Kingdom of Cages

by Sarah Zettel

  “Sadia!” Chena wrapped her arms around Sadia’s shoulders, but Sadia wrenched herself away. Years of backbreaking work had made her too strong for Chena to fight. Chena threw all her weight against Sadia and knocked her sideways. Something snapped. The man screamed.

  “What are you doing?” Chena tried to roll the bigger girl over, but Sadia got to her feet and charged again. Chena blocked Sadia bodily, and hands reached out of the crowd that had formed around them and pulled Sadia back from Chena.

  “What’d they do with him, you bastard?” Sadia shouted past Chena to the man. “What’d they do?”

  “Okay, okay. That’s enough.” A woman, tall and wide, with skin the color of polished oak, waded through the crowd. A blue armband had been sewn onto her tunic sleeve.

  Oh. No.

  The woman clamped a hand around Sadia’s arm and twisted it easily around her back, holding her hard by her shoulder and wrist.

  “I’ll tell!” shouted Sadia after the little man, who retreated back into the shadow of the tent. She fought against the cop’s hold on her, but it was no use.

  “Tell what?” He smiled at her, almost kindly. “What under the wide black sky have you to tell?”

  “Hold still and you won’t break anything,” the cop told Sadia calmly.

  “He’s a tailor!” shouted Sadia. “He’s a tailor!”

  “He’s a tink and a loiterer,” replied the cop. “Calm down, okay?”

  Chena couldn’t move. Shock and confusion welded her to the spot. Should I run? Should I just back away? Sadia, what’s wrong with you?

  What’s a tailor?

  Sadia struggled in the cop’s grip a couple more times and then subsided. The crowd apparently didn’t find this entertaining enough, so they split up, turning back to the screen sheet that had held them all mesmerized before Sadia had had her fit of… whatever it was.

  “Do you want to make an assault complaint?” the woman asked over the top of Sadia’s head.

  The little man cradled one of his long hands in the other. “Can’t afford it, Constable. Not today, anyway.” This last he said straight to Sadia. Sadia looked ready to do blue murder, but she didn’t say anything else. The man walked away, vanishing behind the crowd.

  The constable let go of Sadia’s arm and spun her around by the shoulder. She looked at Sadia’s tattooed hand and jerked her chin toward Chena. Chena held out her own hand, displaying the branched tattoo.

  “Offshoot?” said the constable. “What are you doing here? Who owns you?”

  Chena ignored the strange wording of the question. “We have permission.” Chena fumbled in her belt pocket for a moment and brought out the letter.

  The cop read the text carefully and ran a thumb over the signature. Her eyes were suspicious as she handed the letter back.

  “I’ve trusted Regan’s word on bigger things.” She looked from Chena to Sadia and back again. “But you are lucky the gentleman there decided not to pay for a charge. As it is, I’m fining you fifteen for hauling me out of the guard shack on a cold day.” She held out her hand.

  Sadia scowled hard and reached for her pocket. Chena put a hand on Sadia’s shoulder to stop her and stepped forward.

  “I’ll pay.” Chena pulled out a chit, checked the reading, and handed it across to the constable. “May we have a receipt, please, Aunt?”

  For a moment she thought the constable was going to refuse. But the woman just smirked and pulled out her reader. “Hold out your hand,” she said to Sadia.

  Sadia obeyed and the woman put the reader over the chip. “Now you got a warning, and a receipt saying you paid your fine.” She returned the reader to her belt. “Anyting more I can do for you two?” Neither of them said anything. “No? Good. Let’s all keep it that way.”

  She walked away without looking back. Chena let out a sigh of relief and turned to look for Sadia, but Sadia was three meters down the boardwalk, walking fast and gaining speed.

  Chena growled low in her throat and raced after Sadia.

  “What’s taken over your brain?” she demanded, dodging in front of her, forcing Sadia to pull up short. “First you’re punching strangers, then you almost say piss off to the cop, then you leave me. What is the problem?”

  Sadia’s face scrunched up, trying to become angry, but it didn’t work. Instead, tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes and spilled down her flushed cheeks.

