Mi and Ben are sitting on the mismatched sofas, a chessboard propped on a crate-table. Mi is tall and slim, as light as a feather in every touch and action. His hair is white gold, soft as a child's, and although his eyes are colourless now, I still remember them as they were before the accident, somewhere between green and gold, and almost indistinguishable from his brother's. No wonder I named them after angels.
Ben is the only one of our little family that remotely looks like me, with his tangled mop of brown hair, but his eyes are as dark as peat while mine are described as “cat like” by those trying to be nice and “snake-like” by those who are maybe a little more on the mark. They're likely a by-product of the cocktail of genes I've got sloshing about inside me. You want cat-like agility? Fine! But you may wind up with a few feline characteristics.
Mind you, I was one of the lucky ones. There were others far worse. I would not have been called a success if I'd had any other features.
Mi tuts loudly. “Where did you move?” he asks. He must know I'm standing there, but either he's thinking too hard or he doesn't want to break concentration.
“Um,” Ben glances down at the board, “knight to D5?”
“Hmm. Good move.” Mi stops for a minute. “You're not cheating, are you?”
“No!”
“Good, because cheating against a blind guy–”
“How could I cheat? You remember every move!”
“Aha! So you've at least thought about cheating–”
“Are we celebrating?” I ask Mi, the very aroma of the beef making my mouth salivate.
Mi turns his face towards me, at the same time that Ben leaps off the sofa and charges at my middle.
“Ashe!” he screams, launching his arms around me.
“Hey, bud. What's up?”
“Mi is teaching me how to play chess.”
“The kid's a natural.”
“We're all naturals,” I argue. “It's a strategy game.”
“True. You'll notice I didn't put him against madame, however.”
“Good point.” I sit down on the old, moth-eaten sofa. “What's with the beef?” I ask again, as Ben scurries back to his game. We don't often get beef here. Beef is expensive, usually only used for trading to those more elite clientele. We're more rat, hedgehog, pigeon people.
“Baz had a big order for Luca. Had a few offcuts that weren't quite good enough. Said we could have them as a treat.”
“A treat? What for?”
“Apparently, it's been five years today since I became his apprentice.”
Baz is the local butcher, and we owe him more than I like to admit. I made myself useful to him when we first arrived in the city, selling him whatever we caught and couldn't eat. The relationship could have ended there, but Baz has got a bit of a soft spot for kids, and he gave us more than we gave him, in those early days. Apparently, I'm the best hunter he's had in years and he was just “hedging his bets” but he didn't have to give us oil or bread. He didn't have to help us find the attic. He definitely didn't need to take the risk of hiring a blind twelve-year-old to be his apprentice.
“We've been here five years?” says Ben incredulously. “That's forever!”
We all smile at his definition of forever, but Abi's eyes rise across her sketchpad and lock onto mine, just for a moment. The look on Mi's face is telling, too.
Five years since we lost Gabe.
“Speaking of forever,” says Abi, swiftly changing the subject, “is that stew done yet?”
Mi laughs, and bounds into the kitchen. “Give me five and lay the table.”
The food is barely cooled by the time the table is laid, and is still practically scalding when we guzzle it down. There's not a scrap left for tomorrow, but Abe's payment should take care of meals for a while now. I might even be able to get us some new clothes, fix that leak, stock up on some grain for the winter, top-up our energy stores...
I look around at my family, eating dinner out of chipped bowls, laughing, not caring about their threadbare clothes or the slight leak in the ceiling. I didn't know the word “family” until we came here. I must have heard it, somewhere, when they were teaching us to read and write, but I never questioned its meaning. I didn't know what it meant.
The second I heard it, I knew what we were. It kept me sane, even when a part of that family was missing.
It was worth it, right? I ask the voice in my head, the one that isn't really there any more. This is what you wanted, isn't it?
It's close, Gabe. It's so close.
Chapter 4
Ben asks me to put him to bed. He's at this awkward stage where half the time he insists he's too old for this, and then the other half of the time he's running after me begging for a tuck in. I'm exhausted, there's a hot, dull pain in my side, and I could really do with a bath. But I say yes; I don't know how much more time I have left with him like this.
Ben is eight; he was only three when we escaped from the Institute. I carried him most of the way to Luca on my back. He has some memories from back then, some nightmares from time to time, but he's the most normal of the four of us. He doesn't have the same training, mental or physical. Together, we've taught him how to control his abilities, so as not to draw attention to himself, and how to fight, just in case we ever have to run again. But otherwise he's just like all the other kids at the local school. He tells people I'm his sister, and that our parents died when we were young. Orphans are not uncommon here, and no one questions it.
Tucking him in tonight, I remember when he came to us. We woke up in the middle of the night to the scientists wheeling in a little plastic box. We ignored it at first. We'd been taught to be wary of new things; it was invariably some kind of test. But then the box started to cry.
I looked across at Gabe in the dark, his eyes wide. He shook his head.
Don't.
The crying intensified.
We knew what babies were. We'd seen them in the wards, on gurneys, in the labs. But the nearest we'd been to touching one was when Abi arrived several three years ago. But by then, she was already a toddler.
