She shrugged her good shoulder. "By keelhauling all dissenters?"
"By popular vote. That meant paying the men fairly, and giving the officers a voice in how the ship was run. Like we did in the jukes."
"I hate this."
He exhaled through his nose. "We've committed them to war. If they don't get a say in how it's run, as soon as they get scared, or Valiant offers them a deal, they'll cut our throats."
"I said I hate it," she said, enunciating her annoyance. "I didn't say I wouldn't do it."
"Good talk. For once, one of us didn't wind up bleeding."
"Or thrown in the clink. I'm sorry about that. I didn't know they'd abandoned you."
"I'm not about to let the past hold us back. Not when the present is so important."
"Agreed." Still seated on the bunk, she sprawled back on her palms. "It's funny. When you came here and said we needed to talk, I was sure you meant about us."
"Until I knew you'd put the Locker before yourself, there could be no us."
She laughed softly. "You're not the kid I grew up with. You're not afraid to lead anymore. To step up and make your demands."
"Is that a problem?"
"I think I like it."
"You'd better," he said. "Or you'd never be able to stand yourself."
"So?" She met his eyes, blinking back what might have been a tear. "Can there be an us?"
Ced shook his head. "That's dangerous. If something happens between us, it would crack our leadership. Drive a schism into the Locker."
Kansas lowered her gaze. "You're right. Can't let what we want get in the way of what we need to do."
"I said it's dangerous." He smiled at her. "I didn't say I wouldn't do it."
* * *
They arrived on the Locker. The streets were filthy, the people loud. Parts of it had been trashed or burned by the internal conflicts that Iggi Daniels had been fostering. While Webber and MacAdams rented some ludicrous treehouse in one of the station's larger parks, Rada got her own room near the port.
She kept up with her messages and the news just enough to learn that the Locker's civil war was over. Ced and Kansas Carruth had formed a coalition with the gangs that had opposed them. There were some ongoing arguments about local politics that Rada didn't particularly understand, but nothing serious enough to provoke more violence.
Webber messaged her with an offer to show her the sights. Even when he clarified that none of these would be bar-related, she turned him down. She felt like she was being squeezed in a giant hand, crushed so slowly she could hear her bones groan.
The third night after arriving on the Locker, the feeling was still getting heavier. She put a glass under the dispenser and filled the bottom with grog. The first drink made her choke. The second was smooth. The third was everything.
She woke a few minutes before noon. Headache. Churning stomach. Hot skin. Tongue so dry she could use it to sand down a table. Knowing she wouldn't be able to sleep any longer, she went to the dispenser, pouring herself a water embedded with vitamins and nutrients. She slugged it down in two long pulls.
She stared at the nozzle a moment, then punched in the setting for grog. Just enough to clear her head. As it began to pour, she snatched up the glass and hurled it across the room. It shattered into transparent safety beads which sprung from the wall like hail on a sidewalk.
She got another glass. Filled it with coffee. Sat at the table and sipped. When it was gone, she messaged Webber. "Can you come over?"
He showed up twenty minutes later, clothes rumpled, the creases lined with dust, like they were the same ones he'd tossed beside his bed the night before.
"Everything cool?" he said. "You sounded a little shaky."
She dispensed two cups of coffee and took them to the table and sat down. "I drank last night."
"Me too. Had a blast. So what?"
"So I can't do that. Once I get started, I don't stop. I don't want to screw up again."
"Okay," he said. "So don't do it."
"It's not that easy."
"Probably not. Except it kind of is, isn't it?"
She stood. "Thanks for coming over."
"Hang on." He held up his hands. "I'll stay. Okay? As long as you want. And if you try to screw up again, I won't let you."
Rada licked her lips, then lowered herself to her seat. "Thank you."
"No problem." He swirled his coffee under his nose. "I'm going to need a few tools, though."
"Tools?"
"To keep you in line. You know if there's a whip store around here?"
She laughed dryly. "You're sure this isn't cutting into your time?"
He pushed out his lower lip. "I think I can find space for it in my busy degenerate schedule. So. What do you want to do?"
"Go back to sleep. But I probably need to get my blood moving more."
He drained the rest of his coffee and accompanied her down to the street. Outside, he cast a critical eye at the clean-cut pedestrians and the smooth white towers.
"Everything near the port is so…legitimate. Let's go see the real Locker."
He jogged down the steps of a tube station. As they rode, he caught her up on recent events. While some Earth governments, including most of the major players, had commended FinnTech for finally taking a stand against outer-System piracy, others had denounced them for their aggression. A small coalition had even insisted they return the Hive to its proper owners.
"Wonderful," Rada said. "So when can we expect their fleets to arrive?"
He chuckled. "Physical support or not, it's a real milestone. This is the first time since the start of this whole mess that anyone has cared about what we're doing."
"And all it took was first contact with a hostile species."
"Baby steps, man. Baby steps."
They got out and headed up to street level. Here, the buildings were gray with age. People wore light jackets in every color of the rainbow. They skewed younger than back at the port. Rather than streets with delineated sidewalks, the spaces between buildings were narrow channels dammed up with vendors and stalls.
