I want to talk about my original writing but due to the horrors I can't do it unless I'm wearing an anonymizing hat. (This blog is the anonymizing hat). Main is the-sea-anemone
Project Lifebloom dissolves in a flash flood of an investigation that leaves the previously thriving community of Second- and Third-Gen humans — genetically engineered for physical strength and physic abilities, respectively — packed away in prisons and scattered across the universe. On the Project's distant Outer Station, Avram Ashta has just enough advance warning to pack the next generation of young Lifebloom cadets, an eclectic collection of scientists and soldiers, and a weeks' worth of food onto a ship and flee with nothing more than a scrambled message from the Project's director promising that a safe homeland is out there waiting for them, if only they can find it. Five years later, he's left the children memory wiped and hidden on an obscure planet and is holding his increasingly fractious crew together with both hands. And then news comes of the director's arrest, and with it, the first clue in years of the homeland's location. Except this new version of Project Lifebloom is different than he remembers — or maybe not different at all.
Wherefore Art Thou, Caspian?
What happened to Caspian Anno? This is the question plaguing our unnamed protagonist, who wakes one morning to find themself in Caspian's body with no memory of who they are, how they got there, or why everyone seems to be afraid of them. Written in the format of letters to the illusive Caspian, our protagonist struggles with personhood, identity, and the dawning realization that something terrible might have happened to their body's original owner.
City Witches
Ten covens, twenty fighters, thirty matches. Vandion City's underground fighting circuit has grown from a handful of scrappy witches trading spells in someone's garage to an institution in its own right, maintained through subterfuge and bribery. So when a famous, flashy fighter from a neighbouring city joins her coven and threatens not only to disrupt this precarious homeostasis but to take her spot in the ring, Nev Parker — ruthless, fast, holding the league record for disqualifications and nicknamed "The Brute" by her opponents — is less than thrilled. When the new fighter dies under mysterious circumstances shortly after her first match, Nev finds herself the prime suspect as the league scrambles to find the culprit and cover up the death before it comes to the attention of the authorities.
The Long Year's Night
On an alternate version of Earth, the Antarctic is a strange place: impossible creatures appear from nowhere and vanish just as suddenly. A ten-kilometer walk one day is five the next and twenty the day after. Those who venture too far into the snow are plagued by strange visions, returning as hollow shells of themselves. Time bends, breaks, folds in on itself. On the eve of war, disgraced explorer Edward Lawrence gathers together a rag-tag group of scientists, sailors, and a young man who claims to have the ability to turn back time for his final attempt to reach the pole.
You wake clawing your way up from water, eyes blurred and limbs heavy. Your lungs burn, burn, burn. Thoughts slip between your fingers like seaweed as you cough, convinced you’re drowning, that any moment now the tide will snatch you back under, but when you breath air meets your lungs. Your clothes are dry and scratchy and so is your hair, too long or too short or just wrong where it’s tangled around your face.
Your body— this is not your body. You know it immediately, instinctively, that this frail, rotted thing is not you. Fingers twitch against something soft and yielding. You want out. The limbs thrash, clumsy and out of sync. A burning weight presses down, pins them in place. Sound resolves into words.
“Caspian, stop it. Calm down.” Your— the body’s— eyes wrench open to a blurred cream and mustard chiaroscuro. The weight is a hand curled around its wrist, squeezing tight until the bones grind. “Stop moving.” Are you Caspian? Are you moving? The body stills when you ask it, but you cannot bring yourself to believe it is obeying your commands. How could it, when it’s not your body? “Come on, just work with me. You know I didn’t mean—” A sigh. Slowly, the hands peel back.
You blink, then blink again. Slowly, the colours stop shifting and settle into shapes. Into a person. The person is tall, blond, and tan. Weatherbeaten but young; probably in his twenties, dressed in a sleeveless shirt under some kind of uniform jumpsuit with the top half down around his waist. The room is small and windowless. The walls are the colour of mustard. It occurs to you that you do not know your own name, or this man’s, and in the same moment that this is something you should know.
“How do you feel?”
It’s instinct, maybe, that tells you to pretend. “Fine.” It’s hard to tell what’s wrong with the body’s voice— whether it’s higher or lower than it should be, louder or softer. Probably croaky, the voice of someone who hasn’t spoken in a long time.
“You were sick with a fever,” the man supplies. He sounds sharp and nervy and his fingers are cold when he grabs your wrist to check the pulse. “Your memory may be off.” A pause. “Is your memory off?”
“It’s fine,” you say, staring down at his hand. The body is so thin his fingers wrap all the way around. It must have been sick for a long time. “The others won’t be back for another couple of days. I’ll tell them you were sick.”
“Okay,” you say.
“Okay,” the man says back. You stare at each other for a bit, neither speaking. Seemingly for something to do, the man shrugs the top half of his uniform coveralls back on. There are letters embroidered on the front, and after a moment you manage to squint past the ice pick in your head to read them: Esterhazy.
“Are you just going to stare—” you cut off before you say at me, the words wrong in the mouth that isn’t yours.
“No,” Esterhazy says, abrupt, still staring. Then he blinks, shakes his head. “You can go back to your room.”
You don’t know where Caspian’s room is. “Sure.”
You wrangle the body onto its elbows, the muscles shaky and uncoordinated, stay there panting for a long minute before you tackle the legs. The body’s skin is a shade or two darker than Esterhazy’s, freckled with hairline scars and with lines of tight, indecipherable symbols down the insides of both forearms. You wonder if the body’s original owner drew them on themself, and what they mean. But probably you shouldn’t be looking at the body that’s supposed to be your own in confusion, so you plant its hands on the edge of the bed and push yourself to its feet. Shoddy construction, you think when the ankles sway and threaten to buckle. Esterhazy reaches out and you resist the urge to pull away because you need him to show you to Caspian’s room.
The walls outside are mustard coloured also, the floors speckled beige. There are still no windows. This is the only building you have ever been in— or at least the only building you remember being in— and you hate it. You want to laugh at that, a bit: you’ve been awake for twenty minutes and all you know about yourself is that you’re in a body that is not yours and you think buildings should have windows. And that you know what a window is, you suppose; can picture one clearly in your mind. You are, therefore, someone who has seen a window. Someone who has lived a life before this moment and retained information from it: how to speak, how to read. That you do not trust this man and you do not want to be here.
****
Caspian’s room is small, windowless, and the same mustard colour as the rest of the building, with a narrow wire-frame bed along one wall and a chest of drawers and a desk along the other. They were apparently not a big decorator: the walls and floor are bare, same as the desk. The floor creaks as Esterhazy guides you across to the bed and lowers you to the mattress. It must be an older part of the building, or badly maintained— the floor outside was ugly, but solid.
“Call if you need anything,” Esterhazy says, not sounding much like he means it.
“Sure,” you say, easing yourself back against the mattress and shutting your eyes. When you don’t hear footsteps, you slit them open to find Esterhazy still standing above you. His hand twitches like maybe he wants to reach out and touch you, but instead he tucks it into his pocket, turns, and leaves the room.
You give it another minute, then another minute after that because the body is heavy and sluggish and determined to pull you under to sleep. Instead, you push yourself upright. It’s less of a fight than the first time, but still harder than it feels like it should be. When you sling your legs over the side of the bed, you slither to the floor in a heap instead of standing on your feet and stay there, warily, with your forearms braced against the top of the mattress.
You press your forehead into the fabric and breath. It smells clean enough, just beginning to get dusty. You shift, preparing to stand, and the floor flexes beneath your knees. There’s a hairline gap where the tile peels up at the edge. You shuffle back and dig your fingers in on instinct.
The tile pops upwards. Slotted into the space below are tightly rolled sheets of canvas, some of them no bigger than your hand.
You unroll one at random, pinning it flat on the floor. It’s a painting, all grey and black and red, harsh choppy brushstrokes that make up a picture of something dead: the stretched out body of a construct, a feathered, bipedal thing with its head thrown back and its stomach torn open, guts rendered in sickening, glistening red. You roll it up and tuck it back into the floor.
The next is smaller, a detailed, vividly coloured rendering of the inside of an eye. The next, a square the size of your palm spattered in angry slashes in all the colours of a bruise: deep purple fading to sickly green and yellow at the edges. At the bottom are loose strips of canvas where the colours had obviously been mixed and tested, half-empty tubes of paint, a bundle of brushes held together by a cord. You tuck it all away, discomfited and dizzy, and slot the tile back into place.
You deep breathe on the floor until Caspian’s body feels less like it’s on a ship pitching in the sea— how do you know about the sea? How do you know that this windowless, mustard-coloured building is far from it?— and climb slowly to your feet.
In the desk you find notebooks filled with cramped writing and more drawings of constructs, these ones done by a dispassionate and scientific hand, though you can see it was the same one that did the paintings beneath the floorboards. The writing is scientific and dispassionate as well, describing the illustrated constructs. Focusing your eyes on the letters makes the body’s stomach swoop and its head pulse. You tuck the notebooks away as well, pause with your palms flat on the desk until you’re certain you aren’t about to fall down, then make your way out of the room and into the hallway.
You find a bathroom two doors down, with stalls on one side and a block of showers on the other, a row of sinks between them. The tiles are different in here, small and alarmingly slippery beneath your unsteady feet, and you shuffle yourself along with a hand gripped on the edge of the sinks.
In the mirror, Caspian is unsettlingly thin, skin wrapped tight over the body’s skull, dark hair sticking out in awkward tufts where it’s growing over the ears. Arms jut like twigs from a plain grey shirt and knobbed ankles peek out the bottom of soft, ill-fitting pants. It feels invasive to look, but you shuffle back to the door and snap the lock in place, then ruck up the bottom of the shirt one-handed, the other braced against the sink. The body is flat-chested, the ribs stark ridges decorated by yet more of the cramped, unreadable runes. Craning your neck reveals more along the back, in a neat line down the spine.
Twisting was a mistake. The world tips and suddenly you’re looking up at the underside of the sink, watching the ceiling swirl. Eventually, you make your way back to Caspian’s room and fall face-first into bed, dizzy and sweating. You don’t feel yourself fall asleep, but when you blink there’s a figure standing over you and you flinch, jolt over onto your side, bringing your hands up to... you don’t know what. There’s nothing you can do in this stupid body. But it’s Esterhazy, of course, holding a tray. Just Esterhazy. Is it right to say just, for him, like he’s some harmless thing?
“I brought food.”
You’re not hungry, but clearly the body needs badly to eat. You lever upright and reach out to accept the tray, which settles heavier than it should on your lap. The plate is filled with flat beige squares. You lift one, nibble at the corner, and decide that maybe Caspian is justified in being shaped like a twig, if this is how they eat all the time.
“Do I have to have this?”
“While you’re recovering,” Esterhazy says. “It’s easier on your stomach.”
“Fine.” You eat the rest of the square, slowly, then the one after that, and the one after that, Esterhazy standing over you the entire time. Caspian should be grateful you’re taking better care of the body than they seem to.
“I’m going to tell Golik and the others you were sick,” he says.
“I know, you said that already.”
He shifts from foot to foot. “Will you... also tell them that?”
“Do I need to? Since you’re planning to, and all.”
“Just checking we’re on the same page.”
You’re certainly not going to tell Golik and all these other mystery people that you have no idea who or where you are. “Sure. We’re on the same page.”
“Okay, good.” He hesitates. “Not a big deal, right? You’re fine.”
You don’t feel very fine, but saying so might make Esterhazy stay in the room longer. “Yep.”
“We’re okay, right? Me and you? You know I didn’t mean it.”
You could not care less about whatever fight Esterhazy and Caspian were having. “We’re fine.”
Esterhazy breaks into a smile. “I’m glad. Rest well, Cassie.”
****
The next few days are... okay. You sleep a lot, deeply, and wake feeling groggy and discomfited. You eat your beige squares and wander restlessly through the identical halls and try not to feel horribly invasive when you bathe the body and take it to the washroom.
On the third day, you brave the stairs on steadier legs, pausing every few steps with a hand braced against the wall. You’re out of breath by the end of the first flight, lungs burning, but you force yourself to stay on your feet because you’re afraid if you sit you’ll never get back up. By the end of the second flight, you can taste copper in your mouth. By the end of the fourth, you’re too numb to feel much of anything at all, not even relief when you reach the landing and it ends in a door instead of another flight. You turn the handle and find it unlocked. Braced on your toes, you lean Caspian’s full weight against it until finally momentum swings the door open and for the first time, you’re outside.
The air is hot and dry, buffeting in choppy bursts. For a moment you’re completely blinded by the light, blinking tears from your stinging eyes as you suck in greedy lungfuls of fresh air. When you open them, the sky is a vivid, deep blue, scrubbed free of clouds. The ground is hot beneath your feet, radiating through the soles of the thin sandals you’d found under Caspian’s bed.
The roof— you must be on the roof— is flat, empty besides a folding chair positioned under an umbrella near the edge. It’s harder than it should be to pick your way across the expanse, unsteady on the pebbled surface, and drop into the seat. Whoever positioned the chair had chosen their spot well: rolling scrubby red dunes stretch out endlessly in every direction, interrupted by bursts of low greenery. Lounging back with the sun beating down, your muscles ease, a lizard thawing on a rock.
You’re dozing by the time the first construct ambles past. It’s long, low, and gleaming silver— an amateurish design, basic in shape and unwise in colour, the hallmark of a young hedge witch more concerned with looking flashy than being practical. You whistle at it between your teeth, idly, but it ambles on. Poor harmonics.
The next wander by maybe an hour later, three little mottled, rust-coloured things with beautiful camouflage but a jerky, uneven gait. Their flat, oval faces turn in your direction when you whistle. You haven’t put any command in it, and after a moment, they shuffle on. There’s a fascinating number of constructs— maybe a dozen, by the end of the evening; the sun keeps lulling you in and out of sleep— some clearly from different makers but all living within the same territory. Dubiously constructed as they are, you doubt any are carnivorous, of animals or of other constructs.
You wish you’d brought Caspian’s notebook up with you, although maybe it’s rude to add to someone else’s notes. On the other hand, it’s probably ruder to be walking around in their body, but there’s not much you can do about that. More importantly, the notebooks are down four flights of stairs that you would like very much not to climb again, if you can avoid it.
It’s evening when another shape catches in your peripheral vision. You whistle, instinctively, only when you open your eyes to check the reaction you realize it’s not a construct but three people walking in a single-file line towards the compound. These must be the others.
The first person you meet besides Esterhazy— or the first person you remember meeting— is a squat middle-aged woman with a deep tan, iron grey hair piled on top of her head, and dark, hooded eyes feel like they’re peeling back Caspian’s skin to peer into your soul. You’d drifted off in your chair again and woke to find the sun had set and her standing above you.
“You look rough,” she says. She’s probably in her fifties but her voice sounds much older, raspy and cracking.
“I’m fine.”
“Vincent said you were ill.” It takes you a moment to realize Vincent is probably Esterhazy.
“And now I’m fine.”
“Are you,” she says. “I ask because it seems to me you haven’t done any work.” Is there a subtle way to ask what your work is?
You say, “I was sleeping.” Then you stand up and are narrowly saved from landing face-first on the ground by the woman shooting out an arm to grab you by the collar.
“You’re really fucked up,” she says.
“Less fucked up than I was,” you say. She lets go as you make your way across the roof, but she must be reasonably invested in Caspian not breaking their face because she stays within arm’s reach as you pick your way painstakingly down the stairs, tailing you all the way to Caspian’s room. You pour yourself into bed, asleep before your head hits the pillow.
The following days pass in much the same way. You sleep, eat the tasteless squares, make the painstaking climb to the roof with Caspian’s notebook every morning and stay there until the sun sets. At night, you search methodically through the room, scraping your fingers raw prying at the edge of the floor tiles and reading Caspian’s notebooks until your eyes blur. It doesn’t help much, except now you recognize some of the constructs that wander past.
At the very least it keeps you from having to figure out Caspian’s job for a while longer, with your deep under-eye bags and tendency to fall asleep at random. You need to get out of here, soon, before they realize. It’s a miracle no one has already.
It’s a lot harder to avoid four people than it is one, especially when the additional three seem distinctly less willing to ignore you than Esterhazy had been. Golik, the grey-haired woman, unfailingly tracks you down twice a day, in the morning and again in the evening. You don’t know what she’s looking for, and she doesn’t say. Besides Golik there’s Costa— a wiry man in his late twenties with the scrubby beginnings of a beard and a lot of glossy dark hair— and Aveline, a stocky woman in her mid-thirties who you’ve only ever seen wearing a backwards hat.
“Must have been some fever,” Costa says mildly when he finds you sleeping on the roof. You hate that you sleep so much with these strangers around, so deep you never hear their footsteps until they’re already looming over you.
“You saying I look bad?” you ask, half meaning it as a genuine question: you have no idea if Caspian always looks one stiff breeze from crumbling or if it’s an aftereffect of whatever process had put you in their body. Or maybe they really had been sick with a fever.
“You look sick,” Costa says. “What happened?”
“Uh, I was sick,” you say.
Aveline, for her part, ambushes you in the washroom. Maybe ambushes is the wrong word; it’s a shared space, technically, even if no one has been sharing it until now. She appears behind you in the mirror and asks, “Have you been feeding?” That feels like an odd way to phrase it, but if Aveline isn’t acting like it’s odd, you won’t either. Maybe it’s slang, or an in-joke. Caspian could be the type of person to have in-jokes.
“Es—” you don’t know if Caspian calls Esterhazy by his first or last name. “I’ve been getting room service.”
“We can get something fresher,” Aveline says. You still feel nauseas, most of the time, but the body’s skeletal enough still that you’re not about to turn down the opportunity to get more food into it, especially if that food is something other than Esterhazy’s tasteless squares.
“Sure, thanks.”
You follow Aveline downstairs— which no longer makes you feel like you’re about to keel over and die, thankfully— and through one of the hallways where the others seem to congregate and which you have, as a result, been avoiding. At the end is a small kitchen, just a table with four chairs, a sink, and a collection of hot plates on the counter.
“I’m gonna grab a snack,” Aveline says. She opens a cabinet, so you do, too. The food is all packaged and dried, but it’s not beige squares. You pour a handful of dried fruit into your hand and tip it back into your mouth. It tastes sharp and sweet and unfamiliar; you wonder if it’s a product of your own faulty memory or of Caspian’s diet. Maybe that’s why they were so sick, if they never ate fruit.
“Should you be eating that?” Aveline asks, sounding nervous.
“Uh,” you say, because you’re pretty sure now the answer is no. Your whole mouth is tingling in a way you don’t need a full lifetime worth of memories to know is bad. Your throat fills with hot pinpricks; you can hear yourself breathing in choppy wheezing gasps. Black spots flicker in front of your eyes as you crumple gently towards the ground, one hand braced on the countertop to slow your progress.
It occurs to you, lying flat on the tile failing to suck in air, that you might die like this, in someone else’s body with no memory of who you are, having only ever met four people and seen the interior of one ugly building. What a way to go out.
You don’t die, though. Instead, you wake up in the same room as that first day, unpleasantly clammy and feeling, disconcertingly, like Caspian’s heart is going too fast and too slow at the same time. There’s a stiff plastic mask over your face and needles in your arms and you kind of hate Caspian, right now, even though you’re the one who nearly killed them. Everyone’s crowded around and staring down at you.
“Why did you do that,” Golik says, and what possible answer can you give to that?
“Just trying something new.”
“You changed your runes?” she asks, sharp.
“Uh.”
“Just some minor tweaks,” Esterhazy says, sounding contrite. “I’m sorry. I thought they were minor enough that it would be okay, but it wasn’t my call and we shouldn’t have done it.”
“I got bored of eating squares,” you say.
“So bored you were willing to die from it?” Costa asks.
“Well. Ideally not.”
“I was bringing you to feed,” Aveline says.
“She’s been having some brain fog,” Esterhazy says, inaccurately, but you aren’t about to dispute it.
“Because she hasn’t fed properly,” Aveline says.
“No use complaining about what we can’t change,” Golik says.
“I’m sorry, how is this ‘what we can’t change?’” Aveline demands. “We have refrigeration.”
“We aren’t having this argument again,” Golik says.
“Yes we are! I’ve been saying for months we can’t have a safety protocol that relies on deliberate starvation! If this were happening to any of us, we’d be calling it a human rights abuse.”
Golik sighs, dragging a hand through her hair. “Good thing she’s not human.”
****
Later, after Golik, Costa, and Aveline have gone, Esterhazy sits on the edge of the bed. The breathing mask is off now; the frantic, sickly thing inside you has settled but you’re acutely aware of how weak you are, still. You want to sit up, for all the good it would do, but don’t want Esterhazy to see you fail. You stay flat.
“You don’t remember anything, do you?” he asks softly. He shoots you a benevolent sort of older brother smile, even though you think Caspian is older than him. “It’s okay. It’s normal.”
“From being sick?” you ask. “Or from the runes?” You look down at the lines of writing on Caspian’s skin, but if any are newer than the others, you can’t tell.
Esterhazy shakes his head. “No, I don’t know how to do that. My grandmother’s a hedge witch and she taught me a little, but I never learned the type of runework that you have.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to Golik?” you ask. You’re more relieved than you expected not to have to lie.
“She wouldn’t believe it,” Esterhazy says. “She’d think you’re lying, that you tricked me into backing you up. She thinks you’re dangerous.”
Do you think I’m dangerous? you don’t ask.Why does Golik think Caspian isn’t human?“Why? What did C— what did I do?”
“We don’t get along so well with the people you come from,” Esterhazy says. “They can be... hostile, to outsiders. I know you don’t agree with their practices, but you haven’t been here long. It’s just taking us a little to get used to you, that’s all.”
“Maybe I should go talk tomypeople,” you say. If the runes can theoretically make Caspian un-allergic to fruit, maybe they can put you back in your own body. Wherever that is.
“Cassie, you don’t understand. When you left them, that was it. Best case scenario is they refuse to let you in and you walk back through the desert. Best case.”
“What’s worst case?” you ask. Walking through the desert doesn’t sound so bad. You would be walking through the desert every day if Caspian’s body were more inclined to work.
“They kill you.”
****
You’re still sitting there, too wrung out and confused to feel much of anything about Caspian’s apparent train wreck of a life, when Aveline comes back. Esterhazy had gone... somewhere, so it’s just the two of you.
“Here,” she says, and holds out a sealed glass container filled with what look like purple scales, each roughly the size of the pad of Caspian’s thumb. When you pry open the lid and reach inside. The edges are sharp, serrated ridges catching against your skin.
“Eat,” Aveline says. You stare down at the scale pinched between your fingers, and then you lift your hand and slip it into your mouth. It’s smooth and cool against your tongue and tastes of fresh air and desert ground and something vegetal, and it should be terrible but you’ve never tasted anything better.
In the days that follow, you sleep, and you dream: vivid, shifting dreams that slip just out of your grasp when you wake. You’re sleeping less than before, you think, but the exhaustion doesn’t cling in the same way when you’re awake. You feel refreshed, almost, and strong. The climb to the roof no longer leaves you dizzy and gasping; Caspian’s body begins to put on muscle and fat. Sometimes, you stare down at the runes on the body’s arms and for a split second you’re certain you understand them, the words poised on the tip of your tongue.
You spend a lot of time with Esterhazy, who seems to like you a lot better now that he knows you aren’t Caspian, or at least that you don’t have Caspian’s memories. You paint, mostly landscapes and still lifes, and they look nothing like Caspian’s work though maybe some of the muscle memory is there still because they turn out more realistic than you expect.
You find yourself wondering, more and more, where your body is. Do you and Caspian know each other? Are you one of “their people,” the ones who maybe want to kill them? You wonder, staring in the mirror at a face that is no longer gaunt and hair starting to take on a glossy shine, if this is body might not be so different from your own— are you siblings? Cousins? Friends? Did Caspian choose you to take over their body? Did you choose them to take over yours, if that is where they are? Maybe you volunteered. Are you the type to volunteer for something like this? You do not feel particularly altruistic, but maybe you lost that along with your memories.
“Am I different?” you ask Esterhazy one afternoon. He’s a medic, as it turns out, and the room where you first woke up is a makeshift med bay. Earlier, you’d been rained off the roof in a flash flood that left water pooled in the sand and in your chair, so now you’re sprawled on one of the beds watching as he rearranges his meagre supplies. It feels like a bit of a miracle no one’s died yet, but you don’t say so.
“Not really, except you’re a little friendlier.”
“Sounds like I had a lot going on to be unfriendly about.” It’s still disconcerting, referring to yourself as Caspian. Rude, too.
Esterhazy glances over his shoulder, mouth twisted oddly. “Yeah. I guess you did. I never really thought about that with you, before.”
You rub your fingers idly over the blankets. “Why did I leave my people?” You couldn’t imagine belonging somewhere and then giving it up.
“They kicked you out, I think.” And that’s— it didn’t happen to you, but it stings, anyway. “We took you in.”
“Why? What did I do for you?”
“You knew a lot about constructs.” His mouth ticks up at the corner. “They’re a bit of a problem around here, I don’t know if you noticed.”
“So I, what? Tell you about them?”
“Break them down for materials, mainly.” The image flashes in your mind of gloved hands methodically levering scales free, sawing a serrated knife through thick, leathery skin. Of the same hands, bare, dipping into warm blood and licking it clean.
“And none of you learned how to do it, living out here?”
“It’s pretty specialized,” he says. Some of your skepticism must show on your face, because he carries on, “do you think you could still do it? I didn’t realize it would be part of your procedural memory.”
You can’t imagine anyone reaching adulthood without knowing how to make and unmake a construct. “Sure.”
****
Esterhazy must tell Golik— who seems to be the leader of the group— that you’re able to work, because three days later, she shakes you awake in the early hours of the morning and tells you you’re going on a scouting run with Aveline and Costa, and within half an hour you’re at the front entrance of the compound dressed in the same coveralls as the others. Aveline and Costa are both carrying bags but you don’t have one and they don’t seem to expect you to, in deference to your recent illness or in an effort to stop you going off on your own, you can’t tell.
The sun is creeping above the horizon when you set out, Aveline in front, Costa in the back, and you in the middle. You can feel the constructs so much more clearly down here, the vibrations of their steps echoing across the sand even through the thick soles of your boots. Most constructs are asleep at this hour; working breeds built diurnal for farming or construction.
You whistle an idle greeting all the same as you walk: hello, I am passing through your territory and I mean you no harm. A handful of replies drift over on the wind. These constructs are gentle, used to people, too worn with age or ill-constructed for the jobs they had been built for but still responsive to commands in their deepest instincts. The thought makes you sad, a little, that no matter how much time passes, they’ll never be free of that first, fundamental impulse to obey.
When you stop, the sun is high in the sky. Aveline and Costa sit in the sand sipping water and eating trail mix. You drink some of the water and do not eat the food, in case Caspian’s body tries to kill you for it.
“How are you doing?” Aveline asks.
“Good,” you say, and realize it’s true: you feel strong and sure, like you could keep walking forever. You unlace your boots and dig your toes into the sand, letting the heat seep into your skin. While the others snack, you lay back, worm your fingers between the densely-packed grains, push yourself downwards, shoulders against the ground like you’re trying to bury yourself in it, surrounded by warm sound and the distant echo of footsteps, the constructs’ songs in your ears. You open your eyes to find Aveline and Costa watching you, the former with a strange little half smile.
“You look content,” she says.
“Is that not allowed?”
Aveline shakes her head. “It’s nice. It’s just different, also.”
“What happened while we were gone?” Costa asks. His eyes are dark and intense, arms braced on his knees as he leans over you.
“I was sick,” you say, uncertain.
“You’ve always found ways to feed while we’re gone,” Costa says.
“This time I was sick,” you repeat. “I wasn’t hungry.”
“You were sick because you weren’t feeding,” Costa says.
“We’ll hear you out if anything happened that Vince isn’t saying,” Aveline says.
Would they believe you if you told them you aren’t Caspian? Would they be angry? It occurs to you only now that your body’s usual pilot might be loved here, or if not here, somewhere. That there are people who can tell when they’re— you’re— acting different, who know that they feed when they’re not supposed to and who facilitate it. Who might be angry to find Caspian gone and replaced by a stranger.
Thankfully, Aveline and Costa let it drop as you climb back to your feet and resume walking. It’s maybe an hour later that you begin to feel it: a huge, sickly weight, a black hole in the middle of the desert. A dead construct.
A dead construct isn’t the same as a dead animal, of course. The component parts will begin to rot eventually if the runes are anything less than airtight, and even that is hit and miss against scavengers, most of which are constructs themselves built to bring pieces back to their makers. This one has been dead maybe a week, but it was well-made and no worse for wear.
It’s large enough to be clearly a vanity project rather than a working breed; longer from tip to tail than Costa and Aveline lying end-to-end and wide as a tall adult with their arms stretched to full length at their sides, reaching all the way to your chest even laid on its side. Big teeth, mottled blue and yellow scales.
You set to work, methodically: most of the body you leave to the scavengers, who will feed from it for months to come. When the flesh and organs are all gone, you’ll return for the bones, but for now you remove the teeth. Without your tools, it’s a slow process, fingertips pressed along the gums, forehead resting against the smooth scales of its jaw. You hum, low and resonant, reaching for the hedge magic that built it. Pull the teeth like plucking an apple, a firm twist and tug; pop the smallest in your mouth and swallow it whole. The eyes you leave for the scavengers— they prefer the soft parts and you the hard, in general— and get to work on the scales: two dozen from the delicate work around the eyes, a couple dozen more from along the back, snacking as you go. Since waking up you’d felt vaguely ill but now you’re ravenous. By the time you finish with the claws you’re dozy and sated, curling against the body of the construct.
“Come on,” Aveline says. You’d forgotten about her and Costa. “We’ll camp for the night.”
The three of you walk some distance away— the others don’t like to be near the dead, even dead constructs— and when you have reached the minimum acceptable distance, Costa and Aveline produce the makings of a tent from their bags and have it set up in short order. Without waiting for them to finish, you curl on your side in the sand and drift to sleep.
And wake, you don’t know how much later, to a hand on your shoulder. Aveline is leaning over you, her face very close to your face. You’d quite like to stop waking up like this, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
“What?” you whisper, and then she wraps an arm around your shoulders, levers you upright, and kisses you on the mouth. For a frozen moment, you just sit there. The sensation is— fine. A little dry and awkward because you’re not holding up your end of things by moving or opening your mouth, and you wouldn’t be particularly inclined to do it again if given the choice, but you’ve had worse experiences in your life— although that might count for more if your memory went back farther than a couple of weeks. You only remember a couple of weeks because you are not Caspian, and Aveline thinks you are Caspian. Thinks she’s kissing Caspian, who’d probably want Aveline to be kissing them and not some random person in their body.
Your relationship to Caspian’s body is clinical, that of a nurse caring for a comatose patient. You wash it, you feed it, you touch it no more and no less than necessary. This feels invasive, for Caspian and Aveline both. You should do something. Something tactful, preferably, that doesn’t ruin Caspian’s relationship when they get their body back or make things more awkward for you now. You’re a smart person, probably. You can solve problems.
You solve this one by scrambling back on your hands, breathing hard, and then by folding over your knees and having a panic attack.
“Shit, Caspian, what’s the matter?” Aveline asks. She reaches for you, rubs her hand down your— down Caspian’s back. You can hear your own breathing, loud. In your peripheral vision, Costa crawls out of the tent and settles on your other side, a little ways away.
“Cassie, what happened while we were gone?” Aveline asks softly.
You cannot have Costa and Aveline looking into what happened. This you know with a deep, unshakable certainty. “I was just sick. Seriously.”
Aveline must judge that you aren’t about to freak out again, because she drops down to sit fully in the sand and tugs you flush against her side. “We’re just worried. You’ve been so odd.”
“It didn’t happen then,” you blurt, no idea where you intend to go from there, but your mouth keeps talking anyway. “I was pledged to an, uh, early marriage when I was young. I thought it didn’t bother me, but when I was sick I started having these dreams about it, and they kept going even after I was better. So that’s why I’ve been odd, I guess.”
Immediately, you wince. Caspian and Aveline are close, apparently, and here you are making up a history she might know isn’t true.
“Is that why you’ve been staying in your room?” Aveline asks.
You pick over the wording of that in your head: does she mean during the day? You haven’t been, besides the first few days when you were too weak to do much of anything and only Esterhazy was at the compound anyway. Or does she mean at night— does Caspian sleep with her, literally or figuratively?
Aveline presses, “Was there anything that triggered it, do you think? I want to believe you, Cassie, but you’ve never had nightmares about that before. And the way you and Vince have been with each other. You could barely stand to be in the same room as him when we left, and we come to back to find you half starved and suddenly best friends? I just, I don’t understand what happened and I worry it wasn’t anything— good.”
“Turns out being horribly sick is a good bonding exercise,” you say. “We talked and realized fighting while we live in the same outpost in the middle of nowhere is stupid, and then we realized we actually get along okay when we’re not trying to bite each other’s heads off.” You try for a reassuring smile, reaching around to squeeze Aveline’s hand where it rests on your shoulder. “I was always going to have to work through this. So maybe we can just hold off for a bit, on the...” you gesture vaguely between your bodies.
“Of course, Cassie. However long you need.”
****
Back at the compound, you play it cool. You’re great at playing it cool. Unfortunately, you’re the only one who is. Aveline and Costa vanish into a meeting with Golik, and she comes out of it watching you with her dark, hooded eyes. You visit Esterhazy, as usual, stretch out on one of the cots and watch as he writes out a careful inventory of the construct parts you’d brought back, and you think of Aveline saying you— saying Caspian couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him, of him not-quite-apologizing when you first woke and growing friendlier once he realized you didn’t have any memories. Maybe it’s Caspian’s fault. You hardly know anything about them, after all; they could be some kind of sociopath towards everyone besides Aveline and possibly Costa. Which is half the people you know, but presumably Caspian had a larger social circle.
Bet he did it on purpose, you think, and then, what? That thought hadn’t come from you, you’re certain of it: popped up uninvited in your mind like a groundhog or a particularly persistent weed.
“You okay?” Esterhazy asks, glancing over.
“Yeah.” Abruptly, you don’t want to be here. You want to be out on the roof, want to be in the desert singing harmonics back and forth with the constructs. “Do you think I’ll ever get my memory back?”
Esterhazy is silent for a long time. “I don’t know,” he says finally, slow. “I’m not an expert in this, Cassie. Maybe not. I think you have to be prepared for that.” Then he asks, “do you think it’s coming back?”
“No,” you say. “All clean slate up here.”
Esterhazy abandons the inventory list to sit next to you on the cot. “Hey, it’s not all bad. Your life was pretty hard before; maybe it’s good to have a chance to start over without all that clogging up your brain.”
“I’d rather know.”
Esterhazy touches you on the shoulder and you suppress an instinctive flinch. “Don’t let yourself be consumed by mourning what you can’t change.”
On the roof that night, you trace over the runes on your arm. It’s dark, the crescent moon scrubbed over by cloud cover, but you can see clear as in full sunlight. You press your thumbnail into the corner of a letter and know, instinctively, that this is not your work. This is not the work of the Seniors, whose runes are elegant in their simplicity, tucked away on the spine or the back of the neck where they cannot be meddled with unduly. This is the work of an amateur, writing out every line in clumsy, too literal translation. If you go home, they’ll take the knife to the surface layer, peel it away smooth like skinning an apple, then unweave the deepest rot with their harmonics.
Laying in bed that night, the thought disquiets you: you don’t know anything about runes, or the Seniors, or unweaving. Those were not your thoughts, and since they are not yours, they must be Caspian’s. An animal fright takes root in your chest: you’re in this body, still, with no indication of how to get out, and now this thing is starting to creep in and replace you. Soon enough you might not even be able to tell. You’ll just be gone, erased from existence without anyone knowing you were there in the first place.
“Get out,”you whisper, voice shaking. “I don’t care if it was your body first. I’m living in it now and I’m not leaving until I have somewhere else to go.”
You’re twitchy, the following days. Twitchy but playing it cool. Very cool, and calm, and normal. So normal, in fact, that three days after the scouting trip Esterhazy pulls you aside into the medbay and says, “Hey, uh, what did you and Rosa talk about while you were away?”
It takes you a moment to realize Rosa is probably Aveline. “Nothing much; just telling her about my fun times with the flu. Why?”
“No, no reason,” he says. “You’ve both just been a little, uh...” He chews his lip, looking somewhere over your left shoulder. “Okay, look, don’t take this the wrong way, okay? I know you wouldn’t do it now. But you were trying to get close to Rosa when we were— not really getting along, and I think you told her some things about me that aren’t true to like, get her on your side a little.”
“Well obviously I don’t remember if I did or not,” you say, impatient. “If you all took me in from some evil cult and Rosa’s still taking my side over yours, maybe you should look at yourself before saying I’m trying to brainwash her or whatever.”
“Come on, Cassie, I didn’t say that,” Esterhazy says. He’s smiling and irrationally, you want to punch it off his face. Except no, you don’t. Caspian wants to punch him. You want to tear your skin off, to scream, to claw away this insidious thing in your brain trying to take over. But all that’s impossible, so you settle for pressing your palms into your eyes.
“Sorry,” you mutter into the dark. “I guess I just want to think I was a good person, but it sounds like I wasn’t. Am not. Whatever.”
You smile weakly and make your escape back to Caspian’s room where you stand in the centre turning in circles trying to decide if it feels more familiar than it should, except it turns out it’s pretty hard to tell if a room feels familiar because you’ve been sleeping in it for three weeks or if it feels familiar because its original occupant is trying to take over your brain. You need to fix this.
****
In the end, you just walk out. Wait until the sun sets and slip out the door with nothing but the clothes on your back, whistling harmonics under your breath as you walk. You take off your boots and your footsteps are light on the sand; by morning, the wind will have blown them away. Your feet carry you, instinctively, eating up ground faster than your strides should allow. You walk for hours without stopping and do not feel sore or hungry or tired.
It is hours or days later when the ground is suddenly broken up by a series of sloped ridges, clearly man-made to keep the wind and sand and occasional rain out of the courtyards below, built into the ground to protect against the sweltering heat that ebbs and flows throughout the year but never fully goes away.
At the edge of the settlement, the dwellings are small— a single one- or two-room apartment on each side of the sunken courtyard with a communal garden in the centre— but grow in size as you make your way inland, each connected by a series of underground tunnels.
The central courtyard, when you reach it, is marked by the only tree around for miles: a construct lovingly crafted and impeccably maintained in the shape of a gnarled oak, unchanging in appearance but by now as ancient as the twisted branches and bulging trunk would suggest. The leaves are glossy and vivid green year-round, rustling in the wind.
The stairs into the courtyard begin a little ways away, a long downslope of a tunnel lit only by the faint glow of the sun at the entrance. When you emerge from the tunnel and into the courtyard, there are three people sitting beneath the tree. They turn to look at you in unison. They’re nearly identical, all three slender and wide-faced, dark-haired and dark-eyed, dressed in loose, sleeveless shirts with runes spiralling up their arms, much neater than your own. They look, you realize, just like you— like Caspian.
“I’m one of you,” you say.
“Yes.” The speaker has an accent. You wonder if you have the same one. You must, since no one at the outpost noticed you talking differently. He points towards an arched entranceway across from the tree.
“In there?”
“Yes.”
You poke your head through the entrance, feeling strangely trepidatious. The room beyond is small, with rounded walls lined with shelves filled with ceramic jars. A woman of indeterminate age sits in a rocking chair in the corner, almost hidden from view.
“Which one are you?” she asks without looking up.
“Caspian. But, uh, not really.”
“Hmm,” she says, beckoning you closer. You come to a nervous stop in front of her chair, holding yourself carefully still as she grabs you by the wrist and twists your arm back and forth. “Shoddy work,” she pronounces.
“It’s not mine,” you defend.
She scoffs. “Of course not— this is the work of some half-trained hedge witch.” Her nails tap against the runes, then twist, dig in, in, beneath the skin. She hums, low in her chest, and when she drags her fingernails upwards, the skin comes with them, runes and all.
“No, wait. Stop!” You wrench your arm back, clutching it to your chest. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing you.”
“Wait,” you say again when she reaches for you a second time. “I’m not Caspian. I ended up in their body somehow but I’m someone else, I need to get back where I’m supposed to be.”
The Builder— you know, instinctively, that this is her title— sighs. “This is what happens when you have shoddy runework and a shoddier build. You are not some doppleganger transported into Caspian’s body; you’re just the victim of spectacularly incompetent hedge witchery. Although in my early days I came across a young woman convinced she was a beluga whale, so it could certainly be worse.”
“That’s not what’s happening here,” you say.
“The beluga whale said exactly the same.”
“This isn’t my body.”
“It certainly isn’t the one you had before,” the Builder says, “and it certainly isn’t up to the standards of any of your others.”
You struggle to parse that. “Was I supposed to marry someone here?” you find yourself asking.
“To Senior Edmar,” the Builder agrees. “Until he found you to be... temperamentally distasteful.”
You’d thought you were inventing that story for Aveline, but she hadn’t seemed surprised. But that doesn’t prove anything— you know already that Caspian’s influence is seeping into your mind. You change tack.
“What happened to the other bodies?”
“They’re dead,” the Builder says, blunt She glances up and catches the expression on your face. “Oh, don’t look like that. We take care of you; this is only your third. You should have been in your second for three or four more decades at least, but this is what happens when you fraternize with outsiders.”
“Are you sure nothing else could have happened? Besides me dying and coming into this body wrong.”
“The transfer is impossible while the previous body lives.”
You can’t— that can’t be true. You aren’t Caspian. This has been your one unshakeable certainty since you woke. But how do you know that, without your memories? How do you know Caspian’s memories aren’t simply your own, filtering back? Maybe, when Caspian’s mind subsumes yours, you will be healed— and really what right do you have to this body, to this mind that’s only existed for weeks where Caspian’s has existed for decades? To preserve yourself, you must erase them. How can you justify that?
“The transfer isn’t complete, though. Doesn’t that mean they could still be alive?”
“Caspian, if your previous body was alive, you would not be walking and talking. You don’t feel like yourself because whoever did these transfer runes was either incompetent, malicious, or both, but I assure you, you are so much yourself. I recognized you the second you opened your mouth to start arguing.”
“It’s been a long time since Caspian lived here,” you protest. “Maybe you’re just seeing what you expect to see.”
“And before you left, I knew you in two bodies, and you knew me in three. You are yourself, Caspian.”
****
For three weeks, you live in the sunken village. The Builder assigns you a room at the outskirts with the other constructs. It’s less disconcerting than it feels like it should be to see your face mirror a dozen times over every day. The other constructs greet you by name, placid, and if they have any feeling about your departure and return, they don’t say so. The Seniors, who are not constructs, look you up and down in silence as they pass, dressed up in long robes and jingling bracelets. No one asks anything of you here: you’re a half-wanted guest, neither catered to nor expected to work. At night you walk into the desert and lie on the sand, and your harmonics blend with the other constructs, and under the night sky you feel like an open wound that will never stop bleeding.
You find yourself studying runework. It’s a frustrating endeavour: you never feel like you’re learning anything new, but when you try to call the information to mind without consulting the books, it slips through your fingers. You’re not entirely sure what will happen to you if you get it wrong, which is maybe why you’re brave or stupid enough to try. But one night you head out into the desert, mix blood with dirt and trace a new sigil into your skin below the collarbone, singing to yourself as it sets.
Three more days you wait after that, to make sure Caspian’s memories really have stopped and you haven’t done yourself irreparable damage, and then you walk. You tell no one you’re going but you don’t need to; you whistle as the sunken city fades into the distance and its harmonics raise in farewell.
The animal constructs find you when you’re hungry, stand still while you pluck a row of scales free and crunch them between your teeth. The tracks grow thicker the closer you come to the compound, boxing it away from the sunken village. You half expect to run into the scouting team as the building looms taller in the distance, but day after day comes with no sign of them, until one evening you reach the outer wall and set yourself on the sand with your legs stretched out in front of you and cooling brick at your back. Eyes closed, fingers sunk into the sand, you’re not certain what you’re reaching for but you reach all the same, sliding your harmonics up and down the register waiting for something to catch.
What you’re looking for can’t sing back. It’s a dead, lumpish thing built with a clockmaker’s precision, a hundred times more complex than the constructs wandering the desert. It may or may not be you, or formerly you, or a facsimile of you. Caspian. A person.
****
In the end, you get back into the compound the same way you left: you wait until sunset, and then you open the door and walk inside. You let your feet guide you: you’ve become an instinctive thing of late, and now those instincts have you winding your way silently over linoleum tile. The thing hovers on the edge of your consciousness. Now that you’ve found it you can feel the frayed cord between you.
You find the stairs behind an industrial-looking door in a corner of the building you’ve never been in before. This one is locked, and you spend some time poking at it, digging in your pockets until you come up with a sliver of tooth that you jam haphazardly into the mechanism, to unsurprisingly little result. You shove against the metal with your palms. It jolts forward, grinding against the frame. You stare at it dubiously— the thing looks old but solid; you shouldn’t be able to do that kind of damage. Experimentally, you shove forward again, putting your muscle into it. The latch grinds, loud enough to make you wince, then pops open.
You’d half been expecting something grim and gruesome, but the basement is just a basement. Steep stairs, low ceiling, walls of bare, echoing brick, air close and musty, completely windowless same as the rest of the building.
There’s a lump in the corner, tucked up against the wall and covered haphazardly by a blanket. You kneel, fingers brushing the fabric. Gently, you peel it back.
Your first thought is that Caspian is— that Caspian was— young. Younger than you, with baby fat still in their cheeks. Your second is that they are, unmistakably, dead. Not rotting, because they really were beautifully constructed, but there’s a cold empty spot where their harmonics should resonate with your own and deep bruises on their neck, blood flecked under their fingernails. You smooth your hand over their dark, tangled hair, down to hold their limp hand. These were artist’s hands, once. These hands scrawled notes in hasty lines and runes in the careful script ingrained in them since childhood. Caspian had kissed Aveline, out of love or curiosity or obligation, and told her secrets under the stars. They had argued with the Builder in two bodies and wandered the tunnels of the sunken city and someone had killed them and dumped their corpse in the basement where no one would find it and tried to replace them with you.
“You aren’t allowed down here.” You startle, head jerking towards the entrance. Esterhazy stands in the doorway, flashlight in hand. His eyes glimmer in the light; his chest heaves. There’s something wild in him, nervy.
You turn half towards Caspian, cupping your hand against their cheek. “Why did you do it?” Your voice comes out cool and even.
“I didn’t— it wasn’t—” his hands clench. Colour floods his face. “You didn’t give me a choice!”
“How?” you ask. “I don’t have my memories, remember? You’ll have to tell me.”
“You’re dangerous.”
The bruises on Caspian’s skin are the purple of storm clouds, a ring of almost black at the point where the hand squeezed tightest. “Not as dangerous as you, apparently.”
His arm snaps out, flinging the flashlight against the wall. “You’re a fucking monster. You’re not human.”
“Why did you bring me back, then?”
There’s a long pause, the only sound Esterhazy’s ragged breathing. “I was just trying to scare you.” His voice is a small, crackling thing.
“I imagine you succeeded.” You gather Caspian in arms. Their head flops back, limbs ungainly dead weight.
“Where are you going?”
“Away from here.”
You gather Caspian in close as you edge past him. He shoots out a hand, grabs you by the shoulder. Your skin crawls under the pressure and you jerk away. “What am I supposed to tell everyone?”
“That’s not my problem.” With adrenaline thrumming through your veins, Caspian feels light as a child, fine-boned and brittle the way you no longer are.
****
You take them out into the desert. You walk, and your arms do not ache, and your legs do not grow tired, and as you walk you sing, unbinding the runes that make up this person who used to be you.
On the fourth day, you come to a mud hut. The doorway is low, barely clearing the top of your head, but it’s surprisingly bright and spacious inside; dusty but clearly lived in before that: a hammock with blankets still askew in one corner, tools hung from hooks along the walls, crates crammed underneath long worktables.
The walls are wrong for hanging paper or canvas, but one side is covered in some sort of thin fibrous sheet propped against the wall, a mosaic of splashed reds and greys that you realize up close are tiny interlocked paintings covering every inch of the surface. Caspian lived here. You lived here. Were comfortable and safe here, and could be again. You wonder if they would have liked that— are you enough the same person to assume your preferences are theirs?
The body in your arms feels insubstantial, now, light in your arms, shimmery in the corner of your vision. You lay Caspian down on the bed, tuck the blankets around them tight like swaddling a child.
He looked so much like Mordecai that for a moment Avram was convinced he had stepped back in time, or sideways, to a reality where his best friend had lived to grow old. Across the courtyard, hands deep in mulch, he froze, suspended in time. And then he was moving, wiping his palms clean on his coveralls, dirt still caked under his fingernails, in the creases of his palms, when he seized the stranger by the hand.
“You’re Mordecai’s... you look so much like him,” he said, and realized the mistake only once the words were out of his mouth.
“So it’s true,” the man said, and his voice was deeper than Mordecai’s had been, gravelly. “He isn’t my nephew.”
“No. I’m sorry.” There was so much he had wanted to say to Mordecai and about him over the years, and now it all came spilling out in a rush as he led the man back to the little outbuilding they used as an office.
“Your nephew was such an extraordinary person. Kind to everyone. He was... uncertain, a lot of the time. Always worried about doing the wrong thing or upsetting someone, and all he ever wanted to do was to help. I worried about him so much. More than the kids sometimes, like I knew...” Avram shook his head, herding Mordecai’s uncle inside. It was deserted, thankfully, and he locked the door behind them. “I didn’t, of course. But some people, you know they’ll bleed themselves dry.” He pulled out a chair, gesturing for the uncle to sit while he searched the cabinets for anything to offer their guest.
“What happened to him?”
Avram paused, hand on the cupboard handle, chest tight. “He worked as a Hollow in the infirmary. He just... took too much.” He shut the cabinet without finding anything, tilted forward to lean his forehead against the cool wood. “I tried to teach Sacha to be a kinder person, you know? It’s pretty clear no one did that for him before he came to us or really looked after him at all, but there’s a part of me that’s so relieved it never took. He’s not careful with himself but when it comes down to it he’ll step on someone else to keep himself from drowning.” He smiled, rueful. “They were similar that way— Sacha and Mordecai, I mean. Neither of them had anyone growing up. Didn’t have you.”
“It was complicated with his parents,” the uncle said softly.
“I don’t give a shit what was happening with his parents,” Avram said, surprising himself with his vehemence. “It was your job to show up for him, and you didn’t.”
After Mordecai had died all he ever wanted, besides his friend miraculously returned to life, was a companion in his grief. Someone who remembered him as a person rather than a cautionary tale or a mostly-forgotten acquaintance. Or a little boy they never got the chance to know. Avram dropped into the seat opposite the uncle, empty-handed.
“I’m going to ask you not to tell anyone about this. No matter how you feel about Sacha, he’s supporting the Oasis. That’s what important right now.”
The uncle shook his head. “There is no circumstance under which I would agree to have some criminal snake out there pretending to be my nephew,” he spat. “And even if there was, it’s too late. It’s in the papers, and he’s in jail, where he deserves to be.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you,” Avram bit out, already pushing to his feet. “Excuse me. I have work to do.”
****
Three hours later, Avram, Rico, and Dhillon were crammed into the shuttle’s stiff jump seats. Irritable from his unexpected trek back from the auxiliary camp, Kit brought them into atmosphere with a sharp jolt. A reluctant Josephine and McNamara had been left in joint charge of the Oasis, an even more reluctant Immanuel staying behind with them. He’d reacted to the news of Sacha’s imprisonment with pinched eyebrows and a hard set to his mouth, but he hadn’t argued when Avram and Dhillon announced who would be occupying the shuttle’s three seats.
“We need a backup plan in case your old smuggler buddies won’t help us,” Dhillon was saying, sounding no more convinced of the prospect than they had when Avram and Rico had first floated it. “We’re not appealing trading partners. What to do we have to offer?”
“Ohanian is willing to play the long game. It’s not about what we have now, but what we can convince her we’ll have in ten years,” Avram said. “Besides, she likes us.”
“She got you arrested,” Dhillon said flatly.
“Because she thought we were trafficking children,” Avram pointed out. “Frankly, I wouldn’t be going to her if she’d thought we were doing that and let us get away with it.”
“Ohanian has a certain moral code that we can use to our advantage,” Rico added. “Not to mention the proven effectiveness of having a Second and Third Gen fighting force on your side.”
“We aren’t training our people to be soldiers,” Avram protested at the same time Dhillon said,
“Your side lost on Everlin.”
“Much later than they would have lost without us,” Rico said. They lapsed again into tense silence that lasted until they killed the engines at the edge of Esparda space.
Avram stood, trying to feel strong and captainly and not like he was about to get himself and his crew shot out of the sky. Rico and Dhillon followed him to the cockpit, the four of them together in the small space, sharing warmth. He nodded to Kit, who pressed the transmitter.
“Esparda landing control. Come in.”
“This is Lark, freighter class,” Avram said. “Four crew, no cargo besides necessities.”
“Captain?”
Nothing for it. “Avram Ashta.”
The pause that followed was long and staticky, broken by an inaudible murmur of voices. “Please hold,” the controller said, and the broadcast went abruptly silent.
“That mean it’s time to get out of here, do you think?” Dhillon asked. Their knuckles had gone pale where they gripped the back of Kit’s chair.
Avram shook his head. “Stick to the plan.”
So they waited, and waited, and waited some more. Esparda floated, dusty and bronzed, out the window. Kit watched the proximity detector with keen eyes and tense shoulders.
When the broadcast crackled back to life, they all jumped. “Permission to land. Await escort.”
“We should have demanded a shipboard meeting,” Dhillon said, reaching for the transmitter.
“Ohanian would never agree,” Avram said. “She needs a show of faith.”
“There’s a show of faith and then there’s handing yourselves back over to someone who had you arrested,” Dhillon said, but they didn’t make another move for the transmitter.
The escort arced up to meet them — a slim close-range gunner shuttle, not much fire power, but then again it didn’t need much to take out the Lark. They buckled themselves back into their seats for the landing, lined up at the cargo bay with their hands raised, waited for the radio call to open the door.
Midge Ohanian stood on the dusty ground flanked by a pair of armed guards and looking much the same as she had when they had seen her last.
“Different crew,” she said, nodding towards Dhillon.
“Sure. Been treating you pretty good too, from the looks of it.”
“Could be worse.”
Midge signalled the guards with a sharp twitch of her head. Avram held up his arms for the pat-down, going slightly cross-eyed in an effort to keep the gun pointed inches from his face in view as the second guard crouched to check his boots.
“I’ve never been much for vengeance, Midge, you know that.”
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t take your word for it,” Ohanian said, although Avram was almost certain she did — if she really believed they had any intention of hurting her or her people or her business, they’d be gory pieces chewed up in the vacuum of space already.
“Clear,” the first guard said, moving on to Rico. When they had all been found unarmed, Ohanian dismissed the guards and led the way to her dockyard office.
“I’ll tell you the story, first,” Avram said as they made their way over the hard-packed dirt, sun glinting hot off the rows of parked ships. “I’m guessing you’ve picked up a little of what happened after we were arrested since you allowed us to land and we’re still alive and talking, but I’d like to build back some trust, if I can.”
“We’re smugglers. Not a whole lot of trust going around,” Ohanian said, but she motioned for him to continue.
“Before I was a smuggler, I ran the nursery at Project Lifebloom,” he said. “I... cared for the children a lot. I wanted them to be safe, and when the Project was shut down, I was afraid they wouldn’t be. They were young. Most of them had very little control. I thought if they went into government care and hurt someone...”
At twenty-three, he’d been brazen, confident: kids were kids, psychic powers or no. He’d raised a gaggle of younger siblings and cousins and neighbours in his bubbe’s house on Aspenhold before he hit adulthood; come to the Project convinced there was no problem a child could have that he hadn’t dealt with a hundred times over already. And then it turned out there were plenty of problems a child could have that he’d never dreamed of encountering before, when that child was psychic and raised isolated in deep space, and it was something approaching a miracle he came out of that first year alive and with all his limbs in tact, but he loved those kids as hard he loved all the others.
“That’s why I took them with me, when the Project was shut down. Looked after them as well as we could manage, for as long as we could manage, but when it came down to it we couldn’t do right by them like that. Sacha and Bo locked their gifts down, made them into normal kids. Torched our ship, faked their deaths, and they went into the foster system.” He hadn’t talked about it at all since Sibalt, except in fits and starts during the trial, and behind the thick, coiling guilt was something lighter, like lancing a wound. “That’s why I came to you. Because I know you care about doing the right thing.”
“What are you after, Ashta?” Ohanian asked. She came to a stop, facing him, eyes dark and unreadable.
“A meeting. With you, with your partners in the Kelter. A good word that it will be worth their while, and that if they decide it isn’t, we’ll be left alone.”
“And what’s in it for me?”
“It’s a favour,” Dhillon cut in before Avram could answer. “To be honest, I think this whole venture is precarious at best and I’m not willing to string you along only to run into problems later. Maybe someday we’ll have something to offer in return. We hope so. But for now, it’s a favour.”
Rico’s hands twitched unhappily at her sides. Ohanian’s expression settled somewhere between considering and amused.
“Alright, then. I appreciate the honesty.” She pulled a notebook from her pocket and scrawled something on the page, set it in Avram’s open palm. “If you’re looking for your boy, that’s where you can find him. I’ve got in on good authority the wardens can be... incentivized to lose track of a prisoner.” A smile, all teeth. “Consider it an apology gift.”
