Tracer [Riley Hale 01]

by Boffard, Rob

  He leaves, and I sit back down heavily on the edge of the tank. After a minute, I’m feeling less woozy, and stumble over to one of the nearby trees. Steadying myself against it, I sink down onto the soft, loamy soil. Prakesh will probably shout at me for sitting on something as precious as his good soil, but I don’t care. I’m just happy to be off my feet. I lick my lips. The crust of blood on them cracks just a little, like old glass.

  My thoughts drift back to when I met Prakesh. Back when we were in school, we had to file into a cramped room with hard chairs and harsh lights. When you’re little, it’s kind of fun – you don’t spend as much time there, and you’re mostly being taught how to read and write and count, and sometimes even draw pictures if the teacher had some coloured pencils.

  But when you get older, the classrooms get more packed, and there’s less space on the chairs. What you learn doesn’t make sense, either: the teachers would show us pictures or videos of life back on Earth: animals in captivity, blue-green oceans, huge collections of buildings called cities. They’d try to teach us how it all worked. I remember looking at something, some animal – a huge, improbable thing with a massive, tentacle-like nose and horrible, wrinkled, grey skin – and trying to picture it in real life, as it would have been back on Earth. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t see it. I knew what it looked like but I couldn’t picture it. And the name: elephant, like something out of a scary story. The letters in a weird order, a word light years away from anything I knew.

  I got angry and started punching the tab screen in a fit of stupid rage. I remember the thin glass on the screen cracking, the tiny sting as a piece cut me and the elephant vanished. I was seven.

  I hadn’t really paid much attention to Prakesh up until then. I’d sort of known who he was, sure, but I’d never spoken to him. But for whatever reason, he was sitting next to me that day, and as my hand came down for a fourth time to smash the screen he caught me, grabbing my wrist. I looked at him, startled: I expected to see fear, even anger, but his eyes were kind. He reached across, and gently plucked the piece of glass out of my hand. As I watched, a thin dot of blood appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

  And then the teacher grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. He tossed me out of school right there, ordering me to go home. But as I stood in the corridor, the real pain just starting to creep into my hand, I realised that for the first time, I wanted to get back in.

  It didn’t last. My mom begged them to let me come back, and after a while they did, but I just couldn’t concentrate. Prakesh was friendly, and we started spending more time together, but it wasn’t enough. When my mom died, a few days after my fourteenth birthday, I told Prakesh I was finished. Not surprisingly, the school didn’t come looking for me.

  I didn’t see him for a long time. It’s funny the way this place works. We’re packed in so tight, a million people in this little steel ring that was only designed to hold half that, but you can go years without seeing someone. And then, a few months ago, a woman asked me to deliver a package to her son in Gardens. I almost didn’t recognise Prakesh at first, but he remembered who I was. He was just a food tech then, another guy in a white lab coat. But he showed me around, gave me some water and some fresh, crisp beans to eat, told me about his work. I realised how much I’d missed him.

  Prakesh comes back, bearing a thick plastic flask. He mutters something under his breath when he sees me sitting against the tree, but doesn’t protest. Instead, he drops to one knee and hands me the bottle, and I raise it to my lips, drinking deeply. The water is deliciously cold, so cold it almost stings, and before I know it I’ve drained the bottle.

  “You’re not done yet,” he says, digging some baby tomatoes out of the pocket of his lab coat. As he passes them to me, our hands touch, the warm skin of his fingers brushing mine.

  I eat two tomatoes before I stop suddenly, another halfway to my mouth. “This isn’t the genetic stuff, is it?”

  “Genetic stuff. I love how your mind works sometimes, Riley,” he says, and takes a bite himself. “No, this is good old natural veggie. We won’t have results on the genetic stuff for another year at least. But once we do—”

  “You’ll be able to grow millions of plants in a nanosecond and feed the entire station in a day and use your science skills to give me biological rocket boosters so I can fly away. I know, you’ve told me before.”

