Out of Sight (Progenitor Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Dad was EGSF,” said Austin. “Some Scather shot him in the head. Didn’t kill him, but he wasn’t Dad anymore after. Started hittin’ me and Mom. They fought a lot. One night, he killed Mom and came after me. I got his gun and…” His voice choked off.

  “C’mere.” Sima tried to make room for him to join the hug pile.

  “I couldn’t do it.” Austin’s face reddened. “He killed my Mom and I couldn’t shoot him. I ran like a bitch.”

  “You’re a little boy,” said Sima.

  “I’m eleven.” Austin glowered at the grass. His angry scowl melted to a wounded stare and a quivering lip. With a sniffle, he crawled up to her right side and sobbed.

  He’s been holding that in for too long. Sima cradled his head to her shoulder. It took him a few minutes to calm down, after which he blushed at the ground. Sima sat in silence for a while, Lissa in her lap, a boy on either side. Sweat ran in trails down her back, front, and arms, the unrelenting sun made worse by bodies pressed close. At motion overhead, she squinted up at a huge manta drifting over the canopy. “We’ll be okay. I won’t lie. It’s dangerous, but so were the streets.”

  “There’s no doctors here,” said Juan.

  “Or bathrooms.” Lissa squirmed.

  “Everywhere’s a bathroom.” Austin grinned. “Bigger problem is no E-toilets. I miss pushing a button to clean my butt after.”

  Juan laughed.

  Daylight waned as they reclined in the grass, chatting about the little mundane things they missed.

  “When I was little, I wanted to grow up and join the EGSF,” said Austin, frowning. “I hate them now. Even if I was still on Earth, I wouldn’t join up. I saw what they’re really like to people who don’t have anything. They didn’t care my dad used to be one of them. As soon as I ran away, I didn’t matter anymore.”

  “You matter to me,” said Sima, squeezing him close.

  “Yeah.” Juan smiled at him. “I like having a brother.”

  “Me too,” said Lissa. Her smile soon turned to a sniffle. “I miss my cat, Orange. She was really pretty. Her fur was black and white and orange in spots. I haven’t seen her since those men broke in to our ’partment and made my parents sleep forever.”

  Sima hugged her.

  Austin’s sad glower faded back to an expression of almost contentment.

  “I didn’t have a cat,” said Juan, “but I did have a favorite can. I found it in an alley. It didn’t even have no dents or nothing. I liked the cartoon mouse on the label.”

  Sima kissed him atop the head, making him laugh.

  Austin poked the Omnicomputer. “I guess that’s not really ’cause you got charged with a made up crime. They arrested me too.”

  “I’m sure they came up with a big lie for such a small boy.” Sima winked.

  He chuckled. “Nah. I actually did stuff.”

  She gasped, overacting a bit as she already suspected as much after his mention of a pink jumpsuit. “What could such an adorable boy do that’s illegal?”

  He smirked at her. “My Dad showed me how to hack electronic locks and stuff. The EGSF has all kinds of ways around them. I used to break into apartments and run their fabricators so I could eat real food. I’d take clothes and sometimes even video games.”

  “Wow.” Sima ruffled his hair. “You’re more of a criminal than I was.”

  He flashed his masterful pleading face. “Yeah, but I’m adorable.”

  She tickled him until he squealed.

  Austin stuck his tongue out at her. “What’s the worst thing you did?”

  “I’s charged with crim’nal cuteness in the first degree,” said Lissa with a completely serious face.

  Sima almost melted. “What?”

  “Tha’s what the ee-gee man said when they ’rested me.” She held her arms out, wrists together. “But he didn’t put the handcuffs on.”

  “Aww.” Sima laughed.

  “So?” Austin poked Sima in the side. “What’s the worst thing you did? You’re like old and stuff. Old Outcasts do the real bad stuff. You carried a knife, right?”

  “Umm. For a little while, but I got scared and tossed it. I guess really the worst thing I did was run a box of stuff for this shady guy named Nalas. I don’t know what was in it, but I figure it had to be drugs or something illegal.”

