The Color of Rain

by Cori McCarthy

  I struggle as his hands grope my hips and chest. He rips my arm up and slides back my sleeve—and jolts away.

  “Re-red!” he stutters. “Get out! Get out now!” His wide, hairy face turns all over the ceiling like he’s checking for a secret pair of eyes. I get my arms around a now groaning Lo and lift her by the waist. “GET OUT!” he roars again.

  I trip into the hall only to hear yelling voices at the far end.

  A mass of men coming our way.

  I jog from their drunken calls, gripping Lo and ducking into a room labeled STORAGE. I drop her on a pile of rags and close us in, holding the door shut until I hear the crew members passing. I slide a crate against the frame.

  Then I go to her.

  Of all the times that I’ve found her passed out or beaten up, this is the worst. Her face is as colorless as the Earth City sky, and the greasy filth across her hair makes me gag. I fill a bucket of water from the utility faucet and kneel before her, scrubbing her skin. Her forehead is aflame with fever, and she moans.

  “Rain,” I think I hear her say.

  “Right here.” I tie her hair back with a rag; the dyed pink underneath has lost too much of its brightness. “You knew I’d come.”

  Her eyes tilt open, and I gasp. One of her irises is rimmed with blood. Like someone stabbed it. “Lo! Your eye!”

  “Hit it,” she tries. “Jeb hit it with bottle. Can’t see out of it.” She scoots a little higher on the pile of blankets, her eyelids suddenly flying wide. “Rain! It’s you!”

  “Shhh. I’m right here.” I hold her shoulders to settle her back, but she fights me.

  “Thank the stars! I’ve been trying everything to get up to you,” she says. “I tried to sneak in the elevator, but Jeb . . .” Her voice falls away, making my stomach twist with guilt. Why hadn’t I tried harder to see her before now? How could I be so blinded by needing to see Walker that I didn’t realize that this was bound to happen?

  Lo shakes me. “But I found them! I found them!”

  “Lo, you have to calm down. You’re a mess.”

  She pushes my hands away and takes a few rough breaths. “I was trying to get to you, and I found them in the cargo.”

  “Found who?”

  Her bloody eye pierces my gaze. “The missing Touched.”

  “Shit, Lo. I don’t have time for your paranoid stories.” I prop up her shoulders. “Sleep, and we’ll talk in a little while.”

  She springs forward faster than I would have believed possible and squeezes my face between her thin hands. “Listen, I found them. The Touched are here. On this ship. That asshole captain keeps them in cargo.”

  I pull her hands away. “Why would Johnny have the Touched in his cargo hold?”

  “Because he sells them.”

  I laugh again, and Lo slaps me. Hard.

  My mind spins as I refocus. “You hit me!”

  “They’re sold, Rain! Like slaves. Sweet freakin’ mess, girl! They’re locked in! They’re starving!”

  “You’ve had conspiracy ideas about the Touched since I met you,” I say, “but I think this place has really screwed with your head.” I glance around the dingy storage room. “Mine, too.”

  She kicks the crate away from the door. “If you won’t believe me, I’ll show you.” Before I can stop her, she’s streaked out into the hall, and I have to run to catch up.

  Lo throws up twice on the stairway. I try to hold her shoulders, but she keeps pushing forward. “Never seen you this bad. Let’s stop for a minute.”

  “We don’t have a minute. Jeb will be looking for me, and I’m assuming that the captain didn’t just let you down here.”

  “I came to warn you, Lo. That Kaya girl—”

  “She dead?” Lo glances at me from the side.

  I nod.

  “Figured. She got bumped down to yellow before you came back from meeting the captain, and then we were forced down here. I saw her once, and then, not again.” Lo wipes her nose on the back of her arm. “This really takes the cake of all the freakin’ messes I’ve been in, Rain.”

  “I know. Which is why we shouldn’t be crawling deeper into the shadows. There are cameras everywhere.” Lo has taken me to the level where Ben stabbed that man. To the very spot. “I’ve already seen what happens down here.”

  The huge cargo doors are closed, but an eerie sound slips through them like the hum of penned animals.

