The Android and the Thief

by Wendy Rathbone

  Still wet, Khim dragged on his pants and grabbed the rest of his stuff. He came out to stand by Trev. The problem was they would have to pass that stall to exit.

  The sentry at the door looked nonfunctional, and the laundry robot was outside, in the hall where it did the least amount of good.

  Trev followed Khim’s gaze to the frozen sentry. “What the fuck?”

  Khim said, “I have no clue.”

  “We can’t be here.”

  They moved quickly, but not before a man with a white towel around his waist hopped out of a stall and glared. One of Deb’s men. “Look, it’s Herc,” he cried out with a loud laugh. He looked half-crazed, maybe high, his reddish brown hair sticking up. “Deb says you have to do what humans tell you to do. Is it true?”

  Khim barely heard him. He only had eyes for the man in the stall bent over, held down by two others. All were naked. A sort of dizziness swept him, and he saw again the red in front of him, velvet and soft where they had pressed his face down to the couch as someone entered him from behind.

  He blinked. The shower was on in that stall, steamy wet air covering them. The two men standing were aroused. The third, bent over and bleeding, was not.

  Khim calculated that in under ten seconds he could probably take them all with his bare hands and maybe a little help from the bench if he could lift it high enough and crack it over their heads. “Stop,” he heard himself say. His voice was low. As if stuck in his throat. “Stop.” His body went into a posture of attack; he didn’t even think about it.

  He felt a hand on his bare arm. “Don’t.”

  It was Trev.

  Khim looked down to where Trev touched him, going livid. He yanked his arm away.

  Trev said it again. Calm, but commanding. “Don’t.”

  Khim backed away a step. A wave of submission surged over him at Trev’s tone. Would it be enough to stop him from attacking these men?

  “Damico.” One of the guys in the stall was another of Deb’s men. Deb was not there.

  Trev said, “Yes.”

  The men in the stall let the other man go. “Just having fun,” they said, coming out and grabbing their towels. They were rough-looking, both with small eyes and unappealing bodies. Nothing, Khim thought, like the posh men of the House of Xavier. It didn’t matter that this was a prison and that other place a silk-wrapped boudoir—they were all rapists.

  And he wanted to kill them.

  But the attackers were quickly gone, and Khim stood in his bare feet in the puddles of warm water while Trev went to the shaking man, still bent over in the stall, and said, “Are you badly hurt?”

  “No” came the low response.

  “What’s your name? I’ll call a guard.”

  The man stood, hunched into himself. “They call me Pig. But I’m Jay. And please don’t call any sentries or guards. It’ll just get me into more trouble with that gang.”

  Through narrowed eyes, Khim watched Trev help the man up. “He’s bleeding,” he stated without inflection. It was all over the tile, pink now as it mixed with the water going down the drain.

  “I’ll be fine,” Jay said, grabbing a towel.

  The tightness in Khim’s chest was not receding. He turned his head away, had the urge to go to his knees, bend over himself, let this place beat him to death. He raised both his hands to the sides of his head. He could feel his hair against the palm of his left hand. The right hand felt nothing.

  Trev said, “You need a doctor.”

  The man had his pants on now and was rapidly tying them. “No.”

  Khim moved to the door. The room was starting to spin. He lowered his hands.

  Trev was beside him, and Khim didn’t remember hearing him walk up.

  “Khim. Are you okay? We need to get you out of here. You can’t be a part of any altercations.”

  Khim nodded tightly, watching as Trev walked up to the frozen sentry. Steam smudged the silver surface of its face, chest plate, and arms.

  “Don’t touch it,” Khim said.

  “I built one of these when I was a kid.”

  “If you fix it, they might assume you broke it.”

  Jay came up behind them. He was smaller than Trev, young, blue-eyed, pale. He said, “They do something to its time mechanism. It’ll pop back to life in a minute.”

  “Let’s go,” Trev said.

  Khim followed him. Jay followed behind Khim.

