“Sure,” I say.

We walk over together and Avery makes the introductions. Her name’s Malindra. Lin, for short. I shake her hand, meet her eyes, which are a mesmerizing mixture of blue and green. With each movement, her reddish-brown hair bounces in curls on her shoulders. She’s got a nice, warm smile, like her father, although she doesn’t really carry any of his other features.

“I’ve got to get back,” Avery says, as two blue-clad Enforcers eye his unattended machine as they pass by. He rushes off, leaving us alone…with all the other people standing in line.

“No line jumping,” someone yells from the back.

“Oh, I’m not—” I go to say.

“Shut your mouth, we’re just talking!” Lin yells back sharply. I gawk at her, her smile temporarily falling, but coming back just as quickly. “Have you had your afternoon ration yet?” she asks.

Uh, what? “No,” I say.

“C’mon,” she says, pulling me away from the line. “The food here sucks anyway.”

I let her drag me down the street. A guide is exactly what I was looking for.

When we cross the road that leads back to the main gates, I hear a commotion to our left, somewhere behind the army medical building. “What’s going on?” I say aloud, my thoughts spilling from my lips.

“Who knows, who cares?” Lin says, still pulling at my arm. “The army’s always up to something. Supposedly protecting us from the big, bad savages, or some such nonsense.”

I stop, pull back, listening. It sounds like something big is happening, or has already happened. The mission, I remember, the one Meaty-Bun and Skinny-Bun were talking about when they entered the morgue. Just beginning or just ending?

“Can we check it out?” I ask Lin.

She looks at her watch. “I’ve only got twenty minutes before I have to get back to work…” she says. “Ah, screw it, let’s go.” She releases my hand and we stride quickly toward the building and then past it. “Why the interest?” she asks. “You got a boyfriend in the army or something?”

“Not exactly,” I say, smashing my face to a fence that’s blocking our progress. She does the same, grabbing the metal links with her fingers. We crane our heads far to the right, trying to see what’s happening at the gate.

Vehicles are pulling in, one at a time, soldiers spilling out. Blood on their uniforms, on their faces, on their hands. Backboards being carried to the trucks, loaded up with bodies, hauled away. “What the hell?” I say.

“Looks like the natives might’ve got the best of them this time,” Lin says beside me. “There aren’t usually this many casualties, but it’s happened before. Once. Maybe twice.”

“What?” I say, even though I completely understand what she’s saying. She thinks they’ve been fighting the natives, but does she mean the Tri-Tribes? “Who?”

She shrugs. “I dunno, they don’t tell us much. Only that we’re safe and that the army is doing everything they can to protect us from the savages. But it’s not like the natives are just going to roll over and let us take their land. Nor should they. It’s all a load of rubbish if you ask me. We should just leave them alone and maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

My mind is whirling. If there are this many Glassies…I mean, earth dwellers…dead, then how many “savages” died? Skye and Siena and Wilde and…oh, God, Tristan. Could he have been in the battle? Here I thought I was the one taking the risks, going inside the dragon’s lair, when really the dragon was outside hunting. A pit widens in my stomach.

“Can we climb this fence?” I say, looking up, already sticking a foot between the links. I have to see if they’ve got any prisoners, if any of the dead bodies are the enemy. (Or Tristan.)

“Only if you want to get shot,” she says, grabbing my arm. “It’s a restricted area; they won’t hesitate.” Her eyes are serious enough that I step down.

But I can’t just do nothing, can I? I try to swallow, but my throat’s too dry.

“What’s this really about?” Lin asks, ducking slightly to catch my gaze.

Tristan. It’s about Tristan.

“Nothing,” I say.

~~~

She has to go back to work, so we agree to meet later on. I promise to answer all her questions. But I can’t, can I? She doesn’t seem to have any love for the army, or the way the city is run, and she is a star dweller, or at least used to be…but what if she turns me in? I barely know the girl, and as feisty as she seems to be, if she gets her mind to do something, there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll do it. It’s a risk but…

I could really use an ally.

Before Lin left, she took me back to the food line. I’m halfway to the front but my appetite is long gone, replaced with the dark hole in my gut. Who did the soldiers fight? Did they discover the spy cave used by Hawk and Lara? I cling to the hope that whoever killed so many soldiers didn’t suffer any deaths. Or maybe it was those wild beasts, the Killers. Yeah, maybe the soldiers ran into a huge pack of them. I’ll take anything other than Tristan fighting.

I’m at the front of the line, having forgotten to watch the person in front of me to see what they did. Scan your wrist, do it quick, like you know what the hell you’re doing. I lower my arm to the glass. Will this work?

A red flash. Please turn green, please, please, please…

Green!

The burly man, who somehow contacted the Enforcers to arrest the hungry boy, motions me inside. I resist the urge to spit in his face.

Inside, it’s way too quiet to be a place where people eat. Food involves conversation, and conversation involves stories and laughs and some level of fun. Even in the Pen it was like that, although the fun sometimes included fistfights and insults about mothers.

I see them. Burly men wearing black, standing in the corners. Watching everything, scanning the room, eyes roving back and forth. Back and forth. Fun-killers. People are sitting, eating, most of them in silence, some talking in voices so low I don’t know how anyone can hear them. It’s eerie, like I’m in a cave full of sleeping bats.

The line moves forward and I look for a plate, a tray, something. Everyone moves forward empty handed. I watch as a woman wearing dark pants and a black shirt at the front of the line scans her wrist on another plate, and is handed a dish with a glass of water and four rectangles on it: one green, one red, one yellow, one brown. What are those? Surely not food. She takes her plate and sits down at the first seat she comes to.

The next person, an old white-clothed man with a cane, scans his wrist and is given a similar plate, only with just three rectangles. The same as the lady’s, but without the brown one. “No meat ration for the Lowers today, I guess,” he mutters as he sits near where I’m standing, looping the curved part of his walking stick on the corner of the table. Despite his complaint, he dives right in, using the side of his fork to smash the rectangles into something that looks—at least slightly—more like food. He shovels the resulting paste in his mouth with a large spoon, pausing only to take long gulps of water.

It’s almost my turn, but my mind is on anything but food. No meat ration for the Lowers today. The man’s muttered complaint. By “Lowers” did he mean…those from the Lower Realms? The star and moon dwellers? The ones wearing white, doing all the jobs the former sun dwellers don’t want to do? I pay attention to the three people in front of me. Two of the three are wearing dark clothes and get the brown rectangle. The last one, wearing white, doesn’t. A Lower. So what does that make the others? Uppers?

Feeling disgusted, I scan my wrist. A chubby woman wearing a white cap over her hair hands me a plate. No brown rectangle for me, the Lower.

I take the first seat I come to, fighting back the rising urge to scream.