I don't know how long it was before I left my bunk and crept over to the plastic box. I don't think it was long. I stopped caring if it was some kind of test, if what was inside could hurt me, if it was a trick or puzzle. I had to comfort whatever sad little thing was there.
I lifted the lid. Inside was a small, round, wiggling bundle, with tufts of dark hair and even darker eyes. He looked up at me, and, for a second, his cries subsided. In that moment, something changed in me that I cannot explain, even to this day.
I brought him to my chest as the cries intensified. I had no idea how to hold him properly. He was so fidgety and floppy and loose.
“Don't cry,” I whispered. “You're all right. I've got you. There there.”
I do not know where these words of comfort came from, but I took him to my bed, wrapped him in my blankets (he had none) and just held him. I didn't know you were supposed to rock babies back then... I'd never seen it done before.
He fell asleep in my arms, which is where he slept almost every day for the next three years, until our escape. I cannot quite explain the terror of being his person, of worrying why they had given him to us, if they would take him away. I was absolutely sure he was some kind of test, but perhaps I passed it. Perhaps my reward was keeping him.
I'm not sure what I would have done if they had tried to pry him from my grasp. I'm fairly sure I would have killed them.
“Ashe?” Ben pulls at my sleeve. “What are you thinking about?”
I pull the blanket so far up it reaches his ears, and lean down to smush my nose against his. “Just how much I love you.”
He pulls a face, and disappears under the covers. I get up and turn off the light. A little voice whispers “I love you” in the dark.
And this is why I have trouble killing people. That boy murders my stony heart.
I forget my bath for a moment, and head up to the roof. The
glittering city of Luca towers in the distance, its lights stretching to the stars. It is a beautiful night, if you ignore the dogs fighting in the street below, the screeching of alley-cats, the distant jeers of some other people with some other problem. Once more, Gabe's face joins my thoughts. What would he have made of all this?
A little while later, Mi joins me on the roof, carrying a medical kit.
“You hurt?” he asks.
I half-sigh, half-laugh at him. “How do you always know?”
He shrugs. “Something in your voice, I guess. Broken ribs?”
“Bruised, I think.”
“Can I take a look?”
“I don't know, Mi, can you?”
He makes a hollow, chuckling, tutting sound, his hands already moving towards my middle. He presses against them lightly, reading the slight tremor in my voice.
“Just bruised.” He reaches into the kit beside him and begins smearing on a thick, cool paste. I am familiar with most of Mi's medicines by now, but this one smells different.
“New formula?” I ask.
“I'm experimenting with valerian root,” he says, not that that means anything to me. Mi's herb garden is pretty much his baby, although Abi occasionally helps out if he can't identify a plant by texture or scent alone. “Let me know how it feels.”
Bruised or even broken ribs never hold us up for long. I'm probably looking at about three days, and I won't even feel it after tomorrow. We're far from impervious to pain, but it doesn't seem to hold us back much, and Mi's medical skills are pretty solid. We all learned basic field skills back at the Institute, but once we got out, Mi realised we couldn't rely on any one else if we were ever seriously hurt. We wouldn't be able to afford a real doctor, and we couldn't afford the questions it would bring. Someone with real medical training was bound to notice how different we were.
So, Mi started studying, eating up whatever he could get his hands on. He practised stitches on the dead pigs Baz purchased, in the early hours of the morning, before carving them up. Real doctors were hard to come by in the slums, but apothecaries were fairly common. I'd run errands for them to bring him back fresh cuts of medicinal plants.
I was his only live patient. He's saved my life on more than one occasion.
The first time, I was about fourteen. I'd taken on a big job. Out of my league, really. Too big for one person. Mi was running support for me, of course, but I would have needed at least three people in the field to pull this off. Long story short, I didn't. I escaped the compound with a bullet to the gut. I was bleeding badly, but I couldn't afford to stop running until I lost them. I ended up in an alley, rapidly losing consciousness, the stones underneath me slick with blood.
That's when the others found me.
“We've got to get her out of here!” Abi was screaming.
“We can't move her. She'll bleed to death before we get her anywhere.”
Mi's voice sounded solid and calm, but there was the slightest waver in it. I had never been able to read Mi's mind, but I felt I could then. You can't die, do you hear me?
Dying sounded easy at that point. Simple. Like sleep. Just a few more minutes, please...
“Ben, grab her legs. Prop them up.”
I was aware of being moved, of falling further backwards. Hands, hands all around me. The pain was dulling.
How could he bring Ben here? How dare he let Ben see me like this–
I think then, that that was the moment I realised how truly terrified Mi was. I looked up at him, and, for a second, his face was crystal clear. Only it wasn't his face. It was Gabe's.
Perhaps I wanted to join him. Perhaps he was there to yell at me not to. But suddenly it was Mi's face again, then Abi's and Ben's. I was not going to leave them like he did. I was going to live.
I screamed out loud when Mi pulled the bullet from my abdomen, clutching my baby's hands. I screamed, and I knew that if I could make that much noise, I had enough fight left in me.
