Eighteen Days to Launch
Mal was already awake when the alarm chimed overhead, had been for hours. On her side, she stared at the wall next to her bed, feeling its radiating chill deep in her bones as everyone else rose to leave the room, mumbling sleepily to one another as they filed out the door. She rolled onto her back and tried to block it all out, squeezing her eyes shut to claw back some of her agency.
A cool hand touched her shoulder, trying to rouse her. She grumbled, batting their hand away — expecting to find flesh, her fingers struck hard plastic and smooth metal. On reflex her hand closed around the foreign object, holding it closer to her face as her eyes adjusted. The metallic hand was formed in half-tubes of brass that housed bundles of colourful wires, almost like veins and tendons; farther up the arm the metal abruptly changed to the cool tones of galvanized steel and battered white plastic, and as her eyes travelled over the shoulder and onto the not-face of the war drone hovering mere inches away, Mal found herself in a place much worse than a strange bed in enemy territory.
Her hands scraped over the broken cement and concrete as she tried to fruitlessly scramble backward, wrist smarting from a fall, legs and lungs on fire, the barrel of a modified M16 inches from her nose. Her back thumped against a wall, and with nowhere left to turn she was sure that she was done for — until, with an almighty clang, the drone flew back from Gwenh’s steel pipe. The impact stuck in Mal’s ears like an echo as she got her feet under her and scrambled to Goose’s side. She had been hoping that drawing the war-drone's attention would give them the chance to get up and run for cover, but now she could see why they hadn't: they were nearly catatonic, their face rapidly waning as they helplessly fixated on their mangled leg.
She could hear more drones approaching, bringing the cavalry. While Gwenh turned away and retched, Mal hefted Goose's insensate body onto her shoulders and screamed for her to keep up. A teargas canister whizzed by, rupturing as it struck the pavement at a bad angle, hitting her legs with burning hot vapours and shrapnel. The fumes couldn’t penetrate the filters of her snorkel, but Gwenh’s mask had always been ill-fitting, and she could hear her gagging on the noxious smoke, heaving painfully shrill breaths as her airway closed.
Gwenh staggered and fell to the ground, unable to get up, hands scrambling to rip off her mask in confusion and panic. Mal screamed her name, voice guttural and thin with fear, and suddenly she was thrown from the memory and back onto the linoleum floor of the bunks. Her wrist throbbed from the fall as the war drone slowly turned toward her, head tilting imperiously as it raised its strange brass hands. Fear and confusion curdled together, keeping her frozen and out-of-breath: the drone was wearing same clothes as her, the same shoes, but underneath was the same off-white-and-dark-grey colour scheme of ten years ago with a soft orange glow coming from its chest—
One of the guards stepped past Mal and thrust a stun-baton into the war drone's abdomen; as it fell to the floor, it screamed like nothing she had ever heard. She scrambled to her feet and sprinted from the room, only slowing down to join the back of the shuffling group. In desperation for a distraction she looked down at the swelling that now encircled her wrist like a cuff; her fingers twitched for the splint she had left in Jay's house, but she could stand a mild sprain. No one looked back at her, and she couldn’t be sure if it was because they hadn’t seen the altercation or simply didn’t care. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and tried to calm down, breathing through her stomach, her ribs, her chest — every trick she could come up with to stop thinking about how she had shared her sleeping space with a war drone.
***
In the mess hall, she found herself holding a tray in her trembling hands, staring uncomprehendingly at the machine at the end of the counter as it commanded her to pay up in a currency she neither possessed nor recognized. As the line behind her began to grumble, a teenage boy doubled back and fed a slip of paper into the machine, muttering that she owed him as he took her hand and tugged her away. He led her through the crowded seating area to a table beside the exit, sat with the Untouchables she had shared a bunk with. There was enough room for Mal to sit down, but none in the conversation; she tuned out the localized gossip and idle chatter and focused on her food instead. Whatever she had taken from the counter was oatmeal-like in texture, minimal in taste, and rapidly losing its meagre warmth, and she managed two bites between fizzy gulps out of her randomly-selected plastic bottle of unspecified beverage, before pushing the tray away and making for the bathroom.
The noise inside her head dulled marginally as she closed the door behind her. Once she ascertained that there were no cameras, she pulled open her shirt’s buttons and ducked into a stall, pumping out her milk and flushing the evidence. She realized dully that she had forgotten her glasses in the bunks as she scrubbed her hands clean with the gritty soap beside the sink.
Her eyes blurred with angry tears, and though she kept her heart’s keening wail to herself she could not stopper the leaks in her eyes. She wept silently until she felt desiccated and almost withered away, all the moisture in her body replaced with a headache of roughly equal volume.
Her tears were interrupted by someone — a man, with dark skin and hair twisted into short wicks — coming into the bathroom. She hurriedly turned away and wiped her face clean, clearing her throat angrily; after washing his hands, the man gently patted her shoulder with a kind touch and quietly warned her not to take too long, before giving her space to compose herself. Once the door had swung shut, her head tipped against the mirror with a sigh, counting to ten before focusing back on her reflection. “Laysa laday dziecko. Nie mam ying’er. Wo meiyou saghiir.”
