by Astrid Amara
Since the cots were built into the frame, I couldn’t move them. So I raided the bedding supply box and made a pallet for my prisoner on the back side of the generator, the only object heavy enough now that it was hooked to the whole unit as to not be movable.
Mack mumbled to himself grumpily when I returned to unhook him.
“I’m not as young as I used to be,” he commented. “My arms don’t do well with that kind of confinement. I think I have shoulder impingement.”
I grabbed him by the back of his vest and hauled him up. He cried out and collapsed as soon as he put weight on his left leg. I half dragged him the rest of the way into the tent. The airlock sucked the particles from us as it shut. I led him to the bedding beside the generator, then, despite my fury, helped him lie down. I locked his left arm to the heavy generator by the mag cuff.
“Stay,” I said, patting his head. He sulked and tried to get comfortable.
I made several trips back and forth from the buggy, until our supplies were all stashed in the tempcamp. I ripped open the seal of a water pouch and handed it to him.
“You seem calmer,” he told me, sipping. “You’re pupils aren’t so wide.”
He was right. I was at that tenuous moment in each high where I still felt all right but wasn’t hypersensitive.
But I needed a hit every twelve hours, and with communication cut off, there was no way to get a signal to my dispersal system to unlock a dose.
I could have tried to pry a dose from the device. But I knew of others who had tried that and failed. There was a locksafe program on the dispersal system that dumped the powder as soon as the mechanics of the device were messed with. I couldn’t bear the idea of losing the powder completely.
To keep my thoughts off Peak and my inevitable cravings, I fumbled through the medical kit and splinted my broken thumb the best I could one-handed. I shot numbing agent into the joint.
“Nothing?”
I frowned at him. “What?”
“That’s what you want me to call you, right?” he smirked.
“You’re a real smart-ass, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’ve had a rough life.” He let the empty water pouch drop onto the ground. “Any chance you can give me some food?”
“Why’d you attack the train?” I asked. I rustled through the food supply and found an orange-flavored protein bar. I tossed it at him.
He frowned at the bar. “Of course you would give me the nasty orange bar.” He sighed and struggled to unwrap it one handed. “You could have at least locked my right hand.”
“That would be stupid since you’re left-handed like me,” I said.
He smirked at me. “See? I knew you remembered me.”
“I could tell that when you opened fire, jackass.” I found a strawberry-flavored bar and opened it, then sat on my cot. “Why’d you attack the train?” I asked again.
Mack shrugged. “What else is there to do on a Wednesday on Calypso?”
“You’re going to be interrogated,” I reminded him. “And asked all these questions in an unpleasant way. You might as well tell me now and save yourself the pain.”
“Why do you think?” Mack replied.
“The repository,” I said.
Mack nodded as he chewed.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“I don’t either,” he said.
I growled. “Bullshit.”
“It’s true.” He stuffed the rest of the bar in his mouth and tossed the wrapper onto the floor. “All I know is that it’s critical to the Calypso revolutionary strategy.”
“So you’re a rev,” I said.
“I prefer to think of myself as a freedom fighter.” He rubbed his thigh. “If you give me the ice torch, I’ll be able to walk tomorrow. Otherwise, I may not be able to.”
I looked around the open space I’d made for his cot. There was the possibility he could spray the generator, but there were no openings on the side he was cuffed to. He could spray the cool chemical in my face, but only if I lingered near him. The mag cuff wasn’t susceptible to cold and wouldn’t break if frozen.
So I gave in. I threw it to him, not wanting to get close enough to be torched. His whole body seemed to relax in relief.
“Thanks,” he said, and sounded sincere. He fumbled awkwardly with his right hand but managed to get his thumb on the trigger. He started applying stasis to his wound, and at once his eyes closed and he groaned. “Oh, so much better.”
I shook my head. I should have drugged him, I realized. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep with him awake.
“I knew that Trust controlled its agents,” Mack informed me. “But I didn’t realize it was drug related.” He continued to ice his leg. “I suppose it makes sense. How else are you going to motivate an army of slaves?”
“Do you want me to hit you again?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then shut the fuck up.” I settled against the tent wall and studied the plastic planetary maps, trying to guess the trajectory of the ejection unit and how far it could have gone from the wreckage.
I heard the torch turn off several minutes later. It sagged out of Mack’s right hand. “I think I’m going to sleep a bit, Ivo,” he said groggily. “What a fucking day, huh?”
“Mm,” I said, without thinking.
“I get that it doesn’t mean anything to you,” he said quietly. “But I’m so goddamn happy to see you. More than you could ever understand.”
I ignored him.
“Good night,” he offered.
“Yeah,” I said back, wondering why I didn’t walk over and punch the guy in the face again.
But I didn’t, and he fell asleep, and I spent the rest of the night studying the terrain, cataloging our supplies and waiting nervously for enough light to find my missing cargo.
Chapter Four
I’d Never Date Such an Asshole
Dawn took forever to arrive, and I was restless.
