Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  I’m the captain of Kublai Khan. Whoever’s running her now is just keeping my seat warm. I suspect who would be running her now. Taja Roshan, who I dislike more than Cal. For some reason Lukacs doesn’t bring up her name, so maybe he doesn’t realize our rivalry. She was my lieutenant but not by choice, just because Falcone wanted one of his alpha crew to watch me on my own ship. But Lukacs doesn’t need to know that either, at least I don’t have to confirm it. Out loud I tell him, “You’re counting on the fact they’ll respect my link to you.”

  “Wouldn’t it give you some cachet?” Just like Ops. An overblown sense of their own importance.

  “If they believed me. If they didn’t shoot me on sight.”

  “You’re quite a convincing young man.”

  “I might not be that good. While we’re being honest, Andreas.”

  He smiles again. “Oh, I think you’re that good, Yuri.”

  I believe him on that. He’s gone to a lot of trouble so far. “None of this will work if I can’t even find the Khan. They probably don’t use the same codes or sinkholes I used months ago, and the last I looked, space is kinda big.”

  “I trust you had a contingency plan, Yuri. Once it hits the Send that you ‘died’ in prison, you just follow your recovery protocol. I’m sure they’ll find you.”

  He knows too much.

  “And what if they don’t trust it, and they meet me just to kill me?”

  He shrugs. “Then I don’t lose anything, do I.”

  “Except your precious plan of infiltration.”

  “Risk,” he says. “We both accept it.”

  Especially if he wants something more. To bring down the pirates? How enterprising. How philanthropic of Black Ops. Like hell that’s all he wants.

  I look into his face, not that it makes a difference. “Without pirates or strits, you’re out of business. That occur to you?”

  Now he sits. He positions his slate in front of him once more and folds his hands on it. “Your kind don’t die easy. Isn’t that what you pirates always say? Don’t fear for me or my job.”

  Just fear for your own life, he thinks. Fear for Finch’s. He lets me read it in his eyes. Why destroy something if you can control it? Somewhere beneath his words is the full truth.

  But Falcone trained me to be patient. So I’m obedient and listen to Andreas Lukacs lay it out, what he wants to lay out. What it’ll take to get me off this dirt, if not a way to get the dirt off me.

  Morry the Guard escorts me back to the general population, just like that woman had threatened and just like what Lukacs intended. To let me see Finch, no doubt. To remind me of this deal and the absolute mistake of it. But I make it anyway, like I’ve been making them for months, stitching them together in some desperate pattern that bleeds my fingers in the process.

  Once Lukacs leaves the interview room it’s a direct route for me, cuffed at both wrists and ankles, a shallow shuffle through the hallowed scrubbed-down halls of this high-security military prison. Straight back to the heart of hell.

  Except this hell spews cold vapors, sitting in the polar region of planet Earth, on a still-preserved island called Greenland. And maybe there’s color outside the tall gates and the reinforced steel chambers that keep our evil in, but we don’t see it. Outside is death weather in the winter, anyway, and military spacer and dirtsider alike are sent here if the deed you did was bad enough.

  They put me here because the majority of men inside these walls hate my kind. They wore uniforms in other lives, like Falcone had, and Falcone had bided time in this prison too, so maybe that was the thinking. I was never a part of EarthHub’s elite, so there can’t be any easy inside alliances for me, only hollow reminders of who I came from. Even the guards like to tell me. Pirate, they say, with a superior sneer. It becomes my name, like Whore or Geisha, but at least it’s one that matters. Own it and use it. It goes ahead of me like a shadow, and once or twice a week when people test the edges of that darkness, it bites back. It leaves bloodstains on the floor that trail after my heels like starving children.

  Even when they put me in solitary I can sit for hours with my eyes shut because darkness is nothing I haven’t bedded already.

  So even the guards became cautious.

