Idols (19 page)
I keep my eyes focused on the landing mark. I try not to think about anything other than what it means. Why I’m here. Where we’re going. Why it matters.
The little girl waiting for us on the other side of the ocean.
Things really do change, and then they keep changing.
Perhaps this is what survival feels like. Or life. I honestly don’t know anymore.
I can barely think straight, surrounded by so much misery. I have been so long away from the Hole, I have forgotten what the crush of panic and desperation feels like. How I have to protect myself whenever I am in a crowd.
I feel like I am being trampled by invisible giants.
Not everything has changed, not even after the Icon has fallen. Not even here. Not yet. Not among the Remnants.
Sorrow has its hold once more.
Then the lines of human cargo in front of us start to move again, and I focus my eyes on nothing as I mount the rising ramp that leads me into the cargo hold of the
Hanjin Mariner
.
Our ship is moving. The
Mariner
is leaving the Porthole. From where we are stowed away—curled in the shadows behind the life rafts and the drop skiffs, like Mission children playing Hide the Rabbit—I can look up in the sky and see the vents cough up black smoke as the ship rolls. I’m leaving the Americas for the first time in my life, and that’s all I know.
I’m frightened.
Tima is pale beneath her smudged face—still clutching Brutus—and Lucas is silent. Ro is a bundle of nervous energy, happy to be heading back out into the unknown.
Fortis is less theatrical about it. His low hiss is the only sound track to our departure.
“You are not to move from these shadows until we are all the way out of port. Let me be very clear about that.”
His voice lowers as we watch the legs of the crew pass by through the racks of life rafts in front of us.
“Don’t know how the Bishop thought you’d manage this on your own. Even a Merk only has enough digs to get us smuggled onto this container ship once, so don’t dirt it up. An’ this whole junkbucket’s crawlin’ with two things and two things only. Brass, an’ Remnants.”
He pauses as a different color of uniform stands in front of us. Smoke from a pipe wafts our way.
“Brass won’t kick you off,” Fortis says, “but you’ll wish they did. They’ll either blow your head off, or they’ll toss you in with the real Remnants. An’ no amount of dirt on your face can prepare you for that. They’ll as soon kill you as share their supper.”
Then his voice fades away—like the setting sun around us—and we are left with only the grinding of the motors and the shouts of the crew.
The junkbucket lurches, the whole deck vibrating and the air whistling past me. We have picked up speed, which means we must be leaving the Porthole.
Now I know we’re gone. Bigger and Biggest. The Padre and the Bishop. La Purísima and the Idylls and the Hole.
Gone.
I shiver from the cold, wishing I hadn’t ripped quite so many holes in my Remnant clothes.
I shiver for other reasons too.
As the others settle in for the night around me, I reach out through the darkness to the ones I have lost, over and over, until I can’t think and I can’t feel and I can’t do anything but fall into the kind of sleep that only means defeat.
You’re supposed to save the world, Doloria. Better get on it, already.
That girl isn’t going to find you. The world isn’t going to save you, either.
GENERAL EMBASSY DISPATCH: EASTASIA SUBSTATION
MARKED URGENT
MARKED EYES ONLY
Internal Investigative Subcommittee IIS211B
RE: The Incident at SEA Colonies
Note: Contact Jasmine3k, Virt. Hybrid Human 39261.SEA, Laboratory Assistant to Dr. E. Yang, for future commentary, as necessary.
Scan of a tattered partial page burned by fire.
Found with the remains of the Belter community formerly known as the Idylls.
When the morning comes, the light slicing between the racks of boats and skiffs is so bright I have to shield my eyes. Everything is bright out there, and dark in here. Dark, and damp. Fortis’s hiding hole has served us well.
He really is good at lying low. Merk trick of the trade.
My body is stiff and I can’t feel my feet. I’ve slept in a ball like a potato bug, only I wonder if a potato bug has this much trouble uncurling.
The air around us smells like salt and feels like water. Like the Porthole. Like the sea, back in the Californias. Back home, back in all my homes, which it seems I do nothing but leave behind.
I breathe deep—and wrinkle my nose.
The air may smell like salt, but we smell like a pig farm. I try to remember what we used to blacken our faces and our clothes. I hope it had nothing to do with pigs.
I sniff again.
Pigs, and wet dogs. Everything is damp from the sea air. As if the misery of sleeping rolled in a ball shoved behind a rack of boats on a hard wooden deck weren’t enough.
I twist my neck, turning to see the others wedged next to me. They’re still sleeping. Ro is practically standing up, sleeping slumped against the boat rack. Lucas is bent at an awkward angle, favoring his good side. I bite my lip, thinking of the times when he would sneak his jacket to me in the night. There’s no chance of that now; no Remnant has a proper jacket. He’s as tattered and filthy as I am.
