Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  Enough. “Because you plan to—what? Use him against me somehow?”

  Now Lukacs is the only one smiling. “Of course. The moment I knew you’d do this thing in order to save his life, the better the odds for success if he’s in the picture. Isn’t that so? And how do you feel about that, Mr. Finch?”

  Finch says, “I think you can guess,” in the sort of tone you take right before you kill someone. Maybe he’s this brave because I’m sitting right here, or maybe he really is so angry it provides a kind of focus.

  Lukacs finishes his beer. “Yes, I probably could.” He looks at me, expectant, as the blond agent rises from his seat.

  So I have to slide out so Lukacs can get to his feet. I only edge away far enough to give him wiggle room, and our bodies brush as he passes.

  “Thank you,” he says, with studied politeness. “Thank you for making this so easy.” Just to me, while his eyes cut to Finch like an edge of paper on soft flesh.

  This is what happens, I can almost hear him think, when you allow yourself to be compromised. Or maybe it’s just my own voice, louder than memory.

  I sit back down after they leave the pub.

  Finch says, “What now?” Showing discomfort in the way both his hands lie flat on the table, fingers digging slightly.

  I pick up my glass and look down into its white depths before taking a sip. “You can do what you want, but I’m finishing this drink.”

  Oh-three-fifty in my blueshift and someone knocks on our door. I’m up and off the bed before Finch even rolls over and calls up the lights to a comfortable 30 percent.

  Rika, finally, geisha sister once upon a time and the Elder Sister of Kublai Khan’s Hanamachi. Of course Taja wouldn’t come herself, but I’m surprised she sent someone that I actually trust. Or had trusted. Or maybe she knew I wouldn’t go quietly at gunpoint.

  For a second I wonder if Rika will shoot me.

  But she just says, “Hey, brother,” in her naturally hoarse voice. As if it hasn’t been months. “What idiot let you out?”

  I’m not ashamed, suddenly, to grab her into a tight hug while I hear Finch climb out of the bed behind me.

  “Oh, what’s this?” she says.

  I feel her hand leave my shoulder and drop to her waist, where her gun’s hidden. I hold her wrist.

  “He’s mine, don’t shoot him. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I sit in the copilot seat with Finch behind me at the artillery controls while Rika pilots the outrider, part of her training. It’s a little shuttle registered to my ship whose skin ID is Orlando. But seeing Rika again, I think of nothing but the Khan. Both of them. The one that’s dead, Falcone’s, and the one I’m going back to—mine. I haven’t been back to mine in…

  “Been like a year,” Rika says. “Bastard.”

  That long.

  “What the hell were you doing?” An old anger pushes to the surface of her eyes. “How the hell did you get cuffed by Azarcon?”

  Do I go into my catalogue of mistakes, missteps, and misconceptions? No. I’m her captain, and better she thinks for as long as she can that I was maybe outwitted instead of simply out of joint. She can’t know my dislocation from the moment Falcone died. From before that, in corners that the geisha weren’t supposed to reveal.

  “Azarcon caught up to me.” I stare at her. The hard veneer of bitterness. No I don’t want to talk about the fact he’s a better captain than me. “What’d Taja say?”

  Her response is delayed because she’s trying to chip at my shell. See if I’m soft inside. But her tools aren’t sharp enough, and eventually she shrugs a bit, leaves it alone, whatever she thinks of me and my absence. “Taja said to come get you.” Rika pokes at the system display, swirling her finger around to elicit some information for the ride. She said we’ve got two leaps to go through before we can get to the sinkhole where Kublai Khan waits. “The bitch hasn’t told me if she wants to kill you or not, but there’s folks on board who’d kill her if she left you adrift.”

  “Good to know. I’ll need your help with that.”

  Her glance pins me, but I don’t elaborate. Not yet. So she jerks her chin back at Finch. “Who the hell is he?”

  “Cellmate.”

  Her eyebrow lifts.

  “Not like that. I’ll tell you later.” I have no intention of explaining Finch in detail to anyone, but Rika, my Elder Sister, she at least deserves to know something. But not while Finch is behind us listening.

