by Shelly Crane
Copyright 2015 © Shelly Crane
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, planets, galaxies, hot half-human aliens, robots, new animal species, and intergalactic incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons or “things”, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States
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Editing services by Kim Huther (www.wordsmithproofreading.com)
Cover Art by The Cover Lure
More information can be found at the author's website:
http://shellycrane.blogspot.com
ISBN-13: 978-1530569229
ISBN-10: 1530569222
Prologue
“Cold?” I asked even as I reached across her to check and to see if her built-in warmer was on. It wasn’t.
She pushed my arm away. “I’ve got it.”
I held my hands up. “Just wanted to make sure you were warm enough. It’s freezing out here.”
“I can take care of myself,” she muttered and then seemed to gather steam, tightening her arms around herself. “I hope you don’t think that just because we kissed that you can just…”
“I can just what?”
She looked over at me for a second before looking back to the path we were walking. It was full of people, but she didn’t seem to see a one of them. “You’re not my new Lord. You’re not my new proprietor, my new master, my new…” She gritted her teeth.
I felt my bones go numb. “Go ahead, Sophelia. Let me have it.” I purposely said her full name, knowing she’d notice. She was pulling away, trying to show me the girl she could be. That snarky girl from the ship was making a comeback. But what she didn’t know was that strong, independent girl was just as much of a turn on as the soft Sophelia that I’ve had the past week. But she was forgetting how strong and courageous she was standing up in front of that camera, in front of the Militia when she was running out of air. She was always strong, always courageous, and she was always brave and smart. The loving, caring, amazingly beautifully-hearted girl I’d come to know was just lurking under the surface. And it didn’t take that much digging to find her. She wasn’t two people. She wasn’t a puzzle that needed solving, she was one amazing girl who just didn’t know it yet.
“I’m a plague,” she whispered.
“Oh, my… Soph.”
“I am!” she screamed, surprising me. “I am a plague. I have taken down plenty of people so far.” She scoffed bitterly. “You don’t want to be with me, Maxton.” She wouldn’t look at me. She just shook her head at the ground. “I’m a destroyer of goods things. Of good people.” She finally looked up. “You have family who needs you—”
“That I can’t go home to. You know that. I won’t bring the things I’ve done into my family’s life. It was my decision to do them, before you even came along, and now I’ll pay the price.”
“You could still be near them at least.”
“Next door or a million miles away.” I shrugged. “If you can’t talk to or see the ones you love, what does it matter?”
She closed her eyes, searching her brain for new evidence, I assumed. “I got you fired.”
“I turned you in for the reward. Twice.” I put up two fingers to drive my point home.
She growled. I heard the twins scoffing and making noises at our banter. They had stopped a few feet behind us, knowing better than to come closer.
Her eyes were fierce as hell as she gazed up at me, telling me to run as fast as I could away from her and begging me to stay all in the same blink.
“They will always be after you if you’re with me.” Her bottom lip started to quiver, her tell that it was all crashing down, but she kept up her fierce face. Her fists were clenched at her sides. “You’ll never be safe. You’ll never be free to walk the streets without,” she fingered the appearance scrambler around her neck, “these things on!” she yelled. “You’ll be a prisoner. You’ll be my prisoner!”
A few people walking by on the street had noticed her outburst and were giving us weird looks as they passed, but nobody seemed to care for more than a fleeting second, more worried about whatever mundane things were going on in their own lives.
“Don’t you care?” she yelled. “Don’t you care that your life will be over? Don’t you care that I’m taking everything from you?” She looked over at the twins. “You, too. Run! Run while you still can. You shouldn’t be here.” That lip… “You shouldn’t want to be with me. I’m a plague that will take everyone down with me. I’m damaged, I’m slashed and scarred, I’m cracked…” That lip lost its fight as finally her lips parted and a small sob made its way through.
I came into her space, done with this whole thing. That lip was my undoing.
“You listen to me, Soph,” I growled, but took a breath, taking it down a notch. I lifted her face with a crooked finger under her chin, wanting nothing more than to kiss her trembling mouth and make everything bad in her life go away for good. But life didn’t work that way, did it? You couldn’t think happy thoughts and fly away to Neverland. And you couldn’t kiss girls and have everything in their life that was wrong be right. If only. But I was apparently doing something right, because that lip…it wasn’t trembling quite as much anymore. And her eyes? They begged me to save her. “You were slashed when I found you, remember? And now, you have some scars.” Her face crumpled and she tried to move it away from my hand, but I brought it back to face me. I wrapped my free hand around her back, right against the part of her I was speaking of, and brought her against me. I put my mouth against her ear. “What is a life without scars? Scars come in all forms and we all have them. Some deeper than others, some more than others, some harsher than others. Your scars are yours, Soph, and you earned them,” I said harshly, my lips touching the rim of her ear. “It felt like sh—awful going through what you did, but the point is you did it. You. No one else. And no one else could have but you. And your scars are beautiful because of who you are and what you did to earn them. Don’t ever be ashamed of them. As for you being a plague? If that’s so, then please, infect me. Because I want everything you’ve got to give me.” I was pleased to hear a sniffled small laugh.
