Dexter’s shop bustled with Pervenio security officers. I counted at least four of them... alive. One clearly dead officer was slumped against the adjacent wall, blood oozing out of a gash in his forehead, and across from him was Dexter, sagging in his wheelchair. His throat was slit, and the knife that he kept hidden in his armrest glinted on the floor by his outstretched hand, the tip stained red.
“You, Ringer, this area is off limits!” a member of the security team shouted at me.
My gaze was ripped away from Dexter’s gruesome throat. Four new-gen pulse-rifles aimed at me. My hands shot into the air. I stuttered, but no words came out.
All four of Dexter’s henchmen were dead as well. Three lay behind the counter—messes of bloody, tangled limbs. The fourth was arranged similarly to the dead officer, but with the entire top of his head blown off. His limp body leaned against the room’s open hatch, and on it, I saw something that hadn’t been there earlier: An orange circle was painted on the metal face, so fresh that the point where the brushstroke had stopped still dripped.
“What are you doing here?” the officer questioned.
I bolted out of the room before any of them could grab me. “Get back here!”
I ran as fast as I could, tearing around corners so I’d be impossible to track. I didn’t look back to see if they were following, and I didn’t risk taking the central lift. A series of air ducts returned me to the same escape route underneath the farms that I’d used the day before.
SIX
I flung open the hatch into my hollow on Level B2 of the Darien Lowers and rushed in, checking at least three times that it was locked tight behind me. Once I was sure, I fell against it and ripped off my sanitary mask. Steam from my mouth hung on the frigid air as I released a breath that had seemingly been trapped in my lungs since I fled Dexter’s shop.
That unleashed a deluge of them, and I started to hyperventilate.
I’d seen death in the Lowers before—every Ringer had—but nothing like that. Whatever had happened, it was enough to drive Dexter to cut his own neck rather than be brought in; enough for his henchmen, depraved salt-sniffers, to give their lives as well.
I slid my hand into my pocket and withdrew my compromised hand-terminal. My fingers trembled too intensely to hold it steady. Dexter wouldn’t have let himself die just to get rid of me. He certainly wouldn’t to pull off a prank.
“Hello?” a voice hollered from outside of my hatch. “Anyone home?” Then there came a few knocks, the metal causing them to echo along the rock and ice walls of my hollow.
I was so startled that I threw the hand-terminal across the room onto my bed. Then I jumped up, nearly hitting my head on the low, craggy ceiling. I thought about staying silent, but not answering whoever it was would only make me seem guiltier.
I slowly turned to face the hatch. It was difficult to see what I looked like in the murky reflection on its oxidized metal surface, but I wiped my sweating brow and drew a few lungsful for good measure. I told myself that if Pervenio security had decided to come after me, they would’ve busted through themselves. When I was ready, I pushed the heavy hatch open just enough to peek outside.
“Oh, Kale, it’s just you,” an older Ringer named Benji Reigar said. His pale face was creased with wrinkles so shallow that they appeared sketched on by a pencil. Generations in low g had made my people appear younger than our Earther counterparts of the same age. “I saw someone run in here, but I couldn’t tell who it was.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and opened the hatch a little farther. Benji was just another Ringer from the Lowers like me. He’d been living alone in the hollow next to my mom’s since before I could remember.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought I forgot something.”
“Must’ve been important. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Benji leaned to the side to get a better look into my hollow. I moved with him to obstruct his view. He was a kind man, but he too often pretended like he was in charge of monitoring our little branch of the Lowers.
“I’m fine,” I replied. I patted my empty pocket. “Just my hand-terminal.”
He put on a wry grin and said, “Waiting to hear from someone, eh?”
“You could say that.”
“By Trass, to be young again,” he reminisced. “When are you gonna find someone serious for yourself, kid? A Ringer boy your age ought to have a girl to keep his head on straight.”
“I’m working on it.”
He laughed.
“Well, thanks for keeping an eye on things,” I said, not wanting to let him elongate the conversation like he tended to. “I better be getting to bed. Got work early.” I went to close the hatch, but he blocked it with his elbow.
