The Treemakers (A YA Dystopian Scifi Romance Adventure) Read Online Free

Lou.”
    “Well, hurry it up if you want to eat tonight!” She spins around, headed back toward the office.
    “Yes, madam.”
    “Hey, cutie,” Aby whispers, removing Baby Lou from the sling. She sneaks a snort into Baby’s chin, making her giggle. Aby’s only fourteen, but she’s like a momma, too. Or a big sister to some. She’s impossible not to love, with her long red curls and dimples and puffy, heart-shaped lips—one of those faces you could stare at all day.
    “Winding down now,” she says. “Only four hours to go.”
     I drag the playpen to the freight elevator and load it on with them, then give Baby Lou a kiss on her soft cheek. She tugs at my short brown strings of hair before she and Aby disappear in the dim lighting behind the rattling door. For a few seconds, I stand there, as if they’ll change their minds and come back. I’m not ready to return to the chopper yet. Now, there’s nothing between me and the reality of what happened today.
    But I stumble back, reluctant to push the “ready” button. An invisible force draws my eyes over to the window, where an “X” of ash and bones—Toby’s remains—lie on the ground. I cover my mouth to muffle my sobbing, because there’s no stopping it.
    “Goodbye, Toby,” I whisper. “We’ll miss you so, so much.”
    §
    At dinner, we’re left with Humphrey to watch over us. He growls for us to hush until Mona Superior is in her office, then he settles his stout self into a chair to snooze. A small relief, though still no one talks much. Everyone keeps glancing over at Toby’s empty chair. One thing losing my parents—and now, Toby—has taught me: you don’t realize how big somebody was in your life, until you measure the space of their absence. And his is so much bigger than this thin, shabby chair.
    Once he opened up, Toby was that brother you’d confide in, and he’d drop everything and listen like nothing else mattered. He cared about people. When the twins first came, he gave them his slop, because they’d eaten theirs and wanted more. Who knows how long they’d been without food? They were begging for snotty slop, so they must’ve been starving. Toby had no second thoughts about it. He was thoughtful, generous, unfailing . . . but haunted.
    “You okay?” Jax asks. “You’ re quiet.”
    I stab my cold slop with my spoon. “Don’t feel much like talking.”
    Jax leans closer. His breath tickles my ear. “Tonight.”
    “Did you talk to him?”
    He eyes our snoring, good-for-nothing night guard. “I signaled. As long as he gets his, you know?”
    Humphrey, the man who can be coerced with a jigger full of washtub liquor.
    I sigh. Usually, I’m the instigator. But tonight, I’d rather fall asleep in my lumpy bed and never wake up.
    “Come on,” Jax says. “We need supplies.”
    He’s right. But his eyes also say he means to distract me from the pain of losing our brother today.
    “Okay.” I sigh again. “Let’s do it.”

THREE
    After dinner, we file toward the Orphan Dorms, ushered by Emmanuel Superior wearing a purple satin gown and bright red lipstick, which has smeared across half of one front tooth. What a freak show. Platform shoes, paint-chipped beads, rancid perfume. A baby-smooth face and waxed sideburns. I wonder if he has any clue how completely idiotic he looks. He’s gotten much worse over the past few years, prancing around the Tree Factory like he’s queen of all the land and we’re his royal subjects. His emerald-green oxygen tank sits on six tiny wheels and follows him around like a slave. Long tubes from its spout insert directly into his mouth and nose, so he breathes fresh at all times.
    Emmanuel Superior—the main reason I lie in bed at night and fight to keep from crying.
    He once slapped me for helping a little boy who tripped over a piece of wire and landed on the floor. Sliced my face right open with his sharp purple fingernail. I still have a scar.
    “He’ll never become a man with little