by Elin Wyn
"Is he old enough to go in there?" Davien muttered.
I stared at him, shocked speechless.
"Right." He smirked. "Really the question is, when is it too early for a drink?"
I shook my head and made a slow stroll across the street. A quick glance was enough to show me Hoyt seated at a table at the back, talking urgently with another person. The stranger kept to the shadow of the booth, making it hard to recognize him.
“Shall we?” I slipped my hand into the crook of Davien's arm, and we headed in.
"I'm not sure we'll be having the orange juice here," he commented when a robot attendant rolled forward. No vocals, nothing other than a limited selection of liquids from the house replicator. Davien poked two things at random and paid.
"I know, I didn't ask you," he said as we slid into a booth across the room. "But only because I'm sure you wouldn't actually drink anything here. Think of it as table rent."
If nothing else, the drinks were cold. I kept my hands on the glass, figuring if the container was freshly recycled, it was likely the cleanest thing in the room.
The guy Hoyt was talking with kept twitching, looking around in a short pattern, then head back down. His face was half-covered by a mask, and there was something odd about his jacket. He kept his hood pulled up, nothing too unusual, but the pattern all over was strange, blocky, disturbing. I'd seen him before, somewhere, but the memory stayed just a tickle.
"Face duplication camo," Davien said, putting down his glass after a short sip. "Don't scrunch your face up. It's not that bad." But I noticed he didn't drink again. "The pattern on the fabric has all the identifiers that face recognition software searches for - something that looks like eyes, nose, and so on - but repeated over and over, slightly distorted. Low tech, but throws the systems for a loop, even makes it hard for human eyes to match it with someone they know well."
"I guess..." I trailed off, still trying to place the guy. "But couldn't you just program the system to track anomalies, and then re-filter on them?"
"Only if you're smarter than your average despot," Davien grinned. "Whoops. I think we've been noticed."
I glanced back over, and Hoyt and his friend were bent over the table, whispering furiously and shooting us dark looks. Suddenly, the other man stood up, pulled the mask to cover his entire face, and stalked away.
"Scum," he muttered as he passed our table.
Davien bristled, but the voice had triggered another memory. Waiting in a bar not unlike this, getting a handle on my mark, his daily patterns. There had been a table nearby, people talking loudly about something. Emotions had run high, voices loud with lots of hand waving. Most of the guys there had been in similar jackets and masks. But this guy, I knew him from somewhere else, I was sure.
Hoyt walked up, anger rolling off him, eyes blazing at Davien. "Have I been targeted now, enforcer?"
"Good morning to you, too," I answered.
Since when had Hoyt looked at me like I was the enemy?
"Why are you following me?" he snapped back.
"Believe it or not, I have business in this quarter that has nothing to you with you." Mostly. Rati was in the quarter, so that made it not quite a lie, right?
His defenses started to slide down, then Davien spoke.
"Who was your friend?"
"None of your business. Don't you have errands to run for Xavis?"
Davien ignored the implied insult. "Last time I checked, happy people didn't usually wear optical camo. Makes folks think you've got something to hide."
The topic of the overheard conversation from months ago came back to me with a jolt. "He's part of the Bedrock Core, isn't he?"
Hoyt looked away, and my stomach plummeted.
"Hoyt, they're just another gang. No one wants a war."
"It's not a gang," he muttered. "We're going to stop the gangs, get rid of them."
I shook my head. "I've seen what happens when people go against Xavis. There's no way out, once you're in, unless it’s through the airlock to the Waste."
Hoyt sneered. "I would have thought you'd be the last person to defend Xavis."
I tried my final card to break through. "What about the kids? If there's an attack on the complex, how are you going to keep them safe?"
A flicker crossed his face. "We're moving them today. It's a crappy way to live, always underfoot."
I remembered what Bani had said when he'd brought soup to my apartment, what felt like lifetimes ago. "Is Bani helping you?" A knife twisted, cold in my guts. "Hoyt, he's too young to get caught up in this."
