The Girl in the City Read Free Page B

it looked a lot like one of the circuit boards she scavenged sometimes, but without the corrosion and cracks.
    Leah’s father looked her directly in the eyes, his face intense. “Where did you get this?”
    Leah hesitated. “I found it. It was buried in the undergrowth.”
    Her father put the block of plastic on the kitchen table and placed his hands on Leah’s shoulders. “Leah. This is very important. I need to know exactly where you got this.”
    For a few seconds, Leah considered trying to continue her deception, but the look on her father’s face told her he already knew she was lying. “I was in an alley off Bishop, on my way home. There was a man. He was being chased by someone, and they shot him. He dropped the bag. He asked me to take it, so I did. That’s all. I promise.”
    “What happened to the man?”
    “I think he… died.”
    “Did you see who shot him?”
    Leah shook her head.
    Her father looked up at the ceiling, running his hand through his unruly hair. “Were you followed?”
    “No. They chased me, but I lost them. I was really careful, Dad.”
    Leah’s father stared at her, his expression grim. She swallowed again. Her hands were suddenly sweating, and it felt as though sandworms were trying to chew their way out of her stomach. She willed him to say something, anything, before she was sick.
    “Okay,” he said, his voice quiet. “Go upstairs. I need to talk to someone about this.”
    “I’m—”
    “Now!”
    Leah turned and ran up the wooden staircase and along the hallway towards her room. She felt ill. Guilt and the feeling that she’d let her father down in some terrible, permanent way gnawed at her.
    As she walked into her room, she saw the dollhouse her father had made for her, with its bright red roof and the two little figures he’d carved from clothes pegs. The guilt burrowed deeper. Tears stinging her eyes, she threw herself onto the bed and lay there, listening to the muffled voice of her father in the room below. He was talking to someone on the telephone. He was speaking too quietly for her to hear, the way he always did when he was discussing topics that weren’t suitable for “little ears.”
    A few minutes later, Leah heard the familiar sound of her father coming up the stairs. She wiped her face, blinking away the remnants of her tears. As her father walked towards her room, she sat staring at the door. She was ready to apologize, to promise to be more careful and not to go near the Wild Ones ever again.
    He didn’t come to talk to her.
    Leah heard him unlock the door leading to the attic and go upstairs. His footsteps traced a path across the ceiling above her to the corner at the front of the house. There was a scraping noise, the sound of a box being dragged across the wooden floorboards of the attic, followed by the creak of wood and then the scraping again.
    Her father retraced his footsteps across the attic and down to the landing. Leah heard him lock the attic door, and she was convinced he was going to come and speak to her this time.
    But again he didn’t. He just went back downstairs.
    A couple of minutes later, the front door opened and closed. Leah ran to the window just in time to see her father cutting across the street, heading north towards the merchant zone where she’d got the bag. Where the man had been shot.
    Leah watched her father until he vanished out of sight around a corner, then she returned to bed. Weary, and with an uncomfortable empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, she closed her eyes and cried herself to sleep.

    Leah dozed—a restless, haunted sleep, filled with running across endless hills, dying men crawling in her wake. When she woke, her pillow was damp with tears. It took her a few seconds to realize where she was, and a few seconds more before the past day’s events came crashing back over her. The failed trip into the rural zone, the lost salvage, the dead man, the bag with its circuit board encased in plastic. Her