by King, Sara
Patrick gave her a long look, then, with one last frown at the cockpit, went back to his big metal chair.
She stared at her kneecaps for another ten minutes before the sound of the book snapping shut made her lift her head.
Patrick was standing, crossing the space between them, a long white rag dangling from his hand.
“I said I wouldn’t talk!” she cried. She scrambled to push herself sideways down the wall, bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the sheet metal. She only succeeded in sliding backwards, until her wrists and shoulder-blades gouged into the floor.
Panic surged when Patrick reached her. She clenched her jaw shut and closed her eyes.
For several heart-pounding moments, she lay there, every muscle tense. Then she tentatively pried an eye open.
Patrick knelt above her with the rag in his hand, his hazel eyes unreadable. “Sit up.”
Tatiana squeezed her jaw harder and shook her head stubbornly.
Sighing, he reached down and pulled her up by the shoulder. Then he withdrew a key from his leather vest and released the bands from her wrists.
As the metal fell away, clinking against the floor, Tatiana blinked.
“Let me see your wrists,” Patrick said.
She tucked them to her body and vigorously shook her head.
Seeing that, Patrick rolled his eyes. “Come on. Let me see them. Before you bleed to death, twerp.”
That was a good point… Reluctantly, she held them out.
He hissed upon seeing the oozing cuts and gouges. Even Tatiana, who had lived with them, hadn’t imagined they were that bad. She felt her stomach lurch.
“Hold on,” he said, getting to his feet. He tossed the white rag at her—bandages, she realized, stunned—and went to a shelving unit secured by a cargo net. He removed the net and from a compartment drew out a bundle of neon green strips.
“Here,” he said, kneeling in front of her again. He pulled a strip free from the bundle and removed the adhesive. “These’ll help.”
“What are they?” Tatiana asked.
“Nanostrips,” he said, grabbing a wrist.
Tatiana yanked her hands away and skittered backwards in a hurry. At his scowl, she said, “I’m wired with enough electronics to power a city. Nanos are bad mojo for an operator.”
Patrick’s frown cleared and he glanced down at the exposed strip. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she said, perking up slightly. “Won’t help anyway. I’ve got resident bots patrolling, to keep out intruders. A whole strip will probably fry something.”
“Huh.” Patrick replaced the strip and returned the strip back to the bundle. He got up again, dropped the nanostrips back into the compartment, and returned with regular adhesive first-aid strips and a bottle of alcohol. He held them up. “These do?”
Tatiana nodded, a little mystified by his sudden change in demeanor.
She flat-out stared, however, when he gently took her hand and daubed it with bandages wetted in alcohol. It burned like hell, but she just kept staring. Her mind once again wandered to what she did when she was bored, and whether Patrick would be good material.
A smile quirked at the corner of Patrick’s mouth as he worked. “I think we got off to a wrong start.”
She blushed, realizing she was gaping at him like a schoolgirl. Looking at the wall, she straightened and said, “You’ve committed three federal offenses in the last hour. Assault, kidnapping, and destruction of Coalition property. If you had any idea of how dead you are going to be by tomorrow morning…”
Patrick wiped more dried blood and debris from the wound. “What’s your name?”
Tatiana stiffened further. “If this is a ploy to get vital Coalition data off of me—”
“Tatiana, right?”
Her mouth fell open and she stared. “How did you…?”
Patrick looked up and grinned at her. “Good. Should’ve asked earlier, but we were pretty sure. It’s hard to miss…” He cleared his throat and looked back down at her wrist. “Anyway, sorry about ruining your day.” He wrapped gauze around the wrist and patted it down, then moved on to the other. “If you don’t mind my asking, why were you outside your solider?”
I do mind, she thought bitterly.
Patrick glanced up, saw the look on her face, and laughed. “All right, we’ll leave that one alone for now.”
She let him work for a minute, then muttered, “You were pretty close to the truth, what you said earlier.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her. “About you having a nervous breakdown?”
