Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  Killing strits would be good. Especially the strits that had attacked the Moon. I barely remembered, now, but I still felt it.

  And I missed Mama. Especially when Mishka’s mat would get on my back to go to school just because she didn’t want me underfoot, as if she had a right, as if she shouldn’t have just tried to make her own daughter less of a zombie. Sometimes missing Mama came on so strong I couldn’t control it. But I shook my head and wiped my face with my sleeve, and in a second it was gone. Like her face. I couldn’t remember her face. Papa didn’t have any images.

  I sat up and slipped down from the bin, picked up a rock, and threw it into the lake. Bo-Sheng eased up and dangled his feet for a second, then jumped down and joined me. He cast his rock farther than mine. I elbowed him out of the way, held the cig between my lips, and threw another rock. It made a hollow splash, way out.

  “I think you just knocked out some strit’s brains,” he said.

  We grinned at each other. Tossed more rocks. Then I chased him down the shore.

  That night the wind was so loud, rattling my bedroom window, that it woke me. I lay in the dark, feeling Isobel nestled against my back in a warm lump, and stared across the tiny space at the shadows moving behind the curtain.

  Someone was outside.

  I pulled the blanket up to my chin just as a tapping sounded, sharp against the glass.

  “Yuri!”

  I slid out from the bed and padded to the window, knocking my ankle against one of Isobel’s spinning toys that she’d left on the floor. Biting my lip, I swept the curtain aside and came nose to nose with Bo-Sheng, the grimy barrier of the window between us.

  “Open it,” he said, his voice slightly muffled but still night-clear.

  I undid the latch and slid aside the glass. Cool air rushed in, raising goose bumps along my arms.

  “What’re you doing?” I glanced over my shoulder at my bedroom door. The sliver of space beneath the door was dark; Papa and Mishka’s mat had gone to bed already.

  “Get dressed and come on,” Bo-Sheng whispered. “There’s a shuttle landing!”

  For a second I didn’t know what he meant. But the cold and his words woke me up with a slap. It wasn’t distribution day for another two weeks, and the Army had just dropped a rotation of guards last month. So any shuttle coming to the Camp wouldn’t be for food or protection. It had to be for something else.

  Like Mama. Finally sent back to us?

  “Hurry!” Bo-Sheng said.

  I grabbed my coat and boots from the floor, had to pause to pull on the boots but ran after Bo-Sheng in a stumble, coat flapping open. He finally lost patience and grabbed my arm, hauled me along to the fence around the landing pad, where we saw the shuttle squatting in a pool of white from the control tower. Red-and-blue lights from the little ship strobed the tarmac all around its shark body.

  I didn’t see the Guard seal on its flank, the distinctive round shield with a flaring sun in the center, ringed by stars. It wasn’t a Rim Guardian.

  Unless some merchant brought Mama home?

  My fingers curled through the wire as the rear door whined down.

  A couple of men emerged under the lights, met by an Army guard from the tower. They stood around talking on the tarmac, and nobody else showed up.

  Bo-Sheng looked at me. “Ah, I’m sorry, Yuri.”

  I just shook my head. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like I expected good things to happen.

  Hope was a rabid animal, and it ate you alive.

  Bo-Sheng left because I wasn’t in the mood to do anything, not even smoke. I just sat against the fence and looked at my shadow cast black on the gravel in front of me from the landing lights. Going home seemed the worst thing to do, even though I’d at least be warm in bed. But sometimes the weight of Isobel’s silence and her sad eyes pressed hard against me, and the memory of my father’s words in his journal seemed to tattoo black into my skin.

  It was easier outside in the cold. I wrapped my arms around my knees and put my chin on top and tried not to think of Mama. Or Jascha. And what it might’ve been like if I’d been able to stay with them. Were they on a warm planet, or slowly freezing, becoming numb?

  The fence rattled behind me. “Kid.”

  I jumped and turned around, saw a pair of green-clad legs, and squinted up against the lights. It was a man, but I couldn’t see his face, just the outline of short pale hair that looked like fire in the white glare.

  I’d been chased by guards before for hanging around this site.

  So I got up and ran.