  “He’s cute,” she says. “Maybe he’ll dance for us? With a fan?”

  “You’d have better luck trying to blow up Macedon buck naked. He’s feisty.”

  Finch mutters something incoherent, but I don’t ask what.

  “You know this exclusively, do you?” Her grin is familiar.

  “Speaking of Macedon…”

  She leans back, on autopilot, and props her foot up on the seat, rocking it back a little and gazing out the cockpit at motionless space. “Behind the DMZ still. Sleeping with the strits. Every once in a while that Azarcon kid stirs up the meedees with some political criticism, but nothin’ from Azarcon Sr. at all. I bet the govies’re worried.”

  Falcone used to go under the radar sometimes too and come out a dragon. Govies got to think that the captain’s plotting. President Damiani and her terrorist connections at the very least must be getting very little sleep.

  “The sanctioned carriers still on our asses?” I don’t want to talk about Azarcon too deeply with Rika since she has no idea I tried to get on his ship. Twice. Both mistakes, but she wouldn’t split hairs that finely.

  “Archangel’s the worst.” Macedon’s sister ship, whose jets’ reputations are only upstaged by Azarcon’s. They run joint exercises sometimes and I saw the cross-pollination from the vantage of both brigs, less than a year ago. Their crews are close, know each other by name, and sometimes jump from one or the other ship if deep relationships form. Rare but not unheard of, and when Macedon handed me over, the abuse was much the same.

  Falcone knew carriers.

  Rika lights a cigret that she pulls from her pant leg pocket and blows smoke in disdain. “Archangel’s basically taken up the slack in the Dragons.”

  No surprise there. “And how’s my ship.”

  She’s silent for a second. It makes the hair on my arms crawl. A new captain and she obviously feels some loyalty—or fear—toward Taja.

  But it’s only a second, and she says, “Taja isn’t as convincing as you were with the clients. And whatever charm she had with Marcus doesn’t work on Cal.”

  So everything Lukacs said was true. My ship’s hurting because Taja doesn’t know her shit. Or the shit she offers nobody wants. It’s a backward sort of compliment to me, I guess, although it points more to the fact of the backstabbing nature of this business if the benefits are right.

  I lean over and take the cig from her fingers, just for a drag, that’s all I want right now, then hand it back. “What’s Cal been up to.”

  Rika smiles without humor. “Stealing your contacts and reorganizing the trade.”

  Not surprising in the least. He’s had his eye on it for decades. Which only means he won’t be that happy to know I’m out.

  “And I’m curious,” she says. “How did you get free?”

  “The same way Marcus did, in his time. Some of those cats remember who scratched their backs.” I say it because it’s simplest, and even though we shared a Hanamachi I was always a protégé first.

  3.10.2198 EHSD—The Blood

  A week and a half later Kublai Khan guides us into bay two with winking red lights. I’m groggy from the last leap, which was deep, Finch is nearly still unconscious in his seat, but Rika’s stimmed on rapid infeed and floats us easily to the grappling marks. As soon as we hear the clamps secure on either side of the shuttle she powers down and turns to us. “Home.”

  The ramp grates open behind us, and she edges by me. I stand and follow, feeling for the gun in my backwaist, snagging Finch’s arm on the
way. He’s not steady on his feet.

  But it doesn’t matter. Taja’s sent an escort—five men with rifles. They meet us there as we hit deck, and Rika glances at me in apology. No apologies, really. It’s expected.

  Taja’s there herself, her hair pulled back from her face, emphasizing her cheeks and the dark cant of her eyes. Her features pinch and seem to fix like that, the mark of stress.

  “You look like shit,” I tell her, fully aware that it’s mutual. But I’m not going to pretend that I’m glad to see her.

  She says, “You should’ve stayed gone, Yuri.” Her eyes cut across my shoulder. “At least you brought a friend.”

  He’s leverage for her too, unless she thinks he’s here just as extra muscle. I don’t look at him.

