by David Liss
Tamret was still holding my hand, and she must have felt it when my data bracelet buzzed again, because she now looked up at me. “Oh,” she said. “I get it.”
She then turned and launched herself into a sideways kick, moving with more agility than an Olympic gymnast. She caught Ardov full in the face with her foot, and he went reeling backward, slammed into the wall, and fell on the floor.
Tamret walked over to Ardov, who was on all fours now, his head hanging low. He raised a hand a little bit off the floor. “No more. I’ve had enough,” he said weakly.
“I’m not so sure.” She raised her foot as if to kick him again.
“I promise,” he said. “I’ll leave you alone.”
She paused. She now had no idea, of course, if her blows would land, but I didn’t think she meant to hurt him anymore. She just needed him to believe otherwise.
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“I swear by [the primary goddess of revenge]!” He was crying now. Actual tears were matting the fur on his face.
“Those are just words, and I know words mean nothing to someone like you. But I swear if you try to hurt me again, if you try to hurt anyone I care about, next time you will die. I swear it by [the primary goddess of revenge], and if you aren’t willing to keep your word, you know I’ll keep mine.”
She raised her foot again, and he flinched. Maybe that was enough for her, because she smiled and turned away. She then took my hand. “I think we’re done here,” she said, and led me toward the door.
• • •
Once we were in the hall, she threw her arms around me and hugged me so hard it almost hurt. I didn’t mind.
When she let go, she grinned at me. “That was really, really clever.”
I shrugged like it was no big deal. In fact, I was maybe the proudest I’d ever been in my life. This was better than saving the Dependable. I didn’t have to worry about the harm I’d done. Tamret was safe, and no one was seriously hurt. This was what victory felt like.
Tamret’s eyes misted over, and I realized she had begun to cry. “I’m sorry, Zeke.” She choked and stammered out the words.
“Why are you sorry?” I asked. I had no idea.
“I’m sorry I kept secrets from you.” She pushed me away, and just like that she was done crying. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s go out. I need to get out of here, get some fresh air, see the city.”
“It’s after curfew,” I said.
“I just came within a breath of being killed. I don’t really care about curfew. I have no idea what a [milkshake] is, but I plan to get one. Do you want me to go out by myself?”
I did not.
• • •
A quick search on my data bracelet had identified this as the closest eatery that served anything like a milkshake, and it was a pretty good approximation, though the flavors tended toward root vegetables, and gelatinous chunks bobbed in the glass like icebergs. The location almost made up for the floating chunks. The restaurant was on the roof of a midsize building toward the station’s center, so all around us was the city, with its buildings and lights and wonders spread out almost to the horizon. Above us, three of the gas giant’s variously colored moons shone bright through the dome. There was a low, whining music playing, like mosquitoes buzzing to an irregular and unpredictable beat, and there were other tables with other couples. They were at their tables, and we were at ours, and all of Confederation Central was lit up in every direction and the stars were blazing above us and shuttles with their flashing lights darted through the sky.
Tamret’s jaw was a little swollen, though the nanites were hard at work to minimize the damage. My hand, too, was already feeling better, and I was still nearly dizzy with relief. When I’d first set foot into the control room, I’d been so afraid that I would fail her, that I would have to stand by helplessly while Ardov hurt her, but instead I’d saved her with my button pushing. Now here we were, overlooking all this beauty, all this wonder. I did not imagine it was possible to be happier and more content than I felt at that moment.
“Why does he hate you so much?” I asked.
“Well, now he hates me because he thinks I’ve been messing with his account and keeping him from gaining experience.”
“Have you?”
She laughed and shook her head, and her hair fell forward and danced around her face. She whisked it away and looked up at me. “Don’t be silly, Zeke. Of course I have.”
I leaned forward. “Are you out of your mind? You are going to get yourself kicked out.”
“They’d have to catch me first, so I think I’m okay. Their security amounts to a sign saying ‘Please don’t break our rules.’”
“I thought hacking the skill system wasn’t even possible.”
“For Confederation citizens,” she said with a wicked smile. “For Ardov, the security was a little more lax.”
“I don’t believe this. Are you some kind of compulsive criminal?”
“You’re talking like your chaperone, Ms. Price,” Tamret said. “You know she wants me to stay away from you, right?”
“Did she tell you that?” I felt my whole body tense. Was Ms. Price going around trying to ruin my friendships behind my back?
“She said it was for the good of your planet, that I was getting in the way of your making friends with your own kind. She said that you were only friends with me and Steve because the other humans didn’t want you.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?” My voice broke somewhat embarrassingly, but I hoped it would get lost in translation.
“Well,” Tamret said airily, clearly wanting to tease me now, “I see how you look at the others in your delegation.”
“Tamret!”
“Back to the story. I was talking about how I tinkered with Ardov’s experience points.”
I tried to put Ms. Price’s meddling out of my mind. “Which you should not have been doing! They caught you before, and this is even more serious. You know how they are about the point system.”