  “That’s not really that bad.” Austin jabbed his fingers at the dirt. “It’s not mean. You could’ve said you were tricked if you got arrested. You’re a girl. You can get away with that stuff. They don’t trust boys at all. My dad used to think all boys were criminals, and girls that actually did bad stuff, all they’d have to do was give him sad eyes and he’d let them go.”

  Sima sighed. “Okay. The worst thing I ever did…” She looked down. “I was too much of a chicken to break the law, so I kept begging. Tried to look younger.”

  “That’s not bad at all.” He rolled his eyes.

  “I’m not finished.” She poked him in the stomach. “I used to be really jealous of smaller kids, because they always got all the attention from Citizens and people ignored me. I once grabbed this little girl who kept following me and put her in an ORC bin.”

  All three of them gasped.

  “Why was she following you?” asked Austin.

  “She probably wanted help,” said Lissa, making a sad face.

  Juan grinned. “Sometimes I got good food in ORC bins.”

  “That kid kept trying to stand next to me. I told her to go away because she was taking too much of the charity. Everyone ignored me with her there. After I asked her to go somewhere else, she followed me on purpose so I wouldn’t get any glint.”

  “Oh.” Austin raked his hands at the grass. “I guess stuffing a little kid in an ORC bin is kinda mean, but she sounds like a brat.”

  “You wouldn’t put me in an ORC bin would you?” asked Lissa.

  Sima reached an arm around her and squeezed. “No way. I feel so bad about it now. I can’t even find her to say I’m sorry.”

  “Do you still hate kids?” asked Juan.

  “No.” She patted him on the head. “I used to be a scared, jealous, street rat. I’m not anymore.”

  “Dude.” Austin stared at Juan. “She ran outside to kill a tiger with an axe to protect us.”

  They whiled away the next few hours trading stories of their lives on the street. From the sound of it, Lissa hadn’t been out there long, a week or two at most. She’d wandered away from her apartment in search of her cat after the gang left, and fallen in with a Keeper who ‘managed’ a group of little beggars. The EGSF picked Juan up a few months after his dad left him on the bench.

  Eventually, the boys went roaming the near-jungle while Lissa resumed trying to craft anklets out of flowers. Sima pored over the bracelet’s map display, trying to get it to calculate the most likely spots for falling orbital debris to land, especially other lifeboats that might have supplies.

  The boys wandered back out of the jungle soon after. Lissa got up and hurried over to them, darting into grass taller than her waist. Sima gave up on the map after an hour or so and reclined in the fur-like meadow. Not long after, pats of rain landed on her.

  “Ugh.”

  The sky darkened from bright sunny to gloomy in a matter of two minutes. Yelping at the spots of cold hitting her, Sima laughed and ran over to the kids. They frolicked in the rain for a few minutes before the boys got the idea to play tag. Rain-soaked grass turned into a slippery mess. Any attempt to move faster than walking became sliding, which itself proved fun enough to keep doing over and over again. Their failed effort at tag mutated into simply trying to get as much of a running start as they could before sliding.

  Sima stopped Lissa from racing around before she overexerted herself, and carried her back to the lifeboat to get in out of the rain, lest she catch a chill. If they had blankets, she might’ve wrapped the girl in one. The boys once again started a branch-sword duel, which set Sima laughing hysterically as neither one of them could take a swing wi
thout falling over.

  “Okay, enough. The rain’s cold. Come inside now,” called Sima. Ugh. When did I turn into a mother?

  Austin and Juan hurried over and ducked into the lifeboat, dripping wet. Sima held the water jug out the door to fill it, since she figured a planet devoid of pollution would have perfectly drinkable rainwater.

  Still, she had a purifier unit in the survival kit, so she decided to run the water through it.

  As darkness approached, the rain tapered off to a light drizzle. Sima used the fabricator to ‘print’ some chicken for dinner, and even cooked it using a sheet of metal off the wall as a ‘pan’ over the portable campfire. They sat around inside, safe from the water, though several streams leaked in from the multiple holes in the roof. Within an hour, more than half the floor inside ran with water rushing toward the low end of the lifeboat.

  “You said we couldn’t stay in the cave because we’d sleep in water,” said Juan. “There’s water here, too.”

