My pulse hastened. Dex was far from trustworthy, but I wondered if even he knew who or what he’d sent me after. I approached the screens guardedly, despite being alone, and once I was close enough I saw it. Sitting harmlessly on the counter by the station’s seat was a hand-terminal. Not just any hand-terminal, either. It belonged to me…or at least it had until I’d sold it off cheap so my mom could stay comfortable. I recognized the bent portion of the casing on the upper right-hand side, as well as a series of scratches along the lower part of the screen.
“What the hell?” I asked.
I grasped the device and checked my surroundings again. There was nobody else in the room. I held it up, and when I swiped the screen to see if it was on, a message popped up all on its own.
WE CAN HELP EACH OTHER, KALE DRAYTON. I NEED YOU TO SMUGGLE SOMETHING ONTO THE PICCOLO. DO THIS FOR ME, AND YOUR MOTHER WILL BE RELEASED FROM QUARANTINE AND CURED OF WHAT AILS HER.
LEAVE NOW. VISIT THE MAW AGAIN BEFORE DEPARTING FOR YOUR NEXT SHIFT AND THIS ARRANGEMENT WILL BE NULLIFIED. YOU HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO REPLY WITH A DECISION.
FROM ICE TO ASHES
M
The farther I read the faster my heart thumped. By the end my throat was dry and my forehead was dripping with sweat despite the icy temperature.
The contact address was unknown, and M might as well have been a letter in an alien language, because I had no idea who it could be. But I’d spent enough time in the shadows to know when someone was asking me to do something unsavory. That was when people were vague. Nobody ever cared about telling you the truth of what they wanted if the truth was clean.
I decided that all the stress on me was causing me to see things. There were thousands of hand-terminals like mine. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that another had similar blemishes. I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyelids shut tight so that I could reset my vision before giving it another read.
As my eyelids reopened, the entire array of screens blinked on simultaneously. Every single one displayed the same feed: a view of my mom’s room in the Q-Zone. The sight caused me to stagger backward.
“Mom?” I whispered. Whether or not I was mic’d, she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. She was half-asleep on a torn mattress—not exactly what they’d promised when I’d paid for a better room. One of her scrawny arms was draped over the edge into a trash bin filled with bile, while the other was attached to an IV. A sequence of rashes dappled her face, which unless they’d just formed had been covered by makeup when I visited her. There was no sound, but I could see her groaning. Every few seconds her eyes opened slightly, as if she were checking to make sure she was still amongst the living.
I tossed the hand-terminal onto the counter and ran to the workstation’s control console to try my luck at learning where the feed was coming from. A series of alien-looking, algorithmic encryptions locked me out. I could slice through most rudimentary safeguards given the time, but this was well beyond my capability. My frustration built, and when I slammed down on the keys the array went black again.
“Mom!” I shouted. I tapped one of the screens. It was still warm. Then I whipped my body around and scoured the empty room for anything that might help me figure out who I was dealing with. I didn’t know anybody, not even a fence, who went by M. There was nothing. No stray clothing or closets. Not even a lavatory. Just metal, rock, and at least a hundred blank screens.
It suddenly hit me: This was Dexter’s doing. Either a cruel prank…or worse: He feared his secrets being in my brain and wanted to get rid of me. Security could be on its way to detain me any second. Exchanging unsanctioned communications was considered highly illegal on Titan. It was enough to get you locked up on Pervenio Station for years.
I prepared to run, then froze. The hand-terminal had belonged to me. If it was still registered in my name and discovered with that message on it, I’d be screwed no matter what. I snatched it, shoved it into my pocket, and took off for the exit. It opened easily.
I launched myself over the railing of the stairs without thinking and plunged into the crowd. Cora or Desmond or anybody could have seen me. I didn’t care. I needed to get out of the Maw and to Dexter. If he really was setting me up, I’d get on my knees and promise that I wasn’t being used by Pervenio as a snitch.
