Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  “Pirates are criminals!”

  “So what? Did the Hub ever do anything for us? They just stuck us on that planet to rot. At least here I’m doing stuff.”

  “Bad stuff, Yuri. They—”

  “Like killing strits? They deserve it!”

  He flinched from my shout, but said, “Has he found your mama yet?”

  I didn’t know why, but I wanted to hit him for mentioning Mama. “No. He says Hub bureaucracy is slow as shit, but he’s trying.”

  “He says.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t like to be forced to do things!” Bo-Sheng shouted in my face. “And you shouldn’t either!”

  “Nobody’s forcing me to do anything. What are they making you do?”

  He saw my doubt. It seemed to piss him off. “I have to go.”

  “Where are you going?” First he yelled at me, then he was going to walk away? “How come you get to go around by yourself?” Before me?

  He stared at me. Then he opened the hatch, and the girl was outside waiting. She looked at us, blank-faced. “I don’t,” he said. Then he just went with her, not even looking back at me.

  As if I’d let him down in some way. As if he hadn’t brought me here himself.

  And before it made me sad, it made me angry.

  Estienne noticed my foul mood but didn’t comment on it until the end of the shift, after gym and shooting and fighting class (I sparred mostly with Estienne, and sometimes Marcus if he didn’t need to be on the bridge or somewhere else, and it wasn’t really fighting, just punching and kicking pads and “learning balance,” Estienne said). We also had lunch, and more book work about the stations in the Dragons, and finally on our way back to my quarters he said, “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t want to go to my quarters in case Bo-Sheng was around, so I glanced up at Estienne. “Can I see your q?”

  One eyebrow quirked. “Sure. Why now?”

  “I just never seen it.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. This way.” He put his hand on my shoulder and guided me ahead of himself, up a flight of stairs. It wound around twice before we ended up on another deck, quieter, its shadows receded from cones of pale blue light that washed down from the ceiling. There was a landing and a wall with two doors, no other exits but the stairs and a little to the right of us, a lev. He had to tap a code into a side panel before the doors parted, then he took me through. Every hatch on this deck had a lockpad beside it, and numbers. No names. He took me down to the end of the corridor, to the last hatch, and palmed another panel. Then he pushed it open with his shoulder and called up the lights.

  Inside the room was black. And red. The walls and floor were gloss dark, reflective as a mirror, the pipes and lights overhead coated black like they’d been carved and frozen out of space. Red transparent material hung from the ceiling in airy waves and dripped down the walls. As if the pipes bled. I ran my hand along the curtain covering the bathroom door. It was so soft it seemed to slip through my fingers, no more solid than water.

  Estienne set his slate on the desk, even the furniture was black, and collapsed on his bunk. “Now what happened?”

  I walked all around the quarters. It looked as small as mine, but I knew just from the five strides this way and the other that it was in fact twice the size. Finally, I sat beside him on the bed, rubbed the puffy soft red comforter, and looked up at him. He slouched against the wall with one foot on the mattress, biting the edge of his thumb with concentration.

  “I went to see Bo-Sheng,” I said.

  “Yeah?” His eyes flashed at me from behind blond shards of hair.

  “He complained. He doesn’t like it here. He thinks we’re a pirate ship.”

  Estienne dropped his hand with a sigh and leaned forward, slinging his arm around my neck like he usually did.

  “We are a pirate ship, Yuri. Technically.”

  “What? What do you mean ‘technically’?” It wasn’t a great shock, and in the end it didn’t much matter now, but the secrecy?

  “Technically we don’t like to answer to the Hub. So technically we are a pirate.” He shrugged. “Does that bother you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “But it bothers Bo-Sheng.”

  Now I shrugged. “I don’t know what his problem is. He says people make him do things.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know, he didn’t say.” I looked at Estienne instead of at the black floor. “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Make him do things.”

  He squinted in disapproval. “Yuri, he came on this ship voluntarily just like you. He’s being trained just the same as any crewmember. You get extra-special treatment because Marcus—Captain Falcone—thinks you have that potential. Maybe Bo-Sheng is jealous.”

