Snowburn

by Frost, E J

  Kez and I both turn to look at him in surprise.

  Gig glances from Kez to me. Scratches under his cap uncertainly. “In case he gets lost.”

  “Yeah.” I wink at the kid. “I don’t want to get lost.”

  Kez shakes her head, her expression wry. She can probably tell that I’ve never been lost in my life. “Are you sure you’ll be okay with Nevie?”

  “Sure,” Gig says. “She’s still high. She won’t be a problem until she starts crashing.”

  “Okay.” Kez glances at my trike, and her eyes light the way they did on my ship. “I’d love to ride with you. If that’s okay.”

  I offer her my hand and, when she takes it, lead her to my trike.

  Beauty. The wind in my face and on my bare chest. The thrum of the powerful engine between my legs. Total freedom. No guards. No mission. Just the wind and the trike and the road.

  And the soft warmth of a kitten against my back.

  She presses her body against mine. Shifts with me as I lean the trike into a turn. Totally relaxed. Totally trusting. I can’t see her face, but I’m sure it’s lit up with the same wide-eyed delight that I saw during our flight over Hemos. Thrill-seeking kitten.

  My thrill-seeking kitten. I’m sure she’s mine again. I don’t have to ask. Don’t have to wait for her to offer herself to me again. She wouldn’t have asked me to come home with her if she didn’t want to be with me. She wouldn’t press her body against mine if she didn’t know what was coming as soon as we’re alone. If she didn’t want it.

  I grin into the wind.

  She directs me to a tiny storefront in a dirty alley a few blocks from her house. It doesn’t even look open, but as soon as we pull up, the opaque glaz shutter rises and a man leans over a high counter. He hands two plaz-wrapped bundles to Kez.

  “Gimme your digit, Kez-zy,” he drawls, holding out a print scanner. Kez presses her thumb to it to verify whatever payment she’s given him. The scanner beeps. “You’re golden.”

  “Thanks, Yag!” she calls as I gun the trike’s engine and roar away, plaz flapping in the wind. She laughs into my ear. “Now that’s what I call take-out.”

  Giddy kitten. I think she likes the trike.

  I race through the side-streets, a trickier proposition now that they’re filling with evening traffic. But the trike is built for maneuverability as well as speed, and it weaves between skimmers and pedestrians alike with fluid ease.

  I pull up behind a familiar skimmer, parked in front of the ramshackle building I remember from this morning. Hand Kez off the trike before I power down the neg cells. I landed on my ass the first time I shut the trike down. I don’t want anything bruising Kez’s fine ass. Nothing but my palm.

  I take the trike’s remote out of the control panel, climb off and click the lock. The protective cover unfolds and I secure the locking pins through the wheels. Even if the locals get excessively curious, the trike’s not going anywhere.

  Kez waits for me on the curb. I take one of the bags from her and follow as she climbs the steps to the front door of the house. “Thought I was getting dinner,” I say.

  “It was easier for me to pay. I have an account. And I ordered for everyone. Doesn’t seem fair to ask you to get everyone’s dinner.”

  Her sensitivity is sweet, but it does make me wonder how many people I’m dining with. The larger the group, the more assholes to be endured. I’ll put up with some level of assholism for my one percent, but not overwhelming amounts. “Who’s everyone?”

  “You, me, Ape, Gig. Ape’s girlfriend, Chiara. Duncan should be back from his run by now. Nev might eat if she’s started coming down. I got enough for everyone.”

  Five other mouths to feed. Not an inconsiderable number, particularly on what she probably makes as a runner. A few pieces click into place, like why she was so desperate to complete the run. No matter what the cost.

  “This medicine your friend takes, what is it?” I ask as she puts her hand on a touch plate beside the house’s front door. At my question, she hesitates and looks up at me.

  “Naltrex? It’s a substitute for Hex. It gives her a mild high and keeps her from going into withdrawal, but it doesn’t hurt the baby.”

  “How long’s she been an addict?”

  She sighs. “She started using when we were kids. Fourteen. Fifteen. We were both living at the House then. It was just the occasional derm. At parties. Nothing serious.” She bites her lip. “After I moved out, she met Skylar. He got her using. Hex and D, too.”

