The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song)

by Brenda Cooper

  “What access rights does she have?” Ani asked.

  “None for now,” Fox answered. “Basic com of course. Give me a few days and I can probably broker something.” He looked slightly apologetic.

  So he wasn’t all-powerful.

  Ani, however, looked pretty proud. “It’s better than I thought you’d do.” She turned to Ruby. “I know this must be confusing. It’s the price of keeping you safe. We’re going to help you learn how to be one of us, and eventually Sylva will make up other dangers in her head.”

  Ruby remembered the hatred she’d seen in Sylva’s eyes. She tried not to let her doubt show on her face, or her growing questions about the extent to which she’d traded one prison for another.

  It was hard to figure out which questions to ask first. “Access rights to what?”

  Fox paused a moment, as if he didn’t quite know the answer. “Places and information,” he said finally, an answer with no real information in it at all. But his voice and his look were warm enough that Ruby chose not to push him on it yet.

  “What you’re saying is I’m stuck here, doing what I’m told, just like I was stuck there.”

  “Everybody does what they’re told,” Fox said.

  “You don’t. You came and got me.”

  He laughed. “And you sang ‘The Owl’s Song’ and stood up to Ix.”

  Dayn simply said, “You’re both crazy.”

  “You wanted to be here, didn’t you?” Ani asked.

  Ruby nodded. “With all my heart.” Except that she’d expected to get here with her friends, at least with Onor and Marcelle. She gave up on understanding anything more until her belly was full. As she finished eating her soup, she watched Ani eat, too, and wondered if she would become a friend. Ani’s skin glowed so close to black that she looked almost like metal in certain lights. Her high cheekbones barely showed in a round face with a wide, animated mouth, and she watched people closely. She’d done that all morning, enough for Ruby to notice it.

  Besides Onor and Marcelle, Ruby didn’t really have anyone she considered a true friend. But she’d apparently be spending time with all of these people, and maybe Ani and Dayn would be like Onor and Marcelle. The thought startled her. She closed her eyes for a moment and swore to herself that she’d get Onor and Marcelle here. She just had to learn her way around first.

  “Are you okay?” Ani asked.

  Ruby opened her eyes and looked up. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking about my friends.” She cleared her throat. “It’s all right. The food was great. Thank you.” She told them about Kyle and how his food always tasted a bit better, and that got Dayn and Ani talking about food and let Ruby breathe.

  For now, Ruby really wanted Dayn and Ani both gone so she could spend time with Fox. In her daydreams, when he came for her he wasn’t distant like this at all; he held her and kissed her and whispered that he was glad to see her. Surely those weren’t schoolgirl dreams, and it wasn’t coincidence that he came for her only after she became an adult.

  Ani stood with her plate and gave Ruby a pointed look. Ruby picked hers up and the two of them went into the small kitchen, the close quarters emphasizing that Ani was even taller than Ruby. “It’ll be safer for you to stay away from public places for a little while. Don’t go to the common kitchens where we were this morning.”

  Great. A few weeks ago she’d been warned to avoid private places so the reds wouldn’t get her. Now she was supposed to hide. “I’m looking forward to a tour.”

  Ani looked down at her, her dark hair haloed by overhead light so it looked like a circle around her face. “This is a big change for you. Are you okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Ani looked dubious. “Look, I want to make sure you know how the kitchen works here. Someone will be here all the time for a while, but eventually you might be on your own.”

  Surely Fox could show her. But maybe Ani was really making time for Fox and Dayn to talk. “I didn’t mean to become a problem,” Ruby said.

  “You’re not.”

  “Seems like you have to be my keeper.”

  Ani smiled, looking almost shy. “I get to learn that way.”

  “About what?”

  “You. What it’s like to live in the gray pods.”

  Ruby pointed at the small oven and the dish box and the storage. “It looks like home. Except cleaner. What’s different here isn’t the stuff. It’s the people.”

