Angel Of The City Read Online Free Page B

These angels, they do good, see? They come down from heaven and they help people, just like this girl’s been doing, the one the Counselors grabbed. I been hearing about her for a while now, going from quarter to quarter trying to get the tribes to work together.”
    He puts his hand on my shoulder and draws me near. His eyes are dilated and blood-shot. I think he sleeps less than I do. “I got things to atone to,” he says, solemnly. “If she really is an angel, then I want to talk with her.”
    He’s looking me straight in the eye, yet everything about his manner screams, liar. There’s more to this than he’s telling me, but I can’t worry about that right now. The headache has started again, deep beneath the scar and along with it, the rising anger. I’m still not sure what an angel is, but at this point it doesn’t matter. I have to get out of here.
    “ Devon, she’s in the One Twenty Seven,” I say, although I shouldn’t have to. Maybe it’s the coal; maybe he’s so stitched on dust he can’t understand. “The One Twenty Seven is…”
    “ Hey! Who you taking to? I ain’t some first-day shade. I know where she is.”
    “ Then what are we talking about?”
    He drags me to an overstuffed chair and pushes me into it; pulls up a stool and sits close to me.
    “She was taken in the early morning,” he says. “Not by Counselors, but by Blueshirts. They came to her place in the sixty-fourth and dragged her out.”
    That ’s unusual. Resistance to the government is considered an act of terrorism and those arrests are almost always handled by Counselors. I shrug. “So some over-reaching Blueshirt was trying to make an impression with the Council. No doubt he got slapped down quick enough.”
    “ Yeah, sure, but here’s where it gets strange. A few hours later, the Blueshirts take her from their holding cell with sirens blaring. Wee-ahhh, wee-ahh!” he says, mimicking the City Security Force vehicles. “Middle of the day and they let the whole village watch. Made it a point to keep the noise up as they drove to the One Twenty Seven. Front door,” he emphasizes, “not the back. Paraded her right up the steps and handed her over to Counselors, in front of everybody .”
    He ’s staring at me in anticipation, his hands twitching so bad it’s a wonder they can keep themselves attached to his arms. But I’m not really paying attention. My brain is busy elsewhere.
    The Blueshirts are nothing more than bullyboys, underpaid and undertrained. Their job is to keep small things from becoming big things; from turning a simple disturbance into something the Counselors have to get involved in. Start a fight, steal a loaf of bread, get drunk and vomit in the street—and it’s the Blueshirts who come running first. As a rule, they’ll crack heads and loosen teeth, but being picked up by them rarely risks being turned over to a Counselor. When it does happen, it’s done in secret or after curfew when there are no witnesses. The Blueshirts have to live with the rest of us, after all.
    But it ’s more than the open transfer to the Counselors that bothers me, it’s where it took place. The trip from the sixty-forth to the One Twenty Seven would have passed by dozens of station houses. Why choose that one? To make a point maybe, but for whose benefit? Almost no one outside the Council knows what the One Twenty Seven is used for.
    My eyes refocus and I see Devon still staring at me, like he ’s followed my thoughts. “That’s right,” he says, “who was that little show for?”
    I don ’t know and don’t pretend to. “I give up. Who?”
    “ The resistance,” he says, and starts to laugh. “The Council was sending a message to the fucking resistance.”
    For a minute I stare blankly back at him, then I laugh too. Only my laugh is louder, longer, bringing tears to my eyes until he realizes I ’m not laughing with him, but at him.
    His palm slams across my face. “Respect!”
    The urge to leap at hi m