Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(33)

He understood a lot of things better now. He’d just turned seventeen, but he felt at least ten years older.

But age wasn’t the only alteration on his mind as he stood there, steadily moving hand over hand on the rope until he saw Renie’s fingers scrabbling at the roof edge. He was getting stronger, his muscles harder. Who knew that all it took to get ripped was a steady diet of canteen cuisine and some serious slave labour? It was a winning combination, albeit not one likely to catch on.

Millmoor was changing him, inside and out. And he remembered Renie’s words when he’d done his first job for her: Millmoor changes people. But you get to choose how.

‘Awright!’ the girl said, as he grabbed both her hands and lifted her up bodily. He lowered her to the safety of the roof and she crouched there a moment, wiping her face with the flat of her palm.

‘Let’s get back to base,’ she said. ‘I wanna hear from Jackson exactly why we’ve all been kindly giving a paint job to Millmoor’s prettiest landmarks.’

She stepped out of the harness and they were off. Back across the walkway, down the fire escape, into the dank-smelling service stairwell, and out.

The street lighting was intermittent and dim, but Renie knew where all the lamp posts were. As they rounded each corner they were always on the unlit side of the street. She kept up a mumbling, sarcastic commentary like the world’s least tippable tour guide: shortcuts here, CCTV cameras there. But it wasn’t Millmoor Luke was curious about.

‘How do you know all this?’ he asked her. ‘How long have you been here? Kids can’t start days until they’re ten, and then only accompanied by their parents. Yours must have brought you, but you never mention them.’

Even as the words left his mouth, an awful thought occurred and he kicked himself. What if Renie’s parents were dead, both killed in some terrible accident?

But it was somehow even worse than that.

Renie’s jaw stopped its urgent working of the gum in her mouth. When she turned to Luke her expression was ferocious. He was glad the darkness half hid it.

‘All that stuff,’ she said, hunching her shoulders, hands deep in her pockets. ‘That’s the rules they tell you about. The rules for people like you. Ain’t the rules for all of us.

‘Me mam and da was decent folk, and they tried to do their best for us kids. Mam was young – she’d been your age when she had the first of us. And Da didn’t have much education to speak of. But they loved each other, and me an’ my brothers. Da provided for us all the best way he could. It just weren’t a way the police exactly approved of.

‘Stuff would turn up at home, nice stuff he’d nicked. Mam would tell us not to touch it in case we broke it so it couldn’t be sold. We moved around a lot, so he never got noticed too much in one place, I guess. But someone musta noticed eventually. I was about six when we was all rounded up.’

She trailed off and stared ahead into the gloom, as if looking for her family among the pooling shadows.

‘Didn’t know what happened to any of ’em until Asif helped me look up my records one time when we was on a game. Da got sent to one of the lifer places; my brothers, Mam and me was parcelled out all over. I came to Millmoor. Used to live in a block with a few other oo-moos – that’s kids,’ she added, seeing Luke’s blank look. ‘Unaccompanied Minors Under Sixteen. Sounds cute, right? It weren’t. I ran away about two years ago. Fended for myself; never got caught. I hid out in the old part of town, the original bit. It’s all derelict and no one ever goes there.

‘But I needed to move around to get food and stuff, so I cut out my tracking chip. Didn’t do a good job.’ The girl pulled up her sleeve and Luke winced at the twisted mass of scar tissue. It looked like Renie had carved a fillet from her flesh. ‘Got infected and I thought I was gonna die, but at least I would have died free. I weren’t going to a hospital to get taken in again. Then Doc Jackson found me.’

Luke was aghast. You were always told that there were no children by themselves in slavetowns. That people were only given life for really wicked crimes, like murder or rape. Weren’t there foster homes for youngsters like Renie?

‘Foster homes is for kids what can be fixed,’ she said bitterly. ‘Kids like you if something bad happens to your family. Not kids like me what’s born unfixable. You’ve got a lot to learn.’

Didn’t he just.

He’d thought he was getting the hang of this place, and that in the club he’d found a way to fight back against its petty cruelties.

But it turned out that behind the petty cruelties were bigger cruelties. Worse ones. Did adults know that things like this went on – small children being abandoned in slavetowns – but never mention it? Or was everyone completely oblivious?

Luke wasn’t sure if Renie regretted sharing all that with him, because she was subdued for the rest of the way back. When they reached that day’s HQ, where Jackson and Asif were already waiting, she perched on a stack of cardboard boxes without a word. It was Luke who responded to the Doc’s enquiry about their mission’s success with a big thumbs-up.

‘Now are you going to tell us what it was all about?’ Luke asked. ‘Why the MADhouse now has the word “YES” written on it in letters three metres high?’

‘And Comms-1,’ added Asif. ‘He didn’t tell me why, even when we were out there.’