—
Level B6 was so quiet the dark, yawning tunnels had the feel of an ancient crypt. The hullabaloo of its many factories was absent. Every hatch I passed was sealed tight. Exhaust vents and air recyclers moaned as if they were infested with ghosts.
I tried to act calm, but the device and the message in my pocket made that nearly impossible. The best I could do was to just keep from stumbling over any exposed pipes. I turned into the tunnel leading to Dexter’s chop shop, and the silence somehow grew even more unbearable. I could hear my own heartbeat.
Unlike the rest of the area, light poured out through Dexter’s wide-open hatch. I thought about what I was going to say to him while I approached. A whole slew of pleading and flattery—whatever it took to get him to keep to his word so that my mother wouldn’t be left to die alone. It would hurt my pride, but I’d recover.
I stopped outside to gather focus. Once I felt as confident as I knew I’d ever get, I turned the corner.
“Dexter, you—” The words got stuck in my throat as I stepped through.
Dexter’s shop bustled with Pervenio Security Officers. I counted at least four of them…alive. One clearly dead officer was slumped against the adjacent wall, blood oozing out of a gash in his forehead, and across from him was Dexter, sagging in his wheelchair. His throat was slit, and the knife that was usually stored in his armrest glinted on the floor by his outstretched hand, the tip stained red.
“You, Ringer, this area is off limits!” a member of the security team shouted at me.
My gaze was ripped away from Dexter’s gruesome throat. Four new-gen pulse-rifles aimed at me. My hands shot into the air. I stuttered, but no words came out.
All four of Dexter’s henchmen were dead as well. Three were behind the counter—three messes of bloody, tangled limbs. The fourth was arranged similarly to the dead officer, but with the entire top of his head blown off. His limp body leaned against the room’s open hatch, and on it I saw something that hadn’t been there earlier: An orange circle was painted on the metal face, so fresh that the point where the brushstroke had stopped was dripping.
“What are you doing here?” the officer questioned.
I bolted out of the room before any of them could grab me.
“Get back here!”
I ran as fast as I could, tearing around corners so I’d be impossible to track. I didn’t look back to see if they were following, and I didn’t risk taking the central lift. A series of air ducts returned me to the same escape route I’d used the day before.
Chapter 6
I flung the hatch into my hollow on Level B2 of the Darien Lowers open and rushed in, checking at least three times that it was locked tight behind me. Once I was sure, I fell against it and ripped off my sanitary mask. Steam from my mouth hung on the frigid air as I released a breath that had seemingly been trapped in my lungs since I fled Dexter’s shop.
That unleashed a deluge of them and I started to hyperventilate.
I’d seen death in the Lowers before—every Ringer had—but nothing like that. Whatever had happened, it was enough to drive Dexter to cut his own neck rather than be brought in; enough for his henchmen, depraved salt-sniffers, to give their lives.
I slid my hand into my pocket and withdrew my compromised hand-terminal. My fingers were trembling too intensely to hold it steady. Dexter wouldn’t have let himself die just to get rid of me. He certainly wouldn’t to pull off a prank.
“Hello?” a voice hollered from outside of my hatch. “Anyone home?” Then there came a few knocks, the metal causing them to echo along the rock and ice walls of my hollow.
I was so startled that I threw the hand-terminal across the room onto my bed. Th
en I jumped up, nearly hitting my head on the low, craggy ceiling. I thought about staying silent, but not answering whoever it was would only make me seem guiltier.
I slowly turned to face the hatch. It was difficult to see what I looked like in the murky reflection on its oxidized metal surface, but I wiped my sweating brow and took a few deep breaths for good measure. I told myself that if Pervenio Security had decided to come after me they would’ve busted through themselves. When I was ready, I pushed the heavy hatch open just enough to peek outside.
“Oh, Kale, it’s just you,” an older Ringer named Benji Reigar said. His pale face was creased with wrinkles so shallow that they appeared sketched on by a pencil. Generations in Low G had made my people appear younger than our Earther counterparts of the same age. “I saw someone run in here, but I couldn’t tell who it was.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and opened the hatch a little farther. Benji was just another Ringer from the Lowers like I was. He’d been living alone in the hollow next to my mom’s since before I could remember.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought I forgot something.”
