He watched me with his red-covered eyes. “So you’d rather recruit?”
I pulled my gun and pointed it at him. The two other boys were quick, but Otter stepped forward, once, and it stilled them with their hands at their waists, on their weapons.
“Mutual amnesia,” I said. “I suggest you take my offer.”
He held up his hand. Between his fingers shone a small chipsheet. He flicked it at me like a playing card so it careened over my shoulder and landed on the bed.
“If you change your mind.”
He left. And I didn’t lower the gun until the door shut behind them. I didn’t look at the chipsheet until the door was locked.
But I put it in my pocket like a thieving hand.
I went back to Genghis Khan after two and a half weeks on station with a final list of kids for one of our bloodmates to follow up with, confiscate, then distribute. Estienne asked me “how it went” and I just looked at him, holding that slate full of names and information. “How do you think?” I said, and it was wrong. Because he sat on my bunk looking up at me, and it wasn’t just confusion in his eyes, at my tone. Or concern. He was curious.
“What’s going on with you?” he said.
“Nothing. Just tired. The shuttle ride back was long.” I pulled some clothes down from my locker and started to change. He came up behind me and ran his hand along my stomach.
“Why don’t you go take a shower.”
I stepped away. “Good idea.” I looked at him. “I’ll see you later.”
He bit the inside of his cheek, watching me. Wanting me because it had been more than three weeks for him, counting my transit time. He said, “Are you still upset about—me not joining you on your ship?”
I had to wrench my mind around. I hadn’t thought of it much in the last little while. “No,” I said, even though now that he reminded me, it cut. Again. Even though right now I could barely look at him for some reason, when usually I wanted nothing but to bed down.
He moved closer and held my face in his hands. But my hand came up before he could do anything more, pushing his arm away so he let go.
“Not now.” I stared at the deck.
I heard him release breath. Annoyed, maybe. Sad. But he didn’t say anything.
Sometimes I wished he would ignore the fact I was the protégé, and adult. I wanted him to do what he’d done when I was younger. Not be hesitant around me. Stand up to me. Sometimes. In the muddied parts of my mind.
Now I thought he was a little scared of me.
And so he left.
After my shower I put on clean clothes, black and white, and presented the list in person to Falcone in his office. He made me stand there while he perused.
“Good,” he said, like he was checking for typos. “Good. Have a seat, Yuri.”
I unclamped the chair in front of his desk and dropped down into it.
“So,” he said, resting on his arms, leaning toward me. “With this assignment accomplished, I think it’s time to tell you that I’ve acquired a ship for you. Komodo-class, a bloodchild for the Khan.”
This was something good to hear, finally. I felt my mouth pull into a smile. “Yeah?”
His eyes didn’t leave my face. “However, I’m bothered by something, Yuri.”
I straightened. “What, sir?”
He said, “You know Estienne won’t be a part of your Hanamachi.”
“I know that.”
“But you don’t like it.”
I looked at him.
“Answer me,” he said, still mild. Except for his eyes.
It wasn’t a face you could lie to. And besides, I wanted to see if I could bargain. “No, I don’t like it. I’d like him with me.”
“Because you think you’re in love with him.”
Estienne told. I wasn’t surprised. He’d been telling things to Falcone since he first set me in quarters separate from Bo-Sheng. But in this. Maybe he was pissed because I hadn’t slept with him when I returned?
“Are you in love with him?” Falcone asked.
“No, sir.”
His mouth twisted. “Oh, I know you say you aren’t. I know on the outside you act like there isn’t a problem when you both are with clients. And I know I told you that I don’t mind the connection between crew—or geisha. But that relationship should never get in the way of the work. If you’re going to get your own ship, and be a captain, you can’t be dependent on someone like Estienne.”
“What about Taja?” I said, sitting very still. But watching his eyes.
He stared at me. It seemed like only the black pupils were looking at me. They were stark against his blue irises. Then he got up and came around his desk and laid a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t expect him to do it, and I flinched. He smiled. “Taja amuses me. But I don’t sulk about her other bedmates.”
He’d touched me plenty of times growing up, but never in a way that made me uncomfortable. In that way.
But now.
I forced myself to look up at him, wanted to get up and push him back, but I didn’t move as he ran his hand over my hair, down the back, lifting the ends between his fingers and off the back of my neck. I didn’t move.
He said, “You do want your own ship, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I think you’ll make a fantastic captain for me. If you just learn to separate what’s good and bad for your ship. Control and awareness are good. Deluded fancy notions of romance are not.”
What was so romantic about just wanting someone with you? I didn’t buy him flowers and chocolate. We didn’t hold hands in the corridors.
But I didn’t say anything. I stared at his desk while he played with my hair.
“What do you think would happen if you took Estienne over there and some rival captain found out about your…love for him. You would be giving this enemy a large opportunity to screw you over just by threatening Estienne. Now is that wise? Or fair to Estienne to be your hostage?”
“No, sir, of course not.”
He said, “I don’t think you mean it.” He dropped his hand.
I said, “Does that mean you won’t give me a ship?”
