Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) by Frankie Rose Read Free Book Online

less than a week’s food to most families.
    The Therin have their work cut out for them on the edges of the city. The streets are filthy and littered with garbage, and their cleaning duties must feel endless. There’s no money to afford sturdy materials for any of the houses, and so they’re made out of sheets of corrugated plastic and useless off-cuts of wood. Most of the houses rot from the ground up, where mould and damp festers even in the dry months. This is probably where I should turn around and go home, not because anyone will hurt me, but because I am suddenly overcome with a sickened feeling, as I watch the starving children with their rounded little pot bellies and gaunt expressions play at warriors.   Yet I don’t turn around.
    It takes me twenty minutes to make my way through the streets; I don’t know my way here, but I head north until the shanties fall away and the land opens out. I’ve never been this far out of the city, and I’m surprised when I find fields of grass, which are fenced off for as far as the eye can see. In the distance is the forest ― everybody knows it’s there, but it’s one thing hearing about it and another thing entirely seeing it.
    I’ve never seen so many trees. They’re different to the ones that grow in the city. These ones don’t really have proper leaves, and they are an altogether different kind of green. It’s lush and vibrant, and totally new to me. What really surprises me is how close these trees grow together. They’re almost on top of one another, lined up in formation, a tree line that runs for miles in either direction.
    Directly ahead, before the trees, there are slim, grey chimneys, where billows of dirty white smoke curl up into the afternoon sky. Squat, vast buildings ― grey, windowless ― surround them, and I know this is the processing compound, where the food for the city’s inhabitants is stored, milled, prepared and recycled.
    I have no idea why, but I keep walking. No doubt I’ve been missed back at home by now, but this doesn’t seem to matter. A wide, rutted dirt road leads out towards the processing plant, and on either side of it the chain link fences rise up well beyond three times my height. Loops of vicious barbed wire top them for good measure. These fences are well maintained, and there is no way over or under them.
    It’s eerily silent out here. There isn’t a sound apart from a soft hum emanating from the processing plant, and that’s so low it’s barely audible. All I can hear is my breathing that pulls and blows in and out over my teeth. The world has never been so quiet. As I get closer to the compound I see groups of Therin sitting out in the sunshine, eating from wrinkled paper bags. The men and women are methodical and quick about finishing their lunch. This has a lot to do with the guards standing over them; they’re in full body armour, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never heard of a Therin disobeying anybody before, let alone a Therin who knows how to fight.
    Still, the sight of the guards with their black body suits, wrapped in stab vests, with their thick plexi-shields sends a nervous thrill through my body, and I duck down at the side of the road. I’m not sure what would happen if they found me. I could say I was sent here by Lowrence but they’d want to know why, and I don’t think I’m capable of lying convincingly.
    I hunker down in the tall grass at the roadside and watch for a few minutes as the guards hurry everyone back inside the building to continue their work. When I’m sure they’re all gone, I edge forward to get a closer look at what lies past the plant. Concealed within the trees, another huge fence has been erected; it’s made from steel struts, spaced evenly, about five metres apart, thicker than some of the tree trunks. The fence itself isn’t made out of chain link like the one back by the fields; it’s a rigid, cross-hatched steel, and looks incredibly