  9.18.2185 EHSD—The Captain

  I went to school, I didn’t know why. But something out of routine seemed like a good idea so I wouldn’t think so much about Mama. I took the slate that Papa had gotten for me, with my journal in it, and wrote in that. The teacher was glad to see me, after she’d reprimanded me for skipping all the time in the first place. I didn’t bother telling her that Papa was teaching me fine at home. I just ignored her and all the other things she talked about, and just poked at my slate. I liked that I could save my entries encoded so nobody could see. I drew some shapes beside the words, long ships with fins like fishes.

  “Yuri.”

  I looked up toward the door of the classroom. Bo-Sheng stood in the foyer, motioning me to come out.

  I glanced at the teacher. She was leaning over a girl’s desk, explaining something. All the other kids were working. There were about three grade levels in here, fifty kids, most of them so obedient they bored me.

  “Yuri,” Bo-Sheng hissed.

  I slid from my seat, gathered my slate and my coat, and went out to him. He tugged me out the door, making me trip over someone’s discarded shoes. Outside was gray and cold, a typical day, and we paused at the top of the steps so I could put on my coat and bum a cig from him.

  He smiled. “I want you to meet somebody.”

  “Who?” I followed him down the metallic steps and across the front quad, which wasn’t much more than a square of gravel, sparse brown grass, and strewn toys. The skeletal swing had been broken for at least a year, torn up by a bad storm.

  “He’s from the shuttle,” Bo-Sheng said, and I realized he was leading me to the landing pad.

  “You met one of the men from the shuttle?” I hadn’t told him about my scare that night. I wasn’t sure if it had been a guard or one of the visitors.

  “He came by the orphans’ quarters.”

  “Why?” The cig tasted rotten for some reason. It must’ve been a bad batch, or maybe it was my own spit. I wiped the corners of my mouth.

  Bo-Sheng said, “You’ll see. I told him all about you. He wanted to meet you.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Why would you talk about me? Why would he bother with kids?”

  “He wanted to know if I had any friends. And adults bother all the time.”

  I knew what he meant. The guards bothered with us when we explored where we weren’t supposed to. A few of them bothered with the older kids in a way that got the kids perks like cigs and extra food and clothes.

  But this man from the shuttle couldn’t be like that, or Bo-Sheng wouldn’t deal with him. Bo-Sheng didn’t play those games.

  By the time we reached the gate leading to the tower and landing pad, my cig was almost done. I dug into Bo-Sheng’s coat pocket as we walked to try and get another one and not drop my slate at the same time. He stopped to let me, and I fumbled for a while until he took the run-down cig from between my fingers and finished it off for me, freeing my other hand. I tucked my hair behind my ear so I could see what I was doing. The wind was strong.

  I lit the second cig and looked up, and there was a man watching us, standing near the base of the landing tower, using it as a windbreak.

  Bo-Sheng elbowed me as if I wasn’t already paying attention.

  The man had short silver hair, even though his face was younger than that, and wide blue eyes, like the bottom of a flame. He wore green fatigues and a gray jacket with some sort of me
rchant patch on the arm. When he got close enough that I saw the stubble on his face, I wanted to run again.

  Because he was staring at me. And I knew he was the one I’d run from last night.

  “So this is your friend,” he said. He had an accent that sounded somehow rich, like chocolate when it melted on your tongue.

  “Yuri,” I said, before Bo-Sheng could speak. I stared straight up at him. Couldn’t run now and show I was scared. But there was nothing to be scared of, Bo-Sheng was here. “Who’re you?”

  He didn’t blink. He hadn’t blinked. He watched me smoke.

  “I’m the captain of a ship that’s in orbit right now. And I’m recruiting.”

  I glanced at Bo-Sheng, who was smiling at me as if he’d just stumbled on a table of desserts.

  “Recruiting?” I said.

  “To work on my ship.”

  I scratched the back of my hair. Tried not to glare at Bo-Sheng, who was clearly in love with the idea.

  “I don’t wanna work on your ship.”

  Bo-Sheng said, “Yuri…”

  The man looked around like he was bored, not irritated or disappointed. He fished inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a silver case. He flipped it open and slid free a long white cig, then lit it with his fingerband. A clean rooty scent floated over our heads, strong enough to cut through the cold air. A slight whiff of it seemed immediately to warm my insides. It was an expensive smoke.

