The Android and the Thief

by Wendy Rathbone

  Once in the hall, they moved quickly. Trev didn’t have time to wonder or even think. All he could do was stumble along; their hands pushed and pulled him along the corridor.

  He was more afraid than he ever had been in his life. But not for himself. For Khim. Trev knew he would survive this. But Khim—Khim was in mortal danger.

  They went down the hall and through several sets of doors. Farther into shadow. Into the unknown.

  I might never see Khim again.

  THEY PASSED a series of small doors ranged very close together. Trev stumbled several more times. He heard no sound coming from this place. Only emptiness. Only silence. A stale scent filled his nostrils.

  He had a sentry on either side of him, a human guard in front, and a human guard following close behind. They stopped in front of one of the little doors.

  The guard in front of him said, “Clothes.”

  “What?” Trev looked at the guard’s no-nonsense face, chiseled, dark, firm.

  “Remove all clothing.”

  “All of it?”

  “All clothes. Now!”

  Trev began to disrobe. When he got down to his shorts, he asked, “Shorts too?”

  “All clothes.”

  Trev had let his clothes fall to the floor in a pile. The shorts soon followed.

  One of the sentries bent and held a wand to the door. A series of lights flashed violet, amber, pink. The door sprung open.

  “Get in,” the guard who’d opened the door said.

  The door was maybe five feet high. Trev had to duck low to walk through it. On the other side, an abrupt darkness came up so swiftly and fiercely around him that he lost his balance and fell. His knees hit the hard floor. Then the stars came out.

  All around him, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, was blackness pricked by millions of stars. The entire room was one small transparent cube.

  The door slammed behind him. He heard the buzz of the lock. On his hands and knees, naked and completely exposed, Trev could only gasp.

  He became immediately disoriented and nauseated. Was there even a toilet?

  Trying to clear his mind, he glanced about and saw a low square off in one corner. He crawled over to investigate.

  The toilet was no more than a box with a darkness deep inside, but if he had to throw up, it was right there. Beside that box was an indentation in the clear floor, and sticking out, as if from black nothingness, was a spigot. When he ran his hand under it, water flowed.

  That was it for the niceties. He had no bed, no towel, no toilet paper that he could find, nothing. He drew his legs up, closed his eyes, and huddled against the wall the spigot came out of.

  The air felt cold, but not too cold—just enough to be uncomfortable.

  Trev rested his head against his knees. So, he thought to himself. Solitary is like falling through the stars.

  He wondered how many days he would be here.

  He began to cry.

  Chapter Eighteen

  KHIM SAW blue salt flats. Astral-flecked skies. Starships that looked like the very stars were lashed to their hulls. Constellations cupped in the leftover bowls of ruined planets.

  Fires soared and died in space. On the surfaces of alien worlds, the sounds of the pulse beams and the laser shards and the phase bullets always sounded the same in any atmosphere. Like death.

  Sometimes he thought he’d never stop smelling the burned ozone of the wars.

  The man in the red guard’s suit was asking him a question.

  Khim came out of his daydream long enough to say, “I don’t know.”

  They had asked him many questions. Why he and Trev were in the plaza. Why they had both been gone for short intervals.

  He had answered, “For the dinner lineup” and “Maybe a camera malfunction.”

  They were not satisfied. They asked him how his shirt got torn.

  “Caught on one of the weights in Weight Room One earlier in the day.”

  But he had been caught in a lie. They could see the shirt was not torn when the cameras had spied him going into Weight Room Two just before lockdown. And after he showed up on the camera feeds in the plaza, standing next to Trev, his shirt appeared clearly torn.

  Did he have an explanation for that?

  “I don’t,” he said.

  War was an art. He knew what to do if caught by the enemy, questioned. He knew how to evade. He could withstand torture, on command, and had been conditioned to do so. He’d never questioned that conditioning. Until he was sold.

  Now everything was different. Now there were new rules.

