by Patty Jansen
A message came onto the screen. Help, S2 BC.
Melati stared at the text, her heart thudding. She hadn’t seen the S2 code for a long time. It stood for saudara-saudara, little sisters, the group of young women growing up in Uncle’s care. Most of the original sisters had long since married and had their own families. The only unmarried sisters left were herself and Rina.
BC stood for Bintang Club, and while that venue was no longer illegal and no longer forced to use illegal premises, BC still stood for those old rooms in the BC block where young people used to meet under the cover of darkness and thumping music, in the maze of alleys and storage compartments behind the docks.
Melati stared at the door, realising there hadn’t been a scooter accident, but Rina had tried to break in. Or someone who thought Rina was inside had tried to open the door.
By God, the smugglers.
Never mind the slametan, Rina was in trouble.
Melati went out, pushed the door shut as well as she could and ran through the passage back to the lift hall. A group of people waited there, each carrying a parcel or some kind of item of food for a present for Harto’s daughter’s “marriage announcement”. They were chatting and laughing, dressed in their best finery. Silk sarongs, embroidered kebayas.
“Has anyone seen Rina?”
People shook their heads.
Even without Melati, there were too many people to all fit into the lift at once. This was going to take way too long.
Melati ran past the lift foyer and turned into the emergency stairwell. Down three flights of stairs. Into an alley that led directly into JeJe.
It was busy here. Melati wrestled her way against the stream of people ambling towards far end of JeJe, to the old gym where slametans were usually held. She spotted a few familiar faces and asked those people if they’d seen Rina. None had.
Down in the passage, she came to the fire door that was the end of the B sector, and the enforcer checkpoint. Four enforcers stood with their hands behind their backs, managing not to look bored while doing absolutely nothing in a way that only constructs could. Two hansip members were in the corridor before the checkpoint, both older family men.
One said, “Going to work again?”
His tone grated, full of implied judgements. She shouldn’t work, she shouldn’t work for other people, and ideally, she should get married and be a good wife and general busybody and gossip like so many of the women.
“Have you seen my cousin Rina?”
They shook their heads, and continued to stand there.
She felt like screaming, I know I work for ISF, but is that a reason you can’t offer to help me? What were they guarding anyway?
She hated how judgemental they were. For Ari being sekong, they judged the family. For her and Rina working outside the B sector, they judged the family and even judged Grandma, as if it were her fault.
One day, there would be an argument, but only when she’d found something to do with her anger. One day, when the time was right and her actions would be more than venting. One day when she could actually help people.
So she passed the checkpoint, polite and smiling like a good little girl.
The station’s BC block was the business centre. Apart from the arrival hall, it held the commercial and administration offices and the main entry to the docks. At one point, the alleys off the main thoroughfare had been used for storage, but the docking ring now performed that function, and the previous storage compartments had been empty for many years, in need of repair and an upgrade. There had been debate over expanding the B sector into this area, and while this slow process was taking place—Wahid had been negotiating about getting adequate power and safety precautions for the area—squatters regularly took possession of whatever units they could crack.
One such, when Melati was younger, had been the Bintang Club where teenagers came to listen to very bad and loud music and drink themselves stupid in drinking games. A few years ago, there had been a fire, and StatOp had cleared out the area and allowed bars to open legally on the other side of JeJe. Since then, the area had been left to illegals, young kids avoiding their parents, and other elements.
Melati hadn’t been here for some time, and the signs of deterioration were everywhere. Air vents had not been cleaned and many were blocked, electricity had been cut. The air was stale and stank of sweat and urine and other disgusting smells.
Being here gave Melati the creeps. The memories. She had first met the girls who introduced her to the baby merchants here. They used to hang out and talk to each other about their pregnancies. It wasn’t bad, the tall girl had said. She had a sinuous, graceful body, beautiful pale skin and large eyes with glittering make-up. She wore a skin-tight top and many chains and bangles of glittering jewellery. Her name was Ratna and she had sold two babies. Older women had said having babies made you ugly, but it didn’t seem to have affected her at all.
The younger girls sat around her in a circle, eyes wide, and asked questions.
They take you inside their ship and hook you up to a machine. It hurts a bit, but nothing like it does after the full nine months.
How big is the baby? A girl had asked.
About as big as your hand.
Is it alive?
Ratna didn’t know that.
Will my father be able to tell that I’m pregnant?
No.
Melati cried inside. If only she could go back in time to tell her sixteen-year-old self what was about to happen to her.
So stupid she had been, so very stupid.
Melati had to force the ghosts of the past away to replace them with the dreary abandoned darkness of the present. She knew that Wahid was trying to get this awful place upgraded, but it had been more than fifteen years. Why did it have to take so long?
In the fitful light of a ceiling lamp, a tokay scurried over the wall and vanished behind an abandoned packaging crate, all of it except the tip of its tail. Melati stepped over a couple of broken chairs. Her footsteps sounded loud. The floor felt gritty under her feet.
The airless silence pressed on her, with the laboured sound of her breathing interrupted only by distant thumps and clangs and the ubiquitous ticking of the outer hull. A ceiling vent blew out bursts of air, then stopped, then another burst.
