“Stupid cat,” Talbor said. “Can’t even feel a Spark when you hand it to her on a platter.”
The twins snickered quietly and Karderee smirked, but no one else at the table even acknowledged her existence. Arkady was almost done eating.
A larger spark hit the back of Pendt’s hand, right in the webbing between her two smallest fingers, and she hissed, dropping the cutlery she was trying to pass out.
“Whoever heard of a clumsy cat,” Talbor said. A shower of sparks headed her way. Pendt had had just about enough of him. “Maybe we should trade you for a real one, though you probably aren’t worth as much as one of those.”
Something that Pendt couldn’t name steamed through her and overflowed. She set down the last of utensils and turned to face her little brother. An unholy calm descended on her, some level of self-preservation she didn’t know she possessed. That, at least, stopped her from screaming at him.
“Well, when we get back to Alterra in twenty years, maybe we’ll try to trade your twin for you,” Pendt said. Everyone looked at her, but she didn’t notice. “She’s the one that got star-sense, though, so you’re probably not worth enough to get her back.”
There was dead quiet in the mess. Even the engine hum seemed to stop.
“What did you say?” said Arkady, colder than the void and ten times as merciless.
“My little sister, sir,” Pendt said. She’d spent the resources, and now there was no going back. She had to keep going and hope for the best. “The one we left.”
Arkady struck her with her tray. The empty dishes and cutlery went flying, but the metal rectangle made contact with the side of Pendt’s head, and she went down hard.
This time, there was no blood. Pendt had caught the full force of the blow, but not from the corner of the tray. She’d have a bruise; it hurt like hell, but there was no blood. She tried to stand up, but she was dizzy, and it was hard to find her feet. She focused on talking instead. It never did to keep Arkady waiting when she’d asked a question.
“I didn’t know,” Pendt said, fighting back tears of pain and surprise. Crying would only make it worse. She struggled to her knees. “I wasn’t even ten and I didn’t understand what my magic could do. I just sense her difference in the æther. I didn’t know why until Tanith got pregnant.”
All eyes turned to Tanith, whose hands flew to her belly. The distraction gave Pendt enough time to get back on her feet, leaning heavily on the table as she did. Everyone leaned away from her and she clung to the surface to maintain her balance and clear her head.
“Is my baby—” Tanith was rounding now, a ball attached to the scrawny beanpole that was the rest of her body. She didn’t look healthy or comfortable, but she never said anything about it.
“I don’t know,” Pendt said. Tanith choked on a sob. Pendt felt no pity for her cousin at all. The baby was fine. Pendt wasn’t about to waste her time on another Harland that would grow up to make her life hell. “That’s how I learned. I know what gene-sense feels like in a child because I remember it. I sensed something in my sister, but didn’t know what it was. Lodia felt different from the baby she carried. I can’t tell yours apart from you.”
“Can you change it?” Arkady’s voice had a tone of desperation to it that made Pendt’s blood run cold. Her aunt never sounded desperate, and Pendt didn’t know how to respond to the newness of it.
Everyone on the Harland knew that the ship needed a baby with star-sense. They couldn’t go back for the one they’d given up, but now that they knew Pendt could identify a future child, there were all sorts of new possibilities. Possibilities were not the sort of thing you wanted in the hard certainty of space. Especially not when Pendt was the one exposing them.
“There aren’t enough calories on the whole ship,” Pendt said after pretending to think about it, like changing her own genes to be something else had never crossed her mind. “It wouldn’t work, I’d die, and you’d all starve to death before we reached the next port, unless you ate—”
She stopped short of saying “the crew,” but everyone in the galley froze. Arkady Harland was a hard woman to serve, and no one really believed she’d stoop to cannibalism, but no one had ever heard her sound like this before. There was no telling where she’d strike.
“When we get to Brannick Station, your life is going to change, girl,” Arkady gritted out. “You best stay clear of me in the meantime, in case I forget how much you’ll be worth someday and decide to airlock you anyway.”
“Yes, Captain,” Pendt said.
It was, technically, the first time anyone had ever chosen in her favour.
She didn’t like it.
7.
THESE WERE THE THINGS Pendt Harland knew:
Family was everything, her ship was home, her aunt’s authority was absolute, and as her birthday crept closer, she was descending into an endless abyss of bodily horror she was finally beginning to understand.
When her mother had been pregnant with Talbor, Pendt had been too young to understand. When her period started and her calories were increased, Pendt gained stronger awareness of her body and, though she didn’t realize until Tanith’s procedure, a similarly better awareness of the bodies that surrounded her.
Dr. Morunt had persuaded Arkady to let Pendt study medical texts in preparation for when Pendt would be old enough to hire out to other families and ships. At first, Pendt had been a reluctant student. She hadn’t wanted to learn anything that would take her away from the only home she’d ever known, but as she read each new file, she realized the power in information. She wasn’t just learning about how to diagnose and fix bodies, she was learning how they worked. The patterns she saw in people took on a clearer meaning. She knew their strengths and frailties now.
