Birth of a Killer Read Free

surprise. He loved it when they turned up on time, only to find themselves at the back of a line. By the time he’d processed those ahead of them, thechildren at the rear would be late and Traz could legitimately beat them.
    Traz disliked the Horston boy intensely. The pale weakling was too smart for his own good. He did a fine job of hiding his intelligence, but he gave himself away at times like this. Only the shrewder children were able to second-guess Traz. These two almost always turned up early on daubing days, and he was certain that the Crepsley brat wasn’t the brains of the outfit.
    “You’re early!” Traz barked when the boys stopped before him, as if being early was a crime.
    “Our mother had to leave earlier than usual today,” Larten muttered. “She threw us out, so we came here.”
    Traz glowered at them but decided not to press the matter. Others were already arriving, and he didn’t want to waste too much time on the daubings—he would take the blame if production dipped.
    “Bend over,” he grunted, and grabbed the back of Larten’s neck. Thrusting the boy down, he reached into the bucket of orange dye with his brush, swished it from side to side, then ran the coarse bristles over the top of Larten’s scalp. The dye stung, and a few drops trickled into Larten’s eyes, even though he kept them squeezed shut.
    Traz painted Larten’s head a second time, then a third, before releasing him. As Larten staggered away, coughing and wiping his eyes, Traz forced Vur down over the bucket. He was even rougher with Vur and daubed his scalp five times. Vur was crying when the foreman finally let him go, but he said nothing, only stumbled along after his cousin.
    Traz daubed the head of every child in the factory. Each had a specific color, depending on their job. The lucky few who worked on the looms were blue. Cleaners were yellow. Cocooners were orange. He liked being able to tell with a single look where a child was meant to be. That way, if he saw an orange-haired boy lurking by a loom, he knew straightaway that the child was shirking.
    Larten and Vur had been assigned to the cocooning team when they started at the factory at the age of eight. Their heads had been orange ever since. In fact, Larten couldn’t remember what color his hair had been before that.
    Larten’s father had been a muscular child and had worked on a team carting heavy loads around. His head had been dyed white, and although he’d left the factory before Larten was born, his locks had kept their unnatural color, so Larten had resigned himself to a life of orange hair. Nobody knew what sort ofpoisons Traz included in his dyes, but they seeped into a person’s pores and remained there for life. Larten wouldn’t be surprised if the dye had even turned his brain a dark orange color.
    Once past Traz, the boys made their way to the room of cocoons to begin their shift. They worked in the factory for twelve hours a day, six days a week, and eight hours on most Sundays, with no more than a handful of holidays every year. It was a hard life, yet there were others worse off than Larten and Vur. Some of the children were slaves, bought by Traz from poor or greedy parents. The slaves worked constantly, except when they slept. They were supposed to be set free once they came of age, but most died long before that. Even if they lived long enough to earn their freedom, they were usually ruined by that time, good for nothing except stealing or begging.
    The factory primarily produced carpets, but it also manufactured silk clothes for patrons with more money than Larten or Vur could dream of ever possessing. Silk came from worms, and the boys were part of the team responsible for loosening the strands of the worms’ cocoons.
    Silkworms hatched from the eggs of carefully bred moths and were fed on chopped mulberry leaves to fatten them up. They were kept in a warm room,countless thousands stacked on wooden trays from floor to ceiling, munching