  “There’s a window over here.” She shimmies up a pile of metal crates and beckons to me. I climb, pulling onto my toes to look through a slit of a window.

  “See now?” Lo spits.

  I almost lose my grip.

  Inside the huge cargo hold, hundreds of people stand in jumbled heaps and lie in sickening piles. Men. Women. Elderly. Even kids. Hundreds of them.

  “Rain, there’s another hold just this big and just as full!”

  I open my mouth but my words are broken into sounds. I swallow and try again. “How is this real? I mean, these people . . . are those Earth City people?”

  “Those are Touched people. The ones stolen by the cops.” Lo crosses her arms. “Well? Say something. Who’s paranoid now?”

  I shake my head. Inside, I’m blank. I’m floating as though someone dropped me out the airlock.

  “You told me that you didn’t have time to care about the ones who disappear,” Lo says. “You care now?”

  The people are strewn all over one another, calling out and wailing.

  Every one of them could be Walker.

  “Mom and Jeremy.” I scan the crowd as though I might find my mom or big brother’s face among them.

  Lo touches my cheek. “You’re thinking about your family. I can’t stop thinking about Mom. Who knows how long the cops have been shipping them off planet. I have a feeling, Rain . . . this is just the lip’s tip of something huge.”

  “You said sold. You said slavery. How could they get away with that?”

  “We’re not on Earth City. We’re in the middle of space freakin’ nowhere. And there are no rules. No right and wrong.” The width of her eyes shows off the bloodied one, and she taps her yellow bracelet against my red one. “There are no laws out here. Just deranged people with power. Like that Johnny.”

  “Who are they sold to? And for what purpose?”

  “No one could tell me that,” Lo says. “This is a huge secret. Most of the crew don’t know anything, but Jeb talks when he’s drinking. Still, he doesn’t know much. But I bet I know someone who does.” She jams her finger against the glass pane. “That Mec.”

  I follow where she’s pointing.

  Ben stands at the edge of the Touched crowd. He holds a tablet and scrolls down it, counting heads like he’s running the whole. Damn. Thing.

  CHAPTER

  12

  The rag slips from Lo’s hair and smacks on the ground, and I remember the filthy, balding man that Ben stabbed. He was Touched! Helpless! Like my mom and Jeremy . . . and Ben—the guy who proclaimed to want to help the Touched—he killed him?

  White-hot questions flare inside me as I watch a small girl claw at his pant leg. He pushes her back to slip through the door.

  “I’ll kill him,” I say, already shimmying down the pile of crates.

  “Whoa, whoa, Rain!” Lo charges after me, but she’s not fast enough. Ben closes the cargo doors behind him, and I crash into him. He sprawls on the floor, his tablet skidding away.

  I straddle his chest, pinning his shoulders with my knees, and punch him in his steel eye.

  “Stop!” he yells, bringing up his forearms and grunting as my fists pummel his chest and shoulders. I connect with his mouth and blood spots my knuckles.

  Ben gets his solid arms around me and rolls us so that he’s on top. He squeezes my hips with his knees and pins my wrists.

  “Rain?”

  “Who else?” I grapple my legs up around his waist and pull so that I’m on top again, but he doesn’t let go of my arms. One of his eyes swells with the onset of a bruise, and
the other reflects the light of the ceiling strips. I twist out of his grip and slide off him.

  He touches the blood at the edge of his mouth. “What in the hell was—”

  “What is this? What is all this?!” I point to the cargo door. “There are people in there!”

  He gets to his feet and offers his hand. “Get up fast. We have to move. The alarms will be back on in minutes.”

  “You can’t explain this away!” I yell. “Are you that powerful and amazing, oh Mec?”

  “Course not. But I have a few answers.”

  “You better have a lot of them.” I ignore his offer of a hand and get to my feet. He’s annoyingly calm after the way I just mauled him, and I rub my twisted wrists and call out for Lo.

  She peers from around the corner.

  Ben looks from her to me. “Hell, Rain. You really know how to complicate things.”

