Wandering Soul

by Steven Anderson

  “I helped him set up encryption when he went back to the embassy. The same night you said goodbye to him. He’s been telling me everything that’s happening there, or at least all of the conversations between Janus Boden and Ambassador Killian.”

  “They still trust him? Why would they include him in their plans?”

  “Um, they’re not. I also showed him how to tap into the signal from the bug they planted on him using his display pad. After he told them that Father Ryczek had found and destroyed it, we changed its frequency and he planted it in the ambassador’s office the next morning at like 0300. We’ve been listening to their meetings the last couple of days.”

  “He said he wouldn’t help. He said I was crazy and dangerous.”

  “He had a change of heart on the way back to the embassy. He seems to have self-control issues where you’re concerned. Or Cuza may have hit him.” She considered this while she chewed. “He’s scared, Duse, but he’s doing it for you. If they find out, he’ll be in serious trouble.”

  “He should come here to the Mission after my parents are released, or right now would be better.”

  “He’s gone too far for that now, it would only make things worse for him. He needs to lay low and just ship out like none of this ever happened once Mesa Vista arrives.”

  “But I want him here. Ow!”

  Winn had reached across the table before I could dodge. “You’re better than that, Mala Dusa.”

  “Not when it comes to Sam.” I rubbed my forehead. “I’m not very good at all.”

  “I know. I should have waited before telling you, but I’m excited. The agreement is for them to be released Sunday morning. The terms require them to leave Bodens Gate immediately, and for the Union to bar her for life from participating in the Commission or anything else having to do with planetary politics. They’ll come pick us up and then we’ll all be escorted to a shuttle.”

  “I can’t leave. There’s two new solar arrays arriving on Tuesday that I’m supposed to help set up. I’m under contract.”

  “And you think you’ll be able to sneak out some night for dinner at the Gabriele Restaurant with Sam before he leaves.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He’s right about you.”

  “That I’m crazy and dangerous?”

  “No, that’s why we both love you so much. I was thinking about when he said you were trying to kill him.”

  It was like strong hands were squeezing my chest. “How come you get to talk to him and I don’t?”

  “You know the answer to that. Sam recognizes that you’re a problem so he plays tricks on himself to keep either of you from doing something stupid. He talks to me and not you because he’s pretending that you don’t love him anymore. It’s an interesting tactic. Maybe you should try it.”

  “So when is the great and wise Winona going to allow me to talk to my friend again?”

  She was using a piece of bread to get the last of her salad dressing and stray bits of onion. “We can’t let them know that there’s still a connection between the two of you or they might suspect him of passing information or use it as a conduit to put pressure on Hannah and your dad. My encryption makes it look like he’s just sending messages to his parents. Talking to him should be safe once we’re off planet and there’s no longer any possibility of you seeing him again.”

  I sighed, or it was supposed to be a sigh. It came out as a whimper.

  “Be brave, Duse. He’ll be back about the time we’re finishing our senior year. He’ll come find you, I’m sure of it. Until then, you can send messages back and forth across the light years. It could be worse.” She thought about it. “Much worse.”

  It was Saturday in the Warrens and Winona wouldn’t shut up. She was determined to make me less miserable by the force of her own cheerfulness. She was chattering on about the different styles of architecture we were passing and the organic growth of the streets and alleyways. She was even commenting on what was contributing to each new smell we encountered, making me guess what it was. I wasn’t feeling any less miserable. Sam had died overnight, a dozen times in a dozen different ways, each one hideous and vivid in my mind. Winona told me that I had been screaming for the Tarakana to get out of my head, swinging a wrench at the shadows under the beds and in the back of the closet. After she took my wrench away, Winn had laid down next to me, and held me in the dark until I cried myself back to sleep.

  Walking along with her and Cuza in the bright sunlight, I was still convinced it was the Tarakana. It had felt just like when Merrimac had shoved me down the twisted future paths to where Sam and I were together. But this had been dark, feeding on my fear and panic, showing me all the ways Sam would be taken from me, until only the despair of love eternally lost was left. I woke up angry, wanting to hunt down everyone that wanted to hurt Sam or keep us apart. I wanted to find someone to kill, and that was a feeling that scared me almost as much as loosing Sam.

  “Do you smell that, Duse?” Winona asked again. “Guess what it is.”

  It smelled like garbage soaked in sewage. All of the Warrens smelled that way to me, so I told her, “Garlic.”

  “Nope, it’s garbage soaked in sewage.” She smiled at me, eyes sparkling. “Being used as fertilizer for the garlic.” She laughed and I smiled for what seemed like the first time in a week.

  “God, I love you, Winona.”

  “I know you do. By tomorrow night your parents will be free and all four of us will be on a Union ship thrusting away from here. Sam will be working on his plan for Kempner-27 with your invaluable help via display pad, and you’ll be making rude innuendos to each other all through the trip home. With any luck, he’ll be back in time to dance with you at the spring prom.”

  “You make it sound so easy. Do you really think Hannah will just fly away from all this?”