  He did not notice when they stopped talking to him, but he felt the sharp sentry hands on him pulling him up, pushing him out the door. Things weren’t right. He wasn’t seeing right. He wasn’t hearing right.

  They took him farther into a maze of corridors, somewhere far along one of the arms of the prison space station, away from the hub.

  They came to a hall with dozens of small doors. They stopped in front of one door. A human guard in blue ordered him to strip.

  He complied, tossing his clothing toward the hard floor. A sentry unlocked the short door with a series of light flickers and shoved Khim through.

  He stood, breathing hard, blind at first, seeing nothing.

  Then the stars came out.

  He took a deep breath, let it slowly move through his lungs. Solitary was a room nestled in the darkness between the stars. For a spaceman soldier like Khim, it was stunningly beautiful.

  For the first time since his arrival at Steering Star, he felt utterly safe.

  KHIM LAY flat on the clear floor, looking down, down into the depths of space. The way the stars and all that blackness spun into his brain was a comfort to him.

  To the side, dangling like a jewel made of sapphire and foam, spun the blue orb of Gideon.

  Perhaps he was insane to think this was not torture, not punishment at all. He didn’t care. He knew he was broken. And he probably did not have very much longer to live.

  He counted the days by the meals. After three were served, he knew another day had been completed. The food came in bland protein tubes, much like the sludge he’d first been fed as a newborn android in the vat rooms. Sometimes they had it in the battlefields. He was used to it.

  When he slept, he did not know if he slept hours or minutes. When he got bored, he did push-ups, sit-ups, or paced his way back and forth in the tiny room across the stars.

  Often he thought of Trev and wondered if he was in a room like this. Sensory deprivation of this sort did not bother Khim, but he suspected Trev might not react well to it. He allowed himself to worry about him only because it was Khim’s fault they were here. Khim had made an untrained, rash, aggressive decision. It had resulted in casualties. Trev was one. The only one he felt badly about. After everything, he could no longer hate the guy just for being a Damico.

  His memories returned often to battles he had fought and won, to images of old ships burning from within and atmospheres turning pink on destroyed planets.

  But he continued to think a lot about Trev too, for there was little else to occupy his mind, and memories of war often ended up looking all the same.

  It was interesting that he could allow himself to worry about Trev. He’d never worried about anyone before. What conditioning Khim had left after the House of Xavier ordeal responded to something in Trev. It was not just the Damico name, although that did contribute somewhat. It was something more, something he felt beyond their deal. The deal had been made to help him survive, keep the other inmates at bay.

  But he hadn’t expected how easy it would be to follow Trev’s lead, to listen to him, to respond to his voice. And he had not considered the fact that Trev was just so likable.

  Trev, it seemed, took their deal quite seriously. After Khim had run out of the cell, Trev did not have to follow.

  The deal had been for Trev to keep others away, not to protect Khim from himself. But Trev took it all the way, every day, speaking softly t
o Khim when he didn’t have to, his voice soothing, asking if he was all right or breaking through Khim’s tensions by saying two simple words: “It’s okay.”

  When that happened, Khim felt places open up inside him that he had rarely, if ever, accessed before, not even when he read stories or watched holomovies. Areas of his mind that had seemed once removed now swung wide their gates—hope at the memory of the dawning of a full alien moon, images of a real home where a fire burned and trees whispered in the night. He dreamed of one day putting himself to some task that did not involve duty, weapons, killing. Might he ever paint a picture or write a warrior poem?

  It both scared and intrigued him.

  When he’d had thoughts like these in the past, they’d touched him only briefly, as remote as a wisp of alien pollen on wind.

  Now, whenever he looked at Trev, the oddness of hope, possibility, and comfort swept through him.

  He was perhaps days away from certain death. To have these feelings probably made him the most ridiculous android in existence.

  He shifted his weight on the floor to stretch his muscles, turning onto his back. Stars above, stars below.