  He scratches the back of his head. “Well, we did have a breakthrough yesterday. We actually got an entire soybean plant to sprout in twenty-four hours. Of course, it would have killed anyone who ate it, but it’s a long way from the kids’ stuff they were doing before. And gene work isn’t the whole picture – the plants need the right minerals to grow. It’s been months since we had an asteroid catcher bring back a haul, and the stuff we got from Mars and the moon isn’t doing the job.”

  “Forget the minerals, then. Start doing the genetics on human beings. We don’t need minerals to function.” I hold up the last tomato, then pop it into my mouth. “Just give us the odd tomato to eat, and we’re good to go.”

  “Yes, because hominid genetic modification worked out so well last time. Or don’t you remember school history?”

  “I think I missed that class.”

  He looks down, then back up at me, his eyes clouded.

  “What?” I say. And then, annoyed: “What?”

  “What really happened, Ry? On the run?

  “What do you mean?”

  “So you managed to fight off an entire crew by yourself? In an ambush? Bullshit, Ry. You got your ass kicked, and now you’re lying to me about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  He raises his eyebrows. Usually, I laugh at him when he does this – it makes him look like someone’s just told him a rude joke – but this time, I can see the frustration in his face. His one hand is digging in the soil, and the dark grains are squishing out from between his fingers. I don’t even think he realises he’s doing it.

  “Why do you always do this?” he says. His voice is quiet, but there’s no mistaking the anger. I always forget how quickly his mood can change. He may have stopped me from smashing the tab screen, back in that school room, but as we’ve got older it’s like all my anger has slipped into him.

  “Do what?”

  “I try to help, and you just shut me out.”

  “I don’t need help.” The words sound stupid and petulant, even as I say them. “I can take care of myself, thanks.”

  “Really?” he says, jabbing a finger at my face. “Is this taking care of yourself?”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” I ask, my voice rising. “You want me to stop running? Other gangs are part of the job, Prakesh. You live with it.”

  “It’s not worth it. Not for this. There are other jobs you could do.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?” I pull myself to my feet. The ache in my arches wakes up, starts growling.

  He rises to meet me, springing off the tree with frustratingly easy grace. “Anything. You’re smart, you could get a job anywhere on this station. But running? For what?”

  “For your information, I actually like running.”

  “I know,” he says. “But there’s nothing else in your life. You run, and that’s it. And if you get hurt like this again? What are you going to do?”

  I glare at him. “There’s plenty of stuff I do when I’m not running.”

  His laugh is bitter. “Riley, come on. After all this time, I’ve never seen you do anything else besides run and play cards. Putting your life in danger for what, a few batteries? Some stolen food? It’s not worth it.”

  “Better than working for nothing in a greenhouse all day,” I say. The second the words are out of my mouth, I want to pull them back. Prakesh, however, absorbs them without comment, simply staring at me.

  After a while, he says, “What we do here keeps people alive. In case you haven’t noticed, there aren’t a lot of us left. And without air, without food, there’d be a lot less. So you can come in h
ere and drink my water, and if you want to get angry with me for it, that’s fine. But don’t ever tell me I’m working for nothing.”

  We stare at each other. Our outburst has attracted the attention of another tech, a timid woman with shocking-red hair who’s walking nervously towards us. “Is everything all right, Prakesh?” she says. “I can call security if …”

  “No, Suki, we’re good here,” he responds, but he doesn’t look away.

  “And I was just going,” I say, breaking his gaze and shouldering my pack.

  His hand is on my shoulder. “Riley, listen …” But I shrug it off and break into a run, leaving them standing beside the tree. Before long, I’m outside the Forest, dashing past a startled Dumar. Letting the rhythm of my movement calm me as I run back into the galleries. People are waking up, walking from their quarters to the mess, to school, to their jobs. As I run, my own anger fades, like a handprint evaporating from a pane of glass, and I lose myself in the crowds.