  “Of course not. But she’s shrewd and subtle. She’ll leave, but she’ll find a way to stay involved.” Winn looked around at the crowds on the street as we neared the market square. “She loves these people.”

  “She ain’t leavin’.” Cuza had been ignoring our conversation since we left the Mission. Now he stopped and looked hard at Winona. “Not if she’s who she was, not after you tell her what’s happening here. You see that stone?” He pointed to a large plinth, maybe a couple of meters on a side, which was covered with flowers.

  “Is that where her statue was?” Winn asked, her voice sounding reverent.

  “Yeah, until they made me move it. Those flowers started appearing a couple days ago when the first media reports came out that Ysabeau was alive and being held by the Guards. Folks here remember. They remember what hope felt like and they teach their kids what it was like.”

  We walked up to the stone and he took a single rose from inside his coat. He held it out to me. I sniffed it and smiled, enjoying the sweet scent after the stench of the Warrens. Cuza took his thumb, intentionally stabbed it with one of the thorns, and then wiped his blood on the petals before laying the rose on top of the plinth. I shivered, glimpsing the depth of devotion and love that he had for her.

  Winona took Cuza’s hand and kissed it. When she looked at me there were tears in her eyes. “If Ysabeau stays, I’ll stay and fight with her.”

  An alarm was ringing silently in the back of my head, sounding just like the one on Wandering Star that was supposed to send me running to the rally point.

  “You’ll stay here? Both of you? Fighting? Like really fighting?” The tears in Winona’s eyes had turned to cold hatred and I felt like I was back in my nightmare again, the one where Sam had died so many times that the landscape was littered with his broken bodies.

  “Oh, God damn it,” I said under my breath and immediately put my hand to my mouth. Dad almost never swears; Hannah does it all the time. Both of them yell at me whenever I do it.

  I looked around at the buildings crowded a
round the square, feeling panic. Left, right, maybe behind us. Forty kilograms, Dad had said. Forty-five on Bodens Gate. Maybe looking like a dog, or something else, or maybe nothing but a shimmer in the shadows. No, there they were under an awning twenty meters away. Three dogs lying in the shade with their eyes open watching us. I wished I had my wrench with me.

  I picked up a rock and threw it at them, then another. I charged at them, still throwing. On the fourth throw they stood up and trotted away from me down an alley. I felt a quick wash of amusement from them and then there was a shimmer and they vanished while still in the middle of the alley.

  “Duse, what are you doing?”

  “Didn’t you see those dogs?”

  “Yeah…”

  I put my hands on her face, pushing her hair back, looking at her eyes, trying to see if my Winona was still in there.

  She took my hands and pulled them away from her face. “Mala Dusa, are you OK?”

  “Those weren’t dogs. Think about it. What were you feeling a moment ago, when Cuza was putting the flower on the plinth. Was it normal?”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “I wanted to find Ysabeau’s enemies and help her kill them. I still do, but–” She paused, looking confused. “When I try to think about why killing is needed, it feels fuzzy inside my head. But it is needed, right?”

  “I don’t think so, Winn.”

  “So you two coming to the market or are ya just gonna chase stray dogs?”

  “The market,” Winona answered, still looking troubled. “I need to give my report to Hannah tomorrow.” She squeezed my hand and we followed after Cuza.

  The Warrens were a mess. Maybe it was worse before Hannah united the clans into the confederation; Cuza said it was, but it was hard to believe. Before the war, there had been a thousand clans, maybe more. No one really knew. Now there were fifteen. Every merchant we talked to had a story to tell.

  Elena Croitoru made custom clothing and sold it in the market every Friday and Saturday. Watching her hand stitching an alteration to a wedding dress while she talked to Winona made my fingers hurt. She had been twenty-five when her clan joined the confederation. She lost her husband to a Central Government ambush. The rebellion had brought her a widow’s veil, a small pension, and hope that the daughter that would never know her father might somehow have a better life. Sofia was a year younger than me and was sitting on the ground next to her mother, learning to sew. During the week she attended school in Eindhoven learning to program AI systems. She said she was good at it and wanted to start her own business working the Union ships that passed through the docks for resupply and repair.

  That could be a problem. The Central Government had imposed rules that would require her to join the Space Dock Affiliation first and there was a waiting list, and examinations, and licensing that could take up to ten years to get through and more money than Elena made in a year. Unless your family had connections, like most of the citizens outside the Warrens had.

  But it would be no problem, Elena assured us. Ysabeau was back and she would fight for the Warrens again, fight to finish the revolution and make the people equal to any citizen.

  Her smile made me shiver.

  Darius Bourean made high-end cookware emblazoned with the sign of an ox on the handles. Before the rebellion he had dealt in scrap metal and used crockery. In the first months of peace, he built a factory and made contracts with distributors in the capital, establishing a brand that quickly became known for durability and elegance. Then the clan that controlled the section of the Warrens that included his factory wanted him to pay a separate tax to them and the clan that controlled the road leading to Eindhoven wanted money each year for transit improvements that were never made. The confederation had won the war and lost the peace, in his opinion. Now the Warrens were controlled by fifteen squabbling, corrupt warlords that were supposed to have given their weapons and allegiance to the new government, but instead had set up private security forces, internal checkpoints, and demanded protection money from local businesses. His contracts with the shops in Eindhoven now flowed through the local clan leader, the Clan leadership council and an official in the Central Government, each layer taking a cut of his profits and delivering nothing in return.

