"I like that," Addy said. "I'll think about that when we fight the scum. About home." She closed her eyes, still lying beside him. "Can I sleep here tonight? Lailani won't see, and I won't do anything naughty to you, no matter how much you want it."
"Only if you don't snore," Marco said.
"Promise."
She slept, and finally Marco could sleep too, and with Addy's warm body beside his, he did not dream.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Hey, de la Rosa," Addy said, pulling on her uniform. "Why do you have that rainbow tattoo on your arm?"
They were in the locker room of the Urchin, and Lailani was drying her hair in front of a mirror, wearing a white tank top, her tattoos exposed.
"Never heard of pride?" Lailani said.
Addy tried to brush her hair, but the blond locks were a thick, knotted mess. She grimaced as she pulled her brush through them. Fuck it, she should just cut her hair short like Lailani's.
"Yeah, I heard of it," Addy said. "But I thought you're banging Marco."
Lailani shrugged and pulled on her uniform's button-down shirt. "So? I like him. Even though he's a boy. He's not like most boys. He's softer, kinder, wiser. And I like his book. Hey, I can play on the opposite team too." She glanced at Addy's own tattoo. "What's that blue leaf?"
"The best team!" Addy said. "The Maple Leafs!"
Lailani raised her eyebrows. "Football? Do Santos or Alvarez play for them?"
"Santos and Alvarez play soccer," Addy said. "I'm not some European who gets the names confused. And no, the Maple Leafs are a hockey team. The best damn team in the whole world." She raised her chin. "I was doing great in their tryouts. I could have joined the team if not for this goddamn army."
Lailani's eyes widened. "Wow, I bet the Leafs won the cup a bunch of times!"
Addy grumbled. "Well . . . sort of. A while ago."
Lailani nodded. "I see. So it's been a couple of years since they won. It happens." She tilted her head. "How long since their last win?"
Addy mumbled under her breath.
"What's that?" Lailani said.
"A hundred and seventy-nine years!" Addy said. "All right? Happy?"
Lailani gasped. "The best hockey team in the world hasn't won the cup since—"
"Shut it!" Addy said.
Lailani stuck her tongue out at her. "I'm going to stick with football."
Addy groaned. God damn it. She wanted to hate this girl, but she couldn't help but like Lailani.
She's like me, Addy thought. She's strong. Not physically, maybe. But she's got balls of steel.
Addy thought of that night they had first arrived at Nightwall, treated like prisoners, interrogated, torn away from their friends. She thought of how she and Marco had been so afraid, so lonely, how in their dizzying fear they had made love—raw, sweaty, half in a dream. She didn't like speaking to Marco about it. It still felt wrong to her, but she never regretted that night, how she had grown closer to him, to her best friend.
Since then, being near Lailani had felt odd to Addy. She wasn't jealous. That couldn't be it. She liked Lailani, and she was happy that Marco had found happiness with her. And yet, whenever she saw Marco and Lailani together, whenever she thought of them making love, Addy felt a strange pang, just a little bit rejected, a little bit sad.
It's not because I love Marco, Addy thought. Not like that, not like a woman loves a man, despite that one night. It's because he's always been my best friend, and maybe I'm losing him just a little.
Of course, Addy herself once had a boyfriend. She had left Steve when boarding the rocket to RASCOM; he had been due to be drafted just a few days later. She hadn't seen or heard from the big lump since. Addy doubted she would for another five years, not until their service was over. At least if they both survived that long, which was looking unlikely.
Our whole hockey team joined the army, Addy thought. The whole team is gone. Some of us probably dead.
And suddenly rage filled Addy.
She raged against the scum who had caused this war.
She raged against her politicians and generals who had found no path to peace.
She raged against the loss of Elvis, of Beast, of all the friends she had left behind.
And raged against herself, the fear inside her that would not leave.
She raged against this whole damn cosmos.
"Addy, you all right?" Lailani said, and now her voice was soft.
