Vick scowled, shook his head, and crossed his arms.
“Thought so,” Maya said. “Now go get Kale something to eat.”
“Mai,” he protested.
Maya’s glare bored through him. It made the grimace Captain Saunders wore when he was irritated seem like a smile. “That’s an order.”
Vick hopped to his feet and performed an embellished bow. “My lady,” he said before sauntering around us.
“You’ll have to excuse Vick,” Maya said. “So many years away from home have corroded his manners, if he ever had them.”
“All the years around you, beautiful!” he shouted back, his voice echoing through the vacant corridor outside.
“Years?” I asked.
“I’m sure you have questions,” Maya said. “As long as you promise not to break apart the command deck if we let you go, I’ll answer whatever I can.”
“You won’t space me?”
She grinned. “Not if I can help it.”
I nodded, then realized my head was wrapped in a bulbous helmet and she was at my side. I bowed my entire body forward instead.
They heaved me to my feet and set me into one of the chairs wrapping the command deck. Maya sat across from me in the one Vick had vacated. Like her voice, her face was somewhat different than it’d been through the video feed. There was a warmth in her eyes, the kind someone bears when they see a friend or loved one after a long absence. It caught me so off guard that my desire to grab her by the throat and demand the truth was stunted.
“By Trass, you’ve grown,” she said. “You look just like him.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You really don’t remember? I guess your mother did all she could to get rid of us.”
My mind started racing, wondering how long Maya had been watching me, trying to think of all the times I might’ve felt someone lingering in the shadows to my side. I was at a loss for words. I studied her now that my eyes were feeling better and tried to picture her without the scars mutilating half of her face.
And that was when I remembered…
I was barely four years old. I was tall for my age, even for a Ringer, and my head reached my mother’s chest. I stood beside her, gazing up at her inquisitively. Tears filled her eyes, accompanying a look of conviction on her face that as a child I mistook to be purely sorrow.
Few areas of the Darien Uppers existed that were as dark as the world below, where we came from. We were in one of them. A morgue, a funeral home—it was a little bit of both. It was the Darien Hall of Ashes—where Ringers went to say goodbye to their loved ones. It was essentially a long, low hallway lined in stark panels, with a series of glass-topped tubes poking out along the exterior side.
Earthers traditionally buried their fallen in caskets beneath the ground, whether it was on their homeworld or Mars or some asteroid somewhere. My people released the ashes of their burned dead into the winds of Titan. We’d done it that way since the days of Trass’s first settlers.
My mother held a transparent, spherical container filled with what looked like dust. I was too young to understand that it was all that remained of my father.
“Kale, come here,” she said to me.
I shuffled forward. Six extraction tubes lined the wall, and a few other families were clustered beside them. I knew from watching them that I was supposed to be sad. They sobbed and whispered, and passed around their crystalline spheres.
“Here.” She handed me the container. It was as light as a helium balloon and slightly pliable.
“I thought you said he’d be here,” I said.
She kneeled and looked me straight in the eyes. A sanitary mask covered half of her face, but she was still young, with not a strand of gray in her hair. “He’s in there now, Kale. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but he’s gone.”
“Does that mean…he’s dead?”
She nodded solemnly. “Yes. He’s going to be a part of Titan now, and it’s your job to get him there.” She opened the lid of the tube and gestured to the vessel in my hands.
I rotated the sphere so that the ashes tumbled. My eyes were pressed up against it, wondering how they were any different from the dust that gathered daily in the hollows of the Lowers.
“So I won’t see him anymore?” I asked.
“No, Kale, not anymore. But he’ll always be looking after you. I know he
wished…” She paused, having to gather her breath and wipe her eyes before she could continue. “I know he wished he could’ve seen you one last time, but he…he couldn’t.”
“But he said he would be there for my birthday!” I protested. “He promised!”
“Well, he won’t!” she snapped.
I doubt it was her intention to make me cry, but I did anyway. She quickly wrapped her arms around my head and drew me close, kissing me on the forehead until it was raw.
“He’s gone, sweetheart, okay?” she whispered. Her lips were trembling. “I know it’s hard, but we just have to say goodbye.”
“I don’t want to,” I sniveled.
“Some things are out of our hands.” She took the sphere from me and raised it toward the ceiling. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “We surrender this soul unto the winds of Titan. May he forever watch over those chosen by Trass.”
She lowered the sphere into the tube. It squeezed in perfectly without falling all the way through. “From ice to ashes,” she said. Then she struck a command on a nearby control panel and the sphere was sucked through the dense Darien enclosure toward a tiny pinpoint of light. I didn’t know how the process worked at the time, but it would emerge into the sky and rise through the thick atmosphere of Titan. Once it reached a high enough altitude the change in pressure would cause it to pop like a balloon, sprinkling the ashes into the clouds.
My mom stepped back, her hands still trembling out in front of her as if she’d just accomplished some incredible feat. Her thousand-meter stare was aimed at the tube.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
“Into the sky,” she said. She leaned over and clasped her hands over mine. “Your father loved you, Kale. He may not have known how to show it well, but he did. He wanted you to promise something after he was gone. It’s very important.”