Had the smell always been this bad here?
“Rina?” she said, her voice low.
In her mind, she heard the music, saw the dancing, saw the other girls of the secret sisterhood. Power to the girls was their motto. They’d sworn to travel off-station and visit all the glamorous places. The fashion shops of New Hyderabad, the glitz of the Interstellar Beacon Station, even Ganymede.
Instead, most of the girls had gone on to marry miners and become miners themselves. These days, they were fat, tired, and suffered from arthritis and other problems related to spending a lot of time in zero gravity in the mining ships. Ironically, she was the only one who had bucked the trend and she didn’t feel like a rebel at all.
She remembered her reactions coming here on that fateful day. Where was the merchant ship? The spot where it usually docked had been empty, and enforcers hung around in the hall. Where was Ratna, who had booked Melati in for her second procedure?
Why were there so many enforcers in the docks?
Nothing was as it had been the day before. Scared and confused, she ran back home.
In Uncle’s kitchen, hiding her shame under a wide blouse, she heard about the StatOp crackdown on illegal trade. The New Hyderabad mafia was gone, people said, and they seemed happy about it.
But Melati came back to this empty room day after day, with the growing realisation that the buyers for babies had been busted and would not come back soon. Uncle and Grandma would find out that she was pregnant. No one wanted the bastard child she carried, least of all the jerk of a pilot who was its father; he’d hurt her so much that she’d had to put make-up on her bruises.
When she could no longer hide her shame, she’d run from h
ome and lived here, doing little jobs for dockside businesses, growing increasingly weary with this parasite child inside her. Her back ached; she couldn’t walk two steps without being afraid to piss herself. And then one day . . .
God, she wanted nothing to do with this horrible place, nothing, ever again.
There was a small sound in a room off the main passage. In the illegal club’s heyday, a large and constantly changing group of youths used to sleep here, some during the day shift, some at night, some sleeping off hangovers, some half passed out with drugs. Melati peered into the darkness, half expecting to see people on mattresses.
“Rina, are you here? Come out, please. It’s Melati.” Rina knew how much she hated it here.
Her heart was thudding so much that she could barely hear anything else. Maybe the sound had been a rat, or expanding metal. Maybe it was one of the homeless kids. Back then, she would have hidden. The illegals could be violent if she intruded in their territory. Of course she’d been too stupid to bring any kind of weapon.
Her only reply was a heavy syrupy silence.
Melati groped for her pocket comm and activated the light.
“Rina?” Please.
Melati edged inside. God, it reeked in here.
The comm gave only a feeble bluish glow. Some of the mattresses were still there, stacked in tottering piles and disintegrating with age. Someone had piled office furniture against the back wall. A couple of rags lay heaped on a mattress, suggesting that people had slept here. A table on its side, one corner broken off. A chair with two legs missing. Against the back wall stood an old couch with the stuffing hanging out.
The light of her pocket comm flickered. A cold draft breezed past, making the hairs on her arms stand up. Melati whirled around, half-expecting to see the shimmering form of a ghost cutting off her exit to the door. Pak was a good ghost, Hermann was harmless, even though he sometimes appeared holding a large knife, but who knew about the ghosts of criminals that hung around here?
She lifted the light higher, so it lit more of the room. Long shadows crept over the dirty walls as she slowly turned. A glistening trail of something dark and wet ran down from a larger stain on the far wall. That looked recent.
That looked like blood.
She ran across the room—and her foot hit something soft that felt very different from the rubbish and grit in the room. She directed the light down: a pair of women’s feet.
God.
She staggered back, holding up the light. From the tangled mess of blood-soaked cushions and a blanket protruded a pale arm.
Melati pulled at the blanket, nausea rising up in her stomach.
The woman’s clothing was dark and wet with blood, and torn to shreds as if she had been attacked by a sharp-taloned monster. Melati lifted a cushion and uncovered the face of Rina, her open eyes staring at the ceiling.
“No, Rina.” Melati knelt in the cloying scent of dirt and old blood.
The skin of the arm was cold and stiff under her touch. Her face was oddly unblemished, the only sign of violence a drop of blood in the corner of her mouth. Rina’s golden earrings lay against her cheeks.
“No.” Melati’s vision blurred with tears. “No, no, no, no!”
She had tried everything to protect Rina. She’d talked to her, she’d told Uncle and Grandma about her worries. She’d offered to support Rina’s application to get a job in the ISF ring. She’d warned everybody, constantly and much to their annoyance, about smugglers and the New Hyderabad mafia. And none of that had been enough to save Rina.
She had failed her family.
Her family had failed Rina.
Everyone of the barang-barang had failed Rina. Everyone in the station. The StatOp council with their supposed crime reforms. Wahid with his too-gentle manner. Harto with his hollow words about taking power. If only he and his hansip had directed their aggression at catching the criminals. She had warned them about the smugglers many times. Yet, they did nothing and hadn’t done anything about this issue for years. There was no money and status in protecting girls and the smugglers brought things to the station that the men wanted. They didn’t care about girls.