Arkady, for example, would have grown another three inches taller if she’d been given eight additional grams of protein a day when she was a teen. Lodia’s bones were going to weaken over the next decade. It wouldn’t be dangerous, but it would be uncomfortable. Two of her older cousins had XXY chromosomes. No one asked Pendt for any information and she didn’t answer unasked questions, but she filed everything away for the future, in case it ever became something she could use.
Dr. Morunt was the most fascinating person to read the genes of, and Pendt did so even though she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was intruding. Morunt read everyone else’s genes all the time, after all, though she said she couldn’t read as closely as Pendt could. That was how she calculated everyone’s calorie allotment.
In the doctor’s genes, Pendt could trace the pattern of the power they shared. The pathways of her magic were well-worn and comfortable, because Morunt used her magic all the time. If Pendt looked at herself, she could see that her magic was a wild tangle of unmapped space—no surprise, since she lacked almost all of Morunt’s experience—but it was undoubtedly . . . bigger.
Tanith’s growing foetus was Pendt’s favourite object of study. The existence of the baby still terrified her, and Tanith’s increasingly sallow skin and listless behaviour as the pregnancy progressed wasn’t good for anyone, but the idea of the baby, the newness of it and the flexibility of its growth was irresistible.
She’d told Arkady that she couldn’t change the baby’s genes without more calories than they had on the ship, and she had been telling the truth. But the child was growing, its genes making new decisions every moment of every day. Pendt couldn’t force it into a new pattern, but she could watch as it built itself up from two cells into a person, and in watching, she learned how she could shape it, if she only had the calories to do so.
Arkady asked her frequently what she had learned, and Pendt always had a ready answer about some disease or a broken bone. She never lied; she was still too much a Harland for that. She knew better than to admit that she was starting to think her magic, though different, was more powerful than her aunt’s.
She had also started to read non-medical texts in her studies. The library on the Harland was one big system, so it wasn’t like she was going somewhere she wasn’t allowed to be. As long as she was on time for her shifts in the galley, no one ever questioned her decision to read as much as possible. Her brothers didn’t even make fun of her for it, largely because they didn’t know how to.
She read history and stellar cartography, learning about the Stavenger Empire and the vast swaths of space they had once claimed to rule. She learned about the oglasa, which used to fill the void between the stars and were now reduced to a fraction of their former numbers. And she puzzled her way through legal documents until she fully understood how, with its dying gasps, the Stavengers had locked their subjects into place. Each station had a family, the way the Harland did, only locked to the family’s DNA and controlled by the Y chromosome. It was an entirely new way of thinking for Pendt. On the Harland, girls were inherently more valuable, as they maintained custody of their children over any paternal claim. The ships wanted daughters and the stations wanted sons, though most of the people who lived and worked in less powerful positions didn’t really care.
Pendt also came to understand that the Stavengers had done her a favour with at least one of their decrees. In order for a generation ship to maintain contracts with the stations and mining installations, they must be able to prove that they were not exploiting child labour. No one under the age of eighteen could be contracted into anything outside their own family. As soon as a person turned eighteen, the head of their family had all the rights to decide everything from their working situation to their living arrangements. Pendt knew that when Arkady made decisions about her, it would be for the Harland’s best interests, not anything so unimportant as Pendt’s well-being. Tanith had shown her that. She was ten years older than Pendt, and an electro-mage too, and her body was not her own.
A chime sounded and Pendt closed the file on developmental psychology that she was reading. The concept was alien to her. The only things that developed on the Harland were skills to keep the ship going and sense to stay out of everyone’s way. Encouraging a child by promoting its hobbies was entirely foreign. Pendt had needed the dictionary to learn what a hobby was.
The chime meant that it was time for the graveyard shift to start—the skeleton crew who maintained the engines and the Harland’s course while everyone else slept. Pendt needed to go to sleep too, or she would be too tired to work tomorrow, and might lose her reading privileges. The medical bay was dim and quiet, empty for now since everyone was well. Morunt went about her tasks with little chatter, as always. Pendt got ready to leave so that the doctor could seek her own bunk, but she seemed in no particular hurry this evening.
“I’m glad we’re close to Brannick Station,” Morunt said, absently putting the needles into the medical sterilization unit. “It’s been a long couple of decades and I need to replace some things. I’ll have to work on my requisition forms, but the captain is pleased with our ore haul, so I’m cautiously optimistic. Four more weeks.”
Four weeks to Brannick Station, and Pendt’s life would change, even though she didn’t know all the details about how. Her birthday would fall around that time, and her aunt would contract her out. She might never see the Harland again. And to be perfectly honest, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to.
