Lu followed Adon to school, apologizing to Benny for not texting sooner and promising he was fine, his phone had died and he hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t the first time he hadn’t come home, but usually there was Phaios to corroborate a story. Benny dismissed his concern too easily, Lu’s phone dinging another message asking where he’d been and Lu knew it wasn’t Benny, but Pa. He didn’t give too much thought to why the truth felt sacred or dangerous, but typed out the lie thanks to the Jane before he fully registered what he was saying. 

“I was studying with my tutor and the flood alerts went off. Then my phone died. So I stayed the night until it was safe.” He didn’t add where. Twelve districts had been under flood alert, but only a few had been soaked as bad as Indigo. They could see where his district ID was, if Pa really wanted to know, though he was already trailing Adon to school. Besides, Pa could send any number of terrifying men to abduct him at any time if he really wanted him home, but Lu was just a decoration for the quiet house, and Pa was only asking because he liked to know where all his things were. Benny, on the other hand, Benny would be tallying up all of Lu’s sudden absences. He wouldn’t say much until Pa asked, but Lu knew he was on borrowed time, and he couldn’t find the will to care. 

“What’s wrong?” Adon nudged Lu, catching the phone that fell too easily from his hands.

“Whoa,” Lu whistled at Adon’s reflexive catch, holding out an impressed thumbs-up, “that was awesome.”

Adon’s ears burned red as he smiled proudly and handed Lu his phone. They’d spent the lazy morning encouraging Mess’ dance party and helping him with his homework of filming an expression for each emotion on the Wheel. Adon had been wrapped in blankets and folded beside Lu on the futon, flicking the spinning needle and rapidly calling out the next emotion, Lu laughing at Mess’ inventive faces. Adon had felt warm in the unit for the first time since Heather had punched their independent family group code into the door keypad. His CAPT meeting was in a week and Lu had called him strong and brave and made him laugh hard enough that he wanted to survive. The fines could wait another week. The Asylum was just a big gang, but if he got into the Agricultural Program, all he had to do was finish the term and pay the fees Aphy collected like stickers, then he’d be free to move up to the Mids. They’d be safe. It was possible. 

“Are you following me to work?” Adon nudged Lu again. 

Lu smiled bright, nodding. 

At the cake cafe, Adon disappeared to the back while Lu posted himself at a small table and worked through the pile of CAPT worksheets Adon had sent him. Lu’s current predicted score was in the 40% range and he dropped his head to the table with a soft ow, raising it to find Adon smiling at him from behind the counter, offering an encouraging fighting-fist. Lu nodded, drank his watery juice, then started on the next review section. 

After ten hours of cafe test-prep, Lu followed Adon to the ramen cart, taking another small table, but opening his homework assignment instead, reviewing the rubric and considering all the ways to paint loneliness as the food car rumbled around the carousel rail. Lu was endlessly distracted by Adon’s laughter, then the irritable charm of his funny coworker, until Aphrodite entered with a purple-haired woman, striding arrogantly to the counter where Adon stood. It took Lu several minutes to realize she was their mother, only connecting it when all possible warmth disappeared from Adon’s face. Thinking of Mess sobbing on the floor and whispering about pictures and hurting and wilted apologies, Lu gripped the edge of the table, staring, watching for any sign that Adon needed or wanted help. 

“I didn’t bring her home,” Aphrodite shrugged, defending herself against Adon’s glare as the woman began to cry. 

“I’m sorry Doni,” she whimpered, reaching for him. 

Adon backed away from the counter, the horror on his face making Lu stand. 

“What did you do?” Adon gripped the ladle in his hand. 

“No, nothing,” the woman reached for him again, “not this time. I just missed you. You’re my baby.”

“Back,” Adon demanded, brandishing the ladle like a knife.

The woman dropped her hands, glaring at him with a bitter scoff.

Aphrodite frowned at the sudden change in the woman’s stance, her entire timid demeanor melting off her.

“Leave us alone,” Adon begged the woman, gesturing to the door.

Two men entered, rat-like, scrawnier than Pa’s guys and no one Lu recognized. They flipped a table, sending hot soup flying as customers yelped and scrambled for the door, the car skidding along the carousel platform. 