  “She’s a death-head?” That surprises me. Substance D-users are zombies, emaciated from the acceleration the drug causes in their metabolic rate, nearly mindless from the loss of fatty acids in their brains. Nev’s an idiot, but she’s not a zombie.

  Kez shakes her head. “She got clean. Six years ago. She kicked everything. She got a job. She didn’t even touch alcohol for years. She made us all into vegetarians for a while. That was hard to hack, let me tell you.”

  I smile. I bet. Kez strikes me as a girl who likes her meat. “What happened?”

  “I, um, I had an accident. I was out of it for a long time. Nevie tried to hold things together, but, I don’t know, I guess the pressure was too much. She lost her job. Started using. By the time I got out of the tank, she was hooked again. She’s been fighting it ever since. Nearly three years. She’s okay for a while and then something happens and she disappears. She goes back to Skylar or one of her other dealers and it starts all over.” She hangs her head. Takes her hand off the door and rubs it over her face. Without seeing her eyes, I can’t be sure if she blames herself for her friend’s relapse, but I’m guessing she does.

  “And the baby?”

  “We don’t know. The doctors say they won’t know until it’s born. Each time she fucks up, they run more tests, but they don’t know. Please—” She puts her hand on my bare chest. “Don’t say anything.”

  I put my hand over hers. Tap my fingertips against her wrist. “Might be better for everyone . . .”

  Her hand slides up to cover my mouth. “Don’t say it. I think it too often anyway.”

  I take her hand off my mouth. Grip it in mine. “C’mon, kitten. All this talking’s bad for the digestion.”

  She smiles ruefully, taps the entry plate with her thumb and leads me into the house.

  The sounds hit me first. The sounds of a number of people sharing a confined space. The babble of voices. Doors opening and closing. Footsteps. Running water. It reminds me of slam for a moment. But there’s a difference and my ear registers it immediately. The sounds of slam are regimented, institutionalized, harsh and hostile. These sounds are organic. Unsyncopated. They’re the sounds of humans living, rather than humans biding their time until they can start living again.

  Then I register the smells. A clean, sweet soap smell, the same soap Kez uses in her hair. Green fragrances, growing things. A warm, meaty, animal smell that I assume is from various human bodies, until a half-dozen, knee-high balls of fluff bound into the vestibule and surround Kez. She kneels down among them, ruffling fur and long, floppy ears. I take them for dogs at first, except Kez said she wasn’t a dog person, and they don’t move like dogs. They sort of . . . hop.

  “What the fuck are those?” I finally ask.

  Kez scoops up one of the fur balls and holds it out to me for inspection. Round head, round body, floppy ears, soft dangly front paws, powerful haunches and long, fluffy feet. It could be a miniature kangaroo. Or a miniature wooly mammoth.

  “They’re Norgir rabbits,” she says.

  They don’t look like any rabbits I’ve ever seen. They’re twice as big as a rabbit should be for starters.

  Kez tucks SuperBunny under her arm, like a furry cushion, and crosses the vestibule towards an open door into the house. “I started keeping them when Ape moved in with me. They’re an excellent protein source. But we don’t farm them anymore. They’ve become pets. This is Ronnie.”

  Ronnie-the-Rabbit seems totally content to be tot
ed around under Kez’s arm. Also not like any rabbit I’ve ever seen. The others bound down the hallway after her. A white one, whose fur must be ten centimeters long and looks like a rug-in-motion, tags Kez’s heels and butts its head against her calf when she pauses at the door.

  Kez stops, shakes her head at Torro-the-Bunny, and puts Ronnie down. She gives the white one a pet on the head, but doesn’t pick it up. “This is Helas. She’s the dominant female and she doesn’t like it when I pay attention to the others. Don’t pick her up. She likes to nip.”

  I’ve got no intention of picking up any of the hopping carpets. “Good protein source, huh?”

  Kez nods. “We don’t eat them anymore, so don’t get any ideas.”

  I give her a grin.

  She rolls her eyes and taps the door open.

  Chapter 12

  Beyond the door, the Colony pre-fab, with its permacrete walls and durable fiber flooring, ends and something very different begins. I’m not sure what to call Kez’s house. It’s a greenhouse, except that people – and mutant rabbits – clearly live in it. Down a short flight of stairs from the platform we stand on, the flooring’s been taken up and grass and plants create a living green carpet. There’s furniture among the plants. Some of the furniture could be plants: real wood, twisting frames, soft, floral-patterned fabrics.

