Still he knew, even on the worst days the Barrens could offer, he knew setting Dani free had been for the best.
It had to have been for the best.
He’d spent the better part of six years telling himself that.
“Gideon.”
He blinked, looked up to see she was studying him with an expression he could only hope wasn’t pity.
“You need to wake up, now,” she placed the hand he’d released to his cheek.
“I don’t want to,” he said, sounding, even to his own ears, pathetically bereft. “If I wake up, you’ll leave.”
“Gideon,” she leaned close, “I was never here.”
Then she placed her lips, warm and silky as the bathwater, over his, “Wake—”
“—up already, won’t you?” Mia didn’t know how many times she’d shouted at the man since dragging his head out of the water. Her arms were already trembling as she tried to keep him from sliding down again. Though she’d pulled the plug first thing, water was draining too bloody slow, so she just kept holding on and yelling and hoping she wasn’t shaking a dead man.
Not that he felt dead.
Not that she knew what dead felt like.
From the way the draco was acting, shifting from leg to leg to leg and crooning anxiously, she wasn’t the only one.
“He’ll be all right,” she told the frenetic beast, then turned her attention back to the inert head on her shoulder. “You better be all right,” she said, giving him a massive shake and a thud on the chest, which she vaguely remembered seeing a riverman do to one of his mates who’d been pulled from the water after too long a spell.
When had Dani’s voice gotten so high? Gideon thought. And why was she hitting him?
He opened his mouth to ask just that, when a mouthful of brackish water erupted from his lungs, and he coughed so violently he fell over on his right side.
“No, no! Not that way!” The voice that wasn’t Dani’s bounced around his ears.
“What way?” he asked or, rather, tried to ask. What came out was more a wet gurgle as his inhaled a mouthful of water.
He thought he heard a “Nononono,” but everything was muffled.
Why is it muffled? he asked himself. And why is not-Dani yanking at my arm?
Because, you idiot, you’re drowning, his self replied.
Himself (Selves?) thought he should probably do something about that, but they couldn’t come to an agreement as to what.
Which made it almost a relief when a deep and tearing pain dug into his left shoulder, shredding the fog and galvanizing Gideon’s body into action.
Jerking out of the wet, and with the aid of a pair of fairly determined hands, he got himself upright enough to cough out the water he’d sucked in while not-Dani thumped him vigorously on the back.
“Bleeding keepers!” Not-Dani ceased the thumping as his eyes opened, then she began to curse like an infantry drill sergeant.
Gideon appreciated the sentiment, and would have echoed it, but at the moment he was still working on basic respiration.
He did manage to lift his head enough to see his savior, but closed his eyes again because it appeared there were three small fuzzy people in front of the tub, along with an entire talon of dracos flying from one end of the bathroom to the other.
Yup, he thought, he was right, life had indeed reverted to unpleasantly normal.
10
“Oy, Mister! You okay, then?”
The small person—girl—Gideon’s slowly focusing mind told him—drove away the last whispers of the dream, though her voice still sounded muffled, like it came to his through a lake.
Or fog.
Or a foggy lake.
A cold foggy lake.
He held up a “just a minute,” finger or three, then leaned over the bathtub’s edge and shoved said finger(s?) down his throat until he could successfully puke up what had been mostly a very nice dinner, with the small exception of the morph included somewhere in the meal.
“Oy! That’s disgusting.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he croaked, falling back into the tub.
The girl’s head tilted inside the hood of her tunic. “Then why’d you do it?”
“Because unless you’re under the surgeon’s knife, morpheus is better out than in.”
“And how d’ye know…” she began, then stopped herself. “Because you’ve been under a surgeon’s knife.”
“A time or three.” He reached out and grabbed the towel draped over the edge of the bathtub. Once he’d covered as much as possible, he leaned back again and closed his eyes because seeing was still an unpleasant proposition.
“You gonna die?”
He raised an eyebrow but didn’t open the eye. “Not presently, I don’t think.”
A moment of expectant silence passed, but what the kid expected he couldn’t say.
He also couldn’t say why there was a kid in the bathroom in the first place, or why a stiff, cold breeze shivered over his skin, or why he heard the steady sound of rain.
He should probably ask about that.
He didn’t, not even when he heard the sound of water running from the sink’s tap or felt a hot, damp cloth pressed to the talon marks in his shoulder.
Talon.
Draco.
Elvis!
If the window was open…
But then he felt the distinctive touch of the draco’s head against his cheek, and relaxed.
“He sure likes you,” he heard the girl say.
“We’ve been through a lot together.”
“Looks like you been through more,” she observed. “I ain’t never seen so many scars.”
He thought she shouldn’t be seeing them now, except it wasn’t that big a towel.
“How’d you get so messed up?” she asked.
A childhood in occupied Tesla, half a lifetime soldiering, six years in hell...
“It’s complicated,” he said to the backs of his eyelids.
This statement met with another silence, followed by more running water, followed by the slopping, scraping, swooshing sounds of someone cleaning up.
