was enraged. This plivos scum should never have been able to get the better of me, an apprentice Enforcer, the best in the city. But then again, most never would have tried. I supposed that fact alone had lulled me into complacency.
The younger boy was long gone by now. All that remained of him was the cloud of dust that was already disappearing in his wake, the wind quickly blowing away the tracks that he’d left and covering them with a layer of rusty silt.
“What do you think you stand to gain?” I spat disdainfully. “You’re not going to get away from us. Ketros is armed. He’ll shoot you before he lets you escape.”
“Yes, but you won’t get him.” Eos nodded in the direction the child had run. “I can promise you that.”
“What is so special about that boy, that you’re willing to sacrifice everything for him?”
“He’s my brother,” Eos answered without hesitation, “and that’s something else a patroin wouldn’t understand.”
But I did understand, immediately. Those people in there, the ones that Eos was so insistent upon addressing as his parents… they had broken the eugenics statute. They’d violated the most sacred tenant of the Contract. They’d had a child.
I was astounded. I didn’t know how they could have done it; every person on Iamos—except for partners the eugenicists had selected for reproduction—was on mandatory birth control. It was in the very water we drank. I wondered dimly if the farmers had stumbled across some kind of water source that the geroi were unaware of, didn’t control.
But why? The Society had adopted eugenics for a purpose. The planet