  “Hey,” Kez calls. “Has anyone fed the rabbits?”

  Gig’s capped head pops up from a couch on the far side of the room. “I did.”

  “Then you’re just piggies,” Kez says to the monster bunnies clustered around her feet. They don’t seem to register her censure. Ronnie-the-Rabbit stands up on his hind legs and puts his paws on her thigh. “Softie,” she says. But she picks him up again and carries him across the huge open greenhouse to a raised, tiled area of counters and equipment that’s clearly a kitchen.

  “Whaddo you feed them?” I ask. “Giant carrots?”

  Kez chuckles. “No. They eat grass and we grow some plants they like as well, but they need a supplement that we give them in pellets. The grass here isn’t as nutritious as on Norgir, where they were bred.”

  She obviously knows a lot about her rabbits, as well as Kuseros’s underworld.

  We reach the kitchen area and set down the bags of take-out on the counter. Kez begins pulling plates off a rack above a big double-sink.

  “Want me to unload?” I ask her.

  “Yes, please. You’ll have help in a moment. Now that the food’s arrived, the kemwars will descend.”

  She’s not wrong. Gig, who was lazing on a couch, rises, sniffing, and gravitates in my direction. On the far side of the sink, a door opens and a dark-haired girl emerges in a puff of steam.

  “Oh, hi,” she says. “You must be Snow. I’m Chiara.”

  Tyng’s daughter. She’s surprisingly unremarkable, given her family’s power. Light brown skin, almond-shaped eyes and a cap of silky black hair reflect her pan-Asian ancestry. She’s got a pleasant, round face and a comfortable, rounded body stuffed into too-tight clothes. She’s not beautiful by any measure. But her brown eyes are alert and intelligent.

  I nod at her, and when she offers me her hand, shake it firmly.

  Chiara turns to Kez and takes the plates out of her hands. “Kezzy, I’ll take care of this. Nev’s in the bath.” She tilts her head at the door from which she’s just emerged.

  Kez nods and glances at me. “Will you be okay for a moment?”

  “Yeah, long as your rabbits don’t eat me.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Play nice.” I’m not sure if she’s speaking to me or the rabbits. She slips through the doorway and closes it behind her.

  Chiara organizes dinner in less than a minute. She directs me in setting out the plaz food containers. Gig gets rounded up to carry the plates out into the garden where there’s evidently a table hidden in the foliage. Another man, quietly playing a game on the huge vid screen set between the couches, is summoned with the call of, “Dunk! Drinks!” With a resigned snort, he quits the game and joins Chiara in the kitchen. As he passes me, he nods and says, “Duncan.”

  “Snow.” I return his nod. Observe him unobtrusively while I continue unpacking. Kez has bought enough food to feed a platoon.

  Duncan’s the oldest person I’ve seen among Kez’s little crowd. Where Gig is still a boy, and Ape is in all the ways that count, Duncan probably has a few years on Kez, who I figure is in her mid-twenties. Duncan might even be looking closely at thirty, if the laugh lines engraved into his brow and around his mouth are any indication. Thirty standard is still young, even on Kuseros where the average life-expectancy is only a little over a hundred. But it surprises me to see someone that old in this crowd of orphans.

  Whatever his role, Duncan doesn’t act like a father figure. Chiara bosses him around, even telling him to get different beakers when the ones he takes out of a cabinet aren’t to her liking. He obeys her with a tolerant smile.

  Chiara hands me a large plaz tray. “Could you put the food on that and carry it to the table?”

  Time to establish my place in the pecking order. “Could if you use the magic word,” I say.

  Chiara looks startled, then blushes and says, “Sorry. Nev going off the deep end again . . . it’s made me forget my manners. Could you please carry that to the table?”

  “My pleasure.” I load the plaz containers on the tray as I ask, “How bad is she?”

  Chiara touches her hand to her forehead, a gesture she’s gotten off Kez. “She’s started the coldspiral. That’s why I put her in the bath. She’s just . . . she’s completely out of her head. I’m not sure she even knows where she is.”

