by Exile
Makour saved me when I dangled over an abyss and pulled me from a firestorm when we battled ogres. We slew giants, tamed tsunamis, and rescued orphans. Orphans like me.
I woke up.
Beside me, Keirdran dozed in her seat, her breathing ragged. Before me, the locomotive piloted the ship, its steaming data the same information that the board used to display. The locomotive oozed red and black threads across the board, twining with the thickening silver stalks it had earlier sprouted. Then the dirty once-white walls around me seemed to shake. I gripped my seat to fight vertigo.
Just my poor head, I thought, dizzy from whatever it was that made my arm tingle earlier.
Yet a slender hose to my left hissed and rose; a snake about to strike. An overhead conduit suddenly buckled.
“Keirdran, wake up! What’s your train doing?”
Keirdran rose with a grunt.
“Keirdran!”
“Hol’ on.” She lurched from spot to spot, some particular destination in mind, but her gear still hampered her. Mur Prison was losing control, though. Keirdran’s limbs gradually grew free.
As did my head. My poor head, about to burst as memories returned. I suddenly pictured my lover’s face and remembered his name; how could I have forgotten his name? Serge waved goodbye and winked at me from behind a clear partition. That was twelve years ago. I should have returned to him ages ago.
The woman who raised me came to mind, too. I didn’t yet remember her name, but did recall she fostered three of us. Clothed us, fed us, showed us the stars, told us tales of Earth where our ancestors had lived. Gave me my plastic dragon. Nothing special, just a toy she plucked from a bin of toys. Picked out three, probably at random, and handed one to each of us.
“I lost my dragon,” I blurted to Keirdran. “Lost it on a train to school. The kids took it; threw it out the window. Little shits! Bastards!” I pounded fist on board, inexplicably angrier at those brats than I was at the Murites.
Keirdran looked at me. “The pain will pass,” she said. Gravel voice. Ancient voice. She lifted her visor, something she’d never been able to do. Her movements were jerky. Her face was wan and creased. Blue sacs circled her eyes. Her right cheek was scarred like my wrists.
Do I look that bad? I thought.
“You’ll readjust quickly now,” Keirdran said, just as the locomotive sang out, Prepare the coffin.
“Whaaaaa… ?”
Keirdran plucked my sleeve. “Time,” she said. “Let’s go. The ship’s programmed to self-destruct if we take control. I think it happens slowly, but we can’t…”
Ominous creaking and popping, like the noises a dilapidated building makes when it’s about to collapse, rang out around us, and Keirdran’s locomotive spat out a red warning.
“Time,” Keirdran said again, but I was already pulling on survival gear.
The coffin, our sole lifeboat, could keep us alive for up to thirty days. Keirdran had ridden in it at least fifty times in seven years when she’d sailed out to test rock. Yet when she tapped in the code, the coffin didn’t drop from where it lay stored overhead.
I reached up to help her pry open the panel manually. Silver threads from the locomotive streamed between her gloved fingers to aid her.
A terrifying rumble, followed by a thunderous crack, shifted the entire ship when a chunk of floor fell open to reveal the ship’s bowels spinning with flickering lights. Beneath the bowels, darkening fissures spread like spiderwebs. The dead control board popped. My bunk, which had easily held my eighty-five kilos, fell to the floor. Trash in Keirdran’s room swirled in a vortex.
Makour and I tumbled from a crumbling starship once. I held my breath and my dragon flew through space, bearing me on his back to safety.
My real-life dragon, an old engineer named Keirdran, hung from slender conduits as stalks from her locomotive finally cracked open the hatch to where our one hope of survival sat waiting, and blessedly intact. I grappled with sagging cable and managed to squeeze my right leg into the coffin. Keirdran hauled in the rest of me, then herself, and shut the lid.
We drifted through space huddled together, my hand holding Keirdran’s arm as we escaped Mur Prison’s death sentence.
My arms clutching Makour, escaping villains.