  This one, Morry, holds my arm like a dance partner. All of his kind learned early that I would cause no trouble if they caused none with me. One or two of them tried taunting me, but I broke their bones and they backed off. One or two of them fell victim to my smile, as sweet and meaningless as romance, and got me perks of cigs and soap. Eventually the mean ones got tired of singling me out and left that up to the other inmates. Morry, with his sloping shoulders and hooded eyes, he never raises his voice or his weapon and seems almost apologetic for our route.

  “I’m taking you back to genpop,” he says, like I haven’t figured it already.

  My pace is the jerk and slip of the reluctant. A zombie gait. In the narrowness of the hall, it doesn’t even echo.

  For such an old prison, Kalaallit Nunaat is well kept up like the discarded concubine of some ancient lord. Beneath the polished veneer is a scoured surface that might crack with a laugh. The walls are as gray as near-winter skies, with dull red accents on doors and signs, and glossy green floors the color of seaweed. Dozens of locked and guarded steel gates, like chastity belts for bored wives, stand between the private interview rooms in the sprawling administration complex and the stacked-unit wings where the maligned residents live. The noise of distant voices carries on the cool air that churns through the long corridors.

  Not so different from pirate ships. Here you watch the shadows too, and take favors where you can.

  “You were in that interview room a long time,” Morry says conversationally, as he passes his nanobranded wrist through one gate scan and the next. The heavy bars clang and echo as they slide shut behind us, cutting off retreat. Black optic dots dog our asses, high and mighty on the walls.

  I shrug. “They thought I was cute.”

  “Police?”

  Spacers say pollies, dirtsiders say police. Morry is so much Earth-dirt that he bleeds grains of sand. Which doesn’t make him stupid, necessarily. It can be natural curiosity on his part, but you never know the routes that information takes.

  So I say, “Ask them.”

  And I wonder if Morry is one that Andreas Lukacs paid to plant optics in my cell or persecute Finch while I was in the box, if Morry knows everything already and just wants to play. His long face gives nothing but the stoic-guard glare. Some guards are notoriously easy to bribe. Or intimidate.

  I could ask him, but that would reveal too much of my own concerns. So he just walks at a steady pace and I hobble along beside him like a marionette with one string cut.

  Nothing changes in the landscape of clammy gray skin and arteries of red; we slip intravenous through one junkie’s arm to the next and it just gets busier—blue-clad guards and dark-suited prison officials going about their business. And more security checks: narrow scanning arches and big armed men that paw you with dedicated sobriety. We stop longer at the second-to-last gate so they can run a scanwand from the tips of my hair to the bottoms of my shoes, seeing through my clothing and my skin.

  Then we’re at the gate to Santa’s Workshop. That’s what they call the genpop division, here at Earth’s Northern Hemisphere. All the wicked little elves wait past that gate, eager to hammer you into someone’s special toy.

  My fingers grow stiff from the bone-chill air, so I curl them into fists behind me.

  We pick up another guard. I don’t recognize him, but it doesn’t matter, they’re all faceless at this point, like you make yourself faceless. He takes my arm from Morry, and Morry says, “See you later, Terisov.” As if I’ve done something that amuses him. I don’t have time to look closer at him; Mr. New Guard walks me through the final gate to the Workshop’s wide processing room. Fresh prisoners cuffed and shoved already into nonidentity grays sit like dutiful schoolboys along the benches. They look
up at me with shallow interest. I get moved to the head of the line. Seniority. Priority. Maybe Lukacs’s doing.

  “Back again, Terisov,” Stafford says, the fat official behind his high desk. Santa Claus himself, if Santa was disgruntled and underpaid. He motions me forward and the guard shuffles me up. “Gimme your eyes.”

  I lean my chest to the desk and Stafford shines his scan into both retinas. He reads the pen display. It seems to take longer than it should, or maybe it’s just my dread adding weight to the seconds.

  “Welcome home,” he says eventually, giving me a look as if he knows something I don’t. “I think Finch missed you,” he adds, not out of any concern. Maybe just to mock. Maybe to make me feel guilty.