****
There was something reassuringly consistent about prisons, a massive continuity of identical grey corridors, suspicious guards, wary inmates. In some ways it was not unlike life on a ship, with the thin mattresses on narrow bunks, the water ration, the portioned meals, the stretch of black beyond the slit windows that drew some and repelled others, flinching away from the vast nothingness held back by borosilicate glass and the marvels of modern engineering — these were planet-siders, some off firm ground for the first time in their lives. They all had a sallow, haunted look to them, clustering around the sun lamps like moths.
Sacha did not mind it so much. The wardens had given him something with his dinner, after the first day, arms wrestled around his chest, hand pressed over his mouth while he squirmed. There had been blood on his fingers, then, bruises on his arms from a fight he had not been the one to start. The medication had not been entirely unpleasant, in the end. Slow and syrupy, heavy on his tongue: more than the fighting, they had wanted to stop him talking; he had plodded dreamily through his work assignment in the laundry and slept hard and dreamless on his top bunk, woke shivering and sticky with sweat as it worked its way from his system. He’d made a show of being obliging with his medications after that, and from there had begun a moderately successful trade of pills and cigarettes. Prison was an entrepreneur’s game, one for which a lifetime as a smuggler had left him abundantly prepared.
He said this all to his captain in the visitor’s hall, hands laced together over the table to keep from reaching out to touch, because he did not want to know if the seat across from him really was empty, if he was asleep in his bunk or drifting away from his mind in the laundry. His throat scratched from speaking, a solid wall of words, certain that the captain’s voice would shatter the illusion — that he would not be able to conjure it up in his head but would know it was wrong all the same; that he would hear his own voice spoken back to him.
“It is a delicate ecosystem, in prison,” he was saying now, gesturing with one hand around the visitors’ hall with the spread out tables of twos and threes and the guards watching by the doors. “Maria, here,” he nodded at the woman at the table beside them, “she has very strong opinions, everything must be exactly right, but she is low down in the hierarchy, no one listens to her, she cannot make anything she wants happen.”
Maria, who spoke no English but had a sixth sense for when she was being talked about, whipped around from where she was speaking with her sister. “Keep your mouth shut about me, Sacha.”
“My apologies to the only Maria in the world,” Sacha said.
Maria shot to her feet and Sacha stood to meet her — a business move, too; he had traded three of his smuggled pills to Mikhailov that morning and had only two left — and shook his shoulders loose, eyeing his opponent: she was smaller than him by two or three inches and ten pounds, thin in a way that had her bones pressed close under translucent skin, but vicious. Her sister was on her feet, too, hands out placatingly, throwing a plaintive glance over her shoulder at the guards.
And then Avram snapped, “Sacha, enough.” It was his captain’s voice, low with frustration, and Sacha blinked at him, dazed, reached out a hand — Maria bowled him onto the ground in a clatter of chairs. He squirmed, trying to get out from under her, drove a knee into her ribs, dodged an elbow aimed at his eye, and then there were hands under his arms, tugging him back to his feet, wrapping hard over his chest, dragging him back out of the room.
“No, no, I can—” he said, fighting against the hold, searching for his captain in the sudden flurry of visitors on their feet, of guards shouting for everyone to calm down and sit.
“Enough,” a voice repeated in his ear.
“Captain,” he said, halfway between Russian and English, cold all over, feeling on the precipice of... something. Collapsing into nothing, or bursting into tears. The captain did not seem in the mood to entertain it, so he hissed in a breath between his teeth and wrapped his arms tight around his sides and shoved the impulse down.
“Sacha, tell me you understand what you did,” Avram said. He was holding him in place by the arms, eyes dark.
“Captain,” he repeated, reaching for him. A year ago, Avram would have shifted at the movement, tucked Sacha against his body and held him there until everything felt less apocalyptic.
“Tell me what you did.”
“I put the Oasis in a precarious situation,” he said softly. Closed his eyes so he would not have to watch the captain watching him. “I impersonated your friend, and I know you believe that is... wrong, but I don’t understand why.” They had lost the guards, somehow. Just the two of them alone in the hall. He wanted—
“Okay,” Avram said, flat. “I’m going to bring you back to the Oasis with me. You are going to stay there until I know you aren’t going to ruin anything else for us. After that, we’re done. Permanently. No more chances.”
He opened his mouth, ready to bite back, to smile, ask what if I want to stay here? But he thought this version of his captain with that flat, placid expression would simply shrug and walk away without him. “Yes, sir.”
****
“You know, now that Avram’s got all his ducks back in one place, he’s never letting us leave,” Josephine said, aloud and in sign. Turning to face Kit, she added, “we’re the ducks.” They sat cross-legged on the ground beside the foundation of what would be the main building of the auxiliary camp, dusty and tired from the day’s work.
“He didn’t say we can’t,” said Bo. It was just the four of them: Josephine and Kit and Vani and Bo, the rest of the auxiliary camp contingent out scouting with Rico, Dita off looking for plants with no regard for safety or common sense.
“He doesn’t need to. He decides where we go, you say, no, fuck off, I’m not doing that, and next thing you know you’re living on the shitty little planet you expressly said you weren’t going to live on. It’s like he’s got a fucking gravitational pull or something.”
Venting, not angry, Bo signed to Kit, unreliably: Bo always told him people were happier than they really were.
Vani rolled her eyes. “That’s how being the captain works, genius.”
“No, that’s my fucking point, we’re stuck with him — with each other — whether we want to be or not. We could stage another mutiny and vote, I don’t know, fucking Vani in as new captain—” Vani made an indecipherable sound — “or move to the other side of the universe we’d still find ourselves back here building fucking huts in the middle of the forest for him if he asked. Kit, back me up.”
Kit thought on it. He hadn’t wanted to come to the Oasis in the first place and hadn’t wanted to step foot on it again after his first visit, and now he had been there nearly three consecutive weeks. Even Immanuel, with his new business, had stayed, and Sacha, who was not allowed to leave but whom they all knew could anyway if he set his mind to it. But none of them were setting their minds to it, even Kit, who had keys to the shuttle and knew how to fly.
Rico’s scouting team trooped back to camp before he came up with an answer, the circle shuffling wider to accommodate the new arrivals. Kit’s heartbeat ticked up reflexively as Morales settled cross-legged beside him on the ground.
“How is construction?” Morales signed clumsily.
“Slow,” Kit signed back.
He watched as Morales dug through his bag, emerging with a thermos. He held it out over Kit’s empty mug. Morales always made too much tea before scouting. Kit nodded, waited for him to pour. Wrapped his hands around the warm metal and let the hot steam waft into his face. At the Project, he had never been around the doctors longer than it took to finish his tests. He used to duck to the edge of the hall when they passed, had created a mental map of deserted rooms and hid among the piled crates. It was an odd thing, to see them on the Oasis. To see them human, and ordinary. He wondered if Morales felt the same about him.
The problem was that he liked the Oasis. He liked the quiet, the soft sound of birds and trees rustling in the wind that never grated the same way as the endless churn of ship engines. He liked that when it got loud and being around people made him want to tear his own skin off, he could go into the forest and walk, or sit and watch the trees, as long as he alerted Avram first and stayed near enough to find if they needed him. He liked that they always ate the same food in a rotation and that he was the one to cook, most days, that the others stayed out of his kitchen unless he invited them in. Maybe, given enough time, he would stop feeling sick every time he crossed paths with the doctors. Or maybe, out here, it would turn into the Project again. This time, he refused to be trapped.
****
Three days before the big meeting, Vani trekked into the forest with a smooth paving stone the size of a dinner plate strapped to her back. She had been chiselling the engraving since the first shipload of building materials had arrived and now the letters carved into the rock in a painstaking, tilted-together slant. Her mother would have disapproved of the time wasted and the imperfection and the sentiment, but her mother was gone, now.
She set it under a tree at the edge of a clearing under the stars that were slowly becoming familiar, stripped off her gloves to press her bare palms against the stone, tracing over the jagged letters. In Loving Memory of Estelle Dawson.
“Mama, I can’t be the person you wanted me to be and be happy at the same time,” she whispered. “But I love you so much.” She traced over the arc of the S. “I miss you. I wish I missed you more, and I wish I missed you less, and I love you. I love you.”
Dhillon found her there, later. Vani tracked their approach through the trees, the steady beat of their heart growing stronger, stronger as they approached, as they knelt at her side and their weathered hands joined hers on the stone.
“I knew your mom for thirty-five years, did you know that?” they asked, voice soft, a little amused. Vani shook her head. “Yeah. We met at eighteen in the army. She was infantry, I was a medic; we never got along a day in our lives, and when she signed up for the first round of Lifebloom experiments, I thought that was it, we’d never see each other again. Not because I knew how badly they would go, just, that’s the way some relationships are. They’re in your life, and then they’re not. And then she tracked me down six years later, told me Edward Vannery was dead and she was the director, and offered me a job.”
“Why did she name me after him?” Vani asked. “I heard he was...”
“A shit fucking terrible human being who your mom might have killed?” Dhillon cracked a smile at her expression. “I don’t know. Thirty-five years and sometimes it feels like I never learned a thing about her.”
They were bowed over the stone, staring down at their hand spread over the letters. “She could be just... vicious. With me, with the other doctors. With you.” Vani’s throat closed up. She took a shuddering breath. “I started leaking documents, towards the end, when it seemed like the investigation was going to shut down. I think after that kid, that Hollow, and how upset Avram was, after... I’d gotten so used to thinking of you as subjects, and suddenly it was like something was lifted from my eyes and you were just kids. People. I should have helped you, Vani, I’m sorry.”
“All I wanted was to know she loved me, too,” Vani said, nonsensically.
Dhillon hesitated. Then they lifted their hand and set it gently between her shoulder blades. “I know.”
Bo had hardly been in the main camp since Vani was expelled, with but with their visitor from the Sibalt Examiner gone on the last transport, Rico had turned up to solicit his help with Cyril at the main camp, who had shattered his kneecap and was having trouble staying still long enough for Janus to heal it.
“Sacha offered, but the captain thinks he’s looking to get at the medicinals,” she explained as they walked back. “He’s not very stable at the moment. Just stay out of his way, don’t do anything he asks.”
“Less stable than usual?” Bo asked, then felt immediately ashamed of himself.
“Definitely louder about it.”
As Bo made the walk into town, he did honestly intended to follow Rico’s instructions: he didn’t blame Sacha for his moods, but he’d never known quite how to deal with them, or the way he’d demand Bo soothe him back to calm one moment and refuse to come within ten feet of him the next, watching suspiciously out the corner of his eye. The thought of having to argue with him if he did ask Bo to get him the medicinals made him feel sick, the thought that he might give in anyway despite his promise to Rico made him feel sicker.
Only he wouldn’t, he realized as he walked. Sacha would ask, and Bo would say no because they needed that medication and they did not have much of it — so little that Bo was making the walk from the auxiliary camp to spare using any on Cyril — and he had people to look out for besides himself. He might not have to worry about it, anyway. Sacha was probably off somewhere sulking.
As it turned out, Sacha was off somewhere sulking. Specifically, he was off sulking on the front steps of the building they had designated as the infirmary, scowling into the middle distance and looking very much in need of a nap, a bath, and a few square meals. At his side, Immanuel had one hand braced on his back and was scrawling something in the notebook balanced on his knee with the other.
“Hey, kids, how’s it going?” Bo asked. He folded himself onto the step on Sacha’s other side.
“Badly,” Immanuel said, bland. He met Bo’s eyes over Sacha’s hunched back and he looked worn out, like he really needed someone else to be the adult here but didn’t think Bo would do it. He tried to project reassurance. Somehow. Mainly he straightened his shoulders and smiled at Immanuel, who failed to look reassured.
“Do you want me to...”
“Yes,” Immanuel said.
“I was asking Sacha,” Bo rebuked softly. “Sacha, do you want me to help you?”
“I want you to tell Avram to shove his sanctimonious fucking head up his sanctimonious fucking ass and then crabwalk his way to the river and drown himself in it,” Sacha said. Catching sight of Avram exiting the bunkhouse, he raised his voice. “Enjoying the final days of your doomed experiment, captain?”
Immanuel buried his head in his hands.
“Oh, you’ve changed your accent,” Bo said. “Is that your normal voice, or did you pick it up spending time with other Russians again?”
Sacha ignored him. “He is ruining my life,” he said childishly. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“This cannot possibly break the top twenty,” Immanuel said into his palms. “I promise you will survive not being the captain’s favourite anymore. Bo and I have been swapping out as least favourite for years and look at us: both still alive. Right, Bo?”
“I was the Soother working with Mordecai when he died,” Bo found himself saying. He’d never admitted it out loud before. “We never talked about it, but Avram knows, so, that’s why I’m the least favourite.”
“He just doesn’t like my personality,” Immanuel supplied. He held out a hand for Sacha to shake. Hesitantly, he took it. “Welcome to the least favourites club. We’re still workshopping the name.”
“Company’s good,” Bo added.
“Besides, who wants to be Avram’s favourite? You’re still my favourite, which is much better,” Immanuel said.
Sacha smiled at that, wide and a little tear-stained. “You’re my favourite, too.”
They both turned to Bo. “Vani and Kit are my favourite. Sorry, you two.”
“How dare you,” Immanuel said, and then they were all laughing, slouched against each other on the infirmary steps.
****
Avram had always liked hosting. As a child in his bubbe’s house on Aspenhold, he’d carefully set out the dishes for the Shabbat meal, fetch up chairs and folding tables from the basement when they ran out of space in the dining room. They never turned anyone away from the table, or from the house. There had always been company at bubbe’s place: workers recovering from injuries or illnesses, workers’ children being looked after by his bubbe — and, when he was older, by Avram —, strangers off the street in need of a bed and a hot meal.
He’d scraped together home-cooked meals in factory dorms and cramped apartments with no windows, had taught his kids at the Project to lay a table and mind food sensitivities. After, the world had shrunk to his ship and his crew. In five years, no stranger had stepped foot aboard any of his vessels, besides the occasional customs officer who could not be put off.
“Not sure we’re going to win them over with the table settings,” Rico said, watching him with folded arms as he fussed with the placement of the cups.
“We’re not going to win them over by looking sloppy, either,” he said. “This place is our home. I want it to look like it.” He’d used the kids as pretense, back on the Starside — told everyone it was better for their development, better for keeping them calm and regulated, to have structured group meals, even if there wasn’t always much to eat. Later, when they left Sibalt, he suspected they had kept it up for his sake, and after a while it had simply become routine.
Rico said, “it’s been a good run, Captain.”
“I don’t think things are quite that dire,” Avram said, glancing up at her. She looked almost relaxed, under the circumstances, and as close as she came to fond.
“End of an era, though.”
“Yeah.” Finally, he stepped back from the table. “How many do you think are going to stay?”
“Ohanian doesn’t like owing favours — she’ll at least hear us out. The rest, who knows.”
“I mean of our people.”
Rico shrugged, languid. “Pull this off and you won’t have to worry about it. They leave, they’ll be able to come back.”
The deep rumble of ship engines reverberated across the sky. “Alright. Go time.”
It was a smaller group than he’d hoped, but the Kelter was a small place: just Midge Ohanian of Esparda and Peter Cavill from the Way Station.
“Been adding chicks to the nest, kid?” Cavill asked, thumping Avram on the side of the arm. “Not enough room for all your strays on that dinky little ship of yours, hey?”
“Alouen’s a sturdy girl,” Josephine protested from across the room. “You try living in a hangar for thirty years with no one to look after you and see how well you come out of it.” Cavill, used to dealing with sailors and their neuroses, held up his hands in surrender.
“Shall we get started?” Dhillon said with a tense smile. Avram couldn’t blame them: they were pulling from his contacts, not theirs; he doubted he’d be thrilled if it were the other way around. “A tour, and then a meal.”
Dhillon lead their little group through the buildings of the main camp at a good pace, long enough to linger on the sturdy construction, on the ongoing projects, the garden plots tilled for winter; proof they could, on a basic material level, keep themselves alive. More than that, proof of their people: no one had dressed up, exactly, but today they held themselves like scientists facing a review board, all smiles and eager, digestible explanations of their work at the ready. Vani and Bo stayed out of the way; so did Sacha, who he’d seen Immanuel haul out of sight when the ship landed.
“So,” Ohanian said as they settled at the table. “We’ve met your coterie of scientists and we’ve seen your little compound. Now let’s get to why.”
Avram climbed to his feet, feeling more than a little queasy. He’d never felt nervous about public speaking before— if an audience of two could even be counted as public speaking—, but this felt consequential, in a way it hadn’t before.
“You both have Third Gen on your stations and planets,” he started, and his voice came out steady. “You’ve both had issues with them, too. Children with no control, adults who never got proper training, no one who knows how to help them.” He met their eyes in turn, Cavill’s ever-present little half smile, Ohanian’s cool neutrality. “It’s a security issue, plain and simple, but it’s one that can be solved. We have the expertise, here. Anyone who wants or needs our help is welcome, and when they’re ready, they come back to you with skills they can pass on to their Third Gen kids, neighbours, friends, and you have a population with trained Healers, Soothers, and Hollows. That isn’t something the Vetec has, because they want to sweep their mistakes into the back of a storage closet and shut the door.”
“How do we know you can pull that off?” Ohanian asked. Setting him up.
“Because you know I’ve done it before,” he said, meeting her eyes. “A year on Sibalt with thirteen volatile, hungry children and a crew of nine who hated each other more than we loved each other, back then, and the only reason — the only reason — we didn’t raise those children into stable, healthy Third Gen adults is because the Vetec showed up at our door.”
“We’re not offering completely for free,” Dhillon broke in, blunt. “We don’t produce enough to support a large population, here. We don’t have manufacturing facilities. What we need is your assurance that if the Vetec comes for any of our people again, we would be given the same protection as any other settlement in the Kelter.”
Ohanian and Cavill met each other’s eyes, leaned together to speak in hushed voices. Cavill said, “I’m not so opposed to accepting charity, here. A little group sets up in our territory without permission and offers some favours in return, I say, hey, let ‘em have it. Not such a big deal. Now, a little group sets up out here and starts making demands, that’s a different situation, see?”
“They aren’t demands,” Dhillon said. “If you say no, we’ll continue on as we were: us as a little self-sufficient farming community, you looking after your own interests. But we have the option to create something mutually beneficial, here.”
“Okay, then,” Ohanian said. “Let’s talk numbers.”
****
They broke for lunch, a whole community affair with everyone on the Oasis crammed into the dining hall, warm with the heat of bodies and the crackle of laughter. Avram made his rounds: to Rico first, his loyal first mate and best friend, intense and strategic and brilliant, explaining something to the table with a diagram built from twigs and discarded utensils.
“I’m in this either way, Captain. We’ll make it work,” she said, squeezing his arm quick and hard. To Josephine, deep in an argument about engine caps, who told him I’m getting the fuck out of here but I’ll always be there when you need me, to Immanuel who told him the same but without the always, who ignored the hand he held out to shake and hugged him quick and hard. To Kit, tucked into the corner with his earplugs in, who signed how goes? and nodded when Avram signed back good, I think, and ambled outside with his plate; to Dita, wind-chapped and fresh back from a camping trip. She stood from her table when she saw him, led him outside and under the shelter of the overhang out back and told him, “I owe a duty to these people, Avram. I’m staying.”
To Vani and Bo, no longer trying to be inconspicuous by the back window, not quite part of the crowd and not quite apart.
“I understand if you want to make a life for yourselves completely outside of the Project,” he said. “Even without being able to return to the Vetec, there’s all of the Kelter, or Rodna.”
Vani shook her head. “Not unless you’re kicking me out again, and probably not even then. You’re my people, I’m gonna protect you.”
“I think I’m just tired of running,” Bo said. “I think I’d like to stay for a bit. If that’s okay.”
“Course it is, hon,” Avram said. “However long you want.”
And then there was just Sacha. He padded up behind Avram when he slipped outside to check on Kit, folded himself cross-legged into the snow with his hands in his lap. Avram sat beside him, and for a long time, neither of them spoke.
“Are you able to tell when I’m not telling the truth?” Sacha asked. He sounded different these days, stripped of the carefully polished neutral accent, more of the natural Rodnan slipping through.
“Sometimes,” Avram said. The breeze picked up, swaying the trees against the slate grey horizon. A pair of cormartens chased each other across the treetops.
“Yes, me too.” He listened to Sacha breathe, soft and even in the cold air. Quietly, he said, “I think you saved my life when I joined your crew, and I know I didn’t make things easy for you afterwards.”
“You didn’t make it easy on yourself, either.”
That got a laugh, quiet and a little choked. “No, I guess not.” Sacha tilted against him, gently. Laid his cheek on his shoulder. Avram did not push him off. “I’m sorry, Captain. And thank you.”
And then they sat there together and watched the birds.
Rico saw snow for the first time on Everlin. Winter was damp and a handful of degrees below freezing; the broad white flakes she had admired with breathless awe soon turning to an annoyance as they accumulated in drifts up to her shoulders and the days dissolved into an endless campaign of shovelling. She’d spent a week shivering in her company-issued gear before Josephine took pity and scrounged up a proper set of winter clothes.
Even after she was no longer at risk of freezing to death, she’d still hated it: the cold, the way the slush soaked into her gloves and always seemed to worm its way through the tops of her boots, no matter how tightly she laced them. More importantly, it fucked their supply lines and their marching speed and their second-rate guns purchased from Leiser Station that stuttered and rusted in the humidity. Still, they made it through that winter and the two winters afterwards before going down in crushing defeat that spring. Rico had collected her paycheque, told her commanding officer to send for her when the next war started, and packed herself and Josephine back to the Project to wait, only for it to summarily collapse less than three years later. The closest she came to winter after that was six cool, drizzly months on Sibalt.
On the Oasis, winter was a deep, bitter, still cold. Snow fell at first in clumps and then, when the temperature dropped, in an anemic drizzle. They shovelled and swept the courtyard in shifts every morning and every evening, busywork that had the advantage of both being useful and keeping the troops occupied during long stretches of inactivity. They inventoried their supplies and battened down the shuttles for winter, implemented a rigorous rotation of chores, played endless games of cards and dice and held a wrestling tournament that Josephine won.
Rico and Josephine and Elliot Tsung ran scouting parties, ranging out farther and farther until they had mapped every inch of forest within a five day’s walk. Sometimes Rico accompanied Dita on her long, aimless hikes, half expecting to hear the patter of tiny footsteps behind them and Gemma’s little voice piping up to ask about all the different types of trees. Cyril, one of the Second Gen subjects, tripped off the roof clearing the ice and Janus put him back together.
Rico was content, she decided, in the restless way she tended to be during long stretches of downtime, but Avram was coming to love it so obviously that it was a little painful to watch, eased from the tense, mission-prep stress to the usual low-level anxious fussing he wouldn’t know how to function without, spent long hours outside just to feel the fresh air on his face and the solid ground beneath his feet.
“It’s going to fuck him up if this goes the same way as Sibalt,” Josephine said quietly as they watched him knit his way through a toque in front of the fireplace. They were on sweeping duty that morning, but the night had been uncharacteristically calm and after ten minutes, they had wound up leaning against their brooms near the bunkhouse window. “Fuck, I didn’t even want to be here and it’ll fuck me up.”
“If this goes like Sibalt, we’re going to have bigger problems than your and Avram’s hurt feelings,” Rico said. “We can’t make an evacuation from here. We definitely can’t fight. I’ll keep pushing for weaponry in the next delivery—” this had been a point of contention since the first supply run, and not one where Rico had managed to make much headway — “but for the time being, our greatest, and frankly only, asset is the terrain: we know it, and they don’t. The camp would almost certainly be destroyed first in an arial attack with the surrounding area to follow, but a sufficiently rapid evacuation into the forest would open some chance of survival.”
“Don’t worry about feelings, worry about death. Got it.”
“If you have a better contingency plan, I’m happy to hear it.”
Josephine turned away, mouth set, and swept at an already bare patch of ground. So quietly Rico barely heard her, she said, “I’m just so fucking tired of worrying about the worst case scenario all the time.”
Rico had never tolerated whining from anyone — not her draftees on Everlin, not her crewmates, and not her friends. “Drop the attitude, Corporal.”
“I haven’t been a corporal in nearly a decade, sir,” Josephine snapped back. They stared at each other.
Rico sighed, picking up her broom. “We’ll do another sweep.”
When the ship touched down a week later, three days before the orbit would reach resupply range for their any of their trio of little shuttles, there was no bombardment, no panicked flight into the forest. It was Immanuel who radioed in, sounding tense and unhappy but not using any of their covert distress signals and naming himself and Kit as the full crew.
And then they waited, tense. Kit didn’t need to talk to make it abundantly clear to everyone that he’d never intended to set foot on the Oasis again, and Immanuel had never expressed any interest in setting foot there in the first place. Something must have happened in the past few weeks, and the course of their lives to this point suggested it wasn’t anything good.
Immanuel stepped out first, sharp in a jacket and boots instead of his crew coveralls, hair trimmed and slicked back. He kept his hands linked behind his back and a frostily polite smile on his face, like they were at opposite ends of a negotiating table.
Inclining his head, he said, “Dr. Dhillon, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Captain, Lieutenant, good to see you again.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you as well,” Dhillon said stiffly. “An unexpected one.”
“There have been some... unanticipated developments. Positive ones.” After a moment he hiked the smile wider, like tugging up an ill-fitting pair of boots.
“Glad to hear it,” Dhillon said stiffly. “What are these developments?”
In answer, Immanuel turned back towards the ship, gesturing to someone inside. A figure appeared in the doorway, shadowed against the light, then made their way down the gangplank. Young, but with hair that had gone mostly white and a square, wind-chapped face, an equally weathered set of boots on her feet, a sturdy canvas jacket hanging open over a fleece sweater, and a keen expression on her face that Rico didn’t like.
“Kay Emmerson of the Sibalt Examiner,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me poking around.”
“Would it matter if we said we did?” Rico asked. Dhillon shot her a quelling look.
“What Lieutenant Isparan means is that we’re protective of our people, here,” they said. “Many of them came to the Oasis to build a quiet, private life, and it is extremely important to all of us, Ms. Emmerson, to respect that.”
“The ship may have sailed on that, Doctor.” Whipping out a notepad and pen, Emmerson said, “what are your thoughts on Mordecai Metzger’s campaign of support?”
For a single, frozen moment, Rico could see exactly how everything was about to come crumbling down on their heads: Dhillon, confused, already opening their mouth to say Metzger was dead and had been for years; Avram flinching away from name like a punch in the gut; her own mind scrambling for what how why— he’d been wildborn, come to the Project in his teens same as Bo, she had met him maybe twice in passing and heard the rumours of his death passed on by the resupply teams to the Outer Station. Met him again in Avram’s stories the night he shouted at Bo on Sibalt, the two of them alone in the open cargo bay after everyone else had gone to sleep, sitting side by side and watching the stars. Mordecai Metzger was a dead man, not one running around supporting causes. Except Mordecai Metzger wasn’t the last one to have used his name, she remembered abruptly. Sacha was.
“We appreciate it,” Rico said, voice cutting through the stillness. “Of course. We aren’t the most current with the news out here so I can’t speak to specifics, but we value his effort.”
“This can wait until we’ve unloaded,” Dhillon interrupted. “Lieutenant, could you show Ms. Emmerson to a free room? I’m sure she’s tired after her trip.”
Their smile could cut glass. Rico tossed off a quick salute and corralled the reporter by the arm, marching her towards the bunkhouse, away from where Avram was still staring off into the distance, eyes vacant. When she saw Sacha again, she was going to chop him into bloody bits and toss them out the nearest airlock.
****
Snow danced across the rocky, frozen ground in delicate swirls, stilling for a moment only to stir up again at the next gust of wind. A flake landed on his thumb. Once, when they were weeks from anywhere and had all read through every book on board and watched everything they had on tape, Dita put on a presentation about the shapes of snowflakes. Avram lifted his hand up to his face. A stellar plate: a six-sided star, the arms wide and short around a wide centre.
An ungloved hand appeared on his, nails going blue with cold. Avram blinked and found that it was Immanuel standing in front of him, looking serious and underdressed.
“Did you not bring your gloves?” he asked, reflexive. “You know it’s winter.”
Immanuel ignored him. “You need to pull it together, Captain. Right now.” Avram blinked. He hadn’t thought he wasn’t together. Just... staring blankly at the snow. Maybe not the most reassuring picture for his crew. Straightening up, he looped an arm around Immanuel’s shoulders. He’d always wanted more than anything to be steady for his people. To make them feel like everything would turn out okay even when he wasn’t sure they could be fixed himself. Not cold or unfeeling, just in control. Reliable.
“Let’s see what you’ve got for us, hon, and we’ll pop in on Kit, too. How’s he doing with this? I know he wasn’t keen on coming back.”
“He’s fine,” said Immanuel, allowing himself to be led back onto the ship. It was a sleek little short-distance freighter, no passenger room besides fold-out jump seats for the crew along the wall nearest the cockpit, where he found Kit examining the star chart. Avram shut the door behind them. “Alright. Explain it to me.” He signed it too, for Kit’s benefit. Kit pointed at Immanuel and slipped past them out of the room. The door shut loudly behind him. “Immanuel. Explain it to me.”
Immanuel set his shoulders, hands tucked behind his back, eyes boring into Avram’s. When he spoke, his voice was flat and cool, tension packed down beneath it. “Sacha has been fundraising for you.” Avram waited him out. Immanuel’s shoulders twitched, a tiny, reflexive movement. A sharp little breath. “Using Mordecai’s name.”
Avram nodded, once. He felt... spiky. Locked up inside, frozen. “Why would you let him do that?”
Immanuel laughed sudden and loud. “I don’t let him do shit, Captain. He just does it.” Now his hands were clenching at his sides. He cricked his head sharply to the side, a quick movement like he was trying to shake water out of his ears. It was one of those things he and Sacha had done exactly the same as long as he’d known them. “You know, I never understood—” a sharp little breath. “Fuck. Never mind. I know it’s a dangerous idea with a thousand ways it can go wrong but at least you’re not out here starving to death.”
Avram said, “Mordecai was a real person. He was my friend, not some skin suit to wear around.”
“Jesus,” Immanuel spat, head tilted up to the ceiling. “You’re putting, what, your feelings above people here getting to eat? People die, that’s life. You don’t see me out here whining about my father, do you? Get the fuck over it.”
All the anger rushed out of him at once. He stepped in closer, arms open. God, and he was so young, still, not even twenty-five. “Oh, Manny, I’m sorry. When did it happen?”
Immanuel spun away, arms crossed tight. “Don’t.” His shoulders hitched. “Don’t pretend to— I’m not Sacha. I don’t need— I know you don’t like me. I know I’m your least favourite on the crew.” And then, before Avram had time to react, he spun back around, shoulders straight and hands laced behind his back once more, though his eyes were glittery and red-rimmed. “That was unprofessional. I apologize.”
“Manny, your father died, you’re excused from being professional until further notice. And of course I like you.”
Immanuel let out a sharp little breath, mouth twisting. “I don’t like you.”
Avram had heard that one before, mostly from the nursery kids when he made them eat their vegetables and go to bed on time, and occasionally from his bosses. This time, Immanuel let him pull him in and ruffle a hand through his hair.
“That’s okay, bud. Now, run me through what you and Kit have got for us.”
****
The man in the sitting room looked entirely at home, lounging back on the couch with a novel open in his hands, eyes fixed on the page as Sacha slipped inside and shut the door. He watched the stranger out the corner of his eye as he moved past him to the kitchen, keeping his footsteps light though he was certain the man — tall, rectangular, with a pencil moustache and a shaved on the sides, long on top haircut that made him look even taller and more rectangular — knew he was there. In the kitchen, he made two cups of tea, waited for them to steep, and padded back into the room, placing one in front of the man and taking a seat on the other end of the couch with his own clasped between his hands, ceramic scalding against his palms.
The man was a slow reader, still to the point of deliberateness. He did not look like one of Aaron’s friends; or rather he did not look how Sacha might have expected Aaron’s friends to look if he invited them where Sacha could meet them, which he did not, so really there was not much stock to be put in that assessment.
Either Aaron had allowed him in or he knew how to enter a locked room without a key; not a difficult accomplishment through either official channels (a master key obtained from the station administration, acquired by bribe or warrant) or unofficial (lock picks, a master key obtained from the station administration by theft) but nevertheless limited to those with a specific set of connections and skills which were not, despite what he had assumed as a child, universal.
He set down the tea and scooted closer, hooking his chin over the man’s shoulder. In the sliver where bare skin touched bare skin, he could feel he was strong and healthy and calm. The novel was Countess Morena.
“It’s a metaphysical undoing,” Sacha said, mainly to see if the intruder knew what metaphysical meant and whether he would argue the impossibility of such a thing if he did. “Metaphorically, of course. The Countess leaves and in leaving she is no longer the Countess: the identity disperses, what remains is other.”
“You would know about that, wouldn’t you, Pavlik?”
Sacha shrugged, ghosting a hand into the man’s pocket. He kept his wallet in his jacket, unwisely, and Sacha slipped it out and flipped through the cards until he found a Vetec Interplanetary Investigative Services ID with an ancient photo — the man’s hair was still black, his face unlined — and his name printed along the bottom.
“Are you really called Pelley Camrose?” asked Sacha, suddenly in a forgiving mood for Thomasin sticking him with the same first name as what felt like half the population.
“I am. Are you really Aleksander Pavlik?”
“I suppose it depends on what you mean by really,” Sacha said. He let Pelley Camrose take the wallet from his hand and tuck it back into the same pocket. “In the hypothetical scenario where I say no, do I get compensation for you breaking and entering into my apartment?”
“Why don’t you tell me about the hypothetical scenario where you say yes, first,” Camrose said, setting the book on the table. He eyed the mug of tea with a degree of suspicion that would be insulting, if Sacha were the type prone to feeling insulted.
“In that scenario, I suspect you and I both have bigger issues to worry about.”
Sacha’s fingers slipped under the edge of his suit jacket, tugged gently at the edge of his shirt, slid underneath to touch bare skin. Rested it there, just testing. He always did this with clients, or prospective clients: checking whether they wanted him, and how; whether they saw how young he looked and felt trepidation or excitement, whether they found him amusing or irritating, whether they liked to hurt or be hurt. A flare of disgust, warmth burning under the palm on his stomach. Sacha withdrew his hand, tucking it into his lap: time for a new tactic.
“I will arrest you for solicitation,” Camrose said.
“It’s on the house, if you’re amenable,” Sacha said, but he shifted back to create some space between them.
“And bribery.”
“I’m flattered,” Sacha said blandly. “What is this breaking and entering in service of, if you insist on skipping the proverbial foreplay? It seems to me a simple case of mutually assured destruction where you, if you don’t mind me saying, have quite a bit more to lose: you expose me, I cast doubt on your entire criminal justice system.”
“The Vetec government will not collapse from one scandal,” Camrose said. “You, on the other hand...”
“Oh, I have scandals all the time,” Sacha said, waving his hand. “And it may not collapse, but you certainly are worried or you wouldn’t be here. It’s not a good look, Mr. Camrose.”
“It was a simple case of mutually assured destruction until you chose to make yourself a public figure,” Camrose said. He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a copy of the Sibalt Examiner, which he tossed towards Sacha’s end of the couch. His own face stared back at him, grinning from under the stage lights. The caption above read WHO IS MORDECAI METZGER? “That will say Who is Aleksander Pavlik soon, if you aren’t careful.”
“No one calls me Aleksander,” Sacha said absently, flicking through. He skimmed an article about sixteen unexpected uses for ginger, number ten will shock you. “Have you ever tried making candles?”
Camrose reached over, plucking the magazine out of his hands. “Not even your mother?”
“I was reading that,” Sacha protested. “And I doubt it. I wasn’t called Aleksander when my mother and I knew each other.” Not as far as he knew, anyway.
“Who are you really, then?”
Sacha shrugged, making a grab for the magazine. “Who’s to say who anyone is?” He really was curious about the ginger candles, now. “Define your terms and I might answer.”
“Answer and I’ll give you the magazine,” Camrose said, holding it out of reach. Sacha flopped onto his back, arm draped over the side of the sofa to press flat against the floor. He dragged his fingernails along the grooves between the linoleum tiles.
“Or I could just buy one,” he pointed out. “There is no interesting answer, here. I’m a person, same as you’re a person. Very boring. Like this conversation.” He kicked Camrose in the leg, not lightly. “Get out of my apartment, please.”
To his surprise, Camrose stood. “Shut this down, Pavlik. You won’t like the consequences if you don’t.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
He locked the door behind Camrose, for all the good it would do, and stretched out on the couch with the magazine. Mordecai’s article took up five pages and featured a selection of photographs from his talks — and one of a curly-haired, round-faced child that must have been the real Mordecai, thankfully taken before the age at which identifiable features began to set in, once one controlled for hair and skin colour.
Mordecai Metzger is twenty-five years old, but he looks half his age — literally, Sacha read. (“I do not look fucking thirteen,” he said out loud, offended.) Recruited into Project Lifebloom at age six, Metzger would later undergo a procedure which left him with the outward appearance of a young man in his mid- or late teens. While he speaks candidly and at times humorously of the change to his growing and fiercely loyal audience (“Do you know how hard it is to be taken seriously when you look like you’re not old enough to grow a moustache?” he said at his New Aglia show, the first I watched), he is steadfast in his determination to put his struggles to use in helping others.
“I am so good at pretending to be a good person,” Sacha said smugly to the empty room. He skimmed over Mordecai’s various positive qualities, which took up the first few paragraphs.
The question remains: who is Mordecai Metzger? The murkiness surrounding his experiences at Lifebloom are a given; many of these files, as well as the majority of the investigative findings from the tribunals that took place prior to the Project’s closure six years ago, remain sealed. Birth records trace his origins to the remote planet of Seraphine and to parents Tamara Edelstein and Daniel Metzger, a troubled young couple each with arrest records for a litany of minor offences, including petty larceny and possession of controlled substances. According to his uncle and manager, Aaron Metzger — until recently, an event planner based on New Aglia — he spent much of his early childhood bouncing between relatives who, according to Aaron, loved but lacked the capacity to care for him full-time, given his unique situation. But in light of the dearth of documentation, one cannot help but wonder: is Mordecai Metzger, the troubled little boy, the same person as the Mordecai Metzger now touring the Vetec, racking up donations?
So there would be smugness to share: him and Immanuel, each with their own parcel, though his own would be the larger: the author had speculation painted as evidence, pointed comments about the shape of his face and his straight hair, and a long digression on the small handful of studies which had been commissioned on the Third Generation, how Mordecai’s eternal youth remained unreplicated and without a clear explanation. Old issues brought up anew, nothing to worry over. Sacha set the magazine on the table, thinking. He did not mind being threatened, so much as he minded being threatened over trivialities; a sort of professional distaste for a tactic misused.
And so when he took the stage the next evening, stage lights in his eyes, he said, “my friends, I cannot thank you enough for your generosity: it is because of you that the people of the Oasis will live through this winter in safety and comfort. This is an ongoing battle. Your generosity has touched me in a way I will never fully be able to express, but it is generosity that should not be required of you. It is the Vetec government that sponsored Project Lifebloom. It is the Vetec government that failed to support its victims when its abuses were uncovered, the Vetec government that allowed it to resume operations under the table — because they did know; there is no way they cannot have known — and the Vetec government that tossed the survivors once more into the cold when finally it decided enough was enough. And so it is the Vetec government, not you hardworking people with careers and families and concerns of your own, who should pay for it.”
****
Maybe, if Avram were a wiser person, he would have listened when Rico pulled him aside and told him not to speak to Kay Emmerson of the Sibalt Examiner, eyes searching his face with an intensity she usually reserved for right before a job, when she thought someone was going to fuck it up. Avram hadn’t been on the receiving end of it since the early days when he and Rico were battling for position as captain.
“We have our story,” Avram reminded her. “It’ll be okay.”
“Will you?” she demanded, not letting go.
“I got it,” he said gently, squeezing her hand where it was clasped around his wrist.
Sat across from Emmerson in the corner of the bunk room they had turned into a makeshift office during their winter downtime, he was beginning to think he did not got it. He’d always been the mouthpiece for the crew, both as the captain and as one of its more... stable members, but he was not stable when it came to Mordecai. He’d done fine with the questions about the Oasis, slipping back into the practiced cadence he used to use to convince reluctant clients to take a chance on his misfit smuggling crew with their limited hold space and reputation for losing their ships, but Mordecai...
He’d talk about Mordecai every day if he could; that was the problem. Mordecai was soft-spoken and gentle and so kind it sometimes hurt to witness; so kind he wore himself to nothing healing everyone who came to see him because he understood how it felt to suffer and he couldn’t bear to see it on anyone else. He had lived a hard life and never quite developed a thick enough skin to compensate for it, and Avram had loved that earnestness in him, how deeply he felt everything. Sacha had once riffled through a man’s pockets while he lay gasping on the ground after being shot, crouched on his toes to avoid the stepping in the pool of blood, and told the victim to his face that his watch was a knockoff and his jacket was ugly. He was loud and argumentative and fearless and so delighted by everything all of the time, like the world was a puzzle book he’d been handed to solve.
And Avram could talk about Sacha, too, even Sacha pretending to be someone he’d never met and Avram had never seen him perform, even in a way that would read well in the Sibalt Examiner, never mid he wanted more than anything to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him — except then Mordecai-as-Mordecai would fade even further and Sacha-as-Mordecai would take his place.
“He’s smart,” he settled on, because it was true of both of them, and then paused. Driven? Sacha could be, in fits and starts, but Mordecai wasn’t. Never wanted to stir things up. Compassionate? Mordecai was; Sacha wasn’t. “He’s just... he’s really trying to help people.” That was almost certainly not why Sacha was doing it, but it was at least the effect. If he’d gone about it any other way, Avram would be proud. “I’ve always tried to do right by him, and I think— I think he’s always tried to do the same for me. For all of us.”
****
The ship screamed overhead, and Vani was on her feet before she had consciously processed what the sound meant. Stretched out beside her on the ground radiating heat, Bo blinked awake, struggling onto his elbows. “Wait here. Tell Dita get ready,” she whispered, tossing on her coat, boots, gloves: she’d be no good to anyone if she froze to death on the way. She ran into Morales on the way out, literally, him on the way in from the night watch, already talking, gesturing at the sky.
“I’m handling it,” she whispered back. “Bo’s in charge until I get back.”
Two hours later, the sun had risen and she was halfway convinced everyone would be dead when she reached it, that the ship would turn around and finish the job with Bo and Dita and the others, and it would just be Vani, left alone to avenge them. She reached and reached, knowing they were too far away and reaching anyway, suddenly desperate though she still half wanted to kill them — she wanted to, not some anonymous ship, not another meteor strike disaster —
And there was Rico and Kit, meandering along the path like they had nothing in the world to worry about. She stumbled to a halt, flushed and breathing hard, unpleasantly sweaty under her layers.
“You’re on the wrong side of the border,” Rico said. Vani ignored her in favour of a thorough sweep: tense, cold, slightly underfed, but fine. She did it again, then stepped forward to — something. Shove her hands under their clothes and feel for something wrong that she couldn’t sense, like that would somehow be more accurate.
“How many are there?”
Rico didn’t even blink. “One. A reporter from Sibalt. She came with Kit and Immanuel.”
This was not what she had been expecting. “...I guess that’s better than an attack.”
Rico made a disagreeing noise at the back of her throat. “That, I had a plan for.”
“I can snipe her from here,” Vani said. She could feel the foreign presence now like an itch. Kit shot her a thumbs down. “I can!” Two thumbs down. Vani stuck out her tongue.
“Don’t,” Rico said. “The last thing we need is a Vetec investigation into this place, which is what will happen if a reporter mysteriously disappears.”
“I don’t want her here,” Vani said, petulant to her own ears.
“Neither do I, but killing her isn’t going to make the problem go away. Unfortunately.” This was why she liked Rico: she appreciated the elegant simplicity of violence as a solution where Avram was inclined to lecture. “You and Bo need to stay out of sight. That’s the most important part. If I told you to stay close, would he be able to handle your people?”
“He’s been doing better,” Vani said, out loud and in sign for Kit’s benefit, because he’d stopped kicking at the snow and snapped to attention at Bo’s name. “Went after me a little for how I was doing things with our people. And Dita can...” she thought about it. “Well, I was going to say help out, but let’s not set our hopes too high.”
Rico nodded, sharp. “Right. Vani, stay close, keep an eye. Don’t do anything unless you get the signal from me or the captain. Kit, we’re going to see Bo.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vani hurried off, giddy with relief, giddier with purpose. Nearing the camp, she boosted herself into the trees, settling the solid V of the branches. She counted out the figures milling around the camp: Janus, looking sturdier; Josephine shovelling out the path; the captain with his increasingly impressive beard and beside him, the unfamiliar stocky, dark-haired figure. Hanging her bag securely on a branch, she settled in to watch.
****
“Are you reading the newspaper at the bar?” Valentina peered around his shoulder at the magazine open on the sticky bar top. She was a mezhdi, same as Sacha, raised in the Vetec and speaking English as well as she did Russian. “The newspaper about yourself? You’re so self-centred, Sachenka.”
“Is an article about my alter-ego really an article about me?”
Valentina boosted herself onto the stool beside him. “What’s up with that anyway?” she asked in English, gesturing at the page.
“Nothing is ‘up with it,’ have you not heard of a stage name?” he said in the same language. “I keep up with what people think of him; this is my day job.”
Laughing, Valentina said, “you’re such a bitch today.”
“You’re such a bitch every day,” Sacha said.
Pelley Camrose had not spoken to him again but he’d been at every show, watching. Sacha was not afraid of him but he itched, now; too long in one place doing the same thing, too long with Aaron, tedious housemate that he was — mouth pressed flat, following after him like the galaxy’s least competent shepherd. Sacha, accomplished at losing far more competent and determined shepherds, had shaken the pursuit in the market hall and went in search of fun.
The Rodets quarter here was small and insular, mostly ship crews who spoke only a handful of words of English if they spoke it at all, which was how Sacha preferred it these days. He’d spent a week bunk-hopping with a Kosmat crew, lounging around the ship eating their food and picking back up the regional dialect he had lost as a child. In another life he might be one of them. In another life he might be Mordecai for real, a battered survivor of Project Lifebloom desperately scraping together donations for his compatriots; he might be an artist or a philosopher or dead.
He used to imagine he could press his hands against thin air and it would part around him, fold open for him to slip through, shed his snakeskin and emerge someone new. But he had trapped himself, or rather he had trapped everyone else in their reliance on him. Immanuel should have known better than to ask, than to step into the bear trap, but Sacha should have known better than to say yes. Hadn’t even said yes, just turned around and done it, because Immanuel had asked.
“What are you talking about, mezhdi?” It was Kostya come up behind them, one of the ship crew. He slung an arm over Valentina’s shoulder. She shrugged it off.
“Who are you calling mezhdi?” she snarled back, switching back to Russian.
“Watch your mouth,” Kostya said. “People start talking English in a Russian bar, I start to wonder. Only sensible.”
Sacha snapped the magazine shut, leaned in close. “Did you think we were talking about you?” he whispered. “Laughing?” He walked his fingers along Kostya’s collarbone. “Sharing a little joke about how you—”
He lost the fight, of course, flat on his back on the sticky linoleum, hands tugging at his arms, at his hair, chopped short now, shaved because Mordecai’s hair had curled and Sacha’s did not, straggling flat around his face and over his shoulders like he’d crawled out of the bog, Josephine used to say. Blood in his teeth, an ache in his cheekbone and he laughed, exhilarated, giddy.
He let Kostya haul him back upright with a hand tangled in the front of his shirt, holding him up when his knees wobbled, and he was bleeding into his collar where Sacha had raked his nails down the soft skin of his throat, beginning to bruise around the eyes where someone had caught him with an elbow. They grinned at each other. Kostya smoothed down Sacha’s shirt before releasing him to his wobbly feet to face the scowling bartender, who held his hand out expectantly.
Sacha spread his own hands in apology. “I have no money. Sorry.” This was actually true.
“I have no money, either,” Kostya said, which was not. They both turned to Valentina.
“Nope,” she said, grinning. She was a good fighter, quick and vicious, and had come out the best of the three of them with a cut blooming on her knuckles, holding her shoulder stiff like she’d hit it on something.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” the bartender said. His eyes flicked up over their shoulders and took a step forward, unmistakably a threat.
“Negotiation or not, we have nothing,” Sacha said. He wanted to brush his teeth now, though he supposed if he was going to get hit again, it was best to get that over with first. “Maybe I can introduce you to a little something called a payment plan?”
“If you don’t pay, I will call the constables to arrest you for theft and destruction of property.”
“Dimitri, come now. Don’t be unreasonable,” Kostya said. Sacha was still hung up on the constables: who in their right mind voluntarily called the constables? But he supposed Dima ran a legitimate establishment, in his way, health code stamp of approval on the door and all.
“Pay me what I’m owed and I won’t be,” Dimitri said.
Sacha took a careful step back, then another. The crowd of curious bar-goers ringed tight around them; he shifted, shoulders ducked in to slip between the tight-pressed figures and out the door. Someone shouted behind him and he broke for it, ducked low; no one parted for him but he didn’t need them to, reaping the advantages of his slight frame — and a hard closed hard on his arm.
“You’re under arrest,” a voice said in his ear, in English. “For theft, and destruction of property. You can come quietly, or we can do this the hard way.”
Choosing the hard way, Sacha rammed his elbow blindly back, awkward in the confined space, catching against something soft. A hand grabbed him around the other wrist, shoved him forward over the lip of a table, cuffed his wrists together. Well, that was embarrassing even by his admittedly poor record with fights. Sacha went limp, leaving the constable to heave his dead weight into the hall, cursing the entire way.
“Get on your fucking feet.”
Sacha did not get on his fucking feet. He allowed himself to be hauled along all the way to the constabulary station and dropped unceremoniously into a chair.
He had been in and out of detention as long as he could remember but Sacha had not been properly arrested until he was thirteen or fourteen years old on the Rodna-Capeira run, and in that blank grey room, stripped bare and searched and re-dressed in a scratchy blue jumpsuit too thin to keep out the chill, with twenty words of English to his name and blood pounding in his ears too loud to understand any of them, he’d been terrified, convinced he was going to die for weeks after Thomasin retrieved him.
Now, at twenty, he was relaxed and a little buzzy. The constable had cuffed his arms behind his body and now they pressed hard and uncomfortable against the chair back whenever he leaned against it. A long chain connecting his wrists to the floor kept him from standing; by the time the constable re-entered the room, he had pretzeled his legs onto the narrow seat and was in the process of trying to turn himself upside-down out of sheer boredom. He startled at the sound of the door, slid off the chair and landed awkwardly, facedown and laughing into the concrete. The constable had to unclip him get him upright again, circling around warily like Sacha hadn’t just lost a fight to him in thirty seconds flat, winding the chain around his fist.
“Don’t move,” he said sharply, in English and then repeated badly in Russian. A second constable lingered by the door, arms crossed and looking mean. The first undid the cuffs, grabbed Sacha hard by the wrist when he moved to shake out his arms.
“Don’t move.” He stripped off his jacket and tossed it on the table, then set to a thorough and vigorous pat down. Sacha, not in the habit of carrying anything incriminating on his person for this exact reason, submitted to the penlight shone in his mouth and ears, the inside of his shoes, the ahnds pulling at the sleeves of his shirt.
“Nice ink,” he said in English, eyeing the rose tattooed on his upper arm. “Long way from home for one of Marino’s.”
“I’m on vacation,” Sacha said easily.
The constable snorted. “You hear that, Murray? They get vacation days in the mob. What’s that, annual? Cumulative?”
“A reward for services rendered,” Sacha said. “Why, do you want to join? There’s a referral bonus.”
Hands closed on his wrists, squeezing tight, fastening the cuffs a notch too small so the metal dug hard into his skin. They had not returned his shoes.
“See, I don’t think that’s true,” the constable said.
Eyebrows raised, Sacha said, “You caught me, there is no referral bonus. I’m glad to see our laws are being enforced by perceptive, intelligent people such as yourself.”
“I worked on Capeira ten years, you know? Thomasin Marino runs a real tight ship. So when I see one of her... what are you, a runner? Definitely not an enforcer, I’ve seen how you hit. But I know you’re not here for the scenery.”
“Do you? Enlighten me, then. Why am I here?” he rattled the chains idly. “More immediately, why am I here, in this cell? Don’t say theft, or property damage, or drunk and disorderly; we both know that isn’t it.” People were not cautious around Sacha, as a rule, not the way they were around all six feet and five inches of Bo Kerra, or Vani, when she had a particular look in her eye, but this constable had treated him like a bomb about to explode since the bar. He allowed himself to be steered to the table, set down in the chair.
“I’ve got a very good memory,” the constable said, settling across from him, arms folded on the tabletop. “Don’t always remember the name, but I never forget a face. You’re a distinctive looking guy, you know? Like one of those little planetside things.” he snapped his fingers, eyes up to the ceiling as he thought. “A rat, that’s it. I remember this tiny, ratty little thing with these huge eyes just staring all blank. Creepy little fucker you were.”
“Is that a crime now?”
“Naw. Just saying how I know you’ve done something. Just gotta figure out what.” He sifted through the pockets of the jacket on the table until he found the ID papers. “Mordecai Metzger. Alliterative, I like it.” In a moment of heroic self-restraint, Sacha did not say he was surprised that the constable knew the word alliterative.
“Thank my parents.”
The constable was watching him through narrowed eyes. “See, the funny thing is, I know I remember your face, but I don’t remember there being a Mordecai Metzger on the Oasis. I don’t always remember names, but I’d remember one like that.”
Sacha shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, Constable. Time’s a thief, as they say.”
“So are you.” He slapped the Sibalt Examiner, now crumpled and more than a little sticky, onto the table. Sacha’s own face peered back at him. Who is Mordecai Metzger? “Which is real funny,” he said, tapping at the page, “because it says here you’re an immortal man. Fifteen for going on a decade. Now, when I met you — less than ten years ago, mind — you were just this tiny thing. Not that you’re so big and fearsome now, but I mean ankle-biter size, had this piping little kid voice. Definitely not fifteen.”
“And even if you were on Capeira when you say you were, you have no evidence.” Sacha had never taken notice of the station’s constables. They had effectively been Thomasin’s enforcers, leveraged against her enemies and, on the occasions they were called against her own people — primarily by merchants and visitors unfamiliar with the station — they were promptly delivered back to her free of criminal charges to receive anything from a congratulations to an airlocking. If any of Sacha’s half-dozen brushes with the law in his early teens had involved this man, there was almost certainly no record of it.
“No, not of that,” the constable agreed. “But there is one back before you were Thomasin’s. A record of your arrival on the station, to justify your existence there.” He pulled out his tablet now, and he must have come prepared — must have been prepared even before he arrested Sacha in the bar, because he found what he was looking for quickly. “Aleksander Tomasovich Pavlik, born on Kosmat Station. No known relatives. Ten years old at the time of arrival on Capeira. Is this you?”
He glanced at the picture and the picture stared back. The little fucker did look creepy, he’d give the constable that: huge eyes in a mean, pinched up little face, a riot of freckles, hair chopped unevenly short. He wasn’t supposed to let it get like that, so untidy it had got him caught, but he had because — because he was lazy, he supposed, undisciplined, distracted. The constable pressed on without waiting for a response.
“You’re defrauding his uncle. Taking advantage of a man grieving an unimaginable loss.”
“If anything, he’s defrauding me,” Sacha protested, remembering his conversation with Immanuel. “I do all the work and he makes all the money, besides the donations to the Oasis.”
“Ah, yes, these ‘donations to the Oasis,’” the constable said, heavy with irony. “I’ll be very interested to see where those are going.”
“To the Oasis,” Sacha said flatly. “Besides, Aaron is as much of a fraud as I am — I don’t know who that man is, but he isn’t Mordecai Metzger’s uncle.”
“See, that occurred to me, too.” A sharp smile, glittering eyes. “But he is. A grieving man desperate enough to believe a stranger with an impossible story.” The cuffs had begun to chafe and the tell-tale itch of sitting still had long since set in.
“That’s embarrassing for him.” Sacha cricked his neck to the side, shaking out his restlessness as best he could. He wasn’t sure if the constable was lying, or Aaron was, or both, or neither, and found he did not particularly care.
He leaned forward, chains jingling. “I don’t want you to think I’m not enjoying our time together in this aesthetic grey room, or that I don’t appreciate the effort that went into your research. This is why I’m sorry to tell you that while I recognize that you believe my actions to be immoral, or at least illegal — and I’m willing to argue on either point — they are sanctioned by the VIIS. In fact, a rather impolite agent by the name of Pelley Camrose broke into my rooms the other night to threaten me into leaving this venture behind, seeing as it reflects rather worse on them than it does me, seeing how I was not only allowed but encouraged to give false testimony at an extremely public trial.”
The constable was watching him closely now, calculating. Sacha reached out to pat him on the arm, shackles catching with an inch between his outstretched fingers and the constable’s jacket. “Either your government is corrupt or incompetent. I’m certain it’s a difficult revelation to process.” He grinned. “Or I’m lying, of course.”
“I know you aren’t lying,” he said. “The VIIS has been to see me already. They were eager to handle this privately. Aaron Metzger was not.”
There was a feeling, standing in front of the crowd: eyes upon eyes upon eyes watching Mordecai. It was impossible not to feel real like this; obscured by the glare of spotlights as they transformed him into what he claimed to be. Mordecai was a steady person, soft eyes and a smile for everyone. Peacock bright, styled big, shoulder pads and low heels. Mordecai wore old hurt like a cloak, like wisdom, like dignity. Mordecai spoke with Aaron’s loping, casual vowels, words dropped off at the end: let me tell you somethin’, leaned in close like a secret.
