Sprite

Roselle had blossomed over the summer. Norah—had not. She had grown taller, but she was just as thin, while Roselle had grown into her curves. Will noticed, and spent almost all of their precious free time together talking with Roselle. Norah didn’t have a chance to tell him about her encounter with the sprite that summer. She watched while Will gave Roselle her first kiss. It was tender and innocent, but it showed how Will thought of Roselle—and how he didn’t think of Norah.

The two girls were still roommates at school, and Will sneaked away to visit them every few nights when the rest of the campus was asleep. They would sit in their favorite place by the riverbank. Will made jokes to entertain the girls, when he wasn’t making eyes at Roselle. He still had not told her about his mutation when he kissed her.

Norah felt her own face heat up in embarrassment. She quietly got up and wandered down to the river’s edge, following the path that led away from school and away from them. The weather had already turned cold, but she’d discovered long ago that the cold didn’t really bother her. Making her decision, she stripped and silently slid into the water, feet first. The water was where she belonged. Her hot tears mingled with the cold water, soothing her as she swam faster and faster with the current. Idiot! She scolded herself. Why am I crying? I always knew Will liked Roselle better.

Still, it hurt. Being in her element helped. Norah knew she should really go back, that Will and Roselle would worry about her, especially if they found her discarded clothes, but she didn’t want to. A part of her didn’t want to face them, to acknowledge this major change in their relationship.

So she swam downriver, circled around, and swam back. She almost wished Will and Roselle had found her things and were panicking, thinking she’d drowned. Then she would fly out of the water and reveal herself, and Will would be astounded when he realized that she was a mutant, too. And Roselle—

Norah stopped fantasizing. She didn’t know what Roselle would do, but she would be hurt. They were best friends. They all were. Norah was being childish.

Almost, almost the tears started again. Norah was a child in their eyes. In a crook of the riverbank, Norah had hidden a razor in a little box under a rock. She carefully climbed out of the water. It was still very quiet. No hue and cry, then. Norah sat hidden by the overhang of the bank, and sliced away all traces of her differences, using the pain to help focus her mind on more important things. Grandfather was having her take over some of the responsibilities at one of his factories, which meant she might be running into Will in an official capacity at some point. She really ought to warn him.

Webbing-free, Norah made her way back to where she’d left her clothes. They were still there, undisturbed. She pulled them on, then stomped rather noisily to the place where she’d left Will and Roselle. The two of them sat, arms twined about each other, still murmuring softly.

“I’m going to bed,” she announced stiffly, making them jump. She climbed up the bank and up the trellis that led to their window, and slipped into the room, pretending that she didn’t hear the indulgent chuckles that followed her.

A few days later, she started her job at the factory. It was part of her education, and she was allotted a block of time every afternoon for work study. Several of the students did it, learning to follow in their elder’s footsteps—the elite of Datro.

Her grandfather ran several factories in the Datro area, all devoted to some sort of metal manufacture. Mutant children worked at each and every one of them. Norah had prayed that the factory she was assigned to would not be the one where Will spent his days. She spent her time in the offices above the work floor, doing paperwork and learning about the business. Metal work was very profitable, and not just for Papa’s odd fences, which had not caught on in general, nor even for the gun manufacture which wasn’t done here. They only provided the raw material in this factory. Guns were produced elsewhere, although the Hanan family had a hand in that, too.

The difficulty lay not in the manufacture, but in the procurement of ore and the shipment of the finished product, all dependent upon transportation to and from the vast forest that covered most of the earth. Datro was just one of a handful of cities in this corner of the world, all separated by forest. Each city supported its own farmers with fields that abutted the cities themselves, making the cities self-sufficient. Beyond that, there was only wilderness—forest, mostly, but in some places, great expanses of devastated land devoid of any growth whatsoever. Norah learned that her Papa, her great-grandfather John Hanan, was the exception to the rule. He had made his home in the middle of the woods, surrounded by his metal fence, leaving his business to be handled by his son-in-law after his only daughter died. Alan Avery had expanded the business to deal with other city-states, braving the often treacherous forests to get his products to market and to obtain more raw material to use in the production process. It was dangerous, but profitable.

Norah did not get to handle the actual day-to-day work. That was for the supervisors. She watched through big glass windows as they directed the workflow in the factory below. Mutant children were not the only factory workers; they were just the most expendable. Ordinary Datro citizens also worked in the factory, but it was the mutant children who routinely handled the molten metals, even though they were half the size and had little strength to do the work. They made up in numbers what they lacked in strength.