From inside the coffin, we couldn’t determine whether we were on course, how far we travelled, or how long we rode. We simply slept. Slept past a dozen suns and a thousand rocks. Slept as the mite of a craft finally crept into the giant ship’s maw like a starfish into a whale’s mouth.
Slept while medics pulled out what prison hardware they could and poured nutrients into our hungry blood.
I woke with tubes in both arms, a doctor at my feet, and a lawyer on the console.
Keirdran never killed anyone. She has dangerous knowledge, however: the kind that enables her to hijack a drone ship. Her imprisoned mind fought for seven years to escape, while she cobbled together a marvellous choo-choo train.
I, on the other hand, am charged with manslaughter. I say I remember nothing. I vividly recall, though, confronting a very large Murite man who tried to arrest me. He had a weapon. I did not.
The Murites who raided our ship sentenced dozens of us in their kangaroo court to ensure a supply of miners who’d be sent to the most dangerous quarries known. Miners are expendable. Fifty billion humans roam the galaxy these days. What matter if a few thousand perish in a faraway region on the edge of the system, especially if they’re murderers and thieves and treasonous villains?
I must be patient ’til we reach Phoenix Colony in Yhamarda. There, I’ll wait for a new trial; perhaps a new sentence. Yhamarda has a veneer of civilization. They know my first trial under Murite law was a sham. My lawyer assures me that if I’m convicted, whatever time I served on the mining drone should be taken into account. But no one puts anything in writing. I picture myself sitting in a cell staring out at a bleak landscape with a live volcano on the horizon.
Meanwhile, I’m free to roam the Fu’s corridors, sedated and shackled. I waste my days on its vast observation deck where I gaze out at the trillion stars, trying to determine which one was home.
Keirdran rests, hidden away. She barely survived, she who never killed anyone. Only laughed too loud too often and sang dirty songs and told ribald stories. She won’t remember me, the doctor says, for her memory’s so scrambled it’s a wonder she knows her name.
I pass her quarters daily. Door always shut, silence from the other side. Every day, for ages; long after my bruises fade and cuts heal. Until the night I return late from the deck.
Her door’s wide open and her room’s fully lit.
I slow down but don’t enter, only turn my head to peek.
Metal plates lie like wind-tossed rubbish across the floor around a partially built red locomotive. Keirdran stands at a table, bent over work, her eyes covered by goggles. Her left hand wields a slender needle with a gilded tip. She taps the needle on a shimmering green serpent – a metal dragon whose red eyes glow like rubies and whose claws flex when the needle’s tip oozes golden liquid into it. Its leathery wings languidly unfurl from its scaly, emerald green back. It opens its mouth to reveal dozens of sharp teeth. A puff akin to smoke wafts out from its nostrils and dissipates.
Keirdran sets down her tools, raises her goggles, and winks at me.
WITH ONE SHOE
Karen Abrahamson
By the time Detective Ron Conway pulled up to the Paradis house it had been forty-eight hours since Elvira Paradis had last seen her child. As Ron arrived, the grey clapboard house slouched in its postage-stamp-sized yard just like the other matchy-match houses on the block; a veritable gang of houses emulating the sullen youngsters on their way to school. The house might once have been white. The trim showed a last desperate hint of green. The yard was brown from too much sun and too little June rain. No tree, no hedge, not a single damn living blade of grass. A pink sneaker lay in the middle of the lawn. Desiccated weeds filled what might once have been a garde
n.
Someone had cared – once – but the weight of the neighbourhood had dragged their efforts under. He recognized the place – he’d grown up in one like it – the kind of hell that stole dreams and bred nightmares. Not any place to raise a kid.
And now a fourteen-year-old was missing.
Ron climbed out of the brown sedan, letting the sun dry the damp spot between his shoulders.
“I hate these cases,” his partner, Jake Spinoza, muttered as he climbed out the other side.
“Makes two of us.” Ron pulled his sports jacket on.
“It’s always the same. The kid gets tired of being abused. They run, and drugs and prostitution get them. It doesn’t end well.” Spinoza shook his head. “Maybe we should just arrest the parents. Then the kids might stand a chance.”