I was up and running again within a week. Well, maybe not running. I'm not completely superhuman, after all.
“You're thinking about him, aren't you?”
I give a little nod, before remembering that's wildly unhelpful for him, and make a short sound instead. It's all I can manage.
“The first thing I thought when Baz told me that it had been five years was, it has been five years since I have been with my brother. The second thought I had was how could I have forgotten the date?”
“Time moves quickly out here,” I say.
“It sure feels that way, doesn't it?” He leans back against the railings. “It also feels like forever ago, doesn't it? Another lifetime.”
“Almost.” Gabe was not another lifetime. Gabe was this one.
“I'm never going to stop missing him,” Mi continues. “But... I think... I think he'd be happy, if he knew where we were now. I think he'd be proud of us.”
I think so, too.
“Do you think the others miss him?”
“Abi must. She idolised him.”
“She never says anything.”
“When do we?”
Gabe is an unspoken thing between Mi and myself. I think we both still talk to him. There will be a moment when something happens that reminds us of him, and I'll look to Mi, and he will smile or stiffen, and I know he's thinking of him. Mi's never been able to read my mind in the way Gabe did, but he comes very close.
We still talk about the Institute though. Jokes, mostly. If Ben says, “This food sucks,” we will always retort with, “Better than the slop they used to serve at the Institute!” We'll talk about our training (sometimes thankful for it). We'll laugh at something they never taught us.
We don't talk about the other things. The tests. The experiments. The things they made us do. We don't talk about the nightmares, other than to let Ben know we have them too, and it's OK.
Abi doesn't talk about any of it. She never speaks of it. I wonder if she likes to pretend that that was another life. I wonder if that's why she doesn't speak of Gabe.
“Do you ever wonder what would–”
“Don't,” says Mi shortly.
“What?”
“Don't wonder the what ifs. You can lose yourself in those questions. Life only moves forward.”
Abi's probabilities usually support one outcome. Usually. But there are always variables, and my mind always wants to calculate them.
What would have happened if Gabe survived?
I wonder what questions Mi loses himself in.
Chapter 5
The next morning, I get up before any of the others, grab a leftover hunk of bread and a slightly wilted apple, and head off into the wilderness to see if there is anything to be salvaged. Baz has a good buyer lined up for any deer, if I can get it, but as usual it's slim pickings. We were all taught to hunt at the Institute, although it's a different thing out in the open, and often I can come back with nothing at all despite having been at it for hours. Thieving is easier; more reliable, more money. I don't ever want to have nothing. I've seen people dying of starvation in the slums, too old, too weak, too ill and too alone to find food. Most people here are good folk, but no one is choosing a stranger over their own family. I'd rather watch a stranger die than Ben.
The others are a bit more liberal. I've often caught them giving out “leftovers” and know we won't be eating well that night. Mi is softest, and will go without entirely if it means someone will go with. That's why he's so skinny. Of course, he's at no risk of starving. None of us would ever let it happen, and he's so well-liked he'll find the favours returned a thousand times before he's at any kind of risk. Not, of course, that I don't worry about him anyway. I worry about them all. Mi brings a bit into the family with his job at the butcher's, and Abi sometimes hawks his herbs, but they would struggle to get by without me.
Which is why I have to stay as safe as possible, and not get involved with anything too risky.
After a couple of hours in the wilds, I give up with onl
y a rabbit to show for it. I dump the thing at Baz's before heading to the market to see what I can get with my meagre offerings. As usual, it's awash with people. When we first arrived here, I was amazed by the sheer number of them. I'd had no idea so many people could even exist in one place. It is a haze of odours, few of them pleasant, and every sense is invaded with a veneer of grit and dirt. A thousand colours coated in green and brown and grey. There was only one thing about the market particularly interesting; a mural painted on the side of one of the warehouses. It's a phoenix, a fire bird, emerging from the flames. It's the emblem of the rebellion, the aptly named Phoenix Project, a rag-tag group of misfits attempting to steal from the rich and give to the needy. They tend to work in the shadows and don’t reveal their affiliations publicly, but if they die in the line of duty, their names are added to one of the phoenix’s feathers.
There are a lot more names now than when I first arrived.
I once thought about joining them, when we were new to the slums. They take in lots of orphans, and we needed food and a roof over our heads desperately. But they also do dumb stuff like blow up political buildings in Luca Proper, and I could do without the publicity. Plus, it's not like they keep any of the stuff they steal and... girl's got to make a living.
I don't spend too long staring at the mural. Prices are high today and I'm not in the mood for haggling, so I just I buy some supplies for dinner and decide to call it. I'm heading out when I see Doctor Herb at the door of his surgery, turning people away.
He's not a real doctor, of course. Those are gold dust here in the slums. But he's about as good as many people can get. I've never seen him turn people away again, and one man looks like he's about to get aggressive. His shoulders are winding for a punch.
“Everything OK, Doc?”
The man clearly recognises me, because he backs down immediately and shuffles off. A couple of other customers remain, brows furrowed in confusion.
The Phoenix Project: Book I: Flight Page 2