I nodded hesitantly.
“Remember him always, but never be like him. Ever. Do you understand?”
I searched the room, unsure of what to say. My father and I weren’t very close, though that was only because I didn’t see him much before he was gone. My mom said it was because he worked late into the nights thieving and conning—doing whatever it took to scrape by in the Lowers. On the rare occasions he’d visit us in our hollow I’d get so excited that I couldn’t turn off my smile.
My mother always sat in the corner, observing quietly as he performed magic tricks with ration bars for me or as we watched the newsfeeds on our tiny view-screen. After a few hours he’d be gone, and then it’d be weeks, sometimes months before I saw him again…until the day she told me he was shot while trying to rob a wealthy Earther.
“Okay, Kale?” my mother repeated, grabbing me by the jaw to regain my attention.
“O…okay,” I stuttered.
“Good. You’re being so strong, Kale.” She smiled through her tears and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Now, my boss let me have some lettuce from the gardens to take home tonight. How does that sound? I think we could both use it.”
My eyes lit up. “Real lettuce?”
“Yup. The real thing.”
I bobbed my head enthusiastically, and she gave me one last kiss before we started off. I can’t recall whether or not either of us looked back toward the tube my dad’s remnants were slurped through, but when we reached the exit a woman stood in our way. Maya, minus the burns.
She was strange to me even as a child. The skin on her youthful face was smooth and unmarred, but her eyes were brimming with ire.
“This isn’t right, Kat!” Maya said, ta
king no effort to mask her resentment. “Kale is his son too.”
“I didn’t make this decision alone,” my mom answered.
“Like Alann would’ve said no to you?”
My mom grabbed Maya by the collar. “I won’t risk him being discovered,” she whispered sternly.
“You’ll toss him aside just like that then? You learned well from that Earther master of yours, didn’t you?”
My mom slapped Maya across the face so hard that the skin on her pale cheek went red on the side where one day it would no longer exist. Maya didn’t back away.
“I’ll always love your brother, but I have to do what’s best for our boy,” my mom said. “It’s no life for him.”
“And what about what he wants?”
“The decision’s been made, so honor it and stay away from my son!” She squeezed my hand and pulled. “Let’s go, Kale.”
“You’re a coward, Kat!” Maya hollered. “Always will be!”
My mother ignored her and tugged me even harder, but I stared back at the woman, at Maya, who watched us with revulsion until we’d vanished into the crowds of Darien.
—
Their exchange meant little to me as a child. I’d barely understood what I was doing in the Hall of Ashes. But now, as I stared at Maya’s disfigured face, I didn’t need her to say it for me to realize what she was.
“You’re…” I began.
“Your aunt,” she finished for me. “Your mother told you your father died trying to rob an Earther when you were four.” She scratched a patch of shiny burn scars on her upper cheek before her piercing gaze shifted to look straight into my eyes. “She lied. You are more than you know, Kale Drayton.”
Chapter 15
“My dad’s alive?” I asked, hardly able to believe the words escaping my mouth.
The half of Maya’s lips that weren’t deformed drooped into a frown. “He was…until two months ago on Earth, when he gave his life on M-day so that we might have a chance at more than just surviving.”
The momentary high I felt over learning about a fifteen-year-old miracle swiftly faded. My heart sunk. “But I saw his ashes go to the sky and…and so did you. You were there.”
“All a lie concocted by him and that mother of yours to keep you safe,” she said. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Kale.”
I hopped to my feet and pointed at her chest. “And I’m supposed to believe you? I watched you murder all those people on the Piccolo.”
The grim, silent Ringer sitting next to us rose to his feet as well. He looked like he might have ripped me apart if Maya hadn’t held her arm out in front of him.
“ ‘Murder,’ ” she scoffed. “There isn’t a single Earther out there who wouldn’t put a bullet in your head if it meant them surviving or stuffing their wallet. The truth is that your father was a hero, and that he believed in Titan. Like your mom, he didn’t want his life for you, but now he’s gone. I’ll be damned if I let you become another cog on a gas harvester. Working for them. Handing the Ring over to them, one day at a time. Believe me or don’t, but it’s time you knew exactly who you are.”
After spending a few seconds in disbelief, I sat back in my chair. The grim Ringer did so as well. I had no idea what to say and was grateful when Vick reappeared behind me, allowing me some time to compose myself. He dropped a ration bar onto my lap.
“Here you go, your highness,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Thank you, Vick,” Maya said. She stood. “You can have the controls back. I’d like to speak with Kale alone.”
Vick smirked. “Go easy on him.” He shimmied around us effortlessly to return to the ship’s navigation console, remarkably nimble for someone clad in a bulky suit of powered armor.
“Walk with me,” Maya said to me. “Your muscles can use the exercise.” She nodded in the direction of the quiet Ringer on her way by. He grunted in response. Given the option of staying with him and Vick versus going off with a woman I at least had a vague memory of, I chose the latter.
“He doesn’t talk much, does he?” I asked after I caught up with her.
“Gareth?” she said. “No. Our former captain made sure of that when he sliced out his tongue. Used to be impossible to shut him up before that.”
