He looks up, expecting to find Montgomery sneering at him through those cold black lenses. Instead, her mouth is set firm, like she’s biting back an anger she does not want to unleash on him. She stares down the access tunnels as if she wishes she could set them aflame.
“You don’t even know there’s two pathways here, let alone that you’re on the wrong one.” Her voice is a choked whisper. “It’s stupid, the rules rich kids get to play by. If I do drugs, I’m experimenting—but if you do them, you’re an addict. If I hack into an ATM, I’m young and foolish—but if you do it, you’re a criminal.”
She leans back against an access hatch, stroking her cask like a pet. “I thought everyone got away with shit. And I didn’t even know what happened to those poor bastards until I saw what happened to some friends who didn’t have an auntie to bail them out.”
Kenna has the uncomfortable feeling of watching a holovid, seated as the lead character reels off a soliloquy. As long as he stays quiet, she’ll reveal her darkest secrets, and never notice he’s there.
That’s not fair to her, though.
“It’s not your fault,” he offers. When did Kenna feel sympathy for the rich? But knowing she’s wealthy snaps Montgomery into clearer focus. She has all the hallmarks of a trust-fund kid: a flagrant disdain for money, the boredom of someone who’s seen too much, too easily—
“I didn’t say it was my fault,” she hisses.
—the angry independence of someone determined to prove she needs nobody’s help—
“The point is, I’m better for breaking rules. I’ve refined my methods for getting away with shit. You, Kenna, gods damn—they have beaten all the risk out of you. Someone shakes a rule at you, you piss your damn pants. You think Scrimshaw got where she did by following orders? That Paulius did? No, the rich are entrepreneurs because they spent their childhood getting away with shit, and now they know how to get results.
“But goddammit, they’ve terrified you poor shits into following rules designed to fuck you over—which, sure, maybe works if you’ll never amount to anything anyway, but you? You’re trying to become a prince. And what kind of prince can you be if all you ever do is what people expect?”
Kenna thinks how he’s killing himself to help Scrimshaw, to keep Paulius safe, to keep Mother and Father occupied, and realizes how right she is. The more axes of interference he adds, the more likely he’ll snap.
“But I know not what this celebration is like,” Kenna says. “Risking getting kicked off the station, losing The Sol Majestic and my religion and Mother and Father for—for something I don’t even comprehend…”
He hugs his knees, braced for Montgomery’s blows. Instead, she crawls over to sit next to him, her hip against his—and unlike sitting next to Benzo, which feels soaked in tension, when she taps her knee against his playfully, he understands what it’s like to have a sister.
She sighs, stares at the far wall, shaking her head as though there’s some joke neither of them quite get. “You never know what any party’s like.”
Kenna peers at her, expecting her to continue. But after a moment she hugs her long legs against her, mirroring his quiescence.
She won’t move until he does, he realizes. And if he shuffles back toward the Majestic, she will go with him, and deposit him back in the kitchen to make his decision.
Or he can be her guard. She didn’t choose that word lightly. She’s going someplace dangerous, and needs someone to have her back.
She wants to make him dangerous.
He extends his cupped hands. She deposits the cask into his grip; the Bitch burbles happily at his touch. He can feel the Bitch’s weight crawling up the wooden staves, responding to something new within him.
Montgomery doesn’t look back. She’s bringing up the luminescent map on her forearm again, a wrinkle appearing between her eyes as she figures out the quickest route to the party, this party that Kenna knows nothing about and is feeling better about knowing nothing about.
“I’m gonna get naked,” Montgomery says.
He feels a little less better, but follows, hearing the distant clatter of other maintenance bots rattling toward them.
17
Twenty Minutes Until Explosive Decompression
WASTE REPROCESSING.
The sign is almost obliterated under a garbagey smear, the edges gnawed by rust. The processing plant is squat and heavy, a large bunker jammed between an emergency power generator and an oxygen scrub-station. This patchwork architecture is not unusual in space stations: even a large outpost like Savor Station is assembled one module at a time, prefab units flown in from distant factories orbiting resource-wealthy planets.