  Mr. Guard escorts me through the high arch of Santa’s Workshop, past the corridor of optics and into the wide, half-occupied common area. We call it, not so creatively, the Hangout. It sits dead center of cell rings that rise three stories high, a coliseum of criminals controlled by a maneuverable, trijointed guard tower arm that can stretch from one side of the pit to the other in a matter of seconds. The tower bristles all around like a tank, protected by projectile-proof transparent plexpane.

  Mounted on the west wall is a broad holoframe, currently deactivated. Scattered below this gaudy altar are a poor man’s set of pews—plastic orange social seating nudged against long brown tables. The overall space gives a wide eyeline from the tiers of catwalks above. A few familiar enemies play games or cards at the tables. Nobody’s allowed optical connection here, no surprise, for fear of burndives. They might not be able to access outside systems, but a good diver can still muck up the localized ones. Even games can be compromised, and that would just cause a hassle to fix or piss off some prisoners who need their battle drama.

  In the center of the Hangout a dark man with a light beard laughs at me, looking up from his table’s game display.

  “See who come back to civilization.” He says it loud, and everyone looks up.

  I turn my ass and bound wrists to them and give a finger in greeting. “Hello, gentlemen.”

  The guard yanks me to the side.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say over my shoulder. “Wave on the vid, will you?”

  They laugh, but not from amusement. Anticipation. Like hyenas around a slab of day-old meat. My absence seems to have made them forget how many of them I bloodied in the past three months. Or maybe they remember all too well.

  Mr. Guard propels me down one of the straight corridors on the ground level, past impact-resistant, plex-fronted cells, some of them occupied by idle murderers. Two and three doors gape open to help air circulation and invite allies and dealmaking. Nobody’s locked down here until lights-out or inspection, or as a unitwide punishment. We can all walk around freely on most days, within gate parameters and under eyes and weapons. I doubt there are any corners unmonitored, especially if Ops has a hand in here, but what the guards and prison tyrants choose to notice is another thing.

  My cell at the end of the corridor sits empty, or so it seems until I’m directly in front of it. Sticking out from under the blankets of the bottom bunk are the soles of dirty feet. I breathe out. The guard beeps off my cuffs, slides open the transparent door, and shoves me in. I bang a shoulder on the bunk and steady myself. The feet stir. One hand snakes out from the cover and pulls aside the crinkled pillow, revealing a dark eye, a slice of smooth forehead, and the shadowed angle of a sparsely stubbled cheek.

  “You’re back,” Finch says, unimpressed. Not that I expected a laser light parade.

  Maybe I should ask him how he is, but the sound of his voice reminds me of my own weakness. I rub my shoulder and step to the tiny sink in the corner of the cell. Aside from that and the toilet, there’s nothing in here but the bunks. But it’s all you need, really. A place to shit and sleep.

  I turn on the tap and stick my mouth under the flow of bitter water. Not even that can get the taste of Lukacs off my tongue. I didn’t need to blow him to swallow his offer, and now it’s making me sick. My hands stay clammy even after I rub them on the front of my pants. Finch doesn’t say a thing until I look up and around, squinting at the high far corner of our pod, across from the bunks. This is the angle that Ops footage was shot from.

  “What’re you doing?” He hasn’t emerged from the blankets.

  “Hoist me up.” No chairs.

  “What?”

  I stand below the ceiling corner. Lukacs has to expect this. “Hoist me up, c’mon.” I glance over my shoulder.

  With a bit of a mumble he pushes down the blanket and shows me his full face, the discolored shapes on his skin and the severely short pattern of his hair, which used to be wavy long. Now it sticks up off the top of his head like a sloppy cut you keep sleeping on wrong. He has a striking face despite the abuse and fatigue, all cheekbones, jaw, and soul. You wear that around inside and people will want to screw with you. But he can’t help it. He’s not a real murderer like some of the others in here. Like me.

  I don’t say anything to his stare. There’s no point in apologizing. None of it is my fault. Our silent alliance in this prison stops at self-survival.