“Oh.” I instinctually rubbed my tongue against the back of my teeth to remind myself it was still there.
“I know all of this is a lot to hear, Kale. It wasn’t fair of them to keep you in the dark.”
I stopped. “ ‘A lot to hear’? You want me to believe that my mom was lying for all of these years; that my dad, your brother, was running around Sol for my entire life and never once tried to contact me?”
“Oh, he wanted to. And if Katrina weren’t so damn stubborn he might’ve.”
“Stop talking about her like that!”
“Sorry…Old habits.” She laid her hand on the back of my armor and urged me forward. “He stayed away like he was supposed to, but that doesn’t mean he forgot. Your dad was no paltry thief, Kale. You think you survived getting out of that life because you’re lucky? He was watching, every step of the way. Nobody in the Lowers would dare touch you with him around.”
“Are you saying that he was a fence?”
“You really have no idea?”
“Why don’t you just tell me whatever it is you want to tell me.”
“Soon. Let me show you that your pretty mother is safe and sound first, and then you might start trusting me a little. There’s no point in wasting my breath.”
“That’s a good start.”
She led me back toward the room I’d arrived in. We turned before reaching it into what I assumed had been one of the Sunfire’s rec rooms. There was a couch, its fabric cover almost entirely frayed down to the metal frame, a view-screen, and nothing else but empty space.
“Like I said earlier, there is no way for us to make contact with anybody on Titan from this deep in Saturn, but Mazrah was able to send an update before the plunge. She figured you might not be big on talking until you could see her.”
I choked back a moan of frustration. “Who is that now?”
“You found that hand-terminal in her office. My half-sister.”
I recalled the stunning woman in violet back in the Maw. I should’ve known better than to think she’d left her door wide open by accident, considering what she had hiding inside. “Of course she is,” I groused. “Any more lost family members I should know about?”
“No relation to you, actually. She got the looks and the brain, we got the bloodline. Lucky for her. Amazing what she did with the hand-terminal, though, isn’t it? I forgot to ask if you had any trouble getting it through security.”
“None,” I said. “My mom?”
“Right.” She switched on the view-screen and shuffled through a few recordings before selecting one. The time stamp was from a few hours earlier, and I fell to my knees in front of the screen when I saw what was on it. The feed was so rife with static that hearing anything was impossible, but my mother sat upright on a medical table, in a cavern that looked nothing like her Q-Zone room.
“We had her extracted the moment you left Titan,” Maya said. “She’s in the capable hands of our doctor, receiving treatment.”
I assumed she had to be talking about the woman standing in front of my mom, inspecting her eyes and throat with a flashlight. She was facing the other direction, so I was able to see only the curls of her red hair, but she seemed shorter than your average Ringer.
I slid across the floor on my knees until the screen was an arm’s length away. The recording wasn’t long, only a handful of seconds of my mom undergoing inspections, but there was no question that she looked healthier. An IV was still plugged into her arm, but her rashes were healed and her eyes bustled with renewed vigor. My fingers ran across the screen.
“She had something called strep,” Maya said. “She’s going to be fine now, thanks to you. We’ll make arrangements for a new identity so that she ca
n avoid any trouble.”
The sight brought a smile to my lips that I was grateful my helmet kept Maya from seeing. “Will I ever be able to see her again?”
“Returning to Titan will be difficult for some time. We have more important issues to deal with.”
“ ‘More important’?” I whipped around, my cheeks hot with anger. “She’s supposedly your sister-in-law, for Trass’s sake! You should’ve helped her the moment they put her in there!”
“I did. Arrangements had to be made. With Alann…your father gone, I had to make sure you weren’t harmed. And of course you went right back to that ingrate Dexter Howser. Who knows what he was planning on doing with you. We had to intervene.”
“I can handle myself. You didn’t have to bring me here or make me watch you kill those people!”
“I had no choice!” Maya said, raising her voice for the first time. Her jaw stretched so far I could see an entire row of teeth through her wound. It shut me right up. “Don’t you understand? You’re not just some kid from Darien. You’re not the worthless son of a thief and some Earther’s slave-bitch. You’re the blood of fucking Trass!” She pounded her chest plate. “We didn’t die off after the Great Reunion, Kale. We hid. Your father, you, me—we’re his descendants. The last of his line.”
My mouth froze. It was the most ridiculous claim I’d ever heard. I had to sit on the couch or I would’ve fallen, suit and all. Maya was panting, and before either of us could do anything else Vick burst into the room. Gareth leaned against the wall by the door.
“Mai, it’s happening,” Vick said excitedly.
“Don’t you have a ship to pilot?” Maya murmured.
“It’s on auto. I bounced our reception off a luxury cruiser above us. Look at this.”
He switched the view-screen over to a live, Ring-wide newsfeed. It was grainy, but clear enough to understand what we were looking at. The ticker at the bottom read, URGENT: ATTACK ON THE PICCOLO, and the reporter in front of the camera stood in a hangar on Pervenio Station. Her voice went in and out. Not that I could focus anyway, considering the news about my father. The only thing I heard was that Director Sodervall was going to be addressing the Ring in a matter of hours.
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