  Ben leads us to the docking bay where I first entered Imreas. We pass the hover cab in its airtight chamber along with several other heavy doors with small portholes. A rolling clank sounds from one, and I pause to look through the glass as the noise builds to a sharp snap. Doors tear open at the back, creating a roar of rushing air and revealing the Void beyond the ship—an airlock.

  Ben has paused to watch, too. “Automatic air dump. It releases the pressure between the outer and inner hulls.”

  “Great.” I grip myself, shaking away the idea of a person flying out of that room. At the far end of the catwalk a small space vessel hangs from the high ceiling by a chain net like a souvenir. The word MELEE is stenciled on its side.

  “In here.” He presses a door release and climbs into the side of the ship. I lead Lo through, and he shuts it behind us. “You’re so damn lucky, Rain. The only reason you didn’t set off a host of alarms is because I was down there. You realize how lucky that makes you?”

  I ignore him. “What did I just see in that room?”

  “Give me a second.” He sits in a captain’s chair before a control screen and his fingers fly across it.

  “I want to know now!”

  He pauses; his gaze is fierce despite the fact that one of his eyes is swollen shut. “Let me check the security logs before Johnny sees them and offs us all, will you?”

  “He’s asleep,” I say. “I just left him.” I swallow the sudden flash of Johnny leaning over me in his slick bed, his body working against mine. . . .

  Ben pulls up an image of me in the elevator a few moments ago. His fingers fly over the controls until I disappear from the video.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m looping it. Deleting you from the record.”

  I step back and let Ben work. The vessel we’re in is as small as a hover cab only more equipped. It reminds me of the small, rotting ship on the pier without the rust and age. Someone moans behind me, and I swing around.

  A bald man lies on a bunk, his chest bandaged.

  “Ben,” I hear myself whisper. This is not just any man. It’s the man I saw murdered—stabbed.

  Ben finishes his work at the control screen and crosses to the bunk.

  “Ben,” I say again like it’s the only word I know. “This is him.”

  “I know who it is, Rain.” He sits beside the man and inserts a medical tube into the bend of his own elbow. Blood circles through it, surging straight into the man’s arm.

  “What’s going on?” Lo asks from where she cowers by the door.

  “I saw him kill this man. I saw him,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t see me save him afterward, did you?” Ben gives the man a shot of something that makes his moans stop.

  “You’re not a murderer.” I hold back from adding, “I knew it,” but I slip to the floor by Ben’s feet. “Tell me what is going on here.”

  He checks the man’s pulse while he speaks. “Johnny’s business has nothing to do with passengers. Or girls. That’s a front. He sells the Earth City Touched to a slaver known as Leland. The K-Force have been after both of them for years, but they do their trading in the Static Pass, and no one has been able to take them down so far.”

  “The who?” Lo asks at the same time that I say, “What’s the Static Pass?”

  He pauses. “The more you two know, the worse this is. You get that, don’t you?”

  I exchange looks with Lo. “We need to know,” I say.

  “Those are our people in that hold,” she adds, tightening her arms around her chest.

  “The Static Pass is a section of the Void near Edge space. Electromagnetic fields shut down there and ships kind of glide through—without power or any technology. Johnny does his trading in secret there without interference from the K-Force.”

  “The K-Force?”

  “Mec space police. Or vigilantes, really. They have ties to the military on the Edge, but mostly theirs is a moral mission: rid the universe of filth.”

  “They sound delusional.”

  “They’re the only ones doing something about the lawlessness of the Void.”

  “What does Johnny want the Touched for?” I ask.

  “Mining on the asteroid formation beyond the Void. A place called the Ridges. It’s dangerous work. Most of them die within a year or two. Some less.”

  “So they are slaves.” My voice shrinks around the words. Mom and Jeremy . . . and even Walker, if they got their hands on him. For long moments, the vessel called Melee is silent apart from the ragged breath of the unconscious man. Lo holds herself, rocking back and forth until I rest her head on my lap. In no time, she falls into a dead sort of sleep.

  Ben brings out his dose rod, giving the man something that makes his breath slow and quiet.