(He’d always been good at that: even at the police station with barely ten words of English to his name he’d spoken those ten words in the accent of Capeira’s native sons, articles and all, and maybe that was why Thomasin had kept him. This is how you want me to talk? he had said once, exaggerated, dragging over the words like some third-rate actor, when Josephine asked if he spoke with his real accent. Afterwards he repeated it to himself alone in the cabin, wondering, is this how I sound?)
The problem was that he had put on a new skin without fully peeling off the old: Alyosha had been a passing childish fancy and Nikita had died in the interrogation room on Capeira, the moment Thomasin handed him his new papers (Aleksander, like half of everyone he knew), and he had stepped out of the room as Sacha, runner for Thomasin’s Acolytes, who spoke unaccented English and never forgot his articles.
He let Boris take him to Rodna. “It is not good to be away from home so long,” he’d said, slinging an arm over Sacha’s shoulder — this was a common topic of conversation between them, the nights he came into the Cherrydrop with a trace of Mordecai in his voice — “My brother has a ship, we leave tonight. You must see it once at least.”
“I’ve seen it,” Sacha protested, laughing. He had come from the stage, Mordecai’s jacket still draped over his arm, and he felt wild with it. “I was a miysh, as a child: my father lived on Kosmat Station and my mother on Rodna, and me scurrying between them with an extra something in my bag.” He never had known learned what was in the little blue suitcase Papa handed him at the spaceport (he would not learn to pick locks until he was Nikita), though he had his guesses. He had never learned the man’s real name, either: easier not to slip up, that way. “Later, Rodna to Capeira. That was not so easy; I didn’t speak English. That is why I was chosen, of course.”
“You did not return?”
Sacha shrugged. “There was an arrangement between the vozhdi: you are arrested on Capeira, you become Thomasin’s; you are arrested on Rodna, you become Viktor’s.”
“It is not easy to avoid the companies,” Borya said sagely. He was not born into it the way Sacha had been, but he’d done time as an enforcer before a gunshot to the stomach brought his career to an abrupt and rather unpleasant end; this gave him trouble, Borya told him, but not so much trouble as it had given the man who fired the gun, whose boss had been none too pleased with the discharge of a weapon inside a spaceport and who had airlocked him for his trouble.
****
Familiarity lingered like a ghost in the ornate red and gold of Rodna station: a corridor he was certain he’d walked before, only for it to dissolve into unfamiliarity with the next step; a phantom brush of hands at the sound of the loudspeaker chime; a flash of warmth on his tongue when they passed the central dining hall. Borya steered him with a firm hand on his shoulder and Sacha allowed himself to be steered, listening to the clack of their shoes against the floor. Borya’s voice was low and quiet, so slow that on their first meeting Sacha thought his companion suspected him of having forgotten the language, but he spoke the same to everyone. Gentle, but not very smart. Sacha had slept beside him on the shuttle flight over, recklessly, and woke unsurprised to find himself whole and unharmed.
“I’m a Hollow, do you know?” He had not felt reckless on the flight and he did not feel reckless now, none the wild bubbling pressure under his skin to act, to do something, to claw his way free before he became trapped, but a calm cool awareness that he was doing something unwise, and that that awareness was not going to stop him doing it. A heaviness in his limbs, though he was not sick — was no sicker than ordinary — and was not tired.
“I could heal you so you can work again, but I won’t.” He craned his neck to look up at Borya, bared his teeth in what could not quite be described as a smile, slipped a hand beneath his cuff to hold him around the wrist, skin against skin. “But you could force me, couldn’t you? You’re so strong, Borya.”
Borya patted him on the hand, watching him with those dark, liquid eyes. “I am too old for it anyway, Aleksander Tomasovich,” he said, indulgent like he was speaking to a bad-tempered toddler: he liked Sacha to make him feel big and strong, that age had made him wise instead of weak.
That night he pinned him down with all the weight of his body and Sacha put on a breathy gasp as he traced over the old lines of his scars, asking for stories, playacted shy when Boris did the same for his. In the morning, he covered the bruises with his sleeves and caught the shuttle back to Sarpan.
****
“Where the fuck have you been?” Aaron demanded. His shirt hung unbuttoned from his shoulders and his hair stuck up where he had been running his hands through it, poised on the edge of a lecture Sacha had no intention of listening to. “You missed a performance.”
“It adds to mystique, Uncle,” he said in Sacha’s voice — in Sacha’s voice that he used with Borya, the one that made him sound like a boy from Kosmat. Then, to cover, he added in Mordecai’s English, “I was overcome by spiritual visions. I’m so very sorry to have missed this time with you, my friends, but I’m certain my revelation will make the delay more than worth it.” He sketched a bow, grinning, and tipped himself forward to tumble over the back of the stiff grey hotel sofa, sprawling across it lengthwise.
“And how often are you planning to have these spiritual visions?” Aaron asked. He pushed Sacha’s feet off the cushions to sit next to him, stiffly.
“Unpredictable as the summer rain, my friend,” Sacha said, tossing his feet over Aaron’s lap so the dusty soles rested on his pants. Aaron pushed them off again.
“I think you need a break.”
Sacha squinted up at him, considering. This was not behaviour he wanted to encourage: he’d done something Aaron did not like, and now Aaron meant to starve him out, not that he would succeed — Sacha had lived his whole life with little food and less money; the abrupt end of a career had not killed him yet and he did not intend to allow it to do so now. Which was not to say he eagerly anticipated the painstaking process of landing on his feet.
“I don’t think so,” Sacha said, cocking his head to the side like he was considering it. “I need to share my revelation with the world.”
“I wasn’t asking.” Aaron was making a largely unsuccessful stab at sounding intimidating.
Not in the mood to act intimidated, Sacha said, “rising intonation implies that you were.”
“Your mother wants to speak with you.”
“My mother?” Sacha echoed, thrown. On Rodna, Mama had been a tall, blonde woman who took charge of the little blue suitcase and marched him through the station with an unrelenting grip on his shoulder. They had spent maybe twenty hours together cumulatively in all his years as a runner; he doubted she still remembered that he existed, let alone felt compelled to track him down through Aaron.
Then he realized Aaron meant Mordecai’s mother, which was arguably worse. But Sacha was curious by nature and itchy with boredom, so he said, “Tell her I’d be delighted.”
****
The first fifteen minutes of the trip to Seraphine passed in stiff, awkward silence, Sacha fidgeting in his seat and Aaron turning an increasingly apoplectic red until he ordered him to stand up and walk his energy out. Feeling pleased with himself, he strolled into the next car and invited himself to the first game of Long Deck he came across, lost the first two games and won the third.
Afterwards, he made two-hundred off a man in the bathroom who pulled his hair hard enough to leave orange strands dusted across the floor and when Sacha said he was nineteen he leaned in close and said it’s okay now, you can tell me the truth so he made his voice go wobbly small and said actually I’m fifteen like it was a secret, and when it was over he stormed down the aisle telling everyone the little Russian hooker had stolen from him, until Sacha caught up with him, cornered him in the dining hall and asked, just on the edge of too loud, why’d you do all that when you know I’m a kid?
“You’re not fucking fifteen,” the man snarled, hands clenched and shaking at his sides, but he kept his voice low and stalked red-faced back to his seat, and Sacha dodged back to his own cabin before the dark-eyed woman watching from the table over could pull him aside to ask if he needed help — her type were easy marks for cash and a free meal, but he couldn’t exactly leave the shuttle if she decided to contact the authorities.
He lost the two-hundred at dice, won it back, lost it again, plus an additional twenty, ducked under the hand that tried to grab him as he threw himself through the door to the next car instead of paying, made another three hundred in a second encounter in the toilets, this time with a soft-faced middle-aged woman who wanted him to pretend to be someone called Marcus and broke down sobbing when they were done and didn’t notice when he nicked one of her rings as he rubbed her hand comfortingly, crunched over his knees beneath the sink. The dice players caught up with him outside and wrestled the three hundred off of him, the extra hundred being for delay and distress. He gambled the ring in the next game, won, and got into a spirited debate with a professor of philosophy on the nature of the good, which lasted until they landed.
Aaron grappled hand around the back of his collar as they were saying their goodbyes, him and the professor, grin strained. “Sorry about that. This one’s a talker,” he said, giving Sacha a shake. “Gets away from me sometimes. He’s a little special up there, you know?” He tapped Sacha on the side of the head. Itchy from being trapped on the shuttle and well-practiced at being accused of insanity, Sacha bounced impatiently on his toes and made an unsuccessful attempt at freeing himself. The fingers dug in harder.
The professor’s eyebrows twitched upwards, but he shook Sacha’s hand and said blandly, “have a good day, now,” and wandered off to find his luggage. Aaron kept the hand in place as they shuffled off the shuttle and into the sunlight.
Seraphine was a large planet pockmarked with deep blue pools that covered three-quarters of the surface, sand webbed between them like a sponge. Most travel was done by boat or by light sand sledges, but floating platforms had been built for the landing dock and the inter-city sky train. On the platform he got caught up talking to an old woman who had spent her career bioengineering kelp and her retirement cultivating a vegetable garden, and Sacha played the part of a poor country boy, earnest and eager and a little slow, told her he wanted to go to college but he wasn’t certain he could afford it; heck, he hadn’t even been off Rensanner before but his aunt was sick and he’d spent all his money getting here to see her one last time, and was it much fun, with the kelp?
“I’m too old to tell you anything is possible,” she said, gazing thoughtfully over the gleaming water. “But there’s plenty of good lives out there to be led.” She patted him on the hand.
On the train, he met a ship parts salesman with three children by three different women, all of whom were named Gus and none of whom were aware of the others, a tailor who had lost her shop in a fire she was convinced had been set by her vengeful sister, and a twitchy fourteen-year-old working as a runner.
“I don’t need your fucking help,” he snapped when Sacha dropped into the empty seat beside him, clutching his bag to his chest in a move so incriminating that Sacha burst out laughing.
“If you react like that, you definitely do,” he said, wriggling around so his knees were tucked in and his feet propped up on the armrest instead of on the fabric of the chair, because he wasn’t a barbarian. “You’re going to be arrested.”
“I won’t,” the boy said.
Sacha reached out to ruffle his hair the way Avram used to with him, feeling very old and wise. “You’re a delivery boy and a contingency plan wrapped in one: when you are caught, you can’t lead the constables back to anyone important. I would say less likely to be searched also, but for you this is theoretical.”
The boy was still scowling hard, arms tightening around the bag like he thought Sacha would try to snatch it from him. “What do you know about it?”
A shrug, shoulders pushing against the hard seatback. “I was arrested three times doing your job.”
“Maybe you were bad at it.”
“Oh, I was terrible,” Sacha agreed. “So are you, which is why you should listen to me.” He felt abruptly very urgent about it, though he had never been particularly concerned with his fellow myshi when he was one. He sat up, setting his feet flat on the floor. “You can look nervous, but not afraid — you are young, travelling alone,” he said. “Read a book or play a game but always pay attention to what is around you.” With a tinge of irony in his voice, “be polite to strangers. Learn another language.”
“Which language?” the boy asked.
Sacha shrugged again. “English is versatile.”
“I already speak English. We’re speaking it right now.”
This was true. Restless, Sacha pulled his legs back onto the chair, wrapping his arms around his knees. “If you are sent somewhere else where they speak a different language, you should learn that one.”
“For when I’m arrested,” the boy said flatly.
“Yes.” In Russian, he said, “You will be more frightened than you have been of anything before in your life. It will be worse than being hurt, or sick, or hungry, because being sick and hurt and hungry you understand, and now you understand nothing. Do you see?” In English, he repeated, “Do you see?”
“Fuck, fine, I understand,” the boy said, turning to face the window with hunched shoulders. “How did you get out?” he asked the pools rushing past outside, so quietly Sacha barely heard.
“I didn’t.” He patted the boy on the shoulder, once, and stood. Then, impulsively, he reached back, grabbed the boy’s hand and pressed the ring into his palm. Either he was smart enough to figure out where to fence it, or he wasn’t. “Good luck.”
****
Mordecai Metzger’s alleged mother was a squat woman with a head full of frizzy red hair coming loose from where she had tied it behind her head. She and Sacha were exactly of a height, and her flat, slate-grey eyes fixed on his, assessing. Sacha held his breath, balanced on the edge of a pin, waiting for her to turn to Aaron and say this is not my son.
Instead, she stepped silently back from the door and into the houseboat: with the land too narrow and sandy to build, the Seraphinians lived on floating platforms and shallow-bottomed boats, one or two to a pool. Mordecai’s mother had the pool to herself, far enough from the closest neighbours that they were barely a speck on the horizon. Overgrown vegetable planters crowded onto the porch, wide-leafed water crops filled the space around the boat. Inside it was dark and close and warm, the windows blocked by thick curtains and the only light coming from a pair of table lamps. Their host stood for several moments in the middle of the room, eyes darting between the sagging couch and a pair of mismatched chairs before she jerked her head for them to sit. They did, side by side, as she wandered into the kitchen.
“How have you been, Tamara?” Aaron asked.
The woman, Tamara, set a glass of something murky green and smelling faintly of mint in front of them both. Sacha took a tentative sip and found it to be thick and sweet, surprisingly pleasant.
“You’re too young to be my son,” she said, sitting across from him.
Sacha glanced behind her, scanning the room for any trace of the original Mordecai, and found none. How many years did it take for a mother to forget her son’s face? “It happened at the Project,” he said. “I don’t know how. There were so many procedures...” he trailed off. “It was years before I noticed I wasn’t getting older like I should. Never could find any way to undo it.”
Tamara said nothing. Personality being both environmental and intrinsic, he wondered if this was what he should imitate — but then again Mordecai had not spent his life skulking alone in a swamp. Besides, brooding, while bearing some artistic merit, was both tedious to act and on the whole difficult to pull off with a head full of red hair and a face full of freckles.
“I hardly remember anything from before the Project,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wish I did.” (You’re so lucky not to know your parents, Immanuel had said once after another blow-up argument with his father — one-sided, of course; Felix Salvador never fought back — and Sacha had laughed and said I’m adding it to my stack of blessings, and meant it. Parents, so far as he had observed, were more trouble than they were worth).
“Then we’re strangers,” Tamara said.
What would the real Mordecai say? When Avram spoke of him, he sounded quiet and depressive and more than a little boring, but presumably he had been different as a child. “Do you remember me?”
“As a baby.”
“I guess that does make us strangers, then.”
****
Immanuel did not make the call because he missed him — he had Kit living with him now, quiet and efficient and better as both a companion and a business partner than Sacha had ever been. Immanuel received, inventoried, and sold the ships, while Kit combed through the electronics to erase the old flight data and whatever else might be on there that the former owners didn’t want anyone to see. They had always gotten along as crew, and they were getting along now. Alone on the station besides the occasional customer, Kit did fine, and Immanuel was happy to live with someone who liked cleaning and disliked talking. It was a good situation. It was possibly the best situation he had ever been in. He was, he told himself firmly, content with his life. He was acting entirely pragmatically.
Sacha showed up less than a week later, shiny-eyed and vibrating, clearly on the upswing of one of his moods. He barrelled across the room, threw himself at Immanuel hard enough to knock him into the table, and wrapped his arms around his neck like he was trying to strangle him, talking the whole time. Immanuel, not for the first time, wondered why he had missed him at all.
“I have a business proposition,” he said loudly over whatever Sacha was saying, which was the only way to get a word in edgewise when he was like this.
Sacha said, “did you have a funeral?”
He didn’t ask how Sacha knew. “They airlocked him. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone making a fuss, anyway.”
“Do you believe in ghosts, Immanuel?” They were still standing close; Sacha reached up behind him and trailed his fingernails over the back of his neck. “Will your father seize you in his icy grasp if he disapproves of how you treated his empty meat sack?”
“It would be just like him to grow a spine after he’s dead and can’t do anything useful with it,” Immanuel said, batting the hand away. He circled around the desk, feeling abruptly exhausted as he dropped into the chair. Sacha boosted himself onto the tabletop so his feet were dangling by Immanuel’s knees, legs swinging back and forth like a little kid.
“I called you to talk business,” he said. He wished he had been the one to leave Sacha. That Sacha was the one to come crawling back instead of the one who could very well tell him to fuck off a second time.
“Tell me about this business, partner,” Sacha said obligingly. He was restless, folding his legs onto the table, then down, swaying back on his arms.
Instead, Immanuel found himself saying, “you don’t make me unhappy.” For all he lied as easily as breathing, Sacha wore his emotions plain on his face, when it was just the two of them: his expression was constantly shifting, all widening eyes and twitches of the mouth even when he wasn’t speaking. For a moment he looked flayed open, and then he was smiling again, playful. Immanuel pressed on. “I’m sorry I said you did.”
Sacha considered this, heels knocking against the desk. “I want to trade for a different apology.”
“You can’t trade for a different apology. What apology do you even want?”
Sing-song, he said, “I need time to consider, Mr. Salvador. It’s a very serious decision.”
“Well, if we’re bargaining, I want an apology, too,” Immanuel said irritably.
Grinning like a shark, Sacha clapped both hands on his shoulders, faces very close together. He corralled his expression not entirely successfully into a serious frown and said, “my dearest, darlingest Immanuel. How pained I am by that terrible night three years ago, that tragedy for which I fear you will never — can never — forgive me, for on that night I robbed from you your most precious possession: leftover soup left unlabelled in the refrigerator.”
“Never mind, I’m allowing trades,” Immanuel groused.
“Excellent,” Sacha said. “Let me set the scene: June 5th, a Tuesday. The setting: Rensanner, in the type of back alley where a pair of reputable boys like us should never be seen, our pockets full of cash and our hearts full of hope. But then: sirens! We run; I trip. My ankle shatters; I collapse, drowning in pain like I have never felt before.” Immanuel rolled his eyes; Sacha kicked him in the knee. “Pain!” he said, louder. “Like I have never felt before! The footsteps thunder towards us. I reach for your hand. Immanuel, I say. Please, do not leave me alone. Kill me if you cannot take me with you. Do not abandon me to my fate.” He grabbed Immanuel by both hands. His palms were cool and dry, scabbed around the knuckles like he’d been fighting. “You pull out your gun.”
“At least I get a gun,” Immanuel said.
“You point it at my head. Light glints off the barrel. It is evening: above me the sky is painted red. I can feel the footsteps vibrate through the earth. Your hands tremble. I’m sorry, you say, and run.”
“You can’t trade for an apology for something that didn’t happen.”
“That wasn’t in the terms, Mr. Salvador.”
Because he could reluctantly admit that he owed Sacha one, Immanuel said flatly, “sorry I didn’t fake shoot you in the fake alley to keep you from being fake arrested.”
“Uninspiring,” Sacha pronounced. He hopped to his feet and circled around the chair to prop his forearms across Immanuel’s shoulders, dropped his head so his chin dug into his shoulder and his breath ghosted against his ear. “I stole from the Antiquery.”
“That wasn’t an apology.”
“I’m very sorry for stealing from you,” Sacha said primly. He shifted again, leaning his full weight on the back of the chair until it creaked alarmingly. “Weren’t you going to tell me the business proposition?”
“And my father.”
A sigh. “Sorry, Felix’s ghost. Are you going to tell me the business now?”
“If you’ll sit like a civilized person.” Sacha climbed back onto the table and perched there cross-legged, which, close enough. Immanuel told him about the Oasis, though he’d only heard it second hand from Rico, Josephine, and Kit. “They need funds. A lot, and quickly.” Sacha was nodding along. He patted at his pockets and produced a fifty, which he slapped down on the tabletop. “A lot more than that. Have you seriously spent everything you made through your... whatever you’re doing?”
“That’s a non-profit venture.”
“It wasn’t a non-profit venture when I ran it,” Immanuel said suspiciously.
“Aaron is the treasurer.” Sometimes Immanuel forgot that Sacha was nineteen years old and had only ever worked for criminal enterprises.
“He still has to pay you, Sacha, for fuck’s sake. You’re doing all the work.”
“I have other ways.”
“I let you having terrible business sense slide when we were together—” Immanuel stumbled to a halt. He’d meant together as in, in proximity, or in business, but they’d also—
“Masha, don’t worry about it!” Sacha interrupted, springing to his feet. He backed towards the door like the coming lecture was a mama grizzly and he an unsuspecting hiker. “I have a plan!”
“Do I get to know what the plan—” the door slammed shut behind him. Immanuel dropped his head into his hands.
“I’m not worried,” Avram said for the third time in fifteen minutes. He craned his head to peer out the window.
“Yes, I know,” Rico said wearily.
“But Vani’s not indestructible. Obviously Peterson and his people are no danger to her, but that won’t help her if she fell and cracked her head open. You’re not even supposed to go hiking alone, I knew I should’ve sent someone with her.” He abandoned his half-eaten breakfast in favour of climbing to his feet, arms crossed as he stared out the window.
“Shall I fetch the time machine?” Rico was flipping through the ledger book, which was written in tiny, cramped writing to accommodate the paper shortage. After a moment he dropped down beside her at the tabled with a groan, resting his forehead on his arms. The darkness soothed the headache that had been building since they landed on the Oasis, but not by much.
“How’s that looking?” he asked, jerking his head towards the ledger.
“Same as usual. We’re not about to starve, but we are a lot closer to it than is strictly ideal.” Quietly, she said, “Captain, I’m saying it because someone has to: we don’t actually have an obligation to help these people.”
“I guess I’m just glad you think we’re capable of helping them in the first place,” Avram said. “Look, it’s not good now, I’m not going to pretend otherwise, but that doesn’t mean it never will be, even if it’s a miserable shlep to get there. We need this place. Or at least we need what this place can be.”
“Do we?”
Avram sat up at that. “Rico—”
“I’m not running out on you,” she said. Met his eyes, dark and intense. He’d been intimidated by her, when they first met. Worried she might stab him in his sleep: Rico had never been particularly fussed about keeping the moral high ground. “You’re my captain, Captain.”
Avram looped his arm around her neck so his hand came to rest on the top of her head. Her braids were growing out; he used to redo them in the long stretches of empty space as they planned their next job but there hadn’t been time, lately.
Rico was just on the point of shrugging him off when the sudden eruption of noise outside startled them both to their feet. The figure was hunched over and ragged, tangled hair hanging in her face, jacket torn open along the seams, gaping open. Avram squinted at the dirt-streaked features, trying to place them.
“Janus?” he whispered to Rico.
“Might be.” She paused, clearly mentally running through the list of Peterson’s group Dhillon had given her. “Must be — too tall to be Cally.” Blank, matter of fact, the way she talked about everything to do with the Project. It couldn’t be good for her, pushing everything down like that, but it had gotten them out of too many tight spots for Avram not to be grateful.
“Janus, hey,” he said out loud, stepping closer, hands out in front of him, as non-threatening as he could manage. “Are you hurt? What happened?”
Blearily, she said, “Who...” because when would she have learned there were new arrivals on the Oasis? Besides Vani, maybe.
“My name is Avram, I’m from the Project.” He took her gently by the elbow, shepherding her inside. “You’re gonna be okay. We’ll get you patched up and you can tell us what happened.”
“Stick her in the far room,” Dhillon said from behind them. “Treason not agreeing with you, Janus?”
“It’s only treason if it’s against a state,” Rico said.
Avram laughed despite himself. “I’m mostly glad I’m not the only one with a subordinates running off problem.” To Janus, “You’re doing great, bud, one foot in front of the other, we got you.” He let go of her arm as they passed Dhillon. “Let us talk to her first? There’s a little less bad blood on our side.”
Dhillon nodded tiredly. “Sure.”
Between the two of them, they got her cleaned up with practiced efficiency, the way they did it with Kit when he was injured: touches to a minimum, as much space between them and her as they could manage. If she was one of his crew, he would have drawn a bath — a special occasion shipboard, reserved for after particularly rough jobs — and talked as he washed their hair. Instead, he brought a basin and a cloth and fresh clothes and kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling as he helped her tug them on.
“So,” he said, when Janus was sitting on the bed, clean and bandaged with a mug of watery soup clutched between her hands, “what happened?”
“Vannery.” Her voice was a rough whisper. Avram and Rico locked eyes over her head.
“What did she do?”
“Kept us alive,” Janus said.
“Oh, good,” said Avram, failing to keep the relief from this voice. He’d expected something much worse.
“Why did you leave?” Rico asked.
“She kept us alive,” Janus repeated. She squeezed one fist demonstratively in front of her chest, letting go of the mug to do so, which listed dangerously in her other hand. Avram reached over and righted it before it spilled over her lap. “I could feel her, like she’d reached inside and... and I couldn’t move.”
Avram put his hand on her back, lightly at first, then more firmly when she didn’t flinch away. “Everything will be okay,” he assured her, jerking his chin at Rico over her head. “We’re just gonna step out and get you some more water, alright? We’ll be right back.”
Outside, Rico said, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“At least we know she’s alive and relatively okay,” Avram said.
“She won’t be if Dhillon finds out about this. Or Dhillon and their people won’t be, realistically. Which side are we on?”
“Vani’s,” Avram said, before his common sense caught up. “Wait, no, we are not going down in history as the first planet with a population of twenty-two to have a civil war. We can keep a lid on this thing.”
They could not keep a lid on this thing. They stepped outside to find McNamara ringed by Dhillon’s group, voice strident as she said, “Vannery Dawson vanishes and Janus turns up after weeks looking like this? There’s no mystery here. We all know what happened.” She had a nervy look, hands on her hips, eyes glittering. The others were murmuring, agitation at a low simmer but rising to a boil. Standing at the fringes, Dhillon looked calmer, but they wasn’t disagreeing, and they weren’t making any move to settle the rest of the group.
“Are you about to tell me she’s wrong?” they asked when Avram sidled up beside them.
Stalling, Avram said, “I’m about to tell you it’s complicated.”
****
“She looks really bad,” Bo whispered, peering anxiously around the doorway. Janus was hunched over almost double on the bed with a mug clutched tight between her hands. She’d been a big woman when Bo had known her at the Project — wide and tall, same as Bo himself — with a cool confidence that set him on edge when she came in for recalibration. Now he could see the bones of her wrists where they jutted out from her borrowed shirt.
“So fix her. That’s your job, isn’t it?” Rico said. Locked down the way she got when things went bad. “You know what you need to do?”
“Yes, sir.”
Rico stepped back into the hall, shutting the door behind her. Janus stayed frozen on the bed; Bo stayed frozen in the doorway. “Do you remember me?” he asked softly. Now she looked up, eyes drifting past his face to the far corner, where she stared fixedly. There was none of that cool confidence now.
“You’re here to recalibrate me.” Flat, like the emotion had all been drained out of her already.
“It’ll make you feel better.” She let out a coughing laugh. He sat down beside her on the bed. “You must have been so frightened, and hungry, and hurt. You must have thought you were going to die, if you didn’t do something. You’re really brave, Janus.” At the Project, they’d dressed him as a doctor when he did this: masked, gloved, hair covered. Glaring white lights and a soundproof door, gentle touches as he inserted the IV. He never did learn what it contained. “You don’t need to carry all that. Don’t you want to feel better?”
“I want to remember,” she said.
“You will,” he assured her. “You’ll remember it kinder. So it won’t be so heavy.” He started gentle, smoothing at her edges. Settling panic into fear and fear into nervousness and nervousness into calm. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I can tell you were safe out there, even though it was hard. Someone kept you safe.”
“Yes.”
“Vani kept you safe, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“It was Peterson who hurt you.” He nudged harder. Flattened the bumps where they poked stubbornly up.
“It was Peterson who hurt us.”
“Sleep, now. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
Rico and the captain were speaking with Dr. Dhillon when he made it outside, and they all looked unhappy. When Avram caught his eye, Bo signed, “Done,” and earned a perfunctory nod in return.
He turned to retreat to his room when Avram said, “Bo will handle it.” Bo froze, inching reluctantly closer when the captain gestured for him, reaching up to loop an arm around his shoulders when he got close. “He knows Vani better than anyone here, and, more importantly, she trusts him. He can take barebones medical supplies, help her get them well enough to make the trip back.”
“Wait here. I’m going to talk to Janus,” Dhillon said.
“She’ll agree to it,” Avram said with what Bo felt was unwarranted confidence. “What’s the alternative? If they were willing to send any of her own people, they’d have done it already. With McNamara spinning them up like that, the others aren’t going to take doing nothing as an answer, either.” The doctor was in the centre of the group at the other end of the courtyard, words drowned out in the overlapping burble of voices.
“Killing Vani is an alternative,” Rico said.
Bo flinched, feeling sick. Sicker. Soon one of them was going to tell him to Soothe Dr. Dhillon, and he would, or all of the camp, and he’d do that, too, but if they told him to Soothe Vani, he couldn’t. For all their sparring they’d never been in a real fight before, he didn’t even know if... and she’d never talk to him again, if she didn’t kill him outright. Not unless he kept her under and turned her into someone else.
Avram was saying, “With what, the kitchen knives? Assuming they could even get close enough to try, that’s pretty visceral.”
Rico shrugged. “You’d be surprised. People kill each other all the time.”
“I wouldn’t say all the time. Bo, before you were with the Project, did you know any murderers?”
“Um,” Bo said.
“When I was a miner, they never killed anyone outright; if the foreman thought any of us were about to cause problems — unionize, whatever — they’d get sent down to the parts we were all warned not to go and whatever happened, happened,” Avram said. “It’s different if you have to do it yourself. Besides, Dhillon is a doctor. Do no harm, and all that.” Privately, Bo did not think the doctors with the Project cared much about doing no harm. Judging by the precipitous ascent of her eyebrows towards her hairline, neither did Rico. “None of the ones we have here, at least. If the director was still around, I wouldn’t be so sure.” To Bo, “Don’t tell Vani I said that last part.”
“No, sir.”
****
Bo had been hoping... he wasn’t certain for what, exactly, but for something that was not stumbling through the forest with a pack full of food and medicine, but not as much food and medicine as everyone agreed he’d probably need. (You can do this, Avram had said, staring into his eyes like he was trying to press the belief into him. Not can you do this because he knew the answer would be no. Josephine had once joked that the captain had a stock conversation with each of them, and this was his with Bo).
Vani was waiting for him, cross-legged on the forest floor. Her skin was streaked with dirt and her coveralls were stained rusty brown in a way he didn’t want to think about too hard and the sunlight glinted like fire off her hair, spilling tangled over her shoulders. He stooped and she folded to her feet, graceful still, and she launched herself at him and he caught her, swept her up, bony and lighter than she should have been, and breathed in the muddy, bloody, forest scent of her.
“Vani, what happened?” Her arms clamped around his neck, fingernails digging in. He could feel her trembling against him, cheek fever-hot. For the first time, he could overpower her easy as anyone else. For the first time, he was as dangerous to her as he was to everyone else. He set her gently back on her feet and the magnitude of the loss nearly flattened him.
“Has the captain drafted you for team Sulking in the Woods, too?” Vani asked, forging the way through the trees. When he trailed behind, she reached back for his hand to tug him forward.
“He wanted to, um, check up on you? Because you didn’t come back? And, um. Because of Janus.”
“She came running to Dhillon, then,” Vani said. It was hard to read her tone — relieved and furious and flat all at once. “I was looking after her, you know,” she said, snapping a branch viciously out of the way. “They’d all be dead without me.” Janus’ warmth beside him on the bed. Vani kept you safe, didn’t she?
“They’re all still alive?” Bo asked.
In answer, Vani tugged him through a final tangled thicket of bramble to reveal a small clearing, a conical tent constructed from some type of animal skin set up at the far end. He poked his head inside to find four people there, slumped against each other like dolls tossed away after playtime. After a moment he recognized Peterson, hair gone white and deep wrinkles bracketing his mouth, carving between his eyebrows and grey in his overgrown beard. The other three took him a moment to place: they were all thin and so caked with dirt it was difficult to tell the colour of their hair or skin at first glance.
“Cally, Imran, and Morales,” Vani said, pointing at each in turn. “I keep their hearts beating.” Morales twitched, breath speeding up, then going shallow. He dropped flat when Vani released him. Bo nodded mutely, pushing down the urge to be sick on the forest floor.
“I think maybe we should help them wash,” Bo suggested tentatively. “And, um, maybe— I mean. I don’t think they’re going anywhere?”
Vani raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m not stopping you.”
Deep breath. “Okay. Do you know if there’s any water around?”
“It’s your project, you figure it out,” Vani said, settling herself on the ground. She stretched her legs out in front of her, rolling her head back to grin up at him, all teeth.
He started with Imran and he felt like a baby bird in his hands as he knelt, arm braced around his back and hand cupped at the back of his head as he tipped water into his mouth.You’re needed here. You can do things none of the others can, Avram had told him once, like that wasn’t a terrifying prospect — they’d been on Sibalt then, and Avram’s anger had barely faded over this arrangement with Sacha, and sitting there in the Starside cargo bay watching Avram watch Gemma chase butterflies through the garden, he thought he’d never understand because to Avram, being stronger just meant he could carry the kids around under his arms and rearrange furniture and haul their groceries from town on foot, and not that the whole world was one wrong move away from shattering in his grip.
A long, meandering trip to the river, leaving chalk marked on every tree, convinced the forest would swallow him up and never spit him out. A shorter, less meandering walk back with a water bucket that slopped down his front. He left it hanging on the spit Vani had constructed over the fire until the bone-searing cold softened to lukewarm and left it in the shelter along with the washcloths from his bag. Vani’s eyes narrowed, and he heard the clumsy shuffling of bodies from the shelter.
“Don’t—” His voice came out loud and he flinched at the sound, but Vani only shrugged laconically, turning back to the fire. In the shelter, the shuffling stopped, then resumed in a slower, cautious cadence. “It’s just, you won’t feel good about yourself if you do that. If you keep doing that.”
“I’m not you, Bo,” Vani said. The fire crackled between them. Smoke spiralled up through the trees, stinging at his eyes.
Now besides feeling nervous-sick, he was also starting to feel cold and sore and homesick. To distract himself, he riffled through the bag: a week’s supply of nutrient bars and vitamins, a selection of bandages, a bottle of antibiotic ointment, four crinkly silver shock blankets rolled up small.
(He thought of the woman who had lived in the apartment next to him when he was a child, the way her eyes went glassy when she came in with groceries, how behind that blankness was a resigned horror he hadn’t recognized until years later, Soothing away the pain of a Second Gen boy back from the front with his arm blown off. Hadn’t thought about how she must have been hungry, leaving him food every week, how she couldn’t afford to replace what he took — what he stole — because no one in his village could; how he’d taken from them all anyway).
“If you don’t let go of them I’ll make you,” he said all in a rush. Tightened his fingers against the straps of the bag and pushed down the impulse to apologize, to take it back, to pretend he didn’t mean it.
The day after Bo left, Avram dropped by the makeshift infirmary where Janus was still staying. He’d found himself thinking of Sibalt, these past days, in the nagging, insistent way he had in the first weeks and months after they left, the way he hadn’t realized had faded to a gentler melancholy until the full force of his grief came rushing back. He wished he hadn’t sent Vani and Bo away, not because he thought it was the wrong move but because he missed having them around, because with them gone it felt like another corner had been chipped away, leaving him and Rico in a sea of strangers.
Janus looked up from where she’d been wiping a spot on the counter, raising a hand to swipe through her hair — shorter now, cleaned and detangled — and Avram jolted back to awareness with a sheepish laugh, suddenly aware that he’d been staring blankly at the wall ahead.
“Why did you and Peterson and the others decide to leave?” he asked.
She shrugged, a sharp, closed-off motion: he couldn’t have been the only one to ask that question over the past few days. “We just disagreed on shit. Centrals versus Outers, you remember how it was.”
“We’re all from the same place,” Avram said, and then, because he’d spent the past five years living with Kit Riley, “Figuratively. There’s no stations out here, we’re all in this situation together.”
Janus snorted. “Sure. That’s why you and Rico are always talking in that sign language no one else understands, right?” She brushed past him, muttering about going to get more water.
“We’re not—” he said to the empty room.
Except they were. He could say it was habit left over from how often they’d used it on the cramped Alouen, but the fact remained that his crew had always used sign to talk to each other when they needed to hide what they were saying from everyone else. That Dhillon, and McNamara, and Janus, and all the others on the Oasis, these people he’d spent years looking for, still existed in his mind as everyone else. That since landing here, they had operated exactly as they would on any strange planet, protecting his people and whatever happened to anyone else was none of his business.
In the mines on Aspenhold, in the factories on Kayter, on Eltan, on Mirish, he’d welcomed every new face and promised to look after them, even when they were at each other’s throats the rest of the time. (He hadn’t succeeded, but he’d meant it as much as he’d ever meant anything.) But somewhere along the line his world had shrunk — first to his kids in the nursery, and of course he would do anything to protect them because no one else would, because they were small and vulnerable and so utterly dependent, and then to his crew, the nine of them with no room for anyone else).
“Captain.” He turned to find Rico in the doorway. She jerked her head and he followed her into the hall, then out into the courtyard. The ground had hardened with a rime of frost. Their breath plumed in the air.
“What’ll winter be like, do you think?” he asked.
“Bad,” Rico said distractedly. She led them around the back, sticking close to the building edge and ducking below the narrow windows. “Clear,” she signed, and darted the ten feet to the cover of the forest. Avram followed close behind.
“Why are we sneaking?” he signed, and then it became immediately clear why they were sneaking: there was Josephine, longer-haired and a little thinner, grinning between the trees.
It was a masterful landing. Kit guided the shuttle on a long curve around the rudimentary detection equipment and onto a tiny bare patch in the forest barely longer than the shuttle itself— a hover landing rather than a taxi, propulsors angled ninety degrees, facing the ground, take-off direction. Kit took the atmosphere readings and found the air to be breathable, free of slow-acting toxins, and two degrees above freezing.
The Oasis was entering the apogee of its orbit, heralding a long winter at the farthest distance not only from the sun but from the other planets, stations, and satellites in the system. For three weeks, their long-range G-class shuttle would not be able to make the trip. For another two, it would arrive with less than a days’ fuel remaining, far below the safety threshold. This was barring mechanical failure, which was also a possibility. Immanuel had been charitable enough to lend them a ship, but only one he had no hope of selling for a profit.
“Which is why we need to make sure they’re not all going to starve,” Josephine replied when he said so. She did not tell him not to speak ill of the ship, which was her usual response to this type of criticism. Maybe she believed Lady Stel’s grip ended at the border to the Oasis, or that the Lucky (presumably named to describe anyone who traveled in the shuttle and survived) was poorly constructed enough that she would forgive the transgression.
When they stepped outside, the handheld scanner read five degrees colder and the air pressure and a degree higher than the shipboard scanners, but still breathable and free of contaminants — whether this was a coincidence or an indication that the shipboard equipment retained some functionality would remain an exciting mystery, possibly to be solved when they keeled over and died: their resupply window was narrow enough that they’d had time to retrofit the ship well enough to fly and no more, a strategy which had surprisingly not killed them yet but had not run out of opportunities to do so.
Dita, characteristically, was not concerned about the potential for sudden death — her own and theirs, given that she was their only medical professional — and wandered into the forest to touch the alien plants with her bare hands.
“These aren’t alien plants,” Dita said. “This is an Aglian fir, you can see by the wide, flat shape of the needles — which is not what I would have chosen for this temperature range, but what do I know, I’m not a planetary engineer. Also you shouldn’t be wearing gloves to touch alien plants anyway, you have no idea what materials they’d react to. Did I ever tell you about this guy on Rensanner, fully suited up, gloves, mask, everything, comes up to this tree and it just looks like apples, right? And he plucks one off and it explodes right in his face, eats through the fabric, through his skin, all the way down the bone.”
“Don’t touch,” Kit signed back, irritable.
Dita waved a needle in his face. “Does this look like an apple to you?”
“If you don’t stop arguing, you’re not going to have to worry about the plants because I’m going to kill you,” Josephine signed.
Betrayed, Kit jabbed a finger in Dita’s direction: he hadn’t been the one who spent the whole journey over talking, who left his things in the common areas — not even in the corner designated as bunk space, which Kit reluctantly conceded fell under the same rules as a closed bunk and could be organized however Dita liked, but in the actual common areas which they all shared — and never cleaned up after meals until hours after the fact, even when it was her turn.
“If you’d just keep your hands off my things—” Dita said out loud and at volume.
“Quiet,” Kit signed.
“For fuck’s sake,” Josephine said, squeezing her eyes shut. “Both of you, don’t say anything. Just walk. In silence. Kit, behind me. Dita, you’re rearguard. Do not wander off, and do not, do not, start arguing again. Don’t even look at each other.”
Dita would have to be looking at Kit’s back if she was following him, but Josephine turned around and started walking before he could point this out, and Kit, not wanting to get lost on a strange planet, followed behind her.
This at least saved him from hearing any more from Dita, who he could not see if she was signing and could not understand when she spoke when he was facing away from her, though he was certain the mash of incomprehensible sounds, if translated into words, would be irritating and incorrect. When her footsteps slowed to a stop, which happened every few meters, he’d whip around to find her staring at a tree or crouched in the middle of the trail with her pocket microscope to examine some particularly fascinating bit of dirt, or, once, several feet away in the trees, patting around her pockets for a specimen bag.
“Should have seen that coming,” Josephine said, turning around as well. “Let’s keep it moving, Dita.”
They knew where they were going insofar as they had picked up evidence of a settlement on the sweep-scan as they landed and were picking their way in that direction until they found evidence of human life. Two hours in, such evidence remained steadfastly nonexistent. With nothing to do but think, walk, and wait for Dita to finish showing them a beetle — a native beetle, she said, not an out of place import but evolved to the Oasis specifically — Kit ran through everything that might go wrong, starting with their faulty ship and ending with the fact that they still had no idea why the captain had called them in, or if he and the others were still alive.
As it turned out, the captain was not dead or incapacitated. He was standing in the forest with Rico at his elbow, both of them seemingly undamaged and looking more or less as they had the last time he’d seen them, with the addition of an immense puff of beard, in the captain’s case. Kit, not typically prone to such things, felt a rush of affection. He waved. The captain waved back, eyes crinkling, grinning under the beard. He lifted Josephine into the air with one arm and, struggling for balance, managed to get Dita a handful of inches off the ground with the other, somehow not throwing out his back in the process.
“Report,” Rico signed, and Kit was in the process of delivering it when the captain set Josephine and Dita on the ground and opened his arms coaxingly in Kit’s direction. Reluctantly, he stepped in and allowed himself to be hefted briefly into the air. When they had exchanged their greetings and summarized their respective years (some more efficiently than others), Josephine picked up the report where Kit had left off.
“The good news is we skewed our population estimate high. The bad news is skewing the estimate high doesn’t actually create more room in the hold, which is small — so instead of a months’ supplies for fifty, we have just over two for twenty. Bad news is it’s a five-seater shuttle, and when I say five-seater, I mean it. Unless it’s a potentially suffocating in the vacuum of space is preferable to staying here situation, we’re going to need to do staggered evac, and it’ll be seven weeks minimum after we leave before the Oasis will orbit close enough to the Way Station for us to return for the second round.”
“We aren’t evacuating,” the captain said out loud, signing the words as he spoke. “And we aren’t having is discussion in secret.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Josephine asked.
“When the children were with us, they were our first priority. Right? We all gave up meals for them, stayed up when they were sick. Made sure they had good clothes and toys to play with, even when we had to make them ourselves.”
“Is this a metaphor where the Oasis is a child or is this planet full of actual children, because I can deal with the first one but I don’t think I’m ever going to be emotionally prepared to deal with the second one again,” Josephine said.
“It’s a metaphor,” Rico interjected. “And an apt one: we did not involve the children in decisions.”
“The point,” Avram said, “is that we were all, collectively, trying to do right by a group of people who relied us, and we did that by looking out for their particular needs. Which are not, as Rico has helpfully pointed out, the same between a group of children and one of adults. There were things we hid from the kids because they were too young to understand. These people here, they’re us. They’re crew.”
“Not on a ship,” Kit disagreed. Even if they managed to fit the full population of the Oasis into the shuttle, it would never take off.
“That was also a metaphor,” Avram said.
“Look, I’m not pretending to be any good at any of this logistical stuff, but I was at the Project for a long time and all the director playing her cards close to her chest did was make it so no one trusted her,” Dita said.
“None of us agreed to be part of the Oasis,” Josephine said, indicating herself, Kit, and Dita. “We’re here to help the two of you, and Vani and Bo. I don’t give a shit about the rest of them.”
“You don’t mean that, Josie,” the captain said.
Dita shifted her weight, arms crossed. After a moment, she said, “I’m not looking to rejoin the Project or anything, but Dhillon’s my friend, and the other doctors are — or at least were — friendly acquaintances, so I’d like to register a preference on the side of them not dying.”
“I think we’d all like to register a preference on that side,” Avram said.
Not being an idiot, Kit had known that coming to the Oasis would involve being in proximity to its inhabitants and that the captain might decide to stay. He had even resigned himself to very near proximity, even direct contact. He had not considered that he was supposed to accept these leftovers from the Project as metaphorical crew. Not that what Kit wanted had ever made a difference.
Trailing the others through the forest as the dense underbrush resolved into a clear path, he noticed his hands were shaking. The others were still talking in a mixture of speech and sign but he could not focus enough to understand either. He forced his breathing slow and even as they emerged from the trees into a dusty square ringed by low wood buildings, a shuttle parked at the far end.
The captain stepped into the square, already waving to a figure at the other end — to Dr. Dhillon, Kit saw when she turned around. The doctor strode towards them, and he did not need his diagrams to know the expression on their face did not bode well for them. Avram, always unreasonably optimistic, was smiling as he went to meet them. Kit tucked himself against the side of the building and stood very still so their eyes would skate over him.
Soon they were surrounded. There were eleven of them from the Project, all sickeningly familiar. Bo and Vani were nowhere to be seen — but they wouldn’t be, he reminded himself. Avram had said they were in the forest. Because — his mind went blank, surging with something between panic and irritation. They were all looking at him. Talking, mouthes moving, sounds that would not resolve into words. All around: no escape. Heat. Body warmth pressed too close. Skin prickling at the brush of contact. Twitched away. Too bright, too loud. A buzz in his head that would not quiet. Nails bit into the soft meat of palms. Lip caught between teeth, bite down, bite down. Blood welling up, copper on his tongue added to the cacophony. Talk, talk, more talk. Hot pressure in his throat, in the pit of his stomach. Insistent pressure between his shoulder blades. Flinched away. From the hand, from the noise, from the heat. From his body.
****
It had been too long since she’d been around other scientists, Dita decided. She, Dhillon, McNamara, Tsung, and Tanner had set up shop in the outbuilding, and three hours in, what had started as a rundown of the collective medical conditions had devolved into stories from their student days, warm-faced and doubled over in laughter.
“Okay, look, I knew he was alive, right?” Dita was saying, gesturing with both hands as she spoke. “When I got called up for misconduct I said I thought he was a corpse — which is also a problem if you’re training to be a pathologist, surprise, surprise, you actually need to be able to identify the characteristics of a dead body — I mean, maybe for a second when I came in. But if you fall asleep in the cadaver lab, you can’t not expect people to try to mess with you, right? So I’m standing over him with the scalpel, start the recording, everything, you know, twenty-three year old male, et cetera, not even quietly, just waiting to see how long it will take him to notice. And he’s still sleeping! So I’ve got the scalpel directly over him, right, like I’m going to make a Y incision — which I wasn’t, for the record — and that’s when he sits up, bam—” she jabbed her fist illustratively — “right into the blade! So it’s just sticking straight out of him, bleeding all over the place, and he’s screaming; and, come on, it’s barely even a cut, but it’s fine, whatever, be a baby, get me in trouble.” She laughed. “No, I’m joking. But everyone rushes in thinking this kid’s being murdered, or else I’m the dumbest med student in existence.” A pause for dramatic effect. “And that, my friends, is how I got kicked out of the academy.”
“It is?” McNamara hooted. “Mansour, you are fucking insane.”
“No, not actually, but can you imagine?” Dita said. “No, it was something with the ethics committee, didn’t get prior permission, you know how it is.”
Dhillon shifted forward, steepling their hands over the desk. They wore that expression on that meant Dita was about to get a lecture, which she hadn’t appreciated from her supervisors as a student or from the director at the project, or from Avram, and especially not from a friend who’d done no better than her.
None of that stopped Dhillon from telling her, low and serious, “We aren’t doing things the way we did at the Project.”
“I don’t remember the Project being in a series of huts in the woods, so...” Dita said, an edge creeping into her voice. The room quieted around them.
“This is serious. We owe it to our former subjects—”
“I dissected bodies, I’m not responsible for what the rest of you got up to,” Dita interrupted, pushing to her feet. “I’m going to see if Peterson’s lot are more fun.”
She tossed off a mock salute and marched out the door, already embarrassed at herself. She was almost forty years old, not a temperamental teenager getting her feelings hurt because her friends didn’t like her joke. This past year had scraped her out. It wasn’t her first brush with hunger or poverty, certainly not since joining the crew, but there was a constant undertone of worry that wore at her. Time was, she went where she wanted and did what she wanted, and what anyone else was doing hardly crossed her mind.
It was the distress call that had done it. She’d left her sister’s house fully meaning to head for the dockyard and sign on to the first ship that would have her, only she couldn’t stop circling it in her mind. She’d start off thinking about the expression of iridescence in the Paglian tree frog, or the newly-discovered three-toed beetle on Resanner, and suddenly she’d find herself thinking about how it was time for the crew’s bi-monthly checkup, and that she really should pick up a testing kit at one of her stops; you never really knew what was in the indefinitely shelf-stable protein bars that fuelled the poorly-funded space explorer, and the next thing she knew, she was tracking down Josephine and Kit.
Another advantage of being nearly forty was that Dita was long past the point in her life where she sulked, dwelled, brooded, or otherwise wasted her time worrying about the past when there were more interesting things to be done. Despite the number of doctors on the Oasis, only Dhillon was a medical doctor rather than a researcher, and they’d been too busy with all the tedious business of running the place to keep up with anything but the pressing, acute cases.
So Dita got the remaining test subjects — three Soothers, one high-level and two low, both tending towards the intuitive; two Healers, and one Second Gen — lined up outside the makeshift infirmary for their checkups. Their previous test results were somewhere in the bowels of either the newly minted Innovia Centre or some Vetec government office, but she remembered the aggregate data well enough even if she hadn’t seen most of the individual files. The subjects took the news reluctantly, in a grumbling, side-eyed sort of way, but she was still a Project doctor and when she said when and where to show up, they showed up.
The results were decent, in the sense of indicative of relatively good health given the circumstances — they tended towards the underweight and vitamin deficient, but not to an extent that spelled irreversible consequences — which was to say, boring.
“I can’t believe not even one of you managed to get even like, blood poisoning or an intestinal parasite or something,” she complained to Yuli, one of the low-level Soothers, as she examined a drop of their blood under the microscope. “When we were designing you lot — well, not you lot, your parents’ generation, not that I was there for that, I know I look distinguished but I’m not actually that old — we worried the mutation maybe counteracted Second Gen immunity, but you’re collectively going strong. Too bad I can’t publish a paper about it.” She thought about the torture chamber that was academic publishing. “Actually, never mind. I’m very happy I don’t have to write a paper about it. Peer review, who needs it, right?” Glancing up from the microscope, she flashed a grin in Yuli’s direction. “If Dhillon hears I said that, that was a joke.”
Yuli was looking mournful. Dita thought, briefly and uncharitably, that she was getting tired of everyone making her feel bad for her decisions, thank you very much — but she’d forgotten what it was like at the Project, she realized. She’d never demanded the respect that was technically her due as a scientist on a ship full of staff and subjects, and gradually, they had stopped looking to her as the decision-maker. Except that wasn’t quite it: they’d stopped being afraid of her first. Because at the Project she was someone to be afraid of. Someone with the power to hurt them, and badly; it didn’t matter how friendly she acted. Dita groaned, dropping her head onto the table. Yuli made a sound of alarm.
“No, don’t worry. You’re free to go. Have a nice day, all that.” She packed away her things. Maybe everything would be less complicated with Vani and Bo.
When Immanuel was eight years old, Felix tried to leave him with his mother — Immanuel’s mother, that is, not Felix’s, whom Immanuel knew he would rather die than allow on the same planet as his son. Then again, Felix would rather have died than do a lot of things: later, he’d suspect this was why they found themselves on Olivia Gonzalez’s doorstep in the first place.
Immanuel looked more like his father than his mother, but if he squinted he could see traces of himself in her dark, close-set eyes and the hard line of her mouth. They waited for her all day in the workers’ dorms, until she shuffled in late in the evening with her tangled mess of sandy brown curls pinned at the back of her head, a battered helmet tucked under her arm, coal dust on her cheeks. She marched past them to her bunk, set down her helmet, swapped her boots and jacket for slippers and a sweater, stayed there with her arms braced against the top bunk for five seconds, ten, as they watched the tense line of her back as she breathed in and out. When she turned towards then, her expression was one of exhausted resignation.
“You’re the boy?” she asked Immanuel. Then, to his father, “don’t do this to me, Felix.”
“I’m sorry, Olivia,” Felix said, voice shaking, hand clutched too hard on Immanuel’s shoulder. They were looking at each other over his head, communicating something silently.
“No,” she said. “My answer is the same as it was eight years ago.” And that was it. Immanuel and Felix left, and they hadn’t spoken of it at all until Immanuel sat at his father’s bedside the day before they torched the Starside.
“It wasn’t premeditated, Olivia and I,” Felix said. He was looking somewhere in the distance, eyes misty.
“It never occurred for me a single second that it was,” Immanuel said.
“We were in a bar on New Aglia,” he continued on like he hadn’t heard. “We weren’t with the Project long. Just a year. Estelle thought maybe teenagers, you know, when the Third Gen babies started turning up, maybe we’d be young enough? But it didn’t work out and when she realized, she let us go. I think she regretted that, later.” Long musician’s fingers traced over the rim of the glass cupped in his hands. A reflexive flicker of a smile. “She offered to take the children, if we had any. Not kidnapping; she’d pay what she could. That’s what I mean when I say it wasn’t premeditated. We didn’t have you on purpose, for that.”
“You want a pat on the head for not having a baby to sell to be experimented on? Or for deciding not to sell your child to be experimented on after I was born?” Immanuel said.
His father flinched. “No. No, I just... I want you to know, before you go. I did try to do right by you, Manuelito. I tried so, so hard to look after you and I know I wasn’t any good at it but I love you more than anything. That place did something to me. I would’ve been a good father, before.”
Immanuel squeezed his eyes shut against the disappointment. He hardly knew what he’d wanted, anyway: his father had apologized every way it was possible to apologize over the years and it had never changed a thing.
“I’ve always known that,” he said tightly. “I love you, too. Maybe try doing right by yourself for once.”
****
His father’s presence hung over everything. Maybe it would have been easier if he had returned to find him years dead and the Antiquery gutted and transformed into a cafe or a bookshop or anything that didn’t make him feel like he was being haunted by Felix’s ghost. Or by his own ghost: the ledger books in his own writing were still stacked where he’d left them on the shelves in the back, though they never used to save records for more than a year past. An old pair of his shoes sat in the closet, the soles peeling off. He’d meant to sell them but had never got around to the repairs.
Immanuel dropped out of his crouch onto the floor, shoes still held loosely in his hand. For a moment he thought this was how his father must have felt, this crushing inescapable thing he could not even name because there was nothing outside of it, and why shouldn’t he crawl into the bottom of a bottle and lay down there to die? But he knew there was life outside of this terrible self-indulgent misery because he had lived it, and he would go on living it. He would not be like his father.
Immanuel cleaned. In the Antiquery it was an endless job, one he woke before artificial dawn to start and didn’t finish until long into the shipboard night. When he slept — a handful of hours snatched here and there — it was on the floor of the back room beside his father’s empty bed, still rumpled from the last night he had spent there.
A full inventory, first, difficult because there was no overspill space in the Antiquery to pull everything off the shelves and start new. Listed what to keep and what to throw out, a feat in itself, packing everything and buying space on a shuttle to the Scrapyard, the asteroid X-35 which had been consigned to serve as Capeira’s trash heap.
Then hours in his undershirt and crew coveralls sorting through the accumulated crust of possessions that had drifted into the store over the years. (When he’d lived on Capeira, he would never have dressed in an undershirt and coveralls where anyone could see, but now he clomped down the ladder in his work boots and dusty work clothes to man the register when customers wandered in and climbed right back up afterwards). He washed everything that could be washed and polished everything that could be polished and greased everything that needed to be greased. He combed through Felix’s patchy logbooks, consolidating them with Thomasin’s records when they met three times a week in her office at the back of the bar.
By the end of the third week, he had two years worth of books written out in neat, triple-checked columns. By the end of the sixth, the Antiquery’s hallways were clear for the first time since it opened. By the end of the eighth, the shelves were scrubbed clean, organized, re-priced.
On the first day of his ninth week on Capeira, he packed his cast-offs onto the Scuttler and paid the passenger fee for a one-way trip to the Scrapyard. The pilot offered a raised eyebrow and a muttered warning that whatever Immanuel’s business was, he better keep it off the ship and it was standing room only so if he fell over and cracked his head don’t go suing now, understand? Immanuel said that he did, got a firm grip on the cargo netting, and kept his feet.
****
No one on the Way Station would sell them a ship. Or rather, no one on the Way Station had a ship to sell, because no one came to the Way Station with a ship other than the one they planned to use to get off the Way Station. Visit Esparda was the constant refrain when they asked, or, if whoever they were speaking to had been on Esparda themselves recently, shame you can’t visit Esparda.
“If one more person tells me to visit fucking Esparda, I won’t be responsible for my actions,” Josephine said over dinner, stabbing at her undersized greenhouse potatoes with her left hand, her right bandaged where an exploding spark plug had charred the skin off her palm. “We need to go somewhere else.”
