by Jody Wallace
“No, no,” he said hastily—the closest he’d ever come to any admission of wrongdoing. “My people. Kala heads that branch. We’re not working with contractors anymore. It’s better now.”
She hoped that was true for the sake of his crew. “If I accept your offer, it doesn’t mean everything is okay between us,” she said tiredly. “And Bristler Union may want a cut of the deal.” Unions had benefits—and restrictions.
“No, they won’t.” He reached for her hand. “I can spend my money however I want for my family. Relatives and bequests, that sort of thing, void the necessity of a contract.”
The skin on his palm was tough, tougher than her calluses, and his fingers were as crooked as she remembered. As crooked as her parents’ fingers had been. As crooked as hers would have been if she’d stayed in hazmat. Javier couldn’t fix everything.
“Your folks wanted you to have the business when you were ready,” he said in a low voice. “You know that. It’s your inheritance.”
“I don’t want the business. I don’t want hazmat. I like my box factory, Hoff.” That was another thing he would never understand.
“You’ve made that clear,” he said in a voice as tired as she was. “But the family link will bypass the union restrictions.”
“I’ll think about it.” She rose. It would be so easy to accept his money. But that would be accepting, forgiving, what he’d done. Letting him back into her life, when she’d finally broken out of the life she didn’t want. “Thank you for helping Wil.”
“You’re fond of him,” Hoff observed. “He’s a good man.”
While she agreed, she’d had several days to figure that out. “You don’t even know him. You’ve only seen him dance.”
“That tells me nearly everything,” Hoff said, rising to stand beside her. He didn’t reach out as she feared he might, to hug her. Though there was nothing in the galaxy like one of Hoff’s three-armed hugs, she wasn’t ready for that. “Tells me all the rest I need to know when I see how he looks at you.”
“As the person who saved his life.” The kiss today had been a spur of the moment decision brought on by a rush of relief so big she’d had to express it physically. Wil’s response didn’t mean he was in love with her.
“As the person for whom he wants to change his life,” Hoff corrected. “I know these things.”
“You’re a matchmaker now?” They exited the cafeteria and headed to the barracks wing, Hoff slowing his giant steps to match hers. Like he’d always done. The clang of his boots reverberated down the empty hall.
He chuckled. “How do you think you came to be? I convinced your mother and father to…you know. Give it a whirl.”
“That old story.” It felt far too normal to be talking to Hoff like this.
“Old stories are the best ones.” Much of the barracks was below ground, safe from hailers and union attacks. And chem fires. “I’ll put my staff on half-days for the next few so they have time to learn from Wil.”
“You can afford the slowdown in production?” Hoff’s drive to raise the output of the reclamation factories had meant long hours when she’d been here—and shortcuts.
They reached Nan’s chamber doors and Hoff cleared his throat. “I’ve learned that some things are more important than money.” She cut him a look. “All right, I had better storage tanks constructed for the hazmat as well as a compression method that one of my new people came up with. You would not believe her grasp of fluid science, she—”
Su held up a hand. “I believe it, okay? But I’m exhausted. All of my crew is alive, but we have one day, according to Casada, to hand Wil over. I need to be sharp.”
Hoff gripped his left shoulder. “There will absolutely be a hailer. I can feel it in my joints. His one day deadline isn’t going to matter. You won’t be able to take Wil to him and he won’t be able to attack any factories, yours or mine.”
“Could if he had monster tanks,” Su said. Would Bart be able to find out about that or was that asking too much of an off-worlder?
“Nobody in Tank Union is going to contract with some Gizem whizz to provide monster tanks,” Hoff said. Trash Planet had various ways to overcome the realities of killer hailstorms, and one was the massive ground crawlers that could withstand, even plow through, any amount of ice. As for lightning strikes, their shielding absorbed it to use as fuel. Tank Union built and helmed most of the crawlers and cleared the majority of their income during the dark season when people would get trapped by weather and hail and need supplies—or a rescue.
The rest of the time they hired out as contractors. Poorly.