  “I don’t know.” Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it. Or remember the way he’d looked at me. “Why does the captain think I’m special?” Because I didn’t believe it, really.

  It made Estienne laugh, but not at me. And it was a quiet sound. “You’re smart.”

  Was I? “But how’d he know?”

  Estienne rubbed my hair. “He’s smart. He said when he talked to you he could see it in your eyes. And how much you wanted something different. And even though Bo-Sheng acted like the big tough one, you were the one who would survive.”

  “Survive what?”

  “You know. Just survive. In life.” He tugged my hair. “Plus you’re cuter.”

  I made a face.

  “See?” He grinned.

  Now I didn’t want to talk about that either. “I don’t want Bo-Sheng to be sad, being here.”

  “Do you think he’s been treated badly? Have we ever mistreated you?”

  I looked at my hands. “No.”

  He squeezed my neck a little with his arm, then ruffled my hair. “You know, it’s good of you to be concerned about your friend. But you really don’t have to be. Maybe he just hasn’t, you know, gotten along as well as you. Do you want me to check up on him?”

  “No. I’ll… I’ll see him again, won’t I? I’ll go tomorrow—next shift.”

  Estienne glanced at the ceiling as if pulling a reminder message from the pipes. “I don’t know…actually I think his training schedule’s changed. He’ll be awake when you’re asleep. Sometimes shifts work out that way. I think they’re training him in technical stuff, you know, like how to fix things on the ship.”

  “Why am I not learning that?”

  “You will eventually. Marcus is just doing things differently with you.”

  Because I was special. But that meant I wouldn’t see Bo-Sheng for a while.

  But I had Estienne.

  He hugged me, both arms, until my chin scrunched to my shoulder. “I’m glad you came to me. Never keep your worries bottled up, deal?”

  Estienne was my best friend now. I liked how he never hesitated to hug me. I felt swallowed up by him, and sometimes in my quarters, in the dark, I wished… I wished. I missed the comfort of Isobel beside me just so I knew even asleep that I wasn’t alone.

  Maybe Estienne felt something of it. He kept holding me, so I wrapped my arms around his waist. I looked up at the cascades of red all around the quarters, and it was warm, like his arms were warm.

  “I like your room,” I said.

  I felt him smile against my hair. “You want to stay a while?”

  I nodded.

  “How about a nap before dinner then? You worked hard today.”

  I nodded again, glanced up at him. He let me go and slid back on the bed, tucked against the wall on one elbow. I curled up beside him and sank into one of the pillows. He had two, and they were both thick and smelled like his hair—clean and touched by the sun, even though there wasn’t a sun on this ship. He draped his arm over me and rested his chin near the top of my head.

  “Estienne,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you like it here? Even though it’s a
pirate? I mean…would you ever leave?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “I would never leave. This is my home.” He paused. “I want it to be your home too, Yuri.”

  I said, “It is. It is now.”

  I’d never go back to the Camp. Not now. Not if Papa didn’t even comm and especially not just because Bo-Sheng couldn’t handle it in space.

  I shut my eyes. Estienne’s arm tightened around me and his face pressed into the back of my hair. Behind my lids the black lay divided by the red, an imprint.

  RESCUED

  2.27.2198 EHSD—Pax Terra Station

  Andreas Lukacs takes us up to the station in his transport but he doesn’t disembark with us. “I’ll be in touch,” he says. “With both of you.” Meaning, Finch better not start thinking he can go on vacation to Austro Station just because he’s free.

  “What’s he going to do,” Finch mutters to me as we pass through the security arch between this dock and the checkpoint Customs booths, ten in all even though only five are manned. Typical. We wait in line in harsh lighting and forest green walls to hand over our false IDs. Lukacs had mine made already, coded on a finger-sized chipsheet, along with a couple hundred cred because he’s generous like that apparently. On the twelve-hour ride to the station he’d gotten the same transmitted and encoded for Finch. Black Ops are nothing if not expedient.