She ground her teeth together. “I like to think about it as having a sudden and acute need to get out of tight spaces at random, inconvenient times throughout my life.”
For the first time, he really smiled at her. His dimples returned, and Tatiana felt her heart give an extra thud.
Then he said, “A claustrophobic operator. Isn’t that like a carrot that’s afraid of orange?”
Her eyes narrowed and the extra heartbeats receded. Clearing her throat, she glanced at the ship around them. “So you can fly?” She slapped the steel wall behind her. “You and Milar are both pilots?”
Patrick shrugged and reached for the second bandage. “Yeah. I’m a little pathetic compared to my brother, but I can get ‘er off the ground if I need to.”
“Still,” Tatiana said, “You must be proud. I hear that’s uncommon for a colonist. Where’d you learn?”
He grinned. “A little undercover operation near the North Tear. Trained quite a few of the pilots where we’re going.” He tucked the bandage tight and glanced at her. “What about you? Can you fly one of these things?”
Tatiana snorted derisively. “I’m an operator.”
He glanced at her with a raised brow. “I’ll take that as a no.”
Tatiana yawned. “So where are we going?”
“Little place called Deaddrunk Mine.”
Tatiana tried not to twist her face at yet another ridiculous colonist place name. “That’s…quaint.”
He grinned at her, reading between the lines. “True, though. You’re new to a place, you name it whatever most strikes you about it. Some drunk tripped on a rock and died outside town while taking a piss. Turns out, the rock that killed him was a nugget of ninety-five percent pure silver. Became one of the best mining towns on Fortune…before the government started the Yolk draft.”
Tatiana yawned again, so tired she felt dizzy. “Lots of people in Deaddrunk, then?”
He snorted. “You mean does the Coalition know it’s there?”
“Do they?”
His face contorted in a scowl. “They better. They took another Draft from it just a few days ago. Make a point of visiting twice a year, any time they need more meat for the slaughter.”
Tatiana fought another yawn and wondered if blood loss was making her sleepy. “So it’s got what, a thousand? Two thousand inhabitants?”
Patrick laughed. “Try two hundred.”
“Two hundred?” Tatiana raised her brows. “And the Coalition drafts eggers out of it?”
“Every six months,” Patrick muttered.
“A little town like that…must not have many pilots.” She felt like she was getting loopy…like she’d slammed a good stiff drink and was just now starting to feel the effects. Peering at him through heavy lids, she said, “You put something on the bandages, didn’t you?”
Patrick reddened and rubbed the back of his neck. “Ah, yeah. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” As he spoke, he set the bottle of liquid aside. Not alcohol then. Tatiana cursed for not noticing the label.
“Bastard.” But her eyelids were drooping. “There a lot of pilots in that town of yours, Patrick?”
“Naw, just a handful,” he said. “Like you said, it’s pretty rare for a colonist.” He reached behind him and grabbed a cargo mat. “Here. Put your head on this.”
“No, dammit.” But she was already falling over sideways. He caught her and eased her down onto the mat. “You mess
with me…” she slurred.
“I won’t,” Patrick promised. “Just thought you could use something to sleep.”
“You mean you didn’t want me to see how you get to Wideman Joe.”
He reddened again. “You’re sharp.”
Sharper than you think, Tatiana thought. But she had already passed out.
Chapter 3
A Dangerous Foreman
Being a foreman, Magali realized, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Foremen, for example, didn’t eat at regular intervals like the rest of the eggers. They ate whenever they could catch a spare minute to breathe, if they ate at all. Between consoling panicking eggers who were convinced the next Shriek was coming and scurrying between incidents of the shit generally clogging the engine intake, life as a foreman was one hellacious stress-fest after another.
It did have its good points, however. As a foreman, Magali had direct contact with the male side of the camp, which allowed her a much-needed change of scenery. She even found some men she known back in Deaddrunk, though none of them really wanted to reminisce. Not only did their Coalition babysitters discourage socializing, but every egger in the camp had long-since come to terms with the fact that they were all going to die here. The past, Magali knew, only served to make them that much more bitter about the present.