  “The pods are dry,” said Austin. “And they have cushions.”

  “No!” shouted Lissa, a pronounced rattle in her airway.

  Conversation stalled in the wake of the reminder of what almost happened.

  Austin and Juan broke the silence a few minutes later with a discussion about superheroes from one of the movie series they’d both seen. Lissa arranged herself in a narrow channel of dry floor and stretched out. Sima crawled under the junk wall to the ‘bathroom’ and made use of the cryonic fluid bucket, after which she dumped it out a convenient hole.

  “He did!” yelled Juan. A faint fleshy smack followed.

  Austin growled.

  Oh crap. Sima hurried to crawl back as fast as she could, suffering a painful but bloodless scratch on her back from a pointy metal bit.

  By the time she emerged from the tight passage, Austin and Juan had gotten into a rolling fistfight that wound up with Juan on his back in a puddle where the water collected at the low end of the room. Austin knelt on top of him, fist cocked. Sima scrambled over and grabbed him around the middle, trying to pull him away, though the boys kept throwing punches at each other.

  “Knock it off!” yelled Sima.

  Neither boy slowed their attacks.

  “Stop!” shrieked Lissa, before collapsing in a fit of hard coughing.

  Both boys stared guiltily at her, and gave up fighting.

  “What on Earth got into you two?” asked Sima. She rushed to Lissa’s side and held her, patting her back.

  “He said Dad didn’t love me.” Juan glared at the floor.

  “If he loved you, he wouldn’t have abandoned you on that bench. I didn’t say it to be mean.” Austin folded his arms.

  Juan spun toward him. “He did love me. He wanted me to get outta La Propagación so I didn’t get shot!”

  “Austin,” said Sima. “I think Juan’s father loved him a whole lot to be able to give him up. He thought his son would have a better life, even if it meant never seeing him again.”

  Juan darted to the tunnel, crying, and crawled in, likely to hide in the ‘bathroom.’

  “Ow,” muttered Lissa, still coughing, but slower. “Sorry I yelled. I’m not supposed to yell.”

  “It’s all right.” Sima kept patting her on the back.

  Austin plopped down to sit on the floor. “I dunno. I guess I just thought if you had a kid, the worst thing in the world would be never seeing them again.”

  “A parent who doesn’t love their kid is like my mother.” Sima frowned.

  “What did she do?” asked Austin.

  Lissa peered up at her with sad eyes.

  “It’s more like what she didn’t do. Never really talked to me. Never hugged me. Never smiled at me or really did anything besides let me live in her apartment. Not even a ‘good morning.’ The only time she ever talked to me was when she yelled about something. She only had me as bait, and my dad didn’t bite. So she hated me for not helping her marry a rich Citizen.”

  “Sorry.” Austin leaned against her. “You’re a much better mom than your mom was.”

  That lump appeared in her throat again. She put one arm around him, the other around Lissa, and felt like crying and laughing simultaneously. Her situation had gone way beyond anything she ever imagined having to deal with. Being caught between Magdalena’s, running jobs for Nalas, or trusting the EGSF with their Progenitor project sounded so tame by comparison. Well, before she understood what would happen.

  Juan emerged and sat nearby, sorta joining the group hug.

  She glanced up at the ceiling. The patter of raindrops ebbed and faded, imparting a hollow melody over the steady background of Lissa’s rasp. Going to work for Magdalena didn’t seem at all scary now, compared to this… but looking around at the three faces staring up at her, Sima shuddered under a crash of guilt. If she hadn’t wound up going for that nutri-pack spill, all three of these kids would already have been dead.

  No… I’m glad I got arrested. I’m glad I’m here for them.

  24

  Story Time

  Austin mumbled another apology to Juan for saying his dad didn’t love him.

  The younger boy made a face like he tried to think of something nasty to say back about Austin’s father going crazy, but wound up looking down and sighing. “’Kay.”

  Sima stretched out on her back, trying to stay inside a dry patch of floor. Raindrops continued pelting the lifeboat’s roof. The storm had regained strength, creating dozens of tiny waterfalls that spilled in from the various holes in the hull and gathered in numerous rivulets rushing toward the low end of the chamber. She tried to sleep, but between the noise, her mind wandering among old memories, worries about her present situation, and even fearing that any tiny itch or bug bite could turn into a fatal issue kept her awake.