Her fork skidded against the plate and she groaned, tired and irritable and she loved Dita and Kit but Stel, she wished she’d ended up with anyone else. Neither of them were planners, and if they had one more argument over how often to clean their shared room, someone was going out the airlock. Pointedly, she added, “That means I’m taking suggestions for where we’re going.”
“Somewhere that sells ships,” Dita said helpfully.
Kit, deciding now was the right time to develop a sense of humour, signed, “Esparda?”
It was Cavill who solved it for them, orbiting through the docking bay as Josephine and Kit took their shift hauling cargo and Dita manned the first aid station, a mind numbing job for which, she reminded them at every available opportunity, she was grossly overqualified. (“Are you overqualified for paying rent, too?” Josephine snapped the third time it happened, perilously close to the end of her rope). She was still grit-toothed and bristling when she looked up from the box she had been hauling on board a Swimmer-class micro-freighter to find him leaned against the sleek blue paintwork, peering at her from beneath the brim of his floral-print hat.
“Heard you kids are looking for a ship,” he said.
“Before you make whatever suggestion you’re about to make, factor in that we’re completely fucking broke.”
“Eh?” Cavill said, eyes wide in mock surprise. “Well, that’d put you better than half the folks here, I’d say. Never stopped any one of ‘em from getting a boat before.”
“It’s stopping us now,” Josephine disagreed. Spotting her supervisor prowling closer, she lugged the crate the rest of the way into the cargo hold and strapped it in place.
“Word is, there’s a new shipyard out by one of Capeira’s scrappers. Cheap-like, but you’re real clever getting ‘em in the air when they rightly shouldn’t be flying.” He offered a broad wink, smile ticking up to show the gap between his front teeth. “I’ll put in a word with my friend out that way. Should the brokeness not be a deterrent.”
Which was how they found themselves back on Capeira, having paid their way scrubbing toilets on the next passenger shuttle leaving from the Way Station. Josephine never much liked the place: the proximity to Sibalt made her stomach clench the same way it did when her eye caught on Everlin on the nav chart, not to mention Thomasin Marino was fucking unsettling. Still, Josephine knew enough to make nice with the company boss, and she settled across the desk and allowed herself to be examined by Marino’s flat shark eyes.
“Which side?” she asked without preamble. Josephine blinked, puzzled, until her brain caught up and she realized what she was asking, and what language she was asking in — she hadn’t spoken Draiser in years, but when she answered, it was like slipping on an old coat.
“Rebellion. You?”
Marino stood, shaking Josephine’s hand so firmly she lost feeling in her fingers. Marino’s own fingers were decorated with an impressive array of rings. “It’s not often I meet a comrade these days. Cavill tells me you have business?”
“We’re broke and looking for a ship,” Josephine said frankly. “He said something about the scrappers?”
“Oh, Felix’s boy’s new venture,” Marino said. “You’ve worked with him before. I’d say he might give you a friends and family discount, but Manny Salvador would charge you for walking on his floor and call it a cleaning fee if he could get away with it.”
“Manny?” Josephine said, delighted. “Is Sacha around, or he’s off at the scrappers, too?”
“I have three Sashas sitting out front, take your pick,” Marino said. “Unless you’re looking for a specific one?”
“Pavlik.”
Marino’s eyes sharpened. “No, and if he so much as thinks of stepping foot on my station, he’s going to wish I threw him out the airlock when I had the chance.”
Josephine groaned. “Of fucking course. I’ll make sure he stays clear. Thanks for your help.”
****
Another shuttle, this one standing room only, sharing space with the compressed blocks of trash headed for the scrappers. Whatever business Immanuel had started, he’d need to get transport set up or it wouldn’t last long. Kit kept his arms tucked in close, trying to avoid touching anything, shirt pulled up over his nose. He let out a sharp, disapproving noise when Josephine knelt to examine a promising glint of scrap metal.
Five hours later — three of those spent unloading the ship to cover the transpo cost, an exchange they’d agreed to under the table with the pilot whose job it would be ordinarily — they trooped sweating into the airlock of the admin station, shucked off their spacesuits, took their turns under the single anemic shower in the changing room, and emerged into the office looking vaguely adjacent to respectable.
Hunched over the single desk at the far end, Immanuel glanced up at the sound of the door and he didn’t look surprised, but he did look — bad. The kind of bad Sacha would never usually have allowed, pale and tired the way that came from weeks without sleep instead of days. His hair had grown out almost to his shoulders, and free from the usual slicked-back hold, it had begun to curl. He was wearing crew coveralls in public, which was practically a sign of the apocalypse.
“Heya, Manny,” Josephine called, going for cheerful and basically managing it. Immanuel scowled, pushing himself to his feet.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Marino did,” Josephine said. “Speaking of, do we get to meet Papa Salvador? Seems like he’s popular around these parts.”
“He’s dead,” Immanuel said flatly, brushing past them to poke his head into the next room and exchange a handful of muffled, clipped words with the pilot, who was lounging at the break table with his feet up.
“He’d be awfully young for it,” Dita said when he came back. “Was it anything interest— Ow!” Josephine stomped on her foot. “With all due respect, of course, I’m sure he was a great person. Or a terrible person? I kind of got the impression you two had a complicated relationship, not to speak badly of the dead, unless that’d be cathartic for you? A person of some description who you’re feeling emotions about, my condolences, et cetera.”
“It depends. Is suicide interesting?” Immanuel asked in the same flat tone. He stood angled away from them, fingers clenched on his arms.
Dita made a thoughtful noise. “I mean, not usually, but you’re right about it depends — say he shot himself, it’d be interesting that he pulled it off on a station with the firearm regulations, but the actual wound, that’s nothing special unless it’s like, new artillery or something, we’ve all seen gunshot wounds. I’ve seen it done with some pretty nifty poisons in my time, though. Did he have access to any chemicals — oh, or any plant matter from the outers, that’d be something.”
“Dita, shut the fuck up,” Josephine said. “Both of you, just wait out there and don’t fucking say anything until I tell you. For fuck’s sake.”
“Sorry for your loss,” Kit signed, plainly relieved to be free of comforting duties as he hurried towards the door. Dita followed more reluctantly, glancing back at Immanuel like she expected him to launch into a monologue about the fascinating poison his father had used to kill himself.
“When did it happen?” Josephine asked softly, guiding Immanuel back to the chair.
A tense shrug. “Nearly three months ago, now. I came back because of it. Didn’t even have a feeling, just caught a ship to Capeira thinking... I don’t fucking know. When Thomasin told me, it was like I’d known from the start.”
Josephine hesitated. “Did you ask Sacha not to...” he must have, with those bags under his eyes. “It’s okay either way.”
“I didn’t even like him,” Immanuel said bitterly. He met her eyes, glittery dark and hard. Pushed his hands through his tangled hair. “Awful of me, isn’t it? He’s got to have been, what? Top three best parents, between all of us on the crew? Never hit me, never raised his voice. Never told me I’d fucked up even when I did. I knew he loved me. I knew he was sorry. And I can’t...” The hands tightened in his hair. “All I needed from him was to be a fucking person.”
Josephine crouched beside his chair, resting her hand on his knee. “My grandfather raised me, did I ever tell you that? Him and my mom, once she got back from fighting in the war — they’d both been federals and they were fucking terrified of anything happening to me or my little brother. Just all these rules about everything, shutting us in the basement at every noise, and I fucking hated it.
“The one time I got hit, I was... eleven or twelve, maybe? Out past curfew doing whatever the fuck, I don’t remember, but when I got home in the morning Granda grabbed me by the arm and I’d never seen him like that, just boiling, must’ve had the bruise here for a week—” she clapped her free hand against her bicep. “And he bent me over the table and went at me with his belt ‘til I was bleeding, it was fucking nasty. Still got the marks now. Sometimes I think I only joined the rebellion to get away from him. My brother had a letter smuggled across enemy lines when he died and I was fucking inconsolable. Couldn’t let anyone know I had family on the other side but I was losing it, just falling apart. Fucked a mission and nearly got us all killed.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Immanuel asked scratchily.
“Stel, I don’t fucking know,” Josephine said. “Sorry. It’s complicated, I guess is my point. You love someone and they fuck you up when they’re alive and then they fuck you up worse when they’re dead.” She tapped him on the knee. “Seriously, it’s okay to let Sacha knock you out. At least for one night, you look like you’re about to keel over. Actually, where is your worse half?”
“He said he makes me unhappy.”
Josephine took a moment to parse that. “...And you told him that’s stupid.” Immanuel said nothing. “Manny.”
“Don’t call me that.” Then, quieter, “We don’t owe each other anything. He can do what he wants.”
“Okay,” Josephine said. She settled her hand back on his knee, squeezed once. “Now, speaking of owing — I hear you’ve got a ship?”
****
Vani hadn’t been sleeping. She’d always been a light sleeper — You’re my last line of defence, Vannery, her mother would say, but really she meant first and only; they both knew they couldn’t trust anyone except each other — but she’d still slept, stretched out on her cot in the room next to her mother’s. She could identify everyone in the Project a room away with her eyes closed, and besides, she needed to keep herself sharp; used to be able to drift off any time, any place, stockpiling together odd stretches of minutes.
She could feel herself getting stupider, the stretches between thought and action growing longer; the blank static of words on the tip of her tongue, the moments she paused in the middle of a task and could not remember what she had been doing. Every time she began to drift off, she jerked awake, convinced she’d felt one of the heartbeats stutter.
“Who cares if you live, anyway?” she snapped, she couldn’t say how many days in, shaking Peterson by the front of his shirt. He blinked hazily at her. “Should just let you moulder away here. Fertilizer for the forest, not like it couldn’t use any of that — couldn’t not use it?” She tried to untangle the double negative, gave up, pressed on. “Anyway. Not like you’re understanding any of this, are you? All empty upstairs.”
She tapped her knuckles against his forehead and then, feeling him begin to shiver, hiked his body temperature up a couple of degrees, clumsily, couldn’t tell if his skin was too hot under her hand or if it was her own chilled skin making difference so stark; rolled to her feet and felt something in her ankle pull, cast around for the threat before she realized it was her own body’s betrayal, unwieldy where it had always obeyed her perfectly before. Vani squinted into the trees, propped upright on her elbows. A cormarten honked in the distance. Hunting: that would make everything better. They needed food, her and her little dolls.
She set off, lopsided on her twinging ankle. Muddy senses blurred like eyes gunky from sleep, the cormarten she should have been able to fly into her waiting arms with on more effort than snapping its neck in her hand just out of reach, fingertips brushing a mug on a too-high shelf. The cormarten’s heart beat fluttery fast. The strong, tense muscles of its wings ready to take flight. She reached for it gently, gently, a hand cupped around its heart. A single hard squeeze: a merciful death because she was a good person, or at least she could be a good person if she decided, which was the same thing when it came down to it, really. She bent at the waist to pluck if off the forest floor, balanced on her good ankle, swept her thumb through the soft feathers, over the sharp point of the beak. Golden eyes stared blankly into her own.
The five points of human warmth resolved slowly in her mind as she retraced her steps to the camp. Four at rest (cool, weak pulse, slow with sleep) and one — one not where it was supposed to be, one up and walking, scratched through the skin and limping but limping already to the edge of her range, past it. If she left her sleepers here they would die, unfed and unwarmed, and if she let her runner go, she would die out there in the forest — because it was Janus; of course, it was always harder to keep a hold on other Healers and besides, she never could stand to listen to Vani.
“Why are you making this hard for me?” If there was a whining edge to her voice, no one was around to hear it. She plopped down cross-legged, skinned and dressed the cormarten so quickly she slit her finger open along with the bird, got her sleepers awake and fed and huddled around the fire in their makeshift shelter. “Keep yourselves alive a minute,” she told them. Left the knife, on second thought, and set out.
Janus had been clumsy: when she’d left, she punched a hole through the forest, leaving fresh dangling branches and a staggering trail of deep-set footsteps in her wake. She’d been moving fast — tripped, a deep hand print where she’d caught herself, a scuff where she’d been on her knees. Kept going. The trees petered out, giving way to rocky shale. Vani ranged out over the shale, but it all looked the same: rocks upon rocks upon rocks. She was blind out here. When she stretched her mind she felt nothing but the scuttling of insects, something distant and cold and slippery — a fish, maybe. Nothing human so far as the eye could see.
Silence fell in the cockpit as Aggie screamed through the artificial atmosphere, Rico in the pilot’s seat, Avram the co-pilot, Vani and Bo in the jump seats behind them. Ordinarily Avram would never have allowed his crew to land on strange planet at less than half capacity — but the Oasis wasn’t really a strange planet, just a familiar one reconstructed.
They landed on a rocky dirt strip carved out between the thick covering of trees, barely wide enough for the small shuttle. Rico hunched over the controls, bringing them down in halting starts and stops and finally a lurching jolt. The cockpit breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“I could have done better than that,” Vani said.
“Fuck off,” Rico said.
“Good behaviour, folks,” Avram reminded them. “This is our new home.” There was a general murmur of yes, sir. “Environmental reading?”
Vani peered out the window. “There’s people standing outside alive, so...”
There were maybe ten of them, hanging back by the treeline. They looked well-kept enough, in the scrubby sort of way people on the outer planets generally did; a little dusty, a little weather-beaten, dressed in a mishmash of hand-sewn furs and faded manufactures.
“Give ‘em to me anyway,” Avram said.
“All within range, Captain,” Rico said.
The first taste of their new home was nipping cold and windy. The air tasted faintly metallic, the way it often did on terraformed planets, the sky a flat slate grey. A figure stepped forward to meet them, grey-haired and weathered and vaguely familiar.
“Dr. Dhillon?”
“Ashta,” the doctor said, stepping forward to shake his head. Quietly, body angled as if to keep the others from hearing, they asked, “is the Director with you? Anyone else?”
“This is all of us,” Avram said.
“Did you have any news of her? The Director?” Dhillon pressed.
Avram shook his head tightly. “Let’s see about getting my people settled,” he said. “Might as well start getting to know each other if we’re going to be spending time.”
“Dr. McNamara, show them around, please,” Dhillon said. No one moved. The strangers eyed Vani and Bo in a nervous, wild animal way, gaze skittering towards them then away like they were afraid they’d pounce if they made eye contact.
“Rico.” He’d prefer to have his second for this conversation, but he’d prefer it even more if Vani waited at least an hour after arriving on their new home to start an incident.
“Yessir.” Showing off their superior discipline too, which wasn’t something he could often say about his crew. After a long moment during which no one seemed to want to be the first to move, McNamara — a small, freckly, red-haired type who reminded him briefly of Sacha — started off down a narrow dirt path between the trees. Rico fell in half a step behind her and Vani and Bo a pace back from them. The rest of Dhillon’s people followed a moment later. Avram watched until they vanished into the treeline.
“I can’t have your people treating mine like they’re dangerous.”
“They are dangerous,” Dhillon said. They turned, jerking their head for him to follow, and led him to a narrow stone structure at the edge of the clearing. He hadn’t noticed it before, tucked as it was into the trees. The doctor pulled out a key and unlocked the heavy bolt on the door.
Inside it was cramped but neat, a handful of books packed onto shelves built into the walls, a scarred wooden desk running the whole length of the room cluttered with sheafs of synthetic paper and a single Lifebloom-branded tablet. Dr. Dhillon took the only chair; Avram sat on the desk.
“This is our only interplanetary hookup,” they said, gesturing to the tablet. “No one else is allowed in here unsupervised.”
“Everyone from the Project is dangerous. Isn’t the point of this place that they don’t have to be treated like they are?”
“Sure,” Dhillon said. “But there’s a reason you’re in charge of the crew and they aren’t, isn’t there?”
“Of course there’s a reason, but it’s not that they’re Third Gen and I’m Second, and it’s not that they were subjects at the Project and I was staff. It just... shook out this way.”
“Sure,” Dhillon repeated. They met his eyes, elbows propped on the table, fists loose beneath their chin. They looked tired. “Rico was a captain on Everlin, wasn’t she? And you were a daycare worker. Seems like an odd way for things to have shaken out.”
“I won’t have my crew disrespected,” Avram said.
“And I won’t have mine threatened.” Dr. Dhillon pressed their forehead into their hand, staring down at the scarred surface of the desk. “I’m happy you’re here. Really. It’s just...” the hand tugged through their long hair, pulled it out of its tail then swept it back up. “What happened with the director? You didn’t want to say it in front of the others.”
Really he hadn’t wanted to say it in front of Vani, but he wasn’t about to admit that. “She was caught by the Vetec authorities. They held the trial pretty quick afterwards. I think they were just looking to wrap the whole thing up and, well, she made a good scapegoat.”
“I don’t know that ‘scapegoat’ applies in this case,” Dr. Dhillon said, thin. “Jesus.”
“I’m sorry,” said Avram, though he wasn’t, except for Vani, who’d deserved a better mother and a less traumatic loss.
“She went to find you,” Dr. Dhillon said, still quiet. “Well, not you. Her daughter. She thought we needed... it’s been difficult, here. There have been some — sentiments.” They cleared their throat. “Anyway. I’m sure you’ve had your own problems.”
Unless the director had developed an entirely new personality in the past five years, he doubted very much that it was sentiment that had sent Estelle Dawson searching for her daughter. “It hasn’t been easy, of course. We argue, same as any crew.”
“The director’s instructions were clear: welcome you if you show up. So that’s what I’m doing. She says — said — we can handle it. Absorb the extra population.”
Avram blinked at the abrupt change in topic. He wasn’t as good with figures as Immanuel or Rico, but Aspenhold was all mines and farms and he knew what it meant to live on a knife’s edge, where even four extra mouths to feed stretched resources to their limit. He also knew what type of environment produced that kind of desperation, and the Oasis, cold and rocky though it was, wasn’t that: things grew here, and well.
“She’s right,” he said.
“We need to eat,” Dr. Dhillon said sharply.
“You’ve got good soil here; things can grow — look at those trees, that’s not just from terraforming. This was a growing planet to start off, we’ve just got to work with it a little. I’ll take a look.” He hadn’t been a farmer in something like fifteen years, but soon enough Dr. Dhillon would remember they were in charge now and perfectly free to throw his crew out no matter what the director had instructed them, so he wasn’t about to say it. “We can help you. Please.”
****
The Oasis was tiny freezing shithole of a place, and it had killed her mother. Vani knew this instinctively, the way she imagined Immanuel knew things: these were the selfish dregs of the Project. Their eyes followed her with unconcealed malice and she made no effort to conceal her own malice in return. Dhillon’s cohort was three other Second Gen doctors — McNamara, Tsung, and Tanner —, some squirrelly First Gen woman from the admin side, a Soother, a Healer, two Intuits (low-level Soothers, Dita would have said, but Dita wasn’t there), and one of Rico’s former Second Gen groupies.
Her mother had kept these dregs of the Project alive, it was plain, and it must have been the weight of their incompetence that forced her to leave, to go looking for Vani: even after all these years, her mother knew she’d be loyal. Vani swelled with pride at the thought.
But they had pushed her to it. Weaponized their helplessness, knowing it would leave the Director no other choice. Found some way to call the constables on her and get her arrested, probably. No, certainly: mother didn’t make mistakes; she would never have been caught unless someone she trusted had conspired against her. Vani wouldn’t judge her for trusting Dr. Dhillon, she vowed. They had known each other for years and besides mother’s competence and fitness to lead were so blindingly obvious that only an idiot would seek to oust her — and as a rational person herself, mother expected others to act rationally as well. It was hardly her fault when they didn’t.
Vani lingered at the edges, waiting, waiting for the captain or Rico to notice but the days passed and they did not; attached themselves to Dhillon’s side instead, the trusting idiots. They had never liked mother in the first place. Weren’t even sad she was gone, just pretended to placate Vani. Afraid of her. Which they should be, she reminded herself fiercely, late one night as she lay huddled in her bunk. She could kill them easy as snapping her fingers.
McNamara had put her at the far end of the bunkhouse, a long wood building with slit windows and a dying vegetable garden out back. Three empty rooms between her and everyone else like that would protect them at all; she felt each of their heartbeats clear as if they stood next to her, all she had to do was squeeze — but she wouldn’t, couldn’t do that to Bo or Avram or even Rico; she was loyal, even when they weren’t being loyal back, even when — And Dhillon’s people were a danger to hers. Keeping Vani apart from everyone. Shouldn’t have even been possible in so small a place; they’d tried it often enough back on the ships when they were all jumpy-frustrated-restless but here she hadn’t seen the others in days. When was the last time she hadn’t seen any of them in days? When she’d lost sight of her mother, she died.
At night she listened to the hiss, hiss, hiss of the vents; searched along the wall to find them in the light of day but she found the walls smooth. Poisoning her so she woke groggy, heavy-limbed, pinned to the bed.
“I don’t think there’s vents here?” Bo said quietly when she crept into his room — alone, too, at the opposite end. Half stripped and scrubbed, furniture hauled out to paint the walls and paper over the windows, preparing a proper recalibration room now they had a proper Soother. He was sitting in the lower bunk, legs crunched in because when he lay flat his ankles hung off the end.
“They’re Project doctors,” Vani said. Bo nodded, but he didn’t understand. “They’re Project doctors,” Vani repeated. Her mother had hired them, she meant, and if her mother hired them they were the best, there was no telling what they could do.
“But I don’t think they’d know how to... without any vents. I mean. Dita was a Project doctor and she wasn’t even in allowed in the engine room.”
“You don’t understand,” Vani snarled. She pushed to her feet, pacing the length of the room.
“I guess not,” Bo said. He turned to face her, head ducked to avoid hitting it on the top bunk. He looked too big in the space, the way he did everywhere. “Do you want me to, maybe...” he gestured at the other half of the room with its white paint.
“No!”
“It might be good, though, just to, you know, reset, a little?” He was standing now, drawing the white curtain across the centre of the room. “Take a seat, here—” he cast around, pulled over an upturned box. “Take a deep breath. Feel your body.” He was using his Soother voice.
“They fucking ordered you to recalibrate me?” Vani said, so furious she was choking on it, so furious it poured out of her sticky on her face, locked her hands in claws, nails pressing in skin and she reached out, out, wrapped around Bo, squeezed until his ribs creaked, and then past him, around the whole building, and she would show them, she would make them bleed for what they’d done. Lungs crushed to pulp, die gasping.
“Vani.” No push to it at all but the quiet steadiness startled her and she stumbled back, dropped her hold and to the floor, hands pressed to wood, splinters in her fingers, cold earth bleeding up, up; they really weren’t engineers after all, no idea how to insulate. She wanted to laugh, and sleep, and be done with it all. She wanted her mother.
****
“You need to do something about her,” Dhillon said.
“I know.” They were in the office again, Avram and the doctor. Vani had given him what amounted to a nip, a brief flash of full-body ache, like a fever, and a little worse to Bo — the two of them always played rougher with each other than he’d like — but he’d come into the dining hall afterwards to find Dr. Tanner crumpled to her knees by the wall, spitting blood. “For what it’s worth, she wasn’t trying to kill them. She just likes scaring people a little, when they first meet, so they know she can take care of herself if they try anything.” He smiled at the doctor, ducking to meet their eyes. “That’s what living together is, isn’t it? We learn to put up with each other.”
“Not with this.”
Once Vani had tried to teach Kit to dance, puppeting his limbs. He’d overcome his dislike of touch long enough to claw at her face with his nails, then took scissors to her favourite dress, a flowing, flower-print thing she’d made herself on the old sewing machine. Everyone had taken sides because there was nothing his crew liked more than to argue (besides Bo, who had done his level best to fade into the wall in a state of teary paralysis) and there was a solid half month where Avram was convinced it would be that, of all things, that tore them apart permanently. But they’d gotten over it in the end. His were a forgiving bunch, deep down.
“We owe it to her,” Avram said.
“I don’t agree with everything that happened at the Project.” Dhillon slumped back, dragging a hand through their hair. “I knew every child raised at Lifebloom, Healer or otherwise. So did you. They aren’t like her.”
“Because she’s stronger than they are. The other Healers can’t do what she does, so they weren’t treated the way she was. It’s instinctive, when they’re young, and she was the first born into the Project so no one knew how to help her.”
“Your nursery wasn’t there to help her, you mean,” Dhillon said.
“I’ll take the credit if you’re giving it.” Avram grinned. “No, I’m joking. But you have to admit it was different for her than it was for kids coming up even five years later.”
“You’re right, she is stronger than the rest,” Dhillon said. “Which is why I owe it to my people to make sure they won’t be attacked by someone they can’t defend against, but kicking her out would be tantamount to handing her over to Peterson on a silver platter.”
Avram snapped upright. “Peterson?” It was a common name, but — “you mean, from the Outer Station? He’s on the Oasis?” If Avram thought about the man at all, he would have assumed he’d been arrested after they stole the Starside. He hadn’t exactly been at the top of the list of people Avram had hoped to find here, but survivors were survivors.
“Him and four others. We had some... disagreements. The Director asked them to leave.”
“Leave into the wilderness,” Avram said.
“They had more than enough chance to change their behaviour.”
“So this is a death sentence planet,” Avram said. Catching Dhillon’s expression, “no, it is. I’ve lived all sorts of places with all sorts of people. You send someone out to live in the forest who doesn’t know how, chances are they’re going to wind up dead.”
He watched their face. He hadn’t known the doctor well in the Project days — they’d toured the nursery once or twice when he was on the Central Station, but he’d never been present for the examinations themselves and when there were child-rearing instructions to be dispersed, they came from the Director — but they wore their feelings openly in a way a leader shouldn’t. Now their eyes shifted away from his, mouth pressing into a thin line. Deciding whether to lie.
“Or not,” Avram said slowly. “You know him and his people are still out there. You think they’re dangerous.”
“Peterson? God, no. I think dissent is dangerous. I didn’t agree with the director on much, but we agreed about that.”
Considering his crew had spent five years bickering and disobeying his orders and then mutinied, he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on arguing against that. Still. “No dissent isn’t exactly ideal, either.”
“Is that your argument for keeping your girl?”
“It’s my argument for not ejecting our people to die in the wilderness,” he said. “Which makes it an argument for keeping Vani, if you want to see it that way.”
“What she did wasn’t dissent, it was attempted murder,” Dhillon said, sounding so profoundly tired. “Vannery isn’t staying here. That’s the end of it.”
****
Three weeks before they lost the Seabird, on a night Vani had cockpit duty and Bo was alone in their room caught in the hazy twilight between wake and sleep, Sacha crawled into his bunk. He’d returned from their last visit to port with a split lip, a chip in his front tooth, and a glittering, manic look in his eyes that set Bo’s nerves on edge as he roved restlessly around the ship, picking fights with anyone who crossed his path.
Bo, for his part, took to his room. He had a sinking feeling Avram would order him to soothe it out of him, and Sacha would object, and Bo would be caught in the middle. The nervy hollow in his stomach — a permanent feature at the best of times — made itself known. It would be so easy stop the whole thing, like tamping a blanket over a fire. But Bo tried to be a good person, in spite of his nature.
He’d never developed the preternatural ability to sense when someone was coming near, the way the others had: until he came to the Project, the doctors told him, everyone within a hundred meters simply fell under his influence. Robbed of their free will. Violated.
He didn’t hear Sacha until he dropped onto the bunk beside him, was the point, wriggling briskly under the blankets and then equally briskly under Bo’s arm to press against his body. Like this, he could feel the patter of his heart.
“Do you want me to...” He held his arm up, hovering awkwardly, afraid of crushing him.
Sacha tugged it over his shoulders, shaking his head. “Just crush it out of me.” He sounded impatient, and beneath that, worn thin. Bo knew what it was to be tired of his own mind. They were the same, him and Sacha, in some ways, growing up alone with nothing to protect them but their gifts. He rolled them both on their sides so they were back to front — Sacha allowed it; Bo had more than a foot and at least a hundred pounds on him but he was immovable when he wanted to be — and wrapped his arms around him, firm but gentle, until he settled. Bo’s eyes stung, throat going tight. He felt so often unwieldy, like everything in the world was made of glass about to shatter under his hands. And here was Sacha, who knew as well as anyone how easily Bo could hurt him, trusting him not to. Bo kept thinking about it, after Sacha had betrayed them. How maybe he’d scared him, or planet the seed without even knowing it. No wonder eyes followed him warily on the Oasis.
On the first day, after Dr. McNamara showed them around the bunkhouse, Dr. Dhillon had pulled him aside by the vegetable plots.
“Good to see you, Kerra,” they said perfunctorily. “Plenty of work for you once we get set up.” Bo did not point out that the changes they were making to his assigned room — the scrubbed white walls, the covered windows — had never been necessary for his work. The longer it took, he longer it would be, selfishly, before he had to do it. The doctor met his eyes. “And keep Dawson under control.”
Protests crowded into his mouth — that Vani was her own person, that he’d never convinced her to do a thing she didn’t want to a day in his life, that he only took orders from his captain — but what came out was a quiet, “Yes, sir.”
There was a lonely sort of rhythm to life on the Oasis. It was not the first time Bo had lived hungry and cold, but the way life here revolved around food and warmth was distinct from the way it had revolved around food and warmth when he was a child or on the ships. There, it was simply a matter of access: food existed, if only they could get to it.
On the Oasis, there was no food beyond what they hunted or grew, and they were not good at hunting and growing it. The soil was tangled with tree roots and excavated in hard-won fits and starts. Dr. Dhillon’s group had managed to clear a dusty rectangular plot overgrown with weeds and a handful of wilting leaves that Avram claimed were making a valiant effort at being strawberries.
But really Bo didn’t see much of the captain, who spent his days huddled in conversation with Dr. Dhillon, or of Rico, who led the hunting parties and came home most nights with a handful of cormartens. These were sturdy and abundant birds, speckled white and brown with gleaming, curved black beaks and clear ice-blue eyes, about the size of an adult cat. Bo watched them waddle through the garden plots as he worked, shooing them away gently when they went for the maybe-someday-strawberries and earning a hard peck for his trouble.
More skittish were the bronze and green sparlings that flitted through the trees. There were familiar animals, too — squirrels and rats and possums, the types that always seemed to end up on the wooded planets. Rats were not just a product of the planet-side sailing age, Avram always reminded them as they loaded the ship, and they wouldn’t make pleasant guests sealed together on a ship, not to mention (Dita would interject at this point) the damage they would cause to the already fragile terraformed environments they were visiting. A handful of others were seemingly deliberate imports, furry things with beaver or fox as their base. Creating a new ecosystem from the ground up isn’t as easy as it looks, Dita said. She didn’t disapprove of terroforming, she’d explained, so much as she had a professional rivalry with the planetary engineers — it’s a hundred different jobs in a trench coat and they think they’re better than everyone else because they do them all badly, and they’re paid out the ass to do it.
On the Oasis, there was no one to tell him anything, besides Vani with her roving, suspicious eyes and Dr. Tanner’s terse instructions when she and Cyril came in to paint his room, move this and shift that, reach that top part over there — no, not like that, it’s lumpy, you’ll have to scrape it off and try again, no, not now, when it’s dry.
More and more, he found himself lingering in the garden, not actually doing anything (he felt bad about that, distantly, with Avram crouched across the yard with a shovel in hand, trying to wrench something edible out of the dirt through sheer force of will.) He watched the animals and wished to be rendered down to something so simple and instinctive, something that could just act and not be judged for it. If he touched the plants, he would ruin them.
****
Vani knew the moment the captain stepped into her room. He never knocked before entering, maybe a product of living on a ship full of soldiers or psychics; no reason to announce his presence when they could already sense it, or maybe the fundamental belief that they were an extension of himself, to intrude upon as he wished — and he didn’t now, either, leaving the door open behind him as he leaned against the frame.
“Let’s take a walk, hon.”
He held out his arm and she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, like the heroine of a period drama being escorted to a ball, except it was cold enough that they were both dressed in flannel-lined coveralls under knit sweaters in the style of penny-pinching space crews everywhere keeping the temperature on board a generous handful of degrees below comfortable.
Avram’s skin was too dark to flush from the cold, but there was frost in his beard and she could feel it radiating off his clothes. She dug her nails into his arm, tweaked at the skin with her mind when the pressure got lost in the layers of fabric.
Outside, they passed Bo, cross-legged in the dirt, Rico patrolling the edge of the encampment with one of Dhillon’s Third Gen lackeys. Walked out into the forest, but not far.
“I have a job for you, Vani,” he said. “There’s another group out here; I don’t know where. They had some kind of falling out with the main party and they haven’t been in contact in months. Dr. Dhillon isn’t keen on sharing details when we don’t know each other well, and to be honest I’m not sure how much they know in the first place.” Vani dug her nails in harder, heat crackling beneath her skin. The end sped towards her with all the brutal efficiency of a ship pulling in to dock. “It’s just recon,” the captain said in his gentling voice. She would not hurt him, but oh, how she wanted to, just then. “Find out where they are, how many there are. Don’t make contact.”
“You’re kicking me out,” she said blankly.
“No, of course not,” the captain said, sounding so surprised she almost believed him. “I’m asking because you’re the best one for the job. I need someone I trust to do this for me.”
“You don’t want me around the others.” She wrenched her hand off his arm, backed up a pace, feet planted and ready to fight.
“I think it would do you all good to have a break from each other.”
“You’re gonna get murdered,” Vani said, petulant to her own ears. But now she’d said it, she was imagining it played out behind her eyelids: Dhillon, vengeful, creeping into their rooms at night, knife in hand — no, they weren’t the type, one of their lackeys would do it. The Soother who didn’t like Bo, or the other Healer.
“That’s what you’re going to find out if we need to worry about preventing,” Avram said. Now the gentle tone had a frayed edge. “And Bo will be here to keep us safe. It’s an order, Vani, not a discussion.”
****
There was a time in Rico’s life when Dr. Dhillon had known her better than anyone. Twice a week, the doctor came to find her and take her to Exam Room 3 off the med bay, a long, rectangular space with the drawings Rico and the other children made while Dhillon waited for their results hung up on the walls. She’d been three or four years old and Dhillon probably younger than Rico was now, and when they were done with their tests they’d hold out shiny green bowl full of stickers and plastic toys and novelty erasers that never actually erased anything. A prize for our miracle girl for being so brave, they’d say, and Rico would puff up proud because she never cried or complained, not like some of the others who came back to class red-eyed and sniffling. (They got prizes, too, which four-year-old Rico thought was unfair; they hadn’t been brave at all) and crouched down in front of her, hands on her shoulders, and made her promise to come tell her right away if she found she could do anything special, anything other people couldn’t do.
She brought Dr. Dhillon accomplishments like a cat dragging in mice: look, I can run faster than anyone else in class, I can count to 100 and then do it again backwards (she couldn’t). Dhillon would smile and say oh, wow, good job! And then Vani came along, and it was abruptly clear the thing Dhillon was looking for was something Rico could never offer.
As Rico got older, as the Third Gen kids started to outnumber the Second and Dhillon rose in the ranks, she saw them less and less. Rico became the control group (a head poked around the doorway as she wrote her exams, control’s turn now, crooking a finger in her direction). McNamara examined her as diligently as Dhillon, but by age six, Rico had, quite simply, become uninteresting. Of course, there were advantages to being uninteresting — namely, that the person who had known her best as a child did not seem to remember her as an adult. She had never seen much appeal in spending her adulthood in the company of people who had known her when she was young and stupid.
She couldn’t say why she was thinking of this when she marched into Dr. Dhillon’s office-shack late one afternoon, mud-caked and stiff from a morning hunting western beaverfox — a squat, furry, semi-aquatic thing that didn’t particularly resemble either of its namesakes — and checking the empty snares. Avram had been tense and quiet when she tracked him down afterwards, conscious of the eyes watching, and when she finished her report, he’d sent her to deliver it again to Dhillon.
“Fine,” she’d snapped, irritated. Splitting loyalty between the new arrivals and the old the way they were was an operational risk they should be minimizing; establish either Avram or Dhillon as the leader, put the other as a clearly subordinate but trusted lieutenant, make sure patrols and room assignments contained members of both groups, as far as possible with their limited numbers.
It was the chain of command that kept a small, hungry, isolated group together and away from each other’s throats. It was why she had ceded the captaincy to Avram, back at the beginning, but this time she found herself strangely unwilling to be the voice of reason. It was Dhillon’s planet, and in the end, it would be their command.
But until then, Avram was her commanding officer, and her reports to Dhillon a courtesy free of all the usual obligations that came with addressing one’s superior. Or at least that was how she justified it when she strode into Dhillon’s office with a perfunctory knock and mud dripping off her clothes and said, without preamble, “You may not have noticed this, but we’re fucked.”
Dhillon startled, but when they looked up, they had managed to compose their expression into one of bland interest. “Could you elaborate on that?”
“We don’t have enough food. We’re not going to sustain ourselves with what we have here, and it’s not going to get better.”
“Captain Ashta has been making good progress on the garden plots,” Dhillon said. The title was clearly for Rico’s benefit.
“He’s not a fucking magician,” Rico said.
“I can do coin tricks,” Avram offered, stepping into the room. “I make a mean balloon animal. I can almost juggle. What are we talking about?”
“How’s the growing, Captain?”
Avram slipped into his role without breaking stride. They hadn’t talked about it, but they knew each other well enough that they didn’t need to: he leaned against the wall, arms loosely crossed, considering. “Slow,” he said eventually. “Good soil, but not for this. You’ve done an admirable job with what you’ve been dealt, Doctor, but there’s only so much you can do with a losing hand, you know?”
“Bargain basement terraforming,” Rico supplied.
“We’re only a couple of days from the Way Station,” Avram said. “I know you’ve traded with them before.”
“That was when the director was around,” Dhillon said flatly.
“The Oasis has probably the highest concentration of scientific intellect in the quadrant — in the galaxy, maybe,” Avram said, playing up the aw, shucks, I’m just a dumb backcountry hick accent the way he did when he wanted people to feel like they were smarter than him. Rico suppressed a grimace. “Look, I know four extra mouths is a strain, but can’t we be a help, too? None of us would ever be able to understand the science behind a place like this in a million years, but we can keep everyone fed and calm and protected while you or any of the other doctors are away on supply runs.”
Dr. Dhillon pushed to their feet. “That’s out of the question.”
“Doctor—”
“You saw what happened to the director out there,” Dhillon said.
“She was arrested in the Vetec,” Avram said.
“And you were arrested in the Kelter.”
The captain winced, performatively sheepish. “We’d run into some issues with a trading partner. We didn’t deliver on a job the way she was hoping, and she decided the reward money was worth more than our services as smugglers.”
“She runs the Kelter. The only reason the Vetec boat wasn’t blasted out of the sky the minute it crossed the border was because she told her people to let it be. There’s no Vetec ships out here that aren’t scrap metal. That’s why you chose this place, isn’t it?” Rico said.
“I know what happens to people like us out there,” Dhillon said darkly.
Avram and Rico traded glances. “What happens to people like us out there?” he asked.
“Third Gen are killed every day. Attacked in the streets, torn to pieces, left out to rot, and Second Gen associated with them don’t do much better.”
“My crew and I have been all over,” Avram said. “I’m not saying it’s easy, but none of us have been murdered in the streets.”
“I know what happened to your crew.”
Outside, Avram sank back against a tree, sliding to the ground with his legs sprawled out in front of him. He knocked his head back, grimacing when his hair caught in the bark. “I sent Vani to look for the other group,” he said.
Rico sat down across from him, kicking the edge of her boot against his, not particularly gently. “All due respect, Captain, but why the fuck did you do that?”
“We need to find out more about them, and she can’t stay here.” He dragged a hand over his locs, peering up at the forest canopy. “Her gift works just as well on animals as it does on people, and she knows how to cook. She has matches and warm clothes; she’ll be okay.”
“It’s not Vani I’m worried about,” Rico said. “It’s us. She’s furious, and you’ve just handed her over to the enemy.”
“They’re not the enemy, we don’t know them. Besides, it’s recon. She won’t talk to them, and if she gets into trouble, you know she can handle herself better than anyone.”
“How many members of your crew need to stab you in the back before you realize they are not as loyal to you as you are to them? Because apparently it’s more than three.”
“Everyone Vani has ever known has been afraid of her,” Avram said. “Everyone she’s ever known believes she’s dangerous and unstable.”
“Because she is,” Rico said, flexing her once-broken hand.
“Everyone’s dangerous,” Avram said, sounding very tired. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Treat someone like a rabid dog and they’ll act like one.”
“Treat a rabid dog like it won’t bite and it’ll give you rabies,” Rico countered.
“Vani’s gonna give me rabies?” Avram said, an edge of humour to his tone. They both considered the metaphor. “Or she’ll turn me into a Healer? Like a Third Gen vampire situation?”
They watched each other in silence. Snow drifted down, settling on the frozen dirt. “What’s she going to do when she gets back?” Rico asked.
Avram cracked a grin. “Turn us into vampires, obviously. Everyone she loves being immortal and getting to gruesomely murder people? She’d be all for it.”
Rico kicked his foot again. Somewhere over head, a sparling let out its piercing, musical cry. “So Vani gets her information, and she comes back here to report to you, and then what? She lives among people who treat her like a rabid dog?”
“They’ll get used to her.” Avram’s problem, she thought, was that he loved people so deeply, he couldn’t imagine anyone not doing the same. His eyes flicked down from the canopy, meeting hers. “You did. You’re worried.”
For a long moment, Rico said nothing. She was thinking of Sibalt, which she usually tried not to do, how she and Vani woke early most mornings, how they jogged together as the sky blazed pink with sunrise, taking turns choosing the route but they always stopped at the stream on the way back, and Vani would wade in up to her ankles, fold herself down on the rocks where it ran shallow and lie on her back, letting the water wash over her while Rico waited on the bank.
“It’ll only get worse,” she said. “It’s a summer/winter cycle here. It’ll get cold, they’ll be hungry, looking for someone to blame. We need that someone not to be us.”
“We need it not to be anyone,” Avram said. He levelled her a look that meant he knew exactly what she was thinking and didn’t approve.
“There’s no version of this where Peterson contributes anything useful, besides acting as a lightning rod.”
“We don’t kill people because they’re not useful.”
Rico shrugged. “Self-defence. And I’m not suggesting we kill him — all destroying the lightning rod would do is turn something else into the lightning rod. Which, again, would be us.”
“We don’t need to go around assigning blame, we need food.”
Rico sighed. “I agree, but unless Dhillon pulls their head out of their ass, we don’t have it.”
They lapsed back into silence. “You know, I still have my communicator,” Avram said.
****
Avram had brought them all out camping once, on Sibalt, a mildly disastrous, bug-bitten experience on account of none of them having been in the wilderness before besides him and Dita. Gemma had loved it, though, submitting to the bug spray and the sunscreen and the wide-brimmed hat with her nose scrunched up before haring off into the trees. She’d been such a cheerfully disobedient child, and that day Vani had been so jealous she’d felt sick with it.
On the Oasis, the flies were the size of Vani’s little finger to the first joint, buzzing around in thick clouds and leaving red welts where they landed, and she would’ve killed someone for bug spray. Alone besides all the fucking flies, she crouched on the forest floor and cursed them at the top of her lungs, and then the captain and Rico too, for good measure. When she’d finished informing the sparlings that they were a pair of miserable fucking assholes and her best friend in the world was a cowardly, backstabbing little shit and they (the sparlings) weren’t much better not to mention the fucking flies, she pulled her gloves off with her teeth, tucked them into her pockets, pressed her bare hands into the cool, damp soil, and closed her eyes.
Life in space came in tidy, discreet bundles: here is a person. Here is another person. On the worse stations and ports, here is a rat, a colony of mice; once, inexplicably, a cow. Planet-side, it was an overlapping tangled riot. The hard pinpricks of insects, alien in a way she’d never had the patience to untangle; the weightless hollow-boned birds; the familiar mammalian warmth. Avram and Rico together, Bo alone, sure as she knew the placement of her own limbs. The anonymous huddle of the others. She tweaked Avram on the hand — still alive, you jackass — and searched outwards.
Five bodies. Distant, but not as distant as she would have expected. Not hikers and definitely not hunters, all tender-bruised and overstretched, blood vessels constricted at the skin, empty-stomached and shivering. Not on the brink of death, but within stepping distance. She opened her mouth to say so and then realized there was no one to say it to.
“Okay, get on with it,” she said to herself instead. Scrubbed the dirt off her hands against her coveralls, tucked her hands back into her gloves and then into her pockets, half her mind on the ground and half on the animal shapes in her mind. A burrow of foxes up ahead, she might stop there later when it got to be lunchtime, paralyze the legs and slit the throat. There was a certain visceral satisfaction to doing it that way. To act as an animal and not pretend otherwise, feel the blood drain, the body spasm and still.
Her foot caught and she stumbled, knee cracking against the forest floor. She’d gotten used to having someone spot her when she did this, what a fucking disgrace. Her mother would — well, her mother wouldn’t. Her mother was dead in empty space.
Scraped and irritable, knee stinging, Vani realized she’d expected someone to catch her, to tease her about those assassin reflexes and she’d shove back, tussling in the dirt until the captain broke it up, smiling. Sacha would try to bargain for the scraped knee in exchange for a week of dish duty — four days — three but he’d only lay his healing hands after she got it cleaned, and if she was feeling charitable, she’d agree, because washing dishes sucked way more than a scraped knee and they both knew it. Vani was just nice like that.
Despite the flies and the dense tangle of forest, she had only been walking for a couple of hours when she stumbled across the first signs that someone had been living here, and living badly. Crushed up vegetation, dangling branches, something that was probably supposed to be a snare. The five not quite on the brink of death but might want to take a couple big steps back from the cliff edge mammalian hotspots glowed nearby, but if they had seen or heard her already, they’d made no sign of it, muscles remaining limp and un-tensed. Vani snapped off one of the dangling branches and knocked it against the nearest tree trunk. A sparling shrieked indignantly above, taking off in a flutter of wings.
“Hey!” she called. “I know you’re hiding somewhere here and I’m already in a shit mood so you better get yourselves out here before I start looking, because you are not going to like me when I start looking.” And there it was, thready heartbeats picking up, slow breath, trying to hide. She fished around for a limb, held it in the air for a handful of seconds, and let go. It fell limply back into the dirt.
“For fuck’s sake,” Vani said, irritated. Her feet hurt. Every square inch of skin had been bitten by insects. Her captain had consigned her to busywork because she didn’t instantly trust the people who’d gotten her mother killed like a fucking psychopath. “I’m entitled to bitch, okay?” she said to the world at large. “I’m having a bad time.” But you aren’t entitled to let it interfere with your work, and you certainly aren’t allowed to let it interfere with mine, mother would tell her. “Well, you’re dead and I’m alive, so...” She swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat. “My fucking fault, anyway. I should have...” she couldn’t think of what she should have done. Something, instead of lying there useless while they killed her mother. Protecting her had been her only job.
She stepped forward and her foot hit something soft and yielding. Glancing down, she found that the soft, yielding thing was Dr. Marco Morales, with his sparse little moustache and spiky black hair and wide staring eyes that blinked sluggishly up at her when she trod on his fingers. He was slumped down in the hollow at the base of a tree, like he’d sat down to rest and simply never got up again.
“Vannery,” he said in a thin rasp of a voice, fingers twitching to grasp at the hem of her coveralls.
Vani brought her heel down on his fingers again, this time deliberately. “Marco.”
She wandered past him, keeping a metaphorical eye on his pulse with a vague curiosity, wondering if it would stutter to a stop. But he was still alive when she reached the clearing and the sad listing shack built in it, and when she ducked her head inside — she’d like to maintain her chance at a hasty exit at the first sign it was about to collapse, thank you very much — to find the others huddled there, clinging narrowly to life.
“You’re bad at this,” Vani informed them, not a little smugly. Tapping experimentally at the walls, she chanced stepping inside and knelt by the first soon-to-be-corpse, which belonged to Peterson. His mousy hair had thinned a little, as had the rest of his body. She’d never particularly liked him, but she’d never particularly disliked him, either, being that his perpetual failure to actually do anything meant he’d never been much of a threat. Beside him were two of Rico’s Second Gen lackeys — long-faced, dark-eyed Imran, and Cally with her riot of curls so blond they were almost white — and another Healer, Janus, who unlike Vani really had been trained in healing and spent her time kissing paper cuts better in the infirmary.
“I’m gonna tell the captain you’re dead,” she said. “Which will be true by the time I get back, by the way.”
She did not tell the captain they were dead. Instead, she hauled them out of the sagging shack, cleared a space on the forest floor for the fire — “See, I do listen to instructions,” she told the open air as a proxy for Rico who’d once accused her of trying to burn down Sibalt’s fields — and puppeteered the limp bodies to sit around it, more or less beyond singeing range.
Decently confident none of them were about to slump forward into the fire, Vani let them go and turned her attention towards the forest animals. She caught two cormartens; froze the wings, sent them plummeting to earth which got them dead easy enough, and a dapple brown fox-type thing, got them all skinned and sliced and roasted, gentled the meat through her captives’ shrunken hungry stomachs so they didn’t die from the shock of food after so long without, see how polite she could be.
She ate her own portion with her hands, walked until she found the water. Washed her hands, eyes closed as she felt it run over her fingers, aching cold, barely above freezing. She thought of Sibalt, of the runs she used to go on with Rico, how they never fought then even when they did the rest of the time. How she’d allowed herself to believe they would live there forever, the nine of them and the kids, and forge something better for them than they’d had for themselves. But it hadn’t lasted. Nothing ever did.
It went like this: Vani woke dreary sick and cold, fighting her way out of a thick fog. She breathed steady and shallow, held herself still in place. Cold metal against her wrists, a stiff tugging pull at her shoulders. A murmur of voices, layered: a crowd, heard as though from the other side of a thick pane of glass. Another voice, louder, silencing the rest. Sound her mind could not parse into words. Her eyes slitted open to a blurred patina of colour, bronze and gold and flesh. Her fingers flexed, slowly, curled around cold metal. A figure to her left. Bo: she would recognize him in pitch dark and silence, as a wavering outline in the corner of her eye. She shuffled her foot to knock against his and he knocked back. A figure to her right. This one she did not know in pitch dark and silence, or even in blurred vision. She rolled her head to the side in a limp flop that did not betray her consciousness, blinked at the ruddy short hair, the wan, olive skin, the compact wiry frame so much like her own. Her voice whispered, “Mama?”
****
Estelle Dawson’s daughter was born, miraculous, on what the calendar announced was a spring day aboard the Edward Vannery Center for Human Advancement. Mr. Vannery himself had been laid to rest not quite three years earlier in the vast starry expanse, victim of circumstances which were unfortunate but not precisely clear to the survivors, and which had left Estelle Dawson in a notably stronger position than she had occupied prior. She cradled the squalling, wrinkled infant in her arms and named it in his honour.
There was something strange about the child from the beginning. The nurse placed her on her mother’s chest with hands that were red and cracked. Another’s tooth tumbled from his mouth when he dressed her. A third found of a flush of deep purple bruising where she had held the child in her arms.
Soon, the nurses who tended mother and daughter donned thick jackets and long gloves, trading shifts and muttering prayers outside the door. It made no difference: the girl left her fingerprints on everything she touched. I’ve certainly never had a problem, Estelle said when they raised the issue, tentatively, and bandaged her hurts in private. Vannery was hers, special, a monster of her own making: not the first Third Generation child born to the bloodied survivors of the original Project, a number which counted Estelle herself, but the first born on the Central Station, after a handful of healthy but disappointing Second Gen toddlers.
No one else can survive you, she whispered into her daughter’s wispy soft hair, blood beading along the new cracks in her lips, peering into eyes of deep ocean blue. My little monster, just mine.
****
When Vannery Dawson was three years old, she burst a boy’s heart like a ripe tomato crushed in a fist. She was a round, rosy-cheeked thing, deceptively quick, forever under foot and impossible to keep still when her teachers mustered up the courage to try. A little centre of gravity around which the other children orbited, fascinated and skittish. She babbled cheerily and hugged with her whole body and plucked toys from unresisting hands, fingers gone limp around her prize. And like any child, she explored: strange objects in her mouth, hands on everything she could touch. It was merely an unfortunate quirk of fate that Vannery Dawson could get her hands on more than anyone else could hope to touch. (Monster, meet cage).
****
The day May Kerra died, no one told her son. It happened in the usual way, they said in low, wry tones, meaning a long tumble down a lightless shaft, or suffocation by poison gas seeping up from the fissures, or a collapse somewhere too deep to feel: she simply vanished into the mines one morning, and when she and her scout team failed to return after three days, they were pronounced dead. So it goes.
The boy was a frightened, wide-eyed thing. A hungry, lonely thing, a cold thing, a desperate thing. A void into which affection was poured and absorbed, absorbed, absorbed, giving nothing in return, so they said: the neighbours brought him food, clothes, blankets, toys. Passersby veered towards him, pulled by sudden conviction, to pet his hair and lead him by the hand when he was lost, and when he was gone they could not explain the impulse.
The boy did not work; attended school sporadically and unregistered, lingering at the back and turned in assignments as he pleased. The teachers never thought to question it until he was home, and the police and the child services agents who came to investigate all turned back on the threshold.
It came to an end, of course, as all things do. Bo Kerra grew, and with him his control: it no longer seeped from his skin like water from cloth but was crafted and honed, carved into shape by careful words. Maybe it was his age, or his size — this boy that towered over everyone by the time he hit twelve — that threw up a barrier against what had come so naturally before: no one cared for a strange, looming adolescent as they did a wide-eyed child. And so the noose tightened. The boy did not read minds, they realized, merely influenced them. This made him a danger, but that could be overcome; a frightened twelve-year-old without anyone in the world to defend him.
When the first squad of troopers came to his door, he sent them away. When the second squad of troopers came to his door, he sent them away, as well. When the third squad of troopers came to his door, he let them take him.
****
“I looked for you,” Estelle Dawson said, and her voice was just as Vani remembered it, quiet and raspy like she smoked, though she never had. She reached for her daughter, cuffs catching at her wrists, and Vani reached back. Their fingertips brushed. “I never stopped.”
“Neither did I,” Vani said, half-promise, half-plea, all lie. It had not been a purposeful abandonment so much as the simple weathering of time and obligation. She had gone days without thinking of her mother, towards the end. Weeks. Months. Vast, unforgivable stretches of time. She used to miss her like a phantom limb.
****
The doctors filed in, one after the other. Bo watched huddled at the far end of a narrow wire-frame bed in the concrete windowless room where they had locked him, an overgrown child with his knees to his chest and his hands clenched in the blankets. The doctors wore gloves and strange coin-sized devices clipped at their pockets that emitted a sound he could not quite hear but pulsed as a stabbing ache in his ears and watched him with sharp, assessing eyes.
“Let me go home,” he said, and they would move towards the door only to freeze and turn back, eyes crinkling in uncanny smiles.
“We have people outside the room to tell us when you’re doing your thing,” one of them explained. She had introduced herself as Dr. Mansour.
“Am I in trouble?” Bo asked. He had never been in trouble before; had never faced more than fleeting, redirected anger.
Dr. Mansour shook her head. “You’re a marvel.”
Only being a marvel was not such a good thing, it turned out. The doctors packed him onto a ship — a tiny, terrifying, rattling thing with bunks too small for his body and needle pricks each morning and evening when the force of his panic set the pilot’s hands trembling on the controls. Psychic runoff, the doctors told him. Artificial empathy.
“You’re not inherently dangerous,” Dr. Mansour said. But Bo hadn’t thought himself dangerous at all.
“I never hurt anyone,” he said, and Dr. Mansour’s head tilted to the side like a curious bird.
“I’ll leave that one to the philosophers, I think.”
“I never hurt anyone,” he repeated, plaintive. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“That’s life, kid,” Dr. Mansour said. She reached out and gave him an abortive pat on the shoulder with her fingertips.
He did not understand. He had never hit anyone, had never stolen, or shouted. He’d never needed to: he might be lonely, and afraid, and different in some way he did not understand and could not excise from himself — was not certain he wanted to excise from himself — but he had, at least, been a good person. Only it turned out there was an entire secret set of rules, and who was to say there weren’t others? That he wouldn’t spend his life carving scratches into everything he touched without even realizing it.
Later, when the ship had docked and Bo had been led through narrow, blazing white halls, up a tight, winding staircase to a perfectly round office with windows floor-to-ceiling the whole way around, when he had peered through to the station beyond with his back plastered against the central wall, the Director levelled him a look that was almost soft.
“Take your hand off the till,” she said, when the whole of it had come tumbling from him. “I’ll steer you right.”
****
“Focus. What do you feel?” Her mother’s voice came from above her, somewhere. Vani lay flat on the ground, tile pressing cold and sharp into her shoulder blades, along her spine, the back of her skull. Her mother stood above her and some distance away, a spot of radiating heat. The thrumming pulse of blood, the steady churn of organs. She had spent months combing over anatomy books, listening to the medics who spoke over the intercom of her little whitewashed room. And it was boring, worse even than spelling and grammar combined, only her mother said she needed to learn so she could control herself and hurt people only when she meant to hurt them, and if she did not she would live and die in this room. Wield your powers as a scalpel, not some hammer you’re swinging around like a maniac.
The rat scurried around the edge of the room, a second, smaller point of heat. The patter of its heart, the thrum of blood, the steady churn of organs, not so different from a person writ small. Tendons flexed and pumped in its tiny legs.
Eyes squeezed closed, hands clasped on her chest, she reached out and held them still, back left first, then back right. The rat squeaked, frantic, paws scrabbling at the floor, and she stilled the vocal cords, the front legs, toe by toe. Bent the legs, carefully, mechanically, lost track of one and it kicked, scrambling forward, before she wrestled it under control once more. It was deceptively difficult to get the legs all moving in concert; she kept the back two frozen and dragged it along by the front paws instead. Released it with a gust of breath, muscles unclenching. Opened her eyes.