  “He’s Touched, isn’t he?” Shivers break out across my arms as I remember the man’s moan of Help us.

  “He is, but he has these sane moments. He kept figuring out how to escape . . . that’s what you saw when I . . . you know.”

  “But why bother curing him if Johnny’s just going to sell him into slavery and a horrible death?”

  Ben disconnects the tube from his arm and paces around the room. “Because he didn’t deserve to die that way. Or maybe I just couldn’t stomach being a murderer. I’m a human being, Rain. Give me a little credit.” He takes the med disc from his pocket and hunkers down to my level, brushing Lo’s hair from her face before running the blue light over the bruised lid of her blood-stained eye. She murmurs my name in her sleep but doesn’t wake.

  “How could I have let this happen to her?” I say in a hushed voice that doesn’t reach Ben. He collapses in the captain’s chair with a slight groan, the eye I punched turning purple. I have to do something to turn our fates around. Something good for once.

  I slide Lo’s head from my lap and cross the minor distance to him. “Give me that disc thingy. Let me fix your eye.” I hold out my hand.

  “Not the eye. But you can do my mouth.” He wiggles his jaw and hands me the med disc. “Feeling guilty for attacking me?”

  “Not especially.” I raise his chin, looking down into his face. “You should have told me the truth upfront. Walker and I would never have gotten on this ship.”

  “Yes, you would. You couldn’t hear me back there. You were blinded by your dreams about the Void and the need to help your brother.” He’s right. What could he have said to stop me? I hold the device like I’ve seen him do and pass it over his mouth. The blue light makes the bruise fade to yellow before it blends into the creamy color of his skin.

  “You had some moves back there. When I jumped you.” I wipe a small crust of blood at the edge of his lip with my knuckle. “Like someone taught you how to fight.”

  “Someone did,” he admits. “I’ve had training. You’ve got moves yourself.” I can’t get over how strong his stare is even with one eye—like it’s another muscle he’s honed.

  “My training was living on the street.” I press the disc into his hand. “And I have brothers.”

  “Brothers? You have another brother?”

&n
bsp; “Had. Jeremy was—well, he probably ended up in a place just like that cargo hold. Maybe the same one.” I look away. “I’ve got to go back to Johnny before he wakes and all hell breaks loose. Can Lo stay here?” I look around the small but cozy interior of the ship. It’s different from Imreas. The metal walls are without rough bolt lines, and everything is neat, sparse, and, well, military.

  He nods. “Melee is my ship—or at least it was before Johnny commandeered it. But he has no security tags or monitors here, and it isn’t under the lock of his thumbprint. It’s one of the only safe places on Imreas.” He stands, and I’m too close to him.

  “Give me a few minutes with Lo. I don’t know when I’ll see her again.”

  Ben leaves the vessel, and I wake her gently. “You have to listen,” I say as she rubs her face. “Johnny is using you to get to me. To make me do what he wants.”

  She sits up tall. “He stole your virginity.”

  “He didn’t rape me. I gave it to him. Like I agreed.” I dig my fingernails into my arms, suddenly panicked. I’ve never understood that phrasing of “stolen virginity.” How could he be the thief of what I was handing out? “It was easy, Lo. Like you said.”

  “Who do you think you’re lying to? And if you’ve interpreted what I do as easy, then you’ve never been listening to me. Not one bit.”

  I look away, touching my stomach. “Lo, do you ever feel like . . . like it’s not so bad?”

  “You mean, do I ever like it?” Her tone is all business, and it makes it hard for me to nod. “Rain, there are two types of working girls. There’s the ones who do it. And then there are the ones who feel it. He’ll want you so much more if you put yourself into it, but that means you’re giving away more than your skin. A lot more. And it’s not worth it. Do you follow?”

  “But I need to keep his interest, Lo. Otherwise I’ll have to start sleeping with anyone who pays. I’d rather stay with him. I need to stay with him.”

  “Rain, in this business, need is just about the worst word there is. All you really need is to stay alive. To make it to the Edge with Walker. Everything else is up for grabs.”