Birth of a Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

up!” Traz roared, glaring at one and all. “The savage little rat attacked me. Everybody saw it. I was defending myself, and it’ll go bad for anyone who says different.”
    Traz cast his gaze around, challenging the children to disagree with him. They all dropped their heads, and Traz puffed up proudly. He had nothing to fear. None of these cowards would speak out against him.
    “I’m going to hang his body off a hook out back,” Traz boasted. “I want you to study it long and hard before you go home. This is what happens to vicious fools who attack their foremen. We won’t be having any revolutions in
this
factory!”
    Already, in his mind, he was exaggerating the boy’s act of defiance. He would tell the owners that several of the brats attacked him. Claim it was an organized revolt, that the Horston boy was its leader. Fake regret and say that he had to kill Vur for the good of the factory. Let them believe there were others who were plotting against them. If they believed there was a threat to their profits, they’d give Traz a medal for working so hard to suppress it.
    Men of wealth were easy to appease. If you kept money flowing into their pockets, they backed every move you made. They wouldn’t care that he’d killed an orphan, not as long as he could put a price on the cur’s head.
    On the floor, Larten was staring at Vur with horror. The dead boy’s right eye was closed, but his left was open a fraction, as if he were winking. Larten wished Vur
was
playing a joke. He wouldn’t mind if his cousin sat up and laughed at him for falling for the trick. Larten would cry with joy if that happened.
    But Vur wasn’t acting. Larten had seen death manytimes—an older sister, children in the factory, corpses in the street waiting to be collected. There was no mistaking the chilling stillness of the dead.
    “Out of my way,” Traz sneered, pushing Larten aside.
    Larten hadn’t been focusing on Traz’s speech. He didn’t know what the foreman intended to do with Vur. In his bewildered state, he thought Traz was trying to help.
    “It’s no good,” Larten whispered. “You can’t help him. He’s dead.”
    Traz cocked an eyebrow at Larten and laughed. “
Help him?
Didn’t you hear me? I’m going to hang him from a hook and teach you all a lesson.”
    Larten gaped at the burly foreman.
    “Go home to your father,” Traz huffed. “Tell him he’s lucky I let
you
live. I could have killed you too for attacking me. But because I’m a merciful man, I’m letting you go.”
    Larten didn’t move. He had been crying, but the tears dried up now, and a cold fire ignited at the back of his eyes.
    “Go on,” Traz said, picking up Vur and slinging him over a shoulder as if he were a sack of cocoons. “You can have the afternoon off. But be back here first thing tomorrow. And tell your father he can pickthis one up on Friday—I want to hang him for a few days like a pheasant.”
    As Traz turned away, Larten calmly picked something off the floor. He would never remember what he’d grabbed. The area was littered with every sort of castoff—nails, old spools, broken knives, and more. All he knew was that it was sharp and cool, and it fit perfectly into his small, trembling hand.
    “Traz,” Larten said with surprising softness. If he’d screamed, maybe the foreman would have sensed danger and jerked aside. As it was, Traz simply paused and looked back, half smiling, the way he would if an old friend hailed him in a park on a Sunday.
    Larten stepped forward and drove his hand up. The boy’s eyes were flat, as devoid of expression as Vur’s, but his mouth was twisted into a dark, leering grin, as something vile and inhuman inside him rejoiced at being set free.
    When Larten lowered his hand, whatever he’d picked up was no longer in his palm. The object was now buried deep in Traz’s throat.
    Traz stared at Larten through a pair of wide, bulging eyes. He didn’t drop Vur. Indeed, his grip on the boy