The corroded green BIOHAZARD WARNING sticker slapped across the door, however, makes Kenna pause.
“That doesn’t mean poop,” Montgomery tells him. “I wouldn’t party in poop.”
“Oh, excellent.”
“It means dead bodies.”
Kenna hears a dim rhythmic thumping that might be a bass beat, might be the oxygen reprocessor reclaiming the station’s air. The Bitch lurches in the cask, her weight like a dance partner flopping into his arms, and Kenna realizes he has never danced. Is it like practicing judo katas?
Mother taught him katas. Does Mother know how to dance?
Would Mother dance among dead bodies?
“There’s no stiffs in there now.” Montgomery squats down so low her skinsuit squeaks like a young girl rubbing a balloon; she leans around a corner, directing Kenna’s attention to a lone camera sweeping back and forth. “Savor Station’s a way station, barely knows what to do when a tourist dies.”
“So they don’t warehouse bodies there?”
Montgomery’s fingers close into a triumphant fist. “They have a body catapult that slings corpses into the goddamned sun.”
Her forearm pulses green. She raps the cask once, twice, an executive calling the meeting to order. “Camera’s jammed. Chop-chop.”
Kenna tenses to run—but Montgomery sashays toward the door, stepping carefully so Kenna is forced to stay behind her, the debutante ready to make a grand entrance. Someone on the inside unlatches a door bolt with a hollow clank, which then creaks open like the entrance to a tomb.
Inside is a rusted tomb decorated with Christmas lights, the floor packed shoulder-to-shoulder with young dancers thrusting their hands into the air.
How do you rust an egg? His voice echoes in his skull, sounding louder and more backwater-hick with each repetition. His robe has always been sheer, but now it feels translucent as he walks into the party.
“Do you know how hard it’s been holding this for you?” a skinny Gineer kid snaps. His cheeks are taut as plastic wrap, his straight black hair bound up into a pigtail corona. He wears a stained lab coat two sizes too small, designed to show off his artificially engineered muscles. “It took us two hours of this twelve-hour shift to install it…”
“I paid for the parts.” Montgomery holds her chin high as she glides into the crowd, easing onto the dance floor with the stiff reticence of a woman lowering herself into chilly water. “I go first.”
“Tell that to the other Sensates!” The Gineer kid shuts the door before the camera sweeps back across. “I’ve been offered the most outrageous bribes to try this out! Mutating AIs! Dance lessons! A flourishing dabhand! A dabhand for a pet, Montgomery!”
“You can hold the Bitch for a while, if you want,” she says, flopping a hand back toward Kenna as she strides toward the far wall, then mouths: Don’t let him hold the Bitch.
Kenna elbows his way past the squirming throng, feeling the wooden staves creak as he hugs the cask, excruciatingly aware how fragile the Bitch is; a dancer’s bumping hip could jolt her out of his arms. The booming bass resonates through his rib cage like a second heartbeat.
The room is an effluvia of rot and sweat and rust and sex, this filthy organic churn—yet his body reacts to it, pores opening wide. This is the odor of life, a commodity so rare among the sterile
microbiomes of transport ships, and having this chaos infiltrate his nostrils reminds him life is short, let us dance while we may.
And they are dancing. And making love. And licking eyedroppers filled with drugs, and squatting down to program on flickering green screens, and assembling robots. And their body language is always inviting, hips turned outward, heads craned upward, always looking for someone who might want to join in.
“Hey, cutie!” a squirming naked couple calls out to Montgomery. “Wanna join in?”
“I’ve tried sex already,” Montgomery shoots back. “What else ya got?”
Kenna can’t peel his eyes away from two muscled men pressed against a stack of plastic containers, kissing frantically, oil-stained bodies grinding against each other. He can smell their sweat as he squeezes past; he stiffens, thinking of Benzo.
And as he imagines Benzo, his fears of rusting eggs dissipate. All the drug parties he’s seen on the holovids are vapid affairs, kids skating through malls. This is a working-class party, the folks here so bored after a ten-hour shift refitting pipes that they’re desperate to create.