“So it is true?” he asked. “You’re really going to stay on Titan full-time? People may give you a hard time down here about working on that harvester, but any of them would kill for a job like that, you know.”
News traveled fast. Benji always seemed to find a way to learn everything about everybody who lived nearby. Luckily, I hadn’t yet let anyone in on the real reason behind my choice, or he would’ve figured that out too and hounded me about my mother. The old man probably could’ve made thousands as an information broker if he put his mind to it.
“That’s the plan,” I said. “I landed a cleaning job in the Uppers for now while I search for something better. Those long harvest shifts were killing me.”
“Staying out of trouble at least,” he said. “Good. Your mother must be real proud of you.” He peered over my shoulder into the empty hollow again. “Where’s she been, by the way? I haven’t seen her in a while.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Busy.”
“That boss of hers giving her trouble again? I’ll tell you, if those rich Earthers didn’t have us to clean their sheets, they’d suffocate in their own filth.”
I chuckled and placed my hand on the handle of the hatch assertively enough to warn him to let go. “Speaking of, I really better get going,” I said.
“Well, I won’t hold you,” Benji replied, finally taking the hint. “Give your mother my best.”
“I will.”
I sealed the hatch and exhaled. My nerves were finally starting to calm. From what I’d seen behind Benji, Level B2 was busy, but not with Pervenio officers. They were easy to spot despite their stature. Nobody else in the Lowers could afford armor that shined like polished glass, or pulse-rifles with state-of-the-art digital ammo displays.
I headed to my bed. My legs felt weak, and I needed to sit before they crumpled. The hand-terminal lay next to me, having landed on my thin pillow. The screen was activated and the message from R shined as if mocking me.
I turned away from it and stared into my hollow—the six-meter-long cylindrical cave with ribbed walls exposed to the ice-rock crust of Titan and crooked light fixtures that were so hazy it made my skin appear gray. Two low beds were sunken along the flanks, with some area for storage, a limited kitchen, and a cramped bathroom. Once, the room had been filled with appliances and view-screens I’d earned both from stealing and working on the Piccolo, but they’d all been sold off for my mom’s treatment.
The hollow wasn’t much, but it was home. For as long as I could remember, I’d return from whatever kind of trouble I was off getting into, and my mom’s face would be there to greet me, always smiling. She’d prepare whatever food she could manage to scrum up. Sometimes it would be a yeasty soup, which I’m told was seasoned to taste like the chickens that once roamed Pre-Meteorite Earth freely. I couldn’t say for sure if that was true. Other times, it was a pair of condensed ration bars mass-produced somewhere by some corporation. On rare occasions, if the wealthy Earther she served was feeling particularly generous, she’d even bring home some produce grown fresh in Darien’s Upper Gardens—something I wasn’t able to steal. You had a better chance of getting murdered than finding a good, unprocessed meal in the markets of the Lowers, so those rare nights were my favorites. She’d always let me
have the larger portion.
Not anymore. Presently, the bed across from me had been vacant for months. She’d apparently never even made it back from work the day she got taken in. She’d gone to the Lower Ward Medical Center to see about a minor cough, and that was that. It was also the only reason I was able to keep her condition secret from nosy Ringers like Benji: She hadn’t set off a decon-chamber alarm and been dragged away screaming for all the Lowers to see.
I sighed and glanced back at the hand-terminal, finally with a clearer head. If the message wasn’t Dexter playing games, did that mean it was real? I truly had no idea who R could be, but he or she was serious. The device had been planted for me, and only me, to find. Whoever had left it there knew my name and knew where I worked. Or at least where I had worked. The fact that I’d recently resigned from the Piccolo didn’t seem to matter.
