Marcus was saying to the woman, “I’d like to take Yuri to the strits.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“Is this your protégé?” Marcus asked.
The woman stepped aside with a nod and put her arm around the boy. “Evan, say hello to Captain Falcone.”
The boy’s eyes came up and he smiled. “Hello, sir.”
Even I could see he didn’t mean it.
Marcus stared at him. “Does he give you trouble?”
“No,” the woman said. I thought she must be the captain.
“He might.”
The woman didn’t seem able to answer that. Her mouth looked wilted. Then she said, “He’s still in training.” Her eyes slid to me. “He does well.”
Marcus said, “Come with me and leave the boy.” Then he touched my shoulder and guided me around the woman and Evan. I glanced back, and the woman stroked Evan’s neck and said something in a low voice. He nodded, turned, and headed away down the corridor. Maybe Evan was her son? Although Marcus called him a “protégé”—whatever that meant. Maybe he got special training like me.
The woman walked fast to join us at the lev. She and Marcus didn’t speak as we got in and shot down the decks. I watched the blinking lights, my back to the wall.
Marcus led us both out as if the ship were his own. It could’ve been the same deck except the lights were dimmer here. It was colder, emptier, but the walls were still white. Two men with rifles stood outside a double hatch, but Marcus ignored them, just gave the woman a glance, and she moved up and palmed the call pad. The doors slid aside and Marcus put his hands on both my shoulders and walked me in. To Shiva’s brig.
I didn’t notice anything except the blurry white figures inside one of the steel cages. Marcus led me up to it so I could see inside.
The aliens. Trussed to the bulkhead in chains, their arms apart. Transparent wings fell from their wrists to both sides of their waists, attached. Wings, like the flies I used to find collected on the windowsill of my bedroom in the summer. These wings were shredded or torn. Five strits in this cell. I glanced to the other cells, ten in all, but could only make out shadows. None of the lights were lit except in this one.
They were white-faced, black-eyed, and one of them bared sharp little teeth at me. I stepped back against Marcus, but he squeezed my shoulders.
“They can’t hurt you,” he said. “Open the gate,” he ordered the woman.
“No, wait,” I said.
“You’ll have to face them sometime,” he said. “For what they did. You’re not hiding away on that planet anymore.”
I hadn’t been hiding. I twitched away from his touch and glanced up.
He held my shoulder. Held on. “What’re you going to do about it now? What’re you going to do for your father?”
Papa wasn’t here. Only me.
And I was already forgetting Mama. And Babushka. I didn’t remember Jascha’s face.
But I remembered Papa and Isobel, and how Isobel had no memory of Mama at all, and how Papa sat at the kitchen table late at night and wrote words about pain.
And it was all the fault of these things. When the gate slid aside they stirred in their chains. Even their ankles were bound. Their clothing peeled off their skin in shreds, in long strips, so I saw the white skin beneath. White like the walls of this ship.
They could be human, with their basic faces. Their limbs. Their hair, though the colors were all wrong.
But they weren’t human.
My heart galloped. I stood in front of the one in the center of the wall. It was tied and bruised, with dark yellow stains on its body as if it had wet itself. I pointed at it and smiled. Couldn’t stop the smile.
“It peed.”
“No,” Marcus said. “That’s their blood. It’s yellow. See?” He walked up to that one and grabbed its silver-white hair, lifted its head so I saw the gold drops on its skin. Their blood looked like honey. And its face was marked around the bottomless eyes and down the cheeks with dark blue tattoos. “Aliens,” Marcus said, and let it go.
Now that I saw that none of them could move, even when Marcus touched one, I went closer, looked up at the black eyes. It seemed to stare down at me with hatred, without lines or expression except that dark emptiness.
It yelled at me.
The sound was a raw call, no word I understood, just something from deep in its throat that shot through my nerves and shredded them.
I kicked it, heart thudding in my ears but not loud enough to drown out the thing as it wailed and cried in that inhuman voice. I pounded on its chest to stop it. I thought Marcus might pull me back, but he didn’t. “It hurt your family,” he said. “Take your revenge.”
