Then he said, “Yuri…”
I heard it. And all the anger just vented from my system. My fingers unclenched, and instead of bruising him, I hugged him. And he didn’t fight this time, his arms locked around me. And then he said, “Where’s your family, Yuri?”
For a second I didn’t understand why he’d ask that. It was obvious—my family was here. The geisha and the captain…and Estienne. But he tilted back his head and blinked at me. “Where’s your mama and Jascha, has he found them yet?”
“No,” I said, releasing him and walking to his bunk. I fumbled out my cigrets and lit one, shoving the case back in my cargo pocket.
“Why not? He said he would. Maybe your mama’s in a good place, and we can leave here and go see her. Or go back home to the Camp.”
The pleading tone grated on my nerves. “Fuck the Camp. I’m never going back there. What would we do if we went? Sit on those old boxes and piss at the lake ’til we got sick and died?”
He sniffed, rubbed at his nose, then his arm. “Then we should find your mama ourselves and go to her.”
“Bo-Sheng, don’t you get it?” I stared at him and sucked hard on the cig in frustration. “Nobody wants us! Papa never once tried to comm me, so what makes you think my mama would care where the hell I am?”
“Of course she’d care! And how do you know he never tried? The captain told you? Why do you even believe him?”
“You believed him! You brought me here!”
He recoiled as if I’d struck him. “So you blame me.”
“No I don’t blame you. I like it here! Look at what he’s given us. Why the hell do you wanna leave?”
Estienne was here. I was never going to leave.
“Yuri,” he said, “they do bad things. They kidnap kids and force them into this life. Just because we came here in total ignorance doesn’t make what they do all right.”
“Force them?” I laughed, sheer surprise. “Nobody here is forced.”
“Maybe not up where you are. But down here’s a different story.”
I shook my head. “Estienne would’ve told me…”
“Him? He fucking recruits for Falcone!”
I still shook my head, but my mind started to spiral. “You’re wrong.”
“They lie, Yuri.” He came close and took my shoulders, fingers digging. “I bet he’s been lying to us all along, in everything since we got aboard. Since before. They had your papa sign papers like this ship was a legit merchant, but it’s a pirate, and those papers don’t mean shit. None of what they told your papa or the Camp officials means shit. They took us.” He blinked rapidly. “They—”
I broke away. “I like it here, Bo-Sheng. I don’t wanna leave. So what if we do some bad things? What would you rather do, go off and live in a foster home on some station? Or be held in some detention center until the govies figure out we didn’t mean to get on this ship? Oh, except we did. And I get a better education here than anything those tired old grown-ups in the Camp coulda given. I got my own weapons, my own berth, my own pay. So what if we steal cargo here and there. So what if it’s hard. You earn what you get here, and that’s more than the Hub would ever allow anyone our age.” I took a drag from the cig. “And Marcus has never touched me, that’s just fucking rumor.”
“Maybe he knew you could be got in other ways. What about Estienne?”
I hit him. Ashes flew from the cigret, and he knelt in a heap on the floor, holding his face. Crying. And I bent down and hugged him because I didn’t want to fight with him, I just wanted him to be happy here. I held on tight. “Maybe I can get you moved up to the Hanamachi with me, and you’ll see. It’s not bad at all.”
“No.” He wrenched away and staggered to his feet, putting his back to the wall. “I’m not gonna be your whore!”
I could’ve shot him for that. But he was pathetic, his face muddy with tears. I could’ve made him regret those words.
“Then stay,” I said instead. “Do your drugs and live down here and don’t ever talk to me again. Then maybe you’ll learn.”
I left him. Without killing him. Even though I wanted to, right then.
I was in my quarters, on the floor, with the cage door open and Dexter on the lower bars, ducking his head at me so I could scratch it. So much like a dog it was funny. He made me smile, and for a while I forgot about Taja and Estienne and Bo-Sheng.
