Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

crew. My dad says they treat you like a gun treats a bullet. But the people who don't like the Venters don't know that."
    Ced pulled his pack up his shoulders. "Well, I don't care who my mom works for. If they want us to stay out, it must be because it's cool over there."
    Without looking back, he stepped into the road. Open-topped cars whizzed down the lanes, weaving themselves through all the people without clipping a single one. East of Brookings, the men liked to wear dark, glittery jackets, and to put lenses in their eyes to make them red or black or all white. But in the street and on the other side, everyone's eyes looked normal, and instead of jackets, they wore shirts with buttons and stripes.
    Ced got to the median and turned around. As Stefen watched in horror from the sidewalk, Ced bent down and picked up one of the oranges you weren't supposed to take. He put it in his bag and finished crossing the street.
    Compared to the people there, who were as bright as their buildings, Ced knew he looked dingy. But he just kept walking. Half an hour later, no one had so much as looked at him funny.
    That was when he learned one of the biggest secrets there was: as long as you looked like you knew what you were doing, even the shiny-looking people would believe you belonged.
     
    * * *
     
    His mom kept working and he kept exploring. He was supposed to watch school lessons on his device, but that stuff was easy. Twenty minutes on the net, and he could learn what they took three hours to explain. He liked to do his studies while he and Stefen were riding the tube to a part of the Locker they hadn't been to before. As soon as they got out and aboveground, he put his device away.
    When he got older, he would call that year—the year when he and Stefen mapped out a ring across the entire Locker, poking around new neighborhoods every day—the best year of his childhood. Then again, besides the early years he could barely remember, it didn't have much competition.
    Sixteen months after the vaccine that had made him so sick, with his mom out on another flight, Ced rounded up Stefen for a trip to Gecko Park, about a quarter of the way around the Locker. You weren't supposed to take fruit from the parks—the government said it needed to sell it for heating and lights and stuff—but a few weeks back, after being hassled by a cop, Ced had done a net search and discovered it wasn't actually illegal to take fruit that had fallen down by itself.
    That gave him a new idea: travel from park to park, gathering fruit, and sell it to food carts. Stefen took to the idea at once, and even pitched one of his own: hire little kids to do the gathering in exchange for a cut of the booty. Very oxford. Especially since it meant they'd get to keep traveling while the other kids did the hard work.
    They hopped off the tube and climbed up to street level. The neighborhood wasn't much different from theirs, with blocky apartment buildings and lots of balconies gobbling up the space between them. They headed into Gecko Park, ignored by the dealers and the buyers, keeping an eye out for cops. Ced could already smell the citrus in the air.
    It was a quiet morning and they soon found themselves alone in a stand of lemons and grapefruits. Only a handful speckled the ground—somebody else must have been onto the same game—but it would at least be enough to cover the cost of the tube.
    "Hey," Stefen pointed. Across the park, two Red Men strode beneath the trees, eyes scanning the growth.
    A shot of electricity snapped up Ced's spine. "We gotta move."
    "I thought you said this was legal."
    "It is. But they won't care."
    He hustled through the grass, Stefen beside him. The Red Men were heading their way, but they weren't hurrying the way they could have if they'd seen the two kids. The trees thinned, leading to a patch of grass and an empty playground. Ced pointed to an enclosed slide. They ran to it and climbed inside its mouth, stopping halfway up, bracing