  Khim walked as if nothing were wrong. As if the weight of the prison did not press in on his ten-year-old skin. As if seeing the naked victim on his knees with his blood going down the drain did not leave splinters in his eyes.

  Just over four days ago, there had been blood on a floor by a red velvet couch.

  He did not remember any time in his life, even in the worst of battles with his bunkmates dying around him, when he’d felt so stripped of the psychic armor he’d pulled around himself the day he’d been born.

  The plaza was too bright. Men lined up for breakfast, showered and clean and orderly.

  Khim did not feel the least bit hungry, but he followed Trev, trying to keep only that one focus. Concentrate on the slender gray form in front of him, with the swatch of dark hair on its head. Pretend nothing was out of the ordinary.

  The three of them got in the end of the breakfast line. Khim did not look for the culprits, but he would never forget their faces. He memorized faces well these days. It was becoming a habit.

  When they got their trays of food, Trev headed for an open table in the back. Kant and his men had already gone. No potential friends waved them to a table.

  Trev sat and scooted along the bench to make room for Khim.

  Khim moved too quickly and brushed against Trev as he seated himself. Shock zinged through his body and he huffed a swift breath, putting his hands on either side of his tray. Both of them were fists, one light, one dark.

  Trev turned to him as if nothing were wrong and whispered, “It’s okay. You don’t have to react to anything now. It’s just breakfast.”

  But it wasn’t okay. Right then there was so much hate in him. His glass wall, which surrounded his core self, was growing ever thinner. Khim did not know how he would survive it. Everywhere he turned there was an enemy.

  Jay sat across from them, pale hair hanging in his eyes, still damp. His look was turned inward, thin, unhealthy. But he kept forcing weird smiles.

  Khim could not look at him without seething. Maybe if the man had been stronger, none of this would have happened.

  A lightning bolt of pain centered in his chest at that thought.

  Khim began to eat, stabbing at eggs automatically, chewing, swallowing, not tasting.

  Trev looked a little put out, but took charge anyway, his eyes dull and disturbed. He said, “Jay, do you read?” Jay nodded. “What do you like?”

  Khim blotted them from his mind. He knew Trev was making small talk to calm the situation. He didn’t have to listen to it.

  Breakfast ended not a moment too soon.

  Standing in the plaza, Trev said, “Weight room?”

  Khim nodded. Physical exertion was one solution for burning off excess negative energy. He couldn’t wait to run on the track, speed on the cycle, pound the punching bag. He’d loved the exercise rooms on Doom in Shadow and had spent a lot of time in them.

  Jay tagged along without a word. Khim did his best to pretend he wasn’t there.

  After fifteen minutes at the weights, Khim stripped his shirt off and let the sweat sheen his skin. Already he was starting to feel better. The knot in his chest was untying. His stomach muscles relaxed.

  He did not talk to anyone, but he was aware of Trev’s presence close by at all times. And he was aware that Jay only fiddled with the machines and weights and other apparatus, and did little else. Lazy. Or listless.

  Sometime later, while he was on the cycle, someone said to him, “Hey, Herc.”

  He pretended not to hear and they went away.

  He kept expecting some repercussi
on from the shower scene. Maybe the attackers would come looking for them. Maybe there would be a random lockdown.

  Nothing happened.

  It took about three hours for Khim to feel almost fully relaxed. Oxygen reached the bottoms of his lungs again; he no longer wanted to kill everyone in sight.

  Before lunch, Trev and Khim went back to their cell to relax.

  Khim immediately lay down on his bottom bunk.

  Trev stood by the head of the bed for a few seconds as if undecided. Finally he said, “You all right?” They were the first words spoken between them in hours.

  Khim said, “Surviving,” then gave him the warrior thumbs-up.

  Trev smiled at that before he leaped onto the top bunk.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A WEEK later, Trev lay on the top bunk reading, while outside their cell the lights strobed. Another random lockdown. It might last half an hour or two hours. They never knew.

