Hullmetal Girls

by Emily Skrutskie

  Our exos tug us to the third floor, where Praava waits. The doors on the airlock haven’t been opened yet, and even though she knows she’s on thin ice, she demands to know why.

  Because we’re here to arrest the occupants, Marshal Jesuit replies.

  Praava recoils, and for a moment we’re terrified she’ll grab us again and pile us onto the marshal to defend her sister. “What’s she done?” she asks out loud, pouring her anger into her voice instead.

  “It’s for her protection,” the marshal says levelly. “The protests were focused around this research team. We’re still working to unravel the motivations behind the Fractionist gathering, but it’s important that we make sure its target is contained.”

  “Contained and arrested are two very different words,” Wooj notes. He would know.

  “I’m giving you four a chance to act of your own free will, but do not hesitate to think that I will force you if it comes to that,” Marshal Jesuit snarls through her teeth. For once, do something the right way the first time, she presses after a moment, anger turning to exasperation. You’re low enough on the board as it is. She flicks a command through the exosystem, and the airlock doors hiss open a moment later.

  Praava takes point with the four of us behind her as ten humans step out into the corridor’s harsh lights. Ratna is immediately recognizable among them—though she’s half Praava’s height, they have the same rich brown skin, the same sculpted cheekbones. She shies away at the sight of the Scela waiting for them.

  “Ratna, it’s me,” Praava says when her sister draws near. Her voice is soft, projecting just past the breach suit.

  Ratna squints. My exo pulls me back from reading into the subtleties of her expression—too human, too nuanced, not for Scela eyes. But I do it anyway, because I need to know. I need to see anything but the terror my own sister felt when she saw me as Scela for the first time. That fear she had in her eyes, the way she flinched—it eats at me. And I still haven’t seen my brother.

  It takes extra processing, extra wrestling with the thing on my spine, but it’s worth it for the moment when the realization breaks over Ratna and her teeth bare in a human smile. “I can’t believe they made you even taller,” she says, then lunges forward and wraps her arms around her sister.

  Something deep and horrible shreds in me, my ugly jealousy flaring out through the exosystem before I can rein it in.

  Ratna’s hug brings confusion sputtering out of Praava—she doesn’t know how to react. Her old human instincts urge her to hug back as tightly as she can, but her exo reminds her what a bad idea that is. So she dips her head, tucks her chin, and lets it rest on top of Ratna’s head. A compromise, but it’s enough. For a moment, the corridor crystalizes in the moment of love between the two sisters. Inside and outside the exosystem, we feel it. Wooj grins Scela-wide. Key shifts uncomfortably as her walls slip a bit, just enough that we feel the emptiness inside her aching in a way she can’t explain.

  Ratna’s response has mellowed out the other researchers. They don’t expect it when Marshal Jesuit straightens and says, “Enough.” Ratna jumps back, Praava’s guilt swells, and the rest of the humans snap to attention. “What happened here today is proof that the General Body needs to play a more active role in the work you do.”

  Her voice is strangled, stilted. The humans can’t pick up the subtleties, but we Scela know—her words are being fed to her.

  “Your research into the wasting fever and its origins can’t be properly conducted where there is public access to both you and the materials you work with. If the Fractionist demonstrators had succeeded in what they aimed to do here today—” She falters, resisting. Whatever she’s being fed now, it isn’t ringing true for her. The marshal doesn’t want to say it, but it isn’t the kind of order she can disobey for long.

  When her voice comes back, it’s even more robotic than before. “They would have destroyed everything you worked for and twisted it to suit their own purposes. They would use your research to spread lies and fragment the Fleet. And they very nearly succeeded in killing a good portion of the people on this ship to cover their tracks. This squad of Scela has been deployed to escort the ten of you to a private transport, which will take you to the starship Lancelot. It will serve as a temporary holding facility until we can be sure your work is secured.”