In the corner of the room, her mother hummed, glancing down at her watch. “Tolerable. Again.”
Three months later — three years into her confinement — Vani emerged from her cell and into the general population. Rico was holding court: she had grown tall and wiry, sharp-eyed, adolescent authority worn easily as an old coat. She walked straight-backed, chin up, always flanked by two or three Second Gen. The defectives all protecting each other, Vani taunted, and Rico gave her a black eye before Vani shattered her knuckled from the inside out. (It’s your own fault, Rico would tell her years later, side by side washing dishes in the Seabird’s galley, Rico slow and methodical, Vani griping at her to hurry up. You’re the one that broke my fucking hand.)
Rico was calm and serious. She was the one the their instructors put in charge when they left the classroom. She always beat Vani in sparring, when Vani could have left her in tiny bloody bits on the floor if she were allowed. She longed, on the mats, as her body grew taller and sturdier and capable, just once to fight for real, to push to the edge of her gift the way she pushed to the edge of her straining muscles and have someone push back.
When she was fifteen years old and Rico seventeen, her rival climbed aboard a shuttle headed for Everlin. By the end of the year, the head of the mercenary corps was a permanent fixture, feet kicked up on her mother’s desk in his fatigues and boots, offering more money than the Project had seen since the days of Edward Vannery for more where that came from, that girl is something else, I swear, talk of cadet programs and trial placements and honing the edge. And the war stories.
Her mother had never been a talker, not even with Vani who saw her as no one else did; not as a person instead of a monster but as a monster to match her own monstrosity, who held her when she was a child and hurt everything she touched, who never told her she was too young to understand but let her read the charts over her shoulders and expected her to keep up.
But she talked to this stranger, eyes gleaming and consonants rolling like marbles on her tongue. (Vani would hear it again, later, on the tongues of sailors in the Aglia district spaceports and realize she had never known her mother to speak in her real accent). War stories, traded back and forth into the late hours of artificial night.
“...Popped his head out to grab this locket, of all things; he’d dropped it during the charge, and it’s instant, the kind of quick on the draw that makes you wish you’d had the other side’s training instead, right through his eye.” Her mother tapped her left eyebrow, twice. “Left this perfect neat little hole right through his head, it was amazing.”
The general let out a big belly laugh at that, tipping himself backwards onto the back legs of his chair. Vani, forgotten where she stood against the back wall, did not pop his eye out of its socket in a perfect neat little hole through his head, or shatter his kneecaps, or even tip him backwards out of the chair. She just clenched her hands and hitched her mouth up into a smile of her own.
****
On the last night of her life, Estelle Dawson spoke in her own accent. Time had dulled it all the same, or maybe made it familiar where it had been strange. Made her mother strange where she had been familiar. In the cool, concrete cell where they had been marched after the trial, all three together in a strange mercy, she wrapped her hand around her daughter’s wrist, fingers cool and thin, bones stark, too near the surface.
Her thumb skimmed over the crisp lines of her tattoos, stretching down both arms, over the curve of her shoulders. Bo had spent hours on the designs and hours more inking them into her skin, first with an ad hoc stick-and-poke, then with a proper tattoo gun. The hands reached up to tangle in her hair, coming free of its braid in auburn tangles down her back. Her mother wrapped a lock around her finger, snagging on the chains, and tugged.
“No wonder they found you, peacocking around like this,” she said. “You’re an embarrassment.”
****
In seven years at Project Lifebloom, Bo had grown tall and broad and soft-spoken, with a voice so low it vanished into the background rumble of the machinery. He spent time mostly by himself; the other subjects watched him with a wary sort of curiosity, while the doctors spoke to him only to ask probing questions and deliver orders, which he clung to like a life raft.
They had set up a room for him off the med bay, whitewashed and sound-proof, and when they sent subjects to him he sat them down on the bed and placed a hand on the crown of their heads and washed away all their fear and anger and doubt.
“You keep harmony on this station,” the Director assured him when she came to visit at irregular intervals; sometimes once or twice a year and others several times in a week, a notepad balanced on her knees.
It was like this that he met the Director’s daughter. Vani Dawson was four or five years his junior, with hands and feet too large for her body and a wide mouth that always seemed to be smiling. They were watching him work, that day, tucked into the back corner — the Director had brought a chair for herself, but her daughter sprawled on the floor, watching with undisguised curiosity. The boy on his table — a pale, curly-haired Hollow named Mordecai — had twitched with an instinctive jolt of fear before Bo soothed it out of him. It was always more difficult with the Director in the room, the way it set the subjects nervous, but he did not protest.
Mordecai’s eyes went hazy, then fluttered closed. His breath stuttered, hitched, smoothed out into the even cadence of sleep though he was still awake and upright. When Bo was a child, before everything started to go wrong, he spent his summers at the outdoor pool: Sindarin went dry-hot half the year, all scraggly narrow trees and scrubby ground cover. The pool had been dug by hand, a crooked little thing paved in murderously slick stones. Bo had never learned to swim, but he sat at the edge with his feet in the water as the sun climbed over the horizon. Each morning, the groundskeeper worked around him, silently, skimming stray leaves and dead insects out of the water in precise, methodical sweeps of his net, swabbing the bottom and sides clean.
“Fresh for the new day,” Bo said when he had finished. Mordecai came back to himself in slow blinks, slipping off the table clumsy and mute. He left without acknowledging the Director. Bo said, “I’m sorry, sir, he’s not quite himself yet.”
The Director glanced up from her notes. “This blocks pain?” she asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Trial it in the med bay, then. We’re having a stamina problem with our Hollows.”
Bo was, truthfully, not entirely sure what she wanted from him, but he said, “Yes, sir,” and resigned himself to the panicked task of figuring it out, and to the panicked task of enduring his punishment when he failed. (He could make her tell him, of course, and smooth away her ire as easily as he had smoothed away Mordecai’s fear, felt the urge pushing against the backs of his teeth, but he had never used his gift on the Director and he would not start now.)
She left but Vannery stayed. She hopped to her feet, surprisingly graceful despite her gangly limbs, and boosted herself onto the table, where she perched cross-legged. Was he supposed to say something to her? Had she come in for recalibration? He did not want to recalibrate the Director’s daughter, but why else would she be here?
He reached out a hand, awkwardly hovering in the air between them. The smile quirked wider. Her eyes glittered: they were a strange colour, very dark blue, or maybe it was just the light. Bo set his hand on the crown of her head. Warmth bled up through the soft shorn fringe of her hair into his palm. She blinked when he began, swayed backwards, and then her posture snapped tight, her eyes perfectly clear when they fixed on his. A strange shiver ran through his body. He tried to pull away but his arm stayed locked in place. His chest heaved, heart battering against his ribs — and slowed, though he was still terrified, slowed like a hand had wrapped around it and squeezed it rhythmically to beat.
“Come on then,” Vannery said. “Let’s spar.”
****
They were two monsters in the world, Vani told him. Why not be monsters together?
****
Vani did not believe in soulmates or destiny or even particularly in love, though she supposed she had it, a tangled tender fleshy thing, tacky with drying blood that glued her to her mother. But there was something that burned in her that burned in Bo Kerra, too, like looking at herself through a warped mirror. He was strange and twitchy and shy, which made it all the more fun to pick at him. He never argued out loud, but she delighted in pressing until the Soother lilt entered his voice and the rush of power tickled at the edge of her senses, same as the beat of his heart.
Neither of them won, deliciously. Vani could always sense when Bo used his gift too well for it to work, but he had the force of a hurricane behind him where Vani had years of meticulous study and scalpel precision. He wouldn’t let her teach him to throw a punch or fight his way out of a hold, but he’d grapple with her in his clumsy, over-sized way and the sheer mass of him made him something resembling a decent opponent. The others gave them a wide berth, subjects and doctors and staff: they were fit for no one’s company but one another, and the thought glowed.
****
The shuttle to the Outer Station docked early in the shipboard morning, and when it launched back into open space not an hour later, Vani and Bo were on board. The explanation had been clipped, delivered by Director Dawson and not mother, but both expected to be obeyed. She had been off-station — her and the deputy and three of the doctors — and they were still dressed in their suits and ties for the occasion, eyes bruised tired. Vani’s mother stood at the front of the group, the others spread out behind her. Something had happened here, and she could not piece together what. She tapped her fingers against the side of her leg: should I? And her mother tapped back, No.
“You have your orders,” she said out loud. “Dismissed.”
****
Bo would not learn he killed a man until nearly two years after it happened. Mordecai slumped forward on the hard plastic med bay chair, head pillowed on his arms, lolling sideways. He was still breathing when Bo coaxed him upright and into bed. He could still feel him, alive. And when he did not see him again after, well, he didn’t see plenty of people. It wasn’t his job to ask questions.
He was in the garden when it happened. The captain stormed across the Sibalt grassland with a face like thunder, and it occurred to him, distantly, that he had never seen the man angry. He grabbed Bo by the elbow fingers digging hard into flesh and hauled him away, into the treeline, past the eyeline of the ship. Of the children. They stood there face-to-face on the soft earth — as face-to-face as Bo came with anyone; Avram had to tilt his head up to meet his eyes, which he did, dead on and furious.
“Tell me,” he said, voice strained. “Tell me what you were thinking. Help me understand why the fuck you thought this was a good idea.”
“I’m sorry, captain,” he said immediately, reflexively. A wild panic struck up in his chest. He tried to think back over everything he had done in the past... how long? Day? Week? Month? Life? But his mind had been filled with a blank static.
“After what happened to Mordecai, I can’t believe you would—” the captain raked his free hand through his hair. “Because Sacha asked you? He’s a fucking sixteen-year-old child, have a fucking spine.”
“Oh,” he said, breathless. He hadn’t thought there was any harm in it. The boy was making a living with what he had available to him, and Bo was making it a little easier — like putting on gloves to work in the yard, Sacha had said, an equitable exchange of goods and services though Vani insisted he was under-charging but he thought it was worth it to watch the boy go quiet and calm and relaxed.
“If I ever hear you’ve done something like this again, you’re out. Clear?”
“Yes, Captain.”
****
On the Outer Station, they adopted a stray. The boy was tall and very thin, Third Gen, with a riot of non-regulation curly dark hair. Rico and her posse — now diminished by the war, but with the addition of a Second Gen Everlin girl whose purpose Vani could not discern — never seemed to notice him lurking in the corners, and Vani found that her own eyes had a tendency to skate over him even when she could feel the warm solidity of his presence in the room with him. He did not speak but gestured sharply, with intent, and seemed to understand approximately half of what they said to him, as long as they said it slowly and without any background noise.
“We could teach him sign language?” Bo suggested, only neither of them knew sign language so instead they gestured until gestures coalesced into words. Sometimes, the boy — they named him Kit, because he was quiet and wary as a feral cat, according to Bo, who unlike Vani had met some — and soon enough he began responding to their improvised signs with signs of his own, only a word or two at a time. Explain was his favourite, and he watched them with clear, unblinking blue-grey eyes as they did.
“He’s not that interesting,” Vani snapped one evening, when Bo came back late to the room they had claimed for themselves at the back of the station, and he stammered and turned pink and still kept on visiting Kit, though he’d never understand them the way they understood each other.
“I could take him apart,” she suggested later. Tapped her fingers on the side of her head. “Fix whatever’s gone strange up there. You could try, for that matter. Make a little contest of it, we haven’t had one of those in a while.”
“Leave him alone,” Bo said, steel under velvet.
Vani’s mouth ticked up in an instinctive smile. “Why should I?”
“Leave him alone,” Bo repeated. And really, Kit wouldn’t be half as entertaining if he was normal, would he? An entertaining project while it lasted but with decidedly disappointing results.
“Oh, that hits like a sledgehammer,” she said, circling to the side. Bo was strong, but he was predictable: he would make her tired next, a bone-deep exhausted calm best avoided by staying on her feet and moving. She reached behind her for the desk, fingers closed on one of Bo’s long, flexible rulers — lately he’d taken to seeing Peterson off with a list of art supplies packed into the back of his mind — and tucked it up her sleeve. She flicked it out, lightning-quick, snapping against his upper arm.
“Vani, I’m not playing. Leave him alone,” Bo said.
She flicked him again. Froze two of his fingers in a teasing opening volley. “Give me a fight, then.”
“It’s not a game.” Bo sounded teary. “If you don’t leave him alone, I won’t talk to you ever again.”
“Who will you talk to instead? Your new toy who can’t string two words together? All these people here? You’ll spend your life never knowing if you’re mind-fucking them into being your friend, but not me. No one wants you, Bo, except me. They’re all afraid of you.” Softer, taking his hand in hers, “just like they’re afraid me. Just the two of us monsters.”
****
On the Starside, Kit went blank-eyed and tense, flinching at every sound — and there was a lot of sound. Even Bo could hardly stand it, sometimes: thirteen children and seven adults packed into a ship designed to hold half that number at a stretch, all hungry and tired and in need of a bath. On the last night on the Outer Station (Bo only ever thought of it as the last night when he thought of it at all, which he tried not to), Rico stood at the door with her service rifle trained on her own friends. The children go first, she’d said, and she was not the only one with a weapon but no one wanted to fire inside the station and she was at the door to their only shuttle while they were across the room, too far to make it if the cold vacuum of space came rushing in. Avram next, to look after the children, then the doctor (“Technically I’m a pathologist, not a physician or a nurse,” she’d said. “Not that I’m turning down the free ride away from prison but, you know, fair warning that the field medicine here is gonna be a little on the... ad hoc side.”) Josephine, to keep the ship afloat; Rico to protect them. He and Vani should have stayed behind: they were neither vulnerable nor essential. But he said, “please,” and Rico stepped aside for them to pass.
The first week, they lived on nutrient bars and dried fruit forgotten in the cupboards and the stale, slightly metallic water in the tank. The next, Bo and Vani took the shuttle to Aldamere, returning with two water tanks and as many crates of dry rations as they could cram into the shuttle while Bo held the station calm in haphazard swathes. By the time they made it back to the Starside, he was trembling faintly.
“Come on, it was fun, wasn’t it?” Vani said, grinning, but he didn’t miss the way her shoulders eased when Aldamere faded into a distant dot on the nav screen.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Avram said, dark bags under his eyes and an uneven growth of beard on his face, a hand clasped tight on each of their shoulders. Somewhere in the background, one of the children let out a piercing, wavering cry. Avram’s eyebrows inched together. His smile took on a stiff, pained edge. He spun on his heel and marched off towards the noise.
Bo gentled the children, when he could; kept them calm and sleeping through the nights, dulled the ache of hunger when there wasn’t enough to eat. And they were so small, with tiny, fragile limbs and huge eyes. Bo never wrestled with them the way Vani did — she’d toss them up in the air and flip them upside-down and race around the cargo bay with as many of them hanging off her as she could manage —, terrified they would bruise and shatter under his touch, but when he laid down in his makeshift bunk, they curled around him like cats in the sun.
****
“Are you afraid?” her mother asked. Even now, at the end, there was only one acceptable answer.
“No.”
****
The idea came upon her like madness in the dead of night. She hadn’t cut her hair since they left the Project — there was hardly any time to keep a neat buzz between the pack of children and the clandestine resupply trips — but she had noticed when it grew out snarled and awkward over her ears, and she noticed when it made it to her chin. She had never had long hair before; no one at the Project had: they had it sheared down every two weeks like clockwork. It had grown out thick and auburn, wavy when washed and lank after too many days without, tugging at her scalp whenever she wore it up until Josephine showed her how to brush and gather it into a tail. For the first time in her life, she looked in the mirror and saw someone who looked the way she did on purpose, rather than through the pre-destiny of orders and genetics.
Which was maybe why, when she woke abruptly with her heart pounding in her chest and her skin feeling three sizes too small, she poked Bo awake beside her and said, “I want you to tattoo something on me.” She was not thinking of the wanted posters when she said it, or her mother’s cool grey eyes, but of herself, not the version that lay in the dark on a nowhere planet with a rat’s nest of hair she had barely learned to tame but the version in her head, who smiled wide with metal glinting at her ears and her mouth and ink trailing bright over her arms.
(At least, she would think, years later, I am dying as myself.)
“I certainly hope that wasn’t because of me,” Aaron said, stepping into the room.
“Oh, no,” Sacha said, blinking back to himself. He eased into a grin, pulling out the chair for his guest. “I can promise you we’ve been on the rocks long before you came into the picture, all of...” he made a show of checking his watch, “half an hour ago. And how serendipitous that you showed up just as the position opened! As business partner, that is; Immanuel and I are — were — quite a few other things to each other that are outside your purview.”
“Because I’m your uncle?” Aaron asked. He looked relaxed, lounged back in the chair. This had honestly not occurred to Sacha — his persistent lack of biological family had left him with an admittedly vague idea of what behaviour was and was not expected, as well as a tendency to forget that most people did have it. It was simply that Immanuel had taken a part of Sacha and swapped it for a part of himself, and he was not especially eager to make the exchange again.
“Something like that.”
They sized each other up. Aaron was not — Sacha was almost certain — Mordecai Metzger’s actual uncle, but another ginger-haired man taking advantage of a quirk of genetics. Original Mordecai’s family had had plenty of time to make themselves known during the original investigation, after all, and had chosen not to. The question, then, was whether he knew — or suspected — that Sacha was also an imposter. In all probability it was a case of like recognizing like between them, the way those inclined to lie identified the tendency in others where their more honest counterparts did not.
“I hardly remember anything before the Project,” Sacha said softly. “Just flashes, emotions. Could you tell me about them? Our family?”
He and Immanuel had pieced together what they could — or rather, extracted what information from Dita they could, which was not much — and now he and Aaron would now need to establish some common fiction, unacknowledged by either of them.
Aaron made a passable show of looking pained, a stalling tactic which Sacha himself had employed more than once, playing at being tortured by his tragic past to give himself time to think.
“Jacob was such a quiet child,” he said. This was, presumably, Original Mordecai’s father. “Four years older and always trying to look after me when our parents... well, they did the best they could. I don’t want you to think it was all bad.” High on emotion, low on information, which tended to be the best way to go about it. Sacha nodded encouragingly. They would muddle along together just fine.
“I met you once when you were a baby and not again until you were three or four, and you reminded me so much of him. Just this tiny little thing, but so intense. Not much of a talker, but always watching.”
It was not the description Sacha would have invented for himself as a child — on the rare occasions he thought on the matter at all, he imagined he’d learned to talk early and never stopped —, while Mordecai, who had his feet planted more firmly on the ground and navigated the world in a bubble of benevolent cheer he would have cast as a good tempered, outgoing child possessed of the occasional spark of wisdom above his years. Still, it was a collaborative process. Sacha settled cross-legged on the dressing table and listened to a stranger invent a eulogy for a child neither of them had met.
****
Aaron was, objectively, a better business partner than Immanuel. The fact was undeniable, and yet Sacha found himself restlessly picking it apart: Aaron appealed to venue owners, with his easy smile and reassuring middle-agedness, but he couldn’t match Immanuel’s instincts. He was calm, and relaxed, and even-tempered, and... Sacha kept turning to speak, rolling over at night to tuck himself against another warm body.
But he had known he was trading a beloved partner for an efficient one since he had pressed his forehead against Immanuel’s, hands tangled together. He knew the feel of him better than he knew the feel of himself, felt the ugly intrusion of his exhaustion, the headache behind his eyes, the shivery ache of building fever. And it occurred to him like a wave crashing over that for all his threats, Immanuel wouldn’t leave. That he was a loyal man despite himself. That he had replaced his responsibility for his father with responsibility for Sacha, one misery for another.
With Immanuel, he had not exactly been a hole in the wall act — there had been crowds, and stage lights, and the occasional interview request, which Immanuel always denied; the opening of the Innovia Centre had reignited interest in Project Lifebloom in a way that had proved a highly effective boost to a fledgeling career in the performing arts, if not one that was necessarily replicable.
With Aaron, it was something else entirely. Aaron woke him early in the morning and marched him into a series of brightly lit offices for a series of interminably long meetings in which he was expected to smile, sit still, and let Aaron do the talking. (Living in the Vetec quadrant, he found, was rather like crawling out from under a rock; he never seemed to have read or watched or heard of anything anyone expected him to have read or watched or heard of).
This was how he found himself under glaring studio lights across from the glossy, smiling host of New Aglia Station Night.The program lived in a white-floored studio on the station’s upper floor, made to appear larger by the stark white glittering floor and the wall-to-wall screens displaying brilliant blue sky scrubbed with the occasional fluff of cloud. A flowering tree in a ceramic pot sat in the corner beside the stiff grey couch.
Margola Margolis, the improbably named host, settled into the chair opposite. She wore a suit of dove grey with the barest hint of pinstripes, pale hair scraped back into a sleek tail with the flyaways sprayed mercilessly into place. When she smiled, her teeth were very white and very straight, her nails long, sculpted to points, and shimmering pink.
Sacha and Aaron both dressed down, deliberately; they were of the people, Aaron said, which was to say poor, but not so poor as to be alarming — a category which so far as Sacha could tell encompassed everyone he had known before the start of the year.
“We have a very special episode of New Aglia Station Night,” Margolis said. “Now, Mr. Metzger, Mr. Metzger, you two made quite the splash the other night. Tell us the story from the beginning.”
They honed it into a duet: Aaron first, soft, with his low smoker’s voice and squared posture, shoulders back, hands folded in his lap, spinning out the early history, a bloody battlefield of a life. And then Sacha, younger and wild, filled with electric energy. Mordecai was benevolent. Mordecai entered the Project battered and lost and allowed it to temper him into something whole, sloughing pain like old skin. He performed his miracle — siphoned a little discomfort and allowed that to carry the illusion for a time — and smiled, spun a story out of thin air about love and grace and sharing his gifts.
Afterwards, eyes stinging from the light, he found himself at the Cherrydrop: an almost respectable place awash in pink and green light, the type of club he might have gone to with Vani and a reluctant Bo, where Josephine would have refused to step foot in favour of her grease monkey establishments, where Immanuel might have come along but not enjoyed himself. Now, alone, he leaned against the bar with his hair loose over his shoulders and one of Aaron’s pilfered flower-print shirts unbuttoned all the way and hanging to mid-thigh in a way that either made him look stylish or like a child, he hadn’t decided, trying to look enticing instead of irritated so that someone would buy him a drink, his newfound uncle having declared him insufficiently responsible to have a hand in managing their shared finances.
The whole situation was, of course, entirely his own fault: not in the way that Aaron would claim it was his fault, when Sacha had stumbled home late one night fresh from the gambling tables with an electric buzz under his skin and he sat him down and said he would be handling the money from now on, but in that Sacha had failed not only to identify his new business partner as the type to do such a thing but had largely failed to take notice of him at all, and had thus failed to anticipate how he might act in any given situation: Aaron simply existed in his periphery, like a poorly placed chair on which he occasionally knocked his toes.
He had been at Byelaia Zvezda that day — the one with the gambling — playing across the table from a man by the name of Boris, who had clapped him on the shoulder on their first meeting and exclaimed, laughing, “Sacha, because you are short for Aleksander!” and called him Aleksander Tomasovich like he was some fancy dignitary, and Sacha called him Borya in revenge, and Borya laughed at his accent and told him he had been away from the homeworlds too long.
They had, over the course of that evening and through the next day, sampled half of drinks menu, performed surprisingly well at a long-deck tournament, and had their winnings confiscated in a police raid. Sacha was not trying to disguise his identity, exactly, but he found that with a change in styling, he was not generally accused of being Mordecai Metzger in his off hours, and in the cases that he was, all he had to do was shake his head and allow his natural accent to show through and it would be brushed off as an uncanny resemblance.
But now he was not at the Belaya Zvezda with Boris but in the Cherrydrop alone, and the prospective source of his drink was approaching from the other end of the bar, a tall, dark-haired woman with an impressive collection of piercings — Sacha had once let Vani do his ears, three lobe piercings and a helix, but they had become infected and not healed right; he had spent a week and a half with Avram dogging his steps telling him to stop tugging at them, hon, before he was forbidden from wearing them at all — and when the woman stepped in close he told her he’d always wanted some of his own but he’d had to let the holes close for work; done all of that and in the end he’d left the job all the same, a freighter position in the Kelter.
“Ship’s boy, were you?” she asked, wry but not disinterested.
Sacha batted his eyelashes, playing at coy. “Oh, I’m very good,” he said. “Why else would they bring me all the way out there?” He reached out, traced a finger down her arm, wrapped his hand around her wrist.
“Honey, I could get what you’re offering anywhere else for free.”
A grin, showing his teeth. He had done the work sporadically in the past — after leaving Capeira, primarily; Thomasin had outsourced that side of the business to Bess who did not much like him, but he was not particularly angling for it tonight. Hollow work paid better, as a rule.
“All I’m asking for is a drink.”
She bought him the drink and brought him back to her apartment and perched him on the kitchen counter as she skimmed a needle through the flame of her lighter, leaned over him close so he could smell the sharp scent of liquor on her breath and drove the needle back through the half-healed holes. She whistled when he took it without flinching and they settled together side by side on her bed — she had no other furniture — drinking bathtub moonshine from an empty pickle jar passed back and forth between them as he invented ship’s boy stories and she invented ones about being a traveling artist, and they rolled together, happy drunk and clumsy, and afterwards fished the pickle jar from the floor where they had left it, spilling it over the sheets and themselves and drank what was left.
She rolled over on her side, later, told him stay if he wanted, but Sacha was filled with a buzzing energy these days, a jumping jumbled restlessness in his core that sent him pacing in circles, legs jogging when he sat and fingers tapping as he walked, words stumbling out of his mouth before his mind had time to catch up with him; the kind of mood Bo might have Soothed away, when he had driven everyone on the ship to the point of insanity and it was that or a swift trip out the airlock, and so he turned the shower on hot and scrubbed himself quick and vicious and blistered red, the stillness too much for him, and wouldn’t that be funny, after everything, to die slipping in the shower because he could not stand still? Scrubbed off the night and dressed himself for the day, washed off Sacha and put on Mordecai, and on, and on, and on.
****
One month and three days after Kit and Josephine left Maralenne, they sat at the Way Station’s dockside bar watching the ships come in through the thick glass separating the pressurized and depressurized sections of the station. They were both drinking lemon juice, because they had spent that time feeling sick, coughing up dust, and struggling to regain weight as they worked long days on the loading dock making just enough to rent the room they divided down the middle with a curtain. They listened for signals over the communicator and heard no one, not even from Sacha and Immanuel.
The transport shuttle Ermine slid into dock. When the bay was full, the airlock shuttered closed, the pressurization alarms rang, and when the loudspeakers announced it was safe, the inner door slid open and Dita Mansour strolled through, turning from her group to scan the bar and waving when she caught sight of them. She broke into a grin (Kit did not need his diagrams to recognize that one) and bounded over, juggling her bags to one arm to throw herself at Josephine, who lifted her off her feet and attempted unsuccessfully to spin her around, bags and all. Set back on the ground, Dita held out her hand and Kit smacked it in greeting, then, after a moment of contemplation, slotted himself against her side. She squeezed him; he patted her twice on the back then stepped back, scrubbing a hand down his side until the uncomfortable tingle of contact faded.
“Are we picking up the boys?” Dita asked in sign.
“Which boys?” Kit asked.
Josephine shook her head. “Fuck them. They made their choice.”
Sacha and Immanuel, then. They had seen Sacha twice on the television. Kit thought he looked thin and pale; he was not sure whether this was the result of illness or his Hollow work, or Kit himself having forgotten how he looked during their time apart. If Josephine had an opinion, she had not shared it.
Now Josephine was saying, “We need a boat.” She and Kit — who had calculated that they would either have to steal one or work at the docks for the next fifteen years — turned to Dita.
“Oh, that one’s not mine,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the docking bay.
“Fucking obviously,” Josephine said. “We need to buy one.”
“Okay, great, love that, strong start,” Dita said. Then, “so was this a profitable year for you two, or... ‘cause you’re both looking a little rough. I’m not saying you don’t have ship buying money but, you know, might be a bit of a surprise. Also like a physical exam might be a good idea.” Dita heaved herself onto a stool, leaving her bag between her feet where she would forget it unless Kit or Josephine reminded her, and signalled the waiter.
“We were hoping you’d be the one with boat money,” Josephine said.
“No,” said Kit, who had not hoped this on account of it being extremely unlikely.
“I wish.” The bartender came over; Dita squinted at the menu and said something out loud that Kit didn’t catch. “A sessional instructor does not a shipowner’s money make.”
“Figures.” Josephine sipped at her lemon juice, eyes fixed somewhere in the distance.
But they were not the only members of their crew who had spent a year working, and the others had not been making an instructor’s salary. Kit tapped twice at his chest, the spot where they pinned their communicators when they were working.
“What?” Josephine asked.
He tapped again, more insistently. “Evening. Hear.”
“Not my first choice,” Josephine signed slowly. “But fuck it. Desperate times.”
****
Immanuel went home. He decided this on the shuttle over: not where he was headed, but that it was home. His father lived there. He had a room waiting for him that he did not have to pay for. He recognized the dock workers when he stepped off the shuttle. He didn’t need a station map to navigate. That was what made a home, wasn’t it? Familiarity. Origin, measured in time.
He had lived on Capeira longer than he had anywhere else — four years, age fourteen to eighteen. That must be enough to make a home. Marla Kesparin waved at him when he stepped off the transport, hustled over to say hi, how’ve you been, the Antiquery’s doing well, Thomasin will be thrilled to see you, she’s been looking for someone to run it for ages. (That doesn’t sound like it’s going well, Immanuel said.) Didn’t that mean it was home?
Immanuel had seen hardly any of Capeira when he and Sacha returned last year, or maybe he simply hadn’t paid attention to it, distracted by the planned implosion of his own life and later by Sacha limp and sick at his side. Time had made it smaller, grubbier. Disjointed, because the familiarity made the changes stand out so strongly: a bookstore replaced by a grocer, metal grates overs shop doors, uniformed constables posted every few meters on the lower concourse. But he found Thomasin Marino where he expected her.
It was midday shipboard time, and her bar was nearly deserted, besides Bess at the counter polishing a glass and a handful of stragglers at the tables. He recognized most of them, and they recognized him, too; six sets of eyes tracked him to the bar.
“I’m here for the boss,” he said without preamble. Bess set the glass down with a sharp click and rounded the corner to the office. Knocked sharply on the doorframe.
“Salvador to see you.” An inaudible mumble of voices.
“The other Salvador,” Immanuel called, leaning forward over the counter.
“Go on,” Bess said. She picked up the glass.
Thomasin was watching him when he stepped into the office, and he’d forgotten how that felt, being pinned in her dark, unwavering gaze. Her arms were bare, as always, showing off her company tattoos, her wheat-blond undercut grown out and pulled into a tail.
She nodded at the door; Immanuel pulled it shut behind him. “I’ve been expecting you. When did you hear?”
Hear what sat at the tip of his tongue, but all at once he knew. There was no grief, not even shock. He felt a profound calm, like someone had drilled a hole in the side of his head and all the emotion he should have been feeling had trickled out onto the floor.
“What happened? When?”
“Lady Vekara, boy, is this the first you’re hearing of it?” If Thomasin were a different person, she might sound sympathetic, or pitying; as it stood, her mouth tugged up in dry amusement. “Drank himself to death, last week. I can’t imagine that’s any surprise to you.”
“No, of course not.” Last week. God. He could have — if only — he’d always fucking hesitated. No better than Felix, when it came down to it. No better, except his father was dead and he was alive. “Is he... can I see him? His... the body.”
“You’re in luck,” Thomasin said, standing, and it was such an absurd thing to say that Immanuel bit down hard on his lip, stifling a laugh because he did know what she meant: unclaimed bodies were kept in cold storage for a week, and then they were spaced. A day later and his father would already have been gone out the airlock.
They didn’t speak at all on the way to cold storage. Just the two of them, no guards, but Thomasin walked with a tense set to her shoulders that hadn’t been there before, eyes sweeping the hall as she walked, taking a circuitous route through the lower concourse. Her hold on Capeira wasn’t what it once had been, but walking openly alongside the leader of the Acolytes still carried weight.
“Marla tells me you’re looking for someone to run the Antiquery,” Immanuel said as they reached the double doors to the medical wing.
“It’s in governor’s territory now,” Thomasin said, deliberately controlled. Her eyes stayed fixed ahead. Oh, how that must sting. Immanuel felt the perverse urge to smile rising up again. Forced it down.
“The deed stayed in his name. That was what we negotiated.” They walked down, down, metal stairs echoing beneath their feet.
“Directly before you rendered yourself legally deceased,” Thomasin said. “You’re not as clever as you think you are, Salvador. But yes, Felix’s name was on the deed, not that he ran the place.” A glance sideways at Immanuel, like they were sharing a joke.
“So it’s mine. You wantme to run it.”
“That would be the easiest option,” Thomasin acknowledged. “Make no mistake, it’s far from the only one.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs. Thomasin swiped her station access card at the door. Immanuel had bought his own and his father’s from the Acolytes when they first landed on Capeira, quicker and easier to than a visit to the register, especially when they thought they would only be staying a handful of days. The keypad flashed green; Thomasin held the door open for him. He blinked in the stark white light.
“Busy in here.” It wasn’t; they were the only people in the room. The only living people. The dead were crowded onto gurneys along the walls, some two to a bed.
“War footing,” Thomasin said dryly. “Sibalt’s governor has been making a play.”
“The same play as four years ago?” Immanuel found himself frozen in the doorway and forced himself to move between the bodies. “If the Vetec intervenes, you’ll be finished.”
“They won’t,” Thomasin said. She twitched her fingers through the air, counting the gurneys. She crossed to the far end of the room and flipped down the cover, and all at once Immanuel was not thinking of Sibalt or Capeira or what Thomasin really meant when she said “war.”
A year was hardly any time at all. Felix looked exactly the same as when Immanuel had left him, except that he was so obviously dead.
“It’ll be thirty to keep him in longer, if you’re wanting to make arrangements,” Thomasin said.
“No.” There was no one else in all the universe who would mourn him, besides Immanuel.
Thomasin slapped the corpse’s leg like a friend’s shoulder. “Looks like it’s the airlock for you, Mr. Salvador. Can’t say it’s been a good run but our Lady Vekara knows there’s been worse. Stel keep you.”
Later, in the alcove at the top of the maintenance shaft where he and Sacha had slept for the better part of a year, Immanuel lay flat on his back and pressed his palms against the ceiling. They hadn’t known they were leaving for the last time when they’d done it, and the space still looked lived in. They had left their best quilt, a patchwork thing with a fleece layer on the inside. Three shirts, a pair of boots with the soles peeled off. A lamp with no shade, still hanging from the ceiling. His father had gone out the airlock, early in the shipboard morning and watched by no one but his son.
You always say we don’t owe each other anything, Sacha had said, because Immanuel had never owed anything to anyone besides his father, who had ruined himself keeping Immanuel alive, and he’d repaid him by doing the same. By keeping himself in sight, by making sure he would be the one to find the body, because as long as that was true, Felix would never... And he had promised, the day Immanuel left, when he sat down across from him and said, I won’t be there to stop you, so you have to stop yourself. And his father had agreed, and they’d both known he was lying. The outcome was precisely what he had expected — not just expected, but known, from the moment the Wishbone broke atmosphere. He had done his mourning years ago: reality had simply caught up. And yet. Fuck, and yet.
No one had ever accused Dita of possessing an overabundance of foresight, and they certainly weren’t about to start now. Obtaining multiple advanced degrees had required a certain amount of focus and persistence, of course, but she was past the point of pretending she didn’t have a tendency to fall into jobs, ships, amateur smuggling operations when they presented themselves. Shuttles home to the family she hadn’t seen in going on two decades when they docked in port.
It was the day after her last class of the semester and she had a pile of grading coming her way — Dita Mansour had been made for a great many things but grading was not one of them; she’d inched her way through the midterm papers under a deluge of increasingly irritable messages from the department head, who had in turn been subject to an increasingly irritable series of messages from the students — and instead of hunkering down in her office here she was, trying and failing to doze in her narrow little last-minute seat on a budget passenger transport.
Being a passenger was different from being crew, and it was only when she found herself snapping the storage panels shut as she walked back and forth from the dining car, itchy with boredom and nerves, that she realized it. Might sew it into the underside of the chairs, she thought, without any clear idea of what it was. Inspectors will go straight for the panels, don’t bother with that.
“You’re a sailor, then?” one of the attendants asked when she started awake at the sound of the third watch bell, halfway to her feet before her brain caught up.
“Doctored for one of those small freighter deals for a while,” she said. “Nine-crew, everyone does everything type thing. I was on third watch.”
She earned some sympathetic noises at that — freighter crews and passenger crews each thought the other had the worse deal — and settled down for the rest of her nap. Theoretically, at least. Dita had never been the type to miss people in any concerted way, not when they (or, more often, she) moved away, not even when they died. Made her think she’d been built wrong, when she was younger, but seeing Avram fall apart in the months after they left Sibalt, she’d sent some overdue thanks to Allah for leaving the emotional dial turned down conveniently low.
Which was to say she did not so much miss the old crew as feel sort of benignly haunted by them: they kept cropping up as supporting characters in her dreams, serving her scoops of ice cream and accidentally sewing her favourite scalpel in after the autopsy. She had a sneaking suspicion she was becoming someone who brooded, horror of horrors.
After the trial, she’d stayed on New Aglia for a month, spending her days at endless tribunals rehashing every minute of her time at the Project. The Vetec government paid her room and board and a stipend that would have made any penny-pinching graduate department proud, mostly because she had pointed out that if they wanted her to stay and answer their questions, she needed to be able to afford to live there.
And then, having been accepted back into the ranks of law abiding Vetec citizens, she subjected herself to the surreal mundanity of finding a job. By the end of the first week she was ready to cut her losses and turn up at the ship bay — there were always crews hiring, and long-haulers in particular were always looking for doctors. That she had a demonstrated willingness to bend the law and had kept a crew of smugglers alive for five years in wild space only counted in her favour.
But her pardon, it had been made abundantly clear, was dependent on her staying on the right side of the law with a stable address where she could be easily found, and so she had ended up instead at Three Roads College on Kesper Station. It was a quiet campus on a quiet station, the type of place where all the students were either local or had been rejected by everywhere better.
I am making responsible decisions, she told herself firmly as she dragged herself out of bed every morning for class and settled at the kitchen table with a stack of grading at night and dressed herself in her new collection of business casual blouses. She was a person who wore blouses, now. No cadaver work pending review after 18 months, no work on live subjects ever, not that she’d wanted to do it in the first place.
She did all the responsible, grown-up things, like paying rent and cooking meals and showing up on time for work and attending her monthly review panels. She told her students to be better than her, that if she could go back she’d do it all differently, that she was sorry, and couldn’t decide if she believed it. Woke up some mornings convinced she’d go back to the Project in a second and others convinced she never would in a million years, that maybe she’d never felt guilty the way she knew she was supposed to but she knew right from wrong and she knew she’d been on the wrong side of it with the Project, had even known it at the time.
Maybe this was what it meant to be a good person: the endless, tedious grind forward, forever holding herself up against the measuring tape. But apparently terrible, dragging boredom had its benefits, because two days before the end of the semester, she got a letter from Rashida. They’d been inseparable as kids, just a year apart compared to the five years between Rashida and the twins, and another two between the twins and Mahmoud. I’ve been trying to write this for months, ever since I saw you on TV, her sister had written in that same tight scrawl Dita could still decipher all these years later.I suppose the core of it is I stand by my position regarding Project Lifebloom and your involvement with it, but I see, or at least I hope I see, that you are trying to make a change. I’m proud of the person you’re working to become. And then, Would you come for dinner some time?
The first thing Dita felt, staring down at the familiar writing, was an equally familiar rush of irritation. Her principled, exacting older sister was always so convinced she was right about everything. She used to think it was jealousy, when they were teenagers and Dita, with her slap-dash, last-minute approach to homework and tests she aced without studying was two grades ahead while Rashida did her work every night like clockwork at the kitchen table and remained resolutely average. Dita hadn’t lived with her family since she was sixteen or talked to any of them since she was twenty-five, and still they made her feel like a scolded teenager coming back after curfew. Then again, having been on the receiving end of Sacha’s teenaged refusal to do anything when or where it was asked of him, she was willing to admit some of the scolding had probably been earned.
All of which was to say that by the time the ship docked on Ghenat, she was thoroughly sick of her own brooding. She needed to do something soon or she’d become completely insufferable. At that particular moment, something meant shuffling stiff-legged off the shuttle and into Ghenat’s docking bay, an expansive place with glittering white floors and over-priced cafés at every corner. Ports out in the depths tended to get a worse reputation than they deserved, in her opinion, but now the shiny neatness of it made her skin crawl.
The train station at least was vaguely grubby in a way that had become comforting, with the too-narrow stairs and the chipping tile. Outside, she tipped her face up to meet the sun, shining bright in the clear sky. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on a proper planet-side city, not a tiny start-up place like Sibalt or a factory town like Esparda with a sky the colour of mud.
She set off haphazardly in the direction of her sister’s address and found herself soon enough on the front steps of tall, thin, two-storey place painted a gentle periwinkle blue and surrounded by a white-fenced flowering garden like something out of a storybook. Dita had never been one to hesitate, and she was not about to start now. She knocked on the door.
The man who opened it was tall and gangly and she squinted up at him, trying to decide if he looked familiar. She’d met Rashida’s husband once or twice — they’d been together back when she and her sister were still talking, albeit infrequently — and remembered him being vaguely the same shape. Heavy eyebrows, curly hair, had some kind of job that was similar to Rashida’s job, or maybe the same job?
“Hi, I’m Dita. Mansour. Of Rashida’s estranged sister fame, if that wasn’t clear. You’re...” she searched her memory for the name. “Omar?” The man who may or may not have been Omar blinked at her. “I didn’t forget about you, it’s just, you know, been a while. Unless Rashida got remarried, in which case I never knew about you in the first place. Though I guess she could’ve remarried another mutual acquaintance and that’s why you look familiar. Anyway. How are you?”
“You didn’t say you were coming,” Maybe-Omar said.
Dita thought back. “Oh, yeah, I guess not. I was just walking past the station and thought, you know, might as well. Anyway, Omar: yay or nay?”
“That’s my name, yes.”
“Hah! I’m a genius. Are we going in, or...” Dita considered. “Actually, one more question: same Omar, or Rashida remarried a guy with the same name as the first guy-type situation which, weird, but no judgement.”
“Rashida and I have been married for fifteen years,” he said stiffly.
“Same Omar, gotcha.”
Finally he stood aside and she stepped past him into the house. It was very neat in a way Rashida hadn’t been when they were young — tidier than Dita, not that that was saying much, but in a slightly haphazard, lived-in way. She toed off her shoes at the door, surveying the pictures along the wall. Her parents, looking older and greyer. Mahmoud and his husband and a teenage girl grinning between them. The twins, still mirror images of each other, on vacation somewhere sunny. Rashida and Omar and three kids growing from babies to preteens. A handful of the five of them as kids, Dita round-faced and smiling and always covered in twigs and mud; gesturing with her high heels in her hands at graduation; hanging off Mahmoud’s shoulders as a toddler.
“Time sure does march on,” she said with a strained sort of cheer. “How’s life been treating you? Got some kids, wow, look at you to go. All I did was get and then lost my medical license, ha.” She laughed. Omar did not.
“Rashida will be home soon. Can I get you anything?”
It was possibly the most excruciatingly awkward half-hour of Dita’s life. Omar told her stiffly about his job (accountant), and Rashida’s job (also accountant), and the kids (ordinary), while Dita, unearthing some heretofore undiscovered scrap of tact, pretended to be interested. His fingers tapped restlessly against the table top the whole time.
“You can just say it, whatever it is. Mine hasn’t exactly been a life that leaves you with thin skin, you know, what with all the tribunals,” Dita finally burst out. “Also, I know this wasn’t anywhere near her worst quality but Estelle Dawson had some uncanny radar for insecurity, it was actually really impressive. That woman could craft an insult. You’re not gonna hurt my feelings.”
“Rashida will be back soon,” Omar said again.
He was afraid of her, she realized, or if not afraid, at least nervous. It was the same look she’d sometimes catch from the subjects back at Lifebloom, that sidelong glance as they tried to watch her without her knowing. No one had been afraid of her before, and it’d made her stomach squirm uncomfortably before she’d gotten busy with the freezer room of dubiously preserved corpses and forgot all about it.
She did not care that Omar was afraid of her — he was practically a stranger — but the thought of seeing the same expression on Rashida’s face was so unbearable that she might have walked out, gone all the way back to the station and boarded the first ship that docked if the door hadn’t opened then.
A chatter of overlapping voices rose from the entrance. Rashida and the kids: they sounded young. Omar sprang to his feet and rushed to meet them. There was a flurry of hushed, inaudible whispering, a round face peering curiously from around the corner, the patter of three sets of child-size footsteps on the stairs.
When they were young, Dita and Rashida looked so similar they used to get mistaken for twins: the same rounded faces, the same flat nose, the same eyes Rashida used to complain were just a touch too close together. They’d been chubby children who had grown into fat adults, which had made Rashida self-conscious and which Dita hadn’t thought much about either way until they were dividing rations on the Starside, when she was rather glad of her natural protection against starvation.
In the doorway, Rashida wore a sharp grey pinstripe jacket and dangling earrings. Dark lipstick, hair uncovered and pulled back — she’d always thought Rashida would be the one to stick with the hijab, between the two of them, but Dita had found herself wrapping her hair every morning at the Project with the same stubborn determination that had kept Avram lighting shabbat candles in the privacy of the nursery back room and Josephine whispering prayers to Lady Stel, and she’d kept up with it afterwards, only taking it off when she was at home with the rest of the crew.
And maybe it was because she’d spent the last five years in the company of Avram Ashta, but Dita strode forward and grabbed her sister in a hug. She stiffened, raising her hands slowly to rest on Dita’s back, relaxing by inches.
“I missed you, Rashi,” she said, and realized as she did how much she meant it.
“Me, too,” Rashida said quietly.
They ended up in the yard, stretched out side-by-side on a pair of rainbow-stripe sun loungers. The yard was small, fenced in, with a two-level deck surrounded by flower beds. “I’ll give you planet-siders this one,” Dita sighed. She threw up her arms dramatically. “The sun, what a concept! You’re gonna have to peel my sunstroke-ridden body off this thing, because I’m not leaving.”
Rashida laughed, and all at once it was like the years had peeled back and they were sixteen again, giggling late into the night in their shared room before Dita headed off to college, words tumbling over each other all in a rush as they scrambled to catch up on fifteen years of life.
“— So we land, right, this little middle of nowhere settlement in Kelter space claiming they’ve got fresh water which, who knows, right, sometimes these tiny places run a side business and it’s not exactly the type of thing you can put off forever — this was on the Lady Kay, too, that thing was a nightmare to fly, I don’t think any of us slept more than five hours at a stretch the whole ten months we had her — so we land and this guy comes in to meet us and he looks terrible. Just really sick. And he tells us everyone’s sick, they’ve got no idea what it is but it’s spread to the whole place. Like, headaches, bleeding gums, old wounds reopening, no idea what’s causing it.
“And because there’s no doctors, they’d decided to lure in some passing ship hoping they’d solve the problem. Which is such an ass-backwards stupid strategy I’m legitimately annoyed it worked, right? Because it’s obviously scurvy; it’s the kind of thing ground-side doctors always miss but shipboard and on those little mining colonies where they’re not growing anything fresh, you really gotta look out for it — that and heavy metal poisoning. So we ask what they’ve got for nutrition, vitamins, all that, thinking maybe it’s a manufacturing defect or a late shipment or something. Andthis guy goes, the fuck are you talking about? That shit’s a scam, no one gets scurvy anymore. One, yes they do, and two, most people don’t because we know about vitamin C, we didn’t just spontaneously start producing ascorbic acid in the twentieth century. Anyway then he tried to stab our mechanic because she called him an imbecile, but he had scurvy and she didn’t, which as it turns out is not an advantage in a fight, who could have guessed.”
“That must have been hard,” Rashida said softly. Dita glanced over. Her sister’s expression was intent, eyes soft.
“Not really,” Dita said, thrown. “Josie’s a scrapper, she can handle herself. And scurvy gets in the muscles. Anyone with a knife can do damage, obviously, but she wasn’t in much danger.”
“I meant traveling around like that. Worrying about having clean water, almost getting stabbed. Or what if they had tricked you onto that planet and it had been something infectious?”
“Trust me, the thought had occurred to us and was not unrelated to the imbecile-calling and subsequent near-stabbing,” Dita said wryly. “It’s life. Better than the alternative.”
Rashida was still watching her, and there was something raw and hurt in the downturn of her mouth, now. Dita sat up to face her. Gentle as she could manage, she said, “You know there’s no version of this where I lived the life you wanted me to, right? I was never going to graduate and get a job and live some quiet, stable planet-side life. I’m not built for it.”
“Dita...”
“I’m not going back to Three Roads next semester,” she said, and knew it was true as she said it.
“I’m guessing it would be too much to ask that you’d give it another try?” Rashida asked.
“And I’m guessing it would be too much to ask for you to show up to the shipyard and sign on as a shipboard accountant? It’s not in as high demand as doctors but it’s an important job, someone’d be happy to take you even without the experience.” She reached over, tapping Rashida on the arm to show she didn’t mean anything by it.
“You’re more patient than you used to be,” Rashida said.
“Five years in a series of structurally dubious freighters with eight other people will do that to you.”
For a long moment, they sat in silence. “I have a picture of you all,” Rashida said. This was not at all what Dita had been expecting — she didn’t even have any pictures of them, after they lost the Seabird and then the Alouen. “It was on the news, when they showed inside the ship.” Her sister sounded flustered.
Dita did not particularly want to think about all their things being shown on the news, but she said, “Let’s see it, then.”
It was the one they’d had up in the galley, taken by Midge Ohanian some time in the weeks after they’d bought the Seabird from her when they were camped out on Esparda refitting the shoddy engines and rusted fittings — good bones, bad skin, Josephine had joked — but also sleeping off the past two years, the kids and Sibalt and theclunky, exhausting Lady Kay.
In the picture, they were painting on the racing stripes. It’d been a sunny day, the wind blowing northeast away from the shipyard, scrubbing out the dust and smoke from the factory district and leaving the sky bright and clear. They’d been caught in motion: Avram on the topside deck with his hands on his hips as he surveyed the work, paint speckled in grainy white dots in a cluster around his knees, Josephine balanced precariously on a ladder as she leaned in to touch up the lines down the front, Rico below holding it steady. Sacha up on Bo’s shoulders, both of them laughing, Vani standing on an empty crate with a paint can balanced on her head for them to reach. Kit tucked into the shade, crouched over his knees as he worked at the base, Dita and Immanuel off to the left hauling over a new crop of paint cans. She’d looked at that picture every day for years. We all know what we look like, Rico used to gripe whenever they had pictures up, or, more often (and more presciently), we’re on the run from the police, maybe let’s not put up evidence of our identities in our living space. But Avram had insisted, implacable. It’s our home, it’s going to feel like it.
“I thought for you to turn them in, when you were so close with each other, you must have really...” Rashida trailed off. Imagined Dita having some overpowering moral revelation, realizing the right course of action for the first time in her life and sacrificing all that she held dear to take it. Really, it’d been a terrible slapdash of a plan put together by the two most impulsive members of the crew and Immanuel, who could reliably be counted on to go along with any questionable idea as long as Sacha was also doing it.
And they’d almost gotten Vani and Bo killed. Had gotten Estelle Dawson killed, but Dita couldn’t bring herself to feel bad about that, even though she’d never killed anyone before, at least not like that, deliberate and premeditated. Vani probably wouldn’t go after her for the first but she wasn’t so confident she’d gotten the desire for revenge for the second out of her system going with Sacha. Ah, well. Dita would take her knocks, they’d snipe at each other a little, and eventually it’d loop back to normal.
“Can I keep this?” she asked abruptly, at the same time Rashida said,
“You could stay here.”
They stared at each other.
“If you don’t want to go back to teaching,” Rashida pressed on. “If you need time to... recover. You could stay here. Have a family again.”
Dita shook her head. “You don’t want me to do that.” At her sister’s expression, “no, you don’t. And I don’t either. It was good to see you again, Rashi.” She stood, picture still held between two fingers. “Yeah?”
“Sure,” Rashida said quietly. “Take care of yourself, Dee.”
****
There was no need for security on Maralenne: there were foremen in the factories, constables patrolling the streets, but it was an unavoidable fact that they were in the middle of nowhere, with the only ship depot a couple of hundred kilometres away on the uninhabited side of the planet, all of that barren desert. They were not even forbidden from leaving, technically — so long as they had three months’ salary to pay the shuttle fare.
Kit slipped into the kitchen late at night, gathering up chalky protein bars, vaguely fruit-tasting strips of dried something, vitamin tablets, water jugs. They piled it all into two backpacks and an improvised sledge of spare metal Josephine had scraped together while Kit gathered the supplies. Set out in the dark, one hand each on the rope so they didn’t get separated, the glow of the city fading gradually into the distance.
They kept an eye on the road, lights twinkling at a distance over the vast expanse, and walked at night in case the departing ships spotted their two meandering specks out where there should have been no one.
Kit wasn’t a bad marching partner: away from the relentless sound of the factory he was sturdy, persistent, and reasonable about taking breaks and dividing the food. He was also completely silent. Still, sore, hungry, and irritable were hardly the worst results of a protracted overland trek, and when the shuttle station loomed into the distance six days later, Josephine was prepared to count the whole venture an unexpected success. All that was left to do was wait for a ship to come in.
This was easier said than done. Supply ships came sporadically: at the factory, they sometimes spent weeks at a time stretching bland nutritional meal slurried with water. The two of them settled in behind the closest they could get to cover — a waist-height rocky outcropping — and took turns peering at the docking bay through their single pair of binoculars. It was a stripped down place, a single hangar and three runways. Staff of five, scurrying around in their flight suits. A guide tower some distance away, guard towers at the corners equipped with lights, cameras, probably motion sensors. Kit’s abilities were, if Dita was to be believed, a form of minor telepathy; it wouldn’t keep him from showing up on camera or triggering the sensors.
When the sun had set the next night and the stars were blotted out by the ever-present layer of smog, Josephine and Kit crept along on their stomachs. It was the fucking terrain that was the problem, she thought bitterly as she propped herself up on her elbows. There wasn’t so much as a stray branch to swish into range and blame it on the wind, or enough staff to steal a uniform and claim to be new hires. All it would take was someone glancing in their direction to see the two human-shaped lumps lying in the dirt.
“I hate this fucking planet,” she grumbled, dropped her head back down, coughed at the puff of dust that sprung up. To Kit, she signed, “You be the distraction.” He shook his head. “I can’t teach you to do my part fast enough. You need to be the distraction.”
“Now?” he signed back. Josephine glanced up at the sky, searching for an answer in the eternal smog.
“We don’t know when a ship will land,” she said.
“Distraction. How?”
Josephine shrugged, a difficult task while lying down. “You’re a person in the middle of nowhere, that should do it.”
Kit fixed her with a mullish expression, but when she flapped a hand towards the hangar entrance, he got up on his elbows and began crawling. Josephine headed in the opposite direction, towards the guard tower at the back of the building. They exchanged ready signals over the communicator, and then he climbed to his feet and ambled towards the light. Josephine counted under her breath as he approached, estimating the distance from the speed of his walk and the length of his strides.
The alarm began to blare when he came level with the guard poles — no guarantee he hadn’t triggered a silent alarm before then, but given the general rundown state of the place and the rumpled dock worker that stumbled out the door a minute later, she wouldn’t bet money on it. The worker gestured at Kit as she spoke, growing more agitated as he stood stock still and silent. Stel, this could go bad fast.
Josephine jumped to her feet, hurrying to the nearest tower. Wrapped her arms around the metal pole, slick with dust, and began to shimmy her way upwards. At the top, hands aching where she’d slid down, ankles held at an awkward ankle to press the grips of her boots against the metal, she glanced over at Kit. He was surrounded by all five of the dock workers now, fingers tapping convulsively against his sides.
One arm wrapped around the pole, Josephine reached the other around to wriggle her tool kit to the front of her body. The bulky searchlight inches from her face was a combined apparatus, light and sensor all in one, one on each side and joined in the middle, each big around as her head. The heavy bolts were caked in place by rust and dirt.
“It doesn’t even fucking rain,” she grumbled, testing out a wrench, then swapping it out for a size larger. She wriggled herself into a better position, slipped down a foot, shimmied back up with the wrench held, disgustingly, in her mouth. Hauled at the bolt one-armed, wrapped her legs tighter and used both. The metal dug into her hands. Her legs ached. The wrench went back in her mouth, tasting no better than it had the first time as she rooted around one-handed for a solvent. Something tumbled to the ground, pinging against the pole before landing in the dust with a solid thump.
Josephine winced, shot a glance over at Kit and his entourage of irritable hangar workers. His fingers twitched against the side of his leg. His head twitched minutely towards the building. Alarms off. Sure enough, one of the the workers was peeling off towards the building, presumably towards the shut off switch. She dumped a messy handful of lubricant over the bolts — inadvisable, considering she was about to have to slither down a metal pole — wiped her hands as clean as she could manage against her front, and went back to work at the bolts. This time, they dislodged (behold, the wonders of routine maintenance). Dropping the wrench back into her bag, she grabbed the light and twisted it at an angle, leaving a gap in the scanning field just wide enough for a body to slide through.