Melati rose, and balled her fists against her chest, where anger burned like a volcano. For years, she had tried not to step on too many toes while trying to have something done about these criminals. She had tried to walk the line between tier 1 and tier 2 without upsetting or embarrassing her relatives. She had tried to win the girls over with kindness, tried to get young people out of this cycle of self-hate, self-harm and self-denial inflicted on them by their elders and the New Hyderabad mafia.
That time was over.
Over.
She was finished with trying to be polite. Finished with trying to balance her family’s corruption with her work. Finished with the entire stinking mess that was the black market in JeJe, and if that would put people in jail, then so be it.
“They’ll pay for this,” she said. “Do you hear me, God? They’ll pay for this.” Whoever they were and wherever they were hiding. “You’ll pay for it, if I have to come and kill you myself!”
Her words sounded muffled in the stifling silence.
After taking a few calming breaths, she put her thoughts in order. In her anger, she remained strangely clear-headed. Unlike when Pak died, she had knowledge and power now. She was no longer the frightened little girl she had been back then, nor was she the naïve teenager who had let herself be bought by the New Hyderabad mafia.
Right. What to do next?
What would the killer expect her to do? How did vile minds like that even work?
In the mess of blankets lay Rina’s comm unit. The battery was flat but she hooked it up to her own. It chimed as soon as she turned it on. Several messages came up on the screen, a couple of unanswered calls, from Ari, Uncle and herself. It looked like Rina had kept the unit off during the last few days. Because someone had told her not to use it?
Melati checked the logged calls. Conversations with friends, herself, Ari and Socrates. Nothing out of the ordinary, as least for as far as she scrolled back.
“Oh, Rina, why didn’t you tell me what your problems were?”
Worse, would anyone care?
Every year, a number of kids were found dead either here or at the other end of JeJe. Those deaths were usually kept quiet. No one investigated, no one found the killer. It was assumed to be the kid’s own fault for “going with the bad crowd” and people went out of their way so as not to embarrass the victim’s family. There would be a funeral with all the trappings, and neighbours and relatives would come to the slametan afterwards. Wahid would talk about beautiful young lives lost and nothing more would be said about the manner of death. God, how stupid was that?
A murder was a murder, and in her book, criminals deserved punishment regardless of how much the victim had “asked for it” or had been “courting bad spirits”. The station had laws. It had a courtroom. Every few weeks a judge would visit the station—a shared position with New Pyongyang and New Hyderabad—and preside over whatever cases had been brought in the previous few weeks. That courtroom was where these criminals should go, to be accused according to International law and paraded across the news screens of all people, tier 1, tier 2, ISF, commercial employees, constructs or natural-born, friendly or enemy.
So she was not going to run to Uncle or Wahid or Harto. This was a matter for the StatOp enforcers. This was what they were for. To look for clues. To arrest the killer. Let them do their damn job for once.
Chapter 15
* * *
THE UPSTAIRS CORRIDOR of the administration block of the C sector was quiet during the off-shift and Melati’s footsteps echoed loudly in the empty corridor. Most of the office windows on each side of the passage were dark, but a few of the glass doors blazed light into the corridor. A bored construct worker sat behind the desk at the Station Maintenance office. The Mining Office, the Commercial Liaisons Office and the Taxation Office were all closed.
The next lit door was Melati’s destination: the Station Security Office. The glass door slid aside at her approach.
The woman behind the front desk took one look at Melati and rose, her hand raised to her mouth. “Are you all right?”
The question surprised her. Was she all right? Who cared about her? “It’s not about me. It’s about—”
“Look at you.”
Melati looked. The front of her sarong was dark with blood. Her arms were covered in smudges. God.
Years ago, she’d walked into a different office in this same corridor covered in blood, her own. She remembered only seeing the puddle on the floor when someone pointed it out to her. She remembered the red trails down the inside of her legs and remembered blackness in her vision a moment later. She remembered her legs becoming weak, and falling to the ground, and the panic I’m going to die.
She couldn’t breathe. It felt like the walls of the office were closing in on her.
The woman rushed to her side and guided her to a couch. “Sit down. I’ll get some water.”
“I’m fine,” Melati protested weakly, but the woman had already gone.
She stared at her knees and forced herself to breathe calmly, chasing away the ghost of memories of times past.
A moment later, a glass of water was thrust into her vision. “Here you are.”
Melati took it, wrapping her hands around the coolness of the glass. “Thanks.” The water tasted cold and fresh, but dispelled little of the horrible clinginess of the smell of death.
Meanwhile, the woman reached over the desk and grabbed her scanner. Turned it on and scanned Melati’s arm. Watched the screen. A look of comprehension came over her face.
She sat down next to Melati. The tag on her uniform said Heslop. She wore her hair loose, raked behind her ears, like curtain of dark brown satin. Her face was freckled, like Louise’s. “OK, now tell me what happened.”
Melati forced herself into calmness. “I found my cousin dead in the BC block. Murdered. Probably with a knife.” In words that felt mechanical and didn’t seem to come from her own mouth, she explained how she had found Rina and how Rina—or someone looking for Rina—had tried to break into her unit, and how she’d left the message on her hub. “If you need information, I have a pretty good idea where we can find the killer, but I can’t go after them alone.”