But then he let out a screech, and a second later the hatch beeped and swung in. I’d locked it, but Marcus had a command override, and he stepped in. I got to my feet and Dexter flew from the cage with another screech and perched himself on my desk, flapping his wings before settling. The captain gave him a glance, then looked at me, not smiling.
“You went to crew deck?”
He was going to brig me or worse. “Yes, sir.”
His tone was calm. “Tell me, Yuri, what fucking business is it of yours to go hunting another member of my crew when she did nothing to you? Then shooting a man in the process?”
“He bitched at me in front of all of them. I wasn’t going to take it. How’d they respect me then?” I wasn’t going to answer about Taja if I could help it.
He walked right up to me, two strides that changed the expression on his face. “Before you go shooting my crew you find out who the hell they are!”
Dexter launched from the desk and flew about the room, squawking, biting at my nerves, but Marcus ignored him completely. His shout was louder than the bird. “That man is one of my drive engineers, and I can’t fucking afford to have him lying abed in Medical!”
I couldn’t move.
“I expected better,” he said, in a sudden normal voice. “You did something rash because you’re pissed that Taja is screwing Estienne. What the hell did we talk about at dinner? Are you being led around this ship by your dick and your silly notions of romance? I want it out of your head, Yuri, do you hear me? I don’t give a shit that you and Estienne snuggle on off-hours, but your entire stay on my ship isn’t all off-hours. You’re going to work for what you get here, and if that requires you to bare ass when I say, you will do it and not complain. Do you read me?”
I couldn’t answer. My chest was too tight. I couldn’t breathe.
He hit me at the side of the head, so fast I felt it some seconds after the fact. And then the pain, sharp.
“Do you read me?” he shouted.
“Yes, sir!”
“What you’re feeling now for Estienne,” he said, “is false. What have you been learning here if not that fundamental fact? You can control your emotions. You can use other people’s emotions to control them. This will save you a lot of grief in the future, in your work. You may have affection for people and make attachments, but you learn to balance it. And not let it consume you.” His voice was kinder then, as if he regretted having to yell. “Do you understand?”
I nodded. I did. Even when I’d offered kindness to Bo-Sheng he’d done nothing but spit in my face.
“Estienne will always be here for you.” Marcus said. “Like the Khan will be. But sometimes we have to go off ship for missions. That doesn’t mean you’re forgotten. Just because he sleeps with other people or you’re both geisha doesn’t mean that central part of your relationship is void.”
I nodded again. Tried not to let my eyes leak. I kept them open, and the cool air dried me out.
He said, “You saw Bo-Sheng again, didn’t you.”
I said, “Yeah. And he doesn’t want anything to do with me.” It hurt.
“He’s been difficult since he came here. Jealous of you because I saw more in you than in him.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to believe it. But Bo-Sheng seemed determined to drag me back to the Camp with him. That fucking Camp.
Instead I said, “Marcus, you haven’t found Mama yet?”
Marcus said, “No.”
And why should I doubt him? Even a pirate, maybe even especially a pirate, wouldn’t have had ready access to Hub information.
I said
, “Is it true you kidnap children? Is it true you raped your other protégés?”
He stared down into my face. “What do you believe? What do I have to do, let you interview every crewmember until you decide you can trust me? It’s time to make up your own mind. It’s long overdue. Have I ever been truly awful to you?”
The truth was I wanted to be here.
So I shook my head, and said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
He nodded. “Fine then. No more shooting my crew. Now that you’re older they have little restriction in how to deal with you. So I’d advise you not to troll belowdecks for a little while.” His mouth tugged at the corners just a bit. “You definitely made an impression though.”
But of course I had. I was his.
I didn’t see Estienne until he commed me early next shift, before breakfast. Some part of me thought about apologizing for the whole deal, but then he didn’t even open the hatch for me, I just saw the light go green, and I opened it myself.
Estienne said, “Sit.”
It wasn’t a tone that invited argument. Maybe Marcus had come down on him for my behavior?
