The Color of Rain

by Cori McCarthy

  “He brought you on this ship”—I pause—“to use against me. And he could use Walker as well.” The words fill me with the urge to break something.

  “It’s worse than all that.” Her face is drawn so that I can trace the lines of her skull over her skin. Her sunken eye sockets. Her pointed chin. Tears veil her stare, but she blinks them back. “I shoulda told you sooner.” She takes my hands in hers. They’re shaking.

  Just like Walker’s.

  “Lo,” I almost yell, “you’re—you’re going—”

  “Touched,” she finishes. “I’ve had the shakes since before we left Earth City. I’m going away, Rain. My mind is hightailing it for better space. But you make sure they don’t throw me in that hold,” she says. “You make damn sure they don’t make me a slave. You put me out of my misery when the time comes. Then he won’t have me to use against you.”

  Her shaking hands fumble with her shirt, and she pulls out the picture of her mother. “I want you to take my mom. Keep her safe. If something happens to that, there’s no proof she ever existed.” Tears drop from her eyes. “She has to keep existing, Rain. Promise me.”

  I can’t answer.

  “Promise!”

  “I promise.” I take the picture but then press it back into her palm. “This isn’t the last time I’m going to see you. You hold on to your mom, and I’ll take her if the time comes.” Lo wraps her twitching hands over the old photo like she’s praying.

  “Can’t you fight it?”

  She pulls me into a hug, and her back is all bones and paper-thin skin. “You already know the answer to that.”

  I leave Melee, rethinking the two nightmarish reveals of the evening: Lo is going Touched, and Imreas is a slave ship.

  “I’ll walk you up so you don’t get lost. It’s almost morning,” Ben says. “If Johnny caught you, well, we’d all be . . .” He draws a finger over his throat.

  I barely hear him. I blindly touch the door release, closing Lo into the small ship.

  “Hell, Rain. You look like you’ve seen a Void demon,” he teases. I start down the catwalk, making him jog to catch up. “Which don’t exist, by the way. It was a lame joke.”

  I swallow. “Lo is going Touched. Got any jokes about that?”

  “What?” He tries to grab my arm, but I walk even faster. I don’t face Ben again until we’re rising in the elevator. He clicks the halt button, and we slow to a pause. “How do you know?” he asks.

  “Because I’ve watched it happen time and again,” I say. His swollen eye stirs at my uneasiness. “She’s stage two already.”

  “Out of how many stages?”

  “Three,” I say. “First they get headaches, and then shakes. The final stage is a sort of fog that they drift in and out of, until one day the fog becomes permanent.”

  “Hell,” he says. “Are you afraid of it happening to you?”

  “Why would you say that? Who asks a question like that?!” I smack his chest. “That’s like finding a person chained to a cliff and asking them if they’re afraid of heights!”

  “I’m sorry.” He rubs where I hit him. “I can’t really imagine it. I mean, to watch that happen to everyone you love . . . your brother even.”

  I hold back the sudden image of my family, but now only Walker remains. “Yeah, well, we’ll be at the Edge soon, and your people will have a treatment for him. And for Lo, too.”

  He presses the button, and the elevator begins to rise again. “If anyone can help, the Mecs can. Maybe. You should understand that it’s a closed society. When scientists founded the colony, they were overly conscious of starting a new race. They were precise and clinical. For all its beauty and advancements, the Edge can be a very unfeeling place.”

  “Lo’s going to get worse fast, and if Johnny finds her that way, he’ll sell her with the others. She wants me to kill her before that happens, so I’ll probably have to put her into a coma like Walker. You can do that with all your”—I say, motioning to his pockets—“gadgets, right?”

  “Hell, Rain. Talk about rolling with the punches.” He shakes his head. “You just found out that your best friend is losing her mind, and you’ve already moved on to saving her through elaborate and improbable schemes?”

  “Not everyone likes to wallow and suffer.” I watch him touch the edges of his swollen eyelid. “Why don’t you use that disc thingy to heal your eye?”

