A Song Called Youth Read Free Page A

radbadge—I got a sack of them from Steinfeld—I stuck a badge, in the—here it is—” Rummaging in a greasy knapsack. “Left it in overnight, not a smidge of red. So the bread’s okay . . . Here.” He found the stale bread in its plastic bag, carefully unwrapped it, cursed when a few crumbs dropped. He licked a finger, touched the crumbs, sucked them into his mouth, watching the crow. The crow observed him fixedly, hopping nearer on the concrete rail.
    He broke off a corner of the bread and held it out to the crow.
    The crow’s utter lack of caution surprised him: it hopped up and plucked the bread from his fingers like a man accepting a stick of chewing gum. Casual, familiar.
    Smoke watched, fascinated, as the crow placed the crust on the ledge, then held it down with a claw to keep the breeze from stealing it, and meticulously chipped the bread apart, throwing its head back to down the crusty stuff, till only crumbs were left, and the wind got them.
    “I’m supposed to be recruiting,” Smoke confided to the crow. “Steinfeld says there are likelies here. In one of the rises. Not in this one, though.”
    He looked out over the city, saw it bruised in sunset. There was another high-rise a block north. It looked as lifeless as this one. He felt an alien touch on the index finger of his right hand and thought, A bombspider, and twitched his hand away, revolted—
    The crow flapped on his finger, clinging despite his sharp motion, looking at him crossly as it adjusted.
    He gaped for a moment and then laughed. “You’re trained! You belonged to someone!”
    The crow twitched its wings in a way that was eerily like shrugging.
    Experimentally, he put his hand to his right shoulder, and the crow fluttered onto a new perch there, settled down, perfectly at home, and all of a sudden Smoke felt just a little bit different. About everything.

• 02 •
    Smoke walked into their trap, waited till they’d closed the trap around him, and all the time politely pretended not to know it was happening. He pretended to be watching the L-5 Colony.
    The artificial star glittered in the night sky like a fine timepiece, forty degrees from the horizon. He saw it for ten seconds through a break in the clouds, and then it was erased by mist. He wondered if the War had reached out to the Space Colony—halfway to the moon—and, if it had, if anyone was still alive there.
    And then the crow tensed and made a rasping sound Smoke was to learn meant Watch your ass!  . . . and the three men closed in on him from three directions. The crow fluttered; he whispered to it, and it quieted down, pleasing him with its responsiveness.
    He was standing at a window, looking out at the gray stalagmite outline of the high-rise where he’d met the crow. “I was over in that ’rise,” he told the men, “and I looked at this one and couldn’t see a fire or anything moving.”
    He heard one of them cock a gun.
    And then again, Smoke was not so different, even after feeling that things had shifted: he still found himself hoping that the man would use the gun.
    But behind Smoke, a man with a leader’s voice said, “Turn around.”
    Smoke turned slowly around and saw a compact young man in his early thirties—but, no. Wrong. Subtract the etchings of wartime stress and fatigue and hunger, and the man was perhaps mid-twenties. He was gaunt from hunger; his chin was just a shade too prominent, like the old drawings of the man-in-the-moon at quarter-phase, and his forehead was high; he had a straight nose; a wry, red-lipped mouth; and small, dark-lashed green eyes rimmed with sleeplessness. His hair was thatchy, oily because it was something he ignored. When it was clean, it was probably blond. He was not more than five-seven, and lean in a weathered brown flight jacket that looked like it had done its flying in bad weather; ancient, faded Levi’s; motorcycle boots held together with duct tape.
    He was carrying a . . . Smoke stared.