Metaltown Read Online Free

steps that led from the great room downstairs to the gardens, and then to the dock. The river was bright blue, as it always was after a recent color treatment. An illusion, of course; the water was filthy. The street people from the surrounding districts bathed and laundered in it—and, disgustingly enough, fished in it as well—leaving it even more sludgelike than the sticky black oil water of the Whitewater Sea.
    â€œIs there a problem, Miss Hampton?” asked her tutor, an angular, birdlike woman with a hooked nose. Her dark hair had become speckled with gray over the last year, and she wore it in a short cap around her skull.
    â€œI’m tired of this, Darcy,” said Lena. She rubbed her eyes, the satin fingers of her gloves making the perfect blue water disappear behind her fine lids. “If I have to read one more word of this nonsense I’ll be forced to throw you in the river.”
    Darcy flattened any expression she might have had, and adjusted her simple black dress.
    â€œNow Miss Hampton, there’s no need to be hostile.”
    â€œNot according to the Advocates,” she argued, pleased to have elicited a sigh from her tightly strung tutor. “Hostility seems to be working quite well for them.”
    Just last week she’d read that the Advocates—Eastern Federation radicals, desperate for food—had taken out a supply train headed toward the southern border. The contents, not rations but Hampton Industries weapons, had all been stolen, a large painted A marking the side of the empty boxcar. For a group who claimed they wanted peace, they seemed to have no problem killing Northern Federation soldiers to get it.
    She glared down at her reader again. Poetry was useless, especially poetry in a foreign tongue. If the purpose was to make her worldly, she’d rather learn about the war, and what news there was from the front lines. She certainly wasn’t getting any information about it from her father and brother, who rarely included her in business discussions.
    â€œThe Advocates are misguided,” said Darcy, looking out the window now as well. “Hunger makes people dangerous.”
    Hungry or not, they were ignorant if they thought there was enough food and clean water for everyone to share. Resources were thin. Just last week the Hamptons’ cook had run out of bread for her morning toast. A flour shortage, he claimed. The effects of the crisis were felt even in the River District.
    â€œWell, crates of military-grade weapons make people dangerous too,” said Lena. “Maybe they should try eating them if they’re so hungry.”
    Sometimes her father liked to say that it wasn’t a war about resources, but a war about entitlement. People fighting for what they thought they deserved, rather than what they actually needed. Even the North, who claimed defeating the Eastern Federation’s military would enable them to offer aid to the poor starving citizens there, really just wanted their enemy’s land. She wasn’t naïve. More than once she’d heard her whispers during her father’s parties at the house of what Hampton Industries could do if they expanded their factories into the Eastern territories.
    â€œYou’ve been doing some extra reading, I see.” Darcy’s thin brows pulled inward. There was a fine line between geography and politics, and her father’s orders were that Lena only study the first.
    â€œI read that their leader—Akeelah something—wants a seat on the Assembly,” Lena pressed. The article about the supply train attack had mentioned as much. Apparently he’d lived on the streets, and worked in the cornfields. There were no pictures of him. Perhaps he was hiding, just like his Advocates.
    She could hardly imagine a laborer from the East serving on a board entirely composed of Northern citizens. Her father had served his elected, six-year term alongside military