Read Online Ninth City Burning by J. Patrick Black - Free Book Online Page B

empty anyway. We go downstairs, and he gets right to sewing up the torn seam in my jacket. He’d charge most people a few service credits for that sort of work, but he does my uniforms for free. It’s all part of the deal, I guess. Spammers and me worked everything out with Cranely in advance, back when we first started at the factories, so he pretty much knows what I’ve brought and what he’ll give me. We still haggle a little bit over the weight of the sugar, though, Cranely getting all outraged like I’m trying to lift from him. It’s a form of endearment or something. If he were really mad, he’d get very quiet. That’s when you want to back off about as fast as you can.
    You don’t want to mess with Cranely. You just don’t. He’s sort of an old guy, but there are stories about him that would give you nightmares. Supposedly, this one girl once ran off with his half of a trade, and like a day later, she just disappeared. All anyone ever found was a doll that looked just like her, lying in her bed. It had the same haircut and clothes and everything, just in miniature. And it turned out it was made from
her
clothes, and
her
hair. Her skin, too, I heard. The stories are all like that. Real gruesome stuff. But Spammers and me are on good terms with Cranely, and we intend to keep it that way.
    For the sugar and the fish and my new uniform, which Cranely can alter and sell, I get a whole bunch of condensed milk and canned bread. The guards at the fences make little sandwiches out of that stuff during their night watch. They can’t get enough of it. Spammers and me do real good business trading with them. We were sure to tell Cranely all about it, of course, and he doesn’t mind missing out on what he’d make selling directly to the guards—he’s too old to go running out to the fences at night anyway. We still give him a cut of the profit, though.
    Cranely finishes with my jacket pretty quickly. Afterward, you can’t even tell it was ripped. You really can’t. “You’ve got that look today, boy,” Cranely says. “Got something else for me, haven’t you?”
    â€œI think you’re going to give me a few more pages, Cranely old man. I can just about guarantee it.”
    From my pocket I take a pair of glasses. They’re not the sort of glasses they give you around here, if you’re nearsighted or whatever. Uniform glasses are all thin black plastic, or maybe metal wire if you happen to be pretty important as well as nearsighted. These glasses are basically the same as normal ones, but they look totally different. They’re sort of rounder and spotted yellow and brown. The hinges are all rusty, and the lenses are broken, but it doesn’t matter to Cranely if the glasses aren’t new.
    â€œWhere did you get these?” he asks.
    â€œI get to keep a few secrets, right?”
    He sort of laughs to himself, saying, “Indeed, indeed,” and turning the glasses over in his hands, looking real closely at them. I start to get nervous, like maybe these are just normal glasses. The bivvie girl who traded them to me said she found them deep in hellion territory, but maybe she just got them from some other settlement and like scuffed them up to look like they’d been lying at the bottom of some ruins somewhere. You can’t trust those bivvies, not really. I mean, this girl seemed nice enough, but everyone says a bivvie is just a hellion who knows how to use a fork. It took me months to lift all the parts for that gun I traded her, and it would be just like me to end up with some sham artifact glasses. I can be a real sucker sometimes.
    Finally, Cranely says, “Well, boy, looks like we have something here.” He’s got his big, toothy smile on, like he always does when I bring him an artifact. I don’t know what he does with them, just that he’ll pay big for anything not made in the