“And would you really care if they kicked me out?” she asked.
I could not answer that. Not truthfully. I couldn’t let her know how much I would care. I couldn’t tell her that if I hadn’t been fighting for my mother’s life, I would rather be kicked out myself than have to stay here without her. “Why was he harassing you? Why did you put up with him bossing you around?”
“Because he can,” she said. “I don’t belong to a caste, Zeke. Not anymore, and that means I have to obey the leader of the highest caste in my community. That’s Ardov. According to our law, I have to do what he says, provided he doesn’t tell me to hurt or degrade myself or others. If I don’t obey him, I’ll be arrested as soon as I get home, regardless of how well I do here. I pretended it doesn’t bother me, because that was the only defense I had.”
I didn’t know anything about the caste system in her culture. She had never wanted to talk about it before, and I wasn’t about to start asking her to explain it. I felt like I understood the main points, even if I didn’t know how she had ended up in such a vulnerable position.
“And ‘snowflake,’ since you are so clueless, is an insult. Maybe you noticed no one else in our delegation has my coloring.”
“No one else in my delegation has mine,” I said.
She scrunched up her face. “I guess. Now that you mention it.”
It was crazy that differences in skin color had caused so much misery and pain on my world, yet to Tamret the range from Charles’s dark brown to my sunless pink was hardly noticeable.
“Is white, uh, fur so unusual? Is it an ethnic thing?”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s a recessive trait. Maybe five percent of the population is born looking like this. In some cultures we’re actually considered good luck, if you can believe it.” S
he brushed hair away from her face, but then let it fall back, obscuring her eyes. “Not my culture. We aren’t treated kindly. And Ardov is from a well-connected family with a lot of relatives in the leadership caste. He considered my being part of the delegation an insult to him and his family. That’s why he acted the way he did. So I pretended not to care, and the first chance I had, I messed with him by hacking his account. But it got out of hand. Which is what you saw when you were spying on me.”
“I wasn’t spying,” I said, feeling myself blush. “When I saw you two together in the hall tonight, I had a bad feeling. I thought I should check it out.”
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about this before. I was, I don’t know, embarrassed, I guess.” She put a hand on mine. “I won’t forget what you did for me. Anything you need. Anytime. Any reason. You name it.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” I said, feeling my face burn. “I’m your friend.”
“I know you are, and I know what it means.” She took a long drink. “My father worked for the housing authority in our city-state. When I was eight, the real estate market pretty much collapsed. There were a lot of reasons, I guess—the economy and all that. I don’t really understand it, but I know it wasn’t any one person’s fault, but they needed people to blame. One of those people was my father. He’d never done anything but serve as he had been asked to serve, but they arrested him. I still don’t know if he was killed or sent to a gulag.”
“I’m sorry.” It was a pathetic thing to say, but there was nothing else.
“He and my mother married pretty young. And she was so in love with him.” She smiled when she said this and looked off, like she was remembering something. “It was embarrassing to me, you know, to see how much they loved each other. Holding hands and kissing all the time. And when they took my father away, she couldn’t accept it, you know? People who disappear like my father don’t come back, not ever, but my mother wrote letters and spoke at civic meetings. I didn’t know anything about how things worked, but I knew she was making a mistake. I wanted to tell her that he was gone. She couldn’t get him back, and she had a daughter, a snowflake daughter, who needed her, but I couldn’t say it, because I wanted him back too, and because I didn’t want to face what I knew was true: I wasn’t enough for her. If he was gone, then I wasn’t reason enough for her to live.”
“Tamret,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yes, I do. You need to understand.” She paused for a moment, her eyes distant. “So, no surprise, they took her. When she was arrested, I became an orphan according to our laws. I lost my parents’ status and caste. And because she held our housing permit, I had to leave our home. She was dead or in a gulag—I didn’t know—and I had nowhere to live and nothing to eat. Children without parents don’t exist, and I was a snowflake, so there was no one lower than I was. Things were going to end up very bad for me.”
She was crying now, the silent tears streaming from her eyes. I took her hand and she squeezed it.
“My friends let me live with them,” she said. “Some of them had parents who were sympathetic, and they were kind to me. But I couldn’t stay with one family too long, because of the risk. Sometimes I had to hide in basements and closets and under floorboards when people were home. I lived that way for three years, and I knew that I was never going to be anything but a burden to the people I cared about unless I could figure out a way to change things. Little things. Secret things. I learned my way around computer systems so I could shift things around, help the people who were helping me. And when the government started cracking down on dissident kids, and some of my friends got caught in the net, I was not going to let them rot behind bars or face the silencing squads without at least trying to help them. But I got caught. My government is a lot more worried about security than they are here. Anyhow, that’s why I was in prison when Dr. Roop came for us.”
