Tracer [Riley Hale 01]

by Boffard, Rob

  The corridor opens up into a larger one, with the cells on either side. There’s no overhead light in this corridor, but the cells are brightly lit. Each tiny room contains a single hard cot and a toilet, and the front of every cell is covered with thick, transparent plastic, nearly unbreakable, with two thin slits cut in it for food trays. Some are occupied, and the people in them are collapsed on their cots, shivering. It’s cold here; there’s no point diverting heat to the brig, and I pull my jacket closer around me. Walking next to me, Royo has gone silent.

  We stop at the last cell on the right. I follow Royo’s gaze, and see Oren Darnell. He’s seated on his cot, staring at the wall, seemingly unaware of our presence and looking as if he doesn’t feel the cold. He’s been given a thin, light-grey prison jumpsuit to wear.

  “You have two minutes,” says Royo, and at his voice, Darnell swings his huge head towards us. His eyes have lost none of their malice, and as he sees me, his face stretches in another awful grin.

  “Riley Hale,” he says quietly, his voice given an odd tang by the plastic.

  I’m careful to keep my expression neutral. “What did you mean when you said that the world was going to end?”

  Darnell points to Royo. “Why don’t you speak to him? He’s already asked me the exact same thing.”

  “And what did you say? Why is the world going to end?”

  He stands up quickly, his huge bulk rocketing off the bed, at the barrier in an instant. I take a step back.

  “Not the world,” he says. “Your world. The world will carry on as it always has.”

  Royo tries to pull me away. “Same shit. You don’t have to listen to this.”

  I shrug his hand off, and Darnell laughs. The control I worked so hard to keep vanishes. I slam a hand on the plastic. It shudders under my palm. “Tell me!”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he says. His voice is innocent, carefree, awful. He looks like a man whose destiny has finally revealed itself. “Why would I? It would spoil the fun. And there is going to be so much fun, you believe that.”

  “Kind of hard to do from inside the brig, don’t you think?”

  His eyes are wide, almost beseeching. “We locked ourselves away in this metal box so we could continue to exist, even when everything on the planet was telling us that we’d failed. That’s something we’re going to fix.”

  Without wanting to, I think of the tagger, the one Darnell’s guard murdered, the one who was spraying up messages for voluntary human extinction. I force the image away. That’s not what this is. This is something else entirely.

  Without another word, he turns and lies down on his bunk, facing the wall. I bang on the plastic again, yelling at him, but this time Royo’s hand on my shoulder is firm.

  “I told you you weren’t getting anything out of him,” mutters Royo, and he leads me away, back towards the gate. The other prisoners haven’t stirred. A cold dread has settled on my shoulders like a cloak.

  As we walk, I half expect to hear something from the cell at the end, perhaps even laughter, but there’s just the silence, and the echoing, rumbling movements of Outer Earth.

  22

  Prakesh

  Prakesh has to yell out Riley’s name a few times before the Nest trapdoor slides back and her face appears.

  “You wanna keep it down out there?” she says.

  He shrugs. “Wasn’t even sure you’d be home.”

  “Amira says I need to rest.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  Her face vanishes, then a ladder drops through the gap, hitting the floor with a clunk. Prakesh climbs up, clambering into the Nest entrance. The door to the Devil Dancers’ home is open, and Prakesh can see that Riley’s alone. Detritus from the party is still scattered across the floor, and he’s amused to see that some of it has found its way onto Carver’s workbench, as if ready to be turned into some new toy.

  “How’s it working out?” Riley says, striding back into the Nest. “How do you think? Amira told me no jobs, no running, no anything.”

  “She’s right,” Prakesh says. Under the Nest lights, he can still see the bruised halo around Riley’s eye. She’s tried to hide it with her hair, pulling some of her fringe across, but it’s not quite enough to cover the bruise. It gives her a faintly lopsided look.

  “Doesn’t matter if she’s right,” Riley says, turning away. “I’m bored out of my mind.”