For a moment, I considered how displeased Captain Saunders was when I’d asked for a leave of absence and wondered if maybe he was the one behind the message, in an effort to get back at me. Until I realized how ridiculous that was. There was exactly one “R” in his name, and I doubted he’d go back to the second-to-last letter. Besides, I didn’t do anything on the Piccolo significant enough to warrant a well-off captain risking his freedom by breaking Pervenio regulations. Yes, not reporting an act of unsanctioned communications was against the law, but being the one who sent the message was likely punishable with life behind bars.
DO THIS FOR ME, AND YOUR MOTHER WILL BE RELEASED FROM QUARANTINE AND CURED OF WHAT AILS HER.
It was an appealing offer, and a dangerous one. For my mother’s sake, I wasn’t ready to say no—I couldn’t ignore the view R had shown me of her when she wasn’t all prettied up for a visit— but I wasn’t foolish enough to leap blindly at the chance. I was good at sneaking objects around Darien, occasionally smuggling them between the Uppers and Lowers, but between worlds? And why the Piccolo?
I couldn’t think of a single reason why someone would be interested in the ship. She was one of the oldest operating gas harvesters in the Ring. So old, in fact, that a great deal of her systems remained manual. Over the two years I’d worked there, I’d never seen someone truly important walk its halls or even mention it in passing.
I lay down and held the device in front of my face, reading the message repeatedly, hoping I’d missed something. I had less than twenty-four hours to make a decision, and I planned on spending every one of them considering my options. My mom’s life depended on it.
I couldn’t sleep. A few times I attempted to, but the message rattled around in my skull. I tried to distract myself by switching a newsfeed onto the hand-terminal, but that only made it worse. An old Helix Engineering ad for bone-density boosters ran, and its jingle got stuck in my head. If you don’t want your skeleton a’droppin’... R’s message even started to take on the tune.
I sat up. My upper eyelids felt like they had tiny weights strapped to them. My head ached from exhaustion. The hand-terminal, which still operated normally despite all my contacts being wiped, read 6:00 a.m. In all the hours of failed sleep, I hadn’t come up with a single helpful answer. The only ones I did find were that I was jobless, my mom was still in the Q-Zone, and the only fence who seemed willing to deal with me was dead, meaning the credits from robbing John would never come through. I could only hope that Pervenio had gone after Dex for reasons other than the message from R.
I decided I had to see my mom again. Not on a screen. I had to look her in the eyes to see if I really had any choice. If I hurried, I could beat the early rush for visiting hours at the Q-Zone. I got undressed and headed to my confined shower. Everything that had happened had caused me to slack off on my usual regimen. I scrubbed the stink of the Foundry off my body with water as warm as I could handle; it was the one thing there weren’t many restrictions on. Titan and the Ring had plenty.
Once I was dressed and wearing a new pair of gloves and a clean sanitary mask, I tucked the hand-terminal into my pillow and covered that with a blanket. I couldn’t risk anyone reading what R had sent me by bringing it along through decon-chambers and scanners. I rustled my blanket enough to make its placement appear accidental and then hurried out of my hollow.
The Lowers were quiet. Not uncharacteristically, like when I went to see Dex, but it was so early in the morning that the only people getting ready were those trying to make it to the Q-Zone. I fell in line behind a group of gloomy Ringers lumbering toward the tram station on Level B2.
I boarded the Q-Zone line, same as I did every day, and the vehicle rose up through twenty meters of rock toward the bright surface. The entire ride to the lonely plateau housing the Q-Zone, I stared through a window in hopes that I might see the silhouette of Saturn through Titan’s cloudy sky. I never did. Dazzling strings of lightning flickered in the distance, and a storm gathered to obscure my view.
The line at the quarantine lobby was shorter than the day before, though security was even tighter. It made sense, considering what had happened after Director Sodervall made his address, but it also meant it took just as long as ever for me to reach the reception window. When I finally got there, the same crotchety receptionist croaked, “Name and ID.”
I already had it out and ready to hand over. She studied it the same way she always did, as if it were her first time seeing it.
“Visiting?” she asked after she returned it to me.
“Katrina Drayton,” I said.