  “Oh, piss.…” Chena wrapped an arm around Sadia and steered her into the shadow of one of the tents, out of sight of the main avenues. Someone in the tent sang to herself.

  If we keep our voices down, they probably won’t notice us.

  Sadia cried silently, like someone used to not making any noise, but her whole face was wet now and Chena had no idea what to do. This wasn’t Teal.

  That probably didn’t matter. “It’s okay.” She reached out, intending to hug Sadia.

  Sadia shook her head and leaned her forehead against Chena’s shoulder. Chena rubbed Sadia’s back, repeating, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” even though she felt stupid. It wasn’t okay, and from the way Sadia was crying, it wouldn’t be okay anytime soon.

  Finally, Sadia lifted her head. Tears and snot glistened on her face. Chena pulled out the sweat towel she kept in her backpack and handed it over. Sadia took it and mopped her face dry. Then Chena handed her the water bottle and she drank half of it without stopping to breathe.

  “Definitely got to get you one of these,” said Chena when Sadia handed the bottle back. “You going to tell me what’s going on, or do I just have to send you home?”

  Sadia stared at the ground for a moment, as if she were making a hard decision. Chena bit her lip, waiting to see which way that decision would go.

  “After Mom… left, my dad decided he was going to get us out of the dorms,” she whispered harshly.

  “He came to Stem to see the draft.” She nodded her head toward the library, the screen sheet, and the crowd. Then she caught the look on Chena’s face. “You’ve never seen a draft?” Chena shook her head. “It’s when the hothouse is out of samples and they’re looking for something special.” She drew out the last word as if it were something obscene. “If you’ve got the right kind of genes and they’re expressed the right way, the hothouse will pay you to come live with them and give samples and get experimented on.”

  Or have a baby for them. Chena’s stomach turned over, but she tried to keep her face still. It didn’t matter. Sadia wasn’t looking at her anyway. “If you don’t have the right setup and you want to try anyway, you can go to a tailor and pay to get fixed up.”

  “But”—Chena’s forehead wrinkled—“you can’t engineer adults. You can only do babies.” The genetic patterns of adults were too set, too slow. You needed a baby or, even better, a fetus that was still developing, so you would have the largest possible number of easily accessible undifferentiated cells to work with.

  The corner of Sadia’s mouth twitched. “You can sort of do adults. You can monkey with their… things… stem cells. Or if they have a cancer, you can play with that. It’s got to do with what the cells are doing and what they’ve turned in to, and stuff like that.” Sadia’s fingers knotted around each other. “Dad was close to what the hothouse needed, but not close enough, so he paid a tailor to open his genes up the rest of the way, and the tailor did, and Dad disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sadia looked at her like she was crazed or stupid. “I mean he disappeared. The hothouse took him and they never gave him back. They never sent the money, nothing. We don’t know where he is. I thought… I thought…” She pressed her mouth shut.

  Chena sat back. She knew what Sadia thought. When Sadia saw the tailor, she thought she could make him tell her where her dad had gone to.

  “And you’re sure that was the guy?”

  Sadia nodded miserably. “Remember I told you he brought us here before? I remember him talking to that guy. I remember those hands.”

  That memor
y had almost gotten them in trouble too. Almost screwed everything to the deck and then blown it all apart.

  But Chena couldn’t blame her for one slow second.

  She also couldn’t do piss-all for her. So she just tucked the towel away and said, “Come on, let’s get going.”

  Sadia nodded again and wiped at her face once more. They both scrambled to their feet, dusting themselves off automatically and avoiding each other’s gazes. When Chena finally glanced at her again, she thought she saw gratitude in Sadia’s eyes.

  They started in on their rounds. Chena was careful to introduce Sadia to all of the customers, even though there weren’t many today. Most of the messages that had to go to the market, though, did have replies. She decided to let Sadia wait for those. Chena left Sadia at the tents with money to buy some winter clothes, a water bottle, and lunch, while she went around to some of the houses to finish up the deliveries.