  9

  Darnell

  The door to Oren Darnell’s office is a slab of thick metal, its hinges ringed with rust. It’s half open when he arrives, and he shoves it to one side. The bang when it hits the wall is loud enough to shake the giant window that overlooks the Air Lab. One of the control room techs has followed him, wanting to ask him something, and he has to dodge out of the way as it bounces back.

  Darnell doesn’t even glance at him. “Get out,” he says over his shoulder.

  The tech knows better than to persist. He scurries out, pulling the door shut behind him. Just before it closes, Darnell bellows, “And tell Reece I want to see him. Now.”

  The door wavers, then snicks shut.

  Darnell turns back to the window. Despite what the tech might think, he isn’t angry. He’s excited. So excited that he feels like laughing out loud. He smiles instead, his teeth reflected in the window. He flips open the box, upends it, and rolls the eyeball around in his hands. It leaves his palms slightly sticky, but he barely notices.

  It’s taken so long. So many years of watching and waiting, of having to associate with the filth that make up most of the station’s population. Of having to pretend to the council and the techs and the countless functionaries that he gives a shit about the station’s air quality. No more. The eyeball is the final detail – and at long last, he can give this rotten wreck of a station everything it deserves.

  He tells himself to stay calm. There are still certain things to take care of. Riley Hale, for example. She hadn’t even entered his thoughts as ‘a thing to take care of’ until she walked into the control room. It wasn’t just the bruises. Riley Hale had delivered goods to Darnell a dozen times, and he’d never seen her on edge. Not until this particular delivery. Her entire body was tense, like she was plugged into a power socket. So yes, he knew she’d seen inside her pack, even before she made that crack about the cargo being important.

  Darnell had wanted to wrap his fingers around that pretty throat right then and there when she turned him down, take care of the problem as soon as it presented itself, but he told himself to hold back. It wouldn’t do to kill someone in the Air Lab. Just as it wouldn’t do to let her walk free. He’s much too close to let things like that cause problems for him.

  And he was fair. He gave her a chance to join him. Of course, it won’t matter one way or another – she, and he, and everyone else on the station have a lifespan measured in days. But it might have been fun to bring her over. With her speed, she’d have been exceedingly useful. Now, she’s just a liability.

  He’s pleased at the eye’s condition – Gray had told him that he’d inject it with a compound he’d developed, some sort of preserving fluid to slow decomposition. He bounces it in his palm. It makes a very soft squidging sound, as if he’s handling rotten fruit.

  Movement, right at the edge of the Air Lab. It’s Hale, sprinting silently down the path between two enormous oaks, heading right for the exit. Darnell can just see the edge of her jacket, flying out behind her.

  He seals the eyeball back in its box and sits down at his desk. It’s wood, carved from a dead tree – as far as Darnell knows, it’s the only piece of wooden furniture on the entire station, maybe even the only piece left in existence. He keeps it polished, shiny with oil.

  The desk is dominated by a bonsai tree: a Japanese boxwood, no bigger than his head, with a thin, twisted trunk and puffs of bright green leaves. Darnell keeps a set of shears on his desk, short and stubby, and he reaches for them now. He leans in, grips a twig, and cuts. A single tiny leaf drifts to his desk. He moves, leans forward, cuts again.

  Once, there were hundreds of thousands of boxwood trees across Asia. Beautiful trees, with thick, green foliage. All gone. But maybe, Darnell thinks, they might grow again. If no human beings are around to interfere, to cut them down, to destroy their habitats.

  The door hinges creak. Reece enters, his long coat sweeping around his legs. Darnell doesn’t look up. “You know that tracer, came in earlier?” he says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She was ambushed on her way over here. Some gang or other. They’ll need a visit. Make her tell you who they were. Be persuasive.”

  “What about the tracer?”

  “Kill her.”

