a corner and disappear—“he's a Void captain.”

“No shit,” Lo swears. “Wouldn't that be freakin' sweet!”

I wet my lips. “I think he made me a kind of offer. He said, ‘I have whatever you need.'”

“Screw Hallisy”—she says with a laugh—“
that's
the right guy for you.”

I glance over my brother's vacant face. “I don't know, Lo. A young, rich guy like that doesn't need to bargain for a girl, does he? And how would he have his own ship?” I finger the knotted tabs of my shirt, the proof that he was just here. That he chose to touch me. “People don't just run into you and happen to offer what you've been dreaming about.”

“Rich people do. They can have anything.” The wind picks up, and Lo and I grip each other's shoulders while Walker stands immobile. “Don't overthink this one, Rain. Work what you want from him.” Her voice is twisted high with emotion, and the sudden thought that she will miss me, should I escape, makes me cold.

I slip off Walker's too-big jacket—Jeremy's old bomber—and pull it on. Then I tuck my brother against me and fold the material over him as well. Lo is right. Can I really afford to doubt
whether I should bargain with a Void captain? A
sexy
Void captain, no less . . . even if he was a little . . . off?

“Lo, he looked at me like he'd already bought me.”

“They all do that.” She licks her chapped lips. “Besides, what if you were being tricked into something? Isn't any trick worth jumping planet?”

T
he rain is acidic on Earth City. It appears without warning, without lightning, biting into the skin on my forehead and leaving the backs of my hands itching and red. I lead Walker through it, trying to get him home before he goes completely catatonic.

All the while, Lo's words circle through me:
Isn't any trick worth jumping planet?

I steer Walker around the spot on the square where that Touched girl almost fell on us, her blood halo already bleached into a pale stain by the rain. She was the exploding sun that made me see Walker's headaches for what they really were: the first symptom of the disease. Somehow I had deluded myself into believing that it couldn't happen to us because we were all we had left.

I turn a corner and, like a thunderclap, run into the angry block letters on the streets' endless graffiti of water-damaged billpostings.

KNOW THE TOUCHED!

Symptoms:

1. HEADACHES

2. SHAKES

3. MENTAL FOG

If you see an afflicted, call 999. Abettors are criminals.

Do not sorrow. Fear the infection.

My dad used to scribble the word “feel” between the “DO NOT” and “SORROW.”
If they're going to tell us how to think, they might as well use words we understand
, he'd say. This always made my brothers and me laugh, but looking back, I'm not sure why.

Still, I shouldn't have missed Walker's first symptom. We were working at Dex's then, making enough money to fill our bellies, and I thought he was just not used to the long hours. Had it come on the same way for my mom? I couldn't say. I was barely seven when the cops came for her, Walker clinging to my knee, and all I remembered was that when I tried to hug her good-bye, her eyes were empty.

But I'll never forget when they came for Jeremy.

He wasn't afflicted but had been caught hiding a Touched man in the basement of our apartment building. I was twelve then. Old enough to do something when they locked him in a belted jacket and hauled him away. Old enough to do something when my dad threw himself at the cops and they beat him to death in our stairwell—the sounds echoing up the flights. Crashing, screams, and pounding.

Echoing, still.

Still.

I tighten my hold on the back of my little brother's neck and rush past a crowd of sketchy men who yell slimy words.

That night in the stairwell, Walker became my only family, and like hell will I give him up. There's always hope. There's always
some
chance. To forget that is to become one of the factory worker drones, and I won't bow to that life.

My dad didn't lose hope when my mom became sick. He read poetry to her, and he held on long after she was taken, working wicked nightshifts and then still staying up all day to take us on history walks through what he called old Manhattan.