  She motions one of the men forward. Tall, with a blond half-hawk haircut. I don’t recognize him, which means it’s someone she recruited in my absence. Someone who doesn’t know me or care. He pats me down roughly and confiscates the gun and my fake ID and even my cigrets, which I glare at him for, but he’s paid and dispassionate and doesn’t crack an expression. Then he does the same to Finch.

  And Taja says, “You know where you’re going, don’t you?”

  The walk through my own ship, under guard, is both tense and humiliating. Some of the crew stare in disdain, others turn their eyes away because the gun pointed at my back is embarrassing for them too. I’m someone they supported, and maybe if Taja sees them react any other way, their names will go on the list all pirate captains keep about their crews. A few look with anger, but not at me. Those I take note of in particular. Loyalty can be used.

  My Khan looks the same, though it’s been a year removed. It’s a Komodo-class merchant like its bloodmother, outfitted with the same grade of weaponry as Falcone had. The familiar glow of the lights along the spine of the corridor make the shadows in the corners come alive, little black dancers at the edges of my sight. Our footsteps echo on the deck grille.

  All the way to the brig. Imprisonment is a lifestyle.

  She makes us stew in silence and blinding overhead lights. One cell for the both of us, frigid and bare with nothing but a crooked bunk, a dirty toilet, and a sink that spills only ice water. Looks familiar, I tell Finch.

  “Shite,” he says, with his hands tucked into his armpits.

  “This place’s got optics,” I mutter, before he starts cursing Lukacs aloud.

  “It’s your ship? I figured.” He sits on the bunk with his arms against his stomach. He’s holding up well, but a long stay in a pirate brig will kick that down soon enough.

  “Well.” I sit beside him with my back to the cold wall and my legs over the edge of the bunk. “At least we won’t die of suspense. Likely she’ll just starve us with neglect.”

  “Didn’t you know this was going to happen?”

  “Pretty much. But what am I going to do about it? Nothing I can do if she doesn’t come down here. She’s just being a bitch.” I hope the optics pick that up.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “But. She might also see the benefit of keeping me alive.” That for the optics too. Then I poke his back with one foot. “There’s only one bunk here. Are you going to be freaky about it?”

  Why in my own distress do I persecute him, even mildly. Maybe because I like it when he retaliates.

  His eyes slice to me, black blades. “No, I won’t be freaky. You’re gonna sleep on the floor.”

  I don’t sleep, as it turns out, so I give him the bunk and just sit against it with my arms around my knees, listening to him breathe behind me. Now that he’s in it maybe it would’ve been kinder to leave him back in the prison to deal with things alone. Saddled with me here and on the radar of someone like Andreas Lukacs, he has less of a choice. It’s a prolonged death here.

  I know this. I count my own years backward to the beginning and all the times I slept like him, with interrupted breaths.

  The thoughts spin around, and I can’t turn and look at him, or shake him awake and demand he tell me everything, all of it, what’s in his head and why he never tried to kill me for what I did to him in the prison.

  Instead, just his silence. Protection with a price is just mutual prostitution, so maybe that’s why he can’t hate me enough to kill me.

  He sleeps, and I’m almost dozing when the brig hatch clangs open. I haul myself up and go to the bars, glancing back over my shoulder. Finch faces the wall in a tight curl, so far asleep after the stress of those leaps that he doesn’t hear a thing. So I lean against the bars and watch Taja approach on the other side.

  “Why are you still alive?” she says, meaning in the general sense.

  But I answer her in specifics. “Because you haven’t killed me yet.”

  “Right,” she says slowly, folding her arms and looking at me up and down. “And remind me why you’re not dead now. In my brig.”

  Her brig. What reason does she have to keep me alive?

  “Because you’ve fucked up my operation, and you need my help.”

  She snorts.

  “What’re our resources like, Taja. Our caches. When’s the last time you’ve met with a client and shook a deal?”

  “You lost the right to take that tone when you got your ass captured by Azarcon.”

  “Yeah, but look at me now, a boomerang. And you need me.”

  She doesn’t dance around that. She just looks at me.

  “I can help,” I tell her, flat out.

  “And take my ship?”

  “You know you’ve just been babysitting. By the way, where’s my bird?”