"He's old enough to make his own choices, just like any of us." But he softened. "I just have him cleaning up some space at the old refinery. Not much harm can happen to him there."
I stood up and Davien rose, towering over us both. Hoyt stood his ground. "Hoyt, I don't know what you think, and I don't want to tell you what to do." I stuck my hand out. "But thanks for keeping Bani and the littles out of it."
After a minute he responded, his handshake more that of a man’s than the boy I’d taken him for. “Check for Bani at the top level. He’s probably still there, if you want to find him.”
As we stepped out of the dive, I was torn. The old refinery was back the way we’d come, in a completely different quadrant. We should get to Rati’s first, find out what she could help us with, get her started on whatever searches we needed.
Davien had already headed down the walkway. “Aren’t you coming? I thought the refinery was this way?”
I hurried to catch up. “Don’t you think we should talk to Rati first?”
He shook his head. “I'd rather round him up before whatever your little friend is planning hits the street. Better than wasting time looking for him when we’re ready to get off-planet.”
“Besides,” his voice softened, “I don’t think you got a chance to catch up with him yesterday, straighten things out. That’s on me.”
“Idiot.” I wrapped my fingers around his hand as we caught the next passing tram, gliding along towards the northern sector.
Once upon a time, when the city was built, the plan was that robots would do the mining, and automated roller wagons would bring the raw ore in for sorting and refinement.
Maybe that worked while the Empire was still in charge, but no one had the money to repair the old droids, much less replace them. Humans were cheaper, and could be talked into doing all sorts of crazy things for the chance of a big payoff.
The rollers had been modified into carriers for the miners, and refinery operations had been moved to a series of mobile buildings in the Waste. As mining operations moved, so did they.
The system worked as well as anything else in Ghelfi, but once the warehouses had been torn down, it left the control center standing alone, a tall, narrow building that did no one any good.
Unlike most buildings, no one squatted there - too many old machines and terminals crammed into the rooms to be normal family housing. But for a group of kids used to hiding in back alleys and stairwells, it would be heaven.
Just like Hoyt had promised, it didn’t take long to find a tousled dark head poking around the wiring, shoving components to the side to clear paths.
“Here, let me help.” I bent down to put my shoulder to the crate he was straining against, and he jerked away.
I stood and stepped back, more hurt than I thought I’d be. “Bani, what’s going on?”
He shot a dark look at Davien, who’d had the sense to stay back, leaning against the wall, looking for all the world as if he just happened to be there.
My face flushed. “I didn’t mean for you to walk in when you did. But even still,” I ran a hand through my hair. “Kiddo, you know I’ve had boyfriends. You knew Juda. You never had a problem then.”
He scowled and looked away. “I thought you were hurt. I was worried about you, and I got back and you were fine.” He spat out the last word as if it were poison in his mouth. “You said you'd come by yesterday.”
“Things got crazy with a job.” Which was sort of the truth. Sort of.
“You spent it with him, didn't you?”
“I thought you liked Davien? At least well enough to find him when I needed help.”
“Yeah, he was good for that. But I didn't think you'd be like this.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged and turned away.
“Bani,” I reached for his shoulder. “I'm trying to get us off-world, wouldn't you like that? A better city to live in, no worrying about the tithe, or anyone being thrown into the Waste?”
He tore his arm away, took a step back with his eyes wide. "Did you ever even ask me if I wanted to leave?" He shook his head slowly. "This is my home. My friends are here." He looked at Davien and his eyes narrowed "It's him, isn't it?"
I let out a breath slowly. "He needed some help, and we worked out a deal."
Bani's lips twisted into a sneer. "Everyone was right. You're a whore, just like your mother."
His words slapped me, harder than an actual punch would have. I couldn't say anything, couldn't even breathe. In a blink, Davien stood between me and Bani, large hand gripping the front of Bani’s thin jacket.