He cracked an eye open to see her using the last clean towel to dump the broken shards of his teacup in the waste bin, before moving over to the—aha—busted window to clean up those shards.
At least now he knew why it was so cold.
He looked over the side of the tub, and noted she’d used the second-to-last clean towel to wipe away his regurgitated dinner. He didn’t ask where said towel had ended up.
“Who’d ruin a nice masala, or maybe it was the soup, with enough morph to knock out a mammoth?” he asked instead.
“Someone what wants you dead?” The girl shoveled window glass into the bin.
“Guess that rules you out,” he commented. “By the way, I’m Gideon. Thanks for saving my life.”
She shrugged, but rather than offer her own name, dropped the glass-filled towel into the bin with a shake of her hand, sowing the bright white fabric with a field of tiny red drops.
“You’re bleeding.” Alarmed, Gideon tried to stand, and instantly regretted the attempt; not just because of the lingering dizziness, but because he almost dropped the towel.
That earned a snort from his damsel to the rescue. “So are you.” She pointed to the cloth on his shoulder, stained with long red streaks.
“Still, you should clean that hand.”
“Already did, mother, but thanks.” Though she did take a moment to pat it dry with a bit of tissue, but only, Gideon felt certain, to keep him from fussing.
“How’d you cut yourself, anyway,” he asked. “You cut yourself when you broke the window,” he answered his own question. “But why did you break the window? Right, because you were outside,” he continued the trend.
She stared. “You talk to yourself a lot, then?”
He stared back. “You were outside?”
“Well, I wasn’t hiding in the loo, was I?”
Was he this
much of a smartass at that age? Probably. “Okay, but… why?”
“Would you rather I left you to drown?”
“Absolutely not. But you know, most folks would wonder why a kid your age would even be in the position to break a second story window, that she might come to the assistance of a drowning man, in the first place. Then again, I’m not most folks, and neither are you, I’m guessing. Just like I’m guessing you followed me here from the tram station.”
He enjoyed a brief flash of triumph in being able to surprise the seemingly unflappable girl.
The enjoyment was quickly squashed as she tucked a loose coil hair behind her right ear, momentarily displacing the shadowing hood, and allowing Gideon to see the bruise marring her jaw.
That got him to his feet.
“Who did that to you?”
“What? Who did what?” She looked around herself, startled.
“That stinger of a bruise you’re sporting,” he said, one hand on the wall and the other gripping the towel firmly in place.
“It ain’t nothing,” she said, hunching back into her hood.
“Isn’t anything,” he corrected automatically, and almost laughed at the look she shot him. “Sorry, but seriously, did your fagin do that?”
She bit her lip, then shrugged. “What d’you know about fagins?”
“Only what I learned from mine, back in the day.”
“Your… you had a fagin?” That got her interest. “Nah.” She dismissed the idea immediately. “No way you was a dodger.”
His head tilted as he considered the kid. “Why not?”
“Because,” she said with the air of one pointing out the obvious, “you’re old.”
“Well, ouch.”
“I mean, you know, you’re grown up, is all.”
“I didn’t start that way,” he said.
“Fine,” she shrugged again, “but not many who start as dodgers sign on to the Corps, do they?”
“They did in Tesla,” he said shortly. “They did if they were dodging during the occupation.”
11
Before Morton Barrens, before Nasa, before the Corps, Gideon had been just another dodger on the streets of Tesla, on Ford’s southeast frontier.
But then the Adidans stormed the city, overcame and occupied it within two days, in the Coalition’s first move against United Colonies’ defenses.
The occupation of Tesla lasted for four years, and for Gideon, it changed everything.
“And where do you think you are going, young man?”
Gideon, with one foot on the ladder which descended from the abandoned teleph station they used for shelter, felt his shoulders hunch up to his ears at the sound of Fagin Martine’s voice.
It didn’t seem to matter he was going on fifteen, or maybe sixteen (dodgers seldom having an accurate idea of their birthdates), or that he’d been part of Martine’s hive for going on eight of those years. The merest hint of disapproval in the fagin’s voice had him flushing and hunching like a raw drone, fresh from the streets.
“I was going out to cadge some supplies, seeing as we’re running low on most everything.” He faced the small, tough, Dole Islander who’d fed, clothed, educated and trained him into dodging since the age of seven, and whom he suspected of being a sensitive.
“Supplies my behind.” Her eyes narrowed. “You think I don’t know what you’re really doing down there? I may not be on the streets so much as you young ones, but even this old nose can smell phosphorous on your clothes.”
Okay, he thought, maybe not a sensitive, just observant.
“You been marking targets for the allies,” she continued, “and likely adding a little sabotage of your own into the bargain.”
Busted, he thought. “It’s important work,” he said.
“It’s soldier’s work, and you may be the best cannon I got, but you are no soldier.”
“Not yet.” And damned if he couldn’t taste the bitterness in his own words. “But someday.”
“Someday is not this day. This day you are still my dodger.”