She typed into her computer. “Hand-term—” She stopped herself. “One moment.” She leaned in closer and stroked the keys more aggressively. My fingers tapped on the counter by the time she finally looked up again. The expression on her creased face was the same as usual, but I knew something was wrong.
“My apologies, Mr. Drayton,” she said. “Update just came in. According to the nurses, she’s not seeing any visitors today.”
“Is she all right?” I questioned.
“No changes in conditions. Note just says she wasn’t able to get much sleep last night and is under sedation.”
The image R showed me of her sprawled out on her bed filled my mind. “Can you tell her it’s me?” I asked.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to come back tomorrow.” The woman looked past me toward the rest of the line, as if I wasn’t even there. “Next!”
I didn’t budge. After the shittiest day I’d had since I discovered my mom’s condition, I needed to see her. I needed to know what to do.
“No,” I grumbled, a harsh edge creeping into my tone.
“Sir. Please step aside,” she said.
Something snapped in me. I lunged at her window, my hands wrapping around the sill so tight that my pasty knuckles somehow went even whiter. “Tell her I need to see her!” I shouted.
A security officer seized me by the shoulders. He may have been shorter than I was, but his Earther brawn allowed him to easily tear me away from the window. I managed to squirm out of his thick arms, however, and leaped back at the window.
“Tell her!” I roared, pounding on the glass.
Suddenly, I felt like I was struck in my side by a bolt of lightning. I collapsed, drooling as my body convulsed from ten thousand volts of electricity surging through it. I’d been beaten plenty in my life, but this was the first time any officer had ever gotten me directly with the lit end of a shock-baton. My bones chattered, my organs felt like they were going to burst, and I think that at some point, I vomited. It didn’t last long, but once I regained control of my body, I was as sore as if I’d just put in a full day cleaning the Piccolo at high g. The officer heaved me against the wall and sat me up.
“Next time you’ll be locked up, Ringer!” he growled, waving his charged shock-baton. “Now get out of here!”
He kicked me in the leg and then returned to his post outside of the decon-chamber. There was no mistaking the pride in his expression as he and another officer exchanged a smirk.
The Q-Zone lobby was beginning to become a source of too much pain in my l
ife. None of the Ringers waiting in line were foolish enough to try to help me up. I had to take my time and use the wall to haul myself back onto my feet because my fingers and toes still twitched from the shock.
As I struggled to steady my shaking legs, the same jaded woman I’d seen leaving visiting room C-7 the day before stepped up to the counter. She was beside an older man who looked like he could be her father. She had a quiet exchange with the receptionist, but then her face screwed and tears formed in her eyes.
“No!” she yelled. “No, he can’t be!”
She stumbled backward, no longer silent and somber, but hysterical. She repeated “No!” as her father ran his fingers through her hair and attempted to comfort her. It was obvious he didn’t know what to say.
“Yesterday he was fine and now...” She broke down. Her father hugged her and tried to hush her. It didn’t work.
I felt bad for staring, but the entire line of Ringers joined me. Similar thoughts probably coursed through all their minds. My mother was wrong about what she said. It could get worse. At least she was still alive. Maybe it was the recent jolt to my system that made me realize it, but I couldn’t just wait around wondering what I should do next.
I turned away from the crying woman and her father, wiped my mouth, and dragged my battered body back toward the inter-block tram. Before I could decide for sure if I wanted to do what R was asking, I’d need to reclaim my old position on the Piccolo. I wasn’t going to risk searching Captain Saunders on Solnet with my compromised hand-terminal, and without his contact number, I’d have to try to locate him in the Uppers before I sweated to death. There were only fourteen hours left on R’s offer.
Fortunately, I knew the captain’s favorite place. I just hoped he wasn’t too busy preparing for the imminent departure of the Piccolo’s next shift to be there.
SEVEN
A round of harvester shifts was just letting out when I arrived back in Darien. Unsurprisingly, more security officers were present in the Uppers than ever before. Every Ringer in sight had one in their shadow. Passing through the checkpoints took so long, I thought I was going to explode. Another hour wasted.
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 30