  She sits on the floor and folds her legs under her. Taking a pack of frayed cards out of her jacket pocket, she spreads them across the metal plating.

  Prakesh sits down opposite her. “What are we playing?”

  “Acey-deucy?”

  “Sure.”

  They play in silence for a while. Prakesh is good at the game – something that Riley always forgets. His family grew up playing it, and he was throwing down twos from an early age. He wins the first few sets easily. Riley is reckless, too quick to throw down a challenge. Her eyes are fixed intently on the cards in front of her.

  For once, Prakesh is relieved to be away from the Air Lab. Oren Darnell might have been corrupt, but at least he kept some sort of control. Now that he’s gone, some of the techs have already begun pushing for the top spot. Prakesh isn’t one of them, but it’s made getting things done difficult. He’d never dare mention this to Riley – she’s been through enough.

  After she loses the third set, Riley throws down her cards in disgust. “Cheater.”

  “I don’t cheat. I’m just that good.” Prakesh fans his cards.

  She lifts up a king of hearts. “See this card? I will stuff it down your throat, Prakesh Kumar.”

  “Only you would treat a playing card like a weapon.”

  “It is when I’m holding it,” she says.

  He can’t help but smile. “Death by card.”

  She lifts the card like she’s about to throw it. “Right between the eyes.”

  “You could roll one up. Turn it into a blowgun.”

  “Sharpen up the edges.”

  Now they’re both laughing – the kind of laughter you try to hold in but which sneaks out anyway. Riley clears her throat, still grinning, and looks away.

  The words are out of Prakesh before he can stop them. “You should come stay with me, up in Gardens. It’d be a break from—”

  “From what?”

  Riley is looking at him expectantly, and suddenly Prakesh isn’t sure what he was going to say.

  He shuffles his cards absently. “From everything.”

  They’re silent for a moment. Then Riley says, “Did you ever hear about Amira’s girlfriend?”

  He looks up, confused. “What?”

  “Amira’s girlfriend.”

  “Amira the ice-queen has a girlfriend?”

  “Had. Shut up and listen. She worked in a hospital up in New Germany. Even came by the Nest a couple of times. She was all right.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Amira went to visit her a lot, too, but she wasn’t there often enough. She’d be on a job, or back here, or doing gods know what. And after a while, her girlfriend asks Amira to choose. Her or us.”

  “I would never.”

  “You’d never what?”

  He sighs. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  For a moment, Riley seems about to pursue it. Instead, she quietly deals out another round.

  Prakesh wants to rage at her for being so cruel, for being so short-sighted. The business with Darnell was horrendous, but the one good thing he’d thought might come out of it would be he and Riley becoming closer. He still remembers when she hugged him, right after he woke up in Gray’s room, when there was light and noise everywhere and she was the only thing he recognised.

  He catches the anger before it can really take hold, consciously neutralising it. For a moment, he briefly wonders if he might not be suffering some sort of post-traumatic stress. It’s certainly possible, and he fixes on the idea, keeping it in the front of his mind. It
helps. He can feel the anger settling, like ripples in a cup of water, finally fading away.

  But the effort has rattled him; he loses the next two games, his usual strategies falling apart. Riley is smirking. She’s got the cards up to her face, hiding her mouth, flashing eyes peeking over them. “You might be good, ’Kesh, but I’m better,” she says.

  Something about the way she says it brings the anger back. Very carefully, he puts his cards down on the floor, face-up, then gets to his feet. “I gotta go.”

  Riley looks at the cards. “You had double deuce. You don’t want to finish the hand, at least?”

  “I gotta go,” he says again. It’s about all he can say, like any other words will mutate into something he’ll regret.

  Riley jumps up too. “’Kesh, come on, I was just playing. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  She reaches out to him, and for the first time, he doesn’t want her anywhere near him. He pushes his way out, sits with his legs dangling out the trapdoor. The ladder is there, but he feels the need to drop. To let the shockwave from the landing travel through him.

