Diggers: The Sharp Edge of the Universe Read Free Page A

Some looked away. The rest whispered.
    “Leave.” Reggie stood up. He loomed a full head and shoulders taller than the boy, but Finn guessed they weighed about the same.
    “Leave,” the boy mimicked. A few snickers echoed back.
    “You heard my friend.” Finn stood up too, half a head shorter than the kid, but he didn’t care. “Leave us alone.”
    Ignoring him, Finn and Reggie sat back down and started working on their ice cream again while the mean boy stood at their table trying to decide what to do next. No one else had joined him in the bullying because no one else was that stupid.
    “What ride do you want to do next?” Finn forced himself not to look at the boy’s enormous belly poking out at them.
    “Dunno.” Reggie kept his eyes on his own ice cream.
    Without warning, the boy grabbed Finn’s head and shoved it into his ice cream.
    A moment later, the boy rolled around on the ground, screaming and grabbing at his neck. “AHAHAEEEEEAHAH!”
    Bullying was strictly prohibited—so much so that every person received a bully sensor implanted in their neck when they were born. The moment children, or even adults, went too far, they received a jolt of electricity that left them twitching on the ground for at least ten minutes.
    Finn wiped off his face and looked around at all the people beginning to gather around the pudgy boy. “Serves him right,” Finn said a little louder than he needed to.
    “Yep,” Reggie nodded.
    They stepped over the twitching boy and headed for the next ride.
     
     

Chapter 4: Lectures
     
    The silence at the dinner table, and the three pairs of glaring eyes attached to the biggest people on the Space Station, made for a rotten start to the evening.
    The awesome birthday party yesterday, already a distant memory, didn't seem so amazing at the moment. After the fat-green-boy incident, Reggie seemed more in the mood for rides. They’d managed to ride everything at least once and even squeeze in a movie.
    None of it mattered now.
    “So?” Gus O’Reilly, Finn’s dad, said.
    A massive man with disheveled, blazing-red hair that made him look like his head had caught fire, Finn's dad had a natural knack for making everything around him seem ready to be crushed just by his presence. Gus's long, red eyebrows lent his blue eyes an extra bit of fury. Like Quinn’s, his arms were thicker than Finn’s waist. Actually, Quinn and their dad could have been twins—another thing Finn didn’t have in common with them.    
    “I’m sorry, Dad. I just…I lost track of time. Then I forgot my stuff, and when I came back here…Jasper was…gone. So, I…I thought I’d try to help Mom and find him myself. Yeah. By the time I found him, it was too late to go to class.” He hoped his lie would fly under the radar.
    Gus studied Finn for a long moment, then sighed.
    “Ah, Dad! You believe him?” Quinn threw his massive weight back onto two legs of the chair, which creaked against his weight.
    “Look, Noodle—”
    “Tsk! Fergus…” Finn’s mom said from the sanitizer, where she stood cleaning the dinner dishes—the same place she could always be found after a meal.
    “Sorry, Maggie.” Gus shuddered a little under Maggie’s glare. Digger nicknames were off limits at their home—at least while Maggie was there. “Look…Finn,” Gus continued, “this is your last chance. You’ve got to pass this time. You’ve got nothing else to fill your future with if you don’t. Do you understand?”
    “Finn,” Maggie added as she finished up the dishes and took a seat at the table, “it’s your responsibility to do your best, even with the things you don’t like to do. Classes might be boring, but when you pass, you’ll be able to start the training and that’s a blast. You already know how to do most of the stuff they teach in class. You aced all the mechanical and electrical engineering classes. Just…get through this…okay?”
    “Okay,” Finn said slowly, hunching his