  But he was optimistic. Ysabeau was back and the warlords would fall in line behind her or be swept away like the garbage they were. I bought an insulated metal cup from his stall in the market. A line of oxen was engraved on the side, chasing each other nose to tail in an endless circle.

  I refused to enter the next shop. The sign said they made sausages and neatly wrapped cuts of meat. The smell made me want to have salad for dinner, maybe for the rest of my life.

  “Um, Winona, I’m going to wait out here, if that’s OK.”

  Cuza looked at me and then at Winona, who was already entering the shop. “Let me introduce you to Zimbrean. He’s a friend of mine, so you’ll be safe enough with him. I’ll wait out here with Alice.” He closed his eyes hard. “Sorry, Little Soul, ‘old eyes are easily fooled’, they always say.”

  I smiled at him and waited for him to introduce Winona before going to stand by a stall selling flowers, letting my nostrils have a break.

  I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye just in time. I turned quickly and caught the ball a fraction of a second before it would have hit my head. There was a boy of eight or nine staring at me, just as amazed that I had caught it as I was. I kicked the ball back to him and saw that he wasn’t alone. There must have been at least ten kids between eight and fourteen playing in the spaces between the market stalls, chasing after the ball, kicking it to each other, laughing and screaming and being a nuisance to all of the adults trying to shop. I followed them and soon they were letting me have a turn at the ball. I didn’t know the rules or even what game we were playing, but it was fun. After about three or four laps around the market I stopped in front of the butcher shop to catch my breath and all the kids gathered around me asking me questions and giggling. Where you from? Why you so skinny? Have you been sick? I told them about Earth and Dulcinea and that I was working for Father Ryczek.

  A girl of maybe thirteen, and possessing more curves than my body will ever know, touched my arm. “You’re very strange,” she told me. The rest of the pack had moved on, chasing the ball on another lap of the market.

  “And you’re very beautiful,” I answered.

  “Not like you. You’re amazing.” She held her hand by my face and traced a line straight down to my feet. “All one line.”

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I was suddenly curious about what a child in the Warrens might see as possible futures.

  “I want to be an architect.” She looked around her. “I want to tear all of this down and build it again the right way. Or maybe an engineer. Or maybe…” She blushed and looked away.

  “Or what?”

  “I’ve been dreaming about something the last few nights. I think, maybe, I want to design weapons.”

  “Weapons? What kind of weapons?”

  “All kinds. I think maybe I won’t really be able to become an architect. The waiting lists are so long for the good schools in the capital. And then you have to join the government guild and they only let citizens join, not us. No one will let us do what we want in the Warrens unless we have weapons, so I want to design them and build them. Then I can help Ysabeau fight. At least that’s what I’ve been dreaming about the last couple of nights. It’s kind of silly, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled, feeling a kind of humming building in the back of my head. The rest of the kids were back, crowding around me again, laughing and giggling, wanting to touch my bare arms and staring at my legs.

  There were several adults gathered around me now too. “I really don’t know, but what’s happening here, it isn’t right. The leaders who should be protecting your rights and making your lives easier are
just helping themselves to the money in your pockets. It has to change.”

  More people were joining the crowd now. “This isn’t what people died for, that a few men get rich. Your children’s future should be limited only by the strength of their desire and the abilities God has given them.” I pointed to where the empty plinth stood covered with flowers. “It’s not what she sacrificed for, it’s not what my mother died for.”

  “Are you a child of the Warrens?” an old woman called to me.

  “I am,” I answered. “She died here as the rebellion was being born. Her blood joined with the dirt when they shot her down.”

  There was a murmur in the crowd.

  “How much have you all suffered, trying to make a better life for your children?” I asked them. “We can do better than this. We owe it to those that died, and to our children, and to ourselves. Our struggle isn’t finished. We’ve only paused to rest a moment before pushing on into the daylight. Remember the words in the Articles of Confederation. Our rights are from God, not Janus Boden, who chooses to give us only scraps. Our rights are ours to claim and defend.”

  “Are you starting your own army, Duse?”

  I looked at Winona, blinking several times before I realized where I was. “Are we going back to the Mission now?”

  “Yeah. I think we should.” She grabbed my arm.

  “Let her talk,” someone yelled.

  “Yeah, let her talk!”

  “That’s plenty for today,” Cuza shouted back.

  They hustled me down an alley and away from the crowd. Some of the children followed us until Cuza turned and smiled at them. They scattered.

  “Why did you stop me? I was just about to tell the kids about my mom. She loved kids. I was going to show them the picture of her at the Mission surrounded by her students and covered in paint.”

  “Uh huh.” Cuza replied.

  “And then I was going to tell them everything about my stepmom.”

  Cuza stopped and he and Winona stared at me.