“I don’t know about that. They’re some pretty lousy mouth breathers for people who are supposed to be lifeguards.” They hadn’t come through during the sixteen-day hailer; they certainly hadn’t come through when Hoff had engaged them to repair Factory D. And those were only two of their crap-ups.
“I mean, we don’t hire them any more,” Hoff began.
The door opened behind Su before Hoff could continue. Wil, hair ruffled, stood there with Pumpkin in his arms.
“The cat!” Hoff exclaimed. “I guess you found him.”
Su waited to see if Pumpkin himself would answer, but he didn’t. “Yes, this is Pumpkin. The object of Casada’s obsession.”
“Of course he is,” Hoff crooned. “Who’s a pretty boy? The last time I saw a kitty was on a pick-up run to the E.C. Should I have the staff fetch him some dinner?”
“Nan already took care of it,” Wil said. Pumpkin slow-blinked Hoff. Was Hoff not clean? Wouldn’t surprise Su, though she had no idea why she was. Maybe because she would never hire the Tank Union to make repairs on her fucking factory.
“Do you have everything else you need?” Hoff asked hopefully. “If you’re deciding on a dance to teach tomorrow, I could give you some pointers about my staff’s training and capabilities. And, ah, some accommodations that might need to be made.” He rolled his left shoulder, the one with two arms.
“We’re fine. I’ll see you in the morning,” she told her uncle, slipping into the room with Wil. The antechamber was Nan’s living area with two bedrooms and a private bath, a luxury not afforded to most residents. Her grandmother was nowhere to be seen. “Wil and I will discuss possible places you could take him, if you wanted to come up with a similar list? Tomorrow we’ll cross-reference them.”
“Right,” Hoff said. “I’ll get on that.” He didn’t spot her managing him anymore than he used to, giving him something to do when she was too tired to yak it up all night. But the man never slept, and Su made it a point not to stint herself on bedrest when she could help it.
At last she and Wil—and Pumpkin—were alone and could discuss the events of the day. “Is it safe to talk?” she asked in a low voice.
“I’m going to sleep with Nan,” Pumpkin announced, hopping down from Wil’s arms. He trotted to the closed bedchamber door, peered over his shoulder at Wil and Su, and skipped out with that tiny snap of blue light.
“I guess he’s just going to do that all the time now,” Su said. “Is he mad at me?” She’d assumed the cat would update her on his heroics in locating her crew members at the very least.
“I think he’s worn out. It’s a giveaway when he wants to be held. He actually sleeps a lot.” Wil stared at her with a kind of intensity that made Su uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable in the “my hair somehow got stuck in door” way, but the other way. “There’s only one bed in the guest bedroom. Am I in the bed with you or am I on the couch?”
Wil couldn’t have been more direct in what he was asking, and her mouth dried up like a tardipede’s outgrown husk.
“I know we agreed it was too complicated,” he said, filling the silence. “I know I’m leaving soon. I know you’re under a lot of stress, coming back here. But I know what I want, Su.”
“Do you?” she managed, at a loss for words. She had never been afraid of change, but she was afraid of what would change in her heart if she accepted his proposal.
He approached her quietly, not stalking her like some predator with prey, and simply held out his hand. “May I have this dance?”
Su exhaled and placed her hand in his. If her heart wound up broken, well, she could save up for some nanobots to fix it. “You may.”
Wil placed a kiss on her palm and led her into the guest bedroom. With unhurried movements, he stripped her out of her coveralls and lifted her soft grey undershirt over her head. She had him out of his shirt before he managed her brassiere, and his hands on her breasts filled her with an ache that rivaled the bruised muscles in her backside from the percussion blast this morning.
Wil slid off his pants, never taking his eyes off her, and then cupped her face in his hands.
His kiss melted the rest of their clothes to the floor, and in moments, it seemed, they were on the bed, limbs tangling, hands searching, lips finding. With reverence he caressed the scars around her leg implant, kissing his way back up to her core. When he settled in there, teaching her a new dance of his own, Su lost all sense of time and space and simply followed his lead until they both reached the ultimate conclusion. Twice.