  “You got any cigs? I smell them on your clothes.” He finally slides out from the bunk and stretches up to his full height. My height. He’s tall and faintly muscled. A machete, not a butcher knife. He isn’t wearing a shirt and his nipples are warm brown circles compared to the black stillness of his eyes.

  Looks like they hit him on his body too.

  He’s being difficult on purpose, because I won’t ask about it. “Forget the cigs, Finch. I need to get up into that corner.”

  “I’m not lifting your ass up there for no bloody reason.” In that charming lilt. It makes even his insults sound like endearments.

  I’ve been away too long. I move one stride and grab his arm. Ignore it when he winces. And drag him to the wall. “Lift me up.”

  “Bloody hell, Yuri—” But he can’t win and steadies himself. I step up onto his thigh, holding his shoulder, and reach my other hand to brace against the ceiling. He grabs the front of my shirt, swearing at me. The top of my head brushes the ceiling as I look all over the scuffed gray surface, into the shadowed lines that separate the walls.

  There’s a pinprick of black, like a mole, stuck between a smudge of dead insect and a piece of peeling paint. I dig it out with my fingernail. “Okay.”

  He lets go of me and I hop down.

  “What is that?”

  I drop the optic and crush it under my boot.

  He knows but he still asks, “What was that?” What does it mean.

  There’s no telling if there might be more. It would take hours scouring the pod to find them just by raw sight. This is as safe as we’ll get for talking without extra eyes and ears.

  “We gave some Ops bastards a bit of a show that one time.”

  His face flattens white. And he says again, quieter, “What?”

  I made him my lily because he asked for protection, and this is what the men in here understand. This is what they expect of me, or they would persecute Finch for his young looks. Claim and deference, even if it’s only in front of others. He endured it without a sound or any kind of open resentment, and certainly without any show of pleasure. The screw wasn’t anything artful or needy or even all that satisfying. But then it hasn’t been any of those things in a long time.

  “They were spying on us, Finch. From the moment the guard brought you in here two months ago.” I’m beginning to think it wasn’t just prison protocol that put him with me, young to young, pirate to pigeon. “Why’d you kill your CO? How’d you do it?” You seem too gentle.

  He walks back to his bunk and sits on it. He badly wants that cigret, his knee bounces with nervous desire. “Ops. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Not going to answer me? Lukacs harped on it, so I want to know. “Why’d you kill your CO. You’re not a killer.” Yet. A prison like this could make you a better one, or make you into one.

&nb
sp; He sits there.

  I stand in front of him. He watches the saggy knees of my pants, can bend and bite them if he wants. Not that he wants.

  I fish out the pack of cigs Lukacs gave me, pull a stick and spark the end with my fingerband. Now Finch looks up as I blow a stream of blue smoke into his eyes. You want this.

  “Why’d you kill your CO.” Last time asking.

  His jaw is tight. “I burned him through the gut with a pipecutter.”

  That sweet accent belies the violence of the words. And he still avoids. So I flick ashes onto his lap. “Hephaestus Shipyard?”

  His teeth are clenched, but his breath shoots through them in a hiss. “The hell is this, Yuri?”

  I made a deal with Ops because they want to get you killed. Now I’d like to know. Everything. “Shagging you was a big mistake. You’re useless.” I gesture to his bruised body. “Look at you. I was gone two weeks. Who did this?”

  Now he’s hurt, but in a way that makes him want to hit me. It’s all in his eyes. He’s not a killer because he can’t hide it in his eyes. “If I’m useless then you don’t need to know.”

  “Wex? Dulay?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I leave the pod.

  “Yuri!”

  I head to the Hangout, can hear the voices and the vid going. One sweep, and I zero on Wex playing Ghost at one of the game tables. Wex the rodenty bastard with upper-lip hair that never grows more than a sparse comb line. Dulay’s nowhere in sight, nor is Jones, his crew. I approach on Wex’s blind side, brief silence flanking me before someone gives a whoop of excitement. Fight. Wex turns in his seat just as I toss my cigret at him, then plant my fist into his eye.