  Khim was reading on the bottom bunk.

  The lockdown had happened while they were in the media room. Trev checked out the book he’d been browsing, a novel about Earth kings in a medieval setting, not realizing how close to the final page he had been.

  He opened his eyes. “I’m finished. Now what will I do?”

  From below, Khim said, “What are you reading?”

  “A Consortium of Kings, from an author of twenty-second-century Earth.”

  Khim’s left hand reached up over the rim of his bed with an earbud clasped between two fingers.

  Trev took the bud and handed Khim his own. “I think you’ll like mine. It has horses.”

  “I’ve never seen a horse. I don’t know if you’ll like mine.”

  Trev inserted the bud and closed his eyes. The first sentence was about Marines storming a star base. The next sentence involved laser guns mounted on saucer ships.

  Khim chose volumes about war, battle, combat, or even sports fighting.

  Trev chose books of Earth literature, fantasy, poetry, memoirs, and twentieth-century science fiction.

  It did not surprise Trev that Khim was smart. When they had traded books a couple times before, Khim had seemed to enjoy Trev’s choices. He did not seem to mind pretty words on pages at all. But Khim still chose action and spy novels. Sometimes he chose poetry too, such as that of ancient samurai or Chinese poets from the time of Genghis Khan.

  The last time they’d traded books, Trev had been a little shocked to see lines on the page like:

  The Forbidden City, the nine-tiered palace, loomed in the dust

  From thousands of horses and chariots headed southwest.

  or

  And the wind, that has come a thousand miles,

  Beats at the Jade Pass battlements….

  Trev said, opening his eyes to rid himself of alien marines, “No poetry this time?”

  “Sorry,” he heard Khim mutter.

  “Well, I would think maybe a soldier with other things on his mind would be bored with poetry.”

  “In some old-Earth cultures it was required that a warrior learn to write poetry. The best warriors wrote the best poetry, needing to stay in touch with that which might ground them. Or perhaps otherwise go insane.”

  The response moved Trev greatly. “Maybe we should both read more of that stuff, then.” He grinned. It was nice to hear Khim talk, relaxed and content. A rare moment.

  He wanted to ask, badly, how Khim’s own experience related to that. Instead he bit his lower lip and kept quiet. Khim was too sensitive still, and they did not know each other well enough yet.

  When the lockdown ended, it was dinnertime and Jay was already waiting for them by their cell door. He must’ve run there as soon as the force fields came down.

  Trev noticed Khim withdraw again as the three of them walked together to the dinner line.

  Chapter Fourteen

  KHIM HAD not realized he could spend as much time reading as working out and enjoy both equally. When he read, he could escape the prison, both the physical one and the cage of his own thoughts.

  The moments he enjoyed the most were when he and Trev were alone together. Jay hung around far too often for his tastes.

  The random lockdowns happened at least every other day.

  Today another lockdown came early, just after lunch, and they’d been shut in their cell all afternoon.

  Restless, Khim had done some push-ups on the floor. He had been reading, but he’d gotten bored.

  Trev was napping but woke when he heard Khim moving around.

  Trev sat up, his dark hair falling over his forehead. His face was a little flushed despite his naturally tanned skin color; his eyes looked thickly glazed. “Still on lockdown?” he mumbled sleepily.

  “Yes.”

  They both glanced at the softly humming force field.

  Khim wondered if Trev knew how closely he sometimes watched him. Their deal was to stick together. Khim followed Trev’s lead without really thinking about it. Always a step or two behind. He had memorized the man’s gait, his stance, the way his body moved effortlessly across the floor as if his feet weren’t really touching the surface. It hadn’t been more than a few weeks now, and he knew which hairs at the nape of Trev’s neck curled and which ones were always straight. He knew exactly where the pullover prison-gray shirt wrinkled against Trev’s waist, the exact point where it clutched his hip, how sometimes it caught at the fabric of the cotton trousers and rode up against the curve of his backside.