Leaving the Family behind had once filled her with fear. Now, it was merely another wretched situation she probably couldn’t avoid, only this time with people who bought her, and therefore probably appreciated her presence just a little bit. If she had been going somewhere new to cook and clean, or even to do Dr. Morunt’s job, she might have welcomed the idea of a change, even if it was intimidating. But as Tanith’s form reshaped itself around the new life she carried, Pendt understood that her future had always been her body. Her family would rent out her ability to grow healthy children. The idea of being reduced to that was bad enough. She knew how pregnancy wreaked havoc on the body, medically and from observation. She didn’t want that to be her whole life. If they knew that she was pretty sure she could design children, or at least select their genetic progress with some deliberation, she’d never be free.
Dr. Morunt had given her a warning. She understood and appreciated it. She had four weeks. If she was ever going to anything, it would have to start now.
In the quiet of the medical bay, reading files she wrestled into understanding, Pendt Harland discovered that she knew more things now:
Family was everything; her ship was home; her aunt’s authority was absolute; and as her birthday crept closer, her already limited freedoms became more and more curtailed.
Pendt looked down at her fingernails, and made a plan.
* * *
• • •
In the end, it was both ridiculously easy and impossibly hard. Pendt saved one gram of oglasa from her dinner portion every day for four weeks. It was all she could spare. Her body was already running close to the margin, operating at peak efficiency thanks to eighteen years of training. Any more than a gram per day, and her work would suffer. She might be caught.
She felt the loss of that gram every moment. Worse, she knew exactly where her hoard was, and that she could eat it at any time if she wanted to. It haunted her, and her dreams were full of giant fish that mocked her as they floated in the black of space. But she stayed strong. She was only going to get one chance at this, and there would be no going back. She did her best to put the growing pile of calories out of her mind.
The part that almost made her laugh was that the whole scheme was only possible because of circumstances she had caused. If she hadn’t regrown her fingernail all those years ago, they never would have had to trade for more food at Alterra. They never would have ended up with Talbor. Their food supplies would be endless protein packets, not the densely nutritious oglasa. She didn’t even have to wrap it or keep it somewhere cool. Oglasa didn’t spoil. She could have stored it next to the engine, and four weeks later, it would still be edible.
The rest of her escape was fairly straightforward. Pendt had witnessed several dockings now, and she knew how this one would go. The Harland would make port, the engines would cut off, and Arkady and Lodia would go aboard the Brannick Station. No one else would leave the ship, no Harland, at least. But the doors below, in the hold where the passengers had stayed and possibly died during the extended years of the voyage, those doors would open. And no Harland cared what or who went through them.
The hard seal on the door between the hold below and the rest of the ship was her biggest obstacle. She found a plan of the ship and located an airduct that passed from one part of the ship to the other. It was very, very small, but so was Pendt. It wasn’t like she’d be carrying anything with her.
The day came when the Harland arrived at Brannick Station. Everything went exactly as Pendt imagined, except the part where she ate the twenty-eight grams of protein she’d been hoarding. Nothing could have prepared her for the surge of power she felt rush through her body as it dealt with so much excess for the first time in her life.
When the engines cut, Pendt headed for the airduct. She had picked the one in her mother’s room because Lodia would be gone and Tanith would be in the engine room, running maintenance. No one would see the open duct until much later, hopefully until after the Harland had already left. It was a tighter fit than she was expecting, but Pendt was very determined. Despite the skin it cost her, she shoved herself through the duct, and into the vent that would lead her to the other side of the seal.
The hold below was not what she had been expecting. After so many years of passenger freight, she thought it would be dirty and full of waste and garbage. Instead, it was pristine, so clean it would have met Dr. Morunt’s sterilization protocols. Any evidence of human habitation had been scourged. Beds lined the walls, stacked three high. Almost a hundred people could have lived here, Pendt realized. She thought it was more li
ke thirty. Nothing about it made sense, but Pendt had no time to wonder about it. She had to make it through the doors while they were open.
When she crossed the airlock, she found a large empty bay. Like the hold, it was almost too clean to imagine that a group of people had passed through it, but the clock was still ticking, and Pendt still had to move.
She crossed the bay and the doors opened automatically at her presence. A nondescript corridor waited for her on the other side. Pendt took a deep breath and crossed into the unknown.
8.
PENDT WASN’T USED TO the weight of this much hair. It pulled at her scalp and ghosted along her neck, and even though she’d done her best to make it grow straight, she hadn’t known what to do with it when she had it. She wasn’t exactly in style, but she hadn’t known what style was when she started this, so there wasn’t really anything she could do about it. Almost everyone she’d ever seen before had the same hair: short, blond, and eminently practical. It’s one of the reasons she’d picked something more elaborate for her escape attempt, and she didn’t regret it for a second, even if she had no idea what to do with it.
She also wasn’t used to this much sound. The Harland was an old ship, but it was solid and well constructed, and it ran smoothly, thanks to generations of gifted engineers. The engines’ hum could only be heard in certain parts of the ship, and the walls were enough to mute raised voices and all but the most disastrous of mechanical failures. Here, there were people everywhere, crushing through the corridors as they walked between the docking ports and the service area on the station. She’d never seen so many kinds of bodies. They came in all shapes and sizes, and it was hard not to stare at the un-Harlandness of them all.
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