The Whisper Read Online Free PDF

favor, rushing hard down the alley and carrying their scent away. Then it changed and came back at them, whipping through their hair and blasting around the front of the factory. The Creeper Nets reacted instantly, moving en masse toward them.
    The children blundered out and ran as fast as they could toward the other end of the alley. But when they reached it, they found it blocked by the tall fence that enclosed the storage lot behind the factory.
    They began to climb.
    The thin links of the fence hurt their hands and feet, and the structure swayed with their weight. When they reached the top, they found it covered in rolls of razor wire. They couldn’t get over it.
    The Creeper Nets were scuttling down the alley, up the walls, and over the refuse containers. Tom and Luc clung to the fence, below the others. They watched a girl lunge for the guttering on the Tank Meat factory and dangle from her hands, trying to haul herself up. They watched her feet scramble against the wall. The moment she was on the roof, the rest followed quickly, almost losing their minds to panic,but by the time it was Tom and Luc’s turn, three Creeper Nets were just below them. Tom lunged for the gutter and missed. He lunged again and caught it. Then Luc was beside him, climbing at the same time, up and over before Tom made it. Luc shot off, blind. Tom heard a girl scream, “Watch out!” and hauled himself up just in time to see Luc run straight onto a skylight in the factory roof.
    They heard a splintering crack, the ground dissolved beneath Luc’s feet, and he began to fall.
    The Creeper Nets were coming. They ran toward the skylight and looked down through the broken glass. The light in the factory was soft and orange, cast from long lines of tanks. Luc had fallen into one of these and they could see him thrashing on the surface, his white gown billowing in the orange fluid. He’d fallen into a tank of growing meat. They felt lots of things then, in just a few seconds: relief that he’d survived, disgust that he’d landed in such a horrible place, then panic again. He was fifty feet below them and the Creeper Nets were coming.
    A girl gasped.
    They all turned and saw the flash of surprise on her face as a Creeper Net struck the side of her neck. There was nothing they could do, and more were coming. They ran, leaping over skylights toward the other side of the roof. They found a service ladder leading down into the yard at the back of the factory. But there were seven of them. They could not climb down fast enough. They looked around for weapons and found rusting scaffold poles on the wet, dirty felt. Then they stood at the top of the ladder and fought back the Creeper Nets as they came. They broke the Nets’ legs, smashed their hubs, and battered them down until they lay in twitching heaps.
    It made a lot of difference facing a Creeper Net with weapons in their hands.
    But as Tom climbed last down the ladder, he saw a Creeper Net drop through the hole in the broken skylight. Luc had not been so lucky.
    “The twins have landed, sir.”
    Gorman looked up, alert.
    He swept away Sandwood Seven and summoned a view of the hangar in the fortress. The twins’ freighter had just set down.
    “They agreed to come back with no fuss?” Gorman asked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Really?” Gorman said.
    “Yes, they behaved perfectly, sir. We haven’t heard a peep out of them all the way home.”
    “Excellent,” Gorman said. “At least some of my children are doing what they’re told. I thought Mika would be a good influence on Ellie. I’m glad I’ve put them together again.”
    During the game, he’d hunted for these mutant children and selected the six best to join Ellie. He called them his Chosen Ones, and while the implanted army slept in cold, concrete dormitories, his Chosen Ones were stored at the top of the fortress in a secure white enclosure. Mika, Audrey, Leo, Iman, Colette, and Santos. Gorman’s jewels. He did not know that Mika had