Tima, by his side, is folded into a small sleeping bundle as usual, compact and neat. Her head rests on his shoulder, where mine should be. Brutus is nowhere to be seen.
I look away.
On my other side, Fortis is snoring, arms folded across his chest. His jacket is wedged behind his head like a pillow. Fortis could sleep anywhere, anytime. Another signature Merk trait—stealing sleep as easily as anything else.
I have to get out of here. I have to stretch my body back into a line, the way it was built to be. I pull myself up behind the skiffs, slowly, inhabiting the small strip of vertical space as a snake would, slithering its way up an old pipe. I can’t feel my feet at all, though, or most of my legs. If there were enough room to collapse, I’d already have fallen back down to the wet deck floor.
I slide past the tangle of human bodies until I can squeeze my way past the life rafts and out into the open air of the deck.
I look out from the shadows, cautiously at first—but I relax when I see there is no crew in sight. It must be very early.
I take a step forward, staggering from the pain and from the rolling of the deck beneath my feet.
The sea is everywhere.
The hugeness of it almost knocks me off my feet.
I clutch the skiff rack, steadying myself.
One step at a time.
As I slowly move farther away from the skiff rack, I begin to understand that I have never seen the ocean, not like this. I’ve never been on the water, surrounded by it—excepting the brief ride back and forth from the Porthole to Santa Catalina.
I make my way to the rusting rail along the edge of the bow. At least, that’s what Tima called it, this end of the ship. I lean over the water, as far as I can go.
I have never seen this kind of water, dark and fast and loud. I have never felt this kind of wind, either.
The air rumbles, almost groaning. Even the drifting clouds of smoke from the ship’s vents are tossed off course—soaring and recovering and soaring again, like the Padre on Christmas Eve, when he’d had too much mulberry wine.
My hair whips around my face, stinging my cheeks like hundreds of salty thorns. All around me, the water churns into tiny peaks of white foam, hitting against itself, over and over again, so many impossibly shoreless shores.
I’ve never seen anything like it, never seen the sea—or, for that matter, the world—from the deck of a ship.
Everything looks different from here.
For this one moment, I am the only living thing in the universe—and then I see a pale green lizard wander up the side of the deck railing. He alone does not seem bothered by the crushing rush of air.
“You like it? The sea? She’s big, eh?”
Fortis stands behind me while Brutus slides along the deck behind him. I almost don’t recognize Fortis without his jacket, and in the pleasant sunlight. I nod, holding my hair out of my eyes with one hand.
He looks out to the horizon, then back to the deck. “Probably safe for another few minutes. Watch will change again soon, though. Then we’ll have to crawl back in the hidey-hole, so don’t get too comfortable.”
“Got it.”
He stretches into a long line, like a cat. “So just try to blend in with the crowd and lie low.”
“The crowd? You mean the Remnants?”
He nods. “They’ll mostly be belowdecks, though. Caged an’ chained like animals.” He looks down at Brutus, shaking his head. “It’s not just not human, it’s not humane. Poor sods. Can you feel them?” Fortis scratches Brutus by the ears. “We wouldn’t do that to you, now, would we?”
I shake my head. I will myself not to feel them, the anxiously beating hearts, the simmering anger, the despair. They may be belowdecks, but I know they’re there. I can feel them, every one of them, whether or not I want to.
Today I wish I couldn’t.
Today is hard enough on my own.
Fortis straightens, leaning next to me against the railing. “Unlucky buggers. Just trying to make their own life outside the cities. One minute you’re just a Grass like the rest of us, down on his luck an’ lookin’ for a bit of food an’ work—an’ the next, you’re stuck on the Tracks an’ headin’ for the Projects. Or tossed onto this junkbucket an’ shipped off to the SEA Colonies. How is it right, for one human to treat another like that?”
“It isn’t,” I say. “And I’d be one of them, if the Padre hadn’t found me.”
“Unclaimed masses of humanity, my arse. Remnants aren’t the embarrassment. No such thing as human garbage. Don’t see why they put up with it.”
“Who gives them the choice, Fortis? The Brass? Catallus? The GAP? The Lords? They don’t
put up
with it.”
“They won’t forever. That much I know. History has a way of repeatin’ itself, even if you don’t know it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. But I do know it ain’t the Lords herding these people into the Projects. Those are human beings in those Sympa uniforms. Working the Embassies. Maybe there are worse things than the Lords,” Fortis says. “Sometimes humanity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Seems like we make it easy for them. Did you ever think of that?”
I don’t know what he’s really saying. I’m not sure I want to. “No.”
“Really?”
“The Lords killed my parents on The Day. There is nothing worse than the Lords. So don’t say that to me, Fortis. Never say that.”
I turn and see that he’s studying me, as if I were the lizard on the railing. Then he smirks.