sticking a fork into the soy chicken. Real meat was a luxury, cloned on farms and sold in upscale markets. They’d eaten real meat at the Academy. “It’s not safe out there, Boxer. This city has descended into hell.”
“What’s the song? ‘Hell ain’t a bad place to be’?”
“Christo, you really are old.”
He threw his wadded napkin at her.
She ducked, grinning, then grabbed her can of Tab and popped the lid. The pink can shimmered as its malleable metal morphed into a cup. A division of Corp-Co appeared in pink script. Iridium turned the glass so she couldn’t see the writing. “I saw your nephew on the vids today.”
“Tyler? He commed me a few days ago. I didn’t pick up.”
Iridium chewed on her grainy chicken. “Why not?”
“Hell, what do the kid and I got to say to each other? I ditched out of the Academy when he was in diapers, and he spent most of his better years ready to arrest me on sight.”
“Things are different now,” Iridium said. “But hey, your family is your business.” Christo knew, she didn’t want anyone poking into the Bradford clan’s dysfunction.
“Different, sure. Inmates are running the damn asylum,” Boxer snorted, flipping the vids to the news. It was, if possible, even more violent than the action film he’d been watching. Iridium caught a flash of Shadow and saw Jet in fine form, kicking ass and taking names and still letting the camera find her good side.
Training was hard to shake.
On screen, the anchor announced, “And in other news, mounting tensions in the civilian sector as prison guards at the infamous Blackbird facility for supervillains go on strike.” The anchor smiled perkily at the camera. “Cited causes are lack of pay and increased safety regulations for workers. Blackbird Prison is one of the few not disrupted by riots during this time, but we can only assume that will change. Here’s Tom with your weather.”
Boxer flipped the channel again, to a rerun of Squad House. “You know, my brother was short-listed for this. Before he got his bum leg.”
Iridium heard him from a long way off. She was seeing the sterile corridors of Blackbird, the narrow doors marked with designations instead of names. The screams that echoed endlessly no matter how much Thorazine the medics pumped.
“Iri.” Boxer nudged her with his toe. “You with me?”
Iridium shoved her dinner aside. “I have somewhere I need to be.”
CHAPTER 5
JET
The conditioning will guarantee that the Squadron will always be defenders of the public good. And of Corp-Co’s interests, of course. Can’t bite the hand that feeds you.
—From the journal of Martin Moore, entry #68
T he baseball field had long given way to age—the grassy field now nothing but dust, and the bleachers filled with junk and old ghosts. Jet tried to picture what it must have been like to see baseball outside, to watch a ball hit so hard that it flew over the stadium’s edge until it was lost to the pollution layer. She thought that the notion of playing any professional sport outdoors was a joke, or maybe a whimsical dream. Baseball outside a dome? Impossible to imagine.
And yet, here was Wrigley Field—the original, dated all the way back to the early 1900s, not the covered astropark of the same name over in Grid 3. Jet soared over what had once been home plate, wondering what it would have been like to see Babe Ruth make his famous called shot.
“I’ll take you to a baseball game,” Sam had said, not even two weeks before he’d be killed in the line of duty. “You and me, we’ll get a weekend pass and we’ll hit the Downtown Grid to catch one of the Wrigley vids. You’ll love it!”
Jet blinked back sudden tears. They’d never made it to that game; third year had been insanely busy at the Academy, and Jet had too much work on her plate to request a weekend pass. And Samson hadn’t pushed. Samson had never pushed.
Light, there were times she missed him so much that it hurt to