by Cally Black
‘When I lift my head, you’ll see the artery just above my jacket collar and below the bindings,’ she whistles. ‘Please do not miss. Make sure they can’t fix it.’
‘Tweetoo,’ I breathe and reach for her. To stop her. But I can’t.
She lies down in front of me and blinks slowly at me. She trusts me, only me, to save her at the end of everything.
I pat her chest and loosen her jacket. I wish I could say something. My throat has closed over. I rest my hand on her breastbone. Her heart thumps against my palm. ‘Bud-bud, bud-bud.’
‘Thank you, my sister,’ she whistles softly. ‘I am proud you are in my squad.’
I can only bob my head.
Tweetoo lifts her nose, exposes her throat. I grip the pliers with both hands, prongs closed, pointing down. With as much force as I can find, I stab them into a groove just above her jacket collar. She leaps on the bunk, but her head stays back, her mouth opens, and a whisper of breath escapes. I drag the pliers down in line with the artery, and pull them out.
Then panic. I can’t have done that! My head pounds. I stare at my hands. Ugly hands, not part of me. I’m sick.
I’ve hurt Tweetoo. Clammy sweat crawls down my face, my arms. When Tweetoo sliced the throat of the old woman captain, she took that life clean as.
Blood pulses. It blooms. I close my eyes. Her blood is warm on my face, my chest. From her heart to mine. Opening, closing. Beating together for the last time.
I fumble for Tweetoo’s claw in the warmth. It closes around mine, tight. Tight enough to hurt. Then the claws uncurl and the hand falls away.
Israel knocks me backwards. I hit the wall and slide to the floor. Eyes wide open. Red streaks follow me down. The doctor races to Tweetoo and packs her throat with wadding, pushing down. Tweetoo thrashes and belts her with her nose. The doctor staggers into Israel. The packing drops away.
Tweetoo’s head rolls towards me. Her green eyes stare, the pale streaks gone, her starlight leaving. The rust-flecked edges fade. She lies still.
The blood drips and pools on the floor as I sit against the wall holding the pliers. I’m numb. Frozen. A spectator in a cold metal box.
They yell. Both of them bent over me, yelling. I don’t know what. I can’t see them. Only the blood dripping, puddling, spreading on the grey floor. The big man knocks my hand, hard. The pliers go flying, clatter on the wall.
The smell of urine fills the cell. It runs off the bunk and slices through the blood on the floor, mingles and swirls with the red. Tears run down my face, hot tears on cold skin. I want to sit and watch the blood spread and run. I want to touch it and cry for everyone I’ve lost. Lazella, Teeka, Antonee, and now Tweetoo, but the big man hauls me up. I fight him off, then vomit down his trousers.
Tweetoo, my friend, so brave, so strong, is gone. I’m empty. Broken. Twisted and aching. This world has nothing for me. Nothing unless little Tamiki is still alive. My Gub.
‘Why?’ the doctor screams. ‘Why?’
Israel shakes me.
I drag my eyes off Tweetoo’s blood and look at the doctor. ‘She asked me to,’ I say.
Israel takes me back to the cell, shoves me in. I sit on the floor and stare at my hands. My palms sticky and thick with blood, blood under my nails. This is the last of Tweetoo. I won’t wash her away.
I rest my cheek on the cold floor and draw a sideways 8 in blood. Love never-ending.
Shit. What have I done?
COMPLETELY VULTURE
Israel shoves food in through a hatch. He won’t look at me. I don’t eat. I sleep. When I sleep, there’s no remembering, no cold cell.
But sleep don’t save me for long and soon I’m awake, sitting, arms wrapped round my knees in my blood-soaked, ripped jacket and cell blanket, shivering, trying to keep myself from being torn to pieces at what I did.
Israel comes back. He stands, hand on the door frame, head hanging. ‘What you did was all kinds of wrong,’ he says.
‘I know!’ I snap, cos what kinda choice did I have? Cry like a baby, walk away from Tweetoo when she needed me? She came back for me. She chose me over Tootoopne. But now she’s gone. My link to the Garuwa stops with her. Now I gotta be human again, to get to my Gub.