I leaned back, still holding her chin. There were a few tears clinging to the place under her eyes. I took her face in my hands, ten percent surprised that she let me and ninety percent elated that she was back to the brave, loving girl who took her destiny by the balls and said to hell with her past. I wiped her tears with my thumbs, somehow loving how she closed her eyes when I did so. It made it seem that much more special somehow.
She opened her eyes and I finished my speech.
“And you may be a little cracked, Soph, but it wouldn’t take very much to fix them. And
I’d love to try.”
She smiled, looking at my shirtfront, and sighed. “Why did you have to be so amazing?”
I laughed a little. “Well, I could give you a list—”
She smacked my gut and I “oomphed” for her benefit. She lifted her eyes to mine and I saw the question before she asked. “Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it? I’m…I’m not worth the trouble of all this, of the trouble that is coming for us—for me.”
I hoped it showed on my face. I couldn’t see how it wasn’t. I felt it in that moment as I thought about the way I felt when I was with her, when she had been with my family, when she tugged on my hair in that way she does, when she joked with the twins and laughed so wholeheartedly, when she kissed me back like we wouldn’t wake up the next day so she’d better make it good. I smiled and brought her closer a little, my hand still holding her face.
“The fact that you can’t see how much you’re worth makes you worth so much more.” She opened her mouth once, her brow bunched, but nothing came out. She didn’t know the words to ask. I continued. “A diamond doesn’t know how much it’s worth; it’s just beautiful because it exists.”
Chapter One
grav·i·ty - the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass.
Sophelia
“Mommy, why can’t we have cheese anymore?”
She looked at me and then went back to her work.
I saw the smile in her profile as I continued to brush my contraband doll’s hair. It was blazing red, like mine. Like the run used to be. I didn’t understand Mommy’s smile at the time, but I liked it. Mommy didn’t smile much anymore.
“You love your questions, don’t you? Because the people who decide things now? The Militia and Congress? They get to choose and pick whether people like us get to eat foods like that now. Just like they get to decide where Mommy works and where we live.”
My brush stopped mid-stroke and I looked at her, feeling the weight of those words, but not understanding them for what they were. Not yet anyway. “People like us?”
“People who live in the stacks. People who—” She smiled, but even I could tell it was sad. “People who work honestly for a living and try to pay their taxes the good old-fashioned way.”
“I thought honesty was a good thing.”
She chuckled a little and sliced through the bread on the counter carefully. She did everything with care. She put my plate on the table and ticked her head. “Leave Lolly and come sit.” I sighed and did as she asked, setting my doll Lolly on the one chair we had before moving across the floor quietly so as not to disturb the tenants below us.
Where we lived in the stacks was pretty annoying for an eight-year-old, but it was home. We lived in a shipping crate, stacked on top of another shipping crate, on top of another. I think you get my drift when I say the ‘stacks’. And our neighbors who shared our walls were the same—stacked as far as I could see.
“Let’s give thanks,” she said softly and I bowed my head to pray, thanking someone she called ‘Father’, who I had never met for the food we were given that she had provided by working in the mines. I never really understood why she did it or who this guy was. She said a long time ago, when the exodus that brought us to this planet from Earth happened, that our father God had protected us and gotten us here safely, but as far as I had seen, my life had been misery, broken contraband dolls, and a barely-there slice of bread with three freeze-dried green beans on my plate next to it for every meal.
Count them. Three.
“Amen,” she said as she finished and I hadn’t even heard what she’d muttered to him in between.
I sighed as I picked up my bread and tore off a piece. “Will we ever have anything but bread and vegetables?”
“Soph,” she said gently, “this life is hard on you, I know, and I’m so very sorry about that. I wish your father was here.” She smiled like she always did, but her tears came all the same. “But he’s not. It’s only us. It’s always us; it’ll always be us. And…sometimes life will give you obstacles, things to make you strong. And you know what?”
My eight-year-old mind didn’t know at the time what was coming, just that it was something I should pay attention to, grab onto. I shook my head.
“You are going to be so strong. And brave, valiant, mighty. But you’ll also be a loving, gentle, amazing woman, who loves with her whole self and heart.”