  Maybe this was a tiny introduction into what death would be. If so, he would welcome it. He would miss nothing of his life.

  Except, maybe, the quickness of Trev’s smile.

  He lay back, allowed his lips to curve up, and fell asleep.

  THEY CAME for Khim on what he had counted as the third day. The short door in the corner, where blackness met a dimmer blackness, opened. Piercing white light shone through, momentarily blinding him, stinging his eyes.

  A voice ordered, “Come out!”

  Khim stood unsteadily and made his way to the door. He felt grimy, though the room was dust free. He felt desperately threatened by the light.

  As he ducked his head to get through the archway, a metal hand grasped his forearm and pulled him through.

  Two human guards and two sentries stood outside the solitary cell and faced him.

  One human held out a pile of clothing. “Dress,” he ordered.

  Eyes still stinging from the light, Khim took the clothes. He climbed into a pair of pants that were too tight and too short. The shirt also barely fit him. He said, “These are too small.”

  The guard said, “You can walk to the showers naked if you prefer.”

  Pleasure trickled through him at the thought of warm water. He said, “No. I’m fine.”

  The showers were empty as the guards and Khim entered together. Khim could not tell if it was late morning or late afternoon. Or it could have been mealtime and they’d brought him to shower while all the other inmates were eating.

  The sentries went to the door. The two human guards stood to the side of the stall, looking bored as Khim stripped again, put his clothes on a bench, and showered.

  Khim did not have his own soap or shampoo, but he found a dispenser in the shower and used it.

  The water fell about him like a warm cape. It wakened him. He stretched muscles he hadn’t felt in a long time. His mind numbed out, and he remembered a soothing moment, standing outside a waiting transport after a long, exhausting battle, caught in a hot rainstorm. By the time he’d boarded the vessel, all the blood on his armor had been washed clean. He was brand-new again, like coming from the birthing vats. All ready for his next mission.

  Now he stood under the spray long after he’d rinsed off.

  He heard one of the guards step forward, boot on tile. “Out! Now!”

  Khim stepped away, and the spray of warmth ceased. He found a fresh towel by his clothes and used it. Then he got back into the tight garments as quickly as he could.

  He followed the guards into the entryway, thinking they would take him back to the narrow hall, the short door, the star room that was solitary.

  Instead they escorted him, hair still dripping, into the plaza and up the metal stairs to the second level. They stopped in front of his and Trev’s cell. The force field was on. A sentry unlocked it, and a human guard motioned Khim inside.

  Trev was already there, barefoot and disheveled, struggling with his mattress, which was halfway over the edge of the top bunk, nearly fallen to the floor.

  Khim heard the force field hum to life behind him and the sentries’ footsteps clanging on the deck.

  He surveyed the cell. It was a complete mess.

  His mattress lay in a corner by the toilet. All their toiletries were scattered about the floor, some under Khim’s lower bunk. Their towels and washcloths lay in a pile near the sink.

  Without even thinking, Khim moved beside Trev, put his metal hand under the mattress, and lifted effortlessly, pushing it up onto the bunk.

  Trev turned to look at him. “Thanks.”

  Dark hair tangled on the high forehead. Soft, honey-brown eyes. Khim’s heart skipped. He’d missed those eyes. He realized he really had believed he might never see Trev again. “When did you get back?” he asked.

  “Only a few minutes ago,” Trev answered. His voice came out hoarse. His face was drained of health, almost a pale gold.

  “What happened?”

  “They searched our cell while we were gone.”

  “For what?” He remembered the remote as soon as he asked the question. “Oh.”

  Trev turned to pick up his pillow. “They didn’t find anything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “If they did, we wouldn’t both be here now.”

  Khim nodded, watching Trev pick up piles of sheets, untangling his from Khim’s. “You hid it, then.”

  Trev nodded, dropped the sheets, and went to the sink, looking around. Finally he stooped and picked up a bar of soap. He threw it at Khim.