  She was coming out of Sri Soja’s cramped little house way back in the dunes with a plea for Nan Elle when she saw the tailor lingering on the boardwalk, fingering his chin with his long hand. One of his fingers had been splinted and bandaged. She hesitated when she saw him, and he spotted her. Chena pulled herself together and walked away in the other direction.

  After a moment, she heard footsteps behind her. Chena kept her eyes straight ahead. The footsteps got closer.

  “Piss off,” she muttered under her breath, and picked up her pace.

  The footsteps also picked up their pace. After a couple seconds of this, she heard him wheezing, and then the tailor said, “If you keep this up I may decide it’s not worth it.”

  Chena stopped abruptly and turned on her heel. “What do I care?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his mouth just beginning to spread out to the grin she had seen earlier. “It depends on how much you want a hundred positives.”

  A hundred? Chena clamped her jaw shut. Otherwise it would have dropped open and made her look stupid. “Whatever you want carried, it must be heavy.”

  “Not really.” He walked forward. He moved back and forth, as if he were constantly looking past her for a way out. It should have made him look furtive, but it didn’t. It made him look wary and frightening. “But I have some unusual requirements.”

  I shouldn’t even be talking to this guy. What would Sadia say? This guy helped disappear her father.

  A hundred positives for one job.

  “Such as?”

  The grin stretched wider. His face really was round, like the full moon, and about as pale. The fast walk brought out red blotches on it. Chena was sure she’d never seen anyone so ugly.

  “It needs to be loaded into the Library terminal at Offshoot.”

  The light switched on inside Chena. Sadia had it wrong. This guy wasn’t a tailor. He was a hacker. He didn’t want to mess with anyone’s genes, just their info-systems. “Not for all the worth of God’s garden.” Chena turned away and started walking again.

  “How about three hundred, then?”

  Keep walking, Chena tried to tell herself. Instead, she turned around in midstride. “You don’t have that much.”

  The tailor walked quickly up to her, mincing as he went, ready to run at any second. He pulled a small wallet from the dangling sleeve of his tunic, and from the wallet he pulled a bright red chit.

  “I give you one-fifty,” he said pleasantly, hiding the wallet away again. “The disk goes to the library terminal. I confirm that the library terminal reads it, and I give you another one-fifty.”

  The chit burned a red patch on her retina. Don’t do this. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what kind of trouble this is.

  This is three hundred worth of trouble.

  “No.” Chena clenched fists and turned away.

  “It’ll get done,” he said to her back. “Why shouldn’t it be you that gets the pay?”

  Not worth it, not worth it. I’m too far over the edge as it is. I will not blast this.

  Chena did not look back. She didn’t even look up. She focused on the sun-bleached boards in front of her shoes and walked away as fast as she could.

  And ran smack into a man’s chest.

  “Hey, Chena!” said Farin. “Where’s the leak?”

  Chena backed away hastily. Farin stood in front of her dressed in tan slacks and bulky red sweater that made his hair look coppery. He smiled down at her, a real open smile, nothing like the hacker’s slimy expression.

  He had his arm wrapped around a woman. She was tall and tan, with short black hair, a scarred face, and a politely interested smile.

  “Hello,” Chena said, feeling her cheeks heat up. “I’m, um, sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “I could tell.” Farin laughed, just a little, but her cheeks burned even hotter. “It’s okay, Chena. There’s not a lot of room to maneuver on these walks. Do I have any messages today?”

  “No.” She didn’t want to look at him for some reason. She definitely didn’t want to look at the woman. She hitched up one of the straps of her pack. “Sorry.”

  “Next time,” he said, “make sure you stop by to see me before you leave town. I’ll probably have something for you.”

  Stop being a baby. Chena forced her eyes around to look up into his face. His expression was pleasant, not harsh or embarrassed or judgmental. “Sure. Thanks.”

  “Thank you.” Farin gave her a quick salute. “Now I’ll let you get where you were going in such a hurry.” He stepped aside, pulling the woman with him. She smiled up at him and snuggled a little closer into the crook of his arm.