I kicked it again. For some reason that seemed to make them all erupt. All of those strit voices calling to me, each with an echo as if some smaller version of themselves sat deep within their chests, clawing to get out. The cawing rose high through the steel cages, hurting my ears. I remembered the switchblade in my pocket, pulled it out, and flicked it open.
The chains rattled. Marcus didn’t stop me. And I jabbed the blade into the strit’s chest.
It didn’t make a sound. The noise cut off all around me as if someone had finally gagged them. And the silence was worse. It stung.
So I stabbed it again, around the same area high on its chest, to get it to cry out. Anything. Now they all looked at me, all of those strits with their demon black eyes and sharp little teeth, and they were just things. They were things that killed humans, attacked homes, and took away half my family. Who would miss them? Who would care?
I stabbed the thing in front of me until its chest was the color of frozen amber, jeweled and flecked black. Until my arm throbbed and my fingers felt swollen and slick; then I stepped back, nearly falling over if Marcus hadn’t held my shoulder. His fingers squeezed. The other things didn’t yell or even move now, as if they didn’t care. Cold and heartless. For all I knew strits didn’t feel. Not like humans felt. Not like I felt.
That was for Babushka.
The blade was sticky all up the handle. I tried to wipe it on my splattered clothes, but Marcus plucked it from my grip.
“Let me,” he said, and rubbed my hair with affection. He cleaned the blade on his own pants, then folded it and handed it back to me. “Estienne gave this to you, didn’t he?”
I nodded. I wanted to sit down but I blinked, breathed in until it wasn’t so much of an effort.
“It’ll be all right,” Marcus said. “Something crosses you, you teach it a lesson, then you move on. And aliens are always the enemy. Kill it or use it, but keep it at the end of your blade. Understand?”
I nodded, though his words seemed to gush too suddenly in my ears, as if I’d tilted my head wrong in the shower. Heavy sound.
“You’ll be just fine,” he said. And when I looked up, he was smiling.
The woman walked us to the airlock. She’d stood in her own brig and hadn’t said a word. Now as we left she still didn’t say anything until Marcus turned to her. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Yes, Captain,” she said.
He still had his arm around me, and my hands were clenched up in their sleeve cuffs. They still shook for some reason and felt cold. Had I just killed a strit? Their voices still echoed in my head. Except they weren’t voices, really, not any more than some animal had a voice. Even Seamus had looked at me different from those strits. Seamus knew me, even though I wasn’t his owner. These strits were just—strange other things. My skin crawled from the thought of their black eyes and big insect wings.
Marcus’s hand gripped my shoulder. Maybe he felt me shiver. I went with him through the mating tube to our own airlock. Our own. The Abyssinian. I glanced once over my shoulder at the other captain, in parting. She met my stare.
And for some reason she looked afraid.
10.5.2185 EHSD—Captain Falcone
Every goldshift now, as they called it on ships (not day and night, a habit I wasn’t going t
o break soon), Estienne took me to Marcus’s quarters for breakfast. Captain Marcus Falcone. I’d put it together and started calling him “Captain” like his crew did, or Captain Falcone, and the first time I did he’d asked if I’d picked that up from Estienne. “No,” I said. “The lady from Shiva.”
“Observant,” he said, with a smile.
He had meals brought to his quarters instead of the captain’s galley in the morning before he went on bridge and we sat across from each other and ate. He showed me maps of the Hub on his slate and pointed out features like leap points and the Demilitarized Zone where the strits were never supposed to cross but always did, to attack us. He didn’t mind it if I put my feet up on his bunk, or tried on his jackets, or crawled all over his desk chair when he was in the bathroom shaving or taking a shower. Sometimes he came out of the bathroom dressed only in his pants and I saw the tattoos on his body. Glimpses, until the third time when I worked up enough courage to ask him if I could see them up close.