"Apologize," he growled.
I looked past him at Bani's face, pale with fear. And something else flickered behind his eyes. Regret. He needed space, he lashed out the only way he could.
"Put him down, Davien."
"He needs to learn some manners."
I laughed, maybe a little shakily, but it was the best I was going to do right then. "I'm pretty sure we all do." I touched his shoulder, dropped my forehead to rest on his back, breathing in the solidity of him. "Let's go. We've got things to do."
We left the refinery without another word. When I glanced behind us, I could see Bani's face through one of the upper windows, hand pressed to the plex.
Davien
I fought the anger back, forced myself to walk normally. "Which tram now?"
Kara shook her head, eyes still wounded from Bani's words. "I'd rather walk, if you don't mind."
We headed through the streets, the silence pressing. Enough. "So... want to pick a different passenger to come with us?"
She smiled, but it was tight, a mask only. "Nah. Kids say stupid stuff sometimes, you know?"
I shook my head. "Actually, I don't. By the time we were decanted, we'd had so much training piped into us, I doubt if we acted much like normal kids."
Kara looked up, rolled her eyes. "Didn't you get into trouble at all?"
“Sure, there's never too many in one batch, but Doc probably brought out about three to five of us a solar. So sometimes it must have felt like whole mobs of teenaged boys roaming the ship, all of us stir-crazy, reckless, and trained for action. One cycle, we were so wild she forbade us entry to the labs, but it didn't take long before we bypassed the system, thought we could make our own improvements.”
I couldn't help grinning at the memory. "Turns out she'd been watching us from control, and had a fine time shutting off the lasers every time we got ready to use them. They'd be working one minute, then poof! No power the next."
“So... Lasers, yes, but you never sassed?” Kara asked, finally rewarding the ridiculous but true story with a real smile. I searched my brain for other glimpses of shipboard life that might amuse her.
“Well,” I blushed. “Maybe for sassing occasionally. There may have been times she threatened to space the lot of us and start over.”
But that was more than just sass, I thought. That meant to hurt you, and it did. The anger ran through me again, just as hot.
We continued until she broke the silence. "My mother never threatened to throw me out the airlock, at least. I guess here it would be to toss me into the Waste. She hung on me, wept, apologized."
“Apologized for what?”
“Everything. For failing. For getting addicted. For having me.”
I wanted to pick her up, tuck her away, but she kept walking next to me, eyes fixed forward. I took her hand and squeezed it, the only comfort she'd let me give her right now.
“She was a scientist. I found the record chips when I was a kid, searching for credits. A geologist, here from someplace further towards the Imperial hub. She'd come out to study the rock formations. Apparently, antonium is rare enough everywhere else that someone thought it might be worth the investment to see if it can be artificially created.”
I stayed silent, waiting, but my thoughts raced. An improbable experiment, but one Doc Lyall would have approved of, even if it wasn't her field. Antonium was the final component in modern star drives. An artificial source could change the economy of the entire Empire.
Kara's eyes were so lost in the past, I couldn't help but wrap my arm around her, tug her off the street into a quiet alley.
“What are you doing? We need to get to Rati.”
“Rati will wait.” I kissed her, long and deep. “Come back to me, Kara. Wherever you are, it's not real, not anymore.”
She leaned into me, and I held her, itching for something solid to fight. Memories were too sneaky of a target, even for me.
When she started talking again, her voice was muffled by my jacket, too low for human ears. That was fine. I was built for this.
“Maybe she was having trouble with her research. Maybe she was just stupid. But she got started on Purity. Said it helped her focus.” Kara sagged against me. “After a while, she needed something else to let her sleep. And before she knew it, all her grant money was gone, and she'd hocked her ticket home for another hit.”
Her voice dropped even lower. “Apparently there wasn't a lot of jobs for a constantly drugged-out research geologist. So, she did what she could to keep the money and drugs flowing. And when even those jobs dried up, she whored for it. Mix up enough Rabbit with Serenity, and she didn't even care.”