“I had no intention of giving you a ship.” He stepped away and sat back behind his desk, suddenly all distant business. Not that what he’d been doing wasn’t also business. “You know if you get a ship, it’ll be because you’ve earned it.” He picked up his slate. “Now get out.”
I slept alone that blueshift. Estienne didn’t knock on the hatch or comm me, and out of sheer stubbornness or muted anger at his evident conversation with Falcone, I didn’t comm him either or go to him next door. I had half a mind to go to Jonny or Yasmin, but decided instead to stay in and play with Dexter before bed. He hopped around on my desk, sat on my hand when I input orders for the cargo crew under my command (if I verbally input he tended to think I was talking to him and made noises at me), and when I finally crawled into bed I heard Dexter fluttering in his cage, in the dark, restless. I lay on my back after coming awake for the second time.
When the hatch beeped he screeched at it.
“Sshh, Dex. Lights fifty. Open.” I sat up, expecting Estienne or at least one of the other geisha—and it was Estienne. We’d cuddle and forget about any distance between us.
“Hey,” he said, moving in but keeping the hatch open.
“Hey…” I started to push the blankets aside to invite him to bed but he shook his head.
“Put on your clothes, the captain wants to see us.”
I froze. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. But that was a lie.
So we went—not to the office, but to Falcone’s quarters. Spartan and gray, it wasn’t geisha-decorated in any way, wasn’t comfortable. I hadn’t been in there since I’d first been on the ship, and it looked no different from my vague memories of it.
He was sitting at his small desk and motioned us farther in.
Without any other greeting, he simply said, “Take off your
clothes.”
Estienne started to unseam his shirt.
I stood there.
Falcone said, “Take off your clothes, Yuri.”
“Why?”
He put his hand on the desk. It held a gun.
I stared at him. Estienne was naked and went over to the bunk and sat, unasked.
I didn’t know why I wanted to test things, but I said to the captain, “You wouldn’t shoot me.”
He said, “No?”
“You wouldn’t kill me.” Even though I said it with more rebellion than I was feeling.
He said, “I don’t have to kill you to hurt you. Now take off your clothes and join him on the bed.”
My skin turned cold.
“Get on the bed!” he shouted.
My hands twitched. I pulled off my clothes, dropped them to the deck near Estienne’s, then sat beside him on the bunk, covering myself, even though—why? I’d stripped for clients, I’d done worse or had worse done to me.
But nothing made me feel quite so dirty as when Estienne started to kiss my shoulder while Falcone watched.
He watched the entire time.
I walked blind back to quarters with Estienne trailing. He didn’t speak. I still felt him at my back even though clothes and distance separated us. I still felt Falcone’s eyes.
I barged into quarters so abruptly that Dexter started to squawk. I tried to push in the hatch, but Estienne followed and I turned on him.
“Get out.”
“Yuri,” he said, looking guarded. As well he should.
“I said get out!”
“It was just a test. That’s all it was.”
“Testing what! How bloody twisted he is?” I saw Estienne flinch but didn’t tone it down. I turned it up. “I don’t give a damn if there’s kink with clients, but this is us! This is home! And he”—my damn eyes. But I took a breath and finished it dry and strangled—“he watched!”
“You have to let it go,” he said.
Let him go, he meant.
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to grab him close and tear him inside out with what I felt.
“He’s screwed kids, hasn’t he.” Bo-Sheng’s words seemed to swim physically in front of my eyes, demanding attention. Demanding truth. “Didn’t he?”
Estienne didn’t answer.
“Just like you,” I said.
His right fist flew. I grabbed his arm, but he pelted with his left, and for a few violent seconds we shoved at each other, but not enough to truly hurt because both of us could, both of us could kill each other if we had real intent. But then he broke away and went to the hatch.
“I love you,” he said, “but if that isn’t enough to cancel out all this other shit, then that’s your problem, not mine.”
I let him leave.
I screamed at the hatch, after the fact, “It’s your problem!”
But I was the one it seemed to hurt the most. He’d said it as clear as he could in the captain’s quarters. When it came down to it, he’d screw me first before Falcone.
For a week I cut every blueshift before bed until my arms were a webwork of scars and blood, wrapped in bandages and covered by long sleeves. But it let me breathe, it let me go about my work with a face that gave nothing. I told Rika I was too tired to spar, so avoided her keen eyes. I ditched anything social, and I ignored Estienne. By now the crew just thought I was moody or busy when I got like this. Even Caligtiera tended to avoid me in this state.
But not Falcone. We still had our dinners. On the seventh one since the shift in his quarters, he said, “Some clients might like the scars, but I want you to stop until they’re all fully healed. Do you read me?”
Yeah, they were all right as long as they didn’t infringe on business. As long as they allowed me to do what I did for him. Whatever it took to cope, when drugs weren’t an option.
“Yeah.” I speared a block of meat.
“You’re still angry,” he continued, toneless. “Just because I was witness to what you and Estienne do anyway?”
“What we do outside of clients is personal.” I held a knife and fork to cut into the steak again but set them aside to take a sip of my wine.