Addy nodded, realizing that her eyes were damp. "I was just thinking of home. Hockey games. Hot dogs and beer. The people I left behind." She rubbed her eyes. "I'm happy for you and Marco, Lailani. Honestly. I feel a bit like a third wheel, but I'm happy."
Lailani laughed. "Not a third wheel. A third musketeer. That's us now. You, me, and Marco, and nobody can break this trio."
Addy hugged her. She towered over Lailani; the top of Lailani's head didn't even reach her chin. But she could think of no finer soldier to fight alongside.
"More like the three stooges," Addy said, and Lailani laughed.
"Now come on, let's find Marco," Lailani said. "We'll let him be Curly."
"Good!" Addy said. "So I can be Moe and beat him up."
They left the locker room as the Urchin flew onward through the darkness.
* * * * *
They had chicken wings on the Urchin.
Actual chicken wings!
They weren't taken from real chickens, of course. They had been grown in a lab somewhere on the frontier, flash frozen, and forgotten ages ago in the Urchin's pantry. Lailani knew that many soldiers, especially officers, turned up their noses at lab-grown meat, preferring the real thing from real animals, even if those cuts had to be delivered all the way from Earth. But to Lailani, as she stood staring at the wings warming up in the microwave, this seemed like heaven.
When the microwave dinged, Lailani removed the plate and placed it on the table in the small, cluttered kitchen of the Urchin. She sat, staring at the wings. Five plump, steaming chicken wings, coated with barbecue sauce. For a long time, she didn't eat. Instead, she remembered.
She was a child again, an orphan wandering the streets of Manila, the most crowded metropolis in the world, a city where half the population of twenty-two million was homeless, many of them starving. With eleven million other homeless, hungry souls, Lailani would crawl alongside train tracks, begging for scraps from passengers as the carts trundled by. She would join hundreds as they climbed mountainous landfills, swarming toward the dump trucks when they arrived, leaping into the trash, rummaging, seeking anything that wasn't too rotten to eat. Candy wrappers with some crumbs still clinging to them. Bones with some skin and fat. Peels of fruits and vegetables. Anything to stave off that hunger, a battle against flies, rot, disease, and millions of other starving souls fighting for every scrap.
Lailani's mother had sold her body to the Western men who flocked here. Several times a day, her mother could make a handful of pesos, letting some aging, white-haired, overweight Western man claim her skinny, thirteen-year-old body. But even her mother had not survived long, had died so young that Lailani could barely remember her. And so Lailani, herself thirteen now, survived alone. Stealing what scraps she could. Rummaging. Going hungry most nights.
Many of the girls her age were prostitutes. There were always Western men here in Manila. Thousands, tens of thousands of them, entire communities of them. Some came as tourists, seeking not landmarks but flesh. Others lived in apartments along the beaches, their dollars from home worth a fortune in the east. Some had fallen in love with their whores, had married them. Some men took their girls back west; it was the dream of most prostitutes. But Lailani refused to fall into that trap, as she refused to fall for hintan, the drug that claimed so many of the girls. Prostitution, she knew, led to hintan, the only way to dull that pain. Hintan led to madness, to a slow death. Her mother had died such a slow death.
No. She, Lailani, when she chose to die—it would be quick.
It was one swe
ltering summer day when Lailani dared leave the train tracks and landfills, when she dared roam through the bustling streets by the water. Millions of people lived here, crammed together into the densest place on the planet. They had no permanent homes. They lived in shacks built from scrap metal and tarp. Countless of those huts spread out in massive shantytowns, pressed together, destroyed every year by the hurricanes or a scum attack, only to be rebuilt from the scraps. There were no streets between them. There were only rivers of water floating with debris. Often the streams were so thick with trash one couldn't even see the water, only a film of plastic and wrappers and wood and cloth and rotten food and human waste. Lailani waded through it.