  “Can’t,” he says. “I’ve got hardware in there. You hit me in the one spot I’m vulnerable.”

  “Hardware?”

  The elevator doors slide open. “Don’t worry about it,” he says flatly.

  I step out before Johnny’s quarters. “You shouldn’t tell people where you’re vulnerable, Ben.”

  He frowns. “Not everyone pretends to be invincible, Rain.”

  Lo’s going to leave me now with or without Johnny. She’s going to leave me to sort through the nightmare of this ship alone. I slide into the shadows of Johnny’s room just to escape thinking about her. The room feels dimmer than I left it. I can only make out lumps and creases on the satiny bed. Johnny must be among them.

  But I step through the darkness and into a black voice.

  “Hello, Rain.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  “Lights,” Johnny commands, and the room floods.

  I squint against the sudden brightness.

  “How was your walk?” he asks. “That’s what you’re going to say, yes? You were just out taking a walk?”

  My blood has frozen in my veins. “I don’t think I should say anything.”

  “Smart, but not smart enough.” Johnny sits in the plush chair on the far side of the room. He wears his pants, but no shirt. “Come here.”

  I step to his knees, securing a fist behind my back. If he’s going to beat me, I’m swinging back. But he just scoops me onto his lap, his arm chaining my waist.

  He picks up a tablet from the side table, pressing his thumb into the security clearance that blinks a small red box. “Let’s just see where you really were, shall we? Then I don’t have to hear your lies.”

  My heart thunders into spiky questions. What if Ben didn’t erase it all? What if Johnny sees me with Lo? Or Ben?

  AIRLOCK.

  He runs his fingers through the information on the screen, his frown growing tighter, until he jerks, making me tumble to the floor. “So you were nowhere? You were a ghost through the night hours?”

  My fear turns from his face to his leg. He’s going to kick me. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. I curl my knees against my chest and shake my head.

  “Still not going to spout lies?” He drops the tablet to the chair. Now he has both hands free. Now he could kick me and hit me—I eye his belt with new fear—his hips—and even lower.

  I struggle to swallow. My terror won’t do anything now, and it certainly won’t distract Johnny from the events of my night. But I have to keep his attention on me and away from Lo or Ben or the fact that I now know about his true business.

  “You wanted fiery.” I glare into his glare. “A feisty redhead.”

  He laughs, and the sound spears my little reserve. He grabs me by the back of the shirt and hauls me to my feet. “Get out of my sight until I know what to do with you.”

  He throws me into the hallway, and I stumble into the Family Room just as the green girls are waking. They stare as I slip through the common area and back to my mat. I shut my eyes, but I don’t expect to sleep.

  This isn’t over. This is the edge of Johnny’s razor.

  I wake to a fat man leaning over me. He checks my hair as though he’d like to buy it.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I pull from his reach, my back to the window.

  “Inspecting an unusual specimen. He was right. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He groans as he leans on a silver cane. His hair is missing in patches and streams of sweat work down each temple. “I’ll have you.”

  “I’m Johnny’s,” I blur
t. “I’m red tagged.” I thrust out my arm and pull back my sleeve.

  But my bracelet has turned green.

  He chuckles. “Not anymore, it seems.” He holds out his cane like an offer to help me up, but I get to my feet on my own.

  “Johnny sent you to come get me? Did he tell you to punish me?”

  He wipes his brow with a yellow handkerchief and shoves it in his pocket. “Am I punishment, little girl?”

  My mouth opens and closes without an answer. I’m to please this man. I’m a green tag now . . . right? A real prostitute. Of all the horrific things that I imagined Johnny might do, it comes to this one: he means to whore me into submission. The walls of my mind melt, but I try to hide my panic. This is better than a threat to Lo and Walker . . . it only feels worse.

  “Okay.”

  “Truly?” he smiles and a bead of sweat drops the length of his nose. “What a changeable creature you are.”

  I follow the man out of the Family Room, passing Ben at the door. His gaze tugs at strings in my chest, but I put the sudden emotion out of my mind. I touch my green bracelet; I have a job to do.

  And I do it.