“Just do me this favor, okay?” The woman struggled to maintain her desperate whine, clearly wanting to shout. “I found a good guy. I’m almost happy, don’t you want your mama to be happy, Doni? We’re ready to link, and he’ll give me everything, so I just need it to go away for a little while, okay? Just a little bit.”

“No,” Adon backed away, voice and ladle shaking. “Whatever it is, no.”

The woman sighed, “fine.” With both hands, she shoved Aphro sideways. Lu jumped up to catch her before she toppled out the open window and into the center of the carousel that was no doubt an unfinished pit dropping her to the ground several stories below. Aphy was already crying as Lu caught her. 

The woman lunged forward, climbing over the counter and grabbing Adon by the hair, slapping him hard as she bellowed “YOU’RE MINE! You do as I say, now lower your eyes!”

Adon did not. He pushed and shoved and howled away, Lu stumbling over dining hall chairs to reach him. Aphy screamed as the two men pushed toward them and Lu caught one in the face with his fist, just the way Benny had taught him. The second man had made for the counter, grappling Adon into a headlock as the woman pulled Adon’s district ID pendant from his neck and scanned it against the man’s knock-off Security scanner. She pressed her finger to the gene-needle, another clean piece popping into place as Lu waded across the room, throwing tables out of his way, the second man dragging behind him, clutching his ankle.

Adon fought them, screaming as they broke his finger to get it to the scanner. There was the hiss of the needle, the jingle of confirmation, and the small tinny melody of an Asylum credit account transfer as the scan bot vibrated, “transfer complete.”

The woman stood with a victorious huff, throwing the ID pendant and broken lanyard at Adon crumpled on the floor, “you owe me at least this, don’t you?”

“I owe you nothing,” Adon growled, grunting as the man kicked him. 

Lu, finally free of the second man, vaulted the counter and shoved the man away from Adon. The woman jumped away from him, flipping her hair and stumbling out without a care for the cronies struggling to follow. She waved at Aph to follow, rolling her eyes when she didn’t, and stomping down the carousel platform and into a dark alley toward the transport station.

Adon pulled out his phone, dozens of messages from the ramen cart owner blurring the screen as he swiped them away, his coworker trembling in the kitchen. He opened his credit app, the fines and tax warnings still in the grace-period blues with countdowns to red, but two new circles had been added, one, grey: CAPT Stipend, TBD; the other red: Kin Debt Transfer via Bio-bot, Payment Due. 

Shaking, Adon tapped the red circle, opening the Asylum bank debt his mother had just used a biohacker to scam him with. There were ways to report it, but they would take weeks and he would need HEather to get him a lawyer. If the bio-bot hadn’t been able to confirm their genetic correlation, the transfer would have been canceled. Well’s people couldn’t technically steal money, they could only give debt, and the animalistic, defeated sob that came from Adon’s chest broke everyone’s heart as the zeroes loaded on the screen and a secondary warning flashed: Payment Due. Even his district alert began to flash red. 

Lu hugged a crying Adon for the second night in a row and wondered how much devastation one person could take. How cruel for a world to revolve around luck. He did not look at Aphrodite mumbling confused apologies on the floor, only helped a numb Adon clean the restaurant car, then walked him home. Lu answered the ramen cart owner’s call, yelling back when he fired Adon, threatening to sue him back for not ensuring the security of his customers or employees, citing the open window meant to cut down on environment costs. The man hung up without a fight and Lu used his ID to call a private rail car. Adon did not object, and that scared him more. 

They waited for Aphrodite at the platform on Adon’s insistence, entering their unit quietly, Mess already asleep in the bed. Adon said nothing, Aphro said only sorry, over and over and over, and Lu promised to meet him at school the next day with options, but only after Adon promised to survive the night. 

Lu glared out at the silence of the night, the rattling rail car descending to the decrepit Wells where he was a prince, and wished he’d thought of an excuse to stay.

