The Line Book One: Carrier Read Online Free Page A

wear was a loose shirt, drawstring pants and an ill-fitting pair of sneakers. The clothes were wrinkled and made of a natural fabric I couldn’t identify. They smelled used and felt abrasive against my skin.
    The sun burned high in the sky, casting a white-hot sheen over the filth of 10th Street. It must have been sometime around midday, but I had no idea what day of the week it was or the actual date.
    I kept my head down and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. I wasn’t used to so much activity around me, and I was overwhelmed by the vastness of Central. So much space! I checked the street signs to keep track of where I was.
    Central was constructed like a giant grid, with numbered streets going one way, lettered avenues the other. I knew that much about Central, but that was about it. The lady who’d sold me had worked me as a dishwasher in her restaurant, which was in Central, down on 25th and Q.
    There were times when she’d sent me out on errands with the chef, a burly old man named Hugo who I’d grown to trust, but we never went very far and I knew very little about the other sectors. Including Central, there were also South, North, East and West sectors, each and every one owned by the same corporation—Auberge.
    Auberge, like so many other international conglomerates, had purchased territories after the economic fall of the world governments and deemed the area an independent state. Auberge had gone one step further and built a gargantuan cement wall around their state, supposedly to keep the population “safe” from the outside world. Within, it was widely known that the wall existed to maintain control over the population, even going so far as to mandate how many children you were allowed to have, where you were allowed to work and travel and where you could live.
    Inside the walls, Auberge owned everything.
    Literally.
    They owned the banks, the police, the schools, the hospital, the Line, every building. Everything. If you had a job, you worked for one of Auberge’s companies. If you didn’t, you were on your own, which was why crime was out of control and the black market was a bustling business.
    If you got caught dabbling in either, you were never seen again. Many assumed you were killed and dumped over the wall. But if that were true, the stench from generations of rotting corpses would have overflowed the walls and overpowered the smell of garbage by now, and that wasn’t the case.
    My family had been from East, that much I remembered.
    I thought of going there. If only I knew which way that was.
    I walked along the sidewalks on 10th and tried to picture where I had lived as a child. But all I could remember was the inside of our apartment and my parents’ faces. The images only deepened my feelings of isolation. And no matter how hard I wracked my brain, I couldn’t recall their real names. Just Mama and Daddy. Little good that did me. It would be impossible to find them without knowing who they were, which was too bad, since I could have used some motherly advice just then.
    Besides...they’d probably forgotten all about me.
    Probably.
    I shook the thoughts from my head, pulling my hair away from my face.
    I was alone. There was no point in dwelling on what I didn’t have or didn’t know. It was best to concentrate on the here and now, which was in Central. And from the looks of it, the place hadn’t changed much since last I’d seen it. It was still sticky cement, dirty buildings, smelly unemployed people and mountains of garbage.
    I walked past some kids playing games on the sidewalk with dice. Women sat watching over them and sewed ragged-looking cloth, chatting among themselves on stoops.
    They gave me crusty looks as I went by.
    Friendly.
    First things first, I had to find a place to stay; the streets were too hectic and dangerous. Then I could worry about finding a job. The Line had set me up with some credits courtesy of Auberge Bank to float me in the meantime.
    After the