From the cafeteria, she was the last one into the humid greenhouse; the table beside the door was lined with four sets of gloves and four pairs of gardening shears with colourful rubber handles. She glanced out over the greenhouse as she slipped on the gloves and put the shears in her back pocket; the room was dimly lit besides the panels of grow-lights hovering over the raised planters. The only people not of the Untouchable variety were the roving guards in bulky blue vests, easily identifiable by their uniformly straight and pale teeth. She quickly looked away from one with metal studs and wires laced through his molars, feeling queasy. The ceiling was dotted with fish-eye cameras.
She flexed her fingers inside the stiff gloves as she took her place beside a man roughly her parents’ age, not quite greying but lacking the vibrancy of youth in his dark hair and tan skin. She followed his example as she built up the will to speak, taking her shears to the task of pruning and harvesting marjoram. She was a passable gardener, even with only one good wrist — unless you were known to kill every plant you touched or had been recently trampled by a moose, everyone in Kawehno:ke had to have at least a small hand in helping their food grow.
She firmly shut out any memories of Kawehno:ke, fond or otherwise: the man she had chosen was the eldest and likely held some sway in the group, and she had to focus if she wanted to win him over. “I’m Mal.”
“Isaiah Crane, 2201-12.” He didn’t take his eyes off of his work. “Rough night?”
“You could say that.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the little card she had been given. “Uh— 2112.”
“They caught you stealing, huh?”
“And trespassing.” She snipped a branch too low, and furtively dropped the evidence out of sight — she could hear Murphy laughing at her in the back of her mind. “And carrying a camera.”
“Yikes — good thing Mr. Render stepped in.” He gave her a brief smile, and kicked the branch under the table. His teeth were the same shade as hers, and similarly angled against one another; any apprehension of Render holding her down to drill metal studs into her teeth was swiftly diminished. “If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.”
She plucked a leaf off of the plant and bruised it between her fingers, releasing a warm, spicy scent. “Why grow marjoram here?”
“Perfume and flavouring, mostly.” He glanced over and smiled again — his friendliness was starting to seem insincere. “You’ll fit right in with that technique. It’s most of what we do here.”
Her fingers clenched around her shears, again taking off more than she meant to. “I don’t plan on staying that long.”
“That’s not up to you, unfortunately. Best to think forward, not back.”
Then and there, she decided that she hated Isaiah, her strong feelings in no small part informed by how rank her mouth still tasted from the morning’s fizzy drink. The only water she could see was coming from the misters above, and by the strange smell it was treated with some kind of plant-food — the water from the bathroom faucet had been similarly suspect, smelling just a little off and slotting itself into non-potable territory with ease. “Where can I get some water?”
“Nowhere. Our supply tested positive for cholera a few years back, and it hasn't been fixed yet.” He nodded to the station beside the door, holding a large jug of the carbonated drink and several towers of paper cups. “That stuff’s got all your vitamins and minerals for a healthy diet. I don’t even miss water, anymore.”
“Great.” She was suddenly less eager to quench her thirst. “Listen, I’m looking for someone who passed through here in the past two weeks — Yeung Tai-Song? His sister is worried that he’ll miss Niña’s launch.”
She should have noticed Isaiah’s quickly paling face, but it wasn’t until someone was grabbing her shoulder and forcefully turning her around that she realized her mistake. The guard, a woman that was boundlessly domineering despite her short stature, was holding her baton loosely in one hand and a set of cuffs in the other.
“Sorry, Claudia,” Isaiah said from behind her, voice like a gunshot in her ear. “She didn't mean anything by it, she just doesn’t know the ropes yet. Think of the paperwork — we can forgive some stupidity, yes?”
It seemed that the guard was easily convinced. She sheathed her tools and bared her teeth. “I hear anything about the Page from you again, and you won’t like what happens next.”
Mal nodded as Claudia turned and marched away, not sure how threatened she was supposed to feel when the threat was so vague. She glanced over at Isaiah, but he had turned his attention back to the gardening. "I'm sorry, I didn't know—"
“Call it ‘going home,’ if you have to talk about it,” he muttered, smile dropping away to reveal wide, serious eyes and a naturally tense mouth.
She glanced around, keeping her voice low. "Can we speak freely?"
He purposefully knocked a set of shears off of the table and tugged her down as he knelt to retrieve them. “Three months ago, I asked Mr. Render when we could expect to receive our boarding passes for the Page. Since then, security’s been tightened up, privileges have been cut, and people are punished if they even think about leaving. He clearly thinks that we’re too stupid to rebel.”
"You've got a plan?"
"Of a sort. There's room for you, if you want it."
“I’ll let you know. What about Tai-Song?”
“You’re the first new guy we’ve had in six months.” He patted her sympathetically on the shoulder as he stood back upright, clearly catching onto her wretched distress. “Bad luck. Think forward.”