The Renegades (The Superiors) by Lena Hillbrand

leave before they begin again this evening.”
    Cali
stifled a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t have to feed anyone but him, and if he
went to sleep, he didn’t have any Superior friends to guard her.
    “Where
are we going?”
    “I
don’t know.” Draven opened the door of a long black car and scooted Cali
inside. She liked the other cars better, the ones with pretty pictures and
words and colors all over them. Something about the car he chose, the way it
reminded her of her master’s car, made her uneasy.
    Inside
the black car, the seat’s coldness immediately began soaking through Cali’s
wool jumpsuit, and she wrapped her arms around herself. Draven scooted in next
to her. “You may take the seat. I will sleep behind,” he said.
    She
looked behind the seat at the small square area of floor and felt a little bad
for accepting his offer. But she didn’t want the floor either, so she didn’t
say anything. Draven climbed over the seat and rooted around in a pile of what
looked like the junk her sisters made their houses from. Little pieces of this
and that. He came up with a tattered, thin wool blanket and handed it to her.
    “You
live like a runaway,” she said.
    Draven
didn’t look at her but started undoing his shirt, so she lay down and covered
herself with the holey blanket. She wondered if now was the time to run.
Superiors slept most of the day. But surely he’d tie her up before he slept,
and he probably knew some special Superior knot-tying skill to make knots that
humans couldn’t untie.
    Maybe
he’d forget, though. Maybe he’d leave her untied, and she could make a run for
it. She’d never seen a Superior out in the middle of the day, so she thought
she’d wait until Draven slept a while. She lay still, heart pounding, waiting
for him to remember and come to bind her hands and feet. But after only a few
seconds, her eyelids started fighting to settle in together for the sleep she’d
missed that night.
    “What
would you do if you woke up and I’d run away?” she asked.
    “If
you mean to run, let me know now so I can remove you from my home. If you walk
out, you’ll leave your scent on everything, and Byron will come straight to
this car and kill me. I don’t imagine I’ve been so vile that you’d want to do
that, but if you must, I cannot do much for it.”
    She
sat up and looked over the seat. He hadn’t even gotten mad, and it didn’t sound
like he planned to restrain her even after she told him what she’d been
thinking. She almost said something else, but Draven had his back to her, and
when she caught sight of it, she forgot to answer him. Instead, she stared at
him in horror. It looked like a thousand black bugs had bitten him and burrowed
into the skin, and he’d scratched at them until they bled. Big red welts with
black centers covered his skin.
    “What’s
wrong with your back?” Cali asked before she could stop herself. If some kind
of skin-tunneling bugs lived there, she sure didn’t want to sleep anywhere near
him.
    “Nothing,”
he said, quickly pulling a shirt over his head.
    “Is
that…something that will happen to me? Are there bugs in here?”
    He
frowned and pulled off his shoes. She thought about how bad Shelly’s feet
smelled when he wore his slipper-shoes, and she waited for the stinky-feet
smell to hit her, but like the rest of him, Draven’s feet didn’t smell like
anything.
    “They’re
gone now, it’s too cold.”
    “Then
what are those things in your back?”
    “Nothing.
Take some sleep.”
    She
watched him lie down, curled on his side, and after a minute she lay down, too.
Though she thought she’d fall right to sleep, for a while she couldn’t. She lay
awake, thinking about Shelly and the baby, and how she hadn’t even said
goodbye. Shelly knew, of course. She’d asked him to go with her, begged, but he
wouldn’t budge. So she’d told him she wouldn’t go, and then she’d left without
saying goodbye. And the baby—would little Leo miss