Miscreants: Next Generation by Natalie Bennett (classic books for 7th graders TXT) 📕

than they already were. I wasn’t sure if my family considered me an enemy or not these days. I supposed I’d find out soon enough….

“Considering I have no clue how to do that, can someone share those details with me?”

“Once we make it to Phobos, I’ll give you a hint,” Travis answered.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Who is Phobos?”

“Phobos is the town he’s leading us to,” Takara answered.

“Never heard of it.”

“We’ve got about thirty more minutes until we get there.”

Thirty more minutes of this? That would need to be a swift twenty. I was beginning to itch in places that shouldn’t itch, and I seriously had to pee. Not to mention there was a whole damn faction about to be searching for us. We needed to haul ass and get as far away from them as possible, regardless of how badly I wanted to do the opposite.

“Can we cut that down any?”

Travis twisted at the hip and looked back at me with a wry grin.

“If we run, sure.”

If I never set foot in the woods again, it would be far too soon. Where we wound up wasn’t leaps and bounds better.

Phobos was a husk of a town that looked completely out of place, located directly on the other side of the woods we’d just spent too much time in. We first emerged onto a road that offered us only one direction. The other was blocked off.

“I don’t remember this place being here when Samael brought me to the lodging site.”

“I reckon you came from the other direction. There’s another small town just before you hit the roadway to Camp Lazarus. This got—”

“Camp Lazarus?” I interrupted. “Since when does it have a name?”

Travis glanced at me from the end of our horizontal line, his gray eyes narrowed. “It’s been called that for as long as I can remember.”

“Why are there no tags anywhere?” Poet motioned to the derelict buildings situated on either side of the road.

Travis cleared his throat. “I haven’t known them to leave many visible marks. They seem to tag random buildings, old cars. Things like that. Then when they catch someone in their territory, like me, they can claim you trespassed.”

“Sounds like something Mal would do.”

“Somewhat,” Takara agreed. “But that places us in our own backyard, and there aren’t any proselytes here standing guard, which doesn’t sound like Samael at all.”

“There’s also that.” Travis pointed in the opposite direction, referencing the blockade.

A mess of cars and upheaved rubble with a manhole a few feet in front of it were back that way. The middle of the street looked like a giant mouth, ready to eat anything that got too close to it, effectively prohibiting anyone from going that direction.

“With the only other road going to the camp blocked off, someone would have to retravel the path we just took to get here or there.”

“Mostly impossible and suicidal.”

“Yeah, but that’s not much different than what you three just did. It takes big balls of steel to piss off that guy.”

“How do you know he’s going to be pissed?”

“You guys just killed two of his people…and she’s his stolen treasure.” He pointed to me.

Oh, so he was one of those.

There were lots of stories floating around about Samael and me. Some described us as a romantic tragedy. Others claimed my older sister was the one he’d been madly in love with. Ultimately only one was closest to the truth, and the origins of it tied into our childhood.

A cautionary tale of a silent wolf and his precious lamb. Everyone feared for the day the predator would snap and slaughter his prey. After all, wolves were notorious for making meals of lambs, weren’t they? But this story had one major flaw. How weak they portrayed this lamb to be was wrong.

As wrong as the other rumors about him stealing me away like some helpless maiden.

That always made me scoff. He’d taken me away in a rather unconventional way, but he didn’t kidnap me by any means.

Takara gave me a soft smile, knowing exactly how I’d wound up where I had. I wasn’t going to bother correcting the guy. I didn’t know him well enough or care to change his beliefs. People could think whatever they wanted.

Refusing to get hung up on any more thoughts of Mal, I decided to take in the sights around us. There was a time and place for everything; an abandoned town wasn’t the spot to have a breakdown.

Besides, this was my first time being away from the lodge in forever.

Patchy grass, yellowing and brittle from constantly being in the sun, had grown everywhere. On the sidewalks, beneath old buildings, in the middle of the street.

All the homes and stores were clustered close together.

They were arranged side by side in a way that meant you could climb from one window to the next. Very few still had any glass.

It was obvious no one had lived here in ages. Maybe some animals and lags took shelter here when passing through like we were, but people couldn’t survive in a place like this for long. The town itself didn’t seem as if it should exist.

“I don’t want to slow us down, but I really have to pee.”

“Same,” Takara agreed quickly. “I didn’t want to be the first to say it. I have to go too.”

“Uh.” Poet rubbed the back of his neck and started looking around.

“There’s an old service station somewhere up ahead,” Travis offered.

“Or we could pick one of these houses with overgrown bushes,” I replied.

“Which one?” Poet asked.

I looked to the left and chose randomly. “The one that used to be blue.”

“We’ll wait here. Be quick.”

I nodded and motioned for Kara to come with