  “Hang out and smoke a sweet leaf, I dunno.” I want to smoke, but we can’t in the open deck without pollies ready to haul you away.

  “I mean,” Finch says. “What’s he going to do with me.”

  Because Lukacs gave no indication on the ride what he was planning or thinking, didn’t much communicate with us at all. He knows what I have to do, and he’ll deal with Finch when he’s ready.

  I’m still stiff and distractingly sore from the beat down, and while talking to Finch serves to keep me awake, it also takes more effort than I have right now. And I need to store up my energy to deal with Petra, my contingency plan, who has to get me in touch with my ship.

  “Yuri?” Finch asks, when I zone out.

  “Best that he hasn’t done anything yet. Look, whatever you do, just don’t get in my way.” It comes out bitchier than it sounds in my head, but I don’t qualify it. It shuts him up.

  We pass through Customs without incident, thanks to the IDs and the change of clothes Lukacs had for us—navy blue flight crew uniforms, ubiquitous on any station—and enter the busy traffic of Pax Terra’s main concourse. I look first for a public washroom. Easy to find once you find the food, it’s hidden between two eateries. A long corridor into a blue-tiled room and Finch waits outside, he says, while I do what I have to do.

  I look in the mirror at my unmarred face, feeling the bruises beneath my clothing from the neck down. I smooth my hair, splash my face with cold water to get myself alert. Petra won’t want me to walk into her club looking like drug addict dross. She has an image, and I have an obligation. Even here and now. Even for a room to stay in and a secure link to borrow. She knows me as geisha and Falcone’s protégé, so this is what she’ll get. I rub beneath my eyes, get some color there other than dark circles, bite my lips into a more natural state. The cold on that planet bleached most color away in the last few months. Now, back in space, I tear at them with my teeth, not to break skin but just to get the red.

  When I come out Finch asks, “What took you so long?” But I don’t answer. I try to pick up my feet as we walk so my stride isn’t so crippled. He follows at my right shoulder like a wraith. Two ghosts, it seems, haunting this old station. Pax Terra was the first commercial station in the Hub and became, pretty quickly, just as diverse as the planet “below” it. You can see Earth from most view windows around any of the twelve connected modules. You can put out your hand and touch another world. Inside, among transsteel corridors and the latest fashions, we’re just two of 120,000 people flowing from one module to the next like blood cells converging on disparate diseases. This dock, that office. This apartment and that shop.

  Austro Station, half its size, was modeled after Pax Terra, it’s just considered the Rim version of this first jewel of Hubcentral. But Austro is far newer by fifty-some years, and Pax shows its age most of all in the pleasure district, where I take Finch. Where Petra is, mistress of one of ten flash houses in the section. The one we go to is called Red Square, her headquarters.

  Low ceiling, flickering light, and there’s a definite hiccup of moderated temperature, moisture, and airflow control through the corridors in this district. Scents released here tend to stick, and we’re not five minutes wandering the burrow holes between flash houses, pushing by the press of bodies, before Finch presses his sleeve to his nose and mouth. How many people—cigret smoke, alcohol, and drug scent clinging to their clothes—have passed through here?

  “Why don’t they do something about the ventilation?” He coughs behind me. As if I can do something about it.

  “Who’s gonna pay for it? You?”

  “They should shut this place down. At the very least a health inspector…”

  “Govies come by here every year. But the amount of money it would cost to clear people out…” They don’t think it’s worth it. It serves one good purpose though. People in places like this don’t look at you too closely or ask too many questions.

  I just wish Finch didn’t have to tail me. Wish that if I got him out, he could at least be on his way, and me on mine, though my track back to deep space feels like looking into the long barrel of a gun. Any minute now someone’s going to pull the trigger and you won’t see anything but a flash, and maybe you won’t even feel the shot impact. Sometimes it’s so sudden you don’t have time to feel anything.

  And that can be lucky.