  Ani started clearing food waste into the recycler and stacking the dishes in the small sink. Her movements were spare and graceful. “How so?”

  “I don’t see many reds stalking the halls, telling you what to do.”

  “Peacers,” Ani said reflexively.

  Ruby couldn’t keep her voice as calm as she wanted. “They hurt us, just to keep us doing what they say. Just to show us they can.” Ruby ran warm water into the wash side, stopping when she had an inch or two. “They’re our enemies. They beat us up, and sometimes we die.”

  Ani stopped and stared at her. “They just have to keep order. That’s their job.”

  “My friend died after two reds raped her and stabbed her. Another friend almost died because he was . . . well, he was where he wasn’t supposed to be.” She didn’t really want to talk about this since she wasn’t sure of Ani at all, but she couldn’t help herself. “Owl Paulie’s grandson. Reds are awful. Sometimes it’s their job to kill some of us.”

  Ani chewed on her lip, looking uncertain. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I do.”

  Ani’s eyes narrowed and she gave Ruby a long look. “It can’t be that bad. People would see. Ix at least would see.”

  “Ix doesn’t care.”

  “Of course Ix cares. It helped us get you here.”

  Ruby filed the bit about Ix away for later contemplation. It was a good question. “People don’t care. The reds we see—they don’t care.” She thought about Ben. “I mean most of them. They mostly live there, so maybe the ones on gray aren’t people you know. But they’re evil.”

  Ani shook her head. “Not any of us here. We’d know.”

  “How? How would you know?”

  “A lot of my friends are peacers, and they would never hurt anyone. Not unless they deserved it.”

  Anger made Ruby’s words stiff. “What would a gray have to do to deserve it?”

  Ani pursed her lips and moved around to Ruby’s side, taking the dishes from her to stack in the sanitizer.

  “You said you want to learn,” Ruby reminded Ani.

  An awkward silence ensued. Long enough that the dishes all disappeared into safe places.

  When there was absolutely nothing left to do, Ani stood in the doorway and faced Ruby. “I guess . . . I guess I know you’re right. But it’s no one I know. I’m sure of that.”

  “I don’t see how you can be,” Ruby whispered, “but I’m willing to believe it’s not you. Or Fox. That’s as far as I can get, though.”

  “You’ll understand.”

  Ruby took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I can see how living here where everything is clean and everyone is friends with everyone else might make it hard to see cruel things, but that’s no excuse not to.”

  “Maybe so.” Ani let out a breath. “But don’t think we’re all friends here. Maybe you had it better down there where all your enemies wore the same color.” With that, she turned around.

  Ruby took two deep breaths and shook her arms out. Not the time to be so angry. As much as she loved her anger, that wasn’t what she wanted right now. It took a long time before she felt ready to follow Ani into the living room, where Fox and Dayn sat on the couch talking in low tones.

  Fox looked up when they came in, his smile broad and his strange blue eyes lighting in welcome. He gestured her over to sit beside him on the couch, and when she did, he held her close with one arm. She tried to relax against him even though unfamiliar twinges of pleasure and anticipation kept her spine rigid and her breath from settling.

  Day
n didn’t miss a beat in the conversation, although he widened his eyes and produced a wry smile that she wasn’t sure how to interpret. Ruby caught the last part of whatever Dayn had been saying: “. . . scheduled to play at the right time. It’ll need to be a surprise.”

  The conversation didn’t seem to have anything to do with her directly, so Ruby snuggled down a little closer to Fox. His arm tightened around her waist and he spoke to Dayn. “I want some time alone.”

  Dayn reproduced the wry grin, directing it at Fox. “Self control.”

  Fox didn’t respond to the jab, but simply said, “Three hours.” Ruby didn’t doubt for a moment that it was a command. She glanced over at Ani and noted that her face had gone blank, her green eyes shifted toward the wall. So she didn’t approve either. Oh, well. Ruby was used to doing things other people didn’t approve of.

