Sins of the Father by Mitchel Scanlon Page B

he had first met the boy two months ago. That had been in another warehouse: another one of Freddie Binns's jobs. Daniel had simply walked up to Leonard while he was carrying stuff from one place to another, and said "hello". At first, Leonard had figured the boy must be lost to be out alone so late at night. Then, he had figured the boy must be blind, to walk up to someone as ugly as Leonard without running and screaming when he saw what he looked like. Finally, he had figured the boy must be as lonely as he was. Why else come up to him at all? It had suited Leonard, though, to talk to the boy. The fact of it was, he and Daniel had both been equally as lonely.
    It wasn't easy being a mutant in Mega-City One. By law, mutants were banned from the city. If the Judges found them, they rounded them up and sent them back outside to the wastelands of the Cursed Earth. The Judges' eyes were everywhere: they had spy cameras, and flying surveillance robots. Mutants like Leonard had to stay out of sight, only coming out at night, always wary in case some citizen saw them and reported them to the Judges. Yet, no matter what the laws said, Leonard knew there were plenty of mutants inside Mega-City One. They hid out in City Bottom, or in the ruined Undercity deep beneath the earth. They worked in illegal warehouses and factories for charge-bosses like Freddie Binns. They were the city's invisible people. No one wanted to admit they existed, but they live in the city all the same.
    Invisible people. The more Leonard thought about it, the more he realised that maybe him and Daniel were not so different.
     
    The cutting room was up on level four. One entire wall at the front of the room took the form of a transparent plasteen screen designed to allow the guards outside to keep watch on the cutters while they worked. Inside the room, a dozen cutters sat around a long table. They were naked. Using scales and measures, they weighed out minute portions of powdered coffee, mixing them with larger portions of synthi-caf and synthetic gravy browning, before pouring the resulting mixture into small plasteen envelopes. The first time Leonard had seen the cutting room he had wondered what was going on, but Freddie had explained it all to him.
    Real coffee was illegal in Mega-City One, Freddie had told him. "The damn Judges have banned it, the same way they've banned almost everything else," Freddie had said. "But, of course, that doesn't stop people from wanting it. That's what we do here, Lenny. We give people what they want. We smuggle in real coffee, cut it with cheaper stuff to keep up the profit, then ship it out all over the city. There's a whole lot of caffeine junkies in the Big Meg, Lenny. And, you wouldn't believe what they pay for a taste of mellow roasted."
    The cutters worked in the nude to make it harder for them to steal the coffee, Freddie had explained. One time, the guards had caught one of the mutant cutters trying to smuggle a half-kilo of real Colombian in a skin-pouch on his belly. They had beaten the mutant to death, hanging him up by his arms and hitting him with metal pipes while they made the warehouse's other workers watch. "The price of doing business in the Big Meg," Freddie had called it.
    Now, as Leonard approached the cutting room, a hard-faced man peeled away from the group of guards milling around outside and strode towards him.
    "Freddie send you up?" Jensen asked. He looked Leonard up and down for a moment, his mouth pursed in a frown as though he didn't like what he saw. "The load is over there." He used the sawn-off stump gun in his hands to gesture towards a stack of crates outside the cutting room. "We already counted the baggies inside 'em. The count comes up short at the other end, it'll be you that pays for it." He tapped his gun menacingly on one of the crates. "You understand that, mutie?"
    "I understand," Leonard said.
    He lifted one of the crates, feeling the contents settle as the thousands of plasteen