‘You landed me and the doctor in it, all right. Yoisho.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to, but she asked me,’ I say, and lower my feet to the floor. ‘She was my friend,’ I whisper.
Israel looks me up and down. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’
He leads me to a shower room, and once again I’m left scrubbing at blood, watching it swirl down a drain. Everything ends in blood. Blood and tears. I turn the water to cold, let it wash the redness from my eyes.
When I come out, my boots sit there, cleaned up, next to a pile of new clothes. They mostly fit when I pull them on, and they’re warmer than my Garuwa gear, and little Headless is still in the pocket of my boot, so that’s something.
‘Let’s go answer for our sins,’ Israel says and leads me out of security and down the stairs.
I hang back at the flight deck door, like my body remembers all the other flight deck doors, never mind my brain knows this time is different.
The doctor turns in her seat, a careful smile, when we come into the meeting room where she sits at a long table.
‘Tamara,’ she says softly. ‘How are you?’
I’m shit. I’m the shit shat by a shit drowning in an open sewer. ‘Okay,’ I mumble and look at the floor.
The cold-eyed man comes in, sneers at me, and sits next to the doctor.
A captain, shirt so white, jacket with not a wrinkle, shiny gold badges, comes in followed by another ship’s officer. They sit, then all eyes turn on me. I step back into Israel. He stands me up again, hangs onto my arm.
‘Let’s make this quick, shall we?’ the captain says, and checks his notes. He mumbles the names of everyone present in a rush, like he’s got better things to do than deal with the likes of me. The man with the eyes is Rochford. The captain is Atala. I miss the rest.
‘This Tamara Situ, occupation …’ He checks his notes. ‘Stowaway and thief, killed a Vulture in our cells. Jailor, how did that happen?’
Israel’s fingers get tighter on my arm. ‘The Vulture was wounded, sir. It wouldn’t let us treat it, thrashing about and such drama, bleeding to death. The moment this girl turned up, it went all calm, and they were whistling back and forth. We thought she could help us save it.’
‘Instead she stabbed it in the throat.’ Captain Atala checks his notes again and frowns. ‘Because it asked her to, and it was her friend.’
Tāmāde! Why didn’t I explain better?
The captain leans forward and looks down the table at the doctor.
‘I believe Tamara was compelled to do as she was ordered, and regrets her actions,’ the doctor says like maybe it’s not even my fault.
‘Major Rochford, impact to the war effort?’ the captain asks.
‘I believe this Vulture was high in ranking and could have led us to their fleet,’ says the man with the blue eyes.
‘The jailor says she spoke to the Vulture. Surely we could use someone like that?’ Captain Atala asks.
‘She’s turned completely Vulture, sir,’ Rochford says and stares at me, and I’m thinking maybe those eyes see something in me that even I don’t know is there.
‘I’m not!’ I say.
Israel shakes my arm, like I’m not allowed to speak for myself. And it sets me burning. ‘I’m human and I have a cousin who needs me, and you don’t know nothing about –’
The captain holds up his hand to stop me. ‘You will wait until I ask you to speak,’ he says. He gives a fake smile, his teeth whiter than his shirt, and waves at Rochford.
‘There’s a bit more to her story,’ Rochford says and sneers, his scarred skin wrinkling up one side of his face. He props up his screen on the table and an image appears on the wall at one end of the room.
Me, in my Garuwa gear, at a flight dec
k door.
THEY ALL KNOW
It’s a punch to my throat. I wanna scream, no, stop this! But I can only gag. These people can’t see this. They’ll hate me. They’ll lock me up forever.
Everyone at the table sees me call out the flight deck crew. Everyone sees them die. They see the captain lose his hand. It passes under my pointed helmet nose. Tweetoo slices the captain’s throat. Blood leaking from the slice. Sweat running down my back.
‘Our systems show this is Tamara Situ.’ The blue eyes turn on me, like they’re watching for me to say it’s not. Like they’re cutting into me, looking for what’s wrong with me.
‘Did you call them out to be killed?’ the captain asks and I choke.
‘I didn’t know,’ I croak, cos I didn’t, not that first time.