Ron eyed the house. It didn’t quite have the black-eyed look of the other places on the block. A pot of geraniums next to the front door said that hope hung on by a thread. Maybe other things were different here.
Ron was big and Viking-pale, the bulk to Spinoza’s wiry Latin frame. The door opened, revealing a woman who actually looked interested, perhaps even worried – another first.
“Mrs. Paradis? I’m Detective Conway and this is Detective Spinoza.”
“Come in. Please.” Elvira Paradis motioned them inside. Small, bird-boned, and faded blond, she had stooped shoulders and pale blue eyes that took up most of her face. She had a scent of vanilla and roses. She wore a pair of worn blue shorts that exposed thin legs, and a cotton floral blouse that looked ironed. Another sign that someone cared.
The inside of the house showed it, too. The living room furniture was worn, but clean. A blue sofa faced the front window that had the drapes drawn. Two mismatched chairs faced the couch, draped in green throws to hide lurid yellow upholstery. Curbside finds, he’d bet. But in this house people did the best with what they had. A television sat against one wall topped with family photos of Elvira Paradis and a blonde seven-year-old child just as fine-boned as her mother, but with indigo eyes.
On the couch, Spinoza pulled out his notebook and Ron sat with his hands between his knees. “You contacted the office to report your daughter missing,” Ron said.
She nodded, the most silent witness he’d ever met.
“Tell us what happened.”
Her throat worked. “I got up yesterday and she wasn’t here.”
Definitely a woman of few words.
“When did you last see your daughter?”
Her pale blue gaze settled on his and for a moment the room changed to vivid burgundy with forest green carpets. The furniture was cream and the windows looked out onto a world of verdant hills and forest. For a moment his chest unclenched and he could breathe – almost laughed out loud for the first time in a very long time.
Then she blinked and he was back inside a faded house on Effron Avenue that parched under the Saskatchewan sun.
“At dinner night before last. Afterward she went to her room. That’s it.”
“Tell me about dinner.”
“We had peas and mashed potatoes.”
Spinoza stirred and grinned. Let the great Ron Conway drag it out of her. Spinoza was having fun.
“What did you talk about?”
“School, maybe. She was doing a project. She’s a good kid, May-Bell is.”
“So tell us about May-Bell.”
“She’s smart. Gets straight As in school.”
“Do you have a recent picture of her?” Because a detailed description was clearly beyond her.
She got up and left the room. Spinoza’s smile widened.
“Shut up,” Ron muttered.
“Didn’t say a word.”
Elvira Paradis returned and handed Ron a five-by-seven school photo of the child from the TV photos fast-forwarded to age fourteen. Fine boned like her mother, but her small mouth was determined, and those indigo eyes – there was something wild about them. He couldn’t imagine her surviving in this household’s silences.
He settled back on the couch. “Have you checked her room – seen if anything’s missing?”
When she looked mystified, he added, “Did she take things with her as if she planned on leaving? Are there clothes missing that might indicate what she was wearing?”
“I’ll show you.” She led them down the hall, clearly not knowing the answer.
“Is there a Mr. Paradis we should talk to?” he asked.
She shook her head. “May-Bell and me – we’re on our own.”
May-Bell’s stingy room held a single narrow bed under a window that gave out onto a sun-parched backyard. It held only a swing set with a single dangling swing and a yawning gap where a second swing might have been. Her room was little girl pale pink and purple, but the walls held hints of fledgling teenager: posters of animals, woodland scenes, an art poster of fairies placed at the end of the bed. Not exactly what he expected. No boy-bands or teen heartthrobs.
“No unicorns,” he said.
“They were extinct a long time ago.”
Spinoza arched a brow at him.
“Can you see if anything’s missing?” Ron asked.
She rifled through a painfully empty closet, and almost empty drawers. “It’s all here, I think, except what she was wearing; blue jeans and her favourite pink T-shirt with a running horse on it.”
That was something. “What kind of shoes?”