I watched my slumbering prisoner in the early light that seeped through the translucent walls. Dark stubble contrasted with his pinkish lips. He snored quietly. He’d spent the night thrashing back and forth, and if I hadn’t cuffed him to the generator, I suspected he would have rolled right across the tent.
I went outside, pissed, packed everything back into the buggy, and found painkillers in the medical kit. I took them, hoping to ward off withdrawal as long as I could.
At last I was ready to go, and the bastard slept on like he was on vacation. He twitched and rolled and mumbled in his sleep.
I went over and nudged him with my boot.
“Hey!” he groggily shouted, sitting upright. He blinked at me. “Ivo?”
“Get up. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
Mack rubbed a big hand over his face. “Can you unhook me? I gotta piss.”
“In a minute.”
“Seriously.”
I ignored him. As soon as he stood, I got close enough to yank up all his bedding, and tossed it in the back of the buggy.
“I’m going to piss my pants if you don’t let me go now,” Mack said urgently.
“That would be uncomfortable for you,” I commented.
“You’d be stuck in the buggy with me,” he reminded me, so I gave in. I unlocked him, then took a big step back, aiming the pistol.
“Move,” I ordered. He held his hands up and limped outside.
I was glad to see his leg moved better than it had yesterday, then wondered why I felt glad about this. He didn’t go far. Right in front of the buggy he unbuckled his polymesh trousers and yanked out his dick. As he pissed, he moaned loudly. For some reason that angered me more. He treated this whole thing like a holiday excursion.
Why couldn’t he be serious?
Why wasn’t he afraid?
I yanked the deflate cord and the generator hummed as it sucked the tempcamp back into its box.
“I’ll help you get it in the bug,
” Mack offered.
“No thanks. I’m locking you back in the seat.”
Mack rolled his eyes. “Seriously? Look, I don’t want to be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere any longer than you do. So let’s make a temporary truce until we get the repository, okay? Then you can lock me up or fight me off, or whatever happens.”
“Sit in the fucking buggy.” I aimed carefully.
Mack stared at me, disbelieving, for another moment, then shook his head. “I never realized what an asshole you could be.” He limped to the buggy seat, then stopped. “If you let me drive, this will be easier, since I know where we’re going.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to calculate how this could be used against me.
Mack gritted his teeth so hard I could see the muscle clenching in his face, even amid all the sand. “I’m not going to take you somewhere else. Why do you think I went through all this hassle in the first place? I need the box as badly as you do. And in case you didn’t notice, we are moving in the opposite direction of the biodomes. There’s no backup lurking. So let’s make this easier and let me drive.”
My head was beginning to pound, and my thumb hurt, so I finally nodded.
Mack gave me a blazing, white-toothed smile.
I suddenly had an image of that smile from somewhere. Surrounded by wheat. I blinked, and my head throbbed.
We headed in the direction of the next coordinate. I had maps, water, and some rations in the front of the buggy, and he helped himself to one of the rations as he drove.
I slapped it out of his hand. “No. The strawberries are mine.”
“Come on.”
“Mine.”
“Fine, then give me the coconut. You hate coconut.”
Do I? I wondered, suddenly realizing I hadn’t eat coconut in… I couldn’t remember.
My head hurt too badly to argue. I shook my head to try and clear it. “Fine. Eat it.”
Mack smiled like he’d won some sort of argument and opened the ration. “So how much of your body is real?”
“Huh?”
“Your back is synthetic, some form of metal and polymer?”
I didn’t answer. That didn’t stop him from continuing. His left leg bounced up and down, and he tapped the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel in some sort of beat only he seemed to hear. It annoyed me.
“For fuck’s sake, do you ever stop moving?” I complained.
“I saw you fall, you know,” he replied, not answering my question. “You must have broken your back. So I get your spine being repaired, but some part of you is making whirring noises when you move. Do you have cybernetic implants?”
I didn’t answer again.
“We used to always want implants, remember?” Mack grinned. “I wanted to have one of those eye laser things. You just wanted a dick enhancement.”
Against my will, I chuckled at that.
“You know what I just realized?” he said, looking excited.
“That I want to kill you so badly?”
“That I can tell you the same stories I told you before, because you don’t remember. I have so much material! I can even tell stories with you in them, since you have no recollection of them. This is awesome.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh God. Kill me now.”
“So this one time, when we were like twelve? You decided you needed to rescue this pitiful rat that two older kids had caught in the dorms and were fucking with.”
“I’m not listening.”
“You named it Cecil. And you kept it in a shoebox under your bed for two weeks, feeding it scraps of food.” Mack started laughing. “And that fucker bit you every time you opened the box. And you still told it you loved it every night.”
I was about to tell him to can it, but then I had this sudden image in my head of a brown plastic box, filled with tissue and lettuce and bread, and two little beady eyes staring up at me angrily.
The realization that I might actually remember something Mack said made me go cold. What if he told the truth? What if I was the person he thought I was?