Huts of corrugated metal, rotten plywood, and tarp roofs rose alongside her, people peering between slats of wood. They weren't true homes, just rickety shelters the homeless cobbled together, kilometer after kilometer of them, a sprawling shantytown of hunger and disease. There were no schools here, no libraries, no hospitals, no hope—just a daily struggle to survive, millions of people crammed into the labyrinth, scrounging for food, for a handful of pesos, for another day in Hell. Here was her home, the only reality Lailani had ever known.
But farther out, as Lailani kept walking, she could see the skyscrapers of Makati, the glittering center of Manila. Skyscrapers. Real skyscrapers like they had in Hong Kong, in Tokyo, in Singapore, in those glittering cities beyond the water, so close to here yet unreachable to her.
But Makati was reachable.
Makati was only a few kilometers away.
And so that hot day, Lailani walked. She walked through water that was chin-deep, wading through rot and filth and shit. She walked along cluttered streets bustling with thousands of colorful jeepneys, the rickety and garish cabs of the Philippines, as ubiquitous as yellow taxis in New York. She walked through markets where vendors sold spices, knockoff watches, exotic animals, stolen electronics, and shoes stitched with logos like Nyke and Ribook. Jumbles of electrical wires crackled and buzzed overhead. Rot dripped down decaying concrete walls, roofs crumbled, and rust covered the metal sheets of makeshift walls. But the farther Lailani walked, the nicer the city became. Soon she saw houses—real houses, actual houses with barred windows and tiled roofs, not just shacks in a shantytown. Tall fences enclosed them, and armed guards stood outside the gates, scowling at her. Farther into the city rose apartment buildings, thirty stories tall, and Lailani could see families on the balconies, families who wore real clothes, not just rags, who ate real food, not just trash. Children who had parents. Parents who had jobs. People who knew how to read and write. Who had a future. Who had hope.
Tears flooded Lailani's eyes as she walked toward the skyscrapers of Makati, this pocket of wealth in this hive of poverty.
She had spent her life, all her thirteen years, only a couple of hours away from here, but she had never come to this place before. She gaped. She saw shopping malls, actual shopping malls like in the stories, glittering buildings surrounded by palm trees. She saw families walking dogs and driving foreign cars, not just riding mopeds or bikes. She saw many foreigners—soldiers, diplomats, priests, businessmen from Japan and China and even as far as America. Some of them frowned at her—this barefoot youth in rags. Her kind was expected to stay in the shantytowns, the train tracks, the landfills, not mingle with the city's elite. But Lailani was too hungry, too tired, too angry to care. She was dying, she knew. She would die from hunger, or suicide, or a scum attack, or disease, from a descent into hintan. She doubted she would live to be fourteen, and so she walked here, ignoring the upturned noses.
She approached a restaurant with a neon sign, showing a red and yellow chicken winking at passersby. Lailani couldn't read the sign, but she knew this logo, had seen its wrappers in the landfills. The Happy Chicken Joy Wings restaurant, a favorite of the city's middle class. An armed guard stood at the front of the restaurant, and when he aimed his assault rifle at her, Lailani fled to the back alley. Here, behind the restaurant, she found a large trash bin and several stray cats.
She waited until the rusty back door opened, until a worker in a yellow and red uniform emerged to toss a garbage bag into the bin. Once the worker was gone, Lailani climbed into the bin, tore open the garbage bag, and beheld a treasure—a treasure such as the city slums never offered.
There were cups of cola, some drops still at the bottom. There were greasy napkins and plastic cutlery. And mostly there were bones. Thousands of chicken wing bones, many with bits of meat still attached.
Lailani lifted the entire garbage bag from the bin and dragged it into a deeper, darker alley. She worked for a long time, picking bits of meat, fat, and skin off the bones and placing them on a cobblestone. She feasted.
That night, she was sick.
She vomited again and again, shivering with fever. All next day, she could only lie curled up.
