We Are Satellites

by Sarah Pinsker

  “They don’t,” said Dominic, speaking for the first time on the walk. “Balkenhol doesn’t take interns without Pilots. Why would they? We’re inefficient.”

  Gabe eyed him. “How do you know that?”

  “My grandfather worked for a defense contractor before he retired last year. He tried to get me in for an internship and they said no. We went through his whole list of contacts, but nobody would hire me. He said it’s the last legal line of discrimination.”

  “Your grandfather is right,” Gabe said. “How do they get away with it? ‘Most qualified applicant’ my eye.”

  Once he got onto this topic, there was no stopping him. Sophie was usually right there with him. This time she let him rant on his own. She hadn’t thought far enough ahead to have a useful suggestion ready. How could she capitalize on David’s position? She’d have to think about it. This was not an opportunity to be squandered.

  They’d never gotten this close to Balkenhol before. Imagine what they could learn, given the right access; she’d have to start with making amends with David. Maybe she could lull him into forgetting she had a cause? Fat chance. At least maybe he’d be too preoccupied with the new job to notice her fishing for information. It was worth a shot, in any case. She ran her burnt tongue over her teeth, thinking.

  * * *

  • • •

  On David’s first day of work, Sophie made sure to be waiting in the front room for him when he got home. She had a tablet in front of her, open to the anti-Pilot boards. It was work that needed to be done, whether or not she was setting a trap for her brother; meetings needed advertising, and the letter-writing campaign still needed more letters. She answered some messages, posted a template, hooked it to the local captains to spread.

  When the door opened at six thirty, it took her by surprise. So much for her trap.

  “Hey,” he said without looking in Sophie’s direction.

  The old David would have kicked his shoes into the corner behind the door, but this one sat on the bottom stair to unlace his shoes and remove them. He placed them neatly beside the coatrack, in line to the millimeter, then headed for the kitchen.

  Sophie locked her tablet and tossed it on the couch. She closed her eyes and listened. The fridge opened and closed, followed by the snap and hiss of a beer can. She counted a full minute before joining him.

  When she came around the corner, David was already looking in her direction. Sometimes that was eerie. She remembered trying to sneak up on him when he’d first gotten his Pilot. It hadn’t worked then, and it certainly wouldn’t work now that he was so well trained.

  “Do you want one?” he asked, indicating the beer.

  “I’m nineteen, dummy,” she said.

  “So?”

  “So, my seizures are mostly under control these days, and I like to keep them that way. It’s not like I’ve never had a drink. I just don’t want one.”

  He looked chastened, as if he’d forgotten about her seizures entirely. Good. One point for her. She pulled out the chair opposite his and reversed it so she could lean over the back.

  David tipped his head and drained the entire beer. He tossed the can, and it made a perfect arc into the recycling bin. A few drops sprayed out as it went, but he acted like he didn’t notice. Sophie knew that was an act; he noticed everything. He opened the fridge, grabbed another can, and turned his chair to mimic hers.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “First day. All paperwork, then more paperwork.”

  “As much as the Army?”

  That one got a smile. “You remember me saying that, huh? Yeah, I guess today could give Army bureaucracy a run for its money. At least I think it’s temporary in this case.”

  “Did they give you a badge? Are you official BNL?”

  David reached in his shirt pocket and flashed an ID card at Sophie. “Official. Now people won’t stop me every two seconds to figure out if I belong there. That was a pain all morning ’til they hooked me up.”

  Sophie mentally filed that information. She tried to get a look at the badge and whether it had a bar code or a chip alongside David’s face, but it was back in his pocket before she could gather any further details.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  SOPHIE

  In the end, Sophie couldn’t believe how easy it was to get hold of David’s ID badge. Saturday morning, she brought her dirty clothes to the basement, and there it was, clipped to a shirt at the top of his laundry basket. Saturday was her laundry day, but it used to be his, so she could understand why he hadn’t started the load yet. He thought he had all day.

  “David?” she called.

  Julie’s voice carried down the stairs. “He just left for a run.”

  Maybe that was another reason he hadn’t bothered to start the laundry yet. He’d have more dirty stuff when he returned. Before she could lose her nerve, she slipped the badge into her hoodie’s pouch. Then she checked the directions on his shirt collar, emptied his basket into the washer, and moved the dials to cold wash. She didn’t want him any madder than he already would be.

  She left her own basket beside the machine and pulled her phone from her pocket. She needed someone to take her to the meeting space quickly enough that she’d have a chance of being back before David. Dominic.

  He seemed happy enough to hear from her, and happier when she explained she needed a favor. “Yeah! No problem! Where should I meet you?”

  “Same place as last time?”

  “Will do.”

  Sophie shouted, “Back in a few minutes” as she slammed the door behind her, not giving the chance for either mom to question where she was going or when she’d be back.

  Dominic was as fast as he’d said he would be, gliding that fancy ride into the bus stop. She ducked into the car, then stole a look back. That would be her luck, for David to spot her. No. Even if he did, he wouldn’t guess what she was doing; today was nothing but good luck.