  When the door shut behind Ani and Dayn, Ruby heard the lock click into place. Even though her mouth was almost too dry to speak, she managed to get a few words out. “What’s bothering them? Why didn’t they want to leave us alone?”

  Fox smiled and touched her cheek, the gesture intimate but short. He stood up and stretched. “They’re protecting my reputation. There are rumors I brought you here to be my lover.”

  Didn’t he? I mean, not just for that, but she had dreamed of him for so many nights. She’d used the idea of him to keep her studying and beading and worrying. She watched him closely, waiting.

  Almost nothing frightened her, but she was scared now.

  He touched her cheek again, softly, running his finger like fire from the bottom of her ear to the bottom of her chin and then taking it back again. “Do you like the place?”

  That wasn’t the question she wanted. “Your place? It’s a lot like ours down below. I guess it’s a little big for just one person.”

  He smiled and then laughed good-naturedly. “I don’t live here. You do. This is why Ani wasn’t at breakfast. She was registering this space for you.”

  Ruby felt her mouth open. “My place?”

  “Sure. You’re a working logistics crew person. You have a job.”

  She stood still, absorbing.

  “Yes, you work for me. For all of logistics, actually, for the people here. You get a place to live. Just like everybody else. Do you like it?”

  Of course. She’d have been assigned a hab on gray. Not so big as this, though, not for one. Daria and Kyle were the only people she’d ever met with more than two rooms of their own. She and her mom and two brothers had less room than this.

  Except she didn’t want it right now.

  She couldn’t possibly say she wanted to live with him. But she did. Maybe. What did she want? Did she like this place, if it was hers? “Y . . . yes.”

  She looked around, observing the furniture and the walls and the vidscreens all over again. She’d thought this was Fox’s. Or maybe Fox’s and Dayn’s. She’d thought she’d been sleeping on Fox’s bed.

  It had seemed too small a place for Fox. For her, huge. Bold.

  She swallowed. “Yes. I like it. I do.” As she said it she realized it was true. She walked around the room, looking more closely at the soft, unstained couch, the clever metal table in front of it, simple but with lockable drawers for storage, the blank walls she’d be able to decorate or fill with bins like the ones in Daria’s beading room.

  Even while she circled and looked, Fox was heat in the middle of the room, a constant presence she felt even when her back was turned to him. She made a last smaller circle, ending up standing and facing Fox, close enough to hear him breathing. Not touching. She looked up at him. “Thank you. I haven’t said that yet. Thank you for coming to get me, for defending me, for this place.”

  He leaned down and he kissed her, and she lifted her arms up above her head and put them around him, crossing them behind his back and twining her fingers in his hair.

  His hands slid down her back, stopping at the small of it and pulling her in so that she felt his hips against hers.

  She kissed him and that was all she did. Her world became the kiss, everything, the rough wet of his tongue, the feel of his body, the way he lightened her and heated her just by being there and so close.

  Better than her dreams.

  She had never slept with a man, never actually seen lovemaking, but there was no hesitation at all as she led Fox to her bed.

  26: Calisthenics

  Onor and Penny worked their way through a closed transport station, degreasing and checking seams in the walls. Empty, the station felt huge and full of echo and extra air. The ghosts of activity seemed to be ready to spring to action at any moment. A small, round floor bot circled itself into Onor’s right ankle. He grunted. Even though the bot’s sides were designed to be soft, he was going to end up with bruises.

  “Step over it,” Penny chided him, demonstrating as the poor speechless thing scraped along the wall where Penny stood on tiptoe, running her hand along a seam to check the join. The bot went on, just like it would have whether it hit her or not. If he could figure out how to have the single-minded simplicity of bots, this work would be easy.

  This was the third day after his beating. It still hurt when he stretched his arms over his head, but walking no longer sent shooting pains along his spine.