This could never be a mistake.
This was definitely a mistake.
Su fumbled the pivot that was supposed to come after the toe touch in the folk dance Wil was teaching the hazmat crew members. She ended up facing the wrong neighbor, bumping into the woman behind her, and nearly whacking someone in the knee with her robot leg.
There was no medic on duty for dance injuries.
Wil had sweet-talked Su into taking his dance class. All right, he’d asked, and after last night, telling him ‘no’ was not on her agenda. The cafeteria, which had the best sound system and flooring, had been cleared to allow enough space. The dance should be simple—it looked simple when Wil and Ianthe Hender, Hoff’s new comms expert, demonstrated it—but when she tried to tell her own feet to slide, and glide, and hop, they wanted to kick, and tromp, and stumble.
It was true that Hoff and her father had been devotees of dance. She remembered viewing the feed of competitions and performances, seeing if she could spot Nanny. She remembered Hoff and others taking trips to shows, jetting off on Q-ships for exotic locations. She remembered staff dances during the dark seasons, when work was slower and moods were dreary.
She remembered that this was part of Hoff’s life without having connected that it might soften him toward Wil, even if she didn’t apologize for ditching him and the family business.
She was that detached from her uncle, her bio family. Even Nan, who loved her but hadn’t been around much. It was so peculiar to be back, jolting around like a bristler missing a leg. Her uncle was basically going to save Wil’s life, hide Pumpkin’s sentience from the masses—though he didn’t realize that part—and ease the strain on her factory and finances because she was family. What would she be called to do in return? Was letting Hoff back into her life a mistake?
Most of the excited pupils were mastering the forms and attempting the more challenging modifications Wil was demonstrating. He’d insisted on bare feet for the lesson, for those who didn’t have specialized dance shoes. His lean body, clad in a fitted black shirt and pants, turned every gesture into a thing of beauty and song.
His hands just so. His thighs just so. His sidelong glances just so. He’d been training since childhood, and his talent blazed out of him like a comet. While she’d seen him naked a number of times now, his body in dancewear, in motion, exceeded all expectations.
She could hear music when she watched him, could probably watch him all day in a sort of dumbfounded haze of admiration and lust, but the only music her body made was the clanking and groaning of a jury-rigged machine that needed to be oiled.
“Su, dearest, why don’t you switch to the end where you can…put your own spin on the steps?” Nan suggested. She was functioning as Wil’s teaching assistant, cane and all.
“Why don’t I sit this one out before I hurt someone?” she said wryly. Yesterday she’d shot at Tomen flyers and dug through rubble and run around dodging EE-blasts for hours and not wondered one second about whether she could keep up. Yet attempting to tame her movements into a graceful step-back-step-back hop had beaded her brow with sweat and poked fire into the bruises all over her butt and legs.
“You’re doing fine for someone with no tutoring.” Nan patted her arm—but she did escort Su toward a bench at the side of the cafeteria. Su’s metal foot clanked on the floor like one of Uncle Hoff’s favorite boots. “Many of us, well, we train. I’ve tried to teach anyone interested. That’s why they realize how very talented your Wil is. Oh, it is a pleasure to see that man move. I wish he had been on the scene in my day.” She gave a heartfelt sigh, her hand to her chest.
“He’s not my Wil,” Su said, watching him gently correct the curve of a student’s arm. Hoff demonstrated helpfully with all of his arms, getting the sweep just right three times. Su couldn’t master it once.
Nan arched an eyebrow.
“He’s not permanently my Wil,” Su amended with a bit of a grin. She crossed her foot over her metal knee and dug her thumbs into her sore arch and heel. “Going barefoot is for the rats.” A surprising number of hazmat crew members who’d arrived for the class boasted soft black dance shoes that provided support to their arches.
“You cannot learn to dance if your feet can’t sense the ground,” Nan said.
“I only have one foot, and it says I’m being dumb.”