Some didn’t even recognize her, even after she named the little silver-mining town and her family’s tiny general store. Those were usually close to developing the Wide, and even their own work gang avoided them.
For the rest, the constant fear of the next Shriek had hardened them to any conversation about going home. Magali had tried every chance she got, but as soon as she mentioned ‘getting out,’ their eyes had darkened and they’d found something else to do.
One thing Magali learned with her newfound contacts was that a lot of people on the male side of the camp had tried to escape, but nobody succeeded. The Director gave attempted escapees thirty lashings on their first attempt, and fifty on their second. On their third attempt, she gave another fifty lashes and put them in the stocks for a week. On the fourth attempt, they were hanged.
So far, there was only one person in camp who had ever been put in the stocks. The lashings were usually enough. Despite their fear of the next Shriek, eggers learned to fear the Director more. A Nephyr’s arm was many times stronger than a fully-grown man’s, and the Director’s whippings were known to break bones.
Another dubious benefit of being a foreman, Magali found, was that they were privy to choice bits of blood-chilling information that Magali would have much preferred to not know.
For instance, there had been two minor Shrieks since Magali and Anna had shown up almost two weeks ago, and each one had cost almost a hundred egger lives. Further, those eggers that hadn’t been in the direct blast radius had suffered severe breakdowns and had deteriorated to the mental states of perpetually-panicked three-year olds. Magali had seen them, hunkered against the aluminum siding of their old bunks, booted from the Camp by the Coalition soldiers, yet hadn’t put it together until now.
Already, she’d seen one of those women die.
Magali had tripped over her on her first day in the Camp. The woman had spent the night huddled outside Magali and Anna’s hut—her hut, Magali had discovered later—and had suffered some sort of heart attack during the night. It had been her limp arm slumped across the doorway to the hut that had nearly cost Magali a broken neck, when she was emerging for the morning lineup for the first time.
Magali grimaced when she remembered the way Anna’s face had been completely devoid of reaction upon seeing the corpse.
“Where did you think we got a spare hut from?” Anna had asked, while Magali had hyperventilated. Then her little sister had calmly stepped over the corpse and gone to formation.
“There’s something wrong with her,” Magali muttered under her breath, not for the first time. She thought about what her sister would be like in twenty years, and felt sick.
“Something wrong with who?” a very tall, very lanky man asked of her. He lobbed a rag covered in Shrieker slime at the bin towards the back of the foreman’s breakroom and slumped into a chair. Heaving a huge sigh at the ceiling, he muttered, “God I hate this place.”
“I’m Magali,” she said. “And ditto.”
The man groaned as he threw his arms behind his head and turned to face her. “Joel.”
Magali noticed that his right leg was wrapped in bandages, with the neon green edges of nanotape sticking out from underneath. She nodded at it. “Shrieker?”
The man glanced down at his skinny leg. He laughed. “Nah. Pissed off albino.” He leaned forward and tugged open the breakroom’s tiny fridge. Rooting around inside, he found a strawberry soda and dragged it out, slamming the fridge shut with a foot.
Looking at it, he muttered, “Don’t know what the hell they were thinking.” He held the bottle out so she could see it. “All of a sudden the Camp Director starts ordering nothing but strawberry soda.”
Magali grimaced. Upon arriving, Anna had hacked into the Camp Director’s personal hub. Never mind getting them the hell out of there—her sister had done it so she could have ready access to her favorite beverage.
Popping the cap with a sigh, Joel leaned back and took a big swig, surveying her over the bottle. “Haven’t seen you around here before,” he said once he’d finished and wiped his mouth with the dirty back of a suntanned arm. “You just make foreman?”
“Yeah,” Magali said. “This morning. What about you?”
“Three years,” the man said. He yawned and checked his watch. “Shit. Two more hours to go before shift.”