The waste reprocessing plant is crowded, but they have built tiny enclaves around the garbage compactors and plastic extractors and dump-chutes, constructing tiny tents and covering the controls with sheets of thick plastic so no one sits on the wrong button. Everything is dirt-brown, lent color-blooms by the firefly glows of strung Christmas lights.
Yet as Montgomery makes her way toward a giant hatch at the back of the plant, the partiers watch her pass and lower their eyedroppers, close their laptops, dampen their armflail dancing to gentle hip thrusts. Kenna realizes all this furious activity has been killing time—whatever Montgomery will do with that hatch is the thing they all came to do.
I go first, Montgomery said. How long had she kept this party waiting? All so Kenna could clean enough pots to catch him alone? As the lovemakers sigh, uncoupling to prop themselves up on an elbow to watch Montgomery, Kenna’s heart wells over with pride: She’s my friend, and she’s going to do something awesome.
Carefully applied vandalism in the service of art, Montgomery had said. I paid for the parts, she’d said.
The Bitch hisses through a hole in the cask, exhaling peppery blue fungus that knifes Kenna’s lungs. The choking panic reminds him Montgomery is a Sensate, having consumed all lesser thrills, and nothing but inherent death may satisfy her tonight.
A few partygoers set down their drinks and scurry out, their attempts at a quiet exit foiled by the creak-and-boom of the door’s bolts unlocking. Montgomery takes advantage of the noise to hold her hands up, an old-fashioned cop halting traffic. The thumping music cuts off. She leans backwards lackadaisically, leaning against the long horizontal handlebar jutting out from underneath a black cloth.
She whips off the cloth with a matador’s flourish.
The hatch beneath is a dented, coffin-sized rectangle, inset into the solid metal wall. The black coffin is tilted out at an angle, providing an industrially chilled chest big enough for someone to dump a body into and shove it against the wall like a file cabinet, thus ejecting the corpse.
Except now the coffin’s interior is heaped high with bungie cords, attached to the corners by freshly welded chains. And someone’s mounted a seven-foot-wide monitor on the wall above it, showing a blazing sun hanging in black space …
Wait.
Now that the crowd is quiet, Kenna hears the white noise of oxygen jetting out through the sides of that “monitor,” sees the flapping duct tape where they’ve taped over the tiny cracks in the porthole.
That’s a window straight into space.
Kenna turns to bolt for the exit. He can tell which partygoers are lifelong spacers—they’re the ones poised to run, scanning the walls for reflective yellow. Reflective yellow is the rarest color on any ship; even anarchist pirates follow the rule that nothing on board is reflective yellow except for patch-kits and alert-boxes.
Find the yellow, save a fellow. Kenna’s first memories involve transport captains squirting compressed air in his face when he was barely old enough to walk, thundering if he ever heard that noise, yell yellow. At six years old he learned to read, write, and apply patch kits. The stereotype was that planetside folks were egomaniacs, spacers were humble, but you had to be humble: you were trapped in a reinforced box floating in hard vacuum, billions of miles from help, where any structural failure would kill everyone. Your home could crumple like a paper bag. Everyone had to pitch in to ensure the ship held tight against space’s murderous emptiness, and if you died hitting that yellow alert switch, you died well.
Montgomery and her friends have cut a fucking hole in the ship and patched in a window.
“I believe in informed consent,” Montgomery says, pressing her palm against a leak like she wasn’t practically sticking her arm out into the void. The sun sweeps across the window, an accelerated dawn-to-dusk as the station rotates fast enough to provide the equivalent of gravity. “What we’re gonna try here could lead to explosive decompression. Rakesh’s crew does good work, but we didn’t exactly have Captain Lizzie’s blessing here, so yeah, this window could give, and though we have compressed oxygen to tide us over, once the revelries start, that vacuum-proofed door”—she gestures at the thick bulkhead they’d entered by—“stays shut. Worst case, this room’s a write-off, but we won’t take the station with us.