I stared, blushing, not knowing why this mattered over bread and green beans. She laughed. “Eat, Sophelia. And I haven’t forgotten.”
I knew what she meant, but said, “Forgotten what?”
She smirked, her brow lifting, her strawberry golden hair falling to one side over her eye. “Someone’s day of birth is tomorrow.”
I tried to stop my smile, but failed. “How do you remember so well when every day is the same, repeated over and over?” My smile faded. “When you have so much else to worry about and hardly ever sleep?”
“How could I forget the best day of my life?”
I didn’t smile back. “But you got more taxes that day—”
“I got you that day and that’s all that matters. Eat so we can read more about Peter Pan and Wendy. And find out if the Lost Boys have taken to her or not.”
My back straightened. She was always so tired and fell asleep quickly. We hardly ever got to read anymore. “Really?”
“Really,” she said, nudged her chin in my direction.
I scarfed my bread and the chewy beans. I wiped off our plates with the dish towel and set them in the cabinet. Mom went to the water distillery on the wall next to the door and attached the lidded spout over the top to seal it. She held our jug with shaky hands.
She seemed to be praying again. I paused to watch her, but before I could get worried she opened the spout and let the canister fill with our daily ration of water for our pod and family of two. It was half of what it usually was. Water for…one. She sighed before turning to me.
“Here. You first.” She flipped the lid on the drinking jug, but left her thumb covering the hole so the liquid couldn’t escape. There was gravity in the pod and buildings, but it didn’t apply to liquids. The entire planet’s gravity didn’t. No one could explain why. But inside was the only place we could take our boots off. Everyone wore magnetized boots of some sort. With the granite and metal mixture that made up our planet, it made it extremely susceptible to magnets. But our gravity tabs were what kept us safe and technically, able to walk around outside.
Mom used to tell me stories about all the misconceptions from when our people first got here over seven hundred years ago. People believed their skin would desiccate or burst wide open without something protecting them from the outside air, that their tears would float off their faces, they thought that the sun was yellow.
There were some problems when they arrived here, too. When people first got here, their eyes didn’t adjust to being so close to the sun and everyone had to wear protective contacts. Now they give us these vitamins in the water that protect and restore our eyes, give us some kind of minerals to make them strong enough to take it.
Landu is a planet behind the sun, on the warmest side, thousands of miles away from it, opposite of Earth, and far from easy detection. When they knew they the Exodus was going to happen, they started to explore farther than they’d ever gone before to see if there was somewhere out there we could go. Landu was our saving grace. Or our prison, I’ve heard Mommy say.
“Why did they give us so little?”
Even my child heart knew something wasn’t right.
“Oh,” she brushed it off, “I had some at the mines today. They must have counted that as my ration.”
“Mom,” I hedged.
“Here, take it.” She pushed it toward me, keeping her thumb over it tightly. “Just leave me a couple sips. I’ll be fine.”
We only got one ration of water a day to drink. We didn’t bathe with it or wash our di
shes or clothes with it like I heard the Elitists were prone to do, though that seemed like an epic waste of water to me. I took it from her and immediately sucked it to my lips, letting the warm water suck down my throat and quench me for a moment before I closed the lid, taking that deep breath that dried my throat out once more, taking with it all the calm those few short sips had provided me.
She smiled as she downed the last little bit and then closed it tight, replacing our canister on the hook next to the water distillery spout.
“Ready for Hook?”
“Go brush your teeth and then we will.”
I wanted to grumble, but knew better. “Yes, ma’am.”
I went to the sink where I had cleaned our dishes and lifted the small flap that held my toothbrush and paste. I squirted it onto the brush, letting it touch the bristles as I went, and did a quick, thorough run over all my teeth and tongue. If you did it for more than a minute, it began to burn your gums. There were no dentists here. Well—not for people in the stacks, so our paste was full of all the things needed to keep our teeth from rotting in our heads, but it didn’t feel good to do so. Especially with no water to wash it away when you were done.
I took the sleeve of my shirt and rubbed as much of it off my gums and tongue as I could and then turned. I saw it on her face. “Please. No bath.”
Lye powder soap was less fun than straight-up baking soda toothpaste when there was no way to remove it from your skin.
She smiled. “All right. But you scrub extra hard tomorrow night.”
“Deal,” I said enthusiastically and landed hard on my knees, apologizing silently to the tenants below us as I tugged out my hideaway bed. I sat and waited for her to pull the book from its hiding place. Books were rare. There hadn’t been that many brought over from Earth and to have one in the stacks was unheard of. The Elitists apparently paid a pretty silver for books or anything else they could find from the Old World.