“Yes, but since there’s no one but the enemy to steal from, anyway, why not paint a few targets, or free some horses, or spike some Coal fart tires—”
“You know I do not like that kind of language,” Martine poked a finger into his chest.
“Even for—”
“Even for the enemy, yes.” She gave him the full-on Martine de Loire glare. “Do you know why?”
He looked at his too-tight boots, which were wearing thin as the occupation dragged on. “Because it’s verbally lazy,” he said, parroting one of Martine’s many, many views on the use of language.
“That and because if you belittle something dangerous often enough, maybe you start thinking it is not so dangerous.” Her eyes, a shocking hazel in the dark, wrinkled face, were hard. “You start thinking that, you maybe stop being so careful on the dip, never mind what other trouble you’re getting up to out there, and then…” She brought her hands together in a sharp clap that had Gideon jumping in spite of himself. “No more Gideon here to give me sass.”
He flushed, and hated that even in the dim light of their shielded solar lamp, she’d be able to see it.
“If I promise not to call them Coal-farts can I go?”
She stared.
He rolled his eyes. “If I promise not to call them Coal-farts, and stick to stealing food can I go?”
“Tempting, but no.” She set a gentling hand on his arm. “Lessons first, as always. I need you,” she continued as he began to formulate another protest, “to set an example for the others. They look up to you, Gideon.”
“Only because I’m so swarming tall,” he said, though he straightened some at the praise.
“Not so tall I can’t still box your ears,” Martine said sharply, but with a smile in her voice. “Now, come and join the rest of the hive, or you will see how high I can reach.”
He joined the others, but when the lesson began, Gideon wondered why, of all subjects, Martine would have chosen ancient history.
Not only was it a lesson he’d heard many a time since coming into her care, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as a lesson in lock picking or wall climbing or basic first aid (should the lock picking or wall climbing go amiss).
“So, my young ones,” she began as Gideon settled at the outer ring of dodgers (the youngest, as always, sat closest to Martine), “today you will learn, as I learned when I was young, how Fortune’s history began when Earth’s history came to its end.”
“Earth?” Maurian, nine years old but only recently brought into the hive, looked at the fagin in disbelief. “Earth’s not even real! It’s just a place the keepers made up so we’d follow their Laws.”
“Not so,” Martine replied, but without the heat Gideon would have expected. “Earth existed, likely still does in her little solar system with her one, lonely sun,” she continued to all the children. “She was humanity’s first home, but the humans of Earth were a contentious, wasteful people. Because of this, they did not respect their home, and so their home began to fail. Rather than do the needful and care for it, these contentious people turned on one another, scrabbling over what little remained.”
“Like the Coal-far—like the Coalition forces, attacking the United Colonies for our crystal.” Yribe, a boy of around 12, and an ace at second story work, corrected himself at her glare.
“Some would argue about crystal belonging only to the United Colonies,” Martine said over the ensuing angry buzz of children in the throes of patriotism. “But there are similarities, as the Earthers fought many a war over oil.”
“Like, olive oil?” little Aaya asked.
“Like old, melted dinosaur bones,” Gideon threw in from the rear.
Half the little ones let out a concerted ewww, and the other half clambered to know what a dinosaur was.
“Thank you so very much, Gideon,” Martine said over the tumult.
“Just glad to be needed.” But he put his fingers in
his mouth and whistled loud enough to cut through the uproar.
“Dinosaurs are similar to dracos and lizards and the like,” Martine spoke into the startled quiet. “But bigger—bigger even than a mammoth.”
“But why fight over old melted dinosaur bones in the first place?” Aaya’s question emerged from the chorus of disbelieving nu-uhs.
Martine smiled at the little one. “Because the oil those dinosaur bones melted into was for the Earthers what crystal is for us. Except oil was very dirty, very messy, and it did not grow back after it was pulled from the ground.” She paused for the various sounds of disbelief from the younger dodgers. “Which is why,” she said when they calmed again, “the Earth became so polluted, and why so many people fought over it—fought so bitterly, it was not until Earth’s demise was certain that her children, our many-times great foremothers, accepted the need to work together.”
“For world peace?” Yribe asked.
“More like world pieces,” Gideon muttered, then hunched his shoulders again as Martine shot a look his way.
“More,” she looked back to Yribe, “that certain private citizens with vast amounts of wealth and resources, gathered together the finest minds of their time to do the needful. The needful, in this case, being the engineering and seeding of planets beyond the Sol system. Planets like our own Fortune.”
“Were there others?” Yribe asked, leaning forward, arms resting on his crossed legs. “Other planets the Earthers made?”
“That we do not know. We only know, from keeper records, that many, many ships set forth to many, many systems, in hopes at least one would provide a new home. We may be one of many, or completely alone.”
“Okay, so, maybe the Earthers were real,” Maurian admitted grudgingly, “but they couldn’t have been all that smart.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they left us here, all alone, with no way off and no way to talk to anyone else.”
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