Aurora Read Online Free PDF

their faces half blackened by the fruit they have stuffed inaccurately into their mouths. She leaps back a bit, scared they might be ferals.
    “Hey you!” one says. “Come here!”
    Even in the twilight she can see it’s one of the boys who live across the square from them. He has a foxy face that is attractive, even in the dusk with his stained lower face like a black muzzle.
    “What do you want?” Freya says. “Are you ferals?”
    “We’re
free
,” the boy declares with a ridiculous intensity.
    “You live across the plaza from me,” she says scornfully. “How free is that?”
    “That’s just our cover,” the boy says. “If we don’t do that they come after us. Mainly we’re out here. And we need a meat plate. You can get one for us.”
    So he knows who she is, maybe. But he doesn’t know how well the labs are guarded. There are little cameras everywhere. Even now what he is saying might be getting recorded by the ship, there for Devi to hear. Freya tells the boy this, and he and his followers giggle.
    “The ship isn’t as all-knowing as that,” he says confidently. “We’ve taken all kinds of stuff. If you cut the wires first, there’s no way they can catch you.”
    “What makes you think they don’t have movies of you cutting the wires?”
    They laugh again.
    “We come at the cameras from behind. They’re not magic, you know.”
    Freya isn’t impressed. “Get your own meat tray then.”
    “We want the kind in the lab your dad works in.”
    Which would be tissue for medical research, not for eating. But all she says is, “Not from me.”
    “Such a good girl.”
    “Such a bad boy.”
    He grins. “Come see our hideout.”
    This is more appealing. Freya is curious. “I’m already late.”
    “Such a good girl! It’s right here nearby.”
    “How could it be?”
    “Come see!”
    So she does. They giggle as they lead her into the thickest grove of trees in the park. There they’ve dug out a lot of soil between two thick roots of an elm tree, and down there under the deeper roots she sees by their little headlamps they have a space that reaches up into the roots of the elm, four or five great roots meeting imperfectly and forming their roof. There are four of them down here in the hole, and though the boys are quite small, it’s still an impressive little space; they have room to stand, and the earthen walls are straight, and firm enough to hold a few squared-off holes where they have put some things.
    “You don’t have room for a meat plate in here,” Freya declares. “Or the power to run it. And medical labs don’t have the right plates for you anyway.”
    “We think they do,” the fox-faced boy says. “And we’re digging another room. And getting a generator too.”
    Freya refuses to be impressed. “You’re not ferals.”
    “Not yet,” the boy admits. “But we’ll join them when we can. When they contact us.”
    “Why should they contact you?”
    “How do you think they got away themselves? What’s your name?”
    “What’s yours?”
    “I’m Euan.”
    His teeth are white in his dark muzzle. She is dazzled by their headlamps. She can only see what they look at, and now they’re all looking at her.
    In the light reflecting from her she sees a rock in one of their wall holes. She seizes it up and holds it threateningly. “I’ll be going home now,” she says. “You aren’t real ferals.”
    They stare at her. As she climbs up cut earthen steps out the hole, Euan reaches up and pinches her on the butt, trying for between her legs, it feels like. She swings the rock at him, then dashes through the park and away. When she gets home Badim is just calling for her down in the courtyard. She goes upstairs and doesn’t say anything about it.
    Two days later she sees the boy Euan with some adults on the far side of the square, and says to Badim, “Do you know who those people are?”
    “I know everyone,” Badim says in his joking voice, although it’s basically true,