  But with Finch I feel him by my side with all of his questions and his nervousness, and when the shot comes I think I’ll get the pain. Or maybe thinking you feel anything is just the sort of lie you tell yourself to make your universe make sense. To make you think you still have that capacity, and you’re not just filled with dread.

  He’s looking off the wrong way, so I grab his sleeve and tug him toward the opaque front of the club—black sheen with a red star on the door. It’s 1340 hours and the place is closed, but we can at least get in the foyer. Once the door shuts, casting us in russet half-light, Finch lowers his sleeve and takes a breath of the latent smoke-and-alcohol scent. But it’s fresher air cycling down from the house’s internal system.

  He’s quiet, I’m quiet. I think of past business I’ve done with this woman and hit the intercom.

  “Da?” the man says on the other end.

  I answer back in the same Russian. “Kublai Khan. Turn on your scan.”

  In a second a square of red light appears on the wall at elbow height, camouflaged until activated. I pull my sleeve up and press my Khan tattoo to the surface. Now we’ll see if Andreas Lukacs’s fancy Ops technology can pass muster in the underworld. The scan will pick up my ship ID since I helped them calibrate it to my nanocode long ago, but for all I know they could’ve upgraded, dropped my code once I was incarcerated, or received kill orders from Taja “just in case.” I wouldn’t be surprised.

  But the scan shuts off after a moment, and the inner doors buzz briefly. Finch says, “Maybe I should—”

  “You’re coming with me, or they might decide to sweep you off their entrance while I’m inside.” I yank the door open and step through to the club’s bottleneck front space. The walls morph on a cycle of snowy sunset, antique soldiers in a goose-stepping march, and large graven images of dead politicians. The door shuts behind Finch and he has the good sense to be quiet when a small Asian man approaches from behind the heavy-laden bar that runs along the right side of the wall.

  “You’re out,” he says, in accented majority language. His eyes are flat.

  “Where’s Petra?”

  “Who’s he?” Mr. Asian points behind my shoulder.

  “Crew.”

  He doesn’t believe me. Obviously. On
e look at Finch. “No crew allowed in here.”

  I remember my command voice. “Look, you can sass me for an hour, or you can tell Petra I came, got fed up, and left in two minutes. And then I’ll come back when you’re no longer in service.”

  The man doesn’t argue. He just walks off, straight into the shadowed back area of the club.

  In five minutes she comes out, a stout woman with a round face and long black hair, straight down to her ass. She’s all smiles, and I return it, leaning down to kiss both of her offered cheeks. This is where the work begins.

  “Yuri, I had no idea you’d got out. When? How?”

  “Maybe we can sit? It’s been a long flight.” And I want to curl up somewhere and just let my body heal. The bot-knitters still work, but it’s a maddening itch easiest ignored when asleep.

  But not yet.

  “Of course, of course…” She takes my arm and leads me to one of the empty cushioned booths, glancing over her shoulder. “And who’s your friend?”

  “Prison mate. Busted him out too.”

  Finch hangs back, but Petra motions him forward. So he goes. I sit with a sigh, because I ache, and watch her take Finch by both arms and look him up and down. He does well not to flinch or look too discomfitted. He has no idea that she’s broken boys in half with those same hands, and would do it to him if I pay her. “You trust him?” she asks.

  If I say no, she’ll kick him out. If I say yes, she might use him against me in some way once she gets tired of the pleasant routine.

  “I trust him as long as he’s in my sight,” I tell her.

  She laughs. “Then by all means. Sit.” To Finch.

  He does, right beside me, without a word. Mr. Asian brings across drinks as if he was silently called—which he probably was from a subvocalizer or commstud—and sets them down in front of me and Finch. White Russian for me, she remembers. Some amber-colored booze for him. I don’t touch mine, and won’t, until I’m relatively positive Petra isn’t out to poison me. Finch takes his cues from me and doesn’t even look at the glass.

  “So tell me a good story,” Petra says, leaning back in her seat across from us and lighting a long black cigret.