The screen flicks to a different flight deck. The footage shows me calling another captain out. I want to yell that the captain didn’t die, but he did. Not then, but Antonee died anyway. His beautiful hazel eyes, full of tears at the death of his pilot friend. The recording flicks again, showing me calling. Her, the old woman captain, swearing back at me.
They know. Now they all know. Numb right through my legs, pins and needles driving up my neck. The screen goes on showing scenes. Severed hands. Severed throats. Details I couldn’t look at then, now up in front of me. Too large. Too bright. Showing them what kind of killer I am.
‘I tried to change it,’ I mumble. I can’t look at anyone.
‘Tamara!’ the captain shouts and Israel hoists me up, stops me trying to melt into the floor. ‘Do you think what you did was wrong?’ the captain asks.
I lift my head then and look at him sitting there in his straight white jacket with the gold Starweaver logo on his chest, every hair on his head in its place, his large fleshy hand stretching at me like he can reach into me and pull the truth out. Like maybe everyone in the universe gets to choose between right and wrong. ‘Very wrong,’ I tell him.
The captain frowns. ‘Then why did you do it?’
‘I didn’t want to, but if I didn’t, I couldn’t be in the hive,’ I say, and there’s no way I can make him understand.
‘So you did it to survive?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘Yes, sir. But not for me. For Tamiki. For him. He needs me.’ And all I want is to hold him. To know he is safe. All I did, all of it, was for him.
The captain leans forwards. ‘But you said the Vultures were your friends.’
‘Some,’ I say.
‘How can they be your friends and yet you were afraid they would kill you?’ he asks.
I stop a minute. ‘If I did my job, I could be in their squad.’
The captain glances at the doctor, who nods. ‘Given the circumstances, that would be a reasonable assumption for a young person in a captive situation,’ she explains.
‘She’s been brainwashed. She’ll always be a Vulture,’ Rochford says.
‘No!’ I yell. ‘I’m human. I came back to find my cousin and live with humans. You have to help me!’ And it’s stupid to plead, cos nobody ever helped me and Lazella before, but I can’t find Gub on my own.
The captain holds up his hands like maybe I’m losing it. ‘We want to help you. We want you to help us.’ His voice is too calm, too fake, but it’s all I have.
‘Anything. Just get me to Tamiki!’ I say.
‘Well, Tamara, we have located your cousin alive and well on Dios …’ the captain says, and I can’t hardly see for tears.
I did it! I kept him safe! Everything was worth it. Everything.
‘… then we can know for sure,’ the captain says.
‘No!’ the doctor shouts.
‘What?’ I say.
Captain Atala takes a breath, like maybe I’m pushing his patience. ‘If you agree to some testing, given that we are unfamiliar with what has happened to you in the last six months, then we can put Tamiki on a ship here, right now.’
‘Yes!’ I say. ‘Put him on a ship to me, right now. Anything.’ Cos haven’t I already done the worst things?
‘Tamara, they are talking about interrogation techniques!’ the doctor says, her face pale.
‘Get Tamiki here, and I don’t care what happens to me,’ I say.
‘Well, I object,’ the doctor says. ‘This child has been through a traumatic –’
The captain slaps down his screen and stands up. ‘All yours, Major. Report back to me.’
A sick sneer crawls across the bubbled skin of Major Rochford’s face as the captain leaves the room with his officer.
He’s leaving me with Rochford?
The major strides towards me and my feet step back into Israel again. Rochford walks around me, looking me up and down. He stops, pinches my chin and tilts my head up to look him in those pale blue eyes. Those cold glass arse-shit eyes.
‘In any interrogation there are two types of answers,’ he says, real quiet. ‘I find answers given to make pain stop have more details than those offered freely.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you everything! I’ll translate for you, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. What I did was to get back to my baby cousin. That’s all. If you help me with that, I’ll tell you anything.’
‘Get started then,’ Rochford says, like maybe he don’t believe me. ‘Tell me about where you came from.’