  Every droplet of sweat crawling over her skin made her flinch.

  When the stickiness became unbearable, she looked around at the various streams leaking in and got an idea. Sima crawled under the debris wall to check the rear area for another stream, but the ceiling there had remained intact. The lack of privacy bothered her to a point, but being sticky bugged her more.

  As casual as she could make herself be, she shimmied back to the larger section of lifeboat, undressed, and stood under one of the streams like a shower. The water cascaded over her head and rolled down her body. Neither cold nor warm, it proved refreshing. For a few minutes, she simply stood and basked in it before starting to wash herself as best she could with her hands, keeping her back to the half-awake kids. Sima smirked at the jagged bit of metal sticking out of the wall upon which she’d hung her clothes, wondering at what point the idea of taking a shower (such as it was) in a room with other people had gone from no way in hell to no big deal.

  Once she grew tired of standing under a downpour, she stood beside the stream and scrubbed her undergarments. They had soaked with sweat—which didn’t strike her as the healthiest thing to keep wearing—plus with the interior of the lifeboat having turned into one big watery mess, they also felt rather pointless.

  “I can’t sleep,” said Austin. “You too?”

  “Yeah,” muttered Sima.

  “What’cha doing?” asked Austin.

  She didn’t turn to look back at him. “Taking a shower. We’ve all been wearing the same pants for a couple days and they’re kinda rank. I just felt sticky.”

  “Oh.” He laughed. “Well, at least two of us have. I think Juan lost his.”

  “No. They’re in the wall,” said Juan in a sleepy half-whisper.

  Sima smiled. “You should wash, too.”

  Skin squeaked on metal as Austin clambered to his feet and yawned. “Okay.”

  While he stood in another waterfall to clean himself, Sima re-hung her wet clothes on a jutting scrap of metal to dry, then collected Juan’s shorts from a cubby in the wall to wash. He hadn’t worn them in a couple days, but still. No sense leaving them dirty, and she needed something to do as she couldn’t sleep. Lissa hadn’t tou
ched her briefs since Sima washed them in the river, so those, she considered clean enough to leave alone. She did, however, save them from the low end of the lifeboat where the constant flooding runoff had created a veritable swimming pool.

  “Crap,” said Austin, glancing down at the knee-deep water he stood in. “We’re flooding.”

  Sima twisted left to look.

  Because the lifeboat sat at an angle with the entry hatch on the downward end, water had risen to almost halfway up the wall. The edge of the flood stopped inches from where Lissa and Juan contorted themselves to avoid the runoff streaming across the floor. Fortunately, the water level remained constant. Numerous holes in the sides at that height let it drain faster than it poured in from above. Unless the storm reached impossible proportions, their ‘home’ wouldn’t flood any higher.

  Giving up on sleep, Lissa took advantage of the ‘indoor pool,’ sitting and splashing for a little while before noticing Austin taking a ‘shower,’ at which point, she gave herself a bath. Juan dove into the deepest part of the flood to swim back and forth across the room. Sima cast a longing glance at her wet clothes hanging on the wall, but resigned herself to going without them until they dried. It still bugged her a little, but not as much as having soggy fabric clinging to her.

  Eventually, fatigue got the better of the kids and they all gathered close as they usually did to sleep. Normally, the closed confines of the lifeboat didn’t swelter too badly at night, but the rain had cooled the air somewhat, making it comfortable if not a little chilly. They clustered for warmth, everyone still wet. Only Lissa shivered as if cold, but she grinned.

  “Tell us a story?” asked Lissa, breaking the silence.

  The request stymied her. Mom provided only the most basic of needs, buying food and allowing her to have a bedroom. If she could’ve taught an infant to change her own diapers, she would have. The woman offered nothing in the way of attention. Sima’s thoughts drifted back to a language teacher she’d had in maybe first grade who sometimes read to the class. She choked up at the memory of him, more specifically how she used to fantasize about him being her father.