  “You’d rather stay in this pit?” he asked, breathing dragon funnels at me.

  Bo-Sheng caught my sleeve. “We can work for real up in space, Yuri. Quit here for good.”

  “I got my family here. Isobel and Papa.”

  The man wasn’t paying any attention to Bo-Sheng. He just kept staring at me. And I didn’t like it.

  “You can take care of them from space, if you have cred,” Bo-Sheng said. “When you get enough you can bring them with you too.”

  I looked up at the blue-eyed man. He brought the cig to his lips, and the smoke swirled from his mouth like water, flooding up to the white sky.

  “Why don’t we talk first,” he said, like I was an adult. “And then if you want, you can take me to meet your papa.”

  He told me his name was Marcus and his ship was called The Abyssinian, which I couldn’t even pronounce. He said it came from a poem about a “pleasure dome,” whatever that meant. He asked if we’d like to see the shuttle, and Bo-Sheng immediately said yes. I didn’t mind seeing it either; I couldn’t much remember the one we’d rode in to Colonial Grace, and besides, this one was a merchant outrider. So I dropped my cig and crushed it out and followed them through the gate and onto the landing pad. While Marcus strode ahead I snagged Bo-Sheng’s sleeve and slowed him down.

  “I don’t know about him,” I said.

  “Ah, Yuri…” Bo-Sheng looked at the clouds. “I been talking to him all morning. Captains recruit all the time for their ships, especially orphans.”

  “But I’m not—”

  He stared into my face. “Don’t you want to get off this planet? Fight strits, after what they did to your Moon?”

  “Merchants don’t fight strits.”

  “Merchants with guns do. A lot of them have ’em. Marcus says he does. Sometimes they even run missions for the military. You never know.”

  I shifted the slate in my arms. “Are you going? With him?”

  Bo-Sheng looked down at the ground and kicked the concrete with the toe of his shoe. He buried his hands in his coat pockets. “I want to, Yuri. And I want you to come with me.” He chewed his lip and looked to the side.

  His cheeks were windburned, and if I touched them, they would be cold. Like this world. Maybe soon we’d turn gray like the skies, or poisonous like the lakes.

  “Hey,” Marcus called, standing at the bottom of the shuttle ramp. “You kids coming?”

  Bo-Sheng blinked at me, flicked his hair from his eyes. It couldn’t hurt; I could practically hear his thoughts. So I went with him to the shadow of the shuttle. Marcus led us up the steep ramp, our smaller footsteps echoing lightly on the ridged steel. I stayed behind Bo-Sheng’s shoulder, peered over it as warmth engulfed us. Inside was well lit in a soft blue glow, with clean beige walls and cushioned seats in the passenger cab, running on both sides with an aisle in the middle. Cabinets tracked the same path on the ceiling toward a single door leading to the cockpit. Everywhere smelled like fresh caff and those high-end cigrets. My stomach gurgled, and Bo-Sheng elbowed me.

  Marcus pressed a hand to a panel on the wall, and the ramp whined up behind us, cutting off the cold. He said, “Are you boys hungry?”

  “Yes,” Bo-Sheng said. I didn’t bother answering.

  Marcus reached into one of the overheads and pulled out a few sealed bags. He folded up a couple of the seats, tapped at something on the bulkhead, and a table came down from the wall. He dropped the bags on top. “Here you go, dig in.”

  We swiveled a couple of chairs around, climbed on, and tore open the bags. There were chips and crackers and strips of fruit. I lost where Marcus went, my fingers buried in the bags and Bo-Sheng grinning across at me, but he soon came back, this time with two boxes of hot food and frothy juice drinks. The scent of tangy meat sauce and steamed, candied vegetables made my stomach grumble more, even though half of the chips were gone already.

  For a while nobody spoke. Marcus just sat across the cabin, smoked, and watched us gobble down the food. Then he said, “So what do you like to do, Yuri?”

  “Do?” Eat. I was alternating between the meal and the flavored chips.