"And what makes this better than back at the port?" Rada said. "The stupidity of their haircuts?"
"I didn't say it was better. The rich places in the System all look the same. The true colors of a place only come out where its people are pushed close to the edge."
To her eyes, the people looked the same as anywhere else: trying so hard to look young, hip, and aggressive that it came off as anything but. Like a child trying on his dad's clothes, except without any of the playfulness or fun. She thought about saying as much, then felt a wave of self-disgust.
"Toman's digging into the OHS," Webber said, stepping over a small black dog wearing a tight red shirt. "Sounds like they destroyed some of their files when they saw which way the wind was blowing. Rest of it's encrypted. But if LOTR can shake anything loose, he's hoping to figure out how to neutralize the implants they put in the kids here. And if he can do that, the next step is to try to put the injections to their original use."
"Ending disease? I'll believe it when I see it."
For a while, they did nothing but stroll around. Webber pointed out places he'd been to, told stories of his early days as an outlaw. Late afternoon, Rada felt ready to test her stomach with some food. They got a booth in a hole in the wall that served local fare, which was heavy on citrus and shredded crab. At least the citrus made sense.
They sat around, digesting, then Webber took her to a park of glowing trees. That was a new one. With their legs getting tired, they headed back to her apartment. She felt a little foolish, having Webber around as a babysitter, but she didn't want to send him away yet, either.
He jumped at her suggestion of a monster movie. They set up in the living room. During a lull, he glanced her way. "They have implants, you know. Things that will process the alcohol for you, spare your organs. Or that will convert it to water the instant it hits your stomach. I knew a guy who got one of those. Once in a
while, he'd still drink a beer, but he was pretty much done the instant he got it."
"All that does is close the door on the beast," Rada said. "It's still there inside you. And now it's doing damage where you can't see it."
"Whereas you want to drag it into the light and hit it with a shovel."
"I don't think I can kill it. I just want to make sure it can never break its leash."
Webber fell asleep during the third movie. She drifted off before it finished. Hours later, she woke to a blank screen and a quiet room. She thought about getting up and going to her bed, but Webber's snoring was strangely comforting. She got up for good around nine. Compared to the previous morning, she felt as healthy and strong as a hero of old, capable of striking down the gods.
Webber woke with a start, glancing around the room in a mild, disoriented panic before remembering where he was and sinking back into the couch. "How'd the movie end?"
"With the credits, I assume. I can't believe you fell asleep first. I was sure you were going to put the moves on me."
"The moves?" He sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Was that part of your plan?"
"No. Just seems like a Webber thing to do."
"I'd take issue with that, except you're not wrong." He wandered into the kitchen, nozzling coffee from the dispenser. "I'm right out there with you. Fighting the good fight. I know exactly what it's like to get ordered to do the impossible. I know how much depends on us. And how bad it sucks when you can't get it done. Or when you lose someone along the way. I can't do this alone. None of us can. So we have to keep each other strong."
She fiddled with the handle of her cup. "You're pretty wise, huh?"
"That's because I'm so good at making mistakes. I'm not as good about learning from them, but that's what life is, right? Doing it better next time?"
"Could be. If you ever get tired of carrying out Toman's insane demands, I'm sure there's a spot for you among the monks of the Ever-Changing Way."
They ate breakfast down in the lobby. Rada put it on Toman's tab. Finished, they stood.
Webber brushed crumbs from his shirt. "You need me to stay some more?"
She looked inside, but whatever had been there the other night was gone. "No."
"You sure? Trust me, I don't have anything better to do."
"This might not be the last time," she said. "But for now, I'm fine."
* * *
Ced knocked on the door and stepped back. The door opened, revealing Rada Pence. She looked tired, but in a good way, like a runner after a race they hadn't been sure they'd be able to finish.
"Ms. Pence?" he said. "Can we talk?"
"Only if you call me Rada. I'm not quite old enough to be your mother."
She let him inside. The room smelled funny, but not unpleasant. Though everyone had their own scent, this one seemed foreign. Maybe it was an offworlder thing.
Rada moved to the middle of the room, standing there. "What can I do for you?"
"I wanted to thank you," he said. "In person."
"For what?"
"For freeing us."
She squinted at him. "You do remember that you're the one who broke us out of jail, right? And that it was your fleet that saved ours?"
"Iggi Daniels was about to take the final step in making us subservient. If the Hive hadn't come here, it was only a matter of time before we became another one of Valiant's holdings."
"We had our own reasons for getting involved."
"Whatever your reasons, Kansas and I are now positioned to make the people of the Locker free for the first time in our lives."
"Then it would hardly be right to hold that debt over your heads. Especially after what you've done for us." Her eyebrows swung together. "Back up, did you say Kansas Carruth is still in charge? How can you possibly think that's a good idea?"
"What's the problem?"
"I don't know, maybe because she's the one who locked us up in the first place? On orders from Iggi Daniels?"
"She's not in charge. Not by herself. We're partners. And we're bringing all the crews into the new government."