  Khim caught it easily, looking it over carefully. He saw a dent in one side. The soap wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t soft either. He peered at the dent and saw it was a rift that went all the way through the middle of the bar. Something dark lay inside. “It’s in here. That was smart.”

  “I didn’t know where else to put it. I cut myself getting it in there.”

  Khim put the soap on the edge of the sink. He began to help Trev straighten their belongings, make the beds. Trev’s hands were unsteady.

  “How did you fare these past days?” Khim asked hesitantly.

  Trev did not look at him. “I was sick the whole time.”

  Khim’s spirit was raw, open. As if he continued to float among the stars. “I would not have willingly involved you,” he began.

  “But I am involved.” Trev was frowning, his eyes glittery as he turned. He looked Khim up and down.

  Khim froze, waiting for Trev to unleash some kind of fury, although Trev was not the type to hold grudges, let alone fury toward others. He watched as Trev’s face contorted, twisted a little. But what came from his mouth was a laugh that grew.

  Trev caught his breath and said, “They gave you the wrong size of clothes. Those barely cover… anything.”

  Khim looked down. His legs were bare almost to the knee. The shirt was so small it was like a crop top, revealing his tight, flat abdomen. His drawstring pants weren’t even tied. There was no extra string left to pull through the holes.

  “Idiots,” Trev muttered, turning away again. “How could anyone forget they put a giant in solitary?”

  Even in this horrible place, in the dark pit of his broken conditioning, Khim wanted to smile. No one had ever spoken to him that way. No one had ever cared to.

  But his mind was drawn back to what Trev had said before that. I was sick the whole time. Trev looked exhausted. Khim had no idea when the sentries would let them out of their cell, so he hurried to finish sorting everything and completed making the beds.

  Trev watched him, eyelids heavy. “Thanks,” he said when Khim finished.

  “A mattress and a warm blanket. Then food, perhaps?” Khim said. It was all he had to offer by way of medical treatment.

  Trev did not leap up to his bunk as usual. He climbed slowly up the end, crawling under his co
vers. “I don’t even know what time it is.” He yawned.

  “Me either. I didn’t get a look at the plaza clock on the way back.”

  Trev turned on his side, facing the wall.

  Khim said, “I won’t let you miss dinner. Hopefully something other than gray sludge tonight.”

  Trev made a little disgusted sound and pulled the blanket tighter about his neck.

  Khim sat on his own bunk and stared at the bar of soap on the sink, considering his options.

  Chapter Nineteen

  TREV NEVER wanted to go back to solitary again. Sure, everyone liked stargazing, but floating among waves of suns as if being continually drawn down into the throat of night made him miserably seasick. He figured that was intentional in the design. Solitary was not supposed to be fun.

  He woke in a fog to Khim’s touch gentle on his shoulder. “Do you want to eat?” came the golden voice.

  He rolled to the side. Khim’s hand did not snatch away as he’d expected. It went with him, only drawing back a few seconds later. He could not remember Khim initiating touch of any kind before.

  “Okay.” He pushed his way out of the covers and jumped to the floor, looking for his shoes.

  When he glanced up, he saw that Khim had normal-fitting attire again. “What happened to your summertime clothes?”

  Khim said, “A sentry came by with these. Surprisingly the correct size. They also brought shoes for both of us. Also the correct size.”

  “They’re robots. They shouldn’t make mistakes. All that info is in our records.”

  Khim stood by as Trev sat on the edge of the lower bunk and put on his shoes.

  At that moment, Jay walked by. “Hey, you guys are back!”

  Trev glanced up, stomach muscles tightening. He watched Khim for a reaction.

  Jay said, “Did you hear what happened?” Trev and Khim just looked at him. “You’ve been gone, so I’ll tell ya. Those guys, you know, from the showers—uh, they’re dead. They’re saying they all got into some brawl in one of the weight rooms. That gang, Deb’s gang, turned on some of their own.”