So he stood in front of me, patient with my curiosity. He had two tats: a blood-covered four-armed woman on the left side of his chest that danced with knives and dangling hands about her waist; and on his right wrist was the detail of her dark face. They were ugly but they were pretty in how detailed and how colorful. I reached up to touch the lines of the ink, its rich reds and staining blacks, but stopped, peering up at him.
He put a hand on my hair. “Go ahead. One day you’ll get one too.”
“Really?” I pressed the pad of my forefinger against his skin and traced the lines. “What does it mean? It’s kind of gross.”
He laughed. “This symbol”—he touched the dancing woman—“is Kali. The Hindu goddess of destruction. Fitting for a warship, in its way. She was my ship before this one. My carrier, Kali.” His voice lowered to barely a whisper. “Saving lives and taking down enemies.”
“You were a carrier captain?” Maybe that was why his crew sometimes looked scared of him when he walked down the corridors. I thought of the Rim Guards and their long black guns.
He nodded. “A long time ago. Now this is my ship. How do you like it?” He sat on the bunk beside me.
I fell back on the tucked blankets and leaned against the bulkhead. “I like when we go to the shooting gallery.” Guns. He’d taken me after I’d killed the strit. I grinned at him. “I like the chocolate. I like Estienne…”
“But?”
“But can I send messages to Papa? It’s been two weeks and… I haven’t seen Bo-Sheng either.”
“You’ve been keeping track, have you?” He tousled my hair. I made a face, but I didn’t mind so much. He didn’t do it to make fun of me. “You know your father doesn’t have private communications in the Camp. So…if you write to him, I’ll send it to their general comm, and they can pass it along to him.” He paused. “I gave him my private comm, but he’s never sent anything.”
I sat straighter. “He hasn’t?” It cored me out to hear that. “Maybe it got lost. Papa would send something!”
Marcus shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Yuri.”
I stared across the quarters at nothing.
Marcus slipped his arm around my shoulders. “It’s difficult for them on that planet. I didn’t want to tell you, I knew you’d be upset. But Yuri…you’re in a different place now. And your father wanted you to come. And I’m glad you’re here, you’re doing very well.”
“I am.” It was a question, but my voice was flat. What would be the point of all this if Papa didn’t even care? What if Isobel had forgotten about me too?
“You are.” Marcus turned my head to face him. “Doing very well.”
I wasn’t going to cry, even though the span of space seemed to yawn inside my gut. I was alone on this ship. “What about Bo-Sheng? Can I see him please?”
“How about I give you this first.” Marcus reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a pair of tags on a silver chain. He draped them around my neck.
I looked down. One of them was a tagcomm with tiny contact pads and a sliver for the input display.
“I’ve already programmed my and Estienne’s comm numbers in there. This is for if you get lost on the ship or something happens, you just hit the right button and you’ll get us. Ask it questions, and it’ll tell you how to work it. Okay?”
“Does that mean I get to walk around? By myself?” I must’ve passed something, even though I hadn’t actually been tested. Now I could go talk to Bo-Sheng. I could explore.
“You can walk around by yourself. You can come and go in your quarters.” He smiled. “All of that.” His hand played softly in my hair.
He liked to touch me the way Papa sometimes did. As if I were his son.
Papa.
I picked up one of the tags and looked down at it. “Why wouldn’t he ask about me?”
Marcus didn’t answer. And the silence was enough.
Nobody cared anymore except on this ship.
Things weren’t so strange here. I got used to the whump and whine of the ship’s drives, the way the shadows squatted in the corners of the corridors, and even the way the crew looked. Their studs and tattoos, harsh words and occasional fights. Marcus had told me long ago that I didn’t have to be scared, though, because nobody on the ship would ever touch me.
He said they knew he was my guardian, and I was his protégé.
I went to Bo-Sheng’s quarters first. Even with Estienne or Marcus escorting me back and forth all over the ship for two weeks, and living right beside him, I had never crossed paths with Bo-Sheng. I wanted to tell him about killing the strit, and the gun and knife training I was getting, plus all the slate work about how the Hub ran and the important stations and leap points…it was so much and was Bo-Sheng doing it all too? Was he beating me at it? But there’d never been time. If Marcus wasn’t talking and teaching me, it was Estienne, and I’d learned to stop asking about Bo-Sheng. Clearly he didn’t ask about me.