She wiped at her face and sniffed and seemed to will herself to stop crying. And like that, she was done. “I wouldn’t still be alive without friends, so please understand that my friends are everything to me. Then I left the friends I had behind. I came here in a ship with three Rarels who hate me. I was all alone, and then I met Steve.” She grinned. “When I first saw him, I thought he was a terrifying monster, and then he opened his mouth, and about ten minutes later he was like the best friend I’d ever had.”
I nodded. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“And then you,” she said, her eyes cast downward.
“And then me.”
“This is an amazing place,” she said. “These Confederation types are the most wonderful creatures, but I think maybe you and your green data collector are right. We’ve been brought here for some reason, and I know that things aren’t going to be calm forever. But I have my friends, and if you and me and Steve stick together, I think we are going to be okay.”
• • •
We didn’t talk on the train back to the government compound. We didn’t need to say anything. We sat in our seats, swaying with the movement, looking out the window, feeling the alien and comforting warmth of each other’s presence.
I walked her to her room, and we stood in the hall outside her door in the dim night-cycle light. She took both my hands in both of hers. “This was a good night,” she said. “You rescued me.”
“I pushed some buttons.”
“You rescued me,” she said again, smiling shyly, turning away just a little.
Tamret was clever and wild and a little frightening—maybe more than a little frightening. I felt like I could spend a day, a week, doing nothing but watching her, looking at her fur, her ears, her face, thinking about how it was like and unlike a human’s. I was fascinated by her, and there was no point in pretending otherwise, but was that enough? Could I just like her and admire her and want to be with her without wanting to change the way things were?
Then I thought that the time was running out. We’d started with a year, but the days and weeks would slip away. What if she liked me too? Did I really want, years from now, to look back and think about what I should have done if only I hadn’t been afraid to risk—what? Feelings? Discomfort? I’d destroyed a starship, and I’d defeated a bully with ten times my strength. Was I really too scared to tell a girl I liked her?
“Tamret,” I said.
Her eyes locked on mine.
“Oi!” Steve shouted. He was hurrying down the hallway, cinching his bathrobe. “I just got your message, mate.”
I couldn’t quite keep the irritation out of my voice. “What, the one that said, ‘Help! Come right now!’ that I sent like three hours ago?”
“I’m a deep sleeper. It’s the Ish-hi way. Everything all right, then?”
“It is now,” Tamret told him. “Zeke saved me.”
“I helped her out a little,” I said.
“By saving me,” she said.
“So,” he mused, “all this waking me up was for nothing, then?”
“No, not for nothing.” She now took Steve’s hands in hers. Just the way she had held mine. “I’m glad you showed up. Eventually. After everything was all over. But you showed up because you’re my friend.”
“Right,” he said. “All right, then. Looks like there’s nothing left but the talking, so I’m going back to bed.”
Tamret let go of Steve and opened her door. She slipped partway into the darkness. “Good night, boys.”
Boys. The two of us. Equal. I was such an idiot.
I watched as she shut the door, and I thought of everything I wished I had said. I wished I had told her how I felt, though I wasn’t sure that even I knew. I wanted to tell her that I was there for her. I was her friend. Anything she needed. Anytime. I wished I had told her, but I’d waited too long.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
I slept little that night, replaying the fight
with Ardov in my head. And going out with Tamret. That too. I felt like I was examining every word of our conversation, reading it like it was all in code and I had to decipher it. I remembered everything I said, and I cringed, thinking of a thousand ways I could have said it better, made myself seem cooler or more interesting.
Just after dawn, a knock at the door interrupted my sleeplessness. Charles was curled up on his bed, and he stirred a little. I was awake, and hoping maybe it was Tamret.
It wasn’t Tamret. It was Dr. Roop.
He was fully dressed and had the gravest expression I’d ever seen on a giraffe creature. “I must speak with you.”
I went back in, threw on some jeans and a T-shirt, and followed him to his office. He sat in his chair at the other side of his desk and looked at me with huge dark eyes. “Do you have something you want to tell me?”
At this point there was probably a whole lot more I didn’t want to tell him, so I figured I’d play this as smoothly as possible. “Not really,” I said. Very deft.
He sighed and lowered his long neck. Then he pointed in the general direction of his snout. “Do I appear to be foolish in your eyes?”
“Not as such,” I said, but I was still not sure what he was getting at. He could be talking about the incident in the sparring room or about leaving the compound after curfew. Maybe I was forgetting something. I was breaking the rules with such regularity that I was having trouble keeping up with myself.
“Ardov spent much of the night in the medical facility,” Dr. Roop said. “He claims he was in the sparring room, and he set the parameters too high with the sims.”
Oh, right. The cringing and wounded Ardov. I had forgotten all about him because I was too busy trying to figure out how to talk about my feelings with an alien neko.
I thought I might as well do something that wasn’t entirely pathetic. I told Dr. Roop the truth. “That’s not what happened.”
“I know that is not what happened,” Dr. Roop said, “because I reviewed the log images.”
“What was I supposed to do?” I demanded. “Let him hurt Tamret?”