  Everyone can read the truth underneath her words. The starship Lancelot, First District, is a prison ship. A holding pen for people the General Body sees as instigators. The conditions there aren’t as bad as those tanks on the Endymion, the ones Wooj feared enough that he’d risked a Scela integration instead, but no one has ever come back from the Lancelot. And from the looks on their faces, none of the humans in this narrow, bright corridor believe that they’ll be the lucky first.

  Praava’s rage erupts suddenly, a thousand times stronger than her fear, and she rounds on the marshal. A buzz hums against our necks, pulling us into Praava’s wake as her fists come up. Ratna’s supposed to save the Fleet. Ratna’s research is the entire reason Praava gave her body away in the first place. What’s left for her if—

  “Ganes,” Marshal Jesuit says, her voice dropping to a dangerous, cool murmur. And before Praava can process the marshal’s calm, our supervisor is in her, locking her limbs in place and then forcing her arms down at her sides. The rest of us snap free from Praava’s control and stagger back, watching in horror as the marshal’s mind strips Praava down to nothing. I’ve never had to do this before—please don’t make me do it again. There’s nothing we can do but obey right now, the marshal impresses on her. Stand down or remove yourself. There is no resisting this order.

  Praava gives a mute nod, and Marshal Jesuit releases her. She doesn’t know how to put it into words, to beg for forgiveness in a way that both her pride and the exo will allow. Instead, she turns to her sister and blurts, “What the hell were you doing?”

  We all share the sentiment. Plague research doesn’t exactly strike us as the sort of thing that would inspire Fractionists to assemble en masse to get their hands on. It isn’t the kind of information Yasmin is after either—that’s for certain.

  A researcher opens his mouth, but one of his colleagues tugs on his shirt and he swallows back whatever he was about to say. They glance mistrustfully between us, and I wish I could read their thoughts as easily as those of the Scela around me. Something isn’t right. Something doesn’t add up. But no one’s saying anything. All we can read from them is fear and resignation. Up against our power, against the will of the General Body—there’s no resisting.

  Our exos instruct us to restrain the researchers in case any of them try to bolt. Ten of them and five of us means a fragile human wrist in each Scela hand. The humans don’t seem too happy about it, and there’s a small scuffle about who gets to put their left hand in our grips and who has to offer up their right. Ratna’s the only one who doesn’t complain, offering her right hand to her sister without hesitation.

  A sickening taste sours the back of my throat when we step out the doors of the research center. These people could be helping Amar with their work, and instead we’re dragging them away from where they’re needed most. And I’m not even sure why.

  As we march them up to the intership deck and load them into the shuttle where we’re instructed to deposit them, I keep trying to wrap my head around what transpired today. Yesterday, the Fractionist conflict seemed distant—a minor scuffle, a simple assignment, one we barely had to touch. Before, it was just the trigger for the opportunity to give up my body and save Amar. Now I see it everywhere, the way it weaves into everything that’s happened to me. Somehow the life of the rebel movement is tied to the life of my little brother, to the well-being of my little sister, and to everything I sacrificed myself for.

  But my own life is bound to the General Body. They determine how much I’ll earn and how much I’ll be able to provide for my family.
I need to show them I’m loyal to them too. The exo on my back is at its wits’ end trying to keep my warring allegiances secret.

  Praava bends over Ratna to strap her in, and all of us feel the sudden rush of proximity as her sister leans up to whisper in her ear. All of us hear the words Ratna hisses, barely audible over the stomp of feet and click of harnesses snapping into place.

  “The General Body is lying.”

  A chill rushes over me. If that’s true, maybe Yasmin and her movement are on to something. What if the venting of the Aeschylus was a necessary measure for the Fractionists? Can the deaths today be justified if it moves us toward bucking the General Body’s control over the Fleet?

  My thoughts are clouded, and when we strap in after the prisoners, I slap my hand back against the hullmetal and pray. This time, it’s not because of the shuttle. This time, I pray for answers.

  And I pray I find them fast.