Magali’s eyes fell back to the green edges of nanotape protruding from the bandages. “Another foreman do that to you?”
“This?” The man gestured at his leg, then laughed. “Naw. This was done by a real piece of work I used to do business with, back before he dumped me in this joint.”
Magali stared. “You’ve had that wound for three years?”
He grunted and took another swig of pink soda.
“But…” She gestured at the wound. “I thought that was nanotape.”
“It is,” he agreed. “But the bastard dipped his knife in nanos of his own, the anti-knitting kind. The little fuckers have been at war since he stabbed me. I think his are winning.” He took another long drink, then tossed the empty bottle into the waste bin atop the slimed cloth. “But hey, nice meeting you. I’ve gotta go stop my dumbass crew from kicking up another Shriek.”
Joel got up and was limping from the room when Magali called, “You look familiar. What’s your last name?”
He glanced back at her. “Triton,” he said.
Magali frowned, feeling like she should know it somehow. “Do I know you?”
His green-blue eyes scanned her face. “Don’t think so.” Then, turning, he left.
Magali stared after him. Could he be that Joel? The smuggler known as Runaway Joel? The one her father had done business with, back before the accident?
She quickly dismissed the idea. Runaway Joel’s face had been plastered on every official surface for as long as Magali could remember. He’d been stealing from government depots and undercutting Coalition quotas since Magali had been a kid. There was no way the scrawny, bearded man she had just seen could be the same clean-shaven criminal she had seen on every wanted poster on Fortune. The soldiers would have executed him the moment they had him in custody.
Still, with a haircut and a shave…
A call on her radio cut her train of thought short. “Hey sis. You might wanna get down here. Some idiot’s trying to talk to a Shrieker.”
Magali grabbed her handset in a spasm. “Anna? How’d you get a radio?”
“Took it from the dumb old hag trying to get us killed. I think she’s got the Wide. Oh shit.” Magali heard a series of grunts, then Anna panted, “Hurry, sis.”
Already breaking into a run, Magali yelled into the receiver, “Don’t touch
my sister!”
She received no reply.
Magali shoved her radio back onto her belt and sprinted towards the mounds.
The concrete corridor ended in a locked door.
In an attempt to prevent smuggling, Coalition regulations required that all Shrieker farms be locked at all times—regardless of who was inside. Now Magali threw the door open and dove into the dank air beyond, ducking low to keep from scraping her head on the slimy ceiling.
As soon as she entered, the relative mental peace that Magali had earned in the breakroom became a familiar knotting sensation in her mind as she grew closer to the Shriekers. The static was a constant blur in the back of her head, an itch curable only by exiting the mounds at the end of the shift, and was enough to drive everyone exposed to it over the edge, given enough time.
Magali spent the next ten minutes slipping on the thick, slimy mucus of the Shrieker tunnel as she scrambled to find the chamber with her sister while avoiding the toxic-colored, dog-sized blobs of flesh that were the Shriekers.
When she found the room with her sister, Magali froze. Anna was on the floor, covered in translucent slime, a wiry woman with a pinched face and a foreman’s black coat standing over her tiny body. A radio lay in the mucus a few feet from Anna’s fetal form. As Magali watched, the foreman dropped onto her knees and started hitting Anna with her fists. Despite the beating, her sister was biting back her screams, letting out only small grunts as the blows struck her tiny body.
Instantly, Magali saw why. A few feet away, a brilliant red-and-purple Shrieker was engulfing a pile of lakeweed that they had left for it, its dull black eyes completely oblivious to the two humans in the cavern. Everyone else on the team had fled, probably crowding the exits and banging on the doors in a panic unheeded by the foremen and soldiers outside, terrified the thing was going to Shriek.
It took Magali only a moment to take this all in, and even less to react. She threw herself at the senior foreman and they went down together, sliding through the mucus toward the feeding Shrieker.
“Stop! It’s right—” Anna cried, sitting up behind them. Her words choked off and her eyes went wide.