But the following day, she returned to that bin, and she pulled off the bits of meat from the chicken wing bones. And she found an old woman in a nearby shop who had a little portable stove, and the old woman agreed to fry up the meat in exchange for half the meal. Some of the meat, Lailani realized, sat inside the restaurant garbage for hours, sometimes even days, before being tossed outside into the alley. By then it was rotten, but frying could kill the disease, and when Lailani ate the meal that second time, she kept it down.
She returned to the alley a third time. She stole a third bag of bones. Again the old woman fried them for her in exchange for half the meal.
Lailani began to return to this alleyway every day, and to other alleyways behind other Happy Chicken Joy Wings across the city. Every morning, she trudged through the shantytowns, collected the bones, had the old woman fry them and place meals into plastic bags, then walked back. She traveled through the slums, carrying ten, sometimes twenty plastic bags full of fried bits of chicken meat collected from the bones in the trash. She sold them to the poor, those who had a few spare pesos earned from begging, prostitution, stealing, or odd manual jobs when they could find them. Sometimes, at the end of such a day, Lailani even earned enough pesos to buy a cup of coffee and a bread roll.
Some days, even with the meat fried up, she got sick. Some days, she saw the children she sold the bags of meat to grow ill, vomit. Maybe some of them died. Yet what choice did Lailani have? It was eat bad meat or starve to death. And so she fed them. Her mother had chosen one way to survive for a few years; Lailani chose another. Pag pag girl, they called her in the slums. Pag pag, the name of the food she sold, fried pieces of skin, fat, and morsels collected off bones in trash bins. Pag pag, full of disease and filth, the difference between life and death.
And Lailani knew as the days stretched on, from illness to illness, that she was only staving off death for a while. Another few months. Maybe another year if she were lucky. When she turned fifteen, she was amazed to have lived that long. She was amazed that the human body and soul could survive so many days of pain. By the time she was sixteen, they found her in an alleyway after three days of vomiting, her wrists slit with a shard of broken glass.
When she was eighteen, she boarded a rocket, landed in RASCOM, shaved her head, and became a soldier.
Now the old, scrawny urchin sat in a starship named the Urchin. Now the pag pag girl was a corporal, a seasoned warrior. Now she sat before a plate of real chicken wings—not bones, not scraps from the trash, but real wings with juicy, plump meat—and tears kept streaming down her cheeks.
She could have easily avoided the military, Lailani knew. She could have hidden away in the slums. But she had told the army she had an American father. She didn't know who her father was. Her mother had never told her. But she had said he was American, and they had believed her, had let her serve in the Western Command with Americans and Canadians and Brits. The wealthy half of the world, the Makati of the globe. She had joined to die in this war, but she had found friends here. She had found love. She had found Addy, Ben-Ari, and Marco. She had found these real chicken wings that he
r tears kept splashing.
And now, as the Urchin flew toward war, toward a devastating battle where millions perhaps would die, Lailani just wanted to live.
She lifted one wing, like lifting a holy artifact. She ate. She ate them all, leaving no scrap of skin or fat, and when she tossed the bones into the trash, she let out a sob.
She returned to her bunk, where she found Marco, Addy, and some of the others playing a game of poker.
"Yo, de la Rosa!" Addy said. "You want in?"
Lailani nodded. She sat between them, and Marco dealt her a hand. They played cards—walls around them, a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, flying to war.
As Marco and Addy were arguing about the rules, Lailani looked out the viewport. She could see thousands of other ships, millions of soldiers aboard them. The greatest battle in the history of humanity awaited them, only days away.
Lailani often doubted her faith. It was hard to believe after seeing the cruelty of the cosmos. Yet she had taken to wearing a small cross in the military, and now she prayed silently.
Please, God. Let us all go home. Let us survive this war. I've been dead all my life. Let me finally live.
They flew on into the darkness.
Earth Rising (Earthrise Book 3) Page 15