  The starship Lancelot scares the shit out of me. Not because of the long, dark corridors, the sterile cells, or the empty-eyed people sitting in them. No, there’s something about the ship that makes the gaping holes in me feel even bigger. And I can’t look away.

  We pass rows of cells that are unlike anything I’ve seen on a cast. The jail tanks on the prison ships the Fleet launched with are just barely large enough for a human being to tolerate without feeling like they’re wearing it. Just enough room for movement, not enough room for living. Rumor has it that a sentence in one of the jail tanks on the starship Endymion feels twice as long as it actually is.

  But here on the Lancelot, the rooms are…well, room-sized. Probably because the ship wasn’t built as a prison transport—the need for something like it wasn’t anticipated. The quarters are residential, and the only modifications are the locks on the doors and the transparent walls that make up the corridors.

  Some of the prisoners approach the clear plastic, their dull eyes brightening with curiosity. I’m grateful for my breach suit’s helmet protecting me from their hungry stares. My exo agrees. It doesn’t want anyone here to see my face. To them, I’m just another machine, a weapon in the General Body’s hands. They have no connection to me, and they shouldn’t be allowed to make one.

  But then there’s a face I can’t ignore. A face that stares at me through ragged golden hair with his gaze no longer trapped behind a camera lens in my mind. With my headpiece on, I know I’m just another Scela. But I see his face, and my whole world is blown sideways.

  The boy from my dreams isn’t a figment of my imagination.

  He’s real, and he’s sitting in a prison cell aboard the starship Lancelot.

  My exo clamps down, urging me to keep walking without breaking stride, even though everything in me wants to run to him, smash the plastic of his cell, and shake him by the collar until he explains exactly how he got in my head. I need answers. No more flickers of some life I used to live. No more camera eyes watching in my dreams. For the first time, I have a concrete link to the things I’m missing.

  And yet it feels like my mind rebels against the very notion. The holes in my brain are swallowing me. The machine on my back shutters my thoughts from the others, but it can’t stop my stomach from churning. The back of my mouth goes sick with bile.

  But I keep marching until we’ve herded the scientists down to their holding cell in the ship’s bowels. The light down here is dim, the corridor so similar to the narrow space where we boarded the Aeschylus, but my exo gives my brain a little shove before my thoughts latch on to what happened aboard the ship.

  I want my breach suit off. I want to breathe again, to convince myself that I won’t be trapped in this skintight prison forever. But beneath the layers of sealed fabric is another prison—the structure of the exorig woven into my body. I can feel the creak of my bones in the metal that cages them. It makes them stronger, the exo insists, but it’s a cage of its own and it knows it.

  The boy in my dreams is on this ship. He’s not in any of the memories I have left, but he’s here. That has to mean something. The muscles of my shoulders stretch taut as I try to probe my empty spaces for an explanation.

  Tanaka? Marshal Jesuit asks from the head of the squad. She lets her concern nudge into me, reminding me how little I’ve been paying attention. We’re at the holding cell. No problems from the scientists. Our work here is done.

  It’s nothing, I tell her. I pull my thoughts back, push my holes forward, and try not to let it disturb me how much that puts her at ease.

  A week after the Aeschylus vent, I find myself in the Dread’s Master Control Room, facing down either the smartest, most fearless human I’ve ever met or an utter madman.

  “Lopez,” he says, by way of introduction. If he has any other names, he doesn’t seem to think I’ll need them. Most people try to keep Scela in their lines of sight, but Lopez immediately turns his back on me, drops into his chair, and starts jabbing at his keyboard. I might as well be a piece of furniture.

  “Aisha Un-Haad.”

  “I know.” He doesn’t turn around, and the exo urges on the prickling sense of indignation crawling up my spine. Humans ought to respect us, it croons. Humans who don’t respect us are trouble.