  Now Trev pushed himself forward on the bunk, crossing his legs and leaning out a bit. “Hey.”

  Khim was already looking at him, so he wondered why Trev seemed to think he needed to call out to get his attention. He frowned.

  Trev said, “I got these as a gift from Jay. You know, for helping him out.”

  Khim took a deep breath, not wanting to see anything Jay had given Trev. One perk about lockdown—Jay was not there for a while.

  But Trev waved a deck of playing cards in his face. They were shaped like triangles, but they were regular, with four suits and the usual number of kings and queens. “You know how to play?”

  “Of course.” Khim stared at Trev’s deft hands as he shuffled them. “Gin. Rummy. Poker.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “We don’t have a table.”

  “Jump up. Sit on the end of my bunk,” Trev offered.

  Khim hesitated. It seemed, perhaps, a bit too familiar, too close. But he was so bored.

  He walked over to the end of the bunk’s frame and climbed up. They sat facing each other, knees bent, the cards between them.

  They each knew games the other did not, and they taught each other how to play them. They were both equally quick and won games fifty-fifty.

  Trev looked up at one point. “We’ve been at this for hours, and I didn’t even notice.”

  Khim felt his face relax into a rare smile. It had been quite a nice way to spend a day.

  But as soon as the force field came down, Jay was there again.

  Khim’s insides grew heavy with resentment. If only he could have gone to dinner alone with Trev in peace, it might’ve been one of his better days.

  Chapter Fifteen

  TREV WATCHED the tension in Khim come and go like flashes of lightning. One moment he’d be calm, the next all his muscles would go hard as if he were ready to explode.

  The men were all like that here at Steering Star. But while they faced solitary if they lost control, Khim faced death.

  Trev saw layers of emotion simmering in those dark blue eyes. He didn’t think Khim knew he showed it. But Trev saw, and watched.

  They were all broken here. An aggressive android, a wilting man named Jay. And Trev himself, still reeling from his father’s charismatic cruelties.

  The day after the rape in the shower, Jay had begun hanging out with Trev and Khim every day.

  Khim continued to ignore Jay. He never responded to his greetings or his furtive looks.

  Trev himself did not feel particular
ly strong or capable away from his old life and the things he loved, but now he found himself with two wayward young men following him around. It was because of his name, he knew. It couldn’t be anything else.

  He’d been alone, frightened, and confused when he’d agreed to Khim’s deal of the fake friendship. With Jay, he’d made no such deal. But he felt sorry for the guy and treated him with the respect any human being deserved.

  Khim obviously felt differently. Trev could sense a bitterness in him when every day Jay trailed along behind them to the exercise rooms and the entertainment rooms.

  For about a week, Khim kept hold of his self-control. He exercised, he read, and he remained uninterested in idle conversation. When he saw Deb and his gang, he did not acknowledge them.

  Jay, on the other hand, was a nervous talker. While Trev walked or lifted weights, Jay always engaged him. He liked to see what Trev was reading in the media rooms and would read the same thing. He would begin discussions about the books; he talked about the stories.

  Because Khim did not say much, Trev welcomed pretty much any discussion.

  Today, Jay was talking about a novel they’d both read. “I liked the vampire because he was cool and invincible, and he was forced to see the bigger world around him and all the lies.”

  “I liked that one too,” Trev said.

  They sat in the library alcove, sorting earbuds and gazing at the star field. It was quieter in this area than any other because the earbuds allowed inmates to watch movies individually, piped straight into their brains.

  When Jay started babbling, Khim got up and walked away. Trev watched him go to the movie section and look around. The golden light of Khim filled Trev’s eyes.

  “What’s up with him?” Jay asked. “I know he’s your cellmate, but he’s very rude.”

  Trev glanced away from Khim, realizing he’d been staring after him as if he cared. “Just like all of us,” he replied. “He’s been through a lot.”

  “I know he doesn’t like me.”

  “I don’t think it’s that,” Trev hedged.