Then again, my active imagination could also have created imagery for the story he told. A rat in a shoe box was an easy image to conjure.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to guess what the conclusion of the story was. If it truly was my story, I’d be able to predict the ending, right?
Mack still laughed. He sighed loudly and wiped at his eyes. “Well, like all good things, it had to come to an end. The fucking rat bit you on the face, then Mr. Hemper found out about it, and that was that.”
That hadn’t been the ending I’d come up with.
“Did the rat survive?”
Mack blinked at me. “What? The rat? Who cares about the rat?”
I nearly said “I do,” but realized that was an absurd thing to say. So I kept my eyes on the sand.
“Mr. Hemper told you they set the rat free. In reality I bet that sick bastard brained it in the kitchen and served it to us for breakfast the next day.” Mack sighed and stared out the window. “Sick fucking bastard. Always hated that guy.”
The buggy sank, and he had to twist the wheel to get out of the sinkhole. As we moved farther away from the elevator, the ground got more treacherous with less solid rock and more shifting sand.
“We should be close to a marker,” I told Mack. “Keep an eye out.”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“People must really, really hate you,” I mumbled.
“You didn’t,” Mack replied. “You loved me.”
“I’d never date such an asshole.” I frowned. The idea of dating sounded strange in my mind. I tried to think of dating.
My head throbbed, and I hissed. Best not to think about anything that intensely this close to a hit. My headache built behind my eyes, gathering force like a storm in dark clouds. It always started like a general throb, forming into piercing bolts of pain through my head.
“It’s a good thing you let me ice my leg,” Mack said, steering around another sinkhole. “I wouldn’t be able to use the pedal otherwise.”
I rubbed my head.
“That said, I doubt I’ll be playing any volleyball anytime soon,” Mack added.
I didn’t respond. After a moment he asked, “So if you aren’t called Ivo, what do your bosses call you? Your…whoever you report to at Trust?”
“505,” I said.
“505?” Mack frowned. “What the hell?”
“Agent 505,” I corrected. “That’s my security name.”
“That’s not a name, that’s a number. You’re a fucking number to these people.” Mack’s hands clenched the steering wheel. “God, I’m going to kill them for what they’ve done to you. Soon as I figure out what they’ve done to you.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Like hell it isn’t,” Mack replied. His eyes burned as he glanced at me. “You’re my whole family, Ivo. My whole life. You may have forgotten the nineteen years we spent together, but I remember every fucking minute of them, and want them back.” He blinked suddenly, then turned back to the terrain.
I stared ahead, eyes wide. Nineteen years?
I nearly asked if he seriously thought we’d been dating since we’d been toddlers. I wanted to ask him all sorts of questions. Who the hell he was, who he worked for now, why he cared what happened to me. I had a vague impression that I was gay, but honestly, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had an erection, let alone sexual desire for someone.
But every time I thought about things outside my primary mission, my headache got worse. It was best to focus on small tasks, little things, and get through those. Count the hours to the next dose. So I focused on the drive, and when we finally spotted a coordinate flag, Mack adjusted course and continued. It was slow going, and he didn’t stop talking the entire drive.
He discussed the sand. The buggy’s engine. How humid he thought it was outside. The polymesh armor over my legs. My boots. My hair. The lingering aftertaste of
the coconut ration bar. Whether the water pouches really were twelve ounces each or if they were cheating by not filling the straw portion.
The only good part of Mack’s incessant yammering was that I apparently didn’t have to participate.
After about two hours, we passed by the remnants of an abandoned habitat nearly completely consumed by the ever-present yellow dust.
“What’s that?” I asked, as he slowed on approach.
“Probably a rev outpost,” Mack replied.
“Out this far?”
He shrugged. “This is all they have now. They may have terraformed and planted crops here, but after they started making good money and became a critical food source for the region, the big corporations took over. The only place for those unwilling to fight or give in was out here in no-man’s-land.”
I stared at the empty habitat. A loose piece of webbing around the airlock flapped back and forth in the constant breeze. “Maybe there’s a working comm link inside,” I said, sounding far more enthusiastic than the opportunity deserved. I was due a hit in the next twenty minutes, and I couldn’t wait. “Stop the buggy.”
He stopped the vehicle, and I struggled to get the mask over my head one-handed.
“Need help?” Mack asked.
“No.” I grabbed the pistol, pointed it at him, and held out my injured hand. “The lock.”
Mack sighed but removed the magnetic lock from the dash of the buggy and handed it over.
The sand was treacherously slippery this far south, and I sank to my shins with every slow step toward the outpost. The airlock was busted, and I entered by simply pushing on the door.
Inside, piles of sand mounded atop every surface. Two broken seal-windows allowed sandy particles to bury the room from the inside out. I shuffled through the dreary gloom, seeking any equipment that might be powered by generator.
I found an old osys, but the cracked drive was filled with sand.
“Fucking Calypso!” I told no one. I searched for any other supplies, but it looked to me as if the place had been ransacked before. Nothing of value remained—even copper wires and insulation were missing from the structure itself.