  She ignores that and gestures behind me. “Who is he? One of your playmates? A client? What?”

  “Lint.”

  “Handsome lint. Right up your—alley.”

  I grin at her the way animals do. “You know the crew will kill you before they allow you to run this ship aground.”

  She turns and walks out, slamming the hatch.

  Finch wakes up and rolls over. “Yuri?”

  Maybe he thinks I’ve been sleepwalking again.

  “Your watch now. I want the bed.” I turn to look at him. The light’s high bright, so it’s harder to get a true restful sleep. He squints at me. “Unless.” I move closer and look down at him. With the glow behind my head I know my face is shadowed. I touch his shoulder. “You want to cuddle with me.”

  That makes him move, and I laugh. It’s cruel, but my thoughts are on Taja and my ship when I lie down. The bunk is warm from his body and holds his scent. It helps me to fall asleep.

  When I wake up, minutes or hours later, he’s gone. My mind’s fuzzy from something more than sleep, and when I glance down the transparent shininess of a drug tape winks at me from my arm. They snuck in here and put me down so I didn’t hear them kidnap Finch.

  I rip it off and look up to the corners where I know the optics are embedded.

  “You bitch!”

  But of course nobody answers.

  She doesn’t waste food on me. Or soap. Or time. I don’t see or hear from anybody for maybe three days. Three full shifts. Impossible to tell. I think about gnawing at my own arm. I’m nauseous from the lack of eating, and I piss too much from just drinking water. The tap makes the water metallic and icy, and it sits in my gut like the cold ocean depths. My nails aren’t even sharp enough as I scratch at the healed cuts on my arms. Nothing from Finch, or Rika, or anyone else. Maybe there are guards outside the brig. I know somebody watches. I lie on the bunk, or stretch and pace, but mostly I just sit and concoct elaborate scenarios of murder. Andreas Lukacs. Taja Roshan. That nameless blond agent.

  All of them.

  The hatch opens, and it’s Finch. I’m too tired to roll off the bunk, and he approaches the door of the cage. He’s dressed in black. Not geisha black, but they aren’t the clothes he arrived in. He carries a tray of food and the aroma sinks its teeth into my gut and makes it open wide.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  He says, “On the ship.” Hesita
nt. Maybe because of the optics or maybe he just doesn’t want to tell me.

  “Get me out,” I tell him. Because I won’t be bought even with toast and eggs.

  “She will,” he says, in a quiet voice, and sets the tray edge in the delivery slot. “Here, take this.”

  “What’s in it?”

  He looks down. “Bread, tomatoes…”

  “What’s she been doing with you? Is there poison in there, drugs maybe? What the hell is going on?” I don’t care about the optics now. He looks far too well fed.

  “Yuri, take the food. I wrangled that out of her at least, and you need it.”

  So I get up and I take it and go back to the bunk. “What’s she been asking?” Because she would have asked something. Interrogation didn’t always come with beatings and intimidation.

  “About the prison, mostly.”

  I gaze at him as I eat, try not to gobble it all down and make myself sick. If it’s poisoned, at least I’ll die quicker than starving to death. “And?”

  “Not really anything else.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “She didn’t ask anything else, Yuri.”

  “That’s still bullshit, and if you’re playing me I swear I’ll kill you bare-handed if I ever get out of here.”

  His head tilts, and his eyes narrow. “I’m not playing you, dammit.”

  Paranoia comes easy when you’re alone. I set aside the food, full after a couple of bites, and approach the bars again, sliding my hands around the cold columns. “Finch.” What can I say that they won’t hear? It’s impossible. But I risk it anyway. “If you mean it, then at least try to check on my bird.”

  Now he looks at me as if I’m speaking gibberish. “Bird?”

  “Yeah, my bird. Dexter. Haven’t seen him in months, and he better be still alive. If you can find Rika, she’ll take you to him.” I stare at his eyes. “Rika sometimes took care of him when I was off ship.”

  I need to get to Rika somehow. I need to know who I can count on.

  His face is guarded. Or maybe just scared. “I’ll see what I can do.”