  His new quarters had turned out to be a shared bunk situation. It looked and smelled like the orphanage he’d lived in for the five years between his parents’ death and early last year. The rows of thin, fabric-walled rooms smelled of old sweat and the feet of previous occupants. Penny lived down the hall. Near her, there was another of the banished students—one who had become an apprentice crèche nurse even though she threw up at the sight of blood, even so little as a scrape on a child’s knee. Her name was Nia, and she glanced away every time he entered a room she inhabited.

  While he was thinking about Nia’s sad face, the bot came back toward him, and he imitated Penny badly, almost losing his balance. At least he missed stepping on the earnest little machine.

  Penny laughed. “You’ll get it.”

  The floor bot’s scrubbers swooshed, and his own hand slid noisily along the wall.

  Penny had turned out to be a reasonable, if taciturn, guide to the small things about his new job. He’d known how to command robots for a long time, but he’d never learned the detailed language of clean-and-repair bots. Already, there were three models she let him manage, even if the one did keep thrashing him about the ankles.

  The first night after the beating, Penny had brought him clean rags to soak his hurts. She’d showed him how to find more rags in the communal kitchen and how to hang them over the stim pot to warm them.

  He wouldn’t call her a friend, but they had a truce. It kept him from feeling entirely alone.

  There were two more sections of wall to go. Behind them, the station did look cleaner. He’d not go so far as to call it clean. At least it smelled better.

  He focused down. One thing he’d learned for sure. Penny took pride in what they did. She snarked at him for any sign of slacking or slowing or when he missed a tell that a repair bot should be called. As he slid his cloth up and down the seams, feeling for cracks and testing weld points, he tried to focus completely on the moment.

  It was less painful than thinking about anything else.

  When they finished, they led the bots back to the facilities lounge and checked them in for the next crew. Jimmy had a soft laugh for Onor. “Ankles still bothering you?”

  “Not so much today.”

  Jimmy laughed again, more genuinely. “Penny says you might feel up to joining us after work today. Bruises and scrapes better?”

  Onor drew in a sharp breath. He hadn’t told Jimmy anything about being beaten. His face hadn’t been marked and he’d done a good job of walking normally the first few days even though his side felt like fire with every step.

  Jimmy shook his head. “You didn’t think there are secrets here, did you?”

  Jimmy hadn’t been one of t
he people who beat him up. “No, sir.”

  “Don’t sir me.”

  Onor nodded.

  “Wash up. Ten minutes. By the back door.”

  Ten minutes felt like twenty. Penny passed him by. The rest of the shift passed him, too.

  Finally Jimmy walked out and said, “Follow me,” low, almost a whisper. He didn’t slow down to see if Onor was following, but Onor kept close.

  They walked past the lower entrances to the water reclamation plant toward the trash dump. Horror stories told after lights out suggested to the very young that the trash might grow enough to fill the inside of the ship so that whenever the Fire reached its next destination, there would be no people left. Only trash. If Ruby was right, and they were really almost home, the garbage would finally get dumped when the Fire slowed.

  He wrinkled his nose at the stink of the chemicals that fixed the trash in place and held the dangers in the pile tight inside. Toxins and mistakes and anything that carried illness that had killed anyone on the ship ended up here; everything else was composted or taken back to the most elemental substance possible and reused.

  Rumor had it that the trash here was occasionally taken to the empty A-pod and that when they got home and the skin of the Fire was pulled away, there would be a whole pod to cut loose and toss into an orbit that would deteriorate into a sun somewhere. Of course, rumors also placed the bodies of Lila Red and her armies there.

  Past the dump, Jimmy turned left, and they stepped through a dogged hatch into a dimly lit space. The empty floor continued as far as Onor’s eyes could see before it faded into darkness. Above them, pipes of a hundred widths and colors and markings tangled neatly across the ceiling.

  They’d come in under the park. He had been here a few times, in his old pod. Conroy had taken him to show him the lines that carried the grey water from the orchards and the food gardens back to the reclamation plant. This was the outer skin of the inhabited pods; below his feet there was only cargo.