“Too personal for your captain?”
Maybe the mad mood had taken too much hold. I looked him in the eyes. “Yeah. For the same reason you don’t like anyone reminding you of Azarcon, maybe I don’t like the stuff between me and Estienne to go further than us.”
He boxed me across the face, so fast I didn’t have time to set the glass down. It flew from my hand and shattered on the floor, spilling red. My eyes watered, but I kept my seat and stared at him through the tangle of my hair. Breath felt like shards in my throat.
“That’s the only warning you’re going to get.” He resumed eating. “Say it again, and I’ll take it out on Estienne.”
The next time I went on station to meet a client—Chaos Station, a week later—I took Otter’s chipsheet with me.
And I commed him.
The captaincy, whenever I got it, if I got it, would get me off the ship. I’d still have to follow Falcone’s orders, but I’d be off the ship.
And in the meantime I talked to the underdeck kid. Just to hear what he had to say. Just to hear something in my head other than Falcone’s words. Otter told me that it might be difficult to get my message to Azarcon, but he was sure it would get there, I just had to be patient.
I could be patient, I told him.
Patient as a predator.
Neither Falcone nor Estienne ever mentioned it outside of when it happened; but we got called into his quarters every two weeks or so, in our sleepshifts, and had sex for him. And after three months he summoned me to his office and gave me my ship. I managed to smile at him. The expression came from the thought that I’d be my own captain. I knew already I wanted Piotr as my engineer commander. I was going to fill my crew with as many people from this ship as I knew I could trust.
Kublai Khan, Falcone said. Genghis Khan’s bloodchild. It was waiting for me at Hades, where we were headed. Silently I wanted to know how he could guarantee I wouldn’t shoot him just as soon as I got on my own bridge.
Then he said, “Your lieutenant will be Taja Roshan.”
And I couldn’t protest. Even then. Though I didn’t much hide the faint sneer on my face.
But that wasn’t the real reason he had such confidence in my loyalty. He smiled at me with this gift between us, and he knew exactly why I wouldn’t shoot him. And I knew—so did Estienne.
It was a beautiful ship, my Kublai Khan. It smelled new. Polished and painted obsidian bones. I could walk the corridors asleep because it was a Komodo-class ship, like its bloodmother, where I’d spent the last eleven years learning. But it had none of the other Khan’s scars, yet. There were no bad memories or troubled dreams to mar its surfaces and seep into its bones. My ship was young and waiting, and our steps along the deck sounded like playful music. As Estienne followed me to my new quarters, holding one of my bags as I held Dexter’s cage, I almost regretted that comm to Otter.
My new quarters were twice the size of my previous one, but without the years of lived-in comfort. Blank walls, bulkhead gray, and a stripped bunk in need of occupation. In need of seams and sunken patches that said a body was at home here. Maybe two bodies, occupying one mild depression. One small sadness. “This is all going to change,” Estienne said. Like I was changed.
It was mild between us. I couldn’t stay angry at him, even though it felt that way sometimes. Even though, sometimes, it felt hollow between us. Here now in my large and lonely new place, I looked at him and was ten again.
But only until he dropped his eyes. Then I set down Dexter’s cage and put my arms around him, and Estienne let my bag drop and hugged me back. And leaving Genghis Khan was one thing, but leaving him altogether or turning him over to Azarcon was something else, especially when his tears dampened my collar.
“I’m sorry,” he said. For everything? Maybe.
I didn’t
answer, and his fingers gripped me tighter until I said, “It’s okay.” And of course it wasn’t, but right then it was near enough to it.
His voice was muffled. “Our ships will still run together. Just like we used to do with Shiva. You’ll see, it won’t be so bad. You’re on your own now, and it’s good. It’s good to be away. Just a little.”
He was right in that. But my quarters were empty. So I asked him to stay, if only for a while.
And he did that for me.
Eventually he left, and I sat on the floor of my colorless new world and watched Dexter hop out of his cage and flutter toward me until he landed lightly on my arm. I rubbed his green head with my finger, and his tail feathers shook. He was one bit of color until I could redecorate and make this place my own. I held him up to my lips, and he pecked his bird beak at me, sharp little kisses.
I still tasted Estienne on my tongue.
He’d touched the scars on my arms. “Maybe you won’t have to do this anymore.” He’d never mentioned them before. Maybe because he knew why they were there, and as long as I was there, they couldn’t be helped. Now his fingers were soft along the lines like he was reading them, blind. He said, “Rika and Ville are here at least. You’re going to be fine. And you’ll take on your own protégé eventually.”
I hadn’t thought of that, for some reason. It made my stomach clench.
“Birds have to leave their nests,” he’d said, trying for a smile. Glancing at Dexter in his black cage.
I let Dexter roam and flit freely, then lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling. I could handle things here, alone. I could walk these corridors, I didn’t have to be locked in. A slow smile formed.
This was my ship. It was my arsenal. I was going to run things.
Before I went on my bridge I destroyed Otter’s chipsheet under my heel.
1.15.2197 EHSD—Slavepoint
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