  The bus would have taken an hour, but Dominic got her downtown in fifteen minutes. She jumped out while he was still parking. His car clanged in protest.

  “You’re not supposed to open the door while the car is in motion,” Dominic said.

  “Sorry! Tight deadline!” She had the keys out already. Her fingers shook as she fumbled with the lock. Stay calm, she told herself. Stay cool. No seizures. No panic. A quick errand.

  The door jangled when she shoved it open. Normally she’d pull it shut behind her, but she left that for Dominic. She flipped the light switch to identify where the sleeping bodies were, then turned it off again when somebody groaned from the back.

  She made it to the office without stepping on anyone. Gabe raised his head from his sleeping bag on the couch. “Sophie, man. What brings you in this early?”

  She flashed the ID at him in the same way David had flashed it at her. Gabe was on his feet in an instant. He wore flannel pajamas; he was the only person who stayed there who actually brought pajamas as opposed to crashing in his clothes. It made a certain amount of sense, given how often he slept there. His dad didn’t give him any grief at all.

  “Is that your brother’s ID? You work fast!”

  Even after all these years of friendship, Sophie still loved it when she managed to impress Gabe. “Opportunity presented itself.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “First we copy it.” She tossed it on the copier’s scanning bed. The machine always took forever to warm up, but this morning forever felt extra long. The copy, when it finally came through, looked decent. No glare from the glossy finish. So far, so good. Her brother’s serious face stared back at her.

  “Then we laminate.” Gabe did that part. He was better with the laminating machine than she was. He put it through three times to get the right thickness, then carefully trimmed it to size. She removed the clip from the original and
affixed it to the new badge.

  She hadn’t realized Dominic had come in until he spoke. “What if it has a chip? I think those things have a chip.”

  Sophie smiled. “Now we destroy it.”

  The kitchen was next to the office. She pulled one of the smaller soup pots off the rack—they came in medium, large, and giant— and filled it with water. She held the new badge under, swirling it.

  Gabe frowned. “If I had known this part, I wouldn’t have bothered with three layers of laminate.”

  “It still had to be the right thickness. What else would happen to it in a washing machine?”

  They took turns beating the new card until it looked like it had been through a few rinse cycles.

  “Do you want to call National?” Gabe asked. “They’re going to give you a raise for this.”

  Sophie glanced at her phone for the time. “You can do it. I’d better get back. I’ll leave the original with you, in case anyone snoops around my room.”

  She made it back to the house an hour after she’d left. The shower was going, and David’s running shoes stood neatly by the front door. Nobody in the front room. Perfect timing. Down the basement stairs, toss the new badge into the washing machine to soak against his clothes a little longer, and then back upstairs to play the innocent.

  “What’s got you out of breath?” Julie asked. She was sitting at the dining room table drinking coffee.

  “Checking if David switched his laundry over. I started it for him and everything.”

  “He just got back from a run, so probably not yet.”

  “I noticed. No worries, except someone should tell him Saturday is my day now.”

  “Why don’t you tell him?”

  “Maybe I will.” Sophie poured herself a glass of water. Julie was right. She was more than breathless; her heart beat out of her chest. Relax, she told herself again. You did it. She headed to her room to wait for David’s explosion.

  “Who messed with my laundry?” he shouted a few minutes later.

  Sophie yelled back through her closed door in calculated indignation. “I didn’t mess with it! I started it for you. I checked the labels and everything. Try saying thank you instead.”

  There was a pause, then a faint “Thank you” floated up the stairs.

  She waited some more for the next part, which turned out to be a long string of curse words. “My work ID was in there! It’s ruined!”

  Julie’s voice joined the conversation. “I’m sure they’ll give you a new one.”

  “After one week? That’s an awful first impression.”

  “Hopefully you’ve already made a good first impression and they’ll chalk this up to nerves or something. At least they’ll know you practice good hygiene. I’ve met guys who only wash their work shirts once a month.”

  The conversation continued on without Sophie. She relaxed; he was annoyed, but he didn’t sound suspicious.

  The feeling of having gotten away with something exhilarated her. She never got away with anything. She wasn’t even supposed to lock her bedroom door, and she’d been sixteen when she finally convinced her parents she would move out if they kept peeking in on her at night. But this? It had practically been a spy mission. Straight out of the movies, complete with subterfuge and counterfeits and a switcheroo made in the nick of time.

  It wasn’t until evening that her excitement was replaced by guilt. She walked into the kitchen to find David sitting at the table with a bottle of IPA in one hand, the ruined ID badge in the other. She panicked briefly, afraid he suspected something, then noticed the glum look on his face.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” That was true. She’d figured it would be easy enough for him to get a new ID. “Maybe it won’t be a problem.”

  He flashed a thin-lipped smile in her direction. “Maybe. Maybe I’m worrying for nothing.”

  “You’re good at worrying. You were, I mean. I don’t know if you’re still like that.”