  Chena bit down hard on her lower lip and hurried past them.

  Don’t be stupid, she told herself as her throat constricted. Of course he has a girlfriend. What do you think? He was waiting for you?

  But even as she thought it, she felt sick. She had to lean on the boardwalk rail and take a couple of deep breaths before she could risk a glance around. Farin and the woman had disappeared, and so, thankfully, had the tailor-hacker-mushroom man.

  Chena pushed herself away from the railing. Okay, it’s just a weird day, she told herself. Nothing big. Better go find Sadia and get back home before anything else happens.

  She checked her list and hurried back into the dunes. She also checked her comptroller. Eleven-fifteen, and there were still a couple of deliveries to make.

  But by the time she was able to return to the market, it was well past noon and Chena was beginning to worry about getting home. The days were already at least an hour shorter than they had been in summer. The bikes had lights, and there wasn’t supposed to be anything in the dark that could get through the shock fences, but Mom worried, and besides, Chena wanted to get the Offshoot deliveries made tonight so she could pay Sadia something major for the day’s work.

  Sadia was leaning on the boardwalk railing just outside the picnic area where Farin had first taken Chena for lunch. She munched on dark bread and swigged water from a bottle. She was wearing a quilted jacket like Chena’s except it was brown, and an oiled canvas hat covered her hair.

  “Hey.” Chena came up behind her. “You get the replies?”

  Sadia nodded, her mouth full. She pulled out a sheaf of letters and handed them over. Chena checked each one and made a notation against the client list in her comptroller. “Great. Now give me some of that.” She grabbed for the loaf.

  “Hey, hey!” Sadia held it out of her reach. “Manners!”

  “I’m paying here,” said Chena haughtily. “I don’t need manners.”

  “Who raised you? Squirrels?” Sadia broke off half the loaf and handed it to Chena. It was good stuff, rich and nutty. They ate and drank in silence for a while, watching the boats and the sunlight on the water.

  “Do you really think you can earn enough to get off of here?” asked Sadia at last.

  Chena shrugged and took a swallow of water from her own bottle. “I don’t know. Maybe not for a few years. But I can earn enough to make things better.”<
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  “Yeah,” agreed Sadia. “That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? That’s what my dad wanted.”

  “At least your dad wanted something for you,” murmured Chena. Sadia gave her a sideways glance, but didn’t ask. Chena was glad.

  Even though the remaining few pickups went smoothly, they were back on the rail later than Chena would have liked. Alone, she might have been flying, but Sadia, as strong as she was, was not used to the bikes. They went slowly and the sun sank. By the time they made it back to Offshoot, the bikes’ lights were on and the world around them was dark.

  “Mom is going to kill me,” said Chena as they parked the bikes in the line. “I’ll split the money with you tomorrow, all right?”

  “Okay,” said Sadia.

  Chena hesitated. “The dining hall will be closed down. Mom might have something on the stove. You want to come?” Chena jerked her chin up toward the catwalks.

  “No,” said Sadia. “Thanks, though. I’d better just get back and check on Shond. If I’m not around, he might decide to do something really stupid.”

  “You think?” said Chena, her voice full of sarcasm. They both laughed and saluted each other quickly. “See you tomorrow.”

  Sadia took off down the path and Chena took a minute to let her eyes adjust all the way to the darkness. There was a little moonlight coming in from under the trees, and a few lights from the houses. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for her to find her way.

  Chena took her bearings and headed for the nearest stairway. She thought she saw the faint glimmer of light back in the trees that meant Mom had left a lamp on for her.

  Who am I kidding? Mom is probably waiting up for me.

  She reached for the stairway railing. I am in so much—

  A hand clamped onto her wrist. Before Chena could react, it yanked her off her feet. She collided with a hard chest. The hand and arm held her close and another hand groped at her belt.

  “Let’s see what you have for us, maybe?” grunted an old man with foul breath.

  “Told you she’d be here.” The new voice belonged to a younger man, and for a sharp, sick second, Chena realized she knew who owned it.