Norah was awed at what they did, despite their visible differences. None of the mutants were older than teenagers, and none of them were so deformed that they could not perform physical labor. In fact, few of them were deformed in any way that she could see. It was mandatory that the mutants not hide their flaws. Some, like Will, had excess hair all over their bodies. Unlike Will, the hair was visible on their faces most of the time. Will’s had stopped growing on his hands and face because his mother had shaved it off him repeatedly throughout his childhood, before he was caught and sent to the factories. A few children had extra digits. The ones who had six or more toes were required to wear sandals rather than shoes, so that their mutation would be visible to everyone. There was a pale child with white hair and uncanny eyes, and a surly teenager whose teeth were unusually long.

“Stay away from that one,” one of the supervisors warned her, catching her glance as she watched the surly boy manhandle a cart of ore into the furnace. The boy’s face was sweating, and he was grimacing, effectively baring his teeth. “He doesn’t have long to go, and he knows it.”

“What do you mean?” Norah asked.

The supervisor, a kind, middle-aged man who escorted her to and from the offices each day, waited until they had passed the boy before he replied. “He’s going to try to escape soon. They all do, sooner or later.”

Norah looked back at the boy, to find him scowling at her as if he hated her. It drew her back to the first time she had met Will, at another factory her grandfather ran. Will had hated her then, too. She bit her lip. There must be some way she could help these changelings.

When she got to the factory the next day, it was buzzing with suppressed excitement. The surly boy had run away during the night, as the supervisor had predicted. “Don’t worry,” Jonas, the supervisor, told her. “They’re sending someone else over to replace him later today.”

That hadn’t been what Norah was worried about.

“Go on, get back to work,” Jonas waved his arms at the other mutant children who had been milling around in groups. He didn’t say it unkindly. Jonah was not a bad supervisor. He treated his mutant charges better than some of the others did.

“What will happen to him?”

“Who?”

“The—boy who ran away.”

“It’s hard to say,” Jonas replied, steering Norah away from the other mutants who had gone back to work. “Either he’ll make it, or he won’t. He was lucky so far. Maybe his luck will hold.”

“Lucky? How?” Norah asked. They came to the office, and Norah went inside while Jonah prepared to go back downstairs. She sat behind the desk that belonged to her grandfather. It was piled high with stacks of papers outlining the shipments that had already been sent, and the ones that were still on order.

Jonas gave Norah a long look. “Maybe lucky was the wrong word. Those kids, they have a hard life.” He left her there to puzzle through the papers while he went back downstairs. She was supposed to be learning about trade, but it felt like all she ever did was put things in order. Sighing, she got to work.

A commotion on the main floor drew her attention. Norah walked to the big window overlooking the factory, but she really couldn’t tell what was going on. A few minutes later, Jonas knocked softly at her door before opening it. She could see several people crowding behind him. “Miss Norah,” he began, “I hate to bring this to you, but your grandfather isn’t here, so I guess you’re in charge.”

Norah felt a moment of panic. The only thing she’d been left in charge of was paperwork. Jonas and the other supervisors ran the factory. “What is it?” she asked, craning her neck to try and see what was beyond Jonas.

He moved aside so she could see two burly men with a third, much more slender man slumped between them. The slender man’s hair hung down, shadowing his face.

“Is he hurt?” Norah asked, taking a step forward.

“Don’t touch him, Miss,” cautioned one of the men.

Just then the slender man raised his head, his dark eyes meeting Norah’s defiantly. It was the boy who had escaped the night before. She gasped. His face was bloody and his teeth, close up, looked sharp and deadly. The boy snarled inarticulately, earning himself a cuff on the head from on of his guards.

“We caught him trying to sneak on to one of the barges,” the man explained. He and his fellow guard roughly dragged the boy into Norah’s office. “What do you want us to do with him?”

“Do?” Norah squeaked, backing up so that the desk was between them.

“It’s an automatic death sentence, miss,” the other guard explained. “But usually, in cases like this, the factory gets one last good use out of him before the sentence is carried out.” The guard hesitated when Norah visibly paled.

Jonas interrupted. “Mack’s a good worker,” he said. “Do you want me to put him back to work, under strict guard of course, until your grandfather comes back, or would you rather release him to these gentlemen? They’ll take him away and that will be the end of it.”

“It’s good for the other mutants,” the first guard added. “Shows them what’s in store for them if they try what he tried.”