I went farther into the q and perched on the end of the desk chair. He was dressed in geisha black, but it all had a slightly transparent quality to it that gave his skin underneath a wet sheen. He was sitting on his bunk, but when I sat, he stood, and took the two strides to get in front of me. I had my hands on my knees and didn’t know what to look at. Up into his eyes was suddenly too intimidating. I remembered the knife in my face. So I settled on his navel, which showed through the unseamed bottom half of his shirt.
My palms were damp. I didn’t know why. For weeks I’d stirred with wanting just exactly this. So what was different now?
Maybe it was just a little too abrupt. A little too conscious. And if he was angry at me still, was it going to hurt?
“Look at me,” he said. Gently. No anger.
It struck me that we’d never really kissed. Not like the way a geisha should.
So I looked at him.
His eyes were dark. His hair was long. And when he leaned down to my upturned face, the ends of his hair grazed my cheek, and things were blurry for a second, then not there at all because his lips pressed to mine. I felt his hand snake around to the back of my neck.
He was kissing me.
And I sat there, sweaty palms.
He said with warm breath against my mouth, “You have to kiss back, Yuri.”
So, really, what was I waiting for?
I didn’t have to wait anymore.
I reached up to touch his face, but he pushed my hand down.
“Kiss,” he said, still so close I couldn’t really see him at all.
I leaned forward and up, put my hand somewhere on his shirt to steady myself even though I was the one sitting down, and I kissed him, soft lips, open mouth, tasted the caff and the cigs on him, inside him, and it was all wet and smoky and did things to me that maybe or maybe not were supposed to happen. So much different from Elder Sister Hestia, just because I cared about him in a different way.
His tongue pushed my mouth wider, so I guessed that was what he wanted, or what he wanted to show me, and I let him, but just as it was threading a warmth down through my body he leaned back, licking his lips, and said, “Do something. Don’t just wait for me. You have to initiate.”
And damn it all, he was frustrating me. So I stood, forcing him back, and twisted his shirt in my fist. His hand clamped around my wrist, and I knew he was going to protest, but I said, “You want me to. So shut up and let me.”
“Kiss,” he said. “Nothing more.”
“Tease,” I said. “So forget it.” With my knuckles grazing his bare belly. The fan tattoo.
I thought he’d smile, push my head in that playful way he liked to do, but there was nothing playful in his face. He grabbed my wrists, painfully, and disengaged my hands from his body.
“This is work,” he said. “Not play.”
“Can’t it be both?”
His eyes narrowed. “Yuri.”
“But I know that I know you. That we—we do things already. I know it’ll be different with a real client, but do we have to pretend that’s now?”
He said, “Yuri, don’t confuse the situation. Just because I touch you and we fool around doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing when you have to do it for a reason other than getting off. You have to learn. Despite the fact it’s me—keep your heart out of the equation. Copy that?”
He sounded like Marcus. And his voice was studied. I wasn’t in his equation now.
I clenched my hands at my sides. “Copy that.”
“Good,” he said. “So kiss me.” He didn’t smile. “Properly.”
He didn’t mean to be proper. He wanted me to manipulate.
So I watched his face, etched my gaze along the curves of his lips and the lines of his jaw, down the stretch of his throat to his collarbone. And I took a step until we were chest to chest, and I could feel him breathe. I slipped a hand to his waist, curled a finger in his belt loop, and pulled his hips closer. He was watching me with his hands at his sides. I leaned and kissed him, barely a tilt of the chin, so our noses brushed. I bit his lower lip, gently, and tugged on it, then tongued his mouth wider, delved in like into a burndive. Forget the edges of the real world, the dirty color and mundane solidity. His world was a soft pressure, wet warmth, and all the colors were behind my eyes in flavors. Caff. Cigs. Heat and smoke.
I trailed that kiss along his cheek, his jaw, down his throat when he tilted back his head. And I felt his hand in my hair, and maybe it was just training the way he said, “Good, good,” in a low voice, but if it was, I was determined to train him. He was going to learn. This was going to be more than work. In the end it was going to be worship.