Kit and the others were all headed for the building, now. Josephine wrapped both arms around the pole and made an ungainly and mildly painful escape, slowing her descent as she neared the ground.
The alarm cut off, and in its sudden absence, she heard the voices coming closer. She darted away, tucking herself behind the building. Sunlight glinted off something in the dirt — the bolt she’d dropped earlier. Fuck. They were too close now to risk stepping out to grab it. She pressed the back of her head against the stucco, breathing slow and quiet, straining to make out the rumble of voices, hoping they wouldn’t notice the fresh footprints.
And then there was nothing for it: she waited until the door clicked shut, cast a glance around the corner to be safe, and took off at a run, ducking to grab the fallen bolt plus a handful of dirt as she passed, pressed close to the guard pole, slipped through the new gap in the shielding, and threw herself behind the outcropping that had become their home. Ten minutes later, Kit wandered out and tucked himself down beside her.
“How did you get away?” she signed.
“Walked.”
Kit’s ability to sneak around unnoticed may have been strong enough to sneak past five people trying to detain him, but it was not strong enough to make them forget about the sudden appearance and disappearance of a strange man in the middle of the wasteland. Josephine and Kit carved out a shallow trench behind their outcropping, covering themselves with their dusty brown tent cover and lying still, hardly breathing, whenever they spotted the hangar door opening.
The flat terrain worked in their favour, surprisingly: clearly none of the hangar workers believed anyone could be hiding out there, and their sweeps of the area were cursory at best as Kit faded, as he always did, from memory. Doesn’t it scare you? Josephine had once asked, because it scared her — she’d walked right past him, sometime on Sibalt when they’d already lived together for nearly a year and known each other for three — and she’d been suddenly struck with the fear that someone she cared about could just... slip out of her mind. Kit had shrugged, and she’d made a point to remember his existence, and that had been that.
****
The roar of engines startled her out of sleep. Josephine lay still, having trained herself in the past days out of the much more deeply ingrained impulse to snap to her feet at strange noises in the night, which usually meant emergency engine repair was imminent. She yanked the tarp over their heads, pinning it in place beneath her body. They listened as the roar pitched louder and louder, braced against the rush of wind.
“Ready?” she signed to Kit, awkward and one-handed. He nodded, peeled the tarp back far enough to push up on his knees. Josephine pressed her forehead into the dust, fingers clenching in the dirt. She wanted to be out of this place already, done with all the infernal waiting. She’d found herself thinking of Rico during their endless days crouched there in the dirt; how she’d tucked herself away in that cave on Everlin while the rebel patrols passed by and wore her suffering like a badge of honour. Josephine had never seen the point in all that: huddling behind a rock for three days hadn’t built character, it’d just given her stiff joints and a fine coating of dust and an unwanted acquaintance with profound, mind-melting boredom.
Some interminable time later, Kit tapped her twice between the shoulder blades. Biting back a groan, Josephine levered herself upright — she felt like she’d compressed her ribs, lying flat for so long — and peered out at the ship. She was a Marliner-IV, a sturdy little short-distance transport with two seats for crew in the cockpit, engine room at the front, and a big rounded belly of a cargo bay. The crew had hauled their cargo onto the dirt, clumped together in some ad hoc loading strategy known only to them. One of the hangar crew had pulled the flatbed around, but all seven had vanished back into the building, probably for inventory.
“Wait,” Josephine signed, reluctantly resigning herself to being responsible. They waited while two workers in coveralls walked between the crates with their scanners and clipboards, while they loaded them onto the flatbed, while they drove off and the remaining hangar workers and the pilots lingered out by the ship. And then, finally, the sun slipped below the horizon, the workers ducked back inside, and the flood lights went on.
There was nothing to be done but go for it: two figures, unmistakably out of place, upright and walking through the desert. They might be sticking to the cameras’ blindspots, but if anyone stepped out to stretch their legs and glanced in the wrong direction, there would be no hiding.
But no one did step out to stretch their legs. They slipped through the perimeter, bodies pressed against the guard post because Josephine couldn’t be sure of the exact boundaries of the blindspot she had created. Stepped up to the ship — Stel, to be on a ship, if she never touched solid ground again it would be too soon —, into the empty, echoing cargo bay.
Josephine and Kit set to work unscrewing the decking at the far end. The odd, bulbous shape of the Marliner classhad been a topic of debate within the freighter world for years, but she certainly wasn’t complaining about the two-foot gap between the grating that made up the level surface of the cargo bay and the rounded underside of the shuttle. They tucked themselves inside, pulled the grating back into place, and settled in to wait.
It was a bumpy, miserable ride. The cabin was pressurized (which she had known before smuggling them onboard, for the record), but it was a chilled shipment, and the temperature was set to the standard four degrees above freezing. They folded the tarp for protection against the cold metal and curled up against each other with their hands tucked under their clothes, though Kit twitched unhappily at the contact.
Josephine rubbed her thumb over the edge of her communicator where it was clipped to her chest. She hadn’t turned it on in days, worried the hangar would pick up the frequency, but the shipping lanes ran thick with transmissions, and freighters were programmed to filter out the noise.
When they’d had no choice but to keep themselves quiet and cut off, she’d been able to shove the worry down — they were accomplishing what they could accomplish, driving themselves insane wouldn’t help anything. But now she itched, tap-tap-tapping against the plastic. Kit squirmed over onto his side, wriggling an arm back into his sleeve — he’d wormed it into the body of his sweater for warmth — to make the sharp slashing motion that meant someone was making a sound and he wanted them to stop. She held up the communicator. Kit hesitated. Nodded.
She switched on the receiver, volume turned low. “I am twenty-three years old, but do I look a day over twenty?” Sacha’s voice said.
“For fuck’s sake,” Josephine groaned. She didn’t even want to know what that was about.
“Friends, the greatest gift, the greatest, is that for all the pain of this blessing, I pass it on to you, painless.”
“This fucking asshole.” She jabbed the transmit button, raised her voice as much as she dared. The crates piled above would muffle it anyway, and the roar of the engine that made the deck vibrate beneath them. “Excuse me, you’re not the only ones trying to use the comm channel. Inconsiderate fuckers.” Sacha didn’t even pause, barrelling on in that smarmy, airy tone.
“Well, we’re using it now. It will be free in an hour,” Immanuel said crisply. Stel, she missed these irritating fuckers. Not that it stopped her wanting them to shut the fuck up.
“We’re trying to reach our fucking captain, not that you’d care about that.”
“We haven’t heard from him,” Immanuel said, sounding surprised. Sacha’s voice had cut off; Immanuel must have muted the channel. “You have?”
“Kit and I think we caught a call-in. Just tap code. Right after your... thing, a week ago, maybe two.”
“You’re certain?”
“I just said we think,” Josephine snapped. “We’re trying to make sure, but you two won’t shut the fuck up.”
“Wait,” Immanuel said abruptly. A crackle as he switched back to the main channel, Sacha saying,
“—share my gift with you—”
And Immanuel, desperate, “No, not—” He groaned, said, either to Josephine or to Sacha, or maybe both, “We’ll deal with this later.”
****
The dressing room was uncomfortably hot, the air close and thick. Immanuel paced up and down the narrow strip between the table and the door, nauseas under the glare of the lights. He’d unbuttoned his vest, then shrugged it off, tossing it carelessly onto the back of the chair. Tried to focus on Sacha’s words filtering through the earpiece over the frantic rush of his breathing. Immanuel had warned him this would blow up in their faces, and still this fucking idiot — but no, it was his own fault. He’d known exactly who Sacha was since he turned up in the Antiquery as a scrawny, thieving twelve-year-old to pilfer whatever he could get his hands on, but especially the books. Immanuel should have cut and run years ago, and he hadn’t, and now he would have to deal with the consequences.
He started at the burst of cheers from the crowd. Tugged his vest back on, fastened the buttons, smoothed his hair. Set himself facing the door with his hands folded behind his back and an icy his smile on his face that only got icier when Sacha bounced in. The man who followed him was middle-aged with fine wrinkles around the eyes and mouth and streaks of grey in his gingery-blond hair, worn pulled back in a tail.
“Immanuel, this is my Uncle Aaron,” Sacha said. “Aaron, this is my partner, Immanuel.” They shook hands.
“You remember Mordecai very well, then?” Immanuel asked, making no move to welcome him further into the room.
“Not as well as I’d like,” Aaron said. He had a low voice, scratchy like he was a smoker, or used to be. “My brother — his father — struggled. He and Mordecai’s mother didn’t want me seeing the kids, and I didn’t press. It was until after he was gone that I realized how bad things had gotten.” Now the rasp took on a trembling edge. He set a hand on Sacha’s shoulder, pivoting to meet his eyes. “I regret it every day.”
Immanuel didn’t bother hiding his irritation at the display of emotion. “Touching. I’m going to talk to my partner for a moment.”
When Aaron made no move to leave, he jerked his head pointedly towards the door. The door shut behind him; they both listened for a moment as Aaron’s footsteps failed to get further away. Immanuel hauled Sacha closer by the arm and, past the point of words, gave him a hard shake. Sacha let himself be shaken, unperturbed.
“Would it make you feel better to say it?” he asked.
Immanuel stepped back, dragging his hands through his hair. “You already know you’re being an idiot.”
“I know you think so,” Sacha said. He patted Immanuel on the chest. “Let me handle this one, Masha.”
“Sacha,” he said desperately, exhausted, pulsing with headache. He leaned forward, pressing their foreheads together, lacing their fingers. “Sacha, I can’t. Let’s just...” his fingers tightened. Let’s call it off here, he meant to say. You can take this ridiculous path but I won’t do it with you.
“Josephine said she picked up the captain’s call-in,” he said instead. Sacha’s fingers flexed against his. The headache trickled steadily away until Immanuel kicked him in the side of the foot. “Stop that.”
“I imagine the mutiny disqualified us as members of the crew, with all the benefits and cross-galaxy journeys that implies,” Sacha said, then, “What kind of call-in?”
Immanuel tapped his index finger three times against the side of Sacha’s hand, demonstrating.
“You understand we can’t,” Sacha said. “We won’t... I won’t be taken back, after this. Avram won’t forgive me.” His eyes were open and very close to Immanuel’s, grey-green flecked with brown. “You always say we don’t owe each other anything.”
“Avram loves a project. He’ll get over it.”
“Not this.”
Sacha’s hands were trembling in his, clutching so tightly he could feel his knuckles squeezing together. And all at once Immanuel realized what he was getting at. His stomach dropped. A distant buzzing settled in his ears. He felt, irrationally, like a small child whose favourite toy had been taken by a classmate, complete with the urge to plop to the ground and wail out his fury. Sacha was flighty and impulsive and before they were trapped together in the vast emptiness of open space, he used to vanish for weeks at a time. But he’d never told Immanuel to leave.
“I know I make you unhappy.”
“Of fucking course you make me unhappy. You’re the most stressful person I know.”
“I want you to be happy, Immanuel.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. His hands had gone clammy. He wanted to rewind to the start of the day, to the start of the year, to the shipboard evening standing over the engine so none of this happened in the first place.
And then Sacha’s face split into a grin and he laughed, letting go of Immanuel’s hands, stepping back towards the door. “We’ve been standing together on this precipice as long as we’ve known each other,” he said, almost gentle. “Is it easier if I say I’m tired of you? That having endured about all I can stomach of your not inconsiderable flaws — the sulking and the judgement come to mind, but I assure you they are not the only ones — I find myself in the position to do the shoving, as it were.”
“Fine then, if that’s how you want it,” Immanuel said. Out in the hall, door hanging open behind him, he met Aaron’s smug little smile. Gestured at Sacha where he stood alone in the dressing room, staring off somewhere in the distance, tracing his thumbnail idly over the opposite hand. “All yours.”
The sky on Maralenne was a flat soot grey, weak yellow rays of sunlight occasionally struggling through in the spots where wind had thinned the smoke. Ash carpeted the walkways and the windows, blocking out the light better than any curtains. Not that they needed them: even with their covers, the street lamps were susceptible to the ash as everything else, plunging the streets into a permanent dusk.
Only the windows of the governor’s house were scrubbed clean, courtesy of the servants who went out three times a day in full-body smokesuits to hose down not just the facade but the grounds, leaving a single spot of colour in the middle of the miserable grey city and a mass of sludgy ash caked into the street outside while everyone else subsisted on tinny water rations doled out at meals. Josephine hadn’t lived planet-side in half a decade and the place she’d ended up smelled of smoke and misery and was probably giving her black lung. Fucking typical.
She hurried through the streets, head ducked — her own smokesuit was a shapeless hooded canvas poncho that cinched at the face and reached down to her knees. Paired with thick goggles and a mask, it just about made the walk tolerable.
“ETA, Vesker?” Lane’s voice crackled over the radio. The foreman had taken one looked at Nola-Vespekonet on her name tag, and what had emerged from his tangled attempt at pronunciation was Vesker. Not so bad, as nicknames went; she’d spent long enough in the military to know when to count her blessings.
“Ten minutes,” she said, yanking her hand cart through a patch of caked sludge. The furnace casing strapped to the top swayed precariously. “Would be five if it weren’t like Lord Loa’s fucking asshole in here.”
“Well, hurry it. Your boy’s acting up again.”
“I told you, leave him be, Lane,” Josephine snarled back. The cart jolted free of the ash mound and into the back of her leg. “Fuck!”
Limping, she hauled it the remaining five blocks to the uninspiringly named Factory #30, a hulking concrete monolith with narrow, ash-caked windows coughing smoke into the already laden sky. She maneuvered the cart through the delivery door, paused on the mat to shake off the worst of the soot before she stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
She peeled off her smokesuit, hung it on one of the hooks along the wall before she took off her mask and goggles — she’d only needed to choke on a mouthful of soot shaken free from her hood once to avoid repeating the mistake of lowering the mask first, no matter how badly it smelled of grease and chemicals and her own sour breath —, fished her earplugs out of the inner pocket because she still wanted to have her hearing when she was old, thank you very much, and stepped onto the factory floor.
It was tight and hot and loud, machines barely spaced wide enough to steer her cart between them. She pulled up alongside the hulking central furnace, checked the temperature gauge, and swore.
“Vesker, your boy—” Lane shouted across the shop.
“Just fucking hold on,” she shouted back, shoving on her goggles and gloves. The thick fabric was patched with folded scraps from the bottom of her coveralls, because Maralenne Metalworks Incorporated couldn’t be fucked to buy equipment that wouldn’t wear through on the first use, let alone replace it when it did.
“Vesker—”
“Put him in the mess,” Josephine shouted back. It wouldn’t be quiet, but it’d be better than the factory floor. She wiped the goggles clean, slipped them back over her eyes. Checked over her equipment harness, making sure everything was in its place; propped the new casing against the edge of the furnace within easy reach. Swung herself to the floor.
“Vesker!”
“What?” she pulled herself back to her feet, hand braced against the radiating heat of the furnace. A year in this place and she’d gone all creaky, like an old woman.
What was Kit in the mess room already, making that high, keening sound he only ever did when he had well and truly tripped past the edge of his rope and into a full meltdown. It’d happened once or twice on the ships, but hardly ever after they left the kids and the only constant source of noise was the engines.
But if their year on Maralenne was hard for Josephine, it had been ten times worse for Kit. On his better days, he worked in the office: he had a brain for calculations and a passion for rearranging things into whatever he had decided was the best system, regardless of whether the things’ owners wanted them rearranged. It had driven Dita insane; she may have been one of the more even-tempered members of their little crew but she was also allergic to putting anything away, a practice she insisted saved time. On the ships, Josephine had banned him from touching her own equipment, but here she let him have at it — anything that kept him calm and occupied was a win her her book, and Stel knew they hadn’t had many of those, lately.
Lane had left him alone, at least. Kit had shoved himself into the back corner of the mess hall, rocking on his feet, hands wrapped so tight around his arms it must have been painful, head knocking occasionally against the wall with a force that made her wince. Josephine shut the door softly behind her. She hesitated over the lights: the dark would help; her blundering into every table and chair between her and Kit wouldn’t. She left them on.
“Vesker, why the fuck have you left all this shit in the middle of my shop?” Lane’s voice filtered sharp through the radio.
“Can’t hear you. Interference,” Josephine said, shutting it off. To Kit, she signed, “What’s the problem, bud?”
When he didn’t answer — not that she’d been expecting him to — she fished her heavy-duty ear protectors out of her front pocket and leaned gingerly over to snap them over his ears. There was never anything to be done, here, not really. She could make it marginally quieter, find some corner where he could be alone for a stolen handful of minutes, but there was nowhere free of smoke, or the smell. She slid down against the wall a little distance away and waited it out.
****
The problem was that he could only talk to Josephine. That was not the entire problem, of course — account for systemic factors, it was only a tiny sliver of the problem — but it was the one that he found himself thinking of most often, for reasons he could not explain even to himself. It was not that he disliked Josephine, who was typically his second or third favourite among the crew, and rarely fell lower than fifth or sixth.
Kit preferred to be left alone, and for the majority of his life, he had been. He did not remember until he left the crew that not being able to communicate was very different than choosing not to. He could feel himself slipping, his thoughts muddled and slow as they wore away under the onslaught of this place, the frustration quicker to rise under his skin, the words quicker to desert him: a collection of reactions in human skin.
Kit wasn’t an idiot. He knew there was not much work to come by for someone like him, or for Josephine when she was with him. She did not say it, but alone she was a talented mechanic with years of experience fully capable of a secure career. (That’s an optimistic take on it, Josephine had said when he raised the issue. And a moot point. You’re stuck with me. She meant this as a reassurance, he thought, to tell him that she would not leave even when sometimes he wanted her to, but also literally. He had stuck them both in this place, and now it was killing them).
Josephine left him in the bunkhouse washroom with instructions to take a shower and a nap. But he could not bear the thin, freezing stream of the shower now, or the slimy pinch of his hand-made shower shoes, or the patter of water against his skin, or the freezing air when he stepped out, and so instead he climbed into his bunk and pulled the blankets over his head.
****
“Am I paying you to fix the boiler or am I paying you to coddle that fucking boy?” Lane demanded when Josephine trekked back into the shop an hour later.
“I’m fixing your fucking boiler now, aren’t I?” She snatched the spare boiler plate from where someone had propped it against the back wall, dropped back to the floor, too hard, winced as her shoulder hit concrete. “He wouldn’t be having such an awful fucking time of it if you knew how to run your shop.”
Under the boiler, it was tight and hot and dark. Josephine wriggled her right arm to click on her headlamp. The metal was corroded under the patch job of tape and putty. She’d been asking for months to strip the whole thing out and replace it before it killed them all — really, she’d been asking for months for someone to hire a proper fucking boiler engineer rather than a ship’s grease monkey, because she might like being employed but she liked being alive even better — but Lane had laughed her out of his office, and her one and only attempt to speak to the governor personally had ended with a night in lockup.
“You’re fired.”
“Not until I fix this fucking boiler, I’m not.” As much as she’d gladly watch the factory go up in flames, it’d be a lost investment for the corporation and a lifetime of injury for the workers. So she fixed the fucking boiler.
Afterwards, hands stinging raw under the useless gloves, she pulled herself back to her feet, eye-to-eye with Lane. “You need to fix this,” she said quietly. “I don’t mean hire another grease monkey to patch it when it gets bad, I mean actually fix it. Maybe you don’t give one single flying fuck about anyone else, but you also work here. This thing explodes, I got real bad news for you about how parboiled your flesh is gonna be. Or here’s another idea: go fuck yourself with a rusty poker.”
There wasn’t really an effective way to storm out of a room when leaving required pausing to don several layers of protective equipment, but Josephine made a valiant go of it, slamming the workshop door on the way out for good measure. Outside, she sank against the side of the building, feeling sick.
“Fuck,” she whispered. She barely had enough saved up from this shit job to buy herself passage off the planet, let alone her and Kit. One of the other factories might hire her — workers on Maralenne were constantly bouncing from one shit working situation to another, and even cursing out the foreman wasn’t likely to be a permanent strike; if they never hired anyone who’d mouthed off at a foreman before, the factories would be empty — but she and Kit both knew this place was unsustainable.
And if they did get passage on a ship, where would they go? To another shit factory job on another shit planet? To another smuggler crew miraculously willing to take on a mechanic and a navigator that couldn’t step foot in the Vetec Quadrant without putting a target on all their backs? That might never see Kit as anything other than a liability? She almost wished they’d gone to the Oasis. At least then they’d be with Rico and Avram. Even Vani and Bo — the pair of them were terrifying more often than not, but they’d had their good times alongside the bad.
She took the long way back to the bunkhouse. Or rather, she started taking the long way back to the bunkhouse and halfway through found herself just wandering. The thick, oily scent of the air cleared a little as she made her way out of the centre of Maralenne City. To the east the ground was cratered with mine pits, but to the west was a flat, endless expanse of dust.
“Stel,” she muttered, dropping to the dirt, aftershocks shivering through her bruises. Then, “Sorry, my lady,” tracing a warding sign over her chest. Shouldn’t call on her on land, the lady wouldn’t like that, but Josephine was a ship rat through and through; never had herself a proper dry land patron.
Checking her watch, she pulled out her communicator and switched it to the voice channel, listing to the buzz of dead air. The show wouldn’t start for another five or ten minutes, but listening to the silence like this, eyes closed, she could almost pretend it was another job waiting for the call in. Something nice and simple. Legal, even. The kind where Avram told them to take their time and enjoy the solid ground under their feet and the sun on their faces.
“Sound check.” Immanuel’s voice came over the radio, sounding comfortingly like himself, the two words crisp and underscored with a touch of irritation.
“It is such a pleasure to be with you here today, and look at this venue, nice clear sound, couldn’t ask for anything better,” Sacha’s voice replied, effusive. He had a smoothed-out way of talking now, some kind of Vetec Centrals accent instead of his usual Capeira drawl.
“Are you on stage already?” Immanuel demanded. “What were you planning to do if we had a tech malfunction, Sacha? Fucking guess?” Then, hearing an intake of breath Josephine could identify even over the radio as the prelude to some long-winded bullshit story, this time told through code to a live audience, “never mind. Don’t answer that.”
“And the energy tonight! Breathe it in, folks, nice deep breath, close your eyes, don’t you feel it in your fingertips?” She didn’t think she’d ever heard Sacha use the word folks before he and Immanuel started... whatever it was that they did every Tuesday evening at 1700. “All of us here together, now, feel that connection. Reach out to your neighbour; that’s not a stranger, that’s your sibling, that’s your parent, that’s your dearest friend in all the world. All of us, an organism together.” He sounded almost like himself, with that one. Evidently, Immanuel thought so, too.
“Keep it focused.”
“I have a gift,” Sacha said. “One that’s brought me pain, and I took that pain and I transformed it into something else, let me tell you, something I’m gonna share with you, all of you, just a whisper of taste now, close your eyes and feel it passing through you.” She did not feel the mysterious it passing through her and neither did any of the gullible idiots watching live, but Josephine breathed in anyway — smoky and thick and disgusting, like grease on her tongue — and let herself be lulled by the familiar voices.
“Front row,” Immanuel was saying. “A little to the left. Not her. That’s your right.”
“I’m gonna share it with you today.” A long pause. “In the front row here, I can tell you’re hurting.”
“Recent,” Immanuel supplied.
“You’re not used to it, are you? How could you ever be used to it?”
“Fuck you, Sacha, you manipulative little worm,” Josephine grumbled into the open air. Her eyelids were heavy, exhaustion settling on her all at once. Her fingertips traced lazily into the dirt. She drifted to sleep.
****
Josephine did not return to the bunkhouse at the same time each day. Her shift ended at 1900, but this provided a frustratingly uncertain guide; some days she came back only long enough for a shower and a handful of hours of sleep before she was called back to work. In the beginning, Kit had braved the factory floor to collect her when the clock hit 1905 — five minutes was a reasonable amount of time to get herself ready to leave, he reasoned — and told her to get back into bed when her late nights were followed by early mornings, but he learned soon enough that the starts and ends of shifts on Maralenne were not the real starts and ends. The rules were fake, and if Josephine followed them, she would loose her job.
Which was to say that when she did not return to the bunkhouse at 1905 that evening, Kit decided to be reasonable and patient. He continued to be reasonable and patient for a further two hours and twenty-three minutes, as long as he could manage before the ambient noise of the other workers returning for the night made him feel like peeling his own skin off. He slipped unnoticed from his bunk and into his smoke suit, and out into the night.
Kit followed the proximity beacon past the edge of the factory district and onto the flat sandy expanse of the fields. Josephine was a still lump on the ground, and he hurried towards her until she sat up at the sound of his footsteps and he realized she had been asleep, not injured, hands still folded over her chest, communicator cradled between them. She coughed, sending a shower of dirt over her shoulders when she rubbed a hand through her hair.
“I’m fine,” she signed. He thought she signed, in the low light.
Usually when one of the crew said this unprompted, it meant they were not fine. Kit waited for her to elaborate. Josephine let out a full-body sigh, slumping forward over her crossed legs so her forehead pressed against the ground. This seemed unwise — the dirt was unsettled and even standing up and wearing his mask, Kit was breathing in more of it than he would have preferred — and let out a low groan. She said something out loud, which he did not hear, then signed, one-handed, “Got fired.”
Because she could not see him, Kit wrangled his vocal chords into working order. “Why.”
Josephine sat up, finally. She had a patch of dirt streaked on her forehead. “Not on fucking purpose,” she signed sharply. They stared at each other in silence. The breeze picked up; Kit ducked his face against the blowing ash.
A noise came from the communicator, startling them both. Josephine moved to turn it off, signing with her free hand, “I was listening to Sacha and Immanuel’s scam tour, you know—” she cut off. The sound came again, louder this time. A quick series of taps, three in a row. Come in. A pause, then three more taps. Half a word, lost in static before the communicator shut off from the other end.
“That was...” Josephine said.
“Avram.”
****
“Turn that off,” Immanuel groaned, pressing his palms into his closed eyes. He ached from his neck to his tailbone, and it felt like someone had stirred his brain with a hot poker before jabbing it in his eyes for good measure. Whatever had been making the tapping sound obligingly shut off. He hazarded opening his eyes, then slammed them shut again. The room blazed nauseatingly white.
Somewhere close by, Sacha’s voice said, sounding distinctly queasy, “If I were the type of person to experience regret, I might be experiencing it now.”
“Are you gonna throw up on me?” Immanuel asked.
He chanced opening his eyes again and, after a round of furious blinking, found that they were in the washroom. In the tub, specifically, Sacha sprawled sideways with one leg thrown over the lip and the other foot pressed against the inside of Immanuel’s thigh, head tipped against the tap. They were both in the same clothes they’d worn last night, shoes and all.
Sacha maneuvered himself to sit floppily upright, draped the top half of his body over the rim of the tub, and slithered uncoordinatedly onto the tile floor. “Ow.”
Immanuel peered over to find him lying flat on his back. His vest had come off one shoulder and gotten tangled around his elbow. His hair, come lose from the neat braid Immanuel had put in before he went on stage, splayed out over the blue tiles. They’d consumed... some amount of vodka between them. Definitely more than they should have. It had all gone a bit blurry at some point after Sacha convinced him to climb up onto the table.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” Immanuel said. His voice rasped like he’d been sick.
“I said so already, didn’t I?” Sacha said, wobbling to his feet. One hand braced against the wall, he held out the other to Immanuel. Scrunched an eye closed, thinking. “Or, no, I implied it. Which is better than saying.” He wiggled his fingers; Immanuel grabbed them and nearly sent them both crashing back to the ground as he hauled himself upright, bracing against Sacha’s decidedly unsteady shoulders.
“No, I mean if fucking...” he tried with limited success to corral his thoughts. “You told your groupies they could come see us here. If they need more of your guidance. And if they do, they’ll see we got trashed in the fucking bathtub.”
“We didn’t get trashed in the bathtub,” Sacha said. He wandered over to the mirror and made a cursory attempt at fixing his hair, then re-buttoned his vest on the second try. “We drank with dignity and grace at the bar like civilized people before retiring to meditate in the fucking bathtub.”
“Have fun selling that one,” Immanuel said, stepping gingerly out of the tub to join Sacha at the sink. They both looked waxy and awful. “We need to be careful. We both grew up in the gutter, we have no idea what the rules are.”
“Neither would Mordecai Metzger,” Sacha pointed out. “Poor, traumatized lab rat stumbling through the world, it’s no wonder he blunders into something, every so often...”
“Then you should have played him as a poor, traumatized lab rat,” Immanuel said. He hung his own vest on the hook by the door, followed by his shirt. “And that man in the front row, watching you last night. I swear he’s been there before.”
“Everyone was watching me last night. Stop looking in the shadows.” Sacha draped himself over Immanuel’s back, skinny freckled forearms coming to wrap around his neck, pointy chin dug into his clavicle. “Everything is temporary, Masha; enjoy the ride while it lasts. Also enjoy the shower. You smell like a brewery.”
Five months earlier, after Sacha got up on stage in front of what must have been half the Vetec government and proclaimed himself to be a dead man half a decade his senior, Immanuel had assumed, quite reasonably he thought, that they would count their blessings, catch the first passenger shuttle out of the quadrant, and live out their days on one of the border planets where no one knew their names.
Instead, Sacha had swanned out of the room with blood still on his teeth where Vani had tried to kill him while Immanuel sat trembling and furious and completely incapable of doing anything at all to help, disappeared for a neat two minutes, and re-emerged looking no cleaner than before but with a hard, half-feral look in his eye that meant trouble. He’d gone around the room shaking hands, smiling demurely when they lauded his bravery, telling anyone who would listen I just did what anyone else would do. Started making his goodbyes, siting a need to lay down and shut his eyes, and Immanuel had allowed himself a brief spark of incredulous hope that Sacha had by some miracle managed to navigate this train wreck of a situation. And then a woman in towering heels and a deep purple coat had stepped forward and asked if he wanted to give a lecture.
“Oh, I would be honoured,” Sacha said with real delight, and that was that. Immanuel told him he could make his own awful decisions and live with the consequences, thank you and have a good life, and Sacha told him of course, he’d never expected anything different but weren’t they heading in the same direction anyway, might as well save on transport and board for a little longer yet. So they’d shared a bunk on the shuttle, and Immanuel hadn’t left, after they landed. Had honestly barely considered it.
Now Sacha was chattering about something, enthusiastically, getting water everywhere as he gestured. Immanuel squeezed a drop of shampoo onto the top of his head before reaching around to put it back on the shelf, then redirected when he remembered it was on the opposite side: tired, his muscle memory still reverted to the Seabird, of all places.
It had been years since he’d had a shower without Sacha there, splashing water on the floor and getting distracted — no one who lived on space ships for any length of time showered alone unless they were looking to waste their water ration and die of dehydration, and so he’d become a talking, wriggling part of the landscape. Immanuel couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept without Sacha jabbing him with his pointy little elbows, either; the last time he’d traveled without him folded into a spine-curling pretzel in the seat beside him. We don’t owe each other anything, he reminded himself firmly.
“We’re using too much water,” Immanuel said.
“We are not, unless you know more than the automatic shut off,” Sacha protested, but he finished rinsing his hair and shut off the water all the same, whinging about the cold as he wrapped himself up in a towel, curled up into a ball on the bathmat with all his limbs covered. “Are you being haunted by your mistakes?”
“What?” Immanuel demanded.
“You have the pallor of a man about to expire. Or throw up, which is less dignified.”
“Than dying?” Immanuel said. “Did you listen to Dita? About the smells, and the... orifices?” Sacha pulled a face, suggesting he did, in fact, remember the orifices.
“Being dead is undignified. Dying is not.” Then, anticipating the obvious counterargument, Sacha amended, “or at least it’s not inherently undignified.”
They bickered through getting ready, which was distracting enough that Immanuel forgot about the sick pit in his stomach that never quite went away, these days. They had one final performance in New Aglia, and then it would be another shuttle, another evening waiting backstage for the moment a couple of well-placed questions sent their carefully constructed new life crashing down on their heads.
****
Immanuel was twitchy and dissatisfied in a way he would either get over in a week or that would erupt into a massive argument, which was always exciting — they were neither of them shouters, unless the circumstances demanded it, but Immanuel could be creatively vicious when he wanted, and Sacha wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to be creatively vicious in return.
Contrary to popular belief, he was not indiscriminate in his love of recreational arguments; he did, in fact, understand the value of positive relations when crammed into a tin can alongside the same people for the foreseeable future. But it did leave him with a steady accumulation of stinging personal observations of varying levels of accuracy — a strong insult was an accurate insult, but only effective if its target recognized the accuracy as well; he was not so enamoured with the truth as to be unwilling to sacrifice it in the name of gaining the upper hand.
Which didn’t matter anyway, because it soon became clear that Immanuel was in a sulking mood and quite possibly would be forever. The man lived to be dissatisfied; if he didn’t have something to complain about, he’d die of boredom. Luckily for his continued existence, Immanuel had found plenty to complain about and was in rare, delightfully prickly form as they prepared for the performance that night: he hated live events.
“Sound check,” he was saying, irritably. “Before the show today, salamander.” Salamander was new, more or less — Immanuel wouldn’t call him Mordecai and he couldn’t call him Sacha, and so he’d cycled through a series of ridiculous nicknames (he’d called him buddy, once, an experiment they had mutually and silently agreed never to repeat), and then, after the first high-alert months had passed and he started to slip back into old habits, Sachet, Sacrament, Sand, Salamander.
“I hear you, Kelmian rainforest frog,” Sacha said. He was buttoning his shirt, which was crisp and white and fitted. It was a different one than he’d worn that morning. Mordecai Metzger changed his clothes to perform and brushed his hair every day. Everything he wore was clean and correctly sized: patterned shirts paired with plain vests or vice-versa, matching jacket and pants. It made him look like Immanuel if Immanuel wore colour. (Sacha Pavlik had once worn the same oversize short-sleeve flower print button-down for a month and a half before they landed for their laundry run.)
The performance was at the main stage, tonight: the hall where the crew had been put on trial was a rental space the rest of the year. Sacha (Mordecai) stepped onto the platform where he had obliterated five years of history and the memory of a man he had never met — there was an irresistible narrative drama to speaking in this space, he had told Immanuel, that transcended the earthly concerns of budget and audience size.
The new Mordecai Metzger threw back his arms under the blazing white spotlights and smiled wide for his audience, a hazy crowd behind the glare to a bubbling round of cheers.
“Good evening, New Aglia, good evening, it’s my last night here and I could not ask for a better crowd!” With the lights, he couldn’t see their faces, but he scanned the room from end to end so it seemed he was meeting each of their eyes in turn. “Friends, let me tell you a story.”
“Don’t tell a fucking story,” Immanuel groaned in his ear.
“When I was young,” he said, lowering his voice. “I found the fountain of youth. Tell me now, how old do you think I am? If we ran into each other on the street, what would be your guess?” — “Sacha, for fuck’s sake,” Immanuel said — “In the front there in the lovely pink shirt, give me a number.”
“Seventeen?”
Sacha laughed, pressed a hand to his chest. “Oh, going straight for the kill, there. In the back, what’ve you got?”
“Twenty-two?”
“Thank you, that’s more like it,” Sacha said. “As a matter of fact, I was seventeen years old at the time” — he winked at lovely pink shirt in the front row— “And I knew, I knew, young though I was, that this was a gift I could not help but share.” He did the trick again, the one that made it seem like he was looking them in the eye.
“Sacha you cannot fucking do this,” Immanuel said in his ear. “What are you going to do when you look twenty-five? Thirty?”
“It was a difficult journey, for me,” he said softly. “I came to Project Lifebloom as an unwanted child. A changeling, rejected for a strangeness within myself I could not understand, and when I was cut apart, I was put back together more than whole. I am twenty-three years old, but do I look a day over twenty? Or seventeen, according to some of you.” There was an electric feeling of standing up in front of all these people, their eyes on him, the adoration pouring in, layer on layer until Mordecai Metzger sprung from the grave alive and shining. “Friends, the greatest gift, the greatest,” he said, breathless, tongue moving on its own, “is that for all the pain of this blessing, I pass it on to you, painless.”
The earbud crackled. “Excuse me, you’re not the only ones trying to use the comm channel. Inconsiderate fuckers.” Sacha startled: he hadn’t heard Josephine’s voice in more than a year. Immanuel made an inarticulate noise in his ear.
“Well, we’re using it now. It will be free in an hour,” he said.
“We are trying—” the communicator went silent, shut off from Immanuel’s end, probably. Sacha realized he had let the pause drag on too long and swept his arms out, smiling wide.
“Step up. Let me share my gift with you.” A ripple through the crowd, and then, after a long moment, a man stood from the front row. Solid, mid-height, green shirt, good shoes. Sacha turned his smile on him. “Come up,” he repeated.
The communicator crackled again in his ear in a burst of overlapping voices, and then Immanuel cut through, “No, not—” but it was too late, the man was already climbing the stage stairs. He came to a stop beside Sacha. Good stage presence, relaxed but curious, thumbs tucked into his pockets, rings on most of his fingers. Light hair, mostly grey but probably red before that. Clear blue eyes. Sacha held out both hands, palms up, and did not flinch when the man touched him. Strong grip, fingers uncallused.
“Morty,” he said, loud enough to be picked up by the microphone. “Do you recognize me? It’s your uncle Aaron. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
I will spare you the gruesome details. Suffice it to say when it came to an end I found myself in a room I have since learned is the infirmary, rather closer to death than you were when I woke in your body. My apologies.
Avram had planted the seed himself, Sacha would tell him later. On the Central Station in a windowless, whitewashed room empty besides two chairs — simple steel things, painted the same white — facing each other in the centre of the space.
“This was our recalibration centre,” Avram had said, looping an arm around Sacha’s shoulders, and the alarms had gone before he could ask what that meant. Had not needed to, in the end, when he climbed into his narrow bunk on the Alouen and felt something hard and lumpish poking him in the back when he laid down, when he twisted an arm beneath the thin mattress and pulled the crumpled folders out, reading by the lamplight. The crew’s files, obviously pulled from a larger selection — Kit must have brought them to the ship before he returned to the tunnels. Must have found the collection of documents that would have paid their way for months to come, for maybe a year, if they stretched it, and instead of delivering them to their mysterious employer he had... what? Taken the money for himself? Left them behind? Been too out of his head to formulate any plan at all?
In the days after their escape on the Alouen, he had tucked himself into the quietest corner (there were no quiet corners) with his jacket over his head and hissed at anyone who came near, which did not exactly inspire confidence in his ability to scheme. Sacha read by flashlight with the blankets pulled over his head and said nothing, and Kit said nothing either, and so they stayed, suspended in their shared secret.
Immanuel — who had told him before they left Capeira that all places were the same, that nowhere was better, just differently bad — was in his heart an optimist. His troubles were neat and small and wore his father’s face: Felix had left the Project, turning his back on the fire in which the Third Generation had been forged, and so turning back towards it must be the correct decision. His father, he believed but would not say, had robbed him of his people and left him with a poor substitute.
Sacha, contrary to popular belief, was more practical. There were no ties but those born through proximity, the relentless scrape of sharp edges against sharp edges until they wore each other bloody and, pressed tight, the wounds scabbed them together into a grumbling, many-headed homunculus. Even on Capeira, Sacha had known there was no easy life when they left, simply one he could approach with the clear-eyed acumen of an adult, without the burden of childish mistakes: they would find the remnants of the Project or they would not, he had thought, and Sacha would land on his feet as he always did.
Sent for recalibration. Letters printed neat, dated. Problem behaviour resulting in referral as compared to behaviour in the week following recalibration. Name of the referrer, and beside it, the name of the Soother who had completed the procedure. The Soother, singular: Performed by Bernard Kerra, each and every time. And then there was Bo’s file, twice as thick as the rest. A wild-born miracle, the writer gushed, uncharacteristically florid. Capable of feats beyond any of their other Soothers, though lessons were hampered by his timid nature and persistent failure to recognize when he was using his gift.
(Sometimes, when he was away from the ship, Sacha had the sudden, encompassing urge to come home, so strong it pointed his feet before the thought had time to register consciously, and it was only when he was back in his bunk that he realized it had not been his thought at all. Unnerving, but not irresistible, and he had clung to the distinction tight when panic threatened to crest. Less than ideal, but tolerable. Most things in life were.)
“Were you ever sent for recalibration?” Sacha asked one morning, early, when Avram had just woken up and he had not yet gone to sleep. His captain had his head propped up on his fist and his eyes fixed blankly on tabletop. He knew the answer, of course: just once, seventeen months before the Project collapsed.
“Once,” Avram said. He reached out, drawing his fingers through the tangles of Sacha’s hair. “It’s getting to be time to cut this, hmm?”
“What’s it like?”
Avram hummed again, sweeping his hair back. “You look like a little kitten left out in the rain, hon.”
“I meant recalibration,” Sacha said.
“I figured.” Avram sighed. The silence dragged on. “It’s like stepping into a warm bath. Whatever you were worried about before, you still remember it, but it doesn’t matter so much anymore. Just calm.” He tilted his head, ducking to meet Sacha’s eyes. “Bo can still do it, hon. If there’s something... I know you’ve had a pretty tough time. It doesn’t have to be so hard to carry.”
“What is it I’m carrying, Captain?” Sacha asked, flat. A challenge, presented through bared teeth: they both knew he would lie.
But Avram was watching him, eyes dark and unreadable in the dim light, and he said, “do you want me to guess? Would that be easier than to say it?” He should say, tell me a tale, Captain. Tell him good effort but no dice, that for all his morbid retellings he had been forged in the fires of an ordinary, quiet upbringing.
Instead Sacha said, “it’s not like you’re thinking — there’s no secret festering wound to drain so the rest can heal. Life is just...” he waved his hand vaguely, at themselves and at the walls, “a series of indignities, piled onto each other with no beginning or end, just... continuity.”
All at once he felt the panic in him, cresting, claws dug into his lungs from the inside out. He’d always thought, when he said things he had not meant to say, when his mind refused to be wrangled to the task at hand, that it was at least an authentic fault — but Bo could draw it out of him, couldn’t he? Could mold him into a whole different person and convince him that was who he was all along, scrub him clean and present him shining to their captain with no memory of the person he had been before.
“Sacha?”
He stood, smiling, trembling hands tucked into his pockets. Of his own free will? And the shaking, frightened thing in his chest, that could not be his — Sacha was not someone who was afraid; life happened as it happened and if sometimes it was unpleasant or inconvenient or painful, well, that only made the whole experience more interesting. A life without challenge was a life not worth living, and Sacha would solve this one as he had solved the rest.
****
Sacha was twitchy. Sacha was always twitchy, but the twitchiness was decidedly harder to ignore when he slept — or rather, when he didn’t sleep, that was the whole problem — in the bunk above Dita’s. Every time her poor beleaguered body nearly managed to drop off to sleep in spite of the space so narrow that her arm hung off the side and she smashed her forehead more than once trying to sit up, he decided it was the perfect time to take a nice long stroll around and around and around the ship in circles, up the stairs and through the galley and down the stairs and back up the stairs and into his bunk and out of his bunk and up the stairs—
“I’m going to murder him,” Immanuel whispered on the fourth night. Dita groaned in agreement. Then, louder, “can you please hurry the fuck up and get over... whatever this is?”
“Shut up!” Josephine shouted from the cabin.
Then Avram’s voice, sleepily, “Don’t speak to your crew mates like that.”
He was leaving her and Immanuel to solve the problem themselves, apparently, or doing that thing where he let people have their emotions until they got over it and decided they were ready to talk. Which Sacha did, in a sense: on the fifth night Dita found herself sat on the top step, Sacha and Immanuel folded onto the two steps below with their backs pressed against the wall, signing to each other in the dim yellow glow of the emergency strip lighting along the ceiling that never shut off.
In a court of law she’d say they were exhausted, on edge, irritable. Possibly not at their most rational — let the record show she was not in the habit of following plans created by unstable nineteen-year-olds. So maybe she knew that when Sacha hunched over his knees of the middle step with a wild look in his eyes and a jerky tremble to his hands and told them he wanted Soothers out of his head, permanently, all of them, it didn’t matter how, the sensible thing would have been to suggest meditation, or journalling, or pat him on the head and tell him he was being paranoid and irrational and he’d get over it in a couple of weeks when the next shiny new thing came along.
Instead, she started thinking. Dita had dedicated nearly fifteen years of her life to figuring out the exact mechanisms of psychic abilities, hours upon hours upon hours — years, probably, added all together — hunched over her microscope. She had tissue samples and brain scans from every subject who had lived and died over the course of Project Lifebloom, and samples from more than a few of their wild-born descendants, obtained less than legally and at not insignificant cost. She had read every paper and book and half-baked theory in the field and written more than a few herself. So she knew the easiest way to stop a Soother from using their gifts was a modification to the Soother themselves, not to the Hollow panicking about it — Dhillon and Victoria Kelly had been poking around with something like that for Bo, before they realized his impulse towards rebellion was virtually non-existent — but she kept picking at it.
Maybe it was the inevitable effect of nearly five years cut off from the academic path that had been her lifeblood, or the reminder of a time when, frustrating as life at the Project had sometimes been, she’d been able to throw herself head-first into her research without concern for any of the bureaucracy that she’d railed against and ignored in turns in her earlier years.
They’d decreased accidents with the Hollows and Healers with isolation and layers of clothes; Soothers, in contrast, grew in skill at the same rate they grew to understand people — they might be powerful as kids, but so clumsy it was obvious they were, well, soothing. The way Bo and every other Soother Dita had known explained it, they couldn’t actually feel anyone’s emotions besides their own except through good old fashioned empathy, but there was a certain identifying warmth, a homing beacon that allowed them to reach their targets from a distance where Hollows and Healers needed direct contact. If she could isolate what they were picking up on, she might be able to knock it out in Sacha’s head, make him a blank spot on the map.
She wrote to Dr. Tremblay from the public interplanetary hookup on Rensanner when they stopped for resupply and to Victoria Kelly from Devlin, who put her in touch with her contacts on Capeira. She collected every book she could get her hands on and scribbled notes in the margins and the empty pages at the end. By the time they were headed for the edge of Vetec space, she had a plan. Or rather, she had a theory and a willing test subject, and Immanuel and Sacha had a plan to make it happen.
****
It happened like this: Immanuel said, “why do I have to be the one to do it?” aiming for irritable and landing on plaintive, but he dug through the ship’s drive until he found the manual and read it over and over until his eyes ached, retreated to the engine room every day after dinner on the pretense of alone time to stare at the flight drive until even Josephine no longer bothered snapping at him not to touch anything. They crept closer to Vetec space and Sacha started sleeping again and Immanuel was the one who laid awake at night, eyes fixed on the bunk above and stomach churning.
On Capeira he’d leave. Take what little he’d saved over the years and leave Sacha and his delusions and this whole mess of a crew behind and stay as far as he could from the Antiquerie (from his father). Live a life not dragged down by everyone else’s incompetence, for once. But for now Sacha slipped off the top bunk and squeezed in next to him, bracketed on their sides with their shoulders wedged between the hard mattress and the harder slats of the bunk above, nothing between them but darkness and warmth.
“What are you thinking about?” he whispered.
“Mainly how you’re a fucking idiot.” And Sacha laughed, quiet, so close he felt the vibration of it between their bodies, wrapped his hand around Immanuel’s and squeezed, siphoning away all the sick, built up tension. He slept. The next day, he crashed a space ship.
****
His hands had started trembling the moment the Alouen touched down in the docking bay and had not stopped as they wound their way through the upper concourse, out of place in their battered crew coveralls but safer there than on the lower, where his face or Sacha’s might still be recognized. He wasn’t in the mood for awkward conversation today, especially not when that awkward conversation might make its way back to his father.
The tension in his shoulders had begun to ease by the time they made it to the maintenance ladder at the far end of the station without anyone sparing them so much as a second glance: four years might not be a long time, but it wasn’t like he or Sacha had done anything particularly memorable on Capeira, unless anyone had particularly strong feelings about getting hustled at cards by a couple of teenagers. Or that time Thomasin Marino slapped Sacha across the face with all her rings on and he’d spent two weeks forcing everyone to look at the bloody mess of his cheek while he told gruesome stories about how it happened, even though Marino had done it in the middle of the lower concourse where they could all see what had happened with their own two eyes.
Which is to say it was really his own fault that, in spite of all the evidence collected over the course of his seven entire years of knowing Sacha Pavlik, he assumed that he had come to Capeira equipped with a rational, coherent plan for dealing with his former boss. Sacha had never come up with a rational, coherent plan in his life, and at present he seemed even less inclined to start than usual. They stepped out of the maintenance stairway to find her leaned back against the wall, arms crossed to show the twining rose stems tattooed down both her arms, and his whole body went shock-still, then eased. Marino watched him, dryly amused. She was taller than Josephine by half a foot but they had the same solid, squarish Everliner build, light hair and pale skin stark against dark eyes.
She said, “Do you remember what happens now, Sacha my love?”
“A terrible murder? The poor unfortunate victim dismembered and sold for parts? Dr. Mansour here might be buying,” Sacha said.
“So you can’t pay me what I’m owed,” Marino said. She spoke with a smile edge in her voice, like she was perpetually trying not to laugh at a dull child.
“Sorry, what does he owe you?” Dita cut in.
Immanuel had never been an Acolyte himself, but he’d felt Thomasin’s claws digging in towards the end, coming closer to bringing the Antiquerie into the fold with each passing day. He knew the rules.
“Any unsanctioned income obtained by an Acolyte is due to the organization, with interest of... what was it? Ten percent?”
“Twenty,” Marino said. She wrapped her hand around the back of Sacha’s neck, proprietary. “And, in the case of an unsanctioned departure, the full income the agent would have generated working in my employ during the period of their absence. With interest, of course.”
“Good for me I’m such a bad worker, then,” Sacha said, making no move to extract himself from Marino’s hold. “I have a proposition for you.”
“He doesn’t,” Immanuel cut in, suddenly exhausted. “Marino, can we— you know whatever he says will be bullshit. Let me handle it.”
For a moment he was convinced he’d made a mistake: Marino’s hand tightened on Sacha’s neck, fingers digging crescent moons into the delicate flesh. Her flat, dark eyes narrowed; her mouth curled at the edges into something too dangerous to be a smile. Immanuel held himself in place, a mouse pinned beneath the gaze of a hawk. He’d heard the stories. They’d all heard the stories.
“Be my guest. Stel knows it’ll be more productive than dealing with this one.” A final squeeze and her hand dropped to her side. Sacha rubbed at his neck, pouting theatrically and trying to communicate something with his eyebrows that Immanuel resolutely ignored.
When Sacha and Dita had gone, he turned to Marino. “He can’t possibly have made you that much money,” he said, trying to sound less desperate than he felt.
Marino laughed. “God, no. Truth be told I was thanking the Lady Stel the day he fucked off — that kid worked for me three years and he caused me problems each and every one of them. Figured someone else’d do me the favour of sending him on his way to the Night Host, truth be told, but it’s those little surprises that make life worth living, hey?”
Immanuel smiled back, stiffly. “So you’ll let him go?”
Marino fixed him again with those fathomless eyes. “Kid, I may not think Sacha Pavlik’s worth the ink on his birth certificate, and if we’re being frank I’m getting along just fine without your money. But let me make something perfectly fucking clear: if you don’t pay me what I’m owed, whatever Sacha is up to with Lester Varlec right now is going to look like a nice balmy vacation compared to what I’ll do to him.”
****
Tucked into the far corner of the Lower Concourse, Felix’s Antiquerie looked exactly as it always had: the red and green stripped awning faded, the gold lettering cracked and peeling. The barred windows taped over with old newspaper, the chime hung above the door Immanuel still knew how to avoid triggering. Inside it was dim and cramped, smelling of dust, overflowing shelves crammed in close, the odds and ends that could not fit piled precariously on the ground. He eased the door shut behind him, hand up to silence the chimes. Stood there waiting for his eyes to adjust and breathed in the musty scent of the place and tried not to feel eighteen.
The teetering stacks of detritus had shifted configuration, these past years. The toes of his shoes nudged against haphazardly stacked boxes and battered furniture and loose children’s toys as he picked his way forward, breathing slow against the tickle of dust in his throat. Past the sales counter, deserted as he had counted on it being because his father never could be bothered to man the shop he owned. I will hear the bell, he used to promise, fully dressed and in bed well past noon, and when the bell jangled he’d say, in a moment, in a moment, and in the end Immanuel would go out instead. There was a time it had made him proud, how he was the one supporting the both of them, before it made him exhausted and bitter.
He still had the key. After all this time, he still had the key. The floor creaked as he knelt behind the counter, tucked himself into the dark space beneath the tabletop. He and Sacha used to sit here, sometimes, knees tucked up and feet brushing, hidden away from the world. Woodgrain scraped at his fingertips, flexed when he pressed at the corners. Popped off ungainly and too loud; he grabbed for it and missed, winced as it knocked against the floor. Held his breath listening, but there was no sound of footsteps.
His father had had it since before he could remember: a gold chain ugly with inlaid diamonds, a safety net they never used, not when they were hungry or freezing or stranded. Immanuel ran his thumb over the smooth metal. It was cool and slippery in his hand, heavy. His by right: he had been the one who kept the store running, who smoothed away the gambling debts and kept Marino off their doorstep until he couldn’t. Left before he couldn’t, because he liked the woman but he’d seen what working for her had done to Sacha.
“Manuelito?” He shoved his hands into his pockets as he stood, kept his fingers clenched there around the necklace chain. Met his father’s eyes for the first time in four years. Immanuel had met his mother once as a child, so he knew he hadn’t split from his father in some previously unheard-of process of human mitosis, but sometimes looking at him was like looking in the mirror twenty years into the future, if his future self decided to abandon personal hygiene. Except his father’s hair was clean, now, the purple under his eyes shadows instead of bruises.
“Dad,” he said. His father took a step forward, arms outstretched. Immanuel took a step back.
“Are you staying?” he asked, soft. “Are you— have you come back to me?”
Immanuel shook his head. His heel caught on something and he stumbled, caught himself against the counter on his elbow because his hands were still clenched in his pockets.
“Dad, I can’t,” he said, voice cracking. His father’s eyes flicked to the floor, to the corner of the panel poking out from under the counter.
“Okay, Manuelito. I love you.”
He was back in the middle of the shop now, surrounded on all sides by the shelves, palms slick with sweat, heart pounding in his throat. “Okay,” he echoed. Then he turned and shoved back out onto the lower concourse.
****
Sacha kicked his heels idly back against the table, hands braced at the edge. There had been a giddy fire bubbling under his skin the past week, squashed down in the restless picking of fingers until his inner arms were dotted pink and the plasticky cover of his mattress was flaking off in chunks, but Avram hadn’t called him on it, still circling like Sacha was about to vomit out some hidden truth and collapse weeping in his arms.
Instead he strolled through the lower concourse straight-backed and did not think of Thomasin’s hand on his cheek, the night he left, the way her fingers brushed callused warm against his skin, how she told him what he was giving up if he left and what would be waiting for him if he returned. Laughed silently at Immanuel’s shock: he never did have as much foresight as he thought. Watched them walk away side-by-side.
No one bothered them as they made their way to the free clinic. There was not much point in doing Hollow work at a free clinic, but Sacha had spent the night once, sitting together with Immanuel at his father’s beside. Felix’s skin had been tinged waxy purple by the time Immanuel found him, and when Sacha reached for him in silent offer Immanuel had grabbed him hard by the wrists like he was afraid Sacha would lunge for him the moment he let him go.
Mostly he remembered the tiles on the floor, an ugly scuffed yellow that might once have been gold, how he’d traced the toe of his shoe over the patterns again and again. The room Dita led him to now had the same tile, the same white-washed walls, the same stubbornly lingering scent of bleach. It was there that Immanuel caught up with them, arms crossed and expression tight as that night watching over his father.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” he burst out. “It’s suicidal, and irrational, and a fucking waste of life.”
“It’s a risk for the sake of scientific progress,” Dita said.
“What fucking scientific progress? You can’t publish this. You can’t tell anyone about it.”
“It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” Sacha countered, boosting himself onto the narrow hospital bed. He kicked his heels idly against the legs. “Dr. Dita satisfies her scientific curiosity, I live and die on my own terms, you get off the Alouen. A victory for us all.”
“There’s something wrong with you,” Immanuel said. He sounded tired. Resigned. His lips flattened into a hard line, arms crossed, fingers flexing where they curled around his biceps. “God, you’re trying to kill yourself and you’re making me complicit.” He was making himself complicit, arguably, but Sacha knew as well as Immanuel that there were no solitary schemes between them.
“What difference is there between death and total sublimation to the will of another?”
“But you’re not being totally sublimated to the will of another—” here Immanuel made exaggerated quotes with his fingers— “You’re having a paranoid break. Fuck.”
Sacha watched, curious, as he paced across the room, hands coming up to tangle in his hair the way he never usually did, meticulous as he was with the little pot of hair gel tucked into his allotted space in the washroom. He felt suddenly discomfited, stomach fluttering sickly.
“Immanuel—”
The door opened and a man stepped inside, thin and sallow-skinned, grey speckled through his dark hair and eyes hooded. He wore scrubs and an orange medical exemption badge — orange, the colour marking him as a Healer where Sacha’s, on the handful of occasions he worked above-board, was blue to mark him as a Hollow. A trembling apparition of the first Lifebloom cohort, older even than Immanuel’s father, older than Sacha’s parents must have been.
His eyes flicked to Dita, sharp, looking for instruction, and she nodded. He stepped in close, close, blocking out all the rest of the room until it was just the two of them and the rebounding fever-heat between their bodies. A hand on his shoulder, pushing him flat. Hands on his face, cupped around his jaw. Skin cool, thin, papery dry.