  I turn my mind off just like Johnny taught me, my body slipping against the bare minimum. Afterward, the huge man is a pile of snoring pink flesh, and my brain clicks back on until I’m kneeling on the carpet, unsure of how I got there. I try to stand, but I can’t, and my breath cuts at my throat. Half crawling, I make it to a small door—a closet—and hide inside. The narrow space wraps me up with darkness, and I weep.

  The fat man’s name is Proffers, and I stay in his sauna of a room full of golden, ornamental things for days. He never asks my name but keeps me held up against his mound of a body until I fall away from myself, into an empty headspace. I am anonymous. Invisible.

  This must be what it’s like to be Touched.

  Almost a week after Proffers came for me, I’m lying on a gold-cushioned window seat, watching the white strings of the wormhole dance outside when Johnny leans over me.

  He snaps his fingers in my face to stop me from saying something, and I scoot away from him, listening to Proffers hum a loony song in the shower.

  “Follow,” he commands, doing an about-face and leaving the room. I pull on my shoes while I tread after him. We weave through passengers in the hall who stare from Johnny to me. “Disgusting, wasn’t he?” he says in the elevator. I had forgotten the way Johnny’s eyes and hair can reflect the exact same shade of dark.

  I level my shoulders. “I’ve had worse.”

  Johnny grinds his teeth. “That’s a lovely thinly veiled insult, Rain.”

  “I’m cleverer than you give me credit for.”

  His thin smile matches his gaze. “You are. You really, truly are.” The doors open, and we exit onto the floor for his quarters. “It took me this long to discover what you were up to all those nights ago. What a wild chase you’ve sent me on.” My stomach drops in sudden fear for Lo. “For a few days there, I doubted that I would be able to uncover your secrets. But then, breakthrough.” He holds his door open.

  A man stands in the middle of Johnny’s room. His flight suit is ripped open at the top revealing a patch of curly, grotesque chest hair. I remember his fingers smashing my face against the back of the door and hear his gravel shouting of GET OUT!

  He twists his hands like a small boy before a disappointed father until his eyes fall on me. “That’s the red, Captain. The very red. Stole my girl right out from my room, and I’d paid her up for the week and all.”

  “This is Jeb, Rain. But you’ve already met.” Johnny’s fingers slide along my lower back, gripping the material at my waist.

  “Didn’t touch her but for a second, Captain,” Jeb adds. “Not the second I saw she was your girl.”

  “Would you like her now?” Johnny asks.

  Jeb’s head jerks around from Johnny to me and back again. “If you’re done, of course, then I could—”

  “How about it, Rain?” Johnny dares.

  So he found Jeb, a man more vile than Proffers, to be my next punishment?

  Well, it doesn’t matter because I won’t let Johnny have the best of me. I braid my hair back to shift out from under both of their looks. “Okay, Johnny. Whatever you want.” I step toward Jeb, but Johnny’s grip on my waist yanks me back into his chest.

  “Changed my mind. Go,” he commands. Jeb stands there for an ugly moment, his eyes like loose marbles while he looks from me to Johnny. “I said, go!”

  Jeb hustles out, and Johnny swings me around, gripping my shoulders like he’s about to break me. His perfect skin is blotched with anger, but instead of crushing me, he lifts me by one arm and marches me to the command deck. The handful of crew members on duty exchange glances before disappearing altogether.

  Johnny shoves me away and collapses into his captain’s chair. I take a few steps toward the large window, looking out on the rush of a cluster of passing stars. Johnny is smiling again by the time I turn, showing off his teeth. “I’m so very frustrated, Rain. I didn’t want this, you know.”

  “You did,” I say, gripping my elbows. “You asked for complication. For ruse. You dared me into this.”

  His smile twists into a frown for the briefest flash. “Maybe I did. But you have no one to blame but yourself.” He presses a few buttons on the control panel beside him. “Take a look.” He waves his hand at the window, and I turn to find it altered into a view screen. And the view is a dingy cargo room with one dangling bulb.

  Walker’s pod beneath it.