  “Well, even though there must not be much to do here, I assume you boys occupy yourselves in some way.”

  “He gets the nurses to give him cookies because they think he’s pretty.” Bo-Sheng laughed.

  I kicked him below the table.

  “Oh?” Marcus said, amused.

  “No.” I glared at Bo-Sheng. “They give to a lot of kids. But not him because he’s stupid.” I looked at Marcus and shrugged. “I like to do lots of stuff. I draw and write in my slate, and sometimes we hang around the lake. There’s this dog…or we throw stuff in the lake.”

  “We like to smoke,” Bo-Sheng added.

  “I like to beat him up. And I have a sister and sometimes Papa reads to us or we play games and stuff, like puzzle games. I like puzzle games, and I like playing with my sister sometimes…”

  He was watching so fixedly I got nervous and ate more food.

  “Do you go to school or do you skip it like Bo-Sheng?”

  I sipped my fruit juice and wrinkled my nose, but not at the drink. “I don’t like school. It’s boring and there’s too many kids and the teaches are always busy and mad.”

  He nodded as if this wasn’t a surprise. “Yeah, these camps aren’t all that good for learning. Kids should be given more individual attention.”

  Yeah, maybe. I scraped my plate to get the last bit of gravy. All the food was so yummy by the time I was done I didn’t mind so much how Marcus stared. He was probably just curious. Or pitying. Which was all right if it got us food like this. The nurses pitied me too, and it kept me and Isobel fed with sweets.

  The shuttle seemed more warm, now that I had a full meal in my stomach. In a few minutes I started to get sleepy. I was so stuffed I thought I’d roll right off my chair. The burned-wood scent of that expensive cig wafted around my head, and I blinked when Bo-Sheng nudged my arm. I blinked again and saw Marcus standing over me holding out a stick. Offering.

  I looked at Bo-Sheng. He was smiling. So I took the cig and held it as Marcus sparked the end. His fingerband winked at me, reflecting the shuttle’s cabin light. I took a deep drag, and it was like breathing silk. It warmed me to the inside, steamed my blood until it quickened, and the scent of it made me think of clean things.

  I looked up at the captain and grinned.

  Marcus said that on his ship he took care of his crew. Nobody went hungry, everybody contributed to the work, everybody could learn new skills and
be rewarded for them, and everybody got leave on lots of stations where you could play games and meet new people. He said he’d take anybody who was willing to work and willing to give back to the ship and his crew. He said The Abyssinian was respected throughout EarthHub. For kids our age, underage, he would sign an agreement to make him our guardian.

  He said his ship was like a family, and he was the papa.

  Marcus wanted to leave the next morning. Too soon. Bo-Sheng and I waited outside the shuttle while Marcus talked to his comrade, a young man he’d introduced as Estienne. We were going to go home so Marcus could talk to Papa. But maybe my nervousness was written on my face; Bo-Sheng said, “The captain says he’ll help you look for your mama and Jascha.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “When I talked to him this morning. I made sure and asked.”

  Marcus was a merchant who went to a lot of ports. He was an adult, and people would listen to him, maybe even Rim Guardians. He could find Mama easy.

  I held my slate to my chest and squinted at Bo-Sheng through the whipping breeze.

  “Okay,” I said. My gut clenched.

  He smiled at me and held my sleeve. “Okay?” Excitement made his eyes shine like the winter lakes.

  I smiled back, and he hugged me.

  “It’ll be us,” he said, squeezing me almost out of my coat. He let go and pointed at the sky. “Up there!”

  But I was too busy looking down the road toward my cabin.

  Papa listened to everything Marcus had to say, there at our kitchen table with Mishka’s mat while Mishka was sent to Isobel’s room to mind her. Papa didn’t nod or interrupt, and Marcus laid it all out as clearly as he had for me and Bo-Sheng: if Papa and him both signed a contract, all the earnings I made on The Abyssinian would be put in a fund accessible by Papa. And Marcus said he’d do everything in his power to locate Mama and Jascha.

  “Why can’t you hire Mikhail?” Mishka’s mat asked.

  “And who would take care of Isobel?” Papa said. “No…she is still too young to work on a merchant. She needs her father.”