All this time, the boy Mack had been silent. Blood dripped from several cuts on his face and arms. “Do it, miss,” he said now. “Send me away.”

“Mack.” Jonas shook his head sadly.

“No.” Norah swallowed. “Jonas, please take Mack downstairs and let him get back to work. My grandfather can decide what he wants to do when he gets back.” She was shaking, sick to her stomach. She held Mack’s life or death in her hands simply because she was Avery’s granddaughter.

Mack twisted away from Jonas, but the old supervisor kept a solid grip on him. “None of that, Mack. You ought to be thanking the little miss.”

Norah could not hear Mack’s reply as the guards followed them back out and closed the office door behind them. She buried her face in her hands, work forgotten. What was she going to do? Jonas might go easy on Mack, but when her grandfather returned, he would literally work the boy to death in retribution for his attempted escape.

A sharp knock on the door brought her head back up. What now?

One of the other supervisors poked his head in the door. “The replacement from Factory 4 is here,” he said apologetically. “Do you want me to send him back, or keep him, since Mack’s—since eventually we’ll need another body anyway?”

“No, send him in. I’ll talk to him.” Norah rubbed her eyes tiredly. She didn’t want to do this.

The door opened wide enough to let the new changeling in. His eyes widened. “You!”

Norah looked up to see Will standing in front of the desk, arms rigid, and a look of utter fury quickly replacing the shock that had been there just a moment ago.

“Will.” Norah came around the desk, making sure the office door was firmly closed. The supervisor who had brought Will to her had already returned to the floor, so it was just the two of them. “You knew I was Alan Avery’s granddaughter. I tried to tell you they started me working in the office, but I never got the chance.”

Will stared at her without speaking for so long that Norah began to get worried. He seemed so different from the carefree boy who climbed up the trellis to her and Roselle’s bedroom window. It was as if the last few years had never happened and in front of her stood the belligerent mutant boy her grandfather had introduced her to when she first arrived in Datro.

“Will? Please, don’t be mad at me. I was so glad I was working in a different factory than the one you were in, but now you’re here. Tell me what I ought to do, Will. I don’t want to be in charge of you!”

His eyes hardened, and he gritted his teeth. “You’re the boss, Norah. I’ll do whatever you say I have to do, just like that boy down there whom I’m replacing.”

“Mack? I had no choice! They said if I didn’t put him back to work, they would take him away and kill him! What else could I do?”

Will suddenly grabbed Norah’s upper arms. He was still taller, but not by as much anymore. Norah had shot up over the summer and came up to Will’s shoulders now. “He begged you to let them take him, didn’t he?” he asked, whispering fiercely in her face. “You should have let him go!”

“But why?” Norah could feel tears build up behind her eyes, but she stubbornly choked them back.

“Do you know what they’ll do to him in the factory?”

Norah gulped. She had an idea. “I thought, I thought if I could give him more time, then . . . I don’t know! Neither option was a good one. I didn’t know what else to do!”

Will released her, and Norah sat down on the edge of the desk. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.”

After a minute, Will sat down next to her. He nudged her with his elbow. “I didn’t mean to take it out on you,” he apologized, giving her a crooked grin. “It’s not your fault that you were born normal. Have them send me back to 4. It would be too weird if I had to work where you could see me. All right?”

Norah nodded. “Will? Are they really going to work Mack to death? Isn’t there anything I can do to stop it?”

“I doubt it. He shouldn’t have got caught. He knows that. We all know the consequences. That’s why I’m getting out—soon.” He looked away, then faced Norah. “Don’t tell Roselle, whatever happens.”

“Are you going to leave without telling her the truth?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe. But you saw what happened today. I don’t have much time left.”

Will was about the same age as Mack. Mutants did not grow to adulthood in the factories. If they didn’t escape, something invariably happened to them and they died. Norah didn’t want Will to die. “Will, I never got to tell you. If you ever make it to the forest, ask for Pup. He said he’s a sprite, and he’d watch for you. He owes me.”

Will’s eyebrows rose. “You and I have got to talk,” he said with a swift grin. He quickly rose and went to the door. “I’ll come to the river tonight. Meet me at the usual place at ten.”

“Me? What about Roselle?”

“I’ll see her later,” Will promised, making Norah wish she hadn’t asked. “Tonight, I only want to see you.” He winked. “I’ll tell the supervisor you’re sending me back to 4.” He sauntered out the door, still smiling.