  “Don’t be like this,” Riley says. She’s standing in the doorway, arms folded. The look of contrition has left her face. Now she just looks resigned. Like this fight was inevitable.

  A burst of air pretending to be a laugh escapes Prakesh. He could say a million things right now, about choice, about him, about her. But he doesn’t. He just pushes himself off the edge, and then he’s gone.

  23

  Darnell

  Darnell’s clothes have been taken away from him. So has his knife, and his remaining vials of quicksleep. By now, his office will have been searched, the eyeball found, logged, then incinerated. The thought of stompers moving around his beloved bonsai, touching it, is enough to bring the rage back.

  His hands clench involuntarily, knotting the blankets on the thin cot. The standard-issue prison jumpsuit is too short for him, barely reaching his wrists.

  He looks around the cell. Bare walls, a single bright light set deep into the ceiling. The fisheye lens of a camera, socketed next to it. The light is reflected in the plastic barrier at the front of the cell. The place smells the same as his family’s hab did, back in New Germany: antiseptic mingled with the sour tang of sweat.

  He remembers the hab well. His mother never left her bed. When she smiled, spit would leak out of the drooping, immobile side of her face.

  His father worked in the mining facilities, and most of his time at home was spent caring for his wife. He and Darnell cleaned her body, tried to feed her. Darnell hated both of them. There was never enough food, never enough water. And she got most of it.

  He doesn’t know where the bean plant came from, but he remembers it clearly: the plastic pot, the thick smell, the dark soil. He loved how its leaves hunted for the light, how its only purpose was to survive. It took so little, and gave so much back.

  Darnell was nine years old when his father died. An accident in the refinery. He was angry at first, angry at being left alone, but also strangely happy. It meant space for more plants. His garden grew, every spare inch of hab space stacked with pots and grow-boxes.

  Nobody came to check in on Darnell and his mother. Nobody needed to. Darnell did well in school – enjoyed it, even. Sometimes, the teachers would show them pictures of things that used to exist on Earth, like rainforests and botanical gardens. With fierce pride, he’d realised that he was growing some of the same plants: the flowers and vines and fruit. And with the pride came something else: anger. These plants sustained the whole planet. But the teachers kept saying that everything on Earth was gone, and Darnell couldn’t understand why.

  And no matter how many plants he filled the hab with, he could never get rid of the stench of his mother.

  He would bring home food for her from the mess. Instead of wasting away, her body had ballooned, spreading out across the surface of the cot. One night, he found himself staring at her, at the wobbling fat on her legs where the blanket had rucked up. The pale skin, the patch of drool on the pillow. He suddenly couldn’t believe how fat she’d become, how useless.

  “You’re too fat already,” Darnell says, the sound echoing around the cell. He hardly realises he’s speaking. “You don’t need any more food.”

  Darnell shakes his head, angry with himself for letting his memories get the better of him. It’s been happening more and more lately – they’ll come at odd times, and he finds himself lost in them before he even realises it’s happening.

  He tries to tell himself that his being locked in the cell doesn’t matter. That Outer Earth is finished no matter what he does. It doesn’t help. Instead, it just makes it worse. He wanted to spend the final days tearing the station apart, piece by rotten piece.

  It won’t make a single bit of difference to the outcome. That was set in play ages ago. But it isn’t fair. He can rant and rage all he wants, but no one will listen to him. Not from in here. And if he is tried before it happens, if he is found guilty and executed …

  “Prisoner Darnell.”

  Darnell looks up to see one of the brig guards standing behind the plastic barrier. He’s got a tray of food with him – Darnell’s lip curls as he remembers the fruit that he’d be eating if he was still in the Air Lab. He gestures to the guard to leave it. If there was no plastic barrier between them, he’d break the tray in half and jam the jagged edge into the guard’s face.

  “Got a message for you, Sir.”

  It’s the ‘Sir’ that makes Darnell look again. The guard’s face is familiar, somehow, but he can’t quite place it.