  10

  Riley

  I make it as far as the Gardens border before I have to stop. I can feel every muscle in my legs and abdomen, white-hot filaments criss-crossing my body. When I slow to a jog, a stitch springs up in my side, biting deep. My body begs me to bend over, to relieve tension on the muscles, but I force myself to stay upright, breathing long and slow through my nose. My eye socket throbs with pain.

  I did it. I finished the job, delivered the cargo, got away clean. I have no idea how the hell I pulled that off, but I did it.

  No more jobs today. I am going home, and then I’m going to sleep. Probably forever.

  I’m on the bottom level of the sector, and the corridor is blissfully deserted. I let myself lean on the wall. The metal is cold and oily under my palm, so I rest my shoulder on it instead. Then I turn so I’ve got my back on it. And before I know it, I slide right down the wall. There’s a low power box jutting out right where the wall meets the floor, and I sit down on it, my legs splayed out in front of me. My breathing has slowed, and the heat in my muscles has gone from white hot to a sullen red. It’ll do. At least until I can get back home.

  I can still hear the crowd from the distant corridors behind me. The noise is given a metallic edge by the time it reaches me, twisted and bent by the floor and walls, so that it sounds like a weird alien monster roaming the station.

  It takes me a minute to realise that there’s another sound too. Footsteps. My eyes fly open, just in time to see a figure stepping towards me, silhouetted by the flickering fluorescents.

  The figure stops, raises his hands. “Woah, hey, be cool. I just wanted to ask if you had some food.”

  I blink. The voice is weirdly familiar. Then my eyes adjust, and I see that it’s the tagger I saw earlier. The one I blazed past in the upper-level corridors, just before the border, while I was running to the Air Lab. He’s younger than I first thought, little more than a kid, with a bad case of acne and dark hair that sticks to his forehead. His paint can is tucked in his waistband.

  If he recognises me from before, he gives no sign, just gives my pack a pleading look. I’m about to tell him to get lost, but then I remember that I already flipped him off once today, and feel kind of bad.

  “Sure,” I say. I’m almost certain that my bag’s empty, but there’s always a chance that half a protein bar or something got lost in the bottom. Part of me knows I should stay alert, but surely not even I would be unlucky enough to get jacked twice in one day.

  “Thanks,” he says, as I zip open my bag and rummage through it. “I haven’t had anything to eat all day, and I can’t go to the mess hall until I find a job, so – hey, what—”

  His words turn into a horrific, bubbling scream. I jerk my head uprig
ht just in time to see a flash of metal at his throat, followed by a dark spurt of blood. I bolt to my feet just as the figure behind the tagger shoves him to the side.

  I react on instinct, leaning backwards just as the knife flashes out at me. I get a half-second look at my attacker’s face – it’s Darnell’s guard, the one who let me into the control room. What the hell?

  He slashes at me again, and I manage to grab his arm, just below the elbow. The tip of the knife nicks my neck, and I hiss in pain. The guard twists away, laughing, then attacks again, driving me back down the corridor. Behind us, the tagger’s body twitches as he bleeds out.

  I turn to run – there’s no way this guy can beat me in a straight sprint. But I barely manage two steps before he grabs the back of my jacket. For a second, it’s like we’re locked in an insane dance. I’m bending over backwards, leaning into his body. He’s dropping his shoulder towards me, the blade close behind it.

  I twist to the side, ripping free of his grip, only just managing to stay on my feet. He laughs again. Little needles of terror are shooting through me, but there’s something underneath it too: anger. I delivered the cargo clean. I finished the damn job. And now Darnell wants me gone? Like I’m a loose end that needs to be snipped off?

  No way. Not today.

  The guard reaches out for me. He’s a good fighter, and fast, but he’s easy to read. He wants to pull me in and drive the knife into my belly. So instead of leaning back, like he expects me to, I drop, swinging my right leg in a wide arc.

  He spots the move, dodges back, but not before the edge of my shoe clips his ankle. It’s just enough. He stumbles, tries to stay upright, then crashes to the ground. His right foot hits the ground, bounces up, comes to a rest on the power box where the wall meets the floor.