“Must’ve been important. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Benji leaned to the side to get a better look into my hollow. I moved with him to obstruct his view. He was a kind man, but he too often pretended like he was in charge of monitoring our little branch of the Lowers.
“I’m fine,” I replied. I patted my empty pocket. “Just my hand-terminal.”
He put on a wry grin and said, “Waiting to hear from someone, eh?”
“You could say that.”
“By Trass, to be young again,” he reminisced. “When are you gonna find someone serious for yourself, kid? Ringer your age ought to have a girl to keep his head on straight.”
“I’m working on it.”
He laughed.
“Well, thanks for keeping an eye on things,” I said, not wanting to let him elongate the conversation like he usually did. “I better be getting to bed. Got work early.” I went to close the hatch, but he blocked it with his elbow.
“So it is true?” he asked. “You’re really going to stay on Titan full-time? People may give you a hard time down here about working on that harvester, but any of them would kill for a job like that, you know.”
News traveled fast. Benji always seemed to find a way to learn everything about everybody who lived nearby. Luckily, I hadn’t let anybody in on the real reason behind my choice yet or he would’ve figured that out too and hounded me about my mother. The old man probably could’ve made thousands as an information broker if he put his mind to it.
“That’s the plan,” I said. “I landed a cleaning job in the Uppers for now while I search for something better. Those long harvest shifts were killing me.”
“Staying clean at least. Good. Your mother must be real proud of you.” He peered over my shoulder into the empty hollow again. “Where’s she been, by the way? I haven’t seen her in a while.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Busy.”
“That boss of hers giving her trouble again? I’ll tell you, if those rich Earthers didn’t have us to clean their sheets they’d suffocate in their own filth.”
I chuckled and placed my hand on the handle of the hatch assertively enough to warn him to let go. “Speaking of, I really better get going.”
“Well, I won’t hold you,” Benji said, finally taking the hint.
“See you soon.”
“Give your mother my best.”
I sealed the hatch and exhaled. My nerves were finally starting to calm. From what I’d seen behind Benji, Level B2 was busy, but not with Pervenio Officers. Despite their stature, they were easy to spot. Nobody else in the Lowers could afford armor that shined like polished glass, or pulse-rifles with state-of-the-art digital ammo displays.
I headed to my bed. My legs felt weak and I needed to sit before they crumpled. The hand-terminal was lying next to me, having landed on my thin pillow. The screen was activated and the message from M shined as if it were mocking me.
I turned away from it and stared into my hollow—the six-meter-long, cylindrical cave with ribbed walls exposed to the ice-rock crust of Titan and crooked light fixtures that were so hazy it made my skin appear gray. Two low beds were sunken along the flanks, with some area for storage, a limited kitchen, and a cramped bathroom. Once, the room had been filled with appliances and view-screens I’d earned both from stealing and working on the Piccolo, but they’d all been sold off for my mom.
The hollow wasn’t much, but it was home. For as long as I could remember, I’d return from whatever kind of trouble I was off getting into and her face would be there to greet me, always smiling. She’d prepare whatever food she could manage to scrum up. Sometimes it would be a yeasty soup, which I’m told was made to taste like the chickens that once roamed Pre-Meteorite Earth freely. I couldn’t say for sure if that was true. Other times it was a pair of condensed ration bars mass-produced somewhere by some corporation. On rare occasions, if the wealthy Earther she served was feeling particularly generous, she’d even bring home some produce grown fresh in Darien’s Upper Gardens—something I wasn’t able to steal. You had a better chance of getting murdered than finding a good, unprocessed meal in the markets of the Lowers, so those rare nights were my favorites. She’d always let me have the larger portion.