“She has a pair of pink runners. They’re her favourite.”
“Hold on.” He led them out front to the shoe on the lawn. Pink sneaker, size five. It showed the signs of kid-wear with the heel bent in back from treating the shoe as a slip-on. It lay upside down, as it had fallen. A fight, maybe? A shoe wasn’t something you stepped out of and left as you walked away – at least not just one of them. This was more like the shoe had been dropped as the girl was carried away.
“Did you hear your daughter leave?” Why hadn’t she noticed the shoe?
She was looking up to the sky as if the sight of the shoe pained her.
“Mrs. Paradis? Did you hear her?”
She shook her head, her hair spun like spider thread around her shoulders. “She didn’t come through the living room because I was watching television.” Her small hands worked each other.
He used his smart phone to photograph the shoe. “I’d like to see the backyard please.”
He and Spinoza tramped after her as she flitted across the browned lawn to the side of the house and a small gate that hung open.
“Do you always leave your gate open?”
“No.” She frowned.
The grass underneath May-Bell’s bedroom window did look like some of the blades were crushed. From someone standing here? Or was it from someone jumping down from the ledge? He tested the window and it slid upward with the ease of frequent use. Had the girl flown the coop on her own? Had she left with someone?
The swing set, a factory-made metal job, sat alone in the yard, the lawn underneath faintly green compared to elsewhere. The set had been there a long time – probably put up by a family with young children before the financial crash. Along with two swings it would have had a teeter-totter at one end. Now its bright red paint had chipped and rust ate the metal. The single swing hung like an exhausted child.
“How long have you lived here, Mrs. Paradis?” He crossed to the lone swing and touched the chains.
“Almost eleven months.” Her hair was silver in the sun. It would be ethereal by moonlight.
The swing itself was wooden. He hadn’t seen a wooden swing since he was a kid – now playgrounds had soft rubber because wood was considered too dangerous. When he touched it, the swing groaned where the chain met the suspending crossbar and a tingle ran through him.
He settled onto the wooden seat and had the urge to lean back and start pumping. Instead he stared at the house. “May-Bell come out here a lot?”
“Some.”
But this was the kind of place a teen would come to be alone, to think. H
is house had had a similar swing – a lone board hanging from the strong branch of an oak tree that had long ago been cut down. He’d spent evenings there dreaming of life beyond that yard. What did May-Bell dream of? A knight on a white charger rescuing her from her life?
But the posters in her room spoke of a different kind of girl – not the boy-obsessed fourteen-going-on-twenty-four-year-olds that were everywhere today. No, this one was interested. May-Bell Paradis wanted something. If she left, it would be because she wanted something more.
Beneath the swing set long grooves had been worn into the lawn by feet dragged across the earth. The odd thing was the grooves lay under the spot a second swing should hang.
He stood. The chains that would have held another swing appeared sheared off at the crossbar.
He turned back to Elvira. “How long ago did you have the swing cut off?”
The woman’s mouth settled into a sullen line. When she met his gaze he found himself in a meadow of wild flowers, the wind tossing the blossoms, the air heavy with sweetness and the hum of bees.
She blinked and he again stood in a faded backyard with a rusted swing set. What the hell is going on?
“There was never a second swing,” Elvira said.
“Mrs. Paradis, what do you think has happened to May-Bell? Has she run away or was she taken?”
She seemed to look past him into somewhere else. Then she shook her head. “May-Bell would never leave me like this. Not of her own choice. You’ve got to get her back for me.”
The way she’d looked away, he knew she was lying.
Alexander Junior High filled half a city block with cement stairs and seating areas terraced up to a cinder block façade. There were no trees and no grass, only concrete that reflected sunlight into Ron’s face and heat through the soles of his shoes.
Inside, the air smelled of too many teen bodies. The halls were quiet, just a few wraith-like figures shifting under the fluorescents before disappearing into classrooms. The half-heard drone of teachers’ voices brought another rush of déjà vu. He’d hated high school, had hated junior high more.