And even as I touched him I wondered if he felt this way with Taja. If he felt anything at all now that wasn’t so conscious and so deliberate. And maybe my seeing Taja twice like that hadn’t been an accident. Maybe he was making a point to me.
I bit the side of his neck, and he pushed me back.
I smiled.
He said, “This isn’t going to work. Turn around.”
“What do you want me to do? You said kiss. Didn’t that work?” My gaze slid down to fix pointedly on his crotch.
He took my arm and faced me to the bed. “Lie down. On your stomach.”
All the joking left my brain. I glanced over my shoulder and smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. “Lie down.” Softer voice. So I did that, and he climbed onto the bed and straddled my hips. I raised myself on my elbows because now—
Couldn’t breathe.
“This isn’t fun,” he said from behind me, as I stared at the side of the lockers pushed against the top of his bed. “If someone wants this, you build them up if they want it, there’s no emotion involved. Sometimes they don’t want all the buildup though, so you just go to this.” Echoing parts of what Hestia had said. As he spoke his hands slid underneath the back of my shirt and pushed it up. Not quite the same way he did when we were just casual in his quarters. His fingers pressed my ribs on their way back down. He raised himself off me. “Lift your hips.”
I tried to roll over, free now, because this wasn’t how I pictured it would be. I thought he’d hold me a little first, or talk to me in his real voice, not with this sort of voice as if he were standing at the side of the room, watching.
But he didn’t let me roll over. One hand pressed between my shoulders. “Lift your hips,” he said. “Please.”
So I did. I thought he was going to reach under just to touch me, but he unseamed my pants and tugged them down, and didn’t touch me at all.
“Estienne,” I said.
He moved off me without a word, and I wanted to look back at him, but I didn’t for some reason, I just kept staring at the side of the lockers, their dented metal covered in a fall of red fabric, and maybe I heard him rummage around for something beneath the bed, maybe I heard him remove his
own pants, but it was just me and the lockers and my grip on one of his pillows, my chin pushed into it. I was flat on my chest. Then he said he had to prepare things so he put this stuff inside me and it was cold and I squirmed but he pressed a hand to the small of my back to keep me mostly still, and I wanted to say Stop, but of course I didn’t because he wasn’t going to and I had to learn. Then it happened. He put himself inside me in slow increments, all of him and all of me, until all of me was just wet and red, like the pillow beneath my face. He didn’t talk to me, not really, except for telling me what to do and how to move. He wasn’t brutal, but he wasn’t kind. He wasn’t even really touching me.
It wasn’t him. And it wasn’t me.
It was just the geisha in this room.
He sent me back to my quarters, just like Hestia had. I wanted to go because I hurt. And as soon as I got there I threw up in the bathroom. Grasping the cold steel seat I tried to remember that Estienne loved me, that as long as he loved me it made anything right, because how could anything bad come from those feelings. I tried to keep those thoughts in my head, but as I coughed and spat they wanted to come out of me like the sick. They wanted to revolt.
Early next shift Rika buzzed my hatch. I was still in bed, and she came in, maybe I’d forgotten to lock it, I couldn’t remember. She saw me curled up beneath the blankets, and said, “No fight training today I guess.”
I shook my head.
“No anything today?” she said.
“No.” I watched her as she came closer to the bunk. “Can you tell Estienne? Or Elder Sister? I don’t want to leave here.”
“Sure, but they might not go for it.” For all her general ruthlessness, she could still be caring. She cared a lot about Ville, the way they sometimes held hands at meals. Now she reached down and touched my hair. “You did it finally with him, didn’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“You need to go see Doc Wachter.”
“Later.”
“This shift, Yuri. It’s important you go.” She sat on the side of the bunk. Now I wondered if Estienne had sent her. I wondered why he didn’t come here himself. “You want anything? Food, drink…a gun for target practice?”
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