Not anymore. Presently, the bed across from me was vacant, not having been used in months. She’d apparently never even made it back from work the day she got taken in. She’d gone to the Lower Ward Medical Center to see about a minor cough, and that was that. It was also the only reason I was able to keep her condition secret from nosy Ringers like Benji: She hadn’t set off a decon-chamber alarm and wound up being dragged away screaming for all the Lowers to see.
I sighed and glanced back at the hand-terminal, finally with a clearer head. If the message wasn’t Dexter playing games, did that mean it was real? I truly had no idea who M could be, but he or she was serious. The device had been planted for me, and only me, to find. Whoever had left it there knew my name and knew where I worked. Or at least where I had worked. The fact that I’d recently resigned from the Piccolo didn’t seem to matter.
For a moment I considered how displeased Captain Saunders was when I’d asked for a leave of absence and wondered if maybe he was the one behind the message, in an effort to get back at me. Until I realized how ridiculous that was. There wasn’t even an “M” in his name, and I didn’t do anything on the Piccolo significant enough to warrant a well-off captain risking his freedom by breaking Pervenio regulations. Yes, not reporting an act of unsanctioned communications was against the law, but being the one who sent the message was likely punishable with life behind bars.
DO THIS FOR ME, AND YOUR MOTHER WILL BE RELEASED FROM QUARANTINE AND CURED OF WHAT AILS HER.
It was an appealing offer, and a dangerous one. For my mother’s sake I wasn’t ready to say no—I couldn’t ignore the view M had shown me of her when she wasn’t all prettied up for a visit—but I wasn’t foolish enough to leap blindly at the chance. I was good at sneaking objects around Darien, occasionally smuggling them between the Uppers and Lowers, but between worlds? And why the Piccolo?
I couldn’t think of a single reason why someone would be interested in the ship. She was one of the oldest operating gas harvesters in the Ring. So old, in fact, that a great deal of her systems remained manual. Over the two years I’d worked there I’d never seen someone truly important walk its halls, or even mention it in passing.
I lay down and held the device in front of my face, reading the message over and over again, hoping I’d missed something. I had less than twenty-four hours to make a decision, and I planned on spending every one of them considering my options. My mom’s life depended on it.
—
I couldn’t sleep. A few times I attempted to, but the message rattled around in my skull. I tried to distract myself by switching a newsfeed onto the hand-terminal, but that only
made it worse. An old Helix Engineering ad for bone-density boosters ran, and its jingle got stuck in my head. If you don’t want your skeleton a’droppin’…M’s message even started to take on the tune.
I sat up. My top eyelids felt like they had tiny weights strapped to them. My head ached from exhaustion. The hand-terminal, which still operated normally despite all of my contacts being wiped, read 6:00 a.m. In all the hours of failed sleep, I hadn’t come up with a single helpful answer. The only ones I did find were that I was jobless, my mom was still in the Q-Zone, and the only fence who would deal with me was dead, meaning the credits from robbing John would never come through. I could only hope that Pervenio had gone after Dex for reasons other than the message from M.
I decided I had to see my mom again. Not on a screen. I had to look her in the eyes to see if I really had any choice. If I hurried I could beat the early rush for visiting hours at the Q-Zone. I got undressed and headed to my confined shower. Everything that had happened had caused me to slack off on my usual regiment. I scrubbed the stink of the Maw off my body with water as warm as I could handle; it was the one thing there weren’t any restrictions on, after all. Then I put on a new pair of gloves and a clean sanitary mask.
Once I was dressed, I tucked the hand-terminal into my pillow and covered that with a blanket. I couldn’t risk anyone reading what M had sent me by bringing it along through decon-chambers and scanners. I rustled my blanket enough to make its placement appear accidental and then hurried out of my hollow.
The Lowers were quiet. Not uncharacteristically, like when I went to see Dex, but it was so early in the morning that the only people getting ready were those trying to make it to the Q-Zone. I fell in line behind a group of gloomy Ringers lumbering toward the tram station on Level B2.
From Ice to Ashes Page 6
