Outcasts Read Online Free PDF

scratches. He was bruised as though the guards had beaten him,
perhaps because of his occasional amusement at things so odd that his reaction
seemed insolence. But for now, she would not notice his new scars, and he would
not notice hers.
    “Are you awake?”
    He laughed softly. “I think so.”
    “Do you want to go back to sleep?”
    He reached out and touched her face. “I’m not
that tired.”
    Kylis smiled and leaned over to kiss him. The hairs of his
short beard were soft and stiff against her lips and tongue. For a while she
and Jason could ignore the heat.
    Lying beside Jason, not quite touching because the afternoon
was growing hot, Kylis only dozed while Jason again slept soundly. She sat up
and pulled on her shorts and boots, brushed a lock of Jason’s
sun-streaked hair from his damp forehead, and slipped outside. A couple of
hours of Gryf’s work shift remained, so Kylis headed toward the guards’
enclosure and the hovercraft dock.
    Beyond the drill-pit clearing, the forest extended for a
short distance westward. The ground continued to fall, growing wetter and
wetter, changing perceptibly into marsh. The enclosure, a hemispherical
electrified fence completely covering the guards’ residence domes, was
built at the juncture of relatively solid land and shallow, standing water. It
protected the hovercraft ramp, and it was invulnerable. She had tried to get
through it. She had even tried to dig beneath it. Digging under a fence or
cutting through one was something no spaceport rat would do, short of
desperation. After her first few days at Screwtop, Kylis had been desperate.
She had not believed she could survive her sentence in the prison. So, late
that night, she crept over to the electrified fence and began to dig. At dawn
she had not reached the bottom of the fence supports, and the ground was wet
enough to start carrying electricity to her in small warning tingles.
    Her shift would begin soon; guards would be coming in and
going out, and she would be caught if she did not stop. She planned to cover
over the hole she had dug and hope it was not discovered.
    She was lying flat on the ground, digging a narrow deep hole
with a flat rock and both hands, smeared all over with the red clay, her
fingernails ripped past the quick. She reached down for one last handful of
dirt, and grabbed a trap wire.
    The current swept through her, contracting every muscle in
her body. It lasted only an instant. She lay quivering, almost insensible,
conscious enough to be glad the wire had been set to stun, not kill. She tried
to get up and run, but she could not move properly. She began to shudder again.
Her muscles were overstimulated, incapable of distinguishing a real signal. She
ached all over, so badly that she could not even guess if the sudden clench of
muscles had broken any bones.
    A light shone toward her. She heard footsteps as the guard
approached to investigate the alarm the trap wire had set off. The sound
thundered through her ears, as though the electric current had heightened all
her senses, toward pain. The footsteps stopped; the light beam blinded her,
then left her face. Her dazzled vision blurred the figure standing over her,
but she knew it was the Lizard. It occurred to her, in a vague, slow-motion
thought, that she did not know his real name. (She learned later that no one
else did either.) He dragged Kylis to her feet and held her upright, glaring at
her, his face taut with anger and his eyes narrow.
    “Now you know we’re not as easy to cheat as
starship owners,” he said. His voice was low and raspy, softly hoarse. He
let her go and she collapsed again. “You’re on probation. Don’t
make any more mistakes. And don’t be late for duty.”
    The other guards followed him away. They did not even bother
to fill in the hole she had dug.
    Kylis had staggered through that workday; she survived it,
and the next, and the next, until she knew that the work itself would not kill
her. She did not try to