The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

had loathed seeing her suck him off with a single arm. He said it made him think of a salamander with a leg just chopped right off, calmly carrying on, green and viscous, as if nothing had happened, while the torn-off limb remained behind jerking with pain, or perhaps from surprise at the absence of the rest of its body. The goddamn son-of-a-bitch wanted it to seem as if she was grasping his dick with both hands: this, he said, gave him a hard-on, and made her seem almost a proper whore like the ones wandering the clean streets of the colonies in the city.

It was her who sucked him off, but I was the one who had to swallow that bastard’s sperm. It was me that he raped every time he felt like it, but she was the one who ate in the Rathole, together with the other homies and their pets, and enjoyed a real roof, electric lighting, and running water. She never rebelled, never bit into his member to make the old fucker bleed to death. I begged her to hundreds of times, but she never took any notice of me.

The night they blew his head off, Naima got drunk, but not like the other Rats, who drank to the memory of their companions fallen in the skirmish with the Half-breeds, but from sheer relief. She inherited the homie’s leather jacket, which had the name of the gang spelled out with metallic rivets which would gleam in the light of the night-time bonfires; this made the other small Rats envious because the wearer had the right to stay in the Rathole.

The north-western slope was dangerous because of the drains. If you weren’t careful, you could fall into one, sink into the filthy water, find yourself trapped by an avalanche of bottles and packaging, and die through asphyxiation. Or you might be attacked by huge deformed bugs lurking among the piles of flexible materials, or fall into one of the tunnels they had made. Many Rats had disappeared that way, but Naima knew this gradient well. Sibilo had taken her there on countless occasions, and she had carefully noted the route that led to the discharge points at the feet of some of the steepest slopes.

She heard someone whistling behind her: it was the gang boss – her face covered in pimples, and with a bruise as big as a cockroach on her left eyelid – ordering her to go back. She pretended not to hear, and went on round the huge bulge covered in plastic. Naima had a keen eye for spotting the different types of plastic because you could no longer judge by the colour of the containers: now packaging and bottles were made using exotic polymers, and you needed a combination of sharp sight, sensitive touch and acute hearing to triage the residues of plastic with any precision. She was hoping to find some polyethylene acetone casings, a material much in demand in the resale stalls, which would ensure her better food for a time, and perhaps even the possibility of becoming a homie and sleeping in the Rathole.

It was me who learned the language of the dump, of the safe routes to avoid the drains, and how to listen to the sounds of plastic in order to anticipate avalanches or filtrations of water. Bottles moan and squeal in a certain way when they are crushed beneath the weight of tons of rubbish. It’s not the same sound as lateral shiftings or footsteps on top of the carpet of plastic.

The cold clenched itself round the plastic objects which, piled on top of each other, formed a weirdly homogeneous surface, full of rounded protuberances, strange holes and hollows that harboured toxic gases, inflammable residues, albino creatures or starving indigents from other maras. Naima pulled her neck scarf up over her nose, and followed the path she had memorized. All the forays with Sibilo had enabled her to discover the secrets of the dump, to learn to recognize the behaviour of materials under pressure, heat, cold or rain. She could estimate the stability of a mound of rubbish merely by noting what kind of plastic was predominant, and could even predict how high it was likely to become before collapsing.

Sibilo had been a sadistic old brute, but he understood plastic rubbish better than anyone. He claimed he had once been a Cyclops, making a living from the copper cables he retrieved from outdated or inoperative equipment. And he did indeed wear a red patch over his left eye, which made his face look a bit like a dartboard. Naima liked to imagine one of the Half-breeds aiming at the patch and firing a black bullet to slice a beautiful tunnel right through his brains.

Naima had no way of knowing if Sibilo was telling the truth, and had once lived among the Cyclops, but she did know that they wore patches or glass eyes as a mark of identity. She’d tried to find out from other homies, but no one had been able to tell her anything about the old man’s arrival. He had been part of the mara ever since she could remember, when she would scamper through the rubbish with the other girl Rats, helping the older ones, when she had had to fight for the crumbs that were thrown from the Rathole. But once her tits had started to grow Sibilo noticed her, and she became his pet.

She wouldn’t have survived among the other kids. If I hadn’t pushed her, if I hadn’t robbed, if I hadn’t thrown more than one girl Rat into the drains, she wouldn’t be here.

Like all the other Rats, Naima always hoped to find The Thing, the object that everyone dreamed about, something that the Cyclops had overlooked, something that had the magic power to serve as payment to buy the right to become a homie, to have your own mattress in the Rathole, the only structure in the area