  “I think that’s a hard one to grow out of. I’d probably worry I wasn’t worrying enough.”

  Sophie grabbed the ID card from his hand and sat opposite him. She used the opportunity to examine it and make sure it still looked right. Yep. It still looked like a waterlogged picture of David. One corner had separated and she fought the urge to peel it. She waved the card at him instead.

  “I bet you’ve had way worse things to worry about than this.” It was meant to be a lighthearted remark, but she regretted it the moment she’d said it. His face passed from morose to unreadable.

  She tried to change the subject. “Are you going to see any of your old friends now that you’re home?”

  He shrugged and took a swig of beer. “I don’t know who’s around.”

  “There’s a guy from your class who comes to our meetings, but I don’t think you were friends.” She felt a thrill mentioning the meetings while holding his forged ID.

  “Who?” David asked, his face still neutral.

  “I probably shouldn’t say—well, except he goes to protests, so you’d see him on the news if you were looking, so it’s not really a secret. Will Yuen.”

  “Will-You-Answer-Already?” He smiled. “That dude was weird. Always took ages to answer a teacher’s question, like his voice was beaming in from light years away, before and after his Pilot—wait. I thought your meetings were for people who didn’t have Pilots.”

  “People who don’t have them, including people who never got one and people who had theirs deactivated.”

  “You can have it turned off?” The life came back into his face. He sounded genuinely interested.

  Sophie tried to figure out if he was messing with her. “Of course you can. You didn’t know that?”

  “I mean, I guess I did. I know they disable it if a soldier is having trouble after a head injury. I didn’t know people did it on purpose.”

  “Don’t you remember Ma asking you to turn yours off, back when you were complaining about it that first year?”

  He scratched his head, then nodded. “I guess I never considered it a serious option. I would never have done it then. I knew how much they’d spent, and how hard I’d begged. I would never have admitted it was a mistake.”

  “Was it? A mistake?” She tried not to sound too eager or look too expectant when he took a minute to answer. He looked out the window, though she could tell his attention was on her as well.

  “No. It’s helped me, even though it can be irritating. It’s saved my life.”

  She hadn’t expected him to say otherwise, but for a moment it had seemed possible. She would have loved to have him back on her side of the great divide.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  VAL

  The sun had begun to set over the outfield, painting the sky in purples and pinks as the family picked their way through the full stands to the nosebleed seats. A baseball game had seemed like a good idea for an outing, with lots of distractions to keep everyone occupied.

  Unfortunately, the change of venue hadn’t made much difference. The first problem was that David and Sophie had wound up seated next to each other. Val wouldn’t have thought that would be an issue with two adult children, but they acted determined to regress now that they were living under the same roof again. She didn’t hear the conversation start, or a change in tone, just a seamless continuation of the same unbearable low-grade sniping that had been going in the house for weeks.

  “Enough.” Val looked from David to Sophie and back. “How old are you two? Do you really have to fight like that?”

  “He started it.” Sophie crossed her arms, mimicking Val.

  David frowned and ran both hands through nonexistent curls. “All I said was I couldn’t take you to work with me. Jesus, Soph, I’m still new there. Let me gain some traction before I start trying to pull strings. I already got off on the wro
ng foot when I laundered my badge.”

  “But I thought you were doing presentations at schools and stuff. I want to watch you present. Is that so wrong?”

  “That’s not wrong, just weird. Why would you want to watch that? I thought you were anti-Pilot.”

  “I am. I’m curious about the arguments you use to convince people.”

  Val silently agreed with David: Sophie’s position was strange. Still, it was the bickering that was getting to her, not the content. “I don’t care who’s right and who’s wrong. Find a way to deal with this that doesn’t give me a headache. You’re both adults.”

  Val hoped that was the end of the arguments as Sophie and David both reoriented away from each other. She was starting to feel she was the only one in the family actually there for the game. Julie had her tablet and her phone out, scrolling the former while thumb-typing something on the latter; she might as well not be with them, though if quizzed she’d probably know the score.

  Sophie watched the players below and flagged down every vendor. She’d always loved ballpark food: hot dogs, pretzels, nachos, Cracker Jacks, ice cream. As a kid, this had been the one place where they’d allowed her that junk, and she still made the same indulgences. In between snacks, she pulled out her phone and typed, her fingers lightning fast.

  David watched the crowd more than the game. He had no stillness in him. David and Julie both had twelve-dollar beers in plastic cups. Every once in a while he would exhale, then tilt his beer back. Val noticed that even while he drank he kept his eyes open to his surroundings.

  Fine. Val would pay attention for all of them. The runner on first inched out to steal. The pitcher whipped the ball to second, but the runner had seen the pitcher turn and was already safe back at first.

  “Why do they let the players get Pilots?” asked Julie.

  Val glanced over to see how her wife had read her mind. Really, it wasn’t mind reading. Julie had always been able to follow her thoughts. She didn’t think she was that predictable, but there it was.