“And you?” I whispered, matching my voice to hers.
“Apparently, if you're high all the time, it's easy to forget to have your implant renewed. I was a bit of a surprise. At first a welcome one, she thought motherhood would be like having a doll, something that would always love her, never question.”
“Your father?” Surely someone would have taken pity on her, kept her safe.
A bitter laugh. “My mother and Xavis had an arrangement, but it wasn't exclusive, just her tithe. I've refused a DNA scan. If I really have his genes in me, I don't want to know.”
The sounds of the city around us faded away, she was lost in the past, and I wanted to be there with her, somehow shielding child-Kara from the ghosts that even now could be used as weapons against her. But I couldn’t think of anything to stop the spill of words.
“At first, she had good days and bad. She’d play with me, tease me.” Kara looked up at me from between damp lashes. “That’s what caught me about the ‘crabby pants.’ That’s what she used to call me when I didn’t want to behave. I haven’t thought of it in years. As time went on, she needed more and more of whatever she was shooting that week to stay high. Instead of going to a supplier, she kept it in her room. The apartment was kept almost freezing to keep it all at top potency.”
Dammit. Those small boxes of powder in Sary's storage room. That cold had nearly killed her as a grown woman.
“I left as soon as I could. It was better than slipping out when her 'visitors' came, trying to dodge their hands.”
I focused on my breathing, on being there for her. But Ghelfi was a small city. It would be easy enough to find the bastards.
“When I heard that she'd killed herself, I didn't know what to feel. Her landlord gave me a box of her stuff, and I shoved it into a drawer in my apartment. Never even opened it. Don’t want to.” She sniffled, then straightened her spine. "Not sure what sort of daughter that makes me."
“The kind that does what she can. The kind that survives." I breathed in the smell of her hair. "The kind that kicks ass, usually mine."
She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. "Idiot." Another kiss, l
onger, slower. "And if we're going to get to Rati before the day is over, we better get going."
Maybe the reflective mood had opened some of her memory. As we passed through the streets she happily pointed out random landmarks and people, recalled odd bits of gossip and rumor. A bunk rack with a flashy holo of faraway green mountains: "They say that the owner of the Highland Arms is an exotic dancer who made her fortune and started a very respectable career closer to the Hub. She keeps the place as a reminder, but makes sure to screw over the guests, just to keep in touch."
A pile of rubble taking up half a block: "That's where enforcers set up a gladiatorial ring years ago. Someone tried to bring in giant Hoorverian rats from the Waste, but they didn't survive long enough for the fights to be popular."
A storefront, solid black, no signage at all, caused her to sigh longingly: "They have the best blades in the entire dome. Pricey, but worth it."
Finally, we stopped in front of a totally nondescript building. She kicked aside the refuse at the front of the door and put her hand on the plate. "Just stand here, where she can get a clear view, alright?"
I moved to where she indicated, looked around. "I don't see any cams." I double checked the corners.
Kara laughed. "You wouldn't. She's very, very good."
The door slid open almost immediately and a small, featureless bot faced us. "I'm so glad you're here!" came a young woman's voice from the speaker. "But..."
"Rati, I know." Kara touched my arm gently. "I vouch for him. His name's Davien."
A long moment, then the bot rolled back without acknowledging me, unblocking the entryway and glowing with a soft light. Kara trailed it, and I followed her, looking around. The dimly lit room was stacked high with junk, but on closer look, the junk all seemed to be in remarkably good shape. The path twisted and turned, other openings leading off deeper into the darkness of the room.
"I'm sorry I didn't intervene when they took you," the bot said suddenly. "I'd told the systems to let me work on my project undisturbed. By the time I pulled out and saw the alarm, you'd already been saved."
Kara patted the bot's top. "It turned out fine. I don't expect you to watch over me all the time, you know?"