Rada snorted. "Kid, I've spoken to her. She's completely bloodless. Your new-found freedom will end the first time she disagrees with you. Then you'll learn what the inside of those cells looks like."
He didn't think it was the time to admit Kansas had already locked him up in them. "She thought she needed to be like that—bloodless—to keep this place safe. She's had a change of heart."
"It won't last. When times get tough, people like that always revert to their old ways. I don't like this at all. I'm not going to tell you who can and can't lead your station. But I am going to recommend to Toman that, as long as she's in charge, the Hive and the Locker need to keep a healthy distance."
"You think people always fall back to what they were before?" He beckoned to her. "I want to show you something."
"She can say whatever she wants. I've already seen her fly her true colors."
"We're not going to see Kansas. Not like you think. Now go get your shoes."
Her mouth pulled into a funny smile. She moved to fetch her shoes from beside the door, keeping her eyes on him all the while. Out on the street, he weaved through the well-dressed port crowds, heading to the nearest tube station.
"Where exactly are we going?" Rada said after their second line transfer.
"I'd point to it on the map, but it isn't there."
Four stops later, he hopped off and jogged up the steps into Barker's Park. Carnival rides soared and spun, lights muted by the artificial sunlight streaming from the dome. He left the flashing signs and motormouthed men behind, bringing Rada to a stairwell running up the middle of an empty warehouse. It appeared the stairs only went up, but when he went around to the back side of the steps, a gap opened, leading down. They had to duck to keep from bonking their heads.
They entered the humid stillness of the crypts.
Rada flipped her device onto its flashlight function, shining it over the graffiti, trash, and dirt. "If your plan is to kill me and hide the body, I must warn you I have very determined friends."
"We're almost there."
He kept his hand on the knife in his pocket, keeping both eyes out for the deranged or outcast people who liked to call the crypts home. After a series of turns, he came to a blank wall. He flipped out his knife and stuck it into a crack in the beige bricks. The knife caught, springing a latch; a door seemed to materialize in the stone, swinging inward without a sound, releasing a puff of musty air.
The hallway beyond had no graffiti. No trash. Nothing but a few brown water stains and patches of green mold.
"What is this place?" Rada said.
"We're not sure. Could have been for smugglers. Or maybe the original architects built it into the station just in case. Whatever it was for, people don't use it much anymore. But it's there, if you know where to look."
They passed a series of doorless, empty rooms, shoes whispering on the grainy rock. Ahead, the tunnel terminated in a final room.
"We used to come down here when we were little kids," Ced said.
"You mean last month?"
"Years ago. Not long after we'd been sold to the crews. Kansas and I came here to escape, if only for a few hours."
He stepped into the room, shining his device across it. One wall was painted with blues and greens. Fields and mountains, streams and seas. Sloppy transitions, abrupt changes in perspective, and shifts in paint shade showed where one patch had been finished and another begun, but the mural was continuous, filling the wall from corner to corner. The work was all shaky lines and squashed shapes, but rather than feeling embarrassed by his amateurism, it made him want to smile.
"I made that stuff," he said. He pointed to the opposite wall. "That was Kansas."
This wall started with blacks and reds. Monsters with long claws and shadowed faces. Bodies lying awkwardly, great pools of blood beneath them. These images were as childlike as his: on some of the figures, one leg was twice a
s long as the other; grimacing mouths extended past the border of the person's head.
Where Ced's drawing had shown a single consistent world, with one section more or less the same as the other, Kansas' wall shifted a third of the way across. The red diminished. So did the monsters. Instead, one section showed spaceships zipping toward a distant star. Another painting showed a blond girl standing on the top of an apartment tower looking down on the streets. In another, she held hands with a man and a woman. Soon, the blond girl was punching out grown men in blue uniforms, or blasting a hole in the wall of a prison cell, or kung fu kicking an alien that had grabbed a young boy in its tentacles.
After a while, though the particulars changed, they all showed the same thing: the blond girl leading a group of kids out of a dark place and into a light one.
"You said when times get tough, people become whatever they were before," Ced said. "Well, this is the person I've always known."
Rada moved past him, touching the wall. Her fingers moved over the years-old paint as gently as if it were a newborn chick, but her expression was completely unreadable.
* * *
The kid led her back up to the street. He offered to show her home, but she told him she'd manage. Alone, she walked in the vague direction of her apartment. After three or four blocks, she messaged Toman. She'd hardly gotten her device back into her pocket before it pinged.
He wanted to see her. In person. She called up directions and took the tube to his building, a glassy spire overlooking a park. He opened the door before she could knock. Though it had been less than two weeks since he'd lost his home to homicidal invaders, he smiled readily, and as he led her to the balcony, his steps were as springy and fluid as a dancer or a fighter.
"Surprised you got back to me so fast," Rada said. "From the sound of things, you're so busy you can hardly remember your own name."
"I am never too busy for my people." He leaned against the railing, a two hundred foot drop yawning below him. "Especially you."
"No need to flatter me. I'm back on the job."
"Should I bother to ask what brought you back? Or is this one of those Secret Rada Things?"
Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) Page 27