Time dissolved in a rushed kaleidoscope jumble. Lightning pain behind his eyes, racing through his nerves, melting, molten hot, dissolving him to distended putty. There was nothing before and there would be nothing after, just this moment suspended forever in time, a sack of bones and meat on the table that had ceased to be, for minutes or hours or days, Sacha Pavlik.
****
He came back to himself, walking. His throat burned, scratchy and sour, like he had been sick and would be again. The floor swooped and dipped and swirled beneath his feet; his joints ground with needled glass. And he was free. Forever, he was free.
****
Dita had bought new shoes for the hearing, and all she could think, as Director Dawson spoke at the front of the room, was that her feet hurt: they were shiny, boxy things that pinched at her toes and rubbed at her ankles, bought from the first shop she’d run across outside New Aglia’s docking bay with less than half an hour before she was due in front of the investigative board. She contemplated the wisdom of swapping them for the battered running shoes she wore every day in the lab, crammed into her bag alongside her folder of lawyer-approved notes.
“Edward Vannery founded this centre with a dream,” Director Dawson was saying. She was a decent speaker, passionate and quick on her feet with a sharp, sardonic edge, somewhere between sharp and casual in her pinstripe vest and rolled-up sleeves.
Dita flexed her toes, wincing, and watched Inspector Song watch the Director from the audience. He was there as a spectator; the panel itself a combination of legislators and scientists, all of them out for blood: gross negligence and redressing the oversights of the previous administration and a stain on your souls that will never be wiped out. Histrionic, but she supposed that was the point of the exercise.
To Dita’s left, Victoria Kelly was all fidgeting hands and bouncing knees. To her left, Dhillon’s eyes fixed on the director with a frozen sort of intensity. None of them would ever work in their fields again, probably. Not unless the Project picked itself back up from the wreckage and started afresh for a second time. She would never be known for anything but this.
(Do you swear that your testimony is the full truth to the best of your knowledge, without omission or misinterpretation? I swear. No harm in adding perjury to the list, now. She stood up on the platform and lied.)
The director rounded on them the moment the shuttle doors closed, afterwards. Dita half-listened from her seat at the back. She’d developed a pulsing headache somewhere around the third hour of testimony. Her throat had gone scratchy dry. She was going to throw the accursed shoes out the airlock first chance she got.
“The goal is to deflect suspicion,” the director was saying, acidic, jabbing her finger at Deputy Orson. “Like a group of fucking children in there—” her voice went high and mocking — “I’m not sure, I can’t remember. For fuck’s sake, if we make it through this cowardly, regressive witch hunt, you’ll be in the bin for dementia.”
Orson bore it quietly, face pinched and shoulders squared. His eyes darted away from the director for just a moment, first to Dhillon, then to Kelly, who shifted forward, spine straightening in a tense line. Dita held herself still. The director’s voice cut off mid-sentence, eyes narrow. The shuttle had been built for ten but it felt abruptly claustrophobic, deathly silent besides the rumble of the engines.
“What’s this, then,” she said, all the emotion stripped out, leaving only ice.
Deputy Orson pushed himself to his feet. “This is unacceptable.”
A flat look from the director. “I agree. Was it the official inquiry that tipped you off, or do your stunning powers of observation have something else for us?”
“The way you run the Project,” the deputy pushed on. “The way you have managed this investigation. The way you speak to us, frankly. That is what’s unacceptable.”
“If you have a problem, schedule a meeting.”
“With your attack dog in the other room?” Dhillon said. “Both of them, now, with the Kerra boy.”
“Be careful. Don’t speak about my daughter that way.”
“I apologize,” Deputy Orson said, softening. “What I mean to say is that Vannery’s presence can make it... difficult to have a frank discussion.”
“Director, we’re not gunning for a change in leadership, here,” Kelly broke in. Too bad, Dita thought. “It’s a bad job, we all know it’s a bad job, none of us want it — but we’ll take it from you, if we have to. We can’t live under your heel any longer.”
The director sat, hands folded in her lap. “I always welcome your opinions; I’m sorry if I haven’t always made that clear,” she said, tone unreadable. “If I’m hard on you, it’s as a sign of respect, though I see now it might come off as cruelty.”
Dita blinked, thrown by the sudden shift. “If we’re taking suggestions, I’d like to know what’s happening before it, you know, happens?” she said. “I know we’re supposed to be careful of what we say to the inspector, but it’d be nice to have some actual guidelines on what to tell him and what not to tell him instead of getting pulled in for the interview and having to guess.”
“I want a guarantee of protection for management and for the medical team,” Dhillon said. “Your daughter does not use her powers on us. Bo Kerra does not use his powers on us. You say you respect our opinions? Then make it safe to share them honestly, without worrying we’ll be turned inside out or forget the conversation ever happened.”
The director’s mouth quirked. She turned her flat shark eyes on Dhillon. “I have never used recalibration on upper-level staff. The accusation itself would be offensive and absurd, if it weren’t worrying — this was been a stressful time, Dr. Dhillon; you of all people should know that if there are gaps in your memory or if you feel in any way unwell, we would be more than happy to grant you whatever medical dispensation you should need.”
Dita couldn’t help it, she laughed out loud at that. “Don’t try to pass this off as delusion in a room full of medical professionals.”
“I don’t remember you being a psychiatrist, Dr. Mansour.”
Dita shrugged. “I did my psych rotation, which, I’m not going to pretend that’s a full qualification, but if one rotation means I’m not an expert, then you definitely aren’t.”
The look the director levelled her was sharp, assessing. She said, “I don’t mean to disrespect your expertise, of course, or your opinions. I also trust — seeing as you’ve all elected to stay with Project Lifebloom, knowing full well our purpose and how we’ve gone about achieving it — that you understand that doing what needs to be done is not always easy, or pleasant. If you feel otherwise, you are, of course, free to leave.” She stood, hand resting lightly on the back of the seat, looking no less relaxed than if they’d been discussing the weather. “I will steer us through these rough waters, but to do that, I need your support. More than that, I need your trust — and you will have mine in return.”
(Two weeks later, Dita was on a shuttle to the Outer Station. But so were Vannery Dawson and Bo Kerra).
****
Immanuel, having a functioning brain and a basic perception of reality, had realized early on that between the two of them, Sacha would die first: he ate badly, picked fights with people twice his size (not that it was difficult; most people were), and Immanuel had once seen him chain smoke an entire pack of cigarettes, propped up on his elbow against the side of the Starside when Avram was away in town. He worked as a Hollow. And so Immanuel knew he would attend Sacha’s funeral the way he knew he would attend his father’s, and not just for the usual reason that children outlived their parents. But he’d thought—
“I can’t fucking believe him,” Immanuel said, to distract himself from the way Sacha looked pale and insubstantial against the Alouen’s bathroom tile.
“Uh-huh,” Sacha said. He levered himself upright to throw up.
Immanuel knew he would die first, was the thing, but Sacha moved through life with such reckless self-confidence, so solidly convinced of his own invincibility that Immanuel started to believe it, too. That it would happen quiet and elegant, years in the future, when they both had grey in their hair. He would take Sacha’s cool, thin hand and Sacha would squeeze his fingers and smile, a hint of that shark edge below the exhaustion, and maybe they would talk or maybe they would just sit, content in each other’s presence until the end crept up on him like sleep.
Instead he was nineteen years old and trembling and terrified, spitting bile into the toilet while Immanuel paced behind him and tried not to panic.
“I spent all that time stuck with him, doing everything, keeping him alive, and I leave and he’s just fine? He just would have been fine the whole fucking time?”
“Uh-huh,” Sacha said again. He patted vaguely in the direction of Immanuel’s leg. “Sorry, are we glad your dad’s alive or not?”
“I don’t know!” He dropped onto the floor at Sacha’s side. Sacha patted him, more successfully this time.
“You are not a very comforting presence.” His cheeks were flushed and tear-damp, hands trembling where they tucked against his stomach. Immanuel had seen him cry before — he could do it on command and wasn’t shy about using the talent. But this wasn’t theatrical weeping to keep a mark distracted while Immanuel picked their pocket or shiny sympathetic eyes as he worked his way into someone’s good graces. This was small and tired, tracing over the bridge of his nose to pool on the fabric of his shirt sleeve. His chest hitched with thin, whistling breaths.
“Sorry.” Immanuel reached for him. Hesitated. “Are you going to throw up on me?”
“Only one way to find out.” So they sat there together on the floor, linked palms clammy between them, until the worst of it passed.
Sacha, cockroach that he was, didn’t die. Within the week, he’d recovered enough to mine his misery for theatrics; within two, he was well enough to pretend to be cured, though not so well they couldn’t all tell he was pretending. Where Avram had seemingly come into the world with a built-in instinct for fussing, Immanuel found himself standing, arms crossed, at Sacha’s bedside in the captain’s cabin until he flopped over on his side, glazed eyes crunching down into a squint, and let out a wheezing sound somewhere between a hack and a cough.
“Are you trying to in— intim...” he trailed off, eyebrows scrunching.
“Intimidate?” Immanuel suggested.
“You’re flattering yourself,” Sacha said with a sharp, mean little laugh. He flipped back over and tugged the blankets over his head. Dita, who had been reading quietly in the opposite corner, looked up from her book and met his eyes.
“It could be fine,” she signed when Sacha’s eyes had slid definitively shut and his breathing went slow and deep. “Or it could be brain damage.” An expansive shrug at that, like, what can you do?
“You can’t tell?” Immanuel signed.
“Brains are complicated, and things are...” she waved her hands. “Settling.”
The door opened and they both snapped their arms guiltily to their sides, but it was just Kit, who if nothing else could be relied upon to keep a secret. His face gave nothing away — his face never gave anything away — but he stretched out his hand, staring at Immanuel until he did the same. A folded piece of paper dropped into his palm.
“Fix this,” Kit signed.
****
Dita thought he had brain damage, which was less than ideal. She had not said so to him, or to the captain, but Sacha could make out enough through the splitting migraine and the sparkling patina over his vision to pick up the gist of her and Immanuel’s signed conversations over his head. Anyway she was mistaken; his vision stabilized soon enough and if the words sometimes slid off the tip of his tongue when he went to speak, there were others to make up for it.
By the time Sacha could stand reliably on his own two feet, their commanders were occupied once more with the logistics of removing themselves from Vetec space, and Sacha, Dita, and Immanuel with Kit’s scrawled coordinates.
“It’s for the Oasis, obviously,” Immanuel signed, less sprawled across the bottom step, back pressed against the wall. Kit has showed him the spot on the nav chart during their shared night shift.
“Obviously,” Sacha signed back, sharp.
In the dark, it felt less like an icepick was being hammered through his eyes and into his brain, and more like it was being gently tapped. He stared at the piece of paper clenched in Immanuel’s hand. It was about the size of his thumb; Kit was just as capable of tearing the thing up or dropping it in the engine or eating it as any of them. Or of giving it to the captain. He could not shake the feeling that before Capeira, the reason would have been obvious, that the moment Kit entrusted the coordinates to the Oasis to Immanuel, he would just have known why. Now everything dragged, molasses slow, on the verge of floating away if not for the bite of his fingernail into the side of his thumb. Pressed until the flesh dipped and broke, blood beading up, sliding towards the web of his fingers.
“He was gone for nearly seventy-two hours,” Dita signed, slowly, thinking as she spoke. “That’s a long time to be wandering the tunnels, in a place that size and with his sense of direction. And Bo said he couldn’t feel him at all.”
“New Aglia is close enough, if he left when the ground troopers landed and didn’t spend more than an hour or two station-side,” Immanuel said.
“So the question is why, not where,” Sacha concluded. He tipped his head back against the wall, pressing his temple against the cold metal. It did nothing at all to help. “He had access to other personnel files, presumably.”
“And didn’t bring them with him.” Dita’s eyes were sharp, considering. “Or brought them with him and left them.”
Had he made the handoff, keeping back their own files, and then, what? Regretted it? Failed to scrape together the words to explain and, for reasons known only to himself, had gone to Immanuel instead of Bo, who would at least have had a decent chance of deciphering whatever was going on in his head? If he had been paid for it, he certainly hadn’t shared with the rest of the crew, but then again Sacha was no stranger to secrets kept so long that explaining the silence became a trial in itself.
(Bo had come to sit with him earlier, on the stairs with his knees folded to his chin like an adult in a chair built for children, and he had rested his broad, warm palm on Sacha’s forehead, arm bent at an awkward angle to reach into the bunk, and Sacha had forced himself to go lax, like stepping into a warm bath, like his whole body didn’t prickle at the touch).
“I’ll ask around,” Dita signed. Her academic social circle had emerged surprisingly intact from her Project days; she had apparently come out of the rigorous battery of Project Lifebloom investigations on friendly terms with a number of the experts brought in to help and more than a few of members of the prosecution panel, a phenomenon Sacha put down more to her cheerful demeanour and inability to stop talking once she had started than to any sort of deliberate betrayal — it certainly hadn’t saved her from having her name listed on the arrest warrant alongside the rest of the leadership. But so long as she stayed out of Vetec space, her former colleagues seemed happy enough to ply her with the latest scholarship and news.
****
In the end, it bought them twenty minutes crammed together in a broom closet in Midge Ohanian’s summer house, jabbing each other with their elbows as they signed. The message had come scrawled in the margins of a scanned microbiology text sent through to Dita’s communicator and read, with some difficulty, on the tiny, grainy screen — their communicators could connect with interplanetary and planetary systems, technically, but Josephine hadn’t designed them with that in mind, and Victoria Kelly would hardly be winning any prizes for her penmanship.
“They found... personal files on New Aglia,” Dita read haltingly. “No, wait. Personnel.‘Not you far as I know.’ Well, we got that bit already. ‘New investigation,’ question mark, question mark, question mark.” She squinted at the screen, tapping at the buttons along the side until the text realigned itself. “She says, uh, ‘going into hiding — suggest you do the same. Don’t contact until safe.’”
Victoria Kelly had slipped out of Vetec space early on and set herself up as station doctor on one of the smaller Kelter outposts. If she was worried, it could hardly be a good sign — Kelter and Vetec relations were not, historically, warm; she wouldn’t be worried about the investigation reaching her there without a reason.
“Well, fuck,” Dita said out loud. She tucked the communicator back into her pocket.
What followed was a brief and vigorous argument in sign that left them all bruised, physically more than emotionally — Dita caught Immanuel across the ribs with her elbow as she made a particularly enthusiastic point, and Sacha overturned a cup of paperclips less than two minutes later — but when they emerged into the hall fifteen minutes later with the paperclips still caught in their hair, it was with the cobbled beginnings of a plan.
Immanuel straightened like a dog catching a scent, and then Rico was barreling down the hall, snapping at them to move. They fell into formation, kept moving forward foot after foot when the migraine rolled sickeningly over him all at once, when every step spiked hot through his body and black spots crowded over his vision.
Outside, under the smoggy sky. Crawling up the side of some ship, metal burning under his hands, plastering flat on the top. The troopers swarming between the ships, body armour and rifles, Rico and Vani and Bo picking them off like flies. The captain and Kit, emerging from the shadows. Josephine with her head bowed and her hands plunged into the ship’s guts. Scrambling down, dust under his feet, a hand on his arm, tugging, the sluggish hiss of the pressurization door as it sealed. A new ship, again, and a nice one; room for nine and their cargo, though of course it wouldn’t last them the week, if that. Sacha dropped ungainly onto the couch, propped himself upright against Immanuel’s shoulder so he could pretend the world wasn’t spinning around him.
Took Vani’s hand and watched as her flesh healed and his split, breathed through the awful blazing fire and the nausea and played the poor little broken bird, Avram’s grip tight around him. They might never see each other again. He turned his face into the junction of his captain’s neck, the fabric of his shirt soft against his cheek, smelling faintly of engine grease.
“It’ll be okay, hon.” Resisted the impulse to turn at the sound of the door, to tense at the new eyes raking over him. Guns, too, by the sound of it.
“Is that one of the kids? Lady Stel, what have you done to him?” Sacha sniffled pathetically and did not smile; he knew better than to break character. Tasted blood in his mouth. “Set him down slowly, now. Show us where you’re keeping the others.”
Avram clutched him tighter against his chest. He’d turned out to be a surprisingly decent actor. “He’s nineteen, and a signed member of this crew,” he said, hard and angry, the way he hardly ever showed. “I don’t hurt kids. I don’t hurt my kids.” But Sacha wasn’t one of his kids, or anyone else’s — he hadn’t been at fifteen, and he certainly wasn’t now, an adult by any metric.
A moment of awkward, stomach-swooping jostling Avram handed him over to Bo, who radiated warmth but held his body stiff-armed and awkward, arms somehow too tight and too loose around his shoulders at the same time.
Behave, the captain tapped against his wrist when he was lowered to his feet, squeezing Sacha against his side. Sacha rolled his eyes and pushed down the sudden swell of panic, the desperate irrational urge to demand Avram stay with him when the Vetec captain slipped under his opposite shoulder and hauled him over the threshold to the med bay. He met Avram’s eyes and Avram’s hand twitched, reached towards him, and the door slid shut between them.
The doctor was a woman of slightly above average height with cat-eye glasses and grey streaked through her dark hair. She gave no sign of surprise at the sight of her captain half-carrying a feverish stranger, nodding towards the bed in the centre of the room where he was summarily deposited. The room was surprisingly large; his bed was one of six separated by curtains, all of them unoccupied. Sacha kicked his heel restlessly against the bed frame. He was very exposed here, nowhere to escape besides the sealed pressurization door — but he wasn’t planning to run.
“My name is Dr. Tremblay,” said the doctor. Sacha offered a pitiful little nod, head ducked. He couldn’t see her face like this, but a military doctor would be a practical woman, and the finding line between the amount of pathetic grovelling that would put him below suspicion and the amount of pathetic grovelling that would be aggravating to the point of denying help was a matter of careful calculation. He settled for limp compliance, accepting the flimsy blue gown she handed him, let her press him flat and stitch him closed in a neat, efficient line. She took his temperature, afterwards, shone a light in his eyes, his mouth, his ears. Weighed and measured him and found him wanting.
“You’re underweight,” Dr. Tremblay told him, which he had guessed but did not consider a detriment; seeing as either nature or circumstance or both had consigned him to be frail and small no matter what he did, it was better to be frail and small and able to tuck himself into tight spaces than frail and slightly less small, forcing him to occupy the same physical space as everyone else.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been sick,” he said quietly.
“Vomiting?” the doctor prompted. “Deliberately?”
“No,” he protested, all wounded shock. And he really hadn’t been; the whole business was painful and undignified, not to mention a waste of time.
“When did your symptoms begin?” the doctor asked, now swabbing the inside of his arm with a cotton pad.
“An hour ago? I got shot.”
“The illness,” the doctor said, irritable.
He shrugged, making his eyes go watery. “I don’t know. I don’t feel good a lot.”
“Hmm.” The doctor uncapped a needle, and he watched as she drew his blood until she had a neat little tray of it and the room was listing slightly to the side. She hummed again, manoeuvred him to sit back, pushed a juice box into his hands, stared at him until he drank it. The sudden rush of sugar made him feel vaguely sick. He set the juice box on the table, or tried to; his vision was doing the strange sparkling thing it did sometimes and he misjudged the distance and dropped it on the floor. He watched it spread orange and sticky over the tile.
There were scans. Scans taken standing up and scans taken lying down and scans taken with wired pads taped to his forehead and he shivered through all of them in his thin hospital gown. By the end he was tired and twitchy and clinging to quiet compliance by his fingertips. Follow the pen with your eyes. Draw a clock. The doctor got quieter and quieter as she worked, eyebrows drawing tight. She took her tablet to a table at the opposite end of the room, where she sat with her back facing him and her shoulders hunched. The captain dropped into a crouch next to her and they whispered back and forth while Sacha pretended not to listen.
“...not one of the surviving children... late teens, just stunted... tail end of the first successful generation, maybe.”
“I’m wild-born, actually,” Sacha said. Tried to think back to that conversation in the broom closet on Esparda. “Or they told me I am. Before I came to the Project, it’s all gaps. That means whatever happened was bad, doesn’t it? So I’m happy I don’t remember.”
The captain and the doctor both turned to face him. The captain unfolded herself from her chair and settled across from him, elbows on her knees.
“Tell me the story from the beginning,” she said.
****
The Outer Station was a charmingly cramped little place, maybe a quarter the size of Central, crammed into an expansion-era outpost and run by a man named Peterson who turned the colour of old milk when he stepped into his office to find Vannery Dawson in his chair, feet up on the desk. After he stammered his way through his introduction — “Relax, man, we don’t bite,” Vani said, rolling to her feet to clap him on the shoulder, smiling the way a chimp smiled before it tore your throat out with its teeth — Dita was shown to the empty corner of the cargo bay that would become her office.
For all living there reminded her a little too much of her broke student days except with a body significantly less tolerant of sleeping on the futon and living off cup noodles, the Outer Station was surprisingly relaxing. Peterson had a passenger ship, an ugly old thing called the Starside he’d insisted was for resupply until he realized they weren’t about to rat him out to the director and started taking off on lengthy trips to... no one was entirely certain where, actually, but he wasn’t exactly the type of director one missed when he was gone.
The actual running of the station, it turned out, had been coopted by an ad-hoc ruling trio composed of Rico, back from Everlin; Josephine, a square-faced Second Gen woman Rico had apparently recruited during her mercenary service; and Avram Ashta, Nursery I. They were backed by the Project’s half-dozen other Second Gen subjects, most of whom had followed Rico when she first left to play mercenary and had apparently trailed her home afterwards, guns and all. They accepted Dita’s presence easily enough, after the first day.
Rico had levelled her a long, assessing look when they ran across each other, frozen right in the middle of the central thoroughfare. She had her service weapon at her hip and the jacket of her fatigues open to make sure Dita could see it.
“You weren’t one of the creators,” she said.
Dita couldn’t tell from her tone if it was meant as a question but she said, “Nope, pathologist.” Rico gave a sharp nod and carried on, trailed by her militia. They appeared to be in some sort of conflict with Vani and Bo, which Dita summarily ignored but which had Avram coming to her office every lunch hour to put his head down on her desk, muttering half-formed complaints into his arms before he sucked in a big breath and marched off to broker peace.
“Let them sort it out themselves,” Dita suggested, laughing, as he let out a particularly dramatic groan, but Avram was a meddler at heart; he’d wither and die if he didn’t have his nose in someone else’s business.
It was a camaraderie of proximity, mostly, the two of them on their awkward little island between Rico’s militia, Vani and Bo’s tight two-person circle, and the dozen problem children transferred out of the nursery on Central, but he was decent company. In the evening she’d come up to relieve him after he’d corralled the kids to bed for the night and they’d sit together at the folding table outside the bunk room surrounded by half-cleared finger paints and stacks of board books and just talk. She celebrated Purim with him; he woke up before shipboard sunrise for Ramadan with her. They talked about the outside world, sometimes, like a shared dream, less and less real for all no one else remembered it: they had no connection to the interplanetary system on the Outer Station, just whatever news Central saw fit to send through to them. It was a strange, quiet life, almost peaceful.
She started doing checkups on the kids — the cast-offs, the ones whose powers came in too weak or too unpredictable, behaviour cases, a reedy non-speaking boy in his late teens who’d attached himself to Bo — and soon enough the militia members were turning up for the same. The cold war smoothed into a lukewarm truce.
She would learn, later, that the investigation came to a close with no charges, citing a lack of evidence. Later still, she would learn that this was when Dhillon began passing him information as the Vetec military built to an armed response. In the meantime, she lived suspended in the eye of the storm, until the klaxons woke her in the night.
****
“I would not have called you going military,” Dita said. Dr. Noriko Tremblay was watching her from across the room, hair shot with grey and face crinkled with new lines. They were in what appeared to be a break room, oddly, no guards, just Dr. Tremblay and Captain Adongo flanking the door and Dita at the table trying not to think about what was in the cupboards and when it would be appropriate to ask if she could have any — after more than three and a half decades of life, the hastily scrabbled-together dry rations on the Alouen might be what finally drove her to learn to cook.
“Your Soother,” the captain began, and then stopped. Her hand never strayed far from her service weapon. Dita watched out the corner of her eye, heart beating hard. It was a delicate situation, and diplomacy had never been her strong suit.
“I’d like to discuss some terms before we start talking,” she said.
“I’ll level with you, doctor, you don’t have a whole lot of leverage to negotiate, here,” Captain Adongo said.
“And I don’t have a whole lot of loyalty to Project Lifebloom, anymore; that place ruined my life. I want to help you, I just need to make sure my friends are taken care of first.”
She had never wished more for a strategy session that wasn’t twenty minutes in a supply closet. Then again she had probably never wished less for it either; it wasn’t exactly the type of situation that tended to crop up.
“The boys weren’t a part of it,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady.
“Metzger, you mean,” said the Captain, and Dita let out a breath. So Sacha had managed to sell it, after all. “Boy is the right word for him. I looked up the file; he’d be twenty-five by now, not an adolescent.”
Dita shrugged. “Director Dawson was never too fussed about age as long as they had the talent to back it up. She might have adjusted it a little, for legal purposes.”
“I’m going by the date of birth listed on his government documentation.” Dita wondered if she had been briefed or if she’d pulled the reports on the walk over. Then she thought, fuck.
She shrugged again. “Well, that was a guess. I wasn’t part of the hiring committee, I don’t know how it happened.”
“And you never asked.” Flat, not quite a question.
“And I never asked.”
“She wouldn’t,” Dr. Tremblay said, and Dita was too relieved to care that it’d probably been meant as an insult.
“I was never privy to half of what went on at the Project,” Dita volunteered. “Doctor, you remember what the director was like. Everything happened behind five locked doors and she was hardly bothering with control groups, by the end. If she did something experimental to that kid, chances are I wouldn’t have known about it ‘til I was dissecting his body for autopsy.”
“You’ve performed autopsies before, on victims of Project Lifebloom? On children?”
Dita pushed down the reflex to protest the term victims. “That was my job.” She looked past the captain to Dr. Tremblay, tense and cross-armed across the room. “Look, I’m gonna need those assurances before I go on.”
“I’ll call command.”
****
They were desperate. Even Dita, who had been accused more than once of being oblivious to the practicalities of real life outside of her research, could see it — it was hard not to to, when they escorted her off the ship, flanked by Immanuel and Sacha and into a conference room constructed of steel and sheet glass to face not a police constable or another inspector but a judge, flanked by two hard-faced women and one hard-faced man who introduced themselves as the board of the Innovia Centre.
Pinned by their collective gaze, Dita had the acute sensation of being not a person but a particularly irritating problem to be solved. At her side, Immanuel’s shoulders drew up, bristling. He tugged at the bottom edge of his shirt, which didn’t help much; they still looked like they had been wearing the same set of clothes for the better part of three months after losing the majority of their earthly belongings and then getting arrested.
Dealings went quick and efficient, the way she imagined being stripped of flesh by a swarm of piranhas might be quick and efficient. They agreed to clemency for the three of them — Immanuel was an easy sell, once they realized he’d never been part of the Project they weren’t much concerned with what else he had done in his life — and as for Dita...
“Your knowledge is invaluable, Doctor,” the judge said, though she’d been stripped of her medical license when they put out the warrant for her arrest after the Project. “Tell us what we need to know and that should be more than enough. You were just the pathologist, after all; you were hardly involved in the worst of it.” He had a smooth, smiling voice and a smooth, smiling face, and Dita blinked, thrown to hear her own argument coming out of someone else’s mouth.
“I mean, it’s a more complicated than that, but that’s the general... shape of it, sure,” she said. The judge kept smiling that bland smile. He didn’t ask what was more complicated. “Sorry, it’s just a bit of a different tone than last time I did this. Less, you know, you’ve committed a horrible ethical violation which has stained your soul forever type thing.”
“You won’t have to testify, of course,” the judge continued. The smile took on a slightly frozen character.
“Oh, good.”
“I am willing to speak,” Sacha announced, dramatically. Dita had thought he was asleep, listing slightly in his hospital gown. But if anything was going to wake him up, it would be the idea of testifying — the only thing that boy liked better than an overwrought, bloody story was a captive audience to tell it to.
Now he ducked his head, dabbing at his eyes. When he spoke, his voice trembled faintly. He’d adopted a centrals accent for the occasion. “I’m just so tired of keeping what happened to us hidden.” He stressed the us, pausing to see if the judge picked up on it.
“There must be accountability. A clearing of the slate,” said the first board member.
“We don’t want this to be a bloodbath, so to speak,” the judge rebuked, still smiling. “The Innovia Centre is an effort to rebuild from our painful past, not to reopen old wounds. It will be the ordinary choice for the lesser offenders — the mines or banishment —; as for the others, we must be sensible.”
It was Immanuel who asked, and unlike Sacha, he was doing nothing at all to disguise his accent. “Sensible, meaning what?”
“Aware of the danger they present, and of them harm they have committed in the past, including against this unfortunate boy,” the first board member said, in a tone that suggested she thought Immanuel was very stupid. The unfortunate boy in question looked appropriately mournful.
“If you mean a death sentence, say it.”
The first board member turned an interesting shade of red. The judge held up his hand. “For Vannery Dawson and Bernard Kerra, yes. That is the most likely option.”
“I should do it, then,” Dita blurted. All eyes snapped to her.
“What do you mean, doctor?” The judge asked mildly. Sacha and Immanuel looked like they wanted to know as well, which was unfortunate, because Dita hadn’t exactly planned out a follow-up when she’d said it.
“Third Gen are specialized,” she began, slowly, buying herself time. “Vannery and Bernard are unpredictable. They can be dangerous. They have also lived their entire lives with a strict hierarchy — they’re obedient, when it comes down to it. Not for outsiders, but they will be for me.” Immanuel and Sacha, to their credit, nodded along with admirable conviction.
“It’s a conflict of interest,” the judge said.
“With all due respect, this whole thing is a conflict of interest,” Immanuel said, eyes fixed pointedly on the board members.
“Anyone who was party to Project Lifebloom can do what needs to be done, no matter how grim,” Sacha added.
“I’ll take it into consideration,” the judge allowed, which was probably as good as they were going to get at the moment. “Let me show you to your rooms.”
****
Afterwards, the taste of blood in his mouth and a deep ache in his muscles, Sacha bargained a pack of cigarettes off one of the guards and went for a walk. The bottom of his feet hurt, tingling needles shooting up at every point of pressure. His breath came thick and faintly damp, like he was getting over a bad chest cold. He dragged his fingertips along the wall and the tingling needles prickled up there, as well. Everything hurt.
He’d spent his life hurting, and worse than this, on more than a few occasions. Pain and exhaustion were the tax for being alive and even when he felt weighed down and halfway dead, beneath it was the irrepressible urge to move. To live, and to live expansively, impulsively, clawing himself forward and forward. Now he wanted to lie on the floor and forget he existed. Instead, he slumped back against the wall — next to the vent; usually sound only bothered him in its absence but if the fire alarm went off now he would simply collapse into himself and perish — and began working his way through the pack of cigarettes.
He was on his third when Josephine ran across him, saving him the trouble of making the rest of the trek to the rest of the crew’s quarters. Though they weren’t crew any longer. She propped herself against the wall beside him, radiating warmth. Nodded to the cigarette. “Finishing the job?”
One last argument for them, then. End the story as it began, and middled. (When it was over, his cigarette burned to ash against his fingers, he tipped up on his toes and hugged her, one-armed and awkward, both of them stiff. Her arm burned on his back. His free hand clenched around the slip of paper scribbled with coordinates, slipped it into her pocket in a shaky reverse of a pickpocket’s lift. She patted him, once, just this side of too hard, in thanks or recrimination, he couldn’t tell. He dropped to the flat of his feet; she tucked her hands back into her pockets. A clean break.)
That evening, Sacha begged off the execution. Or rather, he threw up on the nurse during the latest of his endless string of checkups and was therefore forcibly excused in order to spend the next several hours lying in bed in a dark room. The nurse said he had a migraine and had given him something through an IV that made him go loose and fuzzy, because the throwing up had been directly preceded by swallowing an assortment of colourful pills, and that had been preceded by another round of throwing up.
Which was to say he and Immanuel switched places: Immanuel went to the trial to offer their goodbyes to the crew, and Sacha crouched in the morgue, feeling vaguely woozy — the cold sent goosebumps prickling along his arms, and the sharp chemical scent slicked at the back of his throat. Tucked into the narrow space between two shelves, he rested his forehead on his knees and waited. Had drifted half to sleep when the door opened.
Vani and Bo looked dead, to Dita’s credit. The uniformed stretcher-bearers lifted them unceremoniously into a plain wooden crate, both of them together, Bo’s legs crammed up to fit. Tagged it for immediate shipment and incineration, wheeled it into cold storage. A quiet, sterile end to life.
From there it was simple: swapping out the tags, pushing the trolley through the back halls in his baggy stolen uniform, sleeves and legs rolled up like a child dressed in his father’s clothes because the laundry room had offered a disappointing lack of options.
His vision sparkled strangely as he walked, muscles aching under the pressure — Bo was not exactly easy to move, even with the benefit of wheels. By the time he reached the docking bay, he was breathing hard and had to take several slow, measured breaths to avoid throwing up on his shoes. The service hallway opened into a wide open space beside the central pressurization door. The permanent machinery was bolted to the floor, the rest sealed with grav clamps or temporary netting lest the pressure door fail and their cargo go spinning off into space. The ground crews, presumably, could take their chances.
Sacha made a show of cricking his neck, tied his hair back in a messy tail: people saw what they expected to see, and what they expected to see was not the quietly tragic star witness of the Lifebloom trial wheeling a crate to the docking bay while his erstwhile torturers were executed and he was supposed to be languishing in bed from the terrible, lingering aftermath.
“Left my badge, sorry sir, it’s been fucking insane today,” he said to the guard at the docking bay door, who glanced up from where he was reading a novel and waved him through. He parked the crate along the far wall where they kept the unloaded cargo, slapped a crew-claim marker on the top — Avram’s, but if all went to plan the crate would not be there long enough for anyone to look it up in the registry and notice it did not belong to any of the legitimately docked ships, and if all didn’t go to plan, they would have bigger problems to worry about — and sauntered back out.
The three of them came back that evening — unlike Capeira, New Aglia ran on a ship-wide day/night cycle rather than around-the-clock shift work, complete with standardized business hours — when the docking bay was deserted. He had worried they wouldn’t be able to find the ship (“Imagine if they went the mining colony route instead,” Dita had said on the way down, wry, and then they had all lapsed into anxious silence) but it was plain enough which one would ferry New Aglia’s prisoners into the great unknown: it was the only one that looked like it had been purchased third-hand with a bottle of grog and a favour, not to mention the yellow stripes painted along the side to warn everyone of exactly what it was. It was also, it became immediately apparent, not a cargo ship, and not much of a passenger ship, either: the only entrance was through a narrow oval of a door at the top of three folding steps.
They glanced between it and the crate, still settled on the trolley, and went to find a crowbar. They still looked dead, waxy and room-temperature, limbs tangled together like marionettes cut from their strings. Dita grabbed Bo beneath the shoulders; Sacha and Immanuel took a leg each and together they heaved him over the lip of the crate, stumbled over the meter and change of ground between it and the ship, scraped Bo’s back against the stairs as they climbed and his head against the doorway — “You’re welcome for saving your life, sorry for the concussion,” Dita muttered — and crammed him into a cupboard.
Doubled back for Vani, who had rolled over on her back without Bo taking the lion’s share of space. Sacha hesitated before reaching for her, but she did not spring awake to make a second go at killing him. Fair enough; he hadn’t made a second go of his own. They maneuvered her upstairs as well, more easily. Lowered her into the cupboard, tucked against Bo like they were taking an oddly-placed nap. Shut the door.
Dita had never had much to do with the living subjects, which sounded like a bad courtroom defence but was actually true. She’d made it through medical school with a list of complaints about her bedside manner the length of her arm, two official reprimands on her record, and an unspoken understanding that she only made it as far as she did because she’d never made a secret of the fact she intended to spend the rest of her career working with cadavers. And of course she knew the cadavers used to be real living people — she’d even known some of them in their upright and talking days, especially after she’d joined Project Lifebloom —, and sure, maybe she should have asked a few more questions when her new job presented her with a freezer full of psychic corpses and told her to have at it. But how often did an opportunity like that present itself? Besides, it wasn’t like she was doing anything wrong.
The point is, when she tumbled out of bed and into the medical bay at the inhuman hour of 9:30 in the morning to look at the corpse, she failed to recognize it for the portent of doom that it was. She just recognized it as a corpse. The corpse belonged to a wild-born Hollow, late teens or early twenties, male, underweight and a handful of inches below average height, and dead for approximately an hour, slumped over in a hard plastic chair in the far corner of the med bay.
The Second Gen man who had woken her helped carry him to the corner of the medical bay designated as Dita’s cadaver lab and lift him onto the table, where he stood looking waxy and ill. He kept looking convulsively down at the corpse then up at the ceiling and had been crying on and off.
“If you’re gonna throw up you need do that somewhere else,” Dita said.
“I just found him,” said the Second Gen man, which Dita already knew; it was the first thing he’d said when she’d thrown on her hijab and stumbled half-asleep to the door to see who was pounding on it at what was practically the middle of the night. She’d stared at him blankly, then at his name tag, which declared him AVRAM ASHTA NURSERY I. The corpse was MORDECAI METZGER HOLLOW. “I just came in and he was dead.”
“Dead where?” Dita asked, because don’t move the dead body seemed like common wisdom but it never hurt to be sure.
“In the med wing, where I brought you,” Avram Ashta Nursery I said. “Just sitting there in that chair. He was supposed to come in to talk to my kids this morning, and when he didn’t I—” he sucked in a damp breath. “I don’t know what to tell them. You’d think after a while you’d figure it out, wouldn’t you? The secret good way to say hey, sorry hon, there’s an empty space where there used to be a person. Wish I could help but there’s no fixing it.”
“You’ll manage,” Dita said. She snapped on her gloves. “Well, I’m about to get chopping, so...” She waved her hand towards the door. “Not that I mind the audience, but some people get squeamish.”
“You’ll find out what happened to him?”
Dita shrugged. “Medically? Sure. The rest of it’s a bit out of my purview, if he had, I don’t know, death feuds or whatever.”
“He didn’t,” Ashta said softly. “He got along with everyone.” He reached out slowly and rested his hand on the corpse’s curly red hair, whispering something in Hebrew. The unwelcome squirming feeling that came with grieving loved ones made itself known. This was why she didn’t work with live patients.
“I really am about to get chopping,” Dita said, striving for gentle and possibly missing by a stretch.
“Can you tell me when you find out? Please?”
In the end, it wasn’t much of a mystery. The Hollow had died the way most working Hollows died: of someone else’s injuries. They’d had no shortage of either since Rico decided to make her fortune in the Everlin Mercenary Corps and, in a spectacular show of waste, half their carefully crafted future of humanity decided to follow her. At least that had been the official position until the last budget meeting, when it turned out the Everlin Mercenary Corps was part of some sprawling intergalactic network willing to pay more money than most of them had seen in their lives to keep sending Second and Third Gen soldiers their way, at which point the future of humanity’s casualty rate suddenly became a matter of much less pressing concern. So they shipped out, got trench foot or punctured lungs or pneumonia running around out there, got shipped back to the Central Station long enough for one of the Hollows to get trench foot or punctured lungs or pneumonia instead, then turned right back around and headed back to Everlin. She’d once seen Rico do the whole thing in a tidy half-hour.
Two of his ribs were cracked, the right wrist sprained, the thumb on the same hand dislocated — Hollows with better control sometimes liked to concentrate damage on one side, usually the non-dominant —, surface-level abrasions along the back and shoulders, likely absorbed unintentionally or as a favour to the patient. All ordinary, the type of essentially superficial damage most Lifebloom Hollows carried more or less constantly.
But the stomach... that was interesting. He’d started from the inside out on a gunshot wound. His stomach lining had not quite punctured, but it was thin enough at what would have been the entry point on whoever had the misfortune of actually getting shot that she didn’t need the surgical light to see through it. And when she cut it open, she saw the bullet had punched clean through, that he’d absorbed not just the stomach wound but part of the bullet’s bloody path towards his spine.
Usually when Hollows died from their work — Mordecai Metzger would be their third at Lifebloom, and she’d seen a dozen or so reports of others crop up between the regular newspapers and academic journals — it was from a series of accumulated miscalculations, too many hurts that were all eminently survivable individually crammed into the same fragile body. This was... not that. It wasn’t even a matter of self-preservation, it just shouldn’t have been physically possible. The pain of it should have overwhelmed him long before he got to the point of having twin holes in his stomaching lining; he should have lost consciousness when he was still in the realm of a serious mistake but not a fatal one.
“Question time with Dr. Mansour,” Dita announced, striding back into the med bay. “Who here’s either been shot in the stomach or knows someone who’s been shot in the stomach? Recently, I don’t mean ever in your life.”
A long, tense pause as the huddled, hospital-gowned masses peered at her from under their blankets, then a hand in the back raised, weakly. Dita wove her way between the rows to the subject’s bedside. A Soother, according to his chart, eighteen years old and recently back from the front. Arrived in critical condition, now set for two days of observation and bedrest post-intervention.
“How can I help you, Dr. Mansour?” he pushed himself up in bed, wincing as the movement tugged at what remained of the wound.
“Good morning—” she checked his chart again— “Laurence. You were treated by a Hollow when you got here yesterday, weren’t you? White kid, curly red hair?”
“Yeah, Mordecai,” Laurence said. His hands tightened on the sheets. “Is he in trouble?”
Dita considered it. “He’s dead, so at this stage I think that’d be more of a question for a philosopher or a theologian.” Then the question caught up to her. “Wait, why do you think he’d be in trouble?”
“He’s dead?” Laurence said faintly.
“Yeah, long story,” Dita said. “Maybe. I’m not sure yet. Which is why I’m asking you. So: what’s this trouble our dearly departed Mr. Metzger may or may not have been in, and could it have been fatal?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just, you know, sometimes when people ask about someone it’s ‘cause they’ve done something? Or someone thinks they’ve done something. But he didn’t, Dr. Mansour. He didn’t do anything.”
“Right, sure,” Dita said, nodding. “But if he had done something, that something would be...”
“I was unconscious, I didn’t see anything.” Laurence said, shaky. His eyes glimmered like he was about to start crying.
“This isn’t really making me less convinced he did something,” Dita said. “Look, Laurence, you know me. Or not, I don’t know. I didn’t know you until two minutes ago so maybe I shouldn’t assume. But if you did know me you’d know I’m a forensic pathologist, and that means I want to know how he died because knowing how people died is my job, and it’s my job because what you Third Gen can do to the inside of someone else’s body is fascinating, and there’s nowhere else in the universe I can study that. I don’t care about your training or whatever politicking is going on in the rest of this station. I just like knowing things.”
Laurence turned his face away. His fingers clenched tighter around the blanket. “Or I could make it an order,” Dita continued. “Get the director involved, make it a whole thing. Your choice.”
“One of the Soothers has been around,” he said quietly. “Bo Kerra, the tall one. I don’t know what they were doing, I promise.” His cheeks were flushed pink. A tremor ran through his shoulders. “Please don’t— not to tell you what to do, obviously, Dr. Mansour. But I answered your question. Are you going to... you don’t need to tell the director, then, do you?”
She patted him on the leg. “Don’t worry, I’ll take any opportunity not to talk to the director that presents itself.”
She’d also take any opportunity not to talk to Bo Kerra that presented itself. The man himself was fine — she didn’t dislike him, even if he was a bit twitchy and so tall any conversation that lasted more than five minutes gave her a cramp in the neck — but anything said to Bo Kerra was said to Vannery Dawson by transitive property, and anything said to Vannery Dawson was said to the director.
Besides, she didn’t actually need to ask Kerra to know what had happened. A Soother and a Hollow walk into a med bay. The Soother says, hey, Hollow, how’d you like an escape from the pain and the Hollow says, boy, Soother, that sure would be something, or maybe the other way around, and next thing they know he’s dead on the floor with a hole through his stomach because their clever partnership had knocked out his ability to feel pain and with it his ability to tell when to stop.
****
“I can’t believe they left this up,” Dita said, tapping two fingers against the sign, the sound echoing off the metal doors. The paper curled at the corners under the peeling tape and the letters had faded, scrawled in blocky black marker. Hollows: FOR YOUR SAFETY — NO PARTNERSHIPS WITH SOOTHERS. Effective immediately. Questions to Dr. Mansour. She’d written it back in her office after she finished with the ill-fated Mordecai Metzger and that kid who’d been shot, slapped it on the door and called it done, and apparently so had everyone else.
Immanuel studied it over her shoulder. He’d been tense and silent since they set foot on the Central Station, not that he was the only one.
“We had a pretty high fatality rate,” Dita said, mostly to cut through the silence. She glanced reflexively at the mirrored surface of the director’s office where her own distorted face staring back at her and straightened her shoulders like Estelle Dawson was still watching behind it. “With the Hollows, I mean. After the first generation—”
“My father’s generation,” Immanuel said flatly.
“He’d have been a bit later — we tried with older teenagers for a couple of years there, around the time wild-born kids started popping up and Estelle Dawson became director. And by ‘we’ I mean the Project; I was a child when this went down and not working here yet, try to contain your surprise,” Dita said. “Anyway, after the first generation, most fatalities were from fighting on Everlin, a handful of suicides here and there, but it was the Hollows who died at home. They’re like the human equivalent of those little dogs with the flat faces that can’t breathe. Never really ironed out the wrinkles with that one.”
“The wrinkle of Hollows having a high mortality rate,” Immanuel said, pushing open the door. The med bay held twenty beds, five rows of four with curtains separating them. The monitors had been stripped out during the raid, but the beds still had their tight hospital corners. She and Immanuel split, circling around the room to riffle through the empty cabinets, joined back up at the offices along the far end.
“This one was mine,” Dita said, gesturing at the door to the far left. It had gone to Victoria Kelly after she left, according to the nameplate. Quieter, hand pressed against the wood composite, “I practically lived in here, which, not a great work/life balance, but who here had that? And it was the first office I didn’t have to share; there were six of us in the grad office when I was a student on New Aglia.” She pushed open the door, stood blinking in the entranceway: it didn’t look much like her office inside, with the raid and Victoria’s reorganization before that, and her throat went tight. Then she laughed, abruptly exasperated with herself. “This place is doing something to me, I’m all melancholic.”
“Why did you work here?” Immanuel asked. He leaned against the doorway, arms crossed as he peered past her into the office. Desk against the left wall, bookshelves against the right. No simulated windows, lights not hooked up to the central timer. Dita used to stumble out when the singular focus of work had worn off to find the station silent and the hall lights shut off, deep in artificial night.
“Same reason anyone works anywhere. They hired me.” Immanuel levelled her a flat look. “I’d had some trouble in school, I guess. Took a long time to get through my training, ran up against the ethics board a few times, that sort of thing — I’d done this whole series of experiments early in my practicum and couldn’t use any of the data because I hadn’t gotten it approved first, and then I used it anyway. Got caught doing that, kicked out, didn’t look too good when I was applying for positions, you know? Not a lot of takers. Especially not for the kind of research I wanted to do.”
“Do you regret it?” Her first impulse was no, of course not. Her second was more than anything in my life.
What she said was, “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like I fucked myself over in my twenties, just went ahead and ruined my whole life before it properly began. And sometimes I think, it’s not like I did well in academia or the regular hospitals. Maybe if I’d gone the traditional route I’d be thinking the exact same thing.” She hesitated. “But also if I’d done that, maybe I would have talked to my family in the past fifteen years. Things weren’t great before the Project, but they had strong feelings about the work and stronger feelings about me being part of it. The last time I heard from any of them, it was a card from my sister disinviting me from her wedding. I hadn’t even been invited in the first place, she just wanted to make really sure I didn’t come.”
“The last time I saw my father was before we burned the Starside,” Immanuel said.
They lapsed into silence, poking through the wreckage. Dita had never minded the quiet and she’d never minded being alone, but there was an eery silence to the place only amplified by the whisper of Immanuel moving behind her. Her communicator beeped, twice in quick succession, and she startled.
“That’s for the guard satellites?” she asked.
“Last one,” Immanuel said. He opened a drawer, shut it. “We left it too long.”
“They still have to land their ground troopers,” Dita said half-heartedly. That would take an hour at most, the Vetec forces went in careful, which meant an hour to get the full crew back on the Seabird, work the broken airlock, and somehow slip past the approaching ships without being noticed.
But skulking around contemplating their imminent doom wasn’t a productive use of their time either. “Alright, let’s go. Time to reconvene.”
Immanuel looked doubtful, but he had been on the Central Station less than a week compared to Dita’s nine years, and he followed as she led the way back to the bunk room they’d chosen as their muster point. Rico met them at the door, expression set. Their communicators buzzed again, in unison.
“Proximity alarms,” Josephine said quietly. “We need to go, right fucking now.”
“Not until everyone is here,” Avram said.
“Fucking obviously,” Josephine shot back. She tapped at her communicator. “Come on, Kit, you fucking asshole.”
“Who could possibly have foreseen that letting him wander off by himself was a bad idea,” Vani said.
“Not you, seeing as you didn’t say anything about it,” Rico snarled back. “Our captain made a call based on the information he had at the time, and you will respect—”
“Rico, enough,” Avram said. “Bo, get him back here.”
Bo nodded, relief breaking across his expression. Then frowned, closing his eyes in concentration. There’d been a med team meeting when the Sindarin police had first brought him to the Project’s doorstep, power readings so high that Victoria had retaken them three times, then brought Dita in to try a fourth, testing and retesting until there was no doubt about it: Bo Kerra, wild-born and completely untrained, could rewrite their minds from the inside out with no more effort than it took to snap a pencil.
(There’d been arguments about safety measures, the wisdom of bringing him onto the station, but they’d all agreed they needed his genetic material. The kid’s tractable, Dita had argued. Scared of his abilities, scared of himself. He won’t be a threat.) She’d never once seen Bo need to concentrate to find someone, was the point, no more than she needed to concentrate to tie her shoes or button her jacket.
“He isn’t here,” Bo said quietly. Dita’s body shook with a sudden rush of fear, sour and foreign. At her side, Immanuel tensed.
“Bo,” Avram said warningly, and after a moment, it receded to a steady prickle. “Isn’t there, meaning what? Like captured, or...”
“I can’t feel him,” Bo said, voice wobbling.
“If he’s not on the station, we need to leave, now,” Rico said.
“We aren’t leaving anyone behind,” Avram said. “Kit isn’t on the station, then wherever he is, we’ll find him. Immanuel?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Immanuel said. “I’m not a fucking oracle, it’s all just formless dread. Who knows if it’s because we’re about to be arrested or because they’ve got Kit or any of the hundred other things that are constantly going wrong in our lives.”
“Then let’s go.”
Rico took point, Avram and Josephine the rear, Dita, Immanuel, and Sacha in the middle with Vani and Bo on either side like they were about to walk into a firefight instead of a series of (hopefully still) empty hallways. If Kit were there, he would have gone ahead as a scout.
“I did a thermal scan when we docked; if anyone else was on the station when we arrived, I’d know about it,” Josephine said.
“So Kit is on board,” Rico said. “If no one else is lurking around, Seabird is the only way out.”
“He’s not,” Bo repeated, distraught. “I’d be able to tell, I’m not lying, I swear.”
“Obviously,” Vani said, in a tone that suggested if it wasn’t obvious to the rest of them, they were about to have a serious problem — knowing her, a problem in the form of their spleens suddenly erupting out of their bodies or their hands turning into feet.
“No one said that you were,” Avram soothed. They rounded the corner to the docking bay, clumping closer together as they slowed, then came to a stop. The communicator’s proximity alarm buzzed relentlessly against Dita’s side. “Rico, check the control room.”
Rico made it three steps before the blare of the pressurization alarm shattered the silence. “Upstairs,” Vani said, and they rushed up in a clatter of footsteps, stood crushed together on the platform as Rico inched the door open a crack and slipped a mirror low around the frame before opening it the rest of the way. They filed in with the hard-won efficiency of fugitives, ducked low to the floor. Engines rumbled on the other side of the thick glass, then cut off. They crept along to the opposite end of the room, shuffling on hands and knees through the door.
Up the infernal spiral stairs; Dita used to console herself that her office might be tiny and lacking in temperature control and windows but at least she’d never have to carry furniture up the spiral staircase. Then into Estelle Dawson’s terrible creepy circular office — she half expected to find the director herself lurking in the corner, ready to chew them out. Vani circled around the central pillar, hands skimming over the wood panelling. She pressed against the surface and it slid, slowly, to the side; revealed a dark, narrow passageway. They filed into the tunnels and closed the door behind them, cutting off the light.
****
Three days after the Hollow’s untimely death, Dita ran into Avram Ashta, Nursery I, as she made the long loop from her office to see the director. He looked harried and exhausted, with a baby strapped to his front and another to his back and a gaggle of children in high-vis vests holding onto a rope behind him.
“Dr. Mansour, can I ask you for a favour?” he said, bringing the line of children to a stop as she passed.
“Sure, you can ask,” she said. “What’s the favour?”
Avram leaned in, voice lowering to whisper. “Mordecai has family. I don’t know their names or where they are or I’d take care of it myself, Lester’s good about that kind of thing—” Lester audited all outbound personal correspondence, of which there was generally not much — “But I needs their names and addresses. I’ll even pay for it, if I need.”
“The director’s not going to agree to that,” Dita said.
“I’ll do all the work,” Avram promised. “Really, all I need is written permission for the records. That’s all.” A couple of the kids had dropped the rope and began wandering down the hall. “I have to go, but, please? You’d want your family to know if it was you, wouldn’t you?” And then, before she could respond, he took off after the wayward children, calling, “Thank you, Dr. Mansour!” over his shoulder.
“The dead Hollow,” Estelle Dawson said without preamble, eyes fixed on her computer screen. Every time Dita spoke to her, she seemed to be doing at least two other things at the same time.
“He’d engaged in some, uh, ill-advised collaboration with one of the Soothers,” Dita said. “Blocked out his pain response so he couldn’t tell when he’d gone too far, kind of thing.”
“And your team has no safeguards in place to prevent this eventuality?”
“Well, I’m a pathologist and my team is me, so no. Does the medical team have safeguards? I don’t know, because I’m not on the medical team. You’d have to ask them. Ma’am.”
Director Dawson looked up at her, finally. She had a hard, square face, eyes the colour of ice and about as warm. “If it happens on this station, it is your concern,” she said. “And when I ask a question, I expect an answer, not an excuse.”
“I understand that, Director, but no amount of expecting is going to make me spontaneously acquire knowledge I didn’t have before. I can make something up, if you’d like,” Dita said. “Or I could leave and ask the med team, and then come back and tell you a worse version of what they could have told you themselves.”
The director slammed a hand on the table, face darkening. A woman made of ice but with a firework jammed up her ass, Dhillon had once joked, bitterly, head down on the desk after they’d returned from being chewed out for one of the innumerable things they were always being chewed out for.
“I will not stand for insubordination,” she said. Dita wished she’d go back to whatever she had been doing on her computer so she’d stop looking at her with those unnerving eyes. “I do not like putting senior staff through recalibration. Do not mistake that preference for a guarantee that it will not happen.”
“Understood, sir.” And then, because no one had ever accused her of having self-preservation, “What about the Hollow’s family?”
“Unlikely to ask questions. He cut contact years ago,” the director said, focus already slipping back to the screen. You’d want your family to know if it was you. “Send in Dr. Dhillon. Dismissed.”
Dita hesitated. You want your family to know if it was you. She thought of Rashida, how Dita used to follow her everywhere until she turned ten and decided she was too cool to hang out with her big sister. How Rashida still called her after things got bad with their parents, how she’d come to see her in person, at the end, took her by the hands and said, I don’t understand how you could work for them, Dita, please just come home, who two months later had sent her a card on smooth thick paper saying she wasn’t welcome at the wedding. But it wasn’t her who was dead but some kid she’d met maybe twice before she cut him open on her table, who’d died through his own preventable mistake. If Avram asked, she’d tell him the director said no and it’d be close enough to the truth and save them both a lot of trouble in the process.
“Alright, then. May I be dismissed?”
The director waved her hand. “Get out of here.”
“What if it was Vani?” Dita jumped at the unexpected voice but the director barely spared a glance upwards. It was Avram in the doorway. He’d dropped the kids off and there was a hard set to his shoulders that suggested he was about to make Dita’s life unnecessarily complicated. “If your daughter took a job far away and died doing it, wouldn’t you want to know?”
Eyes still fixed on the screen, the director reached over and pressed a button on her phone. “Escort Mr. Ashta for immediate recalibration.”
Vannery Dawson melted out from... somewhere, coming to a stop at her mother’s shoulder. She looked Avram up and down.
He planted his feet. “Director, Vannery, please, I just need five minutes. That’s all.”
“Vannery,” the director said.
“Yes, ma’am.” She did not move, and for a moment, neither did Avram. Then his legs jerked, lifted at the knees like they were tied to marionette strings, twisted to spin him in an ungainly circle and march him out the door.
“Dismissed, Dr. Mansour,” the director said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
****
The tunnels were freezing, pitch dark, and full of rabbit warren twists. Vani had led them forward in as close to a straight line as she could manage, but without Kit or the map they had come to a stop at a three-point fork and set up camp. Or rather, they unfolded a pair of emergency lanterns, took off their packs, and settled on the ground to rest for the night.
Immanuel leaned back against the wall at the farthest point from the rest of the group, cold seeping through the fabric of his coveralls. Beside him, Sacha had his cheek propped against his knees, hands curled loosely around his ankles. He reached over and tapped Immanuel on the back with his freezing, spindly fingers. Do you think Kit is dead? Or rather, morse code stripping away the nuance, Kit dead?