Nobody did.
I fingered my new tags and buzzed Bo-Sheng’s hatch. Maybe he wasn’t even inside. It was just after breakfast. Maybe he was still in the mess hall? Or off to his own training?
But the hatch opened and a teenaged girl stood there. Behind her I saw Bo-Sheng and I didn’t think, I just shoved past her and careened into him, hugged him.
“Yuri!”
I held on. I was more glad to see him now that he was standing right in front of me. He still smelled like those cheap cigrets. I only smoked the kind Marcus gave me. I touched the ends of his hair, and they were ragged. He hadn’t changed.
He returned the hug for a long second and behind me the hatch shut. “She left,” he said, sounding surprised. Then, “Where’ve you been?”
“Training! Like you.” I dragged my eyes from his face—maybe he was a little thinner, but not surprising with the exercise they made us do—and looked around the quarters. A sweater was strewn here and there, the locker stood open, spilling toiletries. The bunk was unmade. I jumped on it and bounced. “I got so much to tell you!”
He didn’t join me. He just stood there, looking surprised still. He rubbed his hair from his eyes. “Yuri…what’s been going on? Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. Look.” I stopped bouncing and pulled out my switchblade. “Estienne gave this to me. I killed a strit with it. D’you know they have, like, yellow blood? It’s so gross.”
“You killed a strit? Where?” He still had that just-woke-up look. Like he was shocked the galaxy was still here.
I scratched my head. “Over on Shiva. Our sister ship. They had a bunch of strits in the brig, and Marcus let me kill one. They’re like…” I twitched, plucking at my sleeve and holding out the blade to him. I wasn’t ecstatic anymore. “Like animals. Don’t you want to look at it?”
“No,” he said, and looked around as if someone else were in here with us.
I shrugged and sat on the bed, flipping the switchblade in my hand. “Well, I’ve been learning to use it, and to shoot, and basicall
y they gave me a free pass around the ship, Marcus just gave me these tags…” He didn’t seem excited for me. “What’s wrong?”
He said, “Yuri…” Now he approached and sat beside me on the bunk. And whispered, “Yuri, this was a mistake.”
“What’re you talking about? And why are you whispering?”
“Because!” His eyes darted. “I don’t think this ship is a merchant.”
I kind of laughed.
“Look,” he said. “The crew… I came from a merchant. This ship isn’t a merchant.”
“Not every ship is your ship, Bo-Sheng. Besides, what do you remember about your ship? You were too little when the strits killed it. When I went across to Shiva, it had a totally different look and—” I didn’t understand why he wanted to ruin this for us.
“Yuri, you gotta listen.” His fingers dug through my sleeve. “I don’t like it here.”
I pulled away. “Well I do. And since you never even cared where I was all this time—”
“What?”
I got up. “I have to meet Estienne. You go and do what you want.”
“Wait!” He snagged my wrist. “Yuri, this is a pirate ship. We have to get out of here!”
I yanked away. “You’re being stupid.”
“They haven’t been all that nice to me!” His voice cracked. He stood and came close, holding both my arms.
“What do you mean?” I tried not to flinch from his grip.
“They just…” His face bled a deep pink beneath his skin. “Yuri, I just want to go. Please, can we go?”
Was he chickening out? He was always the one who got me into trouble in the Camp. “I don’t want to go, Bo-Sheng. Besides, where would we go? Back to the Camp? I don’t even know how to get off this ship or what to do if we were on station. And I like it here! They’re nice to me.” I looked in his eyes. “Maybe you’re just not doing what they want. Maybe you’re just no good at it.”
He dropped his hands from my arms and moved away, his nose wrinkling as if I smelled bad. His voice was harsh. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Well what’s so bad about being here, even if it is a pirate ship? So what?”
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