“So. If you want to leave, go. If you’re staying because your friends are calling you chickenshit, come to me and I will handle your idiot friends. This is as safe as we can make it, but that doesn’t make it safe.”
She takes off her goggles and makes pointed eye contact with every partier as if to say, I mean that.
“Now.” She peels off her skinsuit. “As to why we’d do this damn fool thing, easy answer is ‘I’m a Sensate.’ But I don’t go for any new sensation: otherwise I could settle in a farm town and spend my life licking different barns.
“No, what I’m looking for is enlightenment. And that out there”— she thumps on the window hard enough that everyone flinches—“is reality. We cling to our little air-filled, heat-filled outposts, but the truth is the largest inhabited planet is a speck of sand floating in an ocean. What’s out there is what the universe really is—a place indifferent to life, quintillions of parsecs of emptiness, and you have never seen the universe until you have touched that.”
She’s topless now, kneeling down to unbuckle her boots. “Me, I refuse to cling close to the skin of this world. So Rakesh here is about to catapult me into the void on a carefully preplanned trajectory. I’ll shoot out a couple hundred yards from the station, then bungee back into this ejector like a pool ball into a pocket, all in under a minute. Humans can survive in space for three minutes, so … plenty of room to maneuver, right?”
She stands naked before the crowd, one candy-red thigh-high boot dangling from her hand. Her eyebrows are raised high in anticipation of a laugh that never arrives. She stands proudly bare before them, which should be a majestic thing—but her scarred body is a scrap of flesh framed against endless space.
“Anyway.” She chucks her boot into the corner. “Y’all are welcome to do this too, if I survive. It’s an experience you’ll get nowhere else.”
She jumps into the coffin like a luge competitor hopping into the sled. Rakesh and the other techs bend over, strap nylon rope around her.
She calls Kenna over. Walking toward that hissing, broken window is like fighting gravity, his feet slipping backwards, away from this childhood danger. It’s easier because the only exit is clogged with people, half the people at the party filing out; all this vacuum-jumping seemed like fun until all that stood between them and an icy, gasping death was a piece of plastic.
He justifies stepping near the emptiness by telling himself he is bringing the Bitch to her caretaker. They bind Montgomery’s legs with straps, yanking on the welded eyebolts to verify they won’t snap free to send her tumbling into the void, testing the air-jets tha
t will shoot her out into space.
“Why are they—”
She has crossed her arms across her chest like a mummy; Rakesh is spooling cords to press her hands to her clavicles. “Told ya, kid, it’s a carefully preplanned trajectory. They shoot me out, I bounce back; me flailing when I’m unconscious will ensure I never make it home.”
“Unconscious?”
“Humans can survive for three minutes in space, but we only stay conscious for about twenty seconds.” Kenna does not understand how she can speak so calmly. “That should get me far enough away for me to know what it’s like.”
“Out in space.” The words feel like a curse when he speaks them, wishing ugly death upon a friend—but other revelers jostle close around him, their breath heavy and thick as porn, necks jerking around to take in every detail. They throw rock, paper, scissors, determining who gets to go after Montgomery. They discuss the work they’ve put in, comparing approaches, discussing how to improve the process for next time …
These people are insane, Kenna thinks. I have to get out.
“Bring me my girl?”
Kenna assumes Montgomery is asking a technician for something, but the happy burbling purring against his chest indicates the Bitch heard her. He nudges past the technicians to hold the cask near Montgomery, straight-armed—he can’t bring himself to step one foot closer to the window’s sucking noise.
Rakesh pushes her down into the coffin, but Montgomery shrugs—or tries to, but her shoulders are strapped into place. “She’s hungry,” Montgomery laments, and Kenna realizes why Montgomery wears her goggles all the time. While she’s trained her voice to be flat as cardboard, she has the delicate face of a Gineer debutante, cursed with eyes that reflect her every emotion: without the goggles, her desires are broadcast to the world.
“Can you get her some potassium?” She’s trussed so tight, she can only flick her eyes in the proper direction. “A brown packet in my left-thigh pocket…”
The Sol Majestic Page 18
