The Gryphon Project by Carrie Mac Read Free Book Online

it?”
    He shook his head again.
    “But why not?”
    “Think about it, Phee,” Gryph broke in. “They’re protecting the garden. They’re just making sure they can feed their kids. Is that so wrong?”
    “It’s not wrong at all,” Oscar said with a nod. “I would never stop someone from feeding their children, no matter what it takes.”
    “What if they shot at us for the food we’ve got?” Phee asked, keeping her eye on the men below, whose narrowed glares were locked on the shuttle as it passed overhead. “Even then?”
    Gryph shrugged. “I wouldn’t blame them.”
    “You wouldn’t have a choice! You’d be dead.”
    “Okay, then, when I came back from being reconned, I wouldn’t blame them.”
    “You wouldn’t?” Phee’s disbelief was obvious in her tone. “Come on, Gryph. Really?”
    “I’ve got a life to spare,” Gryph said with a smile. “Several, in fact.”
    “Speak for yourself,” Phee grumbled. Since when did Gryph give a shit about one-pers? Since when had he become Mr. High-and-Mighty-Help-the-Less-Fortunate? She felt her father’s arm on hers.
    “Let me put it this way,” he was saying. “If someone killed me for the loaf of bread I had in my hand in order to feed it to his starving child, I’d make sure that if it was my time to reach heaven, I’d tell God how I understood and forgave his desperate soul. And when that same man reached heaven—”
    “It’d be hell, though, and not long after killing you,” Phee said with a snort, “if Chrysalis found out.” She could handle one person in her family lecturing her on ethics, but two was too many. “Murderers don’t get reconned, in case you’d forgotten.”
    Oscar ignored her and continued. “When my murderer reached heaven, I’d sit him down and have him tell me about his children, and I’d tell him about mine. In heaven, the two of us could be friends in a way impossible here on earth.”
    “So?” Phoenix laughed. “Who’d want to be friends with anyone other than a three-per anyway?” She shot a glance at her brother.
    Gryph had a disappointed frown on his face. “Take a look around you, genius.”
    “And then consider apologizing,” her father added.
    Aside from them, everyone on the shuttle—pilot, crew, social worker, and security guards—were two-pers. And they were staring at her. And not in a kindly way either. They’d heard her. Every single one of them had heard her.
    Phoenix turned to the window again, embarrassed and confused. It used to be that she and her brother both thought their parents were weird for being so sympathetic with people who were less than three-pers. Eva with her “do no harm” mantra and Oscar with his “we’re all God’s children.” Gryph and Phee used to joke about it even, how they wouldn’t be surprised to come home for Thanksgiving dinner one day to find their house invaded by slovenly one-pers waiting for a free home-cooked meal, and filthy no-pers sleeping in their beds and wearing their clothes.
    They were approaching the no-per zone now, and beneath them the chaos lurched out in all directions, distracting Phee from her thoughts. Directly below, little shacks and cramped shanties and hawker stalls lined the old freeway, which was now left to rare automobile traffic (Crimcor still patrolled in armoured trucks, for example), but mostly bicycles and pedestrians made use of it. Many no-pers made their homes under the protection of the overpasses, so children clambered over medians and played on the pavedshoulders of the roadway outside their sad little huts. And then the eight-lane snake abruptly stopped in a heap of jagged rubble, grown over with brambles.
    “Earthquake,” Oscar explained. “Back when I was about your age. The freeway was never rebuilt.”
    The cargo shuttle started its descent, banking wide around a half-built housing project riddled with bullet holes and covered in graffiti. One entire wall had been blown out, revealing the tiny apartments,