  Darnell stands and walks to the barrier, resting his forehead on it. The guard meets his eyes, doesn’t look away.

  “Prisoner Darnell, your trial has been scheduled for three days’ time,” the guard says, speaking loudly and slowly. “Your case is to be heard by the full council in a public hearing. If you wish to call witnesses in your defence, you must inform me of their names now. Do you have any questions?”

  As it happens, Darnell has plenty of questions, but he doesn’t get to ask them, because suddenly the guard says quietly, “Reach through and grab me.”

  Darnell stares at him.

  The guard flicks his eyes down towards the slot in the plastic, the slot holding the food tray with its load of grey slop. Darnell knocks the food tray aside, reaches through, snags the front of the guard’s jumpsuit. He yanks him forwards, slamming against the plastic with a dull bang. Somewhere, an alarm begins blaring, but the guard’s eyes show no fear. He speaks quickly and calmly.

  “I’ll be standing next to you during the trial,” the guard says. “When the time comes, follow me. Don’t ask questions, don’t hesitate. Everything is going as planned, Sir.”

  Darnell smiles, and the guard nods. Then he’s being pulled away by the other stompers, and the plastic barrier is whooshing open, and Darnell is being forced to the floor and stomper boots are being driven into his side and his stomach. But even through the pain, even though every kick feels like a red-hot rod being driven into him, Oren Darnell manages to keep smiling.

  24

  Riley

  It’s not long before Amira puts me back on the job. Not that I mind. The faster I run, the further I seem to leave the last few days behind. The pain in my collarbone and chest and eye socket dwindle and vanish, replaced by the everyday muscle aches of a tracer.

  They’ve scheduled Darnell’s trial for a few days’ time. That’s no surprise – with space at a premium, people don’t usually spend all that much time in the brig. They get them up in front of the sector leaders fast – if they’re guilty, it’s usually a harsh spell of hard labour, working to clean the corridors or helping to maintain the machinery inside the freezing path that leads to the Core. If what they’ve done is too serious for that, it’s the firing squad.

  His words keep coming back to me, and more than once I find myself brooding on what he said.

  The trial – and the likely outcome – give me ch
ills. They shouldn’t, but they do. They used to hold the trials in private, but after a while the clamour to hold them in public got too loud to ignore. Now, they’re a form of entertainment, something to keep people happy. Of course, there are plenty of people who don’t want it that way, but it’s not like anyone listens to them.

  When I wake on the day of the trial, the Nest is cold, resonating with the distant hum of the station. Kev is passed out at the workbench, sleeping on his arms, snoring delicately. Carver and Yao are nowhere to be seen. I pulled a blanket around me when I lay down, but I kicked it off during the night. It lies bundled and twisted at my feet, and cold shivers slither up my body.

  There’s a noise to my right, and I lift my head, eyes blurry with sleep. Amira is there, stretching, her back to me.

  I sit up, rubbing my eyes, and as I reach for a nearby canteen she speaks without turning around. “Got a job for you,” she says.

  “Another one?” I give off a yawn, so big that my jaw clicks.

  “That’s right,” says Amira. “I went down to the market to get us some work. Two jobs. I’ll take one, and since you’re up first, you can take the other.”

  “Sure.”

  “I need you to go to the sector hospital. Nurse at the market was looking for a tracer. Apparently they need something delivered to the hospital in New Germany. Catch and release job.”

  I nod, and move on to stretching my thighs, bending down into a lunge position. Amira reaches in her pack and tosses me something small and green – I catch it without fumbling, sleep failing to dull my reflexes. It’s an apple, smooth and perfect. I flash her a grateful smile. The apple is crisp, and so juicy I have to wipe my chin after I’m done.

  It’s right then that I remember something. “I used your move,” I say to Amira.

  She looks over her shoulder. “What?”

  “Your move. The pressure point.” I quickly tell her about how I took down one of the Lieren using the strike she taught me. As I tell the story, her face breaks into a huge smile.