Immanuel tilted his head to look at him. His pale eyes glittered in the lantern light. Don’t know, he tapped back. It seemed like the kind of thing he should, deep and instinctive, the way he always knew which cards to play or where to find lost socks. Instead all he got was a pit in his stomach and a sense of persistent undirected dread. Here he was in the place his people had been created, the most useless Third Gen of them all. Sacha tilted closer, knocking their shoulders together, and Immanuel wrapped an arm around him instinctively. It was never particularly comfortable, sitting with him like this, all sharp angles and bones pressed too close under his skin. Sacha raised an eyebrow, not so much a question as an acknowledgement, and shuffled to hold him back.
What? He tapped against Immanuel’s shoulder.
Nothing. The eyebrow went up again, but Sacha said nothing. Immanuel wondered if he was thinking about who they would have been if they had grown up here, too. If they would still have known each other. If they would both still be alive. Then again, they’d survived Capeira, living in an alcove in the abandoned maintenance shafts not much larger than their makeshift camp here in the tunnels. Reminds me of home, he tapped. That got a smile, all teeth.
“What’s the plan, Captain?” Josephine asked, voice echoing loud off the walls.
Across the circle, Avram was unusually twitchy, craning his neck to peer down the tunnels, then at his communicator. “I just— I don’t understand what happened,” he said. “It’s a fucking space station. Where could he have gone?” Avram would never ask if Kit was dead. He could be holding the cold body still insisting there might still be hope, which was possibly what made him such a mediocre strategist.
“We need to scout these tunnels. Pairs, tracking our paths with rope, until we have a map. We need to make the most of our territorial advantage,” Rico said.
“We aren’t splitting up,” Avram said. “We all go together, or we don’t go at all.”
“With all due respect, Captain, that’s a waste of our time and, I shouldn’t need to remind you, extremely limited resources,” Rico said.
“What’s the point of any of that if more of us disappear in here? We aren’t splitting up. That’s final.”
They didn’t split up. Space travel was slow and cramped and more than occasionally murderously boring, but if Immanuel thought being trapped in close quarters with the crew for the past four and a half years had prepared them to camp out together in the tunnels, he did not keep thinking it for long. They walked in painstaking, shuffling single-file as Bo maneuvered himself through the space, Avram coddling him the whole way like he was a small child and not a grown adult badly doing his job.
“You can always ask for a different assignment if you’re uncomfortable,” he was saying now, quietly, not that it made any difference when they were all crammed within six feet of each other.
“That’s what I said!” Vani interjected.
“Fix your own problems or stop fucking whining,” Immanuel said under his breath.
“Technically, Captain’s whining on his behalf,” Sacha said. “Our Bo’s bearing up under his great burden with admirable stoicism.” Sacha gestured broadly, mostly to show off that he, unlike most of the crew, still had a nearly full range of motion in the tight space and was feeling smug about it.
Ahead of them, Bo mumbled, “Oh, no, I— it’s—”
“If you’ve got something to say, just say it. Have an opinion of your own, for once in your life,” Immanuel snapped, irritation pushing at his teeth. People like that, they’d keep taking and taking and taking, moulting their hard edges so they could make themselves small and soft and incapable, I don’t know what to do, you choose, whatever you like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry in an endless litany while someone else did all the hard work of living. Couldn’t give them an inch or can you, Manuelito, just this once? I’m so tired today would become I’m sorry, I don’t mean to keep putting this on you would become you’re so smart, Manuelito, I’d just mess it up,and suddenly he was the one running resupply and buying their tickets and running the store and keeping track of where they weren’t welcome anymore because of his father’s latest fuck up.
“Immanuel,” Avram snapped. “If there’s a problem with how a member of this crew behaves, I will handle it. If you think there’s a problem I haven’t addressed, it comes to me. Clear?”
He ground his teeth. “Yes, Captain.”
“Good.”
“You’re in trouble,” Sacha said, delighted, leaning forward to drape himself across Immanuel’s shoulders. “Mr. Salvador, answer me this: are you ready to die for your principles?”
“Sure, we’ll duel at dawn over whether Bo gets to keep being a—” he cut off before he said something that really would get him into shit with the captain. Sacha cackled, then cut off when it echoed unnervingly off the walls. They lapsed into silence.
****
By the time they stopped for the night — what they had decided was night — there had been two more arguments and they were all sore, tired, and generally done with each other, just in time to spent six hours trying to sleep on the un-cushioned floor. Somehow, despite Sacha wriggling around worse than usual beside him and shoving his freezing hands under Immanuel’s shirt, he drifted into a restless, hallucinatory doze.
And snapped awake, upright before he registered moving. Sacha, hands still tucked under his shirt, staggered up with him, fingerings tightening painfully on his ribs as he struggled for a grip.
“What?” he whispered, tipping forward to rest his cheek on Immanuel’s shoulder.
“I felt...” Immanuel started. He grasped for words to describe the thing that had washed through him, the sudden wash of certainty. “I felt...”
“You’re a bad intuit because you overthink it,” he whispered. “Which direction?”
“Forward.”
Sacha disentangled himself and threaded his arm through Immanuel’s. “Forward it is, then.” They had left one of the lamps turned low in the middle of the line of bodies — the corridor was narrow enough that they’d been forced to sleep two by two, end-to-end — and Immanuel leaned over to pick it up. They would be back before anyone noticed it was gone.
His feet hurt, and now the rest of his muscles, ached, too, stiff from the day’s walking and stiffer from lying on the ground. By the time they’d walked five minutes, he was fighting the impulse to turn back and salvage what sleep they could: after years reminding the others his gift was little more than a gut feeling with a fancy label and shouldn’t be trusted to lead them anywhere, here he was, getting himself and Sacha lost in the miserable, labyrinthine tunnels of the place that still gave his father sobbing nightmares.
“I can’t tell if Avram’s a liar or just delusional,” he said, bitter even to his own ears. “A sanctuary. Look at this place.”
“He’s an optimist, which may or may not be the same thing,” Sacha said. In the grainy dark, he reached out a hand to trail along the wall, tracing over the grouting with the tips of his nails. “We’re all guessing from bones, here. Who knows what this place was like when it was alive.”
“Dita says it ruined her life.”
“Did it ruin her life worse than our collective career as mid-rate smugglers is ruining it now?”
“Mid-rate might be generous,” Immanuel said. “And that counts as an extension the Project ruining her life; it’s not like she’d have the smuggling career without it.”
“You never know. A promising young academic, expelled from the academy for her flagrant and frankly alarming disregard for ethics, desperately in search of work. The multiverse might be full of dubiously mid-rate smuggler Dita Mansours. We, of course, are living wild and varied lives.”
“You’re in jail in most of them,” Immanuel said.
Sacha gasped, hand clutched dramatically to his chest. “Slander! I’m in jail in two or three at most. You’re in jail in at least five.”
“I can predict the future and you have no impulse control and the constitution of a dying bird. There’s no way my alternate universe selves are worse at escaping the police than your alternate universe selves.”
“I’ll have you know I have the constitution of a bird in the prime of its life,” Sacha said haughtily, and then they turned the corner and froze. The light appeared first as a faint speck in the distance, growing steadily larger. Immanuel clicked off the lantern, pressing himself flat against the wall as the footsteps whispered closer, soft but not quite soft enough to avoid the echo. Soft, but familiar. At his side, he felt Sacha shift. On instinct, he flicked the light back on.
“Kit?”
Kit looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes and wild curls escaping their usual neat tail. He waved, hurrying closer.
Resting the lantern on the ground, Immanuel signed, “Were you lost in here?”
Kit shook his head. “Way out,” he signed. “Where?” Where are the others, he meant.
“Are we getting paid?” Sacha asked. Kit didn’t respond — he did badly with open-ended questions and worse with implication, as a result of which the number of successful conversations he and Sacha had managed in all the years they’d known each other could be counted on one hand.
“Did you find the documents?” Immanuel clarified. Kit ignored him, too. A complicated answer, then, or one Kit didn’t want to share. “Have you been in the tunnels this whole time?” He looked tired, but not days of walking tired, though it was hard to tell in the dim light.
Another head shake. Kit picked up his pace to walk in front of him and Sacha, only glancing back when they reached a fork so Immanuel could signal which way to turn. A brisk ten minutes later, they had made it back to camp with no more information than at the start.
The others had, it turned out, noticed their absence and were in the middle of packing up. Avram, frazzled, looked like he was about to start shouting before he caught sight of Kit.
“Why—” he said out loud, hand coming up to rub at his eyebrow. Switched to sign. “Do not, do not wander off by yourselves.” Then, “where were you, Kit?” Too open-ended. Kit ignored him.
“Follow,” he signed instead, and follow they did.
After they left Sibalt, they had lived on the Wishbone for just shy of a month. He’d thought at the time that the ship, with its single counter serving as the galley and stacked fold-out bunks, was as cramped as it was possible for a crew of their size to get, and he’d gone on believing it up until the moment he stepped foot on the Alouen. Fifteen years ago, it had probably been a nice shuttle. Now, the lights flickered and everything was either rusty or peeling or faded, or all three at once. It was meant to fly a crew of five, generously.
Avram and Rico, as captain and first mate, took the cabin; so did Josephine as the member of the crew that the captain and first mate liked best. Bo and Kit were both too tall for the bunks and Dita couldn’t sleep in a hammock without feeling sick, which left her, Immanuel, and Sacha to the three narrow bunks built into the wall by the stairs while the rest set up in the cargo bay. Immanuel was tired and itchy in the same clothes he’d been wearing for the past week, but Kit had fucked up the resupply and they barely had enough water to drink, let alone wash.
Worse than that, Avram had been attempting to corner him for a heart-to-heart, once it became clear Kit was in no shape to talk and would spend the next several hours locked in the one and only washroom to have the meltdown he’d clearly been fighting off with his fingernails, leaving Immanuel as the next victim. And so, on their second day aboard the Alouen, Immanuel found himself steered into the cabin by his irate captain and sat on the bunk.
“I’m just trying to understand,” Avram said, hands folded in his lap, eyes fixed on Immanuel’s like if he stared hard enough he’d spontaneously develop telepathy.
Immanuel shrugged. “Bo should pull his own weight. It’s frustrating that he needs to be coddled.”
“He pulls his weight as much as any of us,” Avram said. “Even if he didn’t, you can’t speak unkindly about your crewmates.”
“It was barely unkind.”
“We aren’t debating what is and isn’t kind,” Avram said firmly. “And it isn’t about pulling weight, and I think deep down you know that.” A slight smile. “Look at you and Sacha.”
“I don’t take care of him,” Immanuel protested.
“You do. Maybe not when he’s sick—” Immanuel made a hasty exit at the first indication bodily fluids might come into play— “but I see you together. You wait for him so he can hold your arm when you walk. You bring him things he likes. You let him talk at you. And you’re good with Kit, too, you can tell what kind of questions work for him and which ones don’t, better than I can most of the time. I really admire that about you.”
“Sure,” Immanuel said, pushing himself to his feet. “Good talk, Captain.”
****
“Have you heard?” Dhillon asked when Dita straggled into the staff room, still half asleep. Their nails tapped against the ceramic of their mug in a nervous staccato.
“Uh, good morning?” Dita said. “How are you, are you coming to the meeting later, that kind of thing.”
“About the letter,” Dhillon elaborated. “Vic says she overheard Deputy Orson telling his wife that Inspector Donwald sent the Director a letter saying he’s retiring. Only it sounded less like a retirement and more like he was... not so gently nudged out of office.” That woke her up. Inspector Donwald of the VIIS had been assigned to the Project since before even Dhillon had started there, a portly, grey-haired old man who dropped by once every couple of years to nod vaguely as they gave their presentations and tell them to keep up the good work. Word was he’d been friends with Edward Vannery back in the day, or that he was taking a chunk of their profit in bribes, or that the director had promised him some sort of special, under the table modification — whether with the intent to deliver or to kill him on the operating table before he could spill their secrets was a matter of debate.
“That’s ominous,” Dita said. She had the sudden impulse to go back to her office and burn her filing cabinets. Maybe throw her console out the airlock, for good measure. “What does the Director say?”
“Nothing yet,” Dhillon said. They shrugged, tensely. “We’ll clean house, I suppose.”
The following months passed uneventfully. The bubbling tension faded to a simmer, then to an occasional spike of anxiety, a topic of curious lunchroom conversation. The Director sent out new instructions for file storage and disposal, and they endured a laborious week of combing through their records as Deputy Orson frowned over them, wispy and fretful as he wrung his hands and paced in and out of the labs to peer over their shoulders. Officially, they heard nothing about the resignation, or about a new face in the inspection office. New rumours grew on top of the old, spreading like mushrooms after rain, and Dita allowed herself to believe everything might be okay.
Six months after her conversation with Dhillon in the kitchen, Dita sat in a windowless meeting rooms at the heart of the Central Station across from the new inspector. He looked the part, too, in glasses and checkered tie and a slightly shabby grey suit. He shuffled the thick stack of folders on the table in front of him. Cleared his throat, pushed the glasses up his nose with the tip of his finger. He’d been at it since yesterday morning when his ship landed, unexpected and unauthorized. The cadets had gathered to meet him, and he had stood on the threshold of his ship for a long moment, staring out at the gathered crowd of bristling, hostile teenagers.
In a vertiginous moment of double vision, Dita, watching the scene from behind the control room glass, imagined the scene as she would have before she came to the Project; a strange and uncanny show of force on what was supposed to be a research station. The crowd parted around the Director’s compact figure, then the inspector and his people were lead away, leaving them all in lingering, tense silence.
In the present, Inspector Song heaved the sigh of a man finding his job unnecessarily complicated. “How long have you worked here, Dr. Mansour?”
“Eight years, give or take,” Dita said, keeping her voice light.
“What were you doing before that?”
“Med school.”
It went on for a long time. Questions about her schooling, about her family, about what she did in her off hours. How she got along with her colleagues, how she got along with the subjects. How she felt about their treatment.
“That’s not really my area,” she said.
“But you live here, you see them every day. You must have opinions. Yes?”
“Not particularly,” Dita said shortly.
“And if you were to spot something out of the ordinary, something concerning — if you had reason to believe one of the children was being mistreated, how would you react? Do you have protocols for this eventuality?”
If they did, Dita certainly hadn’t seen them, and she hadn’t asked. Mostly, she’d been happy to skip the endless rounds of training that usually came with starting a new position.
“Report it to Dhillon, I guess,” she said, non-committal. “But they’re med team, they’d notice before I did.”
“Dr. Dhillon, not the director?” Inspector Song said.
There was a sharp look in his eye she didn’t like.She absolutely would not tell the director unless she hated the victim and also herself, but she wasn’t about to admit that out loud. She dug through her memory for her last round of workplace training — it must have been during her first practicum, or the three months when she’d worked part-time at a smoothie bar.
“Sure, if it wasn’t something we could handle ourselves, or if we suspected one of the supervisors.”
“But you’ve never had cause to do that?”
“Nope.”
“You know what to look for?”
“Anatomically, sure,” Dita said. “Bruises, certain types of breaks. Healed fractures, especially untreated. Abrasions. I’m better at autopsies, though.”
Inspector Song pushed up his glasses, jotting something in his notes. “And have you seen anything like that? Bruises, skin tears, as you say.” They were a group of psychics in the midst of military training. Of course they had bruises.
She shook her head. “Just from the occasional roughhousing, youthful misadventures, that kind of thing.”
For a long moment, Inspector Song just looked at her, expression calm and unreadable behind his glasses. For the first time, she wondered where they’d found him. Whether he was not just some overworked bureaucrat catching up on his new workload but someone hired specifically for the Project.
“You can make a real difference in these kids’ lives, Dr. Mansour,” he said with a quiet intensity.
In the following month, the inspector became a permanent fixture. Dita was called in three more times, including an enjoyable three hours on video call with Noriko Tremblay of New Aglia university, who she’d known during her student days, and the inspector had taken to lingering in Dawson’s office during meetings, which had the unexpected advantage of making her considerably more polite.
“She’s nervous,” Dhillon said after one such meeting, when Dita had mentioned it on the walk back to the med bay. “I’d take getting shouted at again if it meant I didn’t have to worry about the inspector anymore, frankly.”
“You think he’s got something on us?” Dita asked.
Dhillon shrugged, lapsing into silence as they passed a line of nursery kids headed in the opposite direction, corralled by a blond, pale-skinner Soother.
“Hey, didn’t Nursery I used to be someone else?” Dita asked.
“Ashta,” Dhillon confirmed. “He was transferred to the Outer Station after recalibration.”
“Really? Seems like a waste of time to recalibrate him if we’re just gonna kick him to proverbial Siberia.”
Dhillon shrugged. “Word is the director started transferring people when Donwald got axed. Anyone she didn’t want talking got shipped out.”
Dita thought back to Nursery I bursting into the director’s office, all righteous fury. “Probably the right call with that one,” she said. “On the plus side, the inspector can’t have found too much yet or he’d have gone off to present it to whoever he presents this stuff to.”
Dhillon shook their head. “I’m not sure. I think he knows there’s something to find, and I’m starting to suspect he has permission to keep digging until he finds it.”
And so the investigation limped into its second month. Word came through the grapevine that the inspector had moved to requisition notes, that the Project’s lawyers had reported that their acrimonious battle in court to have the warrant denied was drawing steadily towards defeat.
Dita worked late nights and early mornings with the door to her office locked, packing her notes into crates that were promptly whisked away by Deputy Orson himself, incongruously wielding a wheelie cart in his crisp three-piece suit. For each crate she sent off, a new one arrived packed with doctored files she barely had time to skim between her regular duties and the secret late-night staff meetings that dragged longer and longer each day. Still, by the time the requisition order came through stamped and approved, she was, she felt confident, as prepared as it was possible to be, given the circumstances. Until—
“I don’t suppose you could help me with this,” Inspector Song said one Tuesday morning, when Dita arrived in his office for yet another round of questioning. “But you wouldn’t happen to know what happened to Mordecai Metzger, would you? I’d been informed he was away visiting family — benefitting from a generous time-off policy, no less — but all the family I was able to contact were certain they hadn’t heard from him in years, not since he started working here. You wouldn’t happen to know where he could be?”
Approximately once every three months, when the Seabird landed in port, Avram decided that Kit should leave the ship. He did this primarily on planets, and hardly ever on space stations, because space stations had been designed to torment Kit specifically, and everyone on the crew knew it. Avram said he needed fresh air, exercise, and socialization outside of the crew, and that Kit would not do himself any good “sitting around like a bump on a log” during shore leave. He said that “sitting around like a bump on a log” meant sitting still and not doing anything, the way the bumpy parts on logs also did not do anything. Had Kit seen a log? He could show him a picture. (Kit had seen a log). This did not make sense, because the bumps on logs were the spots where branches had broken off, and they could not leave to do anything even if they wanted to. Also because they were trees, and therefore inanimate. He did not explain this to Avram, who would tell him it was a metaphor but also the metaphor didn’t matter: he meant Kit should not waste his time sitting around on the ship when he could waste his time getting bitten by insects and talked at by people who didn’t know sign language.
“Come with me,” Avram signed, at the conclusion of the discussion about the logs. Kit came with him down the hall from the crew quarters where he, Avram, and Dita had their single rooms, through the seating area beside the galley, and into the second half of the crew quarters. He knocked on Sacha and Immanuel’s door. Avram often tried to persuade Kit to go planet-side with them, which he said was because Kit was closest to them in age. Josephine said it was because the captain thought Kit would stop them from doing “all the illegal shit they get up to together,” seeing as before Immanuel and Sacha were arrested on Charlen, he hadn’t cared if Kit went with Bo every time.
Avram knocked once and opened the door without waiting for a response, one of his more irritating habits. The sound of voices inside rose then cut off abruptly — Kit could not pick out the words with everyone talking at the same time, but he could tell it was more than just Sacha and Immanuel.
When the door swung open, Josephine, Vani, and Bo were inside as well. The room was very untidy, with clothes on the floor and books stacked crookedly on the table in a way that would send them spilling to the ground when the ship landed. Kit tapped his fingers twice against the side of his leg, twitchy feeling building. He had been banned from cleaning other people’s rooms, on the grounds that it was a violation of privacy, and how would he like it if the rest of the crew went into his room and started rearranging things without asking? But the rest of the crew had no reason to rearrange things in his room, because the things in his room were put away in places where they would not cause a safety hazard. This was, Avram informed him, not the point. Hypocrisy was another of his more irritating habits.
“—going out,” Immanuel was saying. He spoke more slowly than Sacha or Dita, but his accent made him harder to understand than Rico or Vani. If Kit watched his lips, he caught one word in three. “—party at— loud, very crowded— not unwilling—”
Bo sat on the bed against the far wall, Vani on the floor in front of him so he could do her hair. He tied off a braid, waved at Kit, then signed, “Immanuel says we’re going to party but you might not like it.”
“Fucking massive—” Josephine added, coming to stand next to Immanuel. She clasped her hands together and pulled them apart. Big. “—know he’s— meltdown—”
Avram said something in response. He was facing away from Kit, so he didn’t know what.
“I can go with you,” Bo signed. He raised his hands again when Avram started speaking, then lowered them without signing anything. When Avram was finished, he turned back towards Kit and gestured at him to follow. They walked back through the seating area, where Dita had her hiking bag — lightweight, fibreglass frame, bought somewhere in the centrals and build for overnights on the trail — open on the table and was packing it with a methodical consideration she failed to apply to organizing anything else.
“Do you want to go with Dita?” Avram signed. Kit did not. Avram repeated the question. Usually this meant Kit had said the response he thought of in his head.
“No,” he signed.
“I’m collecting samples along the plains trail,” Dita signed. She went on for some time about the negative impact of terraforming on the delicate natural ecosystem, slipping between sign and speech. Kit went back to his room in hopes that Avram would see that no one was available to act as escort and allow him to stay home.
No one else needed an escort before they were allowed off the ship — not that Kit wanted to be off the ship in the first place — but he knew better than to try to argue about it. A month after they fled Project Lifebloom on the Starside, Avram had asked if he wanted to come along when they docked for supplies, and Kit, so sick from the constant noise of the children he could barely eat, had agreed. When they docked, he had rushed off the ship without thinking. The station had been worse than the ship, so loud and bright there was no room for anything else, and because his brain was defective in a way the rest of the crew’s was not, something inside him had shut down. He came back to himself to find Avram steering him back to the shuttle with a firm grip on the back of his shirt. If anyone understood why it was better for Kit to stay home, it should be him.
Avram did not let him stay on the ship. He knocked on the door twenty minutes later and entered without waiting for an answer. “Looks like you’re with us, Kit,” he signed, and then a quick upward flick of his hand that meant he was happy about it, because Kit did not read body language well. By “us,” he meant him and Rico, who led the way down Esparda’s winding, dirt-packed streets to The Engine Room, which was not part of a ship but rather the establishment where Midge Ohanian conducted her business.
The Engine Room was a squat mud-brick building, as was nearly every other building on Esparda. The first storey was a gathering place for both legitimate and illegitimate traders, with a floor of interlocking russet-coloured fired clay tiles, a canteen on one side — strictly non-alcoholic, per Ohanian’s directives, drinking was to be done at The Carousel down the street — and a floor-to-ceiling pin board on the other, because Esparda was not connected to a planetary or interplanetary system.
A list of crews Ohanian had approved to work in the Kelter Quadrant took centre place on the board; Rico found theirs on the list, transferred it to the column for crews currently present on the planet and available to work, and turned to examine the job postings covering the rest. Kit stepped closer to join her, while Avram went around the room speaking to the handful of other captains at the canteen counter. They divided the tasks this way because Avram read poorly; he said the letters moved and he had not learned to compensate for it the way some people did.
“—job for you, Ashta,” Ohanian’s voice cut across the room. Kit waited as Avram made his way towards her. Sometimes Ashta meant just him and sometimes it meant the whole crew. Or however much of the crew was currently present.
“Come along,” Avram signed, so all three of them followed Ohanian up the stairs to the office she used to broker contracts. The client was not present, which was not unusual but which Rico would protest.
“Just us?” she asked now. Away from the hum of engines or the chatter of overlapping voices, sounds resolved more readily into words.
“Client’s anonymous,” Ohanian said. “Very, veryanonymous. So anonymous I’m almost offended.” She slid a crisp white envelope onto the table. “No name, no identity. A hefty transaction fee to get this to you within the next...” she checked her watch. “Three days. Paying well enough that if you hadn’t been on your way here already, I’d have sent out runners.” Which cost a fortune, went unsaid. She kept her fingers steepled on the paper when Avram reached for it.
“You’re an interesting lot, you know? Always seem to be in just a bit more trouble than you’re worth.”
“We lead interesting lives,” Avram said. Ohanian let go of the envelope and he tucked it into his jacket as he stood. “Pleasure as always, Midge. We’ll let you know what we decide.”
Downstairs, he and Rico made another round of the other captains while Kit waited at the far end of the counter for them to be finished, head down on his arms. It didn’t take long, by their usual standard: not even fifteen minutes later, Avram came over to collect him.
They stepped around the back of The Engine Room and Avram pulled the envelope from his jacket, slitting it neatly open with his pocketknife. He drew out a thick sheaf of paper, eyebrows drawing together as he flipped slowly through the contents. Kit was reminded suddenly of the facial expression chart Bo had shown him years ago, before they came up with the hand signals — a sheet of yellow circles with drawn-on expressions and labels underneath: happy, sad, frustrated, angry. He’d thought at the time that if people went around with big cartoon smiles he wouldn’t have a problem figuring out what they were feeling in the first place, but he wondered if it would help now. Avram might not mind if he held the sheet up by his face, the way people usually did, but he had left it behind at Lifebloom. Now Avram handed the papers to Rico, who scanned through them quickly, then again, slower, eyebrows drawing together to mirror their captain. She passed it silently to Kit.
Nine professionally done Vetec citizenship cards, indistinguishable from their legitimate counterparts. Birth certificates, vaccination records, sheets listing places of birth, work histories. His own used a picture a few years old, taken before the raid. All of them did, beside Sacha’s and Immanuel’s, which must have been taken from their most recent documents on Capeira. In the picture, Kit looked thin and tired, hair cut close to his scalp. He flipped quickly past, looking for the job brief.
Instead he found builder’s plans for Lifebloom’s Central Station. It was built in an almost perfect sphere, a miracle of artificial gravity with the examination rooms, the labs, the offices, the administrative and scientific staff quarters all located in the thick central cylinder, while the Third Gen subjects and the rest of the staff had their quarters along the outer shell.
He peered closer at the gap between the cylinder and the outer quarters, which housed the life support and other fundamental systems under the floor. Except the plans suggested they did not just house the life support system: a second outline of the station was drawn under the first, showing none of the rooms and corridors that appeared on the first but rather a series of spiderwebbed lines that shot through the whole of the station, gathering into a thick slash that stretched through the central cylinder from one end of the station to the other. In the middle was marked a neat white X.
“They know who we are,” Rico said, signing as she spoke. They were back on the Seabird, the full crew sat around the long table in the galley with the documents spread out in the middle. “They know we aren’t dead, and not only do they know we aren’t dead, they’re confident enough to spend however much time and effort it took to put all of this together.”
“They’re from the Project,” Vani said. She leaned forward, jabbing her fingers at her picture staring up from the table. At her side and across the table from Kit, Bo repeated it in sign.
Avram said something out loud, then repeated it in sign: “they might be.”
“Who else would know about this?” Vani demanded, gesturing again at the plans. “You didn’t, did you? Not even you, Rico, or Kit. Half the fucking directorial team—” (Bo hesitated in his sign translation, which usually meant he was editing out a curse— “didn’t know about these tunnels. None of the sujects learned about it but me.”
“Thank you, nepotism,” Josephine said. Like Rico, she signed as she spoke. Vani bared her teeth.
“Half the directorial team was arrested. We have no idea what they might have told the authorities, or what the VIIS agents may have discovered themselves in the past five years,” Rico said.
“Why the fuck are we even considering this in the first place?” Josephine said, probably; today her signing was unusually sloppy.
“It might be our only chance to learn what happened to everyone else at the Project,” Avram said. He stood from his spot at the head of the table, pacing around the edge of the room.
“Fuck the Project. That place is a tarpit,” Josephine said, cheeks flushing red. Kit didn’t need his flashcards or Bo’s half-second gesture to know she was furious. “Vani, your mother isn’t a secret genius arranging all this from the shadows. She’s a grasping piece of shit who’s probably in jail.”
“Enough,” Avram said. He settled his hands on Vani’s shoulders, thumbs rubbing in circles. “Enough. We need to talk this through like reasonable people.” His hands stayed on Vani’s shoulders; Bo signed the last part instead.
“Shouldn’t we at least try using the papers? Staying out of Vetec hasn’t exactly been a winning business model,” Sacha said. He signed like he talked, very fast and barely coherent. “Curious as I am about what’s given you all your charming and stable personalities, there’s no reason we can’t take the IDs and forget the job.”
“I know I said fuck the Project, but as a counterpoint, maybe let’s not go out of our way to fuck over the mysterious person and/or people who are apparently capable of tracking us down and know all our information,” Josephine said. “Just tell Ohanian we’re not doing it after all and burn all this.”
“They tracked us to Esparda; it’s hardly the Kalwin’s cave of hiding spots,” Sacha said.
“If it is a trap, why has someone gone through all the trouble of setting it for us, specifically?” Rico interrupted. “I’m not saying this isn’t a suspicious situation, because it is very fucking suspicious. But Vani’s right: whoever sent these plans was either part of the Project — likely very senior at the Project — or they’ve done an incredibly thorough job combing through the site. And if they have that kind of access, they’d have no reason to waste their money sending us to collect documents that they could have collected themselves.”
“I want to see it,” Immanuel said. “We’re still looking for the Oasis, aren’t we? If the goal is to live out the rest of our lives some place built by Lifebloom, I want to see what they did the first time around.”
The rest of our lives. Kit tapped the back of his knuckles anxiously against the side of his leg. He hadn’t thought of the Oasis in years, not when finding it seemed like a fairytale at best. The table went quiet.
“It’s been five years,” Avram said quietly. “We may never get another chance like this.”
In possession of a legitimate ship registration code for the first time since the Project collapsed, Josephine had hooked theSeabirdinto the interplanetary system, and they had alternated long planning sessions with hours watching the movies that weren’t in their hard copy collection and flipping through a seemingly infinite number of streaming channels.
It was like this that they learned what happened to the Central Station. Kit had been sprawled across the floor in front of the couch half-watching the screen as Vani flipped through channels when she stopped abruptly: the director’s image stared back at them from the screen. The video must have been from the hearings; she sat alone at a table facing a panel of five people dressed in VIIS uniform.
The subtitles read, “when my predecessor Dr. Edward Vannery built what is now the Edward Vannery Centre for Human Advancement, it was a marvel of engineering to rival even New Aglia station itself. The EVCHA was, and is, the incubator of the future, a dedicated laboratory where we have been working tirelessly to open a new frontier for humanity and to transform what it means to live in outer space. Have we made missteps? Of course. But far outnumbering those missteps are—”
The screen blinked. A smiling young woman in a brightly-lit room peered out. “Under lockdown since the raids that shut down the notorious Project Lifebloom five years ago, the station formerly known as the Edward Vannery Center for Human Advancement is getting a facelift. Renamed as the Innovia Center and with extensive renovations planned over the coming years, Vandermeer Anderson of New Aglia University says it’s time to leave the Centre’s controversial history in the past and remember the optimistic principles behind its construction. Vandermeer...”
The screen switched again to show Vandermeer Anderson of New Aglia University saying something Kit did not bother to track. Instead he watched the images shown behind him: shots of the Central Station’s smooth white exterior taken at the Lifebloom grand opening, of Edward Vannery in what had been Estelle Dawson’s office since before Kit was born. Shots of military gunners descending in a swarm, of soldiers marching through the halls where he had grown up, before he was sent to the Outer Station. Shots of the station now, cordoned off by guard satellites that their mission brief claimed would be shut off incrementally over the course of a week before the ground crews moved in. This was their window. A quick in-and-out job, Avram said. A challenge, but one that would be worth it. He believed in them.
Later, when the station a gleaming speck on the horizon, Kit and Josephine suited up and installed her newest set of sensors, fist-sized metal cubes that clamped onto the outside of the ship at regular intervals. Sensors to detect sensors, she’d explained, to register where the protective net around the station had been taken down and to alert them if they were spotted in order to “give us a few minutes to contemplate how we’re fucked.”
In an effort to avoid needing to contemplate how they were fucked, they had also fastened on bulky reflective panelling to serve as visual camouflage. The Seabird’s paint was an unobtrusive deep green, the name stencilled on in squat, square letters under the port window, but they had painted on white racing stripes one blazing summer morning on Esparda after they had traded in the Lady Kay, a cavernous, nearly one hundred-year-old freighter with a fuel cost that consumed the majority of their profits and was designed to be run by a crew of twenty. The Seabird would be their home, Avram had said. They should make it look like theirs.
And it did look like theirs, the way the gleaming white speck in the distance did not. In his spacesuit, Kit knew the drag and pull of the anchor cables like he knew his own limbs. He knew that when he pushed himself past the next window, Vani would look up and whistle and Bo would wave and sign how are you doing? With one hand on the hand rail along the roof and the other holding the strip of paneling strapped at his side in place, Kit would gesture back with his elbow, and he would mean, good.
None of the rest of the crew liked outside work: they got nervous that something would happen to him or Josephine out there, or to the ship. Kit had always loved it. The quiet, the weightlessness. A task with steps clearly laid out, a skill to be learned and used again and again, a way to protect his crew without the confusion and frustration that came with living alongside them. He did not have skills like this at the Project. On the Oasis, he would have to learn something new all over again. Would have to get to know people again, outside of their little unit of nine, which was all the people they needed.
He drifted past Vani and Bo, past Rico who offered a short nod, past Dita glancing up from her book to wave. Shimmying himself onto the roof, he fastened the panel in place, lead line pulled short as he worked. I don’t want this. He pushed against the panel, checking the fit. It stayed firmly in place. I don’t want this. Switched his lead line to shimmy back towards the airlock. The station loomed in the distance. I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.
The Seabird drifted in with the engines at a low hum, silent besides the low ping of the new sensors. Sometimes they caught a glimpse of the federal ships out the windows. Josephine and Kit holed up in the cockpit with the star chart between them as they marked out the narrow window where the guard satellites had been shut off. They slipped through, anticlimactic, at 02:00 shipboard standard four years, seven months, and twelve days after the Project had collapsed. Kit’s hands shook as he guided the ship down to the surface. No ground control pings to guide their way or radio instructions he never understood anyway unless Josephine stood next to him and translated to sign. Not that it mattered, without anyone else to crash into.
The outer airlock had been blasted to rubble, a grey wound carved into the otherwise smooth surface of the station. Up close, the white panelling curled back, scorched brown at the edges. Wires drifted lazily through the air, a chunk of dangling metal scraped against the hull as they guided the ship inside. (On the Outer Station, the alarms had woken them in a blare of noise so loud it whited out the rest of the world and froze Kit in place, fingers gripped into the sheets until Bo burst in and hauled him upright, usually so careful to avoid touching not just Kit, with his skin that prickled sickly at the sensation, but anyone, always aware of his size and strength, and hauled him to the docking bay. Later, Bo would tell him the announcement had said they’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming, two words repeated over and over through the emergency broadcast connecting them to the Central Station until it cut off in a rush of static).
Kit steered the ship to the second airlock, following retroreflective guides still painted on the ground. Engaged the grav clamps as Josephine suited back up. She kept her anchor line spooled from the Seabird, pulling her way through the debris field towards the control panel beside the secondary airlock. The anchor point on the wall had been blown off and the cover dangled from its hinges, cracked down the middle. For several long, silent minutes, Josephine’s small, suited figure stayed hunched over the panel, working one-handed as she held herself in place with the other.
In ordinary circumstances, the outer airlock would seal and the inner would open, pressure equalizing between the two and as the artificial grav kicked in. They would steer their ship into the inner airlock, which would seal behind them, and the outer would open. Now, with the outer airlock a gaping hole to open space, she’d be looking for the emergency override: the inner airlock took the place of the outer and the tertiary airlock inside the control room took the place of the inner.
The operators had been sealed behind pressurized glass when the Vetec ships opened fire, but any ships without their grav locks on and any personnel working on the floor had been swept into open space. (That part was never shown on the newsfeeds, when they showed the troopers marching through the halls in their crisp uniforms.)
The inner airlock opened, smooth as he remembered it. Kit waited for Josephine to make her way back to the Seabird and get a firm hold on the rail before he steered into the docking bay. Followed the painted lines on the floor to the farthest stall like other ships would fill the remaining spots after him. Waited as Josephine spooled out her line again and closed the airlock behind them. Where the outer airlock had been destroyed, the inner looked surprisingly normal with the engineering carts still grav locked at the head of the stalls, the tables of the glassed-in control room above littered with mugs, chairs shoved out haphazardly, pictures still taped onto the cubicle walls.
Inside the Seabird, they didn’t feel the moment the artificial gravity kicked in, but Josephine, floating gently by the control panel a moment before, hit the floor with a jolt and braced herself against the wall. She unhooked the scanner from the front of her suit and studied the readings before she flashed them the okay and began unbuckling her hood.
“Don’t—” said Avram, who always wanted to be the first to test the life support un-suited, then sighed in exasperation when she did anyway. When she remained firmly alive and intact, they followed her out. Ran through their safety checks same as they did before any job — communicators on and earbuds in, always; bags packed with emergency rations, ox sensors to alert them if life support was failing and rebreathers and thermals to keep them alive long enough to make it back to the ship if it did, barring spontaneous depressurization.
“All set?” Avram signed for the third time in as many minutes. In that time, they hadn’t made it more than three steps from the Seabird, huddled in a tight circle. For the third time in as many minutes, they signed their assent.
“Okay,” Avram signed, and then nothing else. Kit pressed clammy palms against the fabric of his pants. He felt dizzy, distant, like he might throw up. He wanted to climb back aboardand curl up in his bunk.
“Pair off,” Rico signed abruptly, breaking them from the cycle of safety checks about to start again. Avram shook back to attention as he divided the group, running through whatever mental calculus he always did in these situations — assignments were non-negotiable, he’d reminded them countless times over the years, they all needed to be able to work with everyone else, not just with their friends. Still, there were default groupings, when the job didn’t demand otherwise, and that was what he did now: Avram and Sacha, Dita and Immanuel, Josephine and Rico, Vani and Bo and Kit.
“Group three, you’re in the secret passages. We don’t have time for a full integrity check first, so I want you to be careful. Stick together, mark your path. Vani, be realistic about what you remember. I don’t want to have to fish you out of there because you think you remember a place you haven’t been in coming up on half a decade better than you do.”
“I do remember,” Vani signed.
Outside the docking bay, they made a sharp left and climbed the steep metal stairs up to the control room. It was unlocked and obvious at first glance that the place had been searched, quickly and without concern for putting anything back where it had come from. The drawers on the filing cabinets against the back wall hung open and mostly empty, a handful of stray papers littered across the floor. Vani marched through without stopping, shouldering her way through the door at the opposite end. Down a long, white corridor, floor scuffed with boot prints, alternating blinding white and dark where the lights had burnt out.
The central cylinder was structured like the station in miniature; they emerged from the hall to find themselves in a round anteroom, a spiral staircase stretching up in the centre and doorways along the perimeter. Kit had never been here when he lived at Lifebloom — none of the Third Gen had, besides Vani. Ignoring the doorways, she strode to the staircase and began to climb, pace fast but steady. Sustainable. The stairs — metal, again, everything on the Central station was either white tile or metal — clattered beneath their feet, echoing through the empty space. The back of his neck prickled, but when he looked back there was no one behind him.
They climbed until they reached the top of the stairs, which came to an abrupt end at a pair of double doors, incongruously ornate composite or maybe real wood, splintered at the handle where it had been forced in. For the first time since they had stepped foot out of the docking bay, Vani hesitated. The plaque still read DIRECTOR ESTELLE DAWSON. She pushed it open with her fingertips, stayed frozen in the doorway until the door tapped lightly against the wall and began to swing back. She stepped inside, Bo and Kit trailing after her. They emerged not into the director’s office but into a small waiting room, then up another short flight of stairs.
The office itself was perfectly circular, the bookshelves and cabinets — empty, same as the ones in the control room — pushed back against the central panel that held the door to the stairs, leaving an unobstructed view of the station. And it really was an unobstructed view: in place of walls were floor-to-ceiling windows all the way around, so when he looked out he could see into the labs across and the living quarters below.
It was one-way glass: he remembered sitting in the labs as a child, watching his reflection through the window as the doctors did their tests (no closed blinds in the Project, not in the labs and not in the living quarters, and he hadn’t thought it odd until he transferred to the Outer Station). A system of mirrors mounted above the desk — more wood composite in some antique, embellished style Kit couldn’t name — showed the view from the windows at the opposite side of the room. He could see Avram and Sacha, tiny but clear, standing in the middle of the nursery; Immanuel and Dita combing through one of the labs; Josephine checking her scanner as she and Rico made a lap of one of the halls.
“I keep expecting her to walk in,” Vani said. Even in the encompassing quiet, it took a moment for the words to register. She kicked her feet up on the desk, though Kit noticed she was careful to keep the soles of her shoes from touching the surface. Sank back in the chair with her arms dangling towards the floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling. “She’d be so annoyed, all that time telling me we’ll rest when the work is done and then all of us went and fucked around in space for five years doing nothing.”
“I think probably she’d be happy you’re safe,” Bo said.
“Fucking obviously, but that’s never exactly been mutually exclusive with annoyed where mom’s concerned.” She yanked open the nearest desk drawer and began rifling through, though when Kit moved to stand behind her there was not much rifling to be done: a handful of stray paperclips, a couple of green and gold Project Lifebloom 20th Anniversary pens.
“Can we help you look?” Bo asked.
Vani closed the drawer with a sigh, tugging her hand through her hair, snarling when it caught on a tangle. “I’m not looking for anything. All I’m trying to see is if they left any of her behind or if it’s all just fucking picked bones in here, is that too much to ask?”
“Of course not,” Bo said at the same time Kit signed, “Yes,” because they really didn’t have time for her to have a breakdown over a set of empty desk drawers.
Vani laughed. “That’s cold, Kit, she’d’ve loved you if, you know, the rest of your brain worked right.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your brain, it’s just different,” Bo signed when Vani had her back turned. “She’s just upset, she doesn’t mean it.”
“Are we going or you two want a little gossip break, here?” Vani said, turning around. She repeated it in sign, which was good because Kit had only caught about half the words with her facing in the opposite direction.
“Sorry,” Bo said.
All at once she brightened. “Well, I was going to have you executed by the powers of the high court of Vannery Dawson on account of how gossiping’s a capital crime and all, but if you’re sorry I guess I can let you off the hook. Just this once, mind, don’t make it a habit.” She stood up on her toes to tap Bo on the centre of his forehead. “Bo Kerra, by the power invested in me, by myself just now in my mom’s office, I absolve you. Kit’s the witness, which makes it all official-like.” She dropped back onto her heels. “Now: onward!”
The first day on the Central Station, Kit, Vani, and Bo walked up and down the maintenance tunnels in a painstaking grid. The ceilings were low, the walls so narrow they brushed Bo’s shoulders no matter how tightly he hunched in on himself and both he and Kit walked with their heads ducked. The walls were tiled in speckled blue linoleum, illuminated by the dim beams of their headlamps.
“We can swap you for someone shorter,” Vani offered.
“We’re okay,” Bo said. He shuffled around until he freed an arm and took Vani’s hand, and they started once more to move painstakingly forward.
By the time they met up with the rest of the crew in the former living quarters, they were stiff and sore. The room had been built for efficiency, painted the same stark white as the rest of the Central Station and packed with rows of three-tiered bunk beds. His feet carried him on instinct to his old spot, the top bunk in the fifth row from the left. When he looked over, he saw Rico and Vani had begun to do the same. Kit climbed down. They set up in the far corner instead, with clear sight lines to the door. Sacha and Immanuel claimed one of the top bunks and huddled there together, whispering. Vani wormed her way in beside Bo, though he barely fit into the bunk by himself. Kit claimed the one above them, curled up on sheets grimy with five years of dust. No one spoke. At 20:00 hours, the lights went out, still running on the station-wide day/night timer. He did not sleep.
The sensors pinged as they were poking at their rehydrated rations two days later, transmitted from the Seabird to their communicators. The second day of investigation had revealed no more than the first, except that walking hunched in the maintenance tunnels incubated a vicious headache. It must have been worse for Bo, but he said nothing.
“Guard satellites are down,” Josephine signed. “We won’t have long before the ground crews show up.” And when they did, the first thing they would see was the Seabird in the docking bay.
Avram scrubbed his hands over his face. When he lowered them, he had his shoulders back in the way that meant he wanted them to remember he was captain, which Bo said he didn’t always — don’t you ever want to be just a regular person? He’d asked, but Kit didn’t think he’d understood it the way Bo had meant: he could not be a regular person and still be himself, the way a version of Avram who didn’t try to captain them wouldn’t be himself either.
“We’ll split up,” Avram signed. He hardly ever allowed them to go off alone, even on shore leave. Vani called him Captain Buddy System. “If we don’t find anything by 18:00, we’re leaving. That isn’t up for debate. Keep an eye on your communicators and on your surroundings. Don’t leave anything behind. I don’t want any evidence we were here. Clear?”
Alone, Kit moved fast. Hands brushing against the walls to feel for irregularities, headlamp sweeping back and forth over the tile, he traced his progress against his copy of the plans, worn along the creases now from all the times he had folded and unfolded it in the past days, marking out his path on the map in red pen — he’d never bothered with that before, and never needed to, but the tunnels were dark, winding, and identical. He worked his way deeper and deeper into the heart of the station. The air grew stale and thin and cold in the way of cheap storage on space ships, where they kept life support to a bare minimum. Kit pulled on his respirator, tucked his hands into his pockets, and pushed onwards.
And onwards, and onwards. Dug his stiff hands out of his pockets long enough to check the time on his watch as it crept past 12:00, past 14:00, past 16:00, as his communicator pinged with the movement of ships above. He should head back — he’d wanted to leave since before they even came within sight of the station; the files, even the money could go up in flame for all he cared. But if they didn’t get what they had been sent for now, they might come back. And so he walked, neck aching, face itchy under the respirator straps, communicator pinging not just from the alerts, now, but the rest of the crew signalling him to hurry up and get back.
His watch ticked past 17:30. Kit came to a stop, hand pressed against the wall. The tiles burned cold under his palm. His chest ached. He took a deep breath. Turned. Rammed the side of his foot into something heavy and solid. Blinking against the darkness, he swept the light downwards. The box sat haphazardly in the middle of the tunnel, knee-height and made of a cheap but sturdy paper composite. A handful of steps beyond, three more were stacked against the wall, and more past that.
Kit settled cross-legged on the floor and lifted the lid. They were personnel files, organized in numerical order for the subjects and alphabetical for the staff. He found himself easily enough, almost without meaning to: the Project had never been large, and his file was twice as thick as most of the others. He flipped it open. It started before was born: genetic information, week-by-week tracking of his artificial gestation. Birth size and weight, a picture of him as a wrinkled infant. A list of milestones marked in red. Height and weight average for age but developmental milestones consistently missed — speech is notably delayed as is receptive communication; subject does not respond to external stimulus. Physical examination shows no evidence of structural damage.Issue appears to be mental, social correction to be attempted before physical.
He remembered, patchily, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from a woman trying to understand as she spoke, how the louder she got the less he could make sense of the words; her gleaming white teeth; how she leaned forward and held him by the wrists when his hands began to twitch; how he learned not to cry or struggle as she guided his movements. Later, she told him they were done, that the Soothers had figured out an easier way to fix him — to recalibrate him, she said, and he’d wondered how he could be recalibrated when he had never been calibrated in the first place — and she’d led him to a stark white room and Bo, still a towering stranger in a white gown and mask, had laid his hand on Kit’s. (He remembered nothing, after that, except that he had woken blank and dazed, and the next time he was scheduled for recalibration Bo showed up instead with his chart of faces and taught him to pretend).
Kit snapped the file shut, went to slip it back into place in the box but found himself stuffing it in his bag instead, edges crumpled by the shaking of his hands. Moved on to the next box, and then the next. And then, after five years of looking, he found it, tucked into the back of a thick white binder labelled In Case of Emergency. Kit flipped past fire protocols, life support failures, equipment failures, outbreaks, instructions that had been posted in laminate around the station. But past that were evacuation plans, half typed, half scribbled in pen, whole sections crossed out. Star charts, shipping manifestos, contextless lists of ships and crews. And again and again, scrawled at the top of the pages, Project Oasis. Real after all, coordinates circled in red on the last of the star charts.
He took it out of the binder and folded it up small, tucked it into his pocket. Then he settled back on his heels, looking over the stack of boxes. Even if he wanted to deliver them to their mysterious benefactor — which he was far from certain he did — it would take the full crew half a day at least to ferry them back to the Seabird. His communicator pinged frantically. He had the sudden thought that he was about to do something very unwise, and that he would do it knowing it was unwise.
He shut off his communicator, glanced down at the map once more. Gathered a haphazard armful of staff and leadership files and then, impulsively, combed through until he had the ones for the rest of the crew as well, barring Immanuel and Sacha, who were wildborn.
Instead of turning back towards the Seabird and the rest of the crew, who were almost certainly in trouble and who he would have to get out of trouble, he stood, picked his way past the boxes, and set off towards the centre of the tunnels. It was a short walk, but hard, already stiff limbs weighed down by the folders crammed into his bag and balanced in his arms. The tunnel dipped and the artificial gravity shifted dizzyingly with it. Then the space widened all at once, tile replaced with concrete or something like it, the walls arcing out, concave. A shuttle launch, tucked into the middle of the station. It looked to have been designed to hold four or five ships, but now there was only one, a short-distance sprinter called the Alouen.
Kit did not have the same talent for jailbreaking ships as Josephine, but sprinters never had as much security as freighters. Half an hour later, fingers scraped raw and dotted with electric burns, the door popped open. He ran through the checks, quick but thorough the way Josephine had taught them all; he’d be no good to the others if he blew up or suffocated in open space. She was an old ship, but the engine ran smooth and the life support readings were green on both the shipboard panels and his own sensors. He activated the pressure seals, hands clamped over his ears to block out the sound. Ran the checks again, and then a third time. Dialed in to the tunnel’s automated control system. This was the risky part: he knew shuttles but he did not know launch systems; either it still worked or it didn’t, he had no way to know until it either sent him out into open space or ramming head-first into a wall.
The pressurization door telescoped closed behind him. He shifted the shuttle into gear, wheels picking up speed and the outer airlock opened to meet him. He had come out the far end of the central column, at the opposite end of the station from the main docking bay where the scouter ships might already be converging on the Seabird, maybe on the rest of the crew. Course set, star chart displayed across the screen, the Alouen slipped past them all and into the stars.
Sometimes, when the crew was all bickering or just talking, endlessly, loudly; when they skived off restocking and planning the next job to run off the moment the ship docked, regardless of whether they had been granted shore leave or not, Kit was certain he’d be better off alone. He could talk to people if he really needed, but he wouldn’t need, because he could steal anything when he put this mind to it. Just him, alone and quiet, on his ship.
Instead of basking in the silence, Kit paced up and down, hands twitching against his sides, skin prickling with nerves, repeating the syllables of his false name over and over as New Aglia drifted closer on the radar. (On Sibalt, Immanuel had brought an instructional recording for him in one of the drop-offs. It must have been a guide for linguists or accent coaches, all about oral posture and tongue position. But it wasn’t that Kit couldn’t talk, ever, it was just that his thoughts would not make themselves into words the way they seemed to for everyone else, that even when he knew precisely what he wanted to say, the thoughts refused to turn themselves into words).
The radio crackled, voice coming through in a jumble of meaningless syllables. Kit opened his mouth. Made a formless squeaking sound. His hands clenched, convulsive, twitching at the wrist. Another burst of sound from the radio. He felt sick and shaky and detached at the same time, some small rational corner of his mind watching the rest shut down. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced in a deep breath. Tongue starts behind the teeth. Lips pursed. “Alouen,” he forced out. “Levin Morton, captain. Crew of one. On business.”
“... Send—” the voice on the radio said. That, at least, he could parse, and more importantly, he could do: the controller wanted him to send his documents through the interplanetary system. Hooking the ship in was a risk, but less of a risk than trying to talk his way onto New Aglia. A long pause. A pop-up on the view screen informed him he was number forty in the entrance line. He stood. Paced. Paced some more, for the next hour and a half. His fingernails carved red crescents in his palms. It might have been too long already; by the time he made it back to the Central Station it might be swarming with troopers, the crew already arrested and on their way somewhere he’d never find.
But Avram had decided they would see the job through, and if Kit had shown them the files, they would have delivered them, if not to the designated meeting place on New Aglia, then to the coordinates marked for Project Oasis on the star chart. The others may have forgotten what Project Lifebloom was like, but Kit would remember as long as he lived. They’d be separated the moment they touched down, sent for recalibration and kept apart until all memory and feeling for each other had been scrubbed away. He would not let that happen, even if it meant breaking them out of prison. And so when the approval came through, finally, he guided the Alouen down to New Aglia’s surface.
In the docking bay, he slipped his headphones around his neck, bulky black things that filtered out the worst of the noise but crushed his ears uncomfortably against the side of his head. Kit tucked the staff files into his bag, hesitated at the door to the ship. The rest sat in plain view where he’d left them on the counter in the galley. The Alouen’s windows were high, narrow slits that showed into the cockpit and nowhere else, but the impulse to hide swept over him all at once and he shoved them under the mattress of the lower bunk.
The docking bay was loud the way docking bays were always loud: the roar of engines so deep he could feel it vibrating through his body, the clang of metal on metal, the tinny announcements and the blare of pressurization alarms. He gritted his teeth and marched through, head ducked and hands held stubbornly still. No headphones in the docking bay, that was the rule everywhere. Avram said it was to make sure everyone could hear the announcements, and it didn’t matter Kit couldn’t hear them anyway; all breaking the rule would earn him was attention he couldn’t afford. The gate agent glanced at him, then at his papers, and waved him through.
Kit made his way, somehow. New Aglia was laid out on a grid designed to mimic a planet-side city. He should have been able to navigate it in his sleep, instead of wandering around in circles. But he couldn’t— like a skip in the radar, a blank spot where— and it was so loud, why was everything always so— he wanted to go home. He just wanted to go home.
“Kit.”
The last time he’d seen Estelle Dawson, it had been from the back of the auditorium on the Outer Station while she delivered a speech on stage, and he’d made no effort to parse sound into meaning. She’d been a compact figure in a dark suit who stood with her back very straight and gestured sharply as she spoke. Mostly he’d wanted her gone: Vani had been restless and generally unpleasant to live with in ways beyond how she was usually restless and unpleasant to live with, and for a month before the director’s visit he could not go anywhere without hearing about all the preparation that needed to be done. She looked the same now, in the middle of New Aglia Station. Not quite like Vani. Squarer in the face, thin where her daughter was wiry, hair a shade darker, cut short, slicked back. No tattoos or piercings, but eyes of the exact same shade of deep blue.
Kit realized he was frozen, pressed against the planter boxes as the crowd passed by. Her mouth moved but there weren’t even sound to parse now, just the rush of white noise in his ears. Last time he’d seen her he had been in uniform, a square-shouldered grey jacket with seams that itched but he’d kept wearing it for months after the Project collapsed because he’d never worn anything else. Had worn his hair buzzed short the way everyone at the Project wore their hair buzzed short. Now it had grown out shoulder-length and curly. He was wearing a shark-print button-down over his thermals. Violating at least six points of the dress code, in front of the director.
She took a step forward and he took a step back, jerky and reflexive. Then another, and another. Backed away slow, eyes fixed on hers. Let the crowd swallow him up, grateful for once to be surrounded by people. He ducked his head. Didn’t look back. When he had been walking for ten or fifteen minutes, he swung the bag off his shoulder and pulled out the folders. Set them on the edge of a planter box. Walked away.
A week ago today, for reasons unknown to me, I woke up in your body. Maybe by the time you read this (I’m choosing to believe you will, one day, read this) you’ll know the full story already and all I will have wasted is both of our time writing this, but seeing how I am not certain whether the memory loss is a feature of the switch— I am also choosing to believe, for lack of a better option, that you are in possession of my body— I will err on the side of the thorough.
I woke in your room (10’ x 10’ in size, mustard yellow walls (bare), stone floor, no windows, door across from the bed (narrow), desk on the right coming in from the doorway, folding chair) and knew right away I was not in my own body. This may seem odd, given that I did not then and do not now remember my life prior to this point, but given that you are (were, by the time you read this) presumably in the same or a similar situation, I trust I do not need to waste my time explaining this instinctive certainty.
There was a man sitting at your bedside (tall, pale, blond, nervous). I have since learned that his name is Vincent Esterhazy (henceforth VE), and he appears to be some sort of medic, though not a doctor so far as I can tell, or particularly skilled at his chosen profession. We are the only people here (stone compound, 500’ x 500’ in size, 8’ ceilings, same mustard yellow walls and stone floor, external surroundings unknown) but there are three others who are “on patrol.” VE explained that you had been sick with a high fever, fallen, and hit your head. Some confusion is normal. I did not tell him that I am in your body, or that I have lost my own memories. I made this decision based on instinct, which is, in the absence of memory, is all I have to go on. You are of course welcome to tell your colleagues whatever you wish when you are back in control of your own body. In the meantime, I will do my best to safeguard it for you.