“You could have borrowed my shoes,” Nan reminded her, but Su hadn’t thought she needed them. “Natural dance isn’t easy. I don’t dislike the low-gravity styles, like the Orbital Flow, but there’s nothing like stretching the abilities of your own muscles and tendons to the fullest.”
“There is something like it,” Su said. “Torture, for example.”
And she’d thought the warm-up had been rough. All she’d had to do was follow along and curse—silently at first—when her body told her to fuck off with that nonsense. Then the dance instruction had started, and she’d had to memorize the steps, as well as the step after and the step after and which way to swivel at the end.
It was more her brain than her brawn that was the issue. She wasn’t the only student with an artificial limb, and Hoff wasn’t the only student with a mutation. Wil included everyone’s differences into his adaptations. Now that she was off the floor, the thirty or so pupils swayed in unison, side-side, ball-change, turning exactly the right amount when the dance called for them to pivot. Their arms at the precise angle desired. Their chins up, their weight in the balls of their feet, their spines as straight as their bodies allowed. The synchronization was a pleasure, and when Wil started them from the top again, she managed to lose herself in enjoyment.
It was clear this was Wil’s job, his life, his reason for being. That he was giving this up because of Pumpkin, because of Casada’s greed, was criminal. To see him dance now, electric and vital, she couldn’t believe that she’d never noticed him when she’d been in hazmat watching the holos with everyone else.
But they did say there was nothing like seeing a show live.
Unfortunately, now that she was no longer preoccupied with how to glide on a robot leg without plowing into her neighbor, unease twanged her nerves. The predicted hailer had begun two hours ago, and they’d received no communications from her factory that indicated Casada was making a nuisance of himself. No communications from Bart in Bunk Port, either, who would also be trapped dirtside by the hail. Could be that Casada was jamming again, but Hoff’s light-footed comms expert Ianthe said it was probably the weather.
Yet despite the lull, she couldn’t relax. Whiling away the time with a dance lesson felt wrong, even though it was bringing joy to many.
She’d rather stuff Wil and Pumpkin into a stellarship and take off the moment the hailer was over. Take off—or send them away. Her place was on Trash Planet, at her box factory, and a man like Wil could never be satisfied with this existence.
> But what would his new life bring? The most important thing was his safety, and he couldn’t have that on Trash Planet as long as Casada was breathing.
Too bad Wil was against murder, but she did recognize the impracticality of killing Casada plus unknown numbers of minions. The only bonus to Casada’s obsession was that he wouldn’t have told his boss, Zev, about Pumpkin. Jealousy and lust for power would have restricted that information to people who couldn’t stop him.
If all the people who knew were on a single ship, would she shoot it down? What if some of them were innocents just doing their job for their boss who wanted his alleged cat back? While she’d seen Pumpkin this morning, as he glared at her from Nan’s couch, she hadn’t had a chance to ask him what his plan was for keeping the mere fact of his existence under wraps forever.
She had a list of questions for the cat even longer than her list of things she wanted to do with Wil in the bedroom.
The students broke for water, and Wil joined Su and Nan on the bench. “You have trained many of them quite well,” he told Nan. “I wouldn’t call this a beginner class at all.”
“Except me,” Su said. Tama and Scrapper were positioned somewhere on the other side of the room, the unlikely duo, but they were much further along than she was.
“She never did pick it up when she was younger,” Nan told him in a fake-whisper.
“What you lack in rhythm you make up for in glowers and absence of enthusiasm,” he said with a grin.
His smile softened the edge of the truthful but not particularly flattering comment. “I’m not a dancer. Can’t sing, either, and my art skills are limited to helping the kids throw paint against the walls.”
His shoulder bumped hers. “I wouldn’t change anything about you.”
“Not even my fleet?” She arched her eyebrow. “If you have the power to change something, I’d like for you to gift me with a Q-ship of my own.”
“But then I would have never had the opportunity to meet your grandmother and teach a new generation of students the odri bailarma,” he said logically. “It’s a dance recreated from holos from one of the oldest gen ship databases. The Kestral.”