  “How long before she comes down?”

  Chiara shrugs. “Depends on how much she took. It could be hours.”

  “Long night ahead,” I say and she nods, confirming my fears. I’m not interested in losing another night’s sleep, particularly over someone as messy as Nev. By the time I feel ready for some alone-time with Kez, Nev is going to be down for the night, one way or another.

  I pick up the tray and start off into the garden. Spot Gig’s cap in a grove of purple trees. Making my way into the grove, I nearly trip over two of the exploding fur balls. They seem to have free run of the place. One of them is the white one that Kez said was the dominant female. I put the food down on the long table hidden in the trees and squat down to eyeball Alpha Bunny.

  She rises onto her hind legs, floppy ears and front paws dangling, and meets my gaze. She has blue eyes, a lot like Kez’s. Her furry nose twitches. I offer her my hand to sniff. “Bite me and you’re breakfast,” I tell her.

  She snuffles at my fingers, then drops onto all fours and shoves her head under my hand.

  “That means she wants you to pet her,” Gig observes over my shoulder.

  “She tell you that?” I ask, ruffling the rabbit’s ears the way I saw Kez do. The white fur is incredibly soft.

  “No, it’s lagomorph language.”

  The bunny stays still under my hand. It doesn’t purr like a cat or pant like a dog, but I can tell it likes being petted. I rub my thumb down over the twitchy white nose. “What the fuck’s a lagomorph?”

  “A rabbit.”

  “I thought rabbits were rodents.”

  “Jeez, don’t let Kez hear you say that.” Gig leans down and offers his hand to the other rabbit I nearly stepped on, an extremely round gray and white fluff ball. It goes into the same head down, butt up position as the one I’m petting. Gig rubs its head.

  “Say what?” Kez asks, walking towards us with a handful of chopsticks. She looks from me to the bunny I’m petting. “Wow, what’d you do? She’s never nice to strangers.”

  I smile and rise, dusting fur off my fingers. “Kindred spirits.” I’ve been called an animal so many times, I guess there’s some truth in it.

  “Er, Snow,” Gig begins, a moment before I feel a distinct bump against my shin. I glance down in surprise to see Alpha Bunny ram me again.

  Kez laughs. “S
he didn’t say you could stop grooming her.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” At Kez’s nod, I settle back onto my haunches and offer my hand to Alpha Bunny. She goes back into the pet me posture and I give her a scratch behind the ears. “Don’t think I’m doing this all night,” I tell the rabbit.

  “You’re on the hook now, Snow.” Gig chuckles as he heads back to the kitchen.

  “See that?” I say to Alpha Bunny. “He walked away and your little friend there didn’t bulldoze his leg.”

  Kez laughs from behind me. “Helas is the queen rabbit. She says who grooms her and when.”

  “You put up with that?”

  “The first thing you have to understand about rabbits is that they’re dominant to you.”

  I raise my eyebrow at the fur ball shedding white hair all over my hand while I rub its forehead. “Think so, huh?”

  “She’ll prove it to you again if you stop before she’s ready. She’s a very aggressive rabbit.”

  “What’s that noise it’s making?” The rabbit’s started making a funny mumbling noise, which I can’t just hear, I can also feel through my fingers, like a jackhammer’s vibration.

  “Oh, she’s tooth purring. They rub their teeth together when they’re really happy.”

  “Looks like true love,” Duncan says as he steps past me, carrying a tray of beakers to the table.

  “Great. How long do I have to do this?” I grumble. But I’m actually enjoying petting the rabbit. Its fur is a tactile delight: warm, soft and oh-so-silky. The tooth purring is gratifying. And it gets me out of setting the table.

  Chiara and Gig join us while I’m still petting Alpha Bunny. Once the table is set to Chiara’s satisfaction, they sit down on the long benches that frame the table. Kez pats the empty bench next to her. “Come on, Snow. The food’s getting cold.”

  “Yeah, I’m just worried about losing a leg to Assault Bunny here.”

  Chuckles all around the table. “Here, give her a little of this and she’ll leave you alone.” Gig hands me a piece of crispy flat bread. I break off a corner and offer it to the rabbit, who takes it delicately in her teeth and hunkers down to nibble on it.