DIE EASY, DIE HARD
Rochford backs off to sit on the table, and I tell him my whole story right from the start. Born to two medics. The old humidicrib I slept in to muffle my cries. My parents dead in a disease outbreak, me too young to know. Me, with just my aunt, the chef with the beautiful dark eyes. How I learned to be silent, hiding on freighter after freighter going deeper into dark space, wherever the next stinking cold freighter was heading. Gub’s birth. Our little star. Our stall on Dios. How I failed. How we never stood a chance cos our muscles were weak after years on Level Four. Am I crying? How I was caught, a stowaway. How little Gub missed me, then didn’t trust me so much. Monkey-miki, that day my aunt became just a pale mask on the floor. Hiding Gub in the storeroom. Leading the Garuwa away. Saluting until Tootoopne let me live. But I couldn’t get back to Gub. The living hive. Tweetoo, Wooloo and the squad. The cabinet of hands.
‘What?’ Rochford yells.
‘Tootoopne,’ I say. ‘Every ship she takes, she puts the captain’s hand on her shelf to show she has honoured the hive.’
I tell him how Antonee was alive for so long before Tootoopne killed him and added his hand to her collection. And the compass, the compass shows him the way home to his family but he don’t have it now. He’ll never find them! I’m bawling. Sucking at air. And Tamiki alone all this time!
Israel gets me a chair.
‘Tell me more about the hive,’ Rochford says. He grabs a box of tissues off the doctor like she’s annoying him by worrying about me. Then shoves them at me like I’m annoying him by crying.
My feeling sad for what I’ve lost turns to burning at this man with the cold eyes and cold heart. But I need him to get Gub to me, so I say about entering the hive, the hazy gate, about public areas and the squad rooms. I guess the size of the hive and how many Garuwa live there. Tell him there are other hives that Tootoopne’s hive protects. That they’re just miners. Just collecting minerals. Minerals that humans steal.
‘What about their military? What about the generals?’
‘There are no generals, unless Tootoopne’s a general. They have squads. Lots of squads on Tootoopne’s hive, and lots of flyers.’
‘How many flyers?’
‘Four hundred, maybe even five hundred on Tootoopne’s hive. And there’s elders. Grouchy elders who don’t like humans at all. Everyone does what the elders tell them, except maybe Tootoopne.’
‘Is that the one who organises the raids?’
I nod. ‘Tootoopne. She’s the smartest person I ever met,’ I say.
‘It’s not a person. It’s a beast. A Vulture,’ he says.
‘Tsa!’ I say. ‘If you think that, you w
on’t get nowhere. She’s smarter than us all.’
‘Sounds like you’re a Vulture-lover,’ he says.
‘Not Tootoopne,’ I say. ‘She pretends to have a heart but then she just kills everyone anyway.’
‘So how do we take down this murderer?’
I shake my head. ‘You can’t. You have to leave them alone. If you take their minerals or hurt their hives, they’ll kill you.’
‘Is that what they told you to say?’
‘They didn’t tell me to say nothing. They didn’t know I was gonna sneak off.’
‘That’s your story. You certainly didn’t mind helping them before.’
I stand up, right into him leaning over me, so he has to step back. ‘I did mind! I minded so much I was sick every time. I tried to make her stop the killing. She was gonna do it anyway. You saw her blasting that flight deck when they wouldn’t come out!’
‘What I saw was you trying to trick them into coming out to die!’ he yells.
‘Die easy, die hard, they were always gonna die! Nothing I could do about it but die alongside them, and then who would look out for Tamiki the rest of his life?’ I’m shouting now, my voice ringing through the room.
‘Hey, hey!’ the doctor calls, getting herself between me and that arse Rochford. ‘You’re both going to have to calm down.’ ‘And you’re gonna have to sit down,’ Rochford says, real slow, showing that he’s the one in charge. ‘I’m not done.’
‘Well, perhaps you could be less accusatory and ask more direct questions,’ the doctor says firmly, waving for me to sit back down as she drops back towards her seat. But I don’t. Always people bigger than me demanding answers. I’m getting real tired of it. I stand tall against the heavy gravity, against the heavy stare of this arse-shit man.
‘All right,’ Rochford says, taking a step back. Taking his negging down a tone. ‘Where is the hive you came from?’
‘I don’t know. The Garuwa saw you circling, searching, so maybe you’re close. Can’t you make a deal with them, instead of shooting at them all the time?’ I ask.