☆

Lu stepped through the door of the dark house with a deep sigh. He saw the privileges by comparison to Adon’s unit now, the space, the textured furniture, the ornate choices and decorative greenery, the maintenance required and paid for by flooding drains and dead construction crews. He felt a hatred hardening in his chest, thinking of all the things he didn’t know how to do: laundry, budgeting fines, cleaning bathrooms, or being scared of bribeable Sec-Offs. There were so many things Pa’s money had bought him, but warmth had never been one of them. 

Lu stood in the open doorway of the house for a long minute, playing out what would happen if he left his district ID band and phone on the stoop and ran back to Adon forever. 

The temptation scared him, it was illogical. The Asylum would call him obsessed, a love-struck child, or full of dangerous emotions that warranted a rehab cell in the Charity House. But the thought that gently pushed him inside was that Adon couldn’t afford to feed him too. He would be a burden before he learned to be helpful, and Adon didn’t deserve that, whether he was willing to bear it or not. Lu refused to add to the weight Adon carried. He moved through the cold hall of the cement mansion, determined to learn all he could to climb up beside Adon, out of the Wells. 

Passing the greenhouse, Lu overheard Gideon yelling. He stepped closer, careful to keep his footsteps quiet on the tile, listening to Pa yelling over Benny.

“If he wants to leave here, he better go all the way up!” Pa ripped a trowel out of Benny’s hand, spearing it into the dirt. 

The only people from the Wells who reached the top were the jumpers. Lu gulped down the hollow feeling, snuffing out any leftover warmth, hardening his features the way Pa said looked intimidating, worthy of the Flock inheritance. Lu had never known warmth from Pa, but he’d been careful to understand the cold as a necessary absence, needed to lead unruly uncles and run the construction business and work with dangerous Quartet to make their Grounder districts safer. But he’d grown suspicious in the last year, new questions forming with each answer he discovered. He was a child, slowly piecing the world together, only to find it didn’t fit. Now he understood the expectations too clearly: if he didn’t fill Pa’s footprints, didn’t act as a voluntary shadow, then he was useless, disposable, and he would be made to jump on his own. He imagined running away to Adon’s, Pa rounding up a handful of the worst Flock members, breaking down Adon’s door and dragging Lu away, loading him into a private railcar and expressing to the top, pushing him out at the pinnacle of the Uppers, just before he could see the whole sky. 

The thought wouldn’t have fully occurred to him a year ago, he wouldn’t have heard the whole threat, just the tone. But no one had prepared him for the transition between innocent boy to suspicious man, and he’d spent the last year watching the Janes eye him hatefully, the Jons targeting or dismissing him, strangers skirting the edges of corridors and fancy businessmen giving up private cars to his waiting Pa. His so-called inheritance was dangerous and he didn’t want it anymore. But Pa wouldn’t kill him for denying…. Lu felt no certainty in his understanding of Pa. Pa would and Pa wouldn’t were two sentences he couldn’t finish anymore. 

Lu listened to Pa vent his anger at Benny for Lu’s absence, and to Benny trying to defend him, saying Lu was still young, even as Pa began plotting his son’s induction. 

Lu snuck away, hiding in his room. If he inherited Pa’s fortune, he could keep Adon and Mess, and maybe but hopefully not, Aphro, safe. But Adon was as stubborn as Lu, he wouldn’t accept help, especially not suspicious help. Lu didn’t know exactly what Pa’s companies did for the Quartet, but he knew it must be illegal, and scary enough that even Wells Sec-Offs knew him by name. If Pa had raised him intentionally, Lu wondered if he would feel the loyalty he was supposed to owe the Flock he was to inherit, but he’d only been left alone with a heavy promise of later expectations, and he never felt he owed them anything. He only wanted to be free. 

He shook his head at the ceiling, rolling his eyes at himself. Pa would have to die for him to inherit enough to keep Adon safe, and that was impractical, because then Lu would have to either do the inheriting, or figure out a way to make better money. Everything felt impossible and he was supposed to bring Adon answers in the morning. 

He pulled out his phone and dialed the same number he always entered when the future felt impossible. He felt no guilt toward Pa, ignoring the prompt about non-familiar contact communication and telling his phone to try to connect anyway, listening to the ringing that had been his lullaby as long as he could remember. She didn’t answer. She never had. 

☆