  A choked sound leaks out of me before I can stop it.

  “Apologies,” Johnny says. “Wrong screen.” His fingers tap the panel, and the view switches to a bare metal room with a pair of massive sliding doors.

  An airlock.

  And in the middle of it, Lo’s tiny frame. On her knees and sobbing.

  “Johnny, don’t take this out on—”

  “She’s a distraction, Rain. That’s what your little midnight stunt proved to me. If you can’t have her on this ship without sneaking out then we can’t have her on this ship. Haven’t I already told you the lesson of having nothing to lose?”

  My mouth opens, but nothing comes. He really means to launch her out the airlock.

  “This is just a trick,” I blurt. “You brought her onboard to hold over me. You were never interested in trading her or—”

  “You’re right. She was here to help you learn to separate from everything else.”

  Was?

  “Before my father marooned me on Entra, he gave me my own ship to captain for three weeks. Later on, he admitted that he wanted me to have it all before I had nothing.” Johnny’s brow creases into a knot. “A genius maneuver. If I hadn’t known that I wanted to be captain, I wouldn’t have tried to regain it. Build from the bottom. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.”

  “I get it, Johnny. Your dad was . . . right. I’ll forget I even know her. I promise!” I look to where Lo is ripping at her hair.

  “I tried the same tactics with my father. ‘Let me stay onboard. I’ll work up from the lowest crew position. . . . ’” His voice drops, and he stands. “Eleven minutes to the next automatic dump. You’ll have enough time to say good-bye. Probably. As long as you stop wasting it blathering on, trying to make me change my mind.”

  I sprint so fast that my vision fragments—images blurred by the wetness in my eyes. The silver-walled halls. Black flight suits. The docking bay and the smashing clatter of my footsteps on the grated walkway.

  Lo is in the last airlock.

  I break against the porthole, pounding on the thick glass pane.

  “LO! LO!”

  She stops tearing at her hair. Her filthy cheeks are whipped with tear tracks, and she comes to the window slowly.

  “Rain.” She presses her hand to the glass. A few ripped-free strands of her pink hair hang from her fingernails. I throw myself against the wheel lock on the door without budging it a fraction.

  “Rain.�
�� Her voice is muffled to a whisper, and I press my forehead against the porthole to hear it.

  But the rolling clank sounds first.

  She looks back at the doors. “Don’t trust the Mec. He’s not telling you the truth.”

  “Lo! Don’t . . .” But I have nothing but her name. “Lo.”

  Clank. Clank. Clankclankclank . . .

  “Those are our people, Rain.” She takes out her mother’s picture from her shirt and smashes the scrap against the window. But there’s no hope. Lo’s mother is going with her now no matter what. They’ll lose their existence as one.

  The snap sounds, fracturing the seal on the door.

  “Sweet freakin’ mess,” she mouths as the doors break apart.

  And Lo flies backward . . .

  . . . falling head over heels into the Void.

  PART II

  BLUE

  CHAPTER

  14

  My body swings to a lewd rhythm. If I rock forward, I can see silver-white stars through the tiny passenger room window. If I rock back, I face a dingy ceiling and a spidery water stain.

  And he likes it best when I rock back.

  So I do. Over and over in ugly syncopation until his grunts climax with a wrenching squeeze of my hips.

  “Rain,” he moans.

  “Don’t use my name.” I slip out of my voided state and slide off him. My feet touch the ground in the exact spot where I shed my clothes to begin with, and I’m redressed in a move so refined that Lo would be proud. Now I know what she meant about doing it without feeling it. Sex can be nothing.

  It can be it.

  I button my shirt to my collar and hold on to the edge of the bunk. Remembering Lo no longer makes me sob, but I get dizzy . . . spun up like some fist is twisting all my insides, and though I’m the best at deluding myself, there are still moments when I cannot turn my brain off. When I’m too aware of all that I’ve lost.

  “I said, here.” Tobern thrusts a fistful of coins. I drop them in my pocket while he fingers the ends of my ratty hair. “You’re looking like shit.”