  That’s the point, I retort. Because apparently Lopez is the be-all-end-all of the Dread’s fledgling Fractionist cell. From this tiny room, he monitors the entire ship and controls a good part of it. When a secure door needs opening, one call to Lopez gets you through. When someone needs a camera to go down and needs it to look like an accident, Lopez is your man. And when someone needs to isolate a Scela who’s made a bargain with her duplicitous aunt and direct her up to the security center without anyone else the wiser, well, that’s how I ended up here.

  For something as grandly named as the Master Control Room, it isn’t much to look at. Most of the room is dominated by the instrumentation panel and the bank of screens suspended over it. A few printed photos are taped to the machines—landscapes of Old Earth and discovered worlds. I’m guessing Lopez doesn’t get much scenery outside of them.

  My head’s mercifully lonesome—it’s another rest day, and the marshal dissolved the exosystem this morning before leaving to deliver her second report to the General Body. In the past week of grueling training, we’ve been making up for our failures on the Aeschylus. I doubt this morning’s report is getting us any farther leftward on the board than we were before our last field test, but at least it has the marshal safely shipped off to the Pantheon, making it almost too easy for Lopez to direct me up here without incident.

  “If the Dread is a body, I am its exo,” Lopez drawls, flicking through a camera feed so rapidly that even the machine on my back can’t keep up. “Anything happens on this ship, I see it. Anything happens on this ship that someone else shouldn’t see, I sweep it away.”

  “That’s not really how the exo—”

  “Hush. That’s not the information I’m supposed to be getting out of you. Though Yasmin was unclear on how exactly the Fractionist movement is supposed to benefit from your little arrangement.”

  “You talked to Yasmin?” Excitement flushes through me. At last—I’ve found someone who dances circles around the Dread’s communications lockdown. “Could I send a message to my sis—”

  Lopez spins in his chair and fixes me with a glare fierce enough to freeze an elite Scela in their tracks. “I will humor you, because you’re new at this. This is a communications network people have devoted their entire lives to building. I put my hide at risk every day to encrypt critical information and spread it to the rest of the movement. And you want to use my masterpiece for personal mail?”

  He pauses.

  “I mean, I could if I wanted to. But I don’t need the validation. You have your job, I have mine. Let’s talk about how you’re going to be good at yours.”

  I bristle. The exo urges me a step closer, and I square the shoulders of my ri
g. I’ve spent the past week pressing down my pent-up frustration in the wake of the Aeschylus disaster and all the unanswered questions it awoke—questions I couldn’t answer until the Fractionists finally deigned to reach out. I didn’t come here to be lectured by some puny human.

  The puny human rolls his eyes. “Spirits. I’ve spent half my life around Scela, kid. Posturing isn’t going to get you what you want—just makes you look stupid.”

  I relent, the exo stifling my blush response.

  “So you’re insecure. Good to know.” Before I can snarl, Lopez claps his hands and spins back around to face his bank of monitors. “As I was saying. This is the extent of my reach.” He gestures to the screens as they cycle through camera feeds, reports on the Dread’s systems, and telemetry on other ships in the First District tier. “But you can reach further. The cause needs information only you cyborg weirdos have access to. You have that creepy little mind-reading thing going on. You ship out on missions that elude my gaze. I heard tell you were on the Aeschylus a week ago.”

  Conflict simmers through my system as I nod. The casts this week have been vicious toward the Fractionists, and I’ve found myself agreeing with a lot of what they’re saying. Two hundred and thirteen people died in the breach. The Fractionist movement has fresh blood on its hands. And with the extra maintenance the Aeschylus now requires to preserve its damaged hull, there’s talk of dropping it down the tiers as far as the Sixth District. I don’t understand how venting part of the ship could further the Fractionist cause. If anything, it badly damaged the movement in the eyes of the public.

  The confusion must be clear on my face, because Lopez rakes a hand through his hair and mutters, “Yeah, I don’t get it either. Breaching a hull has never been a strategy in our playbook, and the Aeschylus cell has dropped out of communication, so it